“What’s the latest on the British carrier?”
“She’s still afloat, Mister President.” But only just. Initial analysis suggested that a submarine had put a nuclear-tipped fish into one of HMS Victorious’s close escorts. The thirty thousand ton fleet carrier had very nearly gone over on her beam ends, caught fire and was now drifting half-way between Alexandria and the south coast of Cyprus.
“That’s four nukes that we know about?”
The Greek garrison of Thessalonica had been resisting the invaders, blocking Red Dawn’s complete domination of the northern Aegean, so the enemy had nuked it. Details were scarce but every indication was that a big bomb, perhaps, in the megaton yield range had been detonated above the city. The fall out cloud had almost certainly drifted back over a large concentration of Red Dawn’s own besieging forces but when you were dealing with lunatics that sort of thing was par for the course. Athens had surrendered within hours and now Red Dawn’s conquering horde was sweeping across the rest of the Hellenic World like a great, burning braid.
Yugoslavia, that enigmatic closed kingdom of fractured and divided ethnic and religious enclaves united only by Tito’s iron grip, might conceivably halt the immediate westward advance of the tide from the east. However, if the preliminary reports about nuclear strikes on the suburbs of Belgrade turned out to be true, all bets were off.
After the forthcoming Anglo-US-Portuguese conference in Lisbon SAM 26000’s next port of call was Cairo; which would have been unthinkable until recent days. Israel had talked about collective defence and the links between her people and the peoples of the civilized, democratic World but the only man in the region who actually wanted to discuss real war-fighting co-operation — involving boots on the ground and war planes — with both the British and the Unites States Governments was the forty-six year old President of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein. So, once Jack Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher and the dictator of Portugal, António de Oliveira Salazar, had concluded their business — the ceremonial initialling of a draft interim tri-partied mutual support and defence pact — the US delegation was flying on to Cairo.
Yes, the President of the United States of America knew it was insanely foolhardy. Yes, he was flying into a war zone, and yes, if anything happened to him it was possible that in the leadership vacuum fresh disasters might befall civilization. Jack Kennedy and his closest advisors understood they were playing poker for the highest stakes; winner takes all. There had been a trans-Atlantic telephone conversation between the President and the British Premier during which the pros and cons of them both going to Cairo had been seriously discussed; eventually they had decided that really was courting fate. Besides, British relations with the Nasser regime had never recovered from the Suez debacle, the Anglo-French invasion with Israeli connivance to invade and seize the canal six years before the October War. Jack Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, had ordered the invaders to withdraw on pain of potentially disastrous financial sanctions. Faced with an economic meltdown the British and the French had backed down and the Israelis had withdrawn their troops. The then British Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden had had to resign in the aftermath and his successor, Harold MacMillan, had spent the whole of his Administration patching up the ‘special relationship’ and the Egyptians hadn’t forgotten their humiliating mauling at the hands of the two former colonial powers. Although Anglo-Egyptian relations had thawed sufficiently — in the light of the rapidly changing strategic situation in the Eastern Mediterranean — to allow for the opening of Alexandria to Royal Navy warships, it had been agreed that any suggestion of a formalisation of military ties and obligations was probably a thing best heard from the lips of an American President rather than a British Prime Minister.
After touching down at a rainy Lisbon Portela Airport the President, his Secretary of State, William Fulbright and General Curtis LeMay were whisked across the tarmac to a waiting Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King, one of two flown ashore by the USS Enterprise for the President’s use. Minutes later the two helicopters were racing low across the Portuguese capital to the Palácio de São Bento, the home of the national Parliament.
Margaret Thatcher and her small retinue — Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson, the Foreign Secretary; William Whitelaw, her Defence Minister; and Admiral Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord representing the British Chiefs of Staff — were waiting in the ornately gilded and high-ceilinged reception room prepared for the hastily arranged ‘summit’.
It was the Angry Widow who set the tone for the potentially thorny discussions they were about to embark upon by smiling, stepping up to Jack Kennedy and pecking his cheek. The platoon of waiting pressmen and photographer’s were so surprised that, for good measure, she paused a moment and planted a peck on the American President’s other profile.
António de Oliveira Salazar, the professorial seventy-four year old Dictator of Portugal, watched the kisses and the subsequent friendly, almost jocular hand-shaking and back-slapping between the male members of the respective delegations with diffident unease. For all that he was of that generation of European dictators — he had been born eight days after Adolf Hitler, whom he had detested long before any of Europe’s allegedly ‘democratic’ leaders — his had been a relatively benign three decades in power. He preferred to ridicule, occasional harass and dispossess, sometimes imprison real trouble makers, but otherwise to steer clear of the odious things his fellow pre-war dictators had got up to in their vainglorious pomp. He believed the two crowning triumphs of his life were staying out of the Second World War and saving his country from a civil war like the one which had tormented neighbouring Spain. He also believed that in the disastrously altered landscape of the post-apocalypse World it was vital that he sealed a pact with the last two countries on Earth capable of guaranteeing the independence of Portugal.
Against the dark tide of events in the Eastern Mediterranean Spain was no bulwark; it was isolationist, fascistic and beneath the surface bitterly fractured by its civil war and the years of vicious bloodletting since. The antiquity and the incompetence of the Spanish military had been ruthlessly exposed by a handful of British ships and modern jet aircraft. Besides there could never be a rapprochement with Francisco Franco Bahamonde for no man could sup with such a venomous viper and confidently expect to survive.
Only one thing utterly baffled António de Oliveira Salazar, and that was the force of nature that was Margaret Hilda Thatcher. Meeting her that morning for the first time he had been a little swept off his feet in much the same way a man on the street would react to meeting a movie star. He had read the English newspapers which described her as a ‘blond bombshell’ and the ‘new Boadicea’; reserved judgement until he had actually met her. The woman was a marvel. All she had to do was walk into a room and the result was to stiffen the resolve of every man therein. It made no difference that at this moment the naval power upon which her country’s future depended was being eroded, destroyed piecemeal by a remorseless enemy. She remained optimistic, implacable as if success was a foregone conclusion rather than a distant, illusory chimera.
Unlike many ‘summits’ or international ‘meetings’ or ‘conferences that António de Oliveira Salazar had attended over the decades, this one dived straight into the meat of the matter.
“How long can your forces hold out on Cyprus, Margaret?” Jack Kennedy asked, wondering how the use of the Angry Widow’s Christian name would be received.
“Well, Mister President,” she retorted, “I think Sir David is better qualified than I to answer that question.”