Chapter 59
The air raid sirens were wailing like demented banshees in the near and far distance across the whole Maltese Archipelago; little good would it do if the next strike was half-a-dozen miles closer to land.
Admiral Sir Julian Christopher stood on the ramparts of the old citadel looking north beyond Comino and Gozo. Indistinct in the haze the great nuclear mushroom was beginning to fray around the edges, and drift downwind. The pillar of fire had detonated fifteen miles north of Gozo before the alarm had sounded. The air defence radar net had spotted the second missile, and correctly predicted it would be over fifty miles ‘long’; but been unable to predict landfall — or sea fall — for the third missile. It had briefly been lost in the clutter of electromagnetic disturbance generated by the first strikes. The ‘long’ strike had detonated within the pre-arranged ‘operating area’ where the newly arrived USS Enterprise, USS Long Beach and the 7th Destroyer Squadron was patrolling in anticipation of being joined by the rest of the Enterprise’s Battle Group — designated Task Force Twenty-One — in the coming days.
Peter’s ship was down there somewhere…
The third ICBM, following about a minute behind the first two had come down in the sea between the uninhabited islet of Filfla and the southern coast of the main island. Thus far, the warhead had not detonated. If it had exploded — and had been of a comparable explosive yield as the weapon which had gone off north of Gozo — most of the people on Malta would be dead or dying by now.
That it hadn’t gone off wasn’t luck, good or bad, it was war. War was chaos; chaos was war. At the end of the day there was no rhyme or reason why the one missile that was more or less on target had had a faulty warhead. It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that the bloody thing hadn’t gone off and Malta had survived.
The Commander-in-Chief of all United Kingdom and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean surveyed the half of the island of Malta that he could see from his vantage point high in the gallery of what had been the RAF Central Officers’ Mess prior to his reactivation of the dusty, forgotten emergency World War II era command centre in its bowels two months ago.
God, had he only been back on Malta two months?
It seemed like a lifetime; a second lifetime in fact.
They had sent him to the Mediterranean to ‘hold the line’ but nobody had known what nightmares lurked just below the horizon. He had arrived in time — literally with minutes to spare — to witness the bombing of his island base by US-supplied Italian fascist A-4 Skyhawks, and by four Strategic Air Command B-52s. Irreplaceable men and ships had been destroyed, over a thousand civilians killed or seriously injured and his ability to fight a modern war hamstrung. The reconstruction of the command and control system the bombers had destroyed was still a work in progress, barely begun; too many good men had been killed and too many purpose-built facilities wiped off the face of the Earth. Everything he had done in the last two months had been damage control, he’d known deep down that the emperor had no clothes and that British power in the Mediterranean hung by a thin thread which could be severed at any time. The disasters in the eastern seas around Cyprus had been as inevitable as they had been predictable, but the only alternative would have been to evacuate the island without a fight, and running away would have sent entirely the wrong message to current and future allies in the region and elsewhere in the World. He’d factored in casualties, just not the numbers or the mindless, brutal ruthlessness of his enemy. What sane man could make rational plans to combat an enemy whose manner of making war was to fight like medieval berserkers driving women, children and old folk before them as they assaulted one’s lines? How could he hold back madmen who thought nothing of levelling a besieged city with a one megaton air burst, or who employed nuclear-tipped torpedoes and booby-trapped merchantmen to attack one’s ships?
But he should have anticipated as much.
What had happened in the eastern seas was his fault.
He had never had enough ships, aircraft or infantrymen, or any kind of intelligence framework to underpin a strategy to counter what had actually befallen his over-stretched command. But ever since he had learned of Red Dawn’s existence he’d had few illusions. From that moment onwards the game had always been about one thing; holding on long enough for the sleeping might of the American colossus to awaken.
Cyprus was gone.
For nothing it seemed.
The two QRA — Quick Reaction Alert — V-Bombers based at Luqa would be airborne by now. The other three V-Bombers would be scrambling to get off the ground. At least one of the stood down aircraft was always loaded with a nuclear weapon.
Arc Light, the power to reignite Armageddon lay with the Prime Minister. Sometime in the next sixty minutes the thirty-eight year old widowed mother of twins would have to make the most terrible decision of her astonishing life to date.
Julian Christopher heard a sound behind him.
He turned to find a steward waiting patiently.
“Can I get you anything, sir?”
The older man chuckled.
“A large Scotch would hit the spot,” he confessed with a wry guffaw. “There’s a bottle of Royal Lochnagar behind the bar.” A present from Margaret Thatcher, the second bottle she’d sent him since he’d come to Malta. The steward was a middle-aged man with the leathery hide of one who’d been in Malta many years. Everybody other than the C-in-C and the lowly Mess Steward had gone down to the bomb shelters carved out the living rock of the Citadel rock. “Pour yourself a stiff one, too. A man shouldn’t drink alone on a day like this.”
Chapter 60
“We have clearly been attacked by former Soviet weapons most likely based in the Soviet Union,” Jack Kennedy drawled.
Margaret Thatcher was tempted to quibble with the use of the inclusive pronoun ‘we’, but thought better of it. She reminded herself that she was speaking with a born again Atlanticist, a man who’d rediscovered his defining political and personal convictions in recent weeks. Before the October War he had believed that an attack against an ally of the United States of America was an attack against them all. Now he was restating this sacred article of faith.
“We must retaliate,” the President of the United States of America declared without joy.
“I agree,” Mister President,” the Angry Widow replied. “But…”
“For all we know there may be new strikes against our heartlands at any time,” Jack Kennedy remarked.
“There may be,” she admitted. “But,” she repeated, “what I was about to say is that I’d have thought that if the enemy was going to go for the jugular, as it were, he would have done so with his first rather than in a subsequent wave of attacks?”
The man at the other end of the line in a bunker beneath Alexandria had asked himself, and his advisers exactly that question.
“What do your people in England say?”
“Like your advisors they are divided, Mister President.” She paused, looked around the crowded room — the end compartment of a Nissen Hut planted next to Government House, the dead press baron’s folly — at the pinched, worried faces and eyes of the radio technicians and her inner circle of Ministers. “However,” she qualified, “I am very clear as to my personal stance on retaliation. Having considered the scientific evidence submitted to and by the three Governments; The USA, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom in the years before the October War, to the negotiations we all hoped would result in a general agreement to ban the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons,” she took a deep breath. She was not in the least worried if the President of the United States of America, his advisors or any of her own close colleagues took umbrage to be reminded of inconvenient facts which she felt to be paramount. “Having reconsidered that evidence it is clear to me that if very many more nuclear weapons — particularly of the larger types that we retain in our stockpiles — are detonated in the atmosphere life itself on our planet will be threatened, and perhaps, ultimately doomed. Yes, we have the capacity to ‘carpet bomb’ every inch of territory we suspect that the evil stain of Red Dawn has touched or holds, but at what price Mister President?”