Lyndon Baines Johnson cleared his throat.
“Premier Heath,” he prefaced, dourly, “you’re not the only guy in the room who has constituents he needs to keep sweet.”
“Sweet?” The Englishman retorted flatly. “Sweet, Mister Vice-President? American broken promises and parsimony would have seen millions of my constituents die of starvation and disease this winter if I’d failed to mobilise the military resources at my disposal.”
The Texan held up his hands.
“A lot of my people on the Hill reckoned that if the British Empire can afford to keep more ships in the water than the United States Navy you really don’t need our foreign aid.”
Iain Macleod got to his feet and moved around to speak quietly in Edward Heath’s ear. The Minister of Information was unusually calm and collected. He’d seen the rage building in his old friend’s eyes and, notwithstanding their differences in the last terrible year, he hoped he was still close enough to the urbane, cultured highly intelligent man who’d shouldered the whole weight of carrying his hard-pressed country through its most desperate hours for his counsel of caution to be heard. The Ted Heath he’d known before the war had been a cheerful, solicitous friend to whom personal loyalty and respect were two-way streets. In fact he’d been that rare animal, a politician who valued his personal integrity above party politics who rarely stepped back from discussing unpalatable or inconvenient facts with either his friends, foes, or with the voters. The Vice-President was seriously misunderstanding his man if he thought Ted Heath was a man who’d bow to the famous ‘LBJ treatment’.
“I think we probably want to ask for a brief adjournment now, Ted.”
Across the table the American delegation watched with eyebrows arching.
Edward Heath sat back from the table.
“Take that filthy thing out of my face!” He pushed away the fluffy microphone. He ignored the television screen at the end of the table and met the Vice-President’s unblinking, steely stare with a similarly unrelenting scrutiny.
His chair scrapped loudly on the floor as he stood up.
Chapter 36
Samuel Calleja had seen his younger brother walking towards him from the seaward end of the dry dock. Work gangs were crawling over the wreck of HMS Torquay making final preparations to flood the basin. A great steel patch had been welded over the gaping wound in the starboard side of the wrecked frigate; the whole ship had become a scene straight out of Dante’s Inferno with men hammering and welding plates over every hole and crack in the vessel’s thin skin.
The plan to right, float and tow the hulk around to Marsa Creek where all removable equipment would be salvaged ‘in due course’ was madness. Attempting to right the ship as the dock was being flooded was insane. He’d protested to his British overseers, who shrugged off his vehement objections and politely explained that the dock needed to be ‘made available’ and ‘this way is quicker than breaking up the ship in situ’. The pumps were already blowing compressed air into the compartments sealed by the welding teams.
“Papa said it was a bit of mess,” Joseph Calleja whistled, approaching his older brother, “I thought he was exaggerating. You can’t really see that much from the Valletta side.” He stared at the unreal sight of a two-and-a-half thousand ton, nearly four hundred foot long warship lying on her starboard side. But for her superstructure coming to rest against the side of the dock and the blocks preventing her lying directly on the bottom of the dock, she was literally ‘on her beam ends’. Their father had shown him black and white photographs of HMS Kingston wrecked in this very dock during the 1945 war; he’d never honestly believed he’d ever see the like in his life time. “Can we really right her with the cranes we’ve got?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Nobody’s ever tried doing a thing like this before.”
“We ought to check that the Times of Malta sends a photographer,” Joe Calleja suggested unhelpfully.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“No, I promised the British I’d be a good boy for the duration.”
“So no union meetings?”
“I’m still a member of the Workers’ Council, big brother,” the younger Calleja reminded the older sibling. “Just because of the latest panic it doesn’t mean our people don’t have a right to have their voice heard.”
“Our people! You should hear yourself speak, Joe!”
As they sparred the two brothers had begun to study the elegant lines of HMS Tiger, moored alongside Parlatorio Wharf on the other side of Dockyard Creek with the Daring class destroyer HMS Decoy moored along her port flank.
“What’s the rush to get the dock open again?” Joe asked idly, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the broken frigate.
“If I knew that I probably wouldn’t be allowed to tell you,” Sam Calleja retorted. “Not that it’s hard to guess. The Fleet is expecting reinforcements now that there’s a new man in charge. One, perhaps, two big carriers and their escorts.” He sniffed the cool air. The dusk was almost gone, replaced with the night. In the near distance oxy-acetylene torches burned dazzlingly in the gloom and sparks flew in glittering showers. Across the glassy waters of Dockyard Creek the arc lights burned over HMS Tiger, the lead ship of the last class of big gun cruisers that would ever be built for the Royal Navy. “Tiger is off-loading armour-piercing main battery rounds and taking on anti-aircraft reloads, HE shells with the latest time delay and proximity fuses. The rumour is that she’s off to Cyprus as soon as she and her escorts have rebalanced their magazines with AA munitions.”
Joe Calleja sobered a little.
“It doesn’t sound so good in Cyprus?”
“No, not since Crete declared independence a couple of months back. Some sort of leftist coup.”
The younger man didn’t ask his brother how he was so well informed. Sam had always been obsessed with what was going on in the outside World and their mother lived in terror of being told one day that Sam was leaving Malta. Joe’s frustration that Sam had never converted any of his curiosity about faraway places into politics and activism at home was the primary source of the friction between the siblings. Marija was almost as bad, of course, but at least she’d finally, reluctantly ‘got involved’ when she’d led the Women of Malta protests.
“Does it matter if the Greeks don’t run Crete anymore?” He asked, realising the moment he asked it that it was a stupid question.
“That depends who the new overlords are, doesn’t it?” Sam Calleja sneered dismissively. “And how they feel about the British sailing in their waters?”
Joe Calleja had once, not so long ago, believed that the World was a fairly simple place. If you didn’t like something you protested, fought against it, bloodlessly if at all possible. Then around a year ago he’d been arrested in the middle of the night, dragged off to the Empire Stadium at Gzira and over the course of two nights been beaten very nearly to death by goons taking orders from two men with American accents. He’d have died in that place if a squad of British Redcaps, Royal Military Policemen, under the command of Staff Sergeant Jim Siddall hadn’t interrupted the work of the torturers. Later he been told that the big Redcap who’d since become terminally sweet on Marija had taken one look at what was going on in the Empire Stadium and ordered his men to ‘beat the crap’ out of the Internal Security thugs running the ‘reception depot’. Marija said the big Redcap had just been promoted and was working for Admiral Christopher. His sister had also said that many years ago when the Admiral had last been in Malta he’d carried a flame for Dottoressa Seiffert. Life was full of surprises.