They had talked as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
‘I grew up on Air Force Bases in the Mid-West. Everything for hundreds of miles was flat, just farmlands and prairies. We once lived in a place that was over a thousand miles from the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean.’
Marija Calleja had leaned against the pitted limestone rampart.
‘Your father was in the Air Force?’
‘He started out as an engine fitter and ended up flying B-24 missions over Germany in the Second War. He was with the 7th Bomb Wing at Carswell until a couple of years before the war. That’s in Texas. He went to work for Boeing in Seattle when he and my Mom split up. That kind of messed up Mom for a while. She’d had crazy times when I was a kid but after Pa left she, well, sort of changed. She was angry all the time. Betrayal does that to you, I suppose? I don’t think my Pa had found anybody else, or anything, it was just that after he left the Air Force he didn’t want to be with Mom any more. It was like it was the Service and base life that had kept them together all those years and when he stopped flying the big birds… Hell, I don’t know. You think you know your Mom and Dad and then something like that happens…’ He had shaken his head, eyes misty. The moment of self pity had quickly passed. ‘After the October War my Ma moved up to Washington DC to live with my Aunt Ida. The last thing I heard she was applying for a government job…’
He had apologised for telling her his troubles.
‘Don’t be sorry, Captain,’ Marija had assured him. ‘We all have our stories and sometimes I am afraid that people have stopped listening to them.’
‘From what I overheard some of the Brits saying,’ he had prompted, ‘you have quite a story yourself?’
Marija had laughed.
‘When I was nearly six years old I was trapped in a building that was hit by a bomb. Me and my little brother, Joe. He was unhurt; I was trapped by falling masonry. My pelvis and my legs were crushed. They’d never have found us but for Joe’s crying.’
Marija had not been troubled that Nathan had not known what to say.
‘They didn’t expect me to live,’ she had confided, looking at him with thoughtfully quizzical eyes. The guards had told Nathan that she was ‘friendly’ with a British naval officer; apparently, the pair of them had been exchanging letters since they were kids even though they had never met each other face to face. That had sounded weird. He had not known at the time that the ‘naval officer’ in question was none other than the son of the British Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, or that he had been on the destroyer HMS Talavera when she had been attacked by US Air Force A-4 Skyhawks off Cape Finisterre the day he had been shot down over Malta. The other thing he had not known that day was that Marija Calleja had not known whether the only man she had ever loved was alive or dead. ‘They didn’t expect me to ever walk again,’ she had recalled wryly. ‘If it wasn’t for Commander Seiffert,’ the former US Navy Surgeon Commander who was actually in command of Fort Pembroke and directly answerable for the safety of the POWs directly to the British C-in-C, ‘and a Royal Navy Surgeon called Reginald Stanley Stephens, I’d have lived a different life.”
Nathan had discovered himself trapped in the young Maltese woman’s gaze very much like a jack rabbit transfixed in the headlamps of an onrushing truck. She had half-turned to study the airman. They were — give or take a year — the same age. She was perfectly lovely. Perfectly lovely and he had fallen under her thrall. In another place, in another time he would have hit on her for sure. Not straight out because she was not that sort of girl, but he would have flirted and seen what transpired. She had known what he was thinking and become briefly tongue-tied.
She had taken pity on him.
‘I lost nobody who was close to me in the October War.’ As to more recent disasters, specifically the sneak attack on Malta by the 100th Bomb Group, Marija had confessed that she did not know yet if she had lost anybody close. ‘Things are still too confused. People I know must have been hurt, or killed, because so many are dead and injured…’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.’
‘There is nothing to be said, Captain. The World is the way it is and we must carry on as we may.’
‘Marija!’
The Maltese woman had turned around at the sound of her name.
‘Peter is safe!’
On subsequent days Marija had shyly, proudly spoken a little about Peter Christopher, the man she loved. But on that day the release of knowing that he was alive had overwhelmed her.
She had fainted with relief.
And if Nathan had not caught her she would most likely have fallen fifteen feet down a flight of limestone stairs onto the unyielding stone of the Victorian gunroom floor below.
Marija had been with the POWs each day after that.
Later she had accompanied them to RAF Luqa, shaken each man’s hand at the foot of the ramp up into the cargo cabin of the US Air Force Lockheed C-130 Hercules.
Nathan had swung around to berate the US Air Force cameraman who had taken a snap of Marija planting a sisterly, entirely platonic kiss on his right cheek. She had placed a gentle hand on his arm.
‘We are friends I think, Nathan,’ she had said. ‘Nobody can shame us for that; and shame on us if we let them?’
The Hercules had flown the eight 100th Bomb Group survivors north to Prestwick in Scotland where a silver Boeing 707 in Air Force livery had been waiting to carry the returning ‘butchers of Malta’ to Washington.
“DRESS RIGHT AND CENTER!” Bawled the Marine Corps Major in command of the honour guard. The bemused airmen trooping down the steps onto the cold, windswept tarmac blinked in astonishment as the band struck up the opening bars of the US Air Force song.
However, nothing in Christendom could conceivably have been more disorientating to Nathan Zabriski than the unmistakable sight of General Curtis Emerson LeMay standing at the foot of the steps.
The next few minutes were a blur.
Nathan saluted the great man who had smiled grimly and crushed his right hand in a bear-like grip.
“A man who obeys orders and presses on to the limit of his endurance and courage and far, far beyond in the pursuance of his duty will always be welcomed back into my Air Force, son,” Old Iron Pants said solemnly. While the other returning POWs waited patiently on the steps behind Nathan the legendary former commander of Strategic Air Command leaned closer to the much younger man. “The dishonour in this matter rests on other shoulders. The Air Force will stand behind you and your men. I give you my personal word on that.”
Nathan thought he must have dreamed that part of it because within a hour of landing at Andrews Field he had been whisked away by the Secret Service in the back of an armoured personnel carrier to the CIA Headquarters at Langley.
It was shortly after arriving at Langley, in a brightly lit underground conference room, that he had learned that his mother was in custody in the same complex.
She had assassinated the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, and attempted to assassinate the President of the United States of America.
Chapter 24
Miranda Sullivan had driven to San Francisco with Gerry Devers, a twenty-four year old intern fresh out of UCLA with degrees in Business Administration, Economics and of all things, French. Gerry was an entertaining kind of guy; good looking, obsessively clean, a little over-talkative and clearly aching to hit on her. Unlike Miranda, Gerry was no nearer being taken onto the Governor’s staff now than he had been the day his big check Democrat donor parents had foisted him upon the Office of the Governor back in August. Miranda hardly knew the man but anybody could tell he was an airhead who was never going to have to pay his own way in the world, and that right now he would much rather be hitting on her or playing golf than discussing the composition and the constitution of the California Civil Rights Forum.