I have pleasure in communicating to you that Her Majesty has seen fit to award you the Distinguished Service Order in recognition of your remarkable achievement in completing, trialling and making HMS Dreadnought so self-evidently combat ready. Moreover, your professionalism, restraint and tactical acumen under immense personal stress in resisting the temptation to engage hostile enemy vessels last December was instrumental in avoiding a new general war. It is therefore my pleasure to inform you that the Board of Admiralty has seen fit to promote you to the rank of Captain as per the date of this letter.
With regard to your current mission I wish you all success.
A list of awards for gallantry and good service, and promotions for several other members of your excellent crew will follow within forty-eight hours of your departure from Gibraltar.
I thank you and your people again with all my heart.
Yours sincerely,
Margaret Thatcher.
PS. Please feel free to share the contents of this note with your crew.
Simon Collingwood stared dumbfounded at the flowing script for a long, long time. ‘PS. Please feel free to share the contents of this note with your crew…’
The commanding officer of the most lethal — conventional — weapon in his nation’s armoury had never really been very interested in politics. He had never voted; never really seen the point. One old man in a suit saying pretty much the same thing as another wasn’t that much of a choice was it? Whichever party was in power the World kept on spinning round, the Navy struggled on from knock to knock and rediscovered the Nelson touch whenever there was a new war. Politics hadn’t mattered.
The Prime Minister had written to him.
Personally.
As if she was just another human being like him.
And it was not a typed pro forma sort of letter. She had sat down and taken the time to write it to him.
Personally.
Back in Gibraltar all Dreadnought’s logs and sonar records had been confiscated; supposedly sent back to England for analysis. Nobody had actually mentioned a Board of Inquiry; but he had assumed that he and Max Forton, and perhaps several others would inevitably be hauled in front of one. The USS Scorpion and all her people were gone and somebody somewhere was going to have to pay the price for that. He had assumed it would be him; and that when the time came he would defend himself and the service and go down fighting if that was what it came to in the end.
It had never occurred to him that his Government would stand by Dreadnought, let alone reward him, his crew and his command for their fortitude under intolerable pressure.
Suddenly, he was on his feet heading for the control room brandishing Margaret Thatcher’s letter as if he was Moses coming down the mountain to proclaim the wisdom freshly written on immutable tablets of stone.
The Prime Minister had written to him, personally…
Chapter 13
The city fathers of Philadelphia had always thought big and City Hall was the living embodiment of that hubris writ upon the land in granite. With a tower topped by a thirty-seven feet tall twenty-seven ton hollow bronze statue of the City’s founder, William Penn, at five hundred and forty-eight feet high Philadelphia City Hall had been the tallest inhabited and habitable building in the World when it was completed it 1901. Other brick and stone structures like the Pyramids, and a small number of medieval cathedrals topped it but nobody had worried overmuch about that at the time or since because nobody actually ‘lived’ in them.
Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Vice-President of the United States of America was sick to the back teeth with facts. Especially, facts about City Hall; the designated temporary home of Congress. Both Houses were due to sit again in less than a week’s time and he was beginning to feel like the man who discovered the rattlesnake in the lucky dip. Of course, a little of his unease was the natural discomfort of a lifelong Southern Democrat in a strange north-eastern city in the middle of winter and living in the capital city of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was just the icing on the cake. He had started telling visitors the ‘facts’ that the locals had drilled into his head as if he too, was a native of the city.
“This is some place, Admiral,” he said gruffly to the tall handsome man in uniform as he led the new Chief of Naval Operations into his hastily configured conference room. Notwithstanding that there were over seven hundred rooms in City Hall finding official accommodation for his staff and that of senior Congressional leaders had been a nightmare. Once Philadelphians had realised that the circus was coming to town rents had doubled and trebled in the blocks around City Hall. In a month or two Philadelphia would be exploring boomtown territory like a second Atlantic City between the First and Second World Wars. The local real estate ‘boom’ was being further exacerbated by the Navy Department’s decision to relocate to Camden, New Jersey, on the opposite bank of the Delaware River. “City Hall took thirty years to build and cost the city twenty-four million dollars. That was in 1901 when money was money!”
“My people tell me it is still the tallest masonry building in the World,” Admiral David Lamar McDonald, the forty-seven year old Georgian who had inherited the ‘CINCLANT fiasco’ and was now charged with reversing the mothballing of most of the US Navy. In the absence of a functioning Congress there had been no time for, or any practical means of, conducting acceptance hearings for the CNO; instead McDonald had been invited to Blair House by the President, the Secretary of Defence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and grilled for several hours. The President suspected that the Navy had caused one global nuclear war, knew for a certainty that it had almost started a second one last month by clumsily manufacturing an incident in the North Atlantic with the British nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought, and he was determined that the Navy wasn’t going to screw the pooch again on his watch!
“Yes, they say that too,” the Vice-President sighed.
“They say the observation room up in the tower is five hundred feet up in the air, Mr Vice-President,” the CNO rejoined with respectful affability. He was a naval aviator who had progressed steadily through the ranks with the assurance of one destined for high command; McDonald had been the executive officer of the USS Essex, and later commanding officer of the USS Coral Sea before graduating to command the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean.
“I hear tell you get the best view from the hatch at the top of old Bill Penn’s statue,” Lyndon Baines Johnson replied, determined to get the last word on the subject of City Hall.
The two men shut out their flunkies and took seats at the head of the long, gleaming rectangular mahogany table which dominated the Vice-President’s personal conference room.
“Do you have any problems with the command protocols notified to your office forty-eight hours ago, Admiral?” The Vice-President asked bluntly.
The confident, strong-featured naval officer grunted ruefully.
“The Commander-in-Chief has spoken and General LeMay in his capacity as the lawfully appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has endorsed the President’s actions. These are extraordinary times and I concur one hundred percent with General LeMay that my duty, and the duty of all the men under my command is to stand behind the President.” He half-smiled. “So, to answer your question directly, Mister Vice-President, in the matters we shall be discussing today, I serve at your pleasure.”