“Prime Minister, we are at war.”
“I know we are at war, Jack,” Margaret Thatcher remarked, employing the President’s Christian name without thinking it at all odd. Whatever their temperamental, ideological, and emotional differences they were united she believed, in a great common purpose. “Goodness knows how many of my people have perished in the last days and weeks. But you and I have a higher duty than simply to look to the good, or to the survival of our own people. If I learned one thing from my predecessor, Ted Heath, it was that there is a greater cause to which we must all aspire if we are to rebuild a World fit for our children to inherit. Do we honestly want to so poison our World that every second child is stillborn, to so poison everything that we risk breeding a new, mutated version of the human species?”
Jack Kennedy said nothing.
“Even before the war the levels of Strontium-90 and other isotopes directly related to the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, for example Iodine-131 and 133, were many times higher in our children’s bodies than before 1945. Presently, radiation levels in the United Kingdom are routinely two to four times higher than pre-October War. Radioactive isotopes that accumulate in bone marrow and the thyroid gland have half-lives measured in tens of years. We are have already embarked upon a potentially catastrophic millennia-long physiological experiment in living with levels of radiation that previously,” again she snatched a breath of air, “short-term exposure to which would have permanently disqualified any worker in the nuclear industry from ever working with radioactive substances again. Many of our people already live with a visceral terror of the invisible poison in the air we breathe. Frankly, does anyone really know many more bombs we can let off before that air which we must all breathe is blighted forever?”
“Margaret,” Jack Kennedy sighed. “If we allow our enemies to prevail we have no right to survive.”
“Jack,” she responded, hearing the sickness in his heart. “I don’t know the truth of what happened that that day fifteen months ago. What I have learned in my short time in ‘the hot seat’ is that in the final analysis one must do what one believes to be right. I am sure you did what you thought to be the right thing. That was then and this is now. You and I have a choice. Either together we unleash the fires of Hell on our foes; or we draw a line in the sand.” She waited for the man to stop her. In the silence she drew strength. “Or we make a statement for all time that in the heat of battle we had the moral courage to abjure the use of nuclear weapons for the greater good of all Mankind.”
“And what if a second wave of ICBMs rains down on our surviving cities?”
“Then we shall walk towards perdition together, Mister President,” Margaret Thatcher declared, in a trenchantly strident tone that Boadicea of yore would have recognised. “But wouldn’t you rather march with me towards the high moral ground? Wouldn’t you prefer to be able to look your children in the eye in ten or twenty years and say that ‘I did what I knew to be right!’ on that dreadful day in February 1964?”
Chapter 61
Captain ‘D’ had informed Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher that he planned to take HMS Scorpion under the burning super carrier’s stern so as to add ‘my fire hoses to those of the Enterprise’s own fire fighters’. He’d cordially inquired whether the captain of the Battle class destroyer ‘was game’ to ‘join Scorpion in the endeavour?’
It had never occurred to Peter Christopher to hesitate for a moment.
‘I’ll be right beside you, sir!’
Damage control parties under the direction of the Executive Officer, Miles Weiss, the Master at Arms, Spider McCann, and his new right hand man, Petty Officer Jack Griffin had hauled hoses forward onto the fo’c’sle, and threaded another virtually to the cross-brace of the towering lattice foremast. Every available man seemed to be on deck wrestling with the snaking canvass monsters, braced for the moment when every pump on the ship went to work.
The heat of the raging inferno on the USS Enterprise’s flight deck began to burn unprotected skin at two hundred feet. Only men in full anti-flash balaclavas, fire-proofed overalls and clumsy asbestos mittens could venture onto the bridge or further forward. Other men ducked behind the superstructure as Talavera to port, and Scorpion to starboard nosed slowly under the overhanging maelstrom.
The carrier was steaming slowly into the wind at around seven knots to stop the fire blowing down the length of her eleven hundred feet flight deck. Incredibly, helicopters were shuttling to and from the stricken USS Long Beach, where the cruiser slowly foundered some ten miles to the south. With fires blazing out of control on the latter third of the flight deck and in at least one of the hanger deck compartments below it; men were re-fuelling Sea Kings near the bow so that the mercy missions could continue uninterrupted. Many of the Long Beach’s survivors had been lifted onto HMS Oudenarde and HMS Broadsword which Captain ‘D’ had sent to her aide while enlisting Talavera in the foolhardy attempt to pump sea water into the stern of the huge carrier.
HMS Aisne had been within a mile of the airburst; she was gone with all hands. The USS Long Beach had been almost as close to the epicentre of the blast. Her enormous box-like bridge — which had looked like something out of a Buck Roger’s comic — was part crushed, part shattered and everything above deck was wrecked or hanging over her side. One of her forward missile magazines had caught fire and every few minutes a fresh explosion racked the doomed cruiser. Like the Enterprise she sat beneath a spreading pall, her fires flashing red and orange between the banks of roiling, oily smoke. Unlike her huge consort she was dead in the water, sinking by the bow and listing twenty degrees to starboard in the oddly benign Mediterranean chop.
“Stop PORT!” Peter Christopher shouted.
Above him and to his right the fires roared deafeningly. The destroyer drifted into the carrier’s churning wake. He’d read about small ships being dragged into the sides of big ships — really big ships — and the Enterprise was the biggest thing he’d ever seen afloat. Next to the leviathan Talavera was dwarfed into virtual insignificance. Through the smoke he glimpsed the Scorpion working nearer and nearer the impossibly high grey steel flank of the monster.