“The log of HMS Dreadnought and all relevant sonar and operational data will be made available to the Joint House Committee investigating the sad loss of the Scorpion. Royal Navy officers will make themselves available for interview under oath by members of that Committee in England at the Committee’s convenience.”
“This is going to get brutal, Margaret,” Jack Kennedy declared, his drawl a friendly, pleasant contrast to the starkness of the political consequences of this ‘private chat’ on the porch of his father’s old summer house.
“Give me the Fulbright Plan and you can tear me to shreds in public, Jack. Paint me as ‘angry’ and ‘unreasonable’, or just plain ‘pig-headed’. If the worst comes to the worst we can conduct bad-tempered transatlantic megaphone diplomacy. I don’t care. Just give me the Fulbright Plan and I’ll fight our war in the Middle East.”
The President of the United States of America sucked his teeth.
Nobody would believe a word of this if he recounted this conversation in his memoires. Heck, he would not believe it himself!
The Angry Widow had just given him a shot at getting re-elected in the fall.
Honest to God; he had not seen that coming.
Jack Kennedy offered his right hand; Margaret Thatcher shook it.
The man and the woman viewed each other warily.
Each asking themselves if they had just made some kind of Faustian pact which would later be their undoing…
Chapter 58
The two French destroyers had slowed, like two thoroughbreds after a long gallop, to a relative canter as they neared the Bay of Ajaccio. Clearly they were timing their arrival in their home port for the middle of the day; no doubt expecting a heroes’ welcome. The two approaching warships, identified as the Surcouf and the Cassard, had been sighted by a Royal Air Force Canberra flying out of Malta around sunset last night. HMS Alliance had been ordered to close in to the coast to maximise the chance of intercepting the murderers.
Lieutenant-Commander Francis Barrington stepped across the control room to study the slowly developing attack plot. If the enemy held their present course and speed it would be less than an hour before they were in range of the four heavyweight Mark VIII torpedoes loaded in Alliance’s forward torpedo tubes, or the Mark VIII and the Mark XX passive-seeker acoustic homing torpedoes ready and primed in the boat’s two stern tubes.
Having only ‘dropped’ the snorkelling tube and switched to battery power less than an hour ago the atmosphere in the boat was still fresh, albeit tainted with the dubious aromas of hydraulic oil, other lubricants and the as yet only a vague hint of rotting vegetables and perspiration.
Alliance had actually been submerged for seven straight days, closed up on electric motors during daylight and running with the snorkelling tube — or ‘snork’ — raised to run on her diesels and to re-charge her electric batteries at night. Insofar as anybody on board knew, she had not been sighted and her presence remained unsuspected by the small French squadron based in Ajaccio. The night before last Alliance had crept to within two miles of the entrance to the harbour; the locals had been having some kind of firework display. Possibly, they had been celebrating their ‘victory’ off Algiers.
Francis Barrington did not have a lot of time for an enemy with whom one was not actually at war who launched a sneak attack, and neither did any other man onboard the old, albeit somewhat modernised, Amphion class submarine.
The Amphions had been the last class of Royal Navy submarines laid down during the Second World War, although only two of the sixteen boats eventually commissioned — Amphion and Astute — had actually been launched before the end of hostilities. They were designed as long-range versions of the previous ‘V’ class, ostensibly intended to fight in the Pacific. After 1945, thirty of the forty-six boats ordered were cancelled and the remainder variously modified in one or two, sometimes three phases over the years to incorporate World War II lessons, new equipment based on captured advanced German U-boat plans and hulls, and the great strides which had been made in electronics and sonar technology since the end of Hitler’s war. The Amphions were the Royal Navy’s last class of ‘submersibles’ — vessels that operated best on the surface but which could also operate beneath the surface — rather than true ‘submarines’ like the boats of the later Porpoise and Oberon classes which could stay submerged with relative ease for long periods, and operate almost as effectively underwater as above.
Therefore, even with the ‘snork’ up Alliance was of that generation of Royal Navy submarines that became ranker and her combat efficiency compromised the longer she was on ‘war’ patrol.
For all that, with her modern sonar and a ninety percent charge in her batteries HMS Alliance was nobody’s pushover.
“We will hold at six-zero feet for another thirty minutes before we come up for a quick look around, Number One,” Francis Barrington informed his executive officer, twenty-four year old Lieutenant Michael Philpott.
The younger man repeated back the instructions.
“We seem to have a knack of being in the right place at the right time,” Alliance’s Commanding Officer observed ruefully.
Philpott chuckled.
Two months ago Alliance had accepted the surrender of a Turkish destroyer off Malta and inadvertently captured a pile of Soviet code books and cipher machines. For her temerity Alliance had been quarantined in Lazaretto Creek at Malta for nearly three weeks before re-provisioning and oiling for the current war cruise.
If Michael Philpott had had any lingering misgivings about ‘the skipper’ before the Battle of Malta, they had been swept away in the last couple of months; the man had an uncanny unflappability and a grace under pressure that rubbed off on everybody around him. Nothing got under his skin, he never raised his voice, he was the crew’s ‘skipper’ and father figure.
“There’s time for everybody to have a hot drink and a sandwich before we start hunting in earnest,” Barrington decided, pushing back his cap on his balding pate.
Life was full of surprises. Yesterday was his forty-third birthday. He had been a reservist — a solicitor’s clerk in an English county town, Winchester in Hampshire — for over fourteen years by the time of the October War and had only been called back to the colours as late as last autumn. The last time he had been in Mediterranean waters it had been as a terrified sub-lieutenant on an old U-class boat — the Unbroken — but at least he had known who was trying to kill him in those days. These days, who knew? Red Dawn? The old Soviet Union? The Turks? The Americans? Sicilian and Algerian pirates and smugglers? And now the French!
Alliance had been operating in the waters west of Corsica for the last seventeen days. Barrington had used this time to methodically observe the habits and the courses steered by the sporadic traffic entering and leaving Ajaccio, and clinging close to the western coast of the big island. It was the knowledge he had gleaned that gave him a high degree of confidence that he had placed Alliance in the optimum position to intercept the two returning destroyers. It was a confidence buoyed by the fact that while he had been in these waters he had detected only negligible sonar activity, and no indication whatsoever that the French Squadron bottled up in Ajaccio had any notion that it was under surveillance.
Ever since the ‘Provisional Government’ somewhere in southern France had broadcast a warning for aircraft not to overfly its territory — back around the time of the Battle of Malta — the boats of the 1st Submarine Squadron based in Lazaretto and Msida Creeks at Malta had been re-tasked to patrol in the Western rather than the Eastern Mediterranean. The US Navy had a pair of nuclear attack submarines somewhere at large in the east and the bellicose noises coming out of Clermont-Ferrand had found new work for the otherwise idle Amphions. Alliance’s sisters Alderney and Auriga, both recently arrived in theatre from England, were loitering respectively in the Gulf of Lions watching over Marseilles and Toulon, and patrolling the waters off the Côte d'Azur.