“Did you hear the new Admiral on the radio?” He asked his elder brother.
Sam Calleja shook his head. His wife had spoken of little else than the rousing, reassuring bluster of the new ‘Grand Master’ of the Maltese Archipelago. She honestly believed the islands had been sent a new protector, a new guardian angel. Rosa didn’t understand that all the coming of the famous ‘Fighting Admiral’ signified was a tightening of their chains. In the next few weeks and months the creeks and harbours of the Archipelago would fill with great grey warships; and Malta’s bondage would be complete again for another generation. The British were never going to take their foot off the throat of the Maltese. He’d dreamed that one day they’d pack up and depart. He knew now that this was wanderlust. The latest interlopers in the footsteps of the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem Knights of Malta would only leave when they were driven out.
Joe didn’t pay much heed to his brother’s apparent distraction.
“Anyway,” he decided, sensing that any further attempt to make small talk with Sam was going to be like walking through treacle, “the main office sent me down here in case we burn out any of the servos on the hawser pulleys, or the crane motors. I’m a fully qualified yard electrician, remember?”
This brought the older brother out of his introspection.
“Whatever you do stay behind something solid tonight,” he directed sternly, as if he was addressing a small and somewhat recalcitrant child. “Even if this ‘operation’ goes perfectly cables will inevitably fail sooner or later. I’ve already lost a lot of good men. I don’t intend to lose any more just to ‘tidy up’ the dock for the British!”
Sam Calleja watched as his little brother ambled off into the gloom, stepping in and out of the back light of the arcs pouring harsh white illumination onto the carcass of the broken frigate in the dry dock. He checked his watch. He’d done everything he could to make sure none of his men got hurt tonight; in an hour or so the British would probably find out they should have listened to him in the first place. He hated the waiting.
He gazed across the creek to HMS Tiger.
He’d worked on the ship when she’d come to Malta to complete her maiden cruise; been onboard when her ‘inclining trials’ were conducted in the calm of the Grand Harbour opposite the neck of Dockyard Creek. Tiger was a very modern, beautiful ship but for all her state of the art electronics and gunnery control radars she was already obsolete. Like what remained of the British Empire her proud distinguished facade hid the anachronistic fabric beneath the surface. Although Tiger’s keel had been laid down on Clydebank in October 1941 her uncompleted hulk had only been launched four years later after the end of the Second War to clear the slip. For much of the next decade Tiger and her two sisters, Lion and Blake, had been laid up on the Clyde, rusting, before in the mid-1950s it had finally been decided to complete them as light cruisers carrying the latest automatic quick-firing 6-inch and 3-inch guns. Tiger’s four 6-inch guns mounted in twin turrets fore and aft could each theoretically fire at least twenty rounds a minute; her six 3-inch high-angle anti-aircraft battery — each barrel capable of firing over thirty rounds a minute — was dispersed in three turrets, one to port, one to starboard amidships and one in her after superstructure. If her turrets didn’t malfunction — which they did, frequently — Tiger could easily ‘shoot herself dry’ in less than twenty minutes. This wasn’t a problem because by then the theory was that she’d have deluged any potential enemy with such a weight of horribly accurate, radar-controlled gunfire that the battle would have long been over. Unfortunately, the main battery usually jammed after a minute or so of continuous firing and there weren’t enough 3-inch, high-angle anti-aircraft mounts to put up a broad enough curtain of fire to deter incoming fast jets. Tiger was a brilliantly envisaged, poorly and very expensively executed attempt to build a cruiser to refight the Battle of the River Plate.
Samuel Calleja stared a little longer at the elegant lines and radar adorned lattice masts of the British cruiser. From his vantage point several hundred yards away he could clearly see men moving on Tiger’s decks.
It was odd that a ship like HMS Tiger; so out-dated before her time in the age before the October War; should be so well-fitted for the kind of war that in all likelihood, she was going to have to fight in the coming weeks and months. Notwithstanding, he had few doubts that the initial explosion of Red Dawn would sweep the beautiful ship aside as its flaming banner swept all before it in the eastern Mediterranean.
History had its own momentum.
HMS Tiger, like the British Empire and eventually the destroyers of worlds — the Great Satan, America — would fall beneath the onslaught. Not since the epochs of the Mongol Hordes out of Asia had western civilization faced such an implacable threat to everything it held dear.
The time of the reckoning was upon them and the men crawling over the grey, floodlit carcass of the cruiser tied up alongside Parlatorio Wharf had no inkling of what was coming.
Ignorance was truly bliss…
Chapter 37
“What just happened?” Jack Kennedy demanded flatly. When there was no immediate reply he repeated: “What the fuck just happened?”
Lyndon Baines Johnson and Bobby Kennedy both started talking at once but the President couldn’t see the British delegation walking out of the room so nothing they said made much sense for some seconds.
“They’ll be back,” the Vice-President declared but the wiliest negotiator on Capitol Hill wasn’t entirely convinced and the glimmer of uncertainty sent shock waves of new anxiety radiating out in all directions.
Standing in the back of the makeshift NBC control room in the Aircrew Ready Room next to the Flight Briefing Room, Walter Brenckmann felt like he was witnessing a slow motion car crash and couldn’t understand why none of the parties had seen it coming. He’d suspected the President and LBJ would play the good cop — bad cop game; it had worked before. Apart from the fact it was the wrong game and that time was running out; why wouldn’t it work now?
Since he’d reported to the Base Commander and placed himself at that officer’s disposal ‘in the current emergency’ Walter Brenckmann had been ignored, mildly ostracised and left to his own devices. Eventually, explaining to the NBC producer who’d been bussed in at short notice to supervise the communication link with the White House and to record the ‘peace summit’, that he’d come over from England ‘with the British’ and would like to observe the ‘technicalities of the communications process’, he’d been given a ring side seat without further debate.
He’d watched the opening moves with mounting alarm.
Given that Premier Heath and his associates had flown into an ongoing civil war — no other term began to describe what was going on in America’s capital city — they didn’t need to be told that the Kennedy Administration needed every friend it could get. Yet the Vice-President had switched into attack dog mode at the very moment the British had given him the two headline concessions over POWs and diplomats that the Administration had to be able to deliver to the American people; assuming the main players survived the insurrection that was presently burning down Washington DC.