The Foreign Secretary’s wife had met the tall, elegantly attired and immaculately preened head of MI6 at the door and pecked his cheek in welcome as she had in happier times before she had departed; her presence at Balliol was a fleeting one, a hurried visit to change into a less creased frock and to ‘brush up’ before she went back to the Prime Minister’s rooms at Corpus Christi. Crisis or no crisis her younger friend needed her, and somebody had to make sure the Thatcher twins were sheltered from the storm of chaos and dissent that was threatening to swamp the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom. There had been angry crowds in the street that afternoon and the Army had had to be called in to restore order in the city centre.
Alone in Tom Harding-Grayson’s study, a cluttered oak-panelled former don’s room deep within the ancient college, the Foreign Secretary’s intelligence chief waited as his old friend poured two generous measures of Whiskey into ugly, utilitarian tumblers.
“Pat looks well,” Dick White observed, accepting the glass he was offered.
“Yes, she and Margaret are very close. Most of the time she is acting in loco parentis with Carol and Mark. She’s very fond of the brats. She tells me she never suspected she was the ‘maternal sort’.” The Foreign Secretary’s voice was a little hoarse but betrayed little of the angst-ridden despair that had brought him low in the last forty-eight hours. “If you’ve come to offer your resignation,” he said abruptly, ‘forget it. That’s not up to you or me. The Prime Minister issued an edict this afternoon about ‘men who are more preoccupied with doing the honourable thing than in serving their country’. Nobody resigns. If anybody is for the chop,” he grimaced, “Margaret will deliver the blow herself.”
“Not even the Angry Widow can stop a man resigning, Tom,” Dick White retorted with an irony that verged on insouciance.
“No? She’s right, you know,” Tom Grayson-Harding countered, resuming his seat in front of the low fire guttering in the hearth. “In the old days a fellow could walk away from the consequence of his actions with impunity. But not now.”
“Nevertheless, I will be tendering my resignation. I have the letter in my pocket.”
“Rykov?” His friend asked. “Or the whole Red Dawn nonsense?”
“Krasnaya Zarya was, and is real, Tom.”
“If you say so, old man.”
The spymaster sipped his drink, pausing to reflect that one of the few sectors of the pre-war economy which had survived relatively unscathed and would in any other time have boomed was the Scottish Whiskey distilling industry. In an age when potable, clean drinking water and a reliable electrical supply were at a premium, or unavailable across large parts of the country, Scotch Whiskey was so ubiquitous that but for government regulation the country would be completely awash with the stuff.
“If I had come to you and told you that, despite the evidence to the contrary and the complacent view from across the Atlantic that the Soviet Union was not a ‘busted flush’, you wouldn’t have taken me seriously, Tom.”
“The Soviet Union is a ‘busted flush’,” the Foreign Secretary declared. “Or at least I hope it is or we are all in big trouble.”
The spymaster contemplated his Whiskey.
“In the old days you and I talked a lot about Abadan and what might happen if the Soviets attempted to force a corridor to the Indian Ocean, Tom,” he reminded the other man. “Before the war the Americans, and to a lesser degree, ourselves, kept significant naval and air assets in and around the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Ocean. Iraq, Iran and Pakistan seemed militarily and politically vulnerable in those days but with our bases in the region and with the option of quickly deploying reinforcements by air and via the Suez Canal, well,” he spread his hands, “we were confident we could meet any likely threat. But now?”
Tom Harding-Grayson remained silent.
“Suez is blocked at Ismailia by vessels sunk by a Krasnaya Zarya nuclear strike,” Dick White re-stated what everybody knew. “Our forces in the Persian Gulf and in other ‘friendly’ countries in the region have been slashed to the bone. The Americans picked up all their toys in Arabia and sailed home after the October War. What if the stories of Soviet troop concentrations in Azerbaijan and the reports of some kind of uprising in Tehran turn out to be something altogether more worrying, Tom?”
The Foreign Secretary groaned.
“I outlined my former ‘concerns’ about a Soviet push south through Iran and Iraq to the Cabinet today,” he reported glumly. “The Prime Minister thought I was being hysterical. The trouble is nobody can see beyond what happened in Malta yesterday.” He supped his Whiskey, meditated and met the spymaster’s gaze. “The House of Commons will sit on Monday. Margaret will make a statement to the House.”
Dick White read between the lines.
“Might the government fall?”
“Yes.” Tom Harding-Grayson drained his glass. “Margaret wanted to get onto the first plane out to Malta. Willie Whitelaw and I had a heck of a job talking her out of it. As it is the Chief of the Defence Staff, Airey Neave and Iain Macleod are heading off to the Mediterranean as soon as they’ve filled in the holes in the runway at RAF Luqa. Well, a couple of aircraft carrying doctors, nurses and medical supplies will be going out first, but ‘the VIPs’ will be hot on their tails.”
It was the turn of the Director General of the MI6 to hold his peace.
Tom Harding-Grayson was still uneasy about the decisions that had come out of that evening’s War Cabinet. The general view around the table had been that the worst had happened and that the time had come to pick up the pieces. His own view remained that what had happened in the Mediterranean was a political rather than a military disaster which raised new and frightening questions about the former Soviet Union’s surviving war fighting capabilities. The spectre of further significant aggressive moves on the part of an enemy they had all believed to be a ‘busted flush’ was suddenly back on the table.
However, once it had been decided that the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce would fly to Malta to assess the situation and if necessary — the decision would be his and his alone — act as interim Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations regardless of American sensibilities, and that Airey Neave and Iain Macleod would accompany him, the debate had shifted to one of how to limit the political damage at home and how best to patch up the potential new rupture in Anglo-American relations.
“Sir David might take command in the theatre of operations?” Sir Dick White asked rhetorically. “Why are two Ministers going out to Malta?”
“Well, Airey Neave is Minister of Supply. His department’s writ runs throughout the United Kingdom and the remaining dominions and dependent territories. Malta will need all the help it can get if it is going to be back on its feet as quickly as possible. Besides, the press love Airey.”
“Presumable, the Minister of Information is going to Malta to talk a good war?”
“Something like that. Apparently, the MOI had a film crew with a ringside seat overlooking the Grand Harbour when the Battle for Malta kicked off. According to Iain they got pictures of HMS Talavera roaring out of port to attack the enemy.”
Much of the evening’s War Cabinet had been spent discussing not war, or war fighting but the contentious subject of how best to fight the ‘battle for hearts and minds’. Throughout the heated discussions the Prime Minister had been unusually aloof, a little part of her spirit broken by the loss of the man she had secretly planned to marry. With a man like Sir Julian Christopher by her side there was no telling what she would have achieved. That she had already achieved great things, and might yet go on to achieve greater things was not to be denied. But without Julian Christopher by her side, at her shoulder, the one man in Christendom she trusted with her deepest doubts and secrets, she would forever be in some way diminished. Worse, the spark of optimism and never say die unreasoning courage which had been her hallmark in the short months of her meteoric premiership seemed briefly to have been extinguished. The Angry Widow’s anger, until now largely apocryphal had been transformed overnight into something bleaker, more real, deadlier and potentially self-destructive.