“Helm! Make your course zero-nine-five degrees!”
He waited for his orders to be called back in acknowledgement.
“Make revolutions for fifteen knots if you please, Number One!”
Sensing a presence by his shoulder the commanding officer of the Royal Navy’s only surviving combat ready offensive weapon in the Eastern Mediterranean glanced over his shoulder.
Maya Hayek was patiently waiting while he made the necessary arrangements to recommence his marvellous, magical, spaceship like vessel’s private war against the plague of Krasnaya Zarya.
“Your… Cocoa… Capitan…” She murmured shyly, lowering her twinkling eyes in a slightly melodramatic show of redundant humility.
Simon Collingwood almost burst out laughing.
The weariness and the tension of constantly operating on the absolute, ragged edge of one’s capabilities, with one’s nerves stretched very nearly to breaking point for hours on end, suddenly evaporated and he felt for a moment twenty years younger and without a care in the World.
And all because a pretty girl whom he’d never have known existed but for the nightmare of this new war had made eyes at him!
It was a funny old World.
Chapter 52
Admiral Sir Julian Christopher was impressed but not overly surprised by how quickly his former flag lieutenant, Alan Hannay, had made his mark in his first sea-going posting. The boy had hardly been gone twenty-four and there were people already baying for his blood. In the handful of hours the boy had been HMS Talavera’s new Supply Officer before the 7th Destroyer Squadron had sailed to rendezvous with the much depleted USS Enterprise Battle Group, he’d succeeded in mortally upsetting the captain of the RFA Resurgent, and two middle-ranking Mediterranean Fleet logistics staffers. The Commander-in-Chief chuckled to himself as he strode up to the ramparts for his early morning coffee. As always he was immaculately presented and his manner was such that a stranger arriving at his Headquarters who had not been reading the newspapers, or listening to the radio — and had been on Mars the last few weeks — would have guessed that the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations was currently overseeing the temporary collapse of British military influence in the region.
It went without saying that he hardly viewed recent events with equanimity; but the end of the World was not yet nigh. Any subsequent inquiry, should he live long enough to suffer its forensic, possibly politically twisted verdict, would concur with his assumption that Cyprus was not a ‘tenable base for operations in the current emergency’. However, his assessment of the viability of a ‘controlled evacuation’ of the old CENTO warhead stockpile and the bulk of the British presence on the island had been self-evidently over-optimistic, flawed.
He hadn’t believed that Red Dawn would be so rash as to use nuclear weapons, selectively or otherwise. Not least because they probably didn’t have very many fully generated, viable warheads to hand; and their enemies still had huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
Soviet systems and designs were known to be more elementary than the majority of those developed by American and British scientists; but first principles remained, when all was said and done, first principles. Even under the Neolithic command and control regime in the former Soviet empire the business of actually persuading a warhead to detonate was a less than straightforward procedure. Although numerous nuclear arsenals may have survived unscathed all over the Soviet Union; Red Dawn’s problem was that the command and control infrastructure had been comprehensively dismantled, rendering most surviving weapons, to all intents, inert. In the United Kingdom and the United States that crucial command and control infrastructure had been damaged, but otherwise survived. Every single warhead in British or American stockpiles was as useable and therefore as tactically deployable today, as it had been on 27th October 1962. If the trans-Atlantic allies wanted to re-run the October War all they had to do was hit the button. Julian Christopher had made the mistake of taking it for granted that the leadership of Red Dawn would know that.
Julian Christopher regarded his error of judgement in this respect to be, in retrospect, inexcusable. That everybody else had made the same erroneous assumption was no comfort. What had happened in the last few days had been such a catastrophe to British arms in the Eastern Mediterranean as to be on a par with what had happened when Empire’s forces first encountered the Japanese in Malaya in the winter of 1941-42. Two decades ago Imperial strategists had assumed that Singapore was impregnable; a Japanese Army that depended on bicycles for its mobility and was outnumbered two to one by the defenders had captured the most heavily defended bastion of the British Empire in the Far East in a matter of weeks.
For Singapore in 1942 read Malta in 1964.
No battle plan in history had survived first contact with the enemy.
The Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations liked to think he had recovered from his initial shock with unseemly haste. Plan A was broken so he’d gone to Plan B. Since Cyprus could not be evacuated in a ‘managed fashion’ the garrison would have to hold the island as long as possible and get on with the job of bleeding Red Dawn dry. Losing HMS Blake in such a terrible way and losing so many other ships and most of the fine men on them hurt a lot. However, bad things happened in war; that was why people who’d been to war weren’t usually very keen to fight another one. The bloodier things got the more important it was to accentuate the positive.
HMS Victorious had anchored at Alexandria that morning. Her crew had put out her fires but the ship was half-gutted and listing with four hundred dead and missing. There was no count of her wounded yet; the figure was likely to run to hundreds including many who would surely die of their burns, or would be blinded for life after looking into the heart of the new sun which had briefly burned less than three hundred yards from the carrier’s port side. Even though the nuclear — tipped torpedo, with a warhead in the fifteen to eighteen kiloton range, had detonated beneath the keel of HMS Undine, a Second World War destroyer converted into a Type 15 fast anti-submarine frigate in the 1950s, the fireball had reached out for the carrier. Its thermal shockwave had scorched her port side and ignited aircraft, fuel and munitions on her crowded flight deck. The over-pressure blast wave had smashed into her steel flanks in the moments before a great wall of water had virtually rolled her over — all thirty thousand tons — onto her beam ends. The great ship would have foundered if she hadn’t, by some outrageous fluke of hydro-dynamics been partially sucked upright again by the huge volume of water hurled several thousand feet in the air by the explosion falling back into the pit in the sea created by the initial explosion. It was a fluke that had saved at least fifteen hundred lives, and for that the Commander-in-Chief was happy to thank God!
The tape recorder was already set up in his office when he marched in and slapped his cap, heavy with fresh gold braid on his blotter. He looked to the hard, scarred man in the brand new, locally tailored suite.
“Well,” he grunted, “I’m here. What was so important it couldn’t wait until I’d finished my breakfast, Colonel Rykov.”
The former KGB man waved for the Signals Corps subaltern who had set up the equipment and doggedly guarded it like his life depended upon it, to leave. The man snapped to attention and saluted the C-in-C.