“I’d have thought our recent mutual experience at Balmoral Castle would have been quite sufficient in that respect!”
Julian Christopher suspected the woman had strayed a very long way off message, that she hadn’t planned to let the conversation become so personal so soon. His suspicion was quickly justified. She caught herself instantly; business first, pleasure later.
“You will have heard that HMS Dreadnought is missing?”
“Yes.”
“And that the United States navy is claiming she was destroyed by two of their anti-submarine aircraft after she had sunk the USS Scorpion?”
“Nonsense, of course,” he declared.
“What do you think really happened, Julian?”
“I don’t know but I’m not about to accept anything the Yanks say until I’ve seen some proof. The onus isn’t on us to prove anything.” Realising the anger was rising like bile in his throat; Julian Christopher paused to regain a more level equilibrium. “I shall be attending funerals for the poor souls murdered by Curtis LeMay’s B-52s for over the next few days.”
“It is a terrible business,” Margaret Thatcher said simply.
“The last time I spoke to the First Sea Lord he wouldn’t be drawn on the situation in Washington, Margaret?” Julian Christopher prompted.
There was a pause in which the line sang with soft static.
“The Prime Minister went to Washington with the authority of the War Cabinet to do whatever needs to be done to avoid a war.” As if this statement wasn’t sufficiently definitive she reiterated the essence of the matter. “Whatever needed to be done.”
“Good.”
They’d finished talking about business.
Oddly, neither of them really felt confident moving onto the pleasure part of the conversation. He knew that her call had been superfluous, that neither of them had learned anything new, or gained valuable fresh insights into the state of the World. But they’d needed to talk, to build upon the bond they’d somehow formed in their recent brief acquaintance. Such things were infinitely precious in the brave new World in which they lived.
“Forgive me, Julian,” the Angry Widow prefaced uncomfortably, “I’m not very good at this sort of thing. And things are, well, awkward. My position in the Government, and so forth…”
The man waited patiently. He asked himself how much it was costing her to open herself up to him this way. To show him her vulnerability.
“I cannot allow myself to be in any way compromised,” Margaret Thatcher explained in a rush. “Or to become the object of gossip. It would reflect badly on me and inevitably, sooner or later detract from my work, you see…”
“I agree. If we were to have an affair it would be irresponsible,” he agreed.
“Oh…”
Never had a murmur, a gasp communicated so much.
Julian Christopher was quite taken aback by it.
Oh, my God!
“You are right, of course,” the woman said, unable to conceal that she was utterly crestfallen.
“Margaret!” The man blurted in quiet panic. “That’s not at all what I mean. Of course it would be irresponsible for us to act in a way that was unbecoming to our roles and our responsibilities, especially at a time like this. Of course it would be, but that’s not what I meant.”
“Oh!” The Angry Widow was a little vexed with him now.
“I only meant to say that whatever we do must be irreproachably above board, that’s all,” the man retorted, trying not to mirror her vexation and failing dismally. They were both a little angry with each other.
“Well, it is very difficult to know what one is supposed to think when the other party to the conversation is being so opaque,” the woman complained. Her voice was decidedly unmelodic and peeved in that moment.
Julian Christopher stifled a chuckle of amusement.
God, what a woman!
“Margaret, there is a very simple remedy for our situation.”
“There is?” Margaret Thatcher asked, clearly not convinced he was being serious and wondering if this was the point at which she hung up.
Since there was nothing quite like striking while the iron was hot and his blood was well and truly up, the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations struck before he thought better of it.
“Yes, there is! Dammit, Margaret! Just marry me and be done with it!”
Chapter 44
Jack Kennedy had loved his time in the United States Navy. Or rather, he’d loved most of his time in the Navy. Not the parts when he’d been in excruciating pain, obviously. Just the rest of the time. It was during his service in the Pacific that he’d discovered his own leadership qualities, begun to believe that there was more to life than, well, ‘fooling around’ basically. The Navy had made him the man he was and given him the kind of unimpeachable back story no politician could buy for love or money. Rightly or wrongly, the Navy had made him a hero and after one or two missteps along the way he’d ended up President.
Now he was afraid the Navy had already started World War IV.
Back in October 1962 CINCLANT had been a NATO command denoting the C-in-C of all Allied Forces in the Atlantic Theatre of Operations, now it simply described the US Navy Admiral in command of the US Atlantic Fleet. Back in October 1962 he’d given the then CINCLANT — Admiral Robert L Dennison — the benefit of the doubt, not least because a narrative that traced a causal link for Armageddon back to a madman in a Soviet submarine had suited the Administration. In fact, if the maniac in the Foxtrot class submarine B-59 hadn’t existed, somebody in Washington would have invented him by now. CINCLANT’s narrative might even have been materially accurate but that was less important than the context it supplied for subsequent events. The Soviets fired the first shot. The Cubans fired the second, third and fourth. Tens of thousands of innocent Americans died before he — John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America — had ordered a massive and annihilating first strike against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. Nobody had seriously questioned that chronology because most of the people qualified to question it were, sadly but conveniently, dead by the early hours of the morning of Sunday 28th October 1962. This was fine and dandy so far as it went until history threatened to repeat itself. Whatever happened now in this new crisis people would be forced to re-examine the original timeline of the October War and remark upon the obvious similarities and unfortunate coincidences between the choreography of last year’s and this year’s, dance towards disaster.
Admiral Robert L Dennison’s services had been dispensed with that spring. The World was far too dangerous to risk him dropping the nuclear football a second time. It was self-evident that his replacement hadn’t drawn the appropriate lessons from his predecessor’s sudden fall from grace.
Inadvertently goading one ‘enemy’ submariner into starting a global nuclear war might be deemed — if not by the survivors, then by future generations of historians — an unfortunate concatenation of circumstances, an accident. Repeating the exercise a second time a little more than a year later would seem, to an informed observer at best careless, at worst criminal. When the fires of Washington DC had been extinguished and the dust and smoke of recent disasters had settled, Jack Kennedy would find another Commander-in-Chief Atlantic. The one cruel redeeming factor in the whole sorry farrago was that both the Scorpion and the Dreadnought were missing and almost certainly lost with all hands. Had one or the other survived the fallout would have rolled over the Administration like a tsunami and possibly washed the whole Kennedy clan down to toilet pan of history.