Peter Christopher raised his glass to his lips and drank deep.
The malt whiskey burned his throat.
Marija, he decided, would have been in Mdina. Miles away from the bombing around Valletta. Unless she’d gone home to Sliema for the weekend to be with her parents…
“You won’t have heard about the fighting in Washington, of course?” Giles Gerard asked rhetorically.
No, they hadn’t heard.
“The situation is a tad confused,” the older man frowned. “But it sounds dreadful. Full-scale insurrection. Perhaps, an attempted coup. They always used to say that the World was going to Hell in a handbag, didn’t they. These days one wonders if they weren’t right all along.”
Chapter 39
The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce was stoically ashen-faced as he laid the latest flash report from HMS Dreadnought on the table in front of the Acting-Prime Minister. He almost jumped out of his skin when the door behind him opened and Margaret Thatcher and Airey Neave rushed into the room.
“Is it true, Jim?” The Angry Widow demanded without preamble.
The man behind the big desk in the Minister of Defence’s office sighed and pushed the note towards her. Before the Home Secretary could pick it up, Airey Neave, her de facto chief of staff and the newly appointed Minster of Supply grabbed it and read aloud.
“IMMEDIATE C–IN-C FLEET STOP USS SCORPION DESTROYED BY SURFACE OR AIRBORNE LAUNCHED TORPEDOES AT 03:07 HOURS ZULU STOP FORCED TO RUN DEEP TO OUTRUN HOMING TORPEDOES AND UNABLE TO RISE TO PERISCOPE DEPTH UNTIL 07:15 DUE TO PRESENCE OF HOSTILE SURFACE FORCES STOP NO TORPEDO WAS FIRED BY DREADNOUGHT IN THIS ACTION STOP FURTHER AAR TO FOLLOW MESSAGE ENDS…”
The former escapee from Colditz looked up.
“This was sent hours ago,” he remarked idly.
Sir David Luce had clasped his hands behind his back.
“Dreadnought hasn’t broadcast again since the initial after action report. My best guess is that is she hasn’t been destroyed that she’s running silent. Presumably, avoiding hostile vessels or aircraft.”
Margaret Thatcher had drawn up a chair opposite the Acting-Prime Minister’s desk. She gave James Callaghan, the Leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party a thoughtful look.
“I’m told the fighting has flared up again in Washington, Jim?”
The big man nodded.
“There are reports that the CIA complex at Langley is under sporadic artillery fire. There have been truck and petrol tanker bombs in New York.” He pursed his lips for a moment. “It seems several National Guard units have been stood down. The reports list ‘stand downs’ in several States including Texas, the Carolinas, Virginia and New Jersey. I should caution that all of the reports are coming to us via third parties…”
“GCHQ intercepts?” Airey Neave checked.
“Yes. And from BBC listening stations.”
The Angry Widow looked to the First Sea Lord.
“What is your assessment of the situation in the Atlantic, Sir David?”
“Dreadnought’s last reported position was over three hundred nautical miles west of the Spanish mainland. The only reason she’d have been so far west was if she was either attempting to shake off pursuit, or deliberately drawing potentially hostile units away from the Hermes Battle Group.”
“Have the Americans said anything yet?”
There were shrugs around the room.
“The US Navy’s communications net seems to be partially disabled at the moment,” the First Sea Lord remarked. “CINCLANT may be operating without effective political oversight and guidance. One intercept inferred that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was ‘down’. It is chaos in Washington.”
“If Kennedy’s top soldier is ‘down’?” Airey Neave asked. “Who is next in line over there, Sir David?”
The Admiral grimaced.
“General LeMay, I should imagine.”
Margaret Thatcher groaned: “Marvellous,” she exclaimed, “absolutely marvellous!”
“Are there any indications of renewed civil disorder at home, Margaret?” James Callaghan inquired after a troubled quietness threatened to envelop the meeting.
“No. After the outrage at Balmoral the Army and the Police rounded up known troublemakers and anybody the Security Service had previously identified as a person of interest. I doubt if that would have scratched the surface of a conspiracy like the one we’re witnessing across the other side of the Atlantic; but it may at least have driven our own terroristic elements underground. Bear in mind martial law was applied somewhat heavy-handedly last winter. That may have had a dampening effect on any nascent Red Dawn cells that survived the October War.”
James Callaghan remembered the bombings and the assassinations in the weeks after the war; and the brutal tactics the Army, reinforced by Royal Navy and Royal Air Force units and the Police, had employed to hunt down those responsible. In the United States there had been no sudden outbreak of lawlessness other than in the bombed areas; in America the decline towards civil disobedience, and the gradual disintegration of the old social order had spread like a slow, inexorable plague across the continent. The authorities had managed to keep the lid on things in the big cities but in some parts of the country, and out in the back woods, anarchy was embedding itself in the fabric of the nation. Local militias had sprung up, vigilante groups roamed the streets and while regular units of the Armed Services remained loyal, thousands of disaffected career soldiers, sailors and airmen discarded by the Kennedy Administration in a desperate attempt to rebalance the hard-hit American economy with the huge ‘peace dividend’, had provided a raft of recruits to mostly rightist protest groups. The October War might not have devastated the American heartland; it might yet prove to have splintered it.
Sir David Luce glanced at his watch.
“HMS Victorious will be sailing from Portsmouth about now,” he reported. “She’ll be in a position to support the Ark Royal’s air operations in approximately thirty hours.”
James Callaghan tried not to broadcast his unease.
HMS Victorious had been in dockyard hands until eight weeks ago. The old, much rebuilt and modernized carrier was a paper tiger. She’d had no opportunity to work up to any kind of operational readiness and until more aircraft and pilots became available — a big imponderable in the present circumstances — her air group was going to consist of a single squadron of De Havilland Sea Vixens and a pair of Westland Wessex helicopters, the latter fabricated from spares cannibalised from unserviceable and crashed machines.
If the omens seemed uniformly oppressive to the Acting-Prime Minister, who’d received no word from Andrews Air Force Base since the receipt earlier in the day of confirmation that the Prime Minister’s aircraft had landed safely; the First Sea Lord’s preoccupations were similarly dark.
History weighed heavily on his shoulders.
Against the might of the Enterprise Battle Group the Royal Navy was pitting one exhausted ship, the Ark Royal, in urgent need of six months in dockyard hands with a depleted air group of less than twenty aircraft; and an old World War II vintage ship straight out of dock with a maximum of twelve serviceable interceptors. The USS Enterprise was in company with nuclear-powered cruisers, the US Navy’s latest destroyers and boasted an air group of at least eighty fighter, bomber, anti-submarine, tanker, and airborne early warning and electronic warfare aircraft and half-a-score of helicopters.
Sir David Luce remembered the disastrous outcome of the Battle of the Denmark Strait in May 1941 when the elderly, obsolescent battlecruiser HMS Hood and the brand new battleship HMS Prince of Wales — the latter with teams of civilian workers onboard struggling to iron out problems with her main battery — engaged the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen. The German ships were newly built, state of the art modern warships which had been working up to peak combat efficiency for several months, in Bismarck’s case for over a year; HMS Hood was old and tired, a relic from another age, HMS Prince of Wales ought by rights to have still been in dockyard hands. In hindsight the outcome of the battle ought to have been entirely predictable. The Hood had blown up after a handful of salvoes with the loss of over fourteen hundred lives. The Prince of Wales had been handled so badly she’d reeled out of the fight behind a smokescreen only minutes later.