Tiger’s Captain, forty-six year old Hardress Llewellyn ‘Harpy’ Lloyd, a cheerful, solidly professional officer who had earned a Distinguished Service Cross commanding MTB 34 in a fight with German E-Boats in the North Sea in August 1942, joined Davey as he studied the navigation plot.
The two men had got on famously from the moment Nick Davey had hoisted his flag on Tiger.
“Ten miles out should be enough to give us unrestricted all round eyes on the sky and surrounding seas, sir,” the younger man suggested quietly.
“Very good.”
The two men regularly dined together and yarned about past battles, the idiocies of the peace time navy and any number of mutual friends and acquaintances, living and dead.
“It’ll give us time to start detailing off parties to go on shore to assist the civilian authorities,” Nick Davey thought out aloud. “Assuming the locals don’t start blaming us for their misfortunes, that is.”
“Triumph is reporting minor topside damage, sir!”
The old aircraft carrier, converted to the role of heavy repair ship — a mobile workshop in lieu of ports with suitable dry-docking or maintenance yards — was tied up alongside at Damman.
“What about Retainer?”
The fourteen thousand ton Royal Fleet Auxiliary armament support ship the Retainer had offloaded munitions for ABNZ ground forces and set up a naval ordnance dump outside Kuwait City at the head of the Gulf, delivered ammunition for the guns of the Centurions and the Royal Artillery units guarding Abadan, and returned to Damman only two days ago. In the coming week the ships of the ABNZ Squadron would come alongside the Retainer to top off their magazines depleted in the last fortnight’s ‘battle exercises’.
RFA Retainer was presently moored Tarout Bay.
“No word yet from Retainer, sir.”
Nick Davey shrugged.
“She’d have been several hundred yards further from the big bang than Triumph,” he observed.
That was when the flash from the second huge explosion lit up the entire bridge despite the fact that practically every window was blanked by a steel scuttle.
Chapter 64
Parliament had spoken. It had not spoken with a united voice but its mood had been unambiguously expressed in the tally of the votes.
Immediately after the vote her friends and colleagues had advised Margaret Thatcher to delay her visit to the Palace to the morning, to reflect overnight on the ‘possibilities’ of the situation and to consider her ‘options’ with a fresh mind after having ‘slept on matters’. However, as the armoured Prime Ministerial Bentley cruised through the darkened country lanes, the Prime Minister understood that nothing would change overnight; and that the brutal arithmetic of the House of Commons permitted her no leeway.
Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson had offered her a stiff drink before they set out on the short drive to Blenheim Palace; Margaret Thatcher had declined it. Her thoughts were hamstrung by weariness and despair; alcohol would have further blurred her perspectives and that risked doing Her Majesty a disservice in their forthcoming interview.
The House had divided two hundred and seventy-four against two hundred and six; voting by a majority of sixty-eight that it had lost confidence in her Unity Administration of the United Kingdom. She had survived three previous votes of confidence; today’s battle had been a battle too far.
All political careers end in failure; everybody knew that.
In the next hour she would be presenting her resignation to the Queen.
“Thank you for coming with me at such short notice, Pat.”
The older woman forced a smile. Normally a Prime Minister might expect to be accompanied on such desultory journeys by a spouse, or a partner; Margaret Thatcher had lost both, her husband on the night of the October War and a man who could have been her soul mate, Julian Christopher, in the Battle of Malta.
Both women knew that in the coming hours and days the UAUK was likely to tear itself to pieces, as Tory grandees who had never really been comfortable having to account for their actions to a mere woman, manoeuvred and connived — cheered on by Michael Foot’s irresponsible, pacifist and defeatist Independent Labour Party — to replace her as first among equals.
Had there ever been a more unholy alliance in British politics than that of the country ‘gentlemen’ faction of the Tory Party and the socialist hardcore of the Labour Party?
“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Margaret,” Pat Harding-Grayson assured her friend.
The Prime Minister shook her head, and smiled a rueful smile. Earlier in the year re-calling Parliament had been her idea. Her friends and ministers had thought she was mad and who was to say that in strictly political parlance, they were wrong? But she had followed her instincts, done what she thought was right. If they wrote that on her gravestone she could have no complaints.
Yes, it was a little galling to be hoist by one’s own petard.
But no, actually she would not have changed a single thing.
“No,” she concurred, “neither would I…”
Author’s Endnote
‘A Line in the Sand: The Gulf War of 1964 — Part 1’ is Book 7 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62. I hope you enjoyed it — or if you did not, sorry — but either way, thank you for reading and helping to keep the printed word alive. Remember, civilization depends on people like you.
In ‘The Mountains of the Moon: The Gulf War of 1964 — Part 2’ Anglo-American relations plumb new lows and the stakes in the Middle East become ever deadlier as the World lurches towards a second global catastrophe.
Britain and her Commonwealth allies have drawn a line in the sands of the Middle East. Here we stand and here, if it comes to it, here we shall die.
The British Government had always assumed the Kennedy Administration would ‘do the right thing in the end’ but as events spiral out of control and the final battle of the Gulf War reaches its terrible climax, one monstrous final betrayal threatens to poison the well of international affair for all time.
‘The Mountains of the Moon: The Gulf War of 1964 — Part 2’, Book 8 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62, is published on 27th October 2016.
As a rule I let my books speak for themselves. I hope it does not sound fuddy-duddy or old-fashioned, but broadly speaking I tend towards the view that a book should speak for itself.
However, with your indulgence I would like briefly — well, as briefly as is possible without being overly terse — to share a few personal thoughts with you, the reader about the Timeline 10/27/62 World.
I was not yet seven-and-a-half years old in October 1962 when I realised my parents were paying an awful lot of attention to the radio, devouring every line of print in the daily newspaper and were not quite themselves, a little distracted in fact, now that I think about it. I heard the word ‘Cuba’ bandied about but did not know until much later that the most dangerous moment of my life had come and gone without my ever, as a child, knowing it.
I was not yet eight-and-a-half years old when one day in November 1963 the World around me came, momentarily, to a juddering halt. I had heard the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and I even knew that he was the President of something called the United States of America. I did not know then that he was a womanising, drug addicted and deeply conflicted man who had lied to the American people about his chronic, periodically disabling illness which in any rational age ought to have disqualified him from the Presidency; but I did know that he was a charismatic, talismanic figure in whom even I, as a child more interested in soccer, model trains and riding my new bicycle, had invested a nameless hope for the future. And then one day he was gone and I shared my parents’ shock and horror. It was not as if a mortal man had been murdered; JFK had become a mythic figure long before then. It was as if the modern day analogue of King Menelaus of Sparta — hero of the Trojan Wars and the husband of Helen, she of the legendary face that launched a thousand ships — had been gunned down that day in Dallas.