The First Sea Lord was rheumy-eyed.
“We have already lost the battle for Cyprus,” he said bluntly. “Presently, the issue is whether we can do anything for the fellows we’ve left behind. In the short-term our units are well dug in. However, even minimal air re-supply may not be practical.”
“I can have two wings of B-52s flying out of England within seven days,” Curtis LeMay declared. Give me air bases in the Mediterranean and I can have C-130s dropping supplies day and night in ten days time. CINCLANT tells me he’ll have three SSNs east of Malta inside a week. Can your boys hold out that long. Five to ten days?”
“We have approximately four thousand effectives and as many dependents, civilian workers, auxiliaries and so forth inside our lines. At present the enemy has no artillery and his air strikes are poorly co-ordinated and badly directed. The terrain is in our favour but our people are vastly outnumbered. Given the nature of our foes I don’t think ‘giving up’ or surrendering is an option. Holding on is the only thing our people can do in the circumstances.”
Margaret Thatcher was grim.
“Red Dawn is raping that island.”
General Curtis LeMay wasn’t going to move on without mentioning the Elephant — the bellowing, foot stomping, enraged bull Elephant — in the room. “What if Red Dawn nukes your defensive concentrations in the middle of the island, Prime Minister?”
Margaret Thatcher looked the burly air force general in the eye.
“Who exactly would we bomb, General LeMay?”
“Troop concentrations, transportation hubs, enemy units at sea.”
“If we can locate and identify those targets we can bomb them with conventional weapons, General,” she said waspishly. “With a minimum of civilian, non-combatant casualties. How many more nuclear bombs do we need to let off to poison the whole planet?”
“Red Dawn don’t care about that, ma’am.”
“Well, I jolly well do care!”
Chapter 51
Captain Simon Collingwood rotated the periscope mast through three hundred and sixty degrees a second time. In the south the pillar of smoke from HMS Victorious’s fires climbed high into the atmosphere, slowly drifting north-west on the wind. The wind had veered around in the last twelve hours, piling up the short, grey waves of the dying storm.
The Soviet Foxtrot class submarine had surfaced twenty minutes ago; and ever since then she had rolled and pitched sickeningly as the short, steep waves buffeted her.
“She’s still just sitting there,” he reported to the control room at large.
“Do you think she knows we’re here, Skipper?” Max Forton, Dreadnought’s Executive Officer inquired idly.
“After the last few days nothing would surprise me, Number One!”
“She could be an Egyptian boat?”
“Down periscope!” Simon Collingwood joined his friend at the plotting table, staring ruminatively at the symbols. There were no Royal Navy ships within seventy miles of Cyprus, precious few ships anywhere east of the Libyan Sea. The Big Cats — the cruisers Lion and Tiger — were in company with HMS Hermes east of Malta, operating in a patrol area approximately between 19 and 20 degrees East on more or less the same latitude as the Archipelago. The picket line of 2nd Submarine Squadron ‘A’ class diesel-electric boats had pulled back to 21 degrees East. Apart from Dreadnought and the Victorious’s surviving escorts, the Royal Navy had been bombed, torpedoed and ‘nuked’ out of the Eastern Mediterranean.
“Bandit One is venting her tanks!”
“Is she getting under way?”
“Negative, sir.”
Simon Collingwood and his Executive Officer swapped raised eyebrows; they’d been doing that a lot the last fortnight. Their new foes did a lot of surprising and a lot of very stupid things. Other than when they attempted to set cruel traps and exploded a nuclear warhead in a civilian harbour, there was very little evidence of careful, professional consideration in their antics.
“Bandit One is just sinking, sir!”
And that was what the Foxtrot class submarine continued to do. Sink. She sank for several minutes and then, when she passed through the seven hundred feet mark, she imploded with a dull, tearing ‘whumph’ that even over two thousand yards away and five hundred feet higher in the water column made Dreadnought momentarily shudder.
HMS Dreadnought’s commanding officer was beginning to ask himself what sort of madmen he was fighting.
Mission accomplished. Boat damaged, dead in the water. Never mind, flood the ballast tanks and wait for the boat to reach her crush depth. All over, no need to write an after action report…
Max Forton sniffed, he’d have pawed the deck in vexation but it wouldn’t have looked dignified.
“Good thing we didn’t waste our last Mark XX on that silly beggar,” he observed unkindly.
Simon Collingwood returned to his command chair.
He was handed the engineering department’s latest fault list. Dreadnought had been commissioned with such alacrity — some would say recklessness — last spring that there had been no opportunity to rectify the inevitable defects that a completely new design throws up. The boat was suffering the cumulative effects of dozens, scores, possibly hundreds of little patches, adjustments, and botched repairs which really ought to have been addressed by experts in the calm, controlled environment of a dockyard rather than in an ad hoc, needs must way at sea in between and sometimes under combat conditions. The boat was designed to run at twenty-eight knots submerged; she’d never managed more than twenty-six knots, at the moment he only dared take her up to twenty-one. It had been impossible to pump out Number Three Torpedo Tube after the battle with the invasion force off Cyprus because the bow door wouldn’t shut. Below three hundred feet the boat leaked in the turbine room bilge and aft around the shaft packing. Worse, Dreadnought was getting progressively noisier. Even the air in the boat was getting thicker, the circulation and scrubbing equipment overloaded by the extra people on board and the extended periods running silent with every available piece of kit, including air pumps, turned down low or switched off.
Simon Collingwood passed the clipboard to his Executive Officer.
“Stand down from quiet running routine.
His orders gave him licence to roam the Eastern Mediterranean ‘interdicting enemy communications’ and that was what he intended to do until or unless his ship broke. There was no invasion to block; it had already happened. There was no carrier battle group to defend; it was limping south towards Alexandria while HMS Victorious’s crew fought her fires. Having twenty-two civilian refugees onboard wasn’t ideal but he hadn’t been obliged to invite them onboard; and the intelligence they’d provided had more than paid for their bed and breakfasts. In the Royal Navy a man made the best of a bad deal. The tradition was the thing; one fought until one — or one’s vessel — could fight no longer and even then giving in wasn’t an option. Defeat was simply one’s cue to think and work a little harder at the serious business of confounding the Queen’s enemies.
“We will run northwards towards Limassol. Assuming we don’t bump into anything on the way we will re-assess the situation when we get there.” Dreadnought had a Mark XX homing torpedo and four heavyweight old-fashioned Mark VIIIs loaded in her five working torpedo tubes. Captain Simon Collingwood had no intention of leaving them unemployed when it was so patently obvious that it was his duty to launch them into the sides of the ships of the abomination of Red Dawn!