Julian Christopher launched into a concise summation of the general naval situation.
“HMS Blake is still at Limassol. The transferral of warheads and the tactical uncertainties arising out of the movements of the surface forces Dreadnought has encountered have put Blake’s part in Operation Reclaim on hold. HMS Victorious and her escorts will be in a covering position mid-way between Crete and the North African coast by around dawn tomorrow morning. HMS Dreadnought continues in contact with the former Soviet cruiser Admiral Kutuzov and her two screening destroyers. The Kutuzov group is presently patrolling in an area close to the north-west coast of Crete. My concern is that this ship is approximately a match for HMS Blake in a gunnery duel and at her maximum speed could easily intercept either the Victorious, or the Blake task forces in the open sea. While Dreadnought remains in contact with the Kutuzov we have the whip hand; however, the intelligence picture is dangerously incomplete. We have no idea where the old battlecruiser Yavuz is, or where the other major surface units spotted at Istanbul may have deployed in the last week.”
William Whitelaw stared at the charts on the table. He looked up.
“What action will you take if the Kutuzov attempts to intercept HMS Blake or HMS Victorious, Sir Julian?”
The Fighting Admiral did not hesitate.
“I have ordered Dreadnought to sink her if she approaches within thirty miles of elements of either the Blake or the Victorious’s screens. In the event that Dreadnought is out of contact with the Kutuzov at that time or unable to carry out an attack, I have issued similar orders to the Flag Officer, Victorious Battle Group, sir.”
There was really very little to discuss: HMS Victorious was steaming hard to be in position the following morning, the Blake was preparing to leave Limassol for a high speed run to Malta with her cargo of nuclear warheads, and the Dreadnought was stalking a former Soviet cruiser now flying the flag — they assumed — of Krasnaya Zarya.
“Before we left Brize Norton,” Sir David Luce said, speaking for the first time in some minutes, “I spoke to Admiral McDonald, the new US Chief of Naval Operations. He seems a good, solid fellow. Basically, practically all US Navy available major surface units are converging on Gibraltar. Logistically, it is a complete dog’s breakfast; the Americans are having to improvise practically everything. The long and the short of it is that two big carriers, the Enterprise and the Independence will be in theatre sometime in the next twenty days. The Enterprise sooner, it seems. One fly in the ointment is that the Independence has catapult troubles; and we’ll have to see what we can do to help her at Gibraltar. If needs must McDonald is prepared to send Enterprise and her ‘goalkeeper’ the Long Beach, the two nuclear-powered ships directly into the Med. He’s also ordered four SSNs already on exercise or patrol in the Atlantic to proceed to a holding position off Lisbon. Unfortunately, these boats are not provisioned for an extended cruise so again, we’ll have to see what we can do about that at Gibraltar. So, it seems the cavalry is on the way. Personally, I hope we don’t need to be rescued, but I rather suspect that whatever is brewing in the Eastern Med things are going to start happening fairly soon.”
The Secretary of State for Defence mulled matters.
“Sir David mentioned to me on the flight here that HMS Hermes may be forced to return to Gibraltar?”
“Machinery troubles, sir,” Julian Christopher bemoaned philosophically. If Hermes couldn’t steam fast enough for long enough to launch and recover fast jets, there was nothing he could do about it. One fought battles with what one had to hand, not with the forces one wished one had. Hermes’s woes had not been entirely unexpected and Rear Admiral Nigel Grenville had shifted his flag to the Victorious before the operations against Pantelleria, Linosa and Lampedusa. “Hermes will dock at Malta pending a decision as to whether to send her back to Gibraltar. A second carrier would be just the ticket right now but we haven’t got one so that’s that.”
“What of HMS Ocean?”
“She’s in relatively good fettle given the hastiness of the repairs carried out after her mining in Algeciras Bay, sir. Presently, she can only steam at twenty-three knots but that’s not such a huge problem since she’s configured solely as a helicopter carrier.”
“Um. Might it be advisable to indefinitely delay HMS Blake’s departure from Cyprus?”
The Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations didn’t read into, or imply any criticism from the Secretary of State for Defence’s question.
“Yes,” he admitted immediately. “It might be. However, given how exposed our garrison on Cyprus has become with the fall of Crete to — if not hostile then possibly inimical — unknown forces and certain other worrying intelligence indications, the weapons store at Akrotiri has become a hostage to fortune. Removing it from the strategic ‘mix’ will greatly clarify the situation in the event of a crisis in that area.”
William Whitelaw straightened and met Julian Christopher’s gaze.
“You mean that we won’t necessarily have to resort to Arc Light, Sir Julian?”
In the months since the October War nobody talked about using nuclear weapons; Arc Light, the name of a pre-war exercise simulating the effects of a limited atomic exchange had become the generic header under which a generation of British senior officers and their political masters now debated the unthinkable.
The hangdog, prematurely jowly face of the forty-five year old Defence Secretary was suddenly stony.
“The Prime Minister reserves to herself the prerogative to authorise Arc Light strikes at both the tactical and the strategic level. She has asked me to ascertain from the officers ‘on the spot’ their acknowledgement of, and their undertaking to comply with this stricture.”
Air Vice-Marshall Dan French flicked a glance at the First Sea Lord, who replied with a barely perceptible shrug of his shoulders
“What if Red Dawn possesses viable nuclear weapons?” Julian Christopher responded coolly.
“If they do,” William Whitelaw said resignedly, “I suspect that sooner or later Red Dawn will employ them regardless of what we do.”
Chapter 33
It was a dull, windy day with spits of rain in the air and the water in the three-and-a-half mile channel between the uninhabited, rocky outcrop of the island and the Cretan mainland was choppy, with white-capped waves tripping over each other. The island of Elasa itself was drably faded green and mostly brown, and the sea had turned that particular iron shade of grey that all seasoned mariners knew was a harbinger of stormy weather.
It was over an hour since the Admiral Kutuzov and her two escorting destroyers had changed course to pass through the channel. It was too risky to follow the surface ships into such narrow waters so Dreadnought had broken away to the east and run at high speed to intercept the big cruiser south of Elasa. The Sverdlov class cruiser ought to have been filling the lens of the attack periscope but the channel was empty.
“Down periscope!”
Captain Simon Collingwood cursed silently.
“Come right. Make our course zero-nine-five!”
He stumped over to the tactical plot.
“The sneaky buggers must have put about as soon as the island was between us and them, sir,” Max Forton, the boat’s Executive Officer commiserated.
“We’ll retrace our course. Hopefully, we’ll pick up the Kutuzov again.”
There was nothing intrinsically wrong with the theory it was just that this was going to be one of those days when nothing worked out as planned. An hour later when the submarine crept up to periscope depth north of Elasa there were no big ships on the horizon.