The Corn Exchange Trust Building itself was a magnificent rotunda designed by the Architect Frank Furness in 1908 as a reproduction of the Pantheon in Rome. The exterior structural fabric of the great edifice was constructed with nine thousand tons of Georgia marble; and the interior with Carerra marble quarried in Italy. A relief of Stephen Giraud, the bank’s founder was carved above the colonnaded entrance, and the oculus of the rotunda’s one hundred foot diameter dome was one hundred and forty feet above where reception parties greeted all high profile visitors to the Philadelphia White House.
Today only a small party was waiting to intercept Lord Franks as he hurried inside after braving one of the angry spring showers roving across the city. His bodyguards held back, shaking the water of the battery of umbrellas which had failed to completely keep their charge dry in the downpour.
“My, my,” the British Ambassador exclaimed ruefully, “I swear that it never used to rain so hard in the old days.” The brim of his hat was dripping wet and the lenses of his spectacles were blurred with water.
J. William Fulbright had made a point of coming downstairs from his office to be seen greeting his visitor. He shook his friend’s hand and smiled sombrely. This morning Philadelphia was like an agitated hornet’s nest; positively buzzing with anti-British sentiment.
He led Oliver Franks towards the stairs.
“The President is flying back to Philadelphia tomorrow morning,” the United States Secretary of State confided. “He’s as worried as I am about the news from the Mediterranean. Bob McNamara’s as mad as a March hare about what happened at Malta.”
The British Ambassador had heard more than one troubling account of the Secretary of Defence’s somewhat fraught dealings with the high command the United States Navy. The latest he had heard of the affair of the sinking of the USS Scorpion in December — an incident in which HMS Dreadnought, the Royal Navy’s only nuclear-powered submarine had been damaged by a torpedo launched by a Grumman S-2 Tracker flying off the USS Enterprise — was that it was still the official view of the Navy Department that the American submarine had been sunk by the Dreadnought. At the very moment the newly formed US Sixth Fleet was fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean senior officers in Philadelphia were still peddling bare-faced lies, scurrilously politicking against British interests in the heart of the relocated seat of the American government.
Oliver Franks would not have been at all surprised if the malicious rumour that the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom had become so infuriated with the lack of progress in reinstating a unified — NATO, North Atlantic Treaty organisation — integrated high command for ongoing and future Allied operations in the Mediterranean and possibly elsewhere, that it had unilaterally taken matters into its own hands and appointed Admiral Sir David Luce as Supreme Commander, had originated from within the upper echelons of the US defence establishment. If he had been a betting man he would have wagered its most likely source was the Navy Department, newly relocated just across the Delaware River in New Jersey.
The resultant furore had given a new focus to all those in the United States who believed that in the aftermath of the October War the only way forward was to pursue a ruthlessly ‘America First’ policy. People who subscribed to this view bitterly resented every grain of corn, drop of oil, and every cent in aid that went overseas; particularly when that precious treasure went to prop up a former ally who, in many American eyes, had ‘let them down’ on the night of the war.
Problematically, very few people in America yet understood that President Kennedy had launched a massive pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw pact Allies without consulting with, or forewarning its closest NATO ally, and that far from hanging back at the critical moment the United Kingdom had only known that war had been declared when the first Polaris missiles broke surface in the Norwegian Sea and the first Soviet missiles began to hurtle over the horizon on terminal trajectories targeting London and the English East Coast bomber bases of the RAF’s V-Bomber Force, over forty percent of which had been destroyed on the ground.
“What is the mood in England?” William Fulbright asked as soon as the two men were alone in his palatial office. Heavy blast drapes made the room a little gloomy unless the lights were on and armed Marines stood guard outside the Secretary of State’s door.
“Grim,” Oliver Franks replied. “The Prime Minister has taken things very badly. I have learned that she and Admiral Christopher were personally very close. They were at Balmoral at the time of the attempt on Her Majesty’s wife, you know. Apparently, the Fighting Admiral shielded her with his body during the attack and the Prime Minister, well, obviously she wasn’t Prime Minister at that time, she nursed him the night after the attack and afterwards they were, as I say, very close…”
Fulbright’s eyebrows lifted.
This was all news to him and as he absorbed the import of the finely calculated confidence the British Ambassador had adroitly shared with him, his worries multiplied.
“Very close?” He asked, as if he was simply musing aloud.
“I am led to believe that Mrs Thatcher was affianced to the Fighting Admiral,” Oliver Franks said lowly.
In his terse trans-Atlantic telephone conversation with his immediate superior, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson had been at pains to impress upon him that this information was only to be divulged if, and when, Franks saw no other way of warning their Allies that what had happened at Malta ought to be the thing concentrating minds, not the nonsense about the who was, and who was not in the frame to be ‘Supreme Commander’.
Oliver Franks looked the United States Secretary of State in the eye.
“The couple planned to announce their intention to wed at the earliest appropriate time. The wedding would not have been until the conclusion of Sir Julian’s tenure in Malta. At that time it was anticipated that he would retire from the Service and stand by his new wife in her political career.”
The United States Secretary of State said nothing.
Overnight the American Ambassador in Oxford had personally informed the British Prime Minister that Rear-Admiral Detweiller had been removed from his command and would almost certainly face charges of dereliction of duty and negligence on his return to the United States.
Walter Brenckmann had reported that the Prime Minister had received the news in stony silence.
Fulbright raised a hand to his brow,
He sighed long and hard.
“Hell, Oliver,” he grunted, “this thing just gets worse!”
Chapter 43
Marija had felt like she was going to swoon with relief — or it might just have been from sleep deprivation and exhaustion — when Dr Michael Stephens knocked on the door of the first floor office of the Medical Director of St Catherine’s Hospital for Women and cautiously stuck his head into the room.