Prompted by the sudden declaration of a ‘no fly zone’ over French airspace by the Provision Government of South France, Malta-based submarines and aircraft had begun to show a little more interest in the doings of the French; but not that much more interest. What with one thing and another, the Mediterranean Fleet had been too busy lately to worry overly about what the French were up to.
The inexperienced rating manning the big green Type 965 repeater screen in the CIC–Command Information Centre — situated directly beneath HMS Hampshire’s bridge had been keeping an eye on the two contacts almost directly north of the destroyer. They had appeared late in the afternoon at extreme range and slowly closed to approximately nineteen nautical miles.
The Officer of the Watch had casually ordered him to ‘keep an eye’ on the anonymous ‘friends out there…’
“Sir!” The man at the Type 965 repeated called in alarm. “Something’s happening!”
Suddenly there were men at the operator’s shoulder.
“What the Devil is that?” Somebody asked.
Where there had been two contacts now there were three.
The new contact was travelling impossibly fast…
“SOUND AIR DEFENCE CONDITION ONE!”
Klaxons began to screech.
“Label that incoming contact Bandit One. I want reports! Keep them coming. Bearing and range and speed. Only bearing and range and speed!”
“CONSTANT BEARING DECREASING RANGE!”
Collision course…
“RANGE ONE-FOUR MILES!
The ship began to heel into a turn to port, her engines racing. There was no need to ratchet up Hampshire’s advanced combined gas and steam turbines, down in the bowels of the ship the engineers just ‘turned on’ the power at the press of a button. The destroyer picked up speed.
“BANDIT ONE ON CONSTANT BEARING!”
“RANGE ONE-ONE MILES!
“BANDIT ONE SPEED ESTIMATED AT SIX-ZERO-ZERO KNOTS!”
A fourth contact, moving as impossibly fast as Bandit One winked into life on the big green repeater screen.
“BANDIT TWO ON CONSTANT BEARING DECREASING RANGE!”
“RANGE ONE-EIGHT MILES!”
“SPEED FIVE HUNDRED KNOTS INCREASING THROUGH FIVE-FIVE ZERO KNOTS!”
In the Hampshire’s CIC nobody was actually afraid.
Not yet.
The terror came a little later when the men in the room realised that the impossibly fast contacts barrelling towards the big destroyer at close to the speed of sound were missiles.
Missiles with HMS Hampshire’s name written on them.
Chapter 52
The President of the United States of America had opened the first session of the ‘informal’ US-UK ‘symposium’ with the declaration that tomorrow he planned to ‘go sailing’.
Margaret Thatcher had received this news stoically because she could hardly claim it was any kind of bombshell. Shortly before the parties convened in the hurriedly ‘opened up’ dining room of old Joseph Kennedy’s summer home from home, Peter Christopher had passed her the President’s hand-written note inviting him to join him ‘on the waters’ at ‘eight sharp tomorrow AM’.
Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson, the Angry Widow’s Foreign Secretary had chuckled out aloud, much to the Prime Minister’s displeasure.
‘Margaret,’ he had soothed emolliently, ‘if FDR could have his old English Navy chum Winston Churchill, JFK can have his surely?’
Peter Christopher had felt a little like the meat in a sandwich wedged between two rocks with a hammer. He had still not fully digested what the Ambassador, Lord Franks, had put to him the day before about his becoming, in effect, the United Kingdom’s emissary to the West Coast Confederation of States. Notwithstanding that the last time any American ‘state’ had attempted to form any kind of ‘confederation or confederacy’ very bad things had happened, and he really did not want to take is pregnant wife and his friends into the middle of somebody else’s war, nothing in his life and career to date had remotely prepared him for such a ‘diplomatic role’. He might have felt a little better about it if he had had the chance to talk to Marija, but all the phone lines in the British delegation’s hotel in New Bedford had been humming with official business or been reserved exclusively for ministerial use last night.
Marija had already made light of having been whisked off to not one but two foreign lands almost immediately after their marriage; however, underneath her placid acceptance of being transplanted thousands of miles from her home in Malta, he suspected she was as disorientated by recent events as he was. And then there was the baby…
“May I join you?”
Peter had been staring out to sea to where the USS Southerland was slowly quartering the approaches to Hyannis Port. He was at a ‘loose end’ with no formal role in the proceedings other than to stand at the Prime Minister’s shoulder as required. Officially, there was no ‘military component’ to the US-UK ‘symposium’; and apart from the troops guarding the compound and the surrounding countryside, and the sailors out in Nantucket Sound nobody was in uniform.
Fifty year old General William Childs ‘Westy’ Westmoreland was attending the ‘Cape Cod Dance’ — as the event was derisively referred to in the new ‘Philadelphia Pentagon’ — as an observer on behalf of his boss, Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara. Like his political master Westmoreland was intrigued by how sure-footedly the British had played, and were continuing to play, their ‘poor’ military hand in the Middle East. The selective use of air power, the ongoing attempts to make new alliances and rebuild old ones, and the way a ‘penny packet’ formation of British armour had intervened decisively early in the imbroglio to frustrate — frankly lunatic — Iraqi ambitions at Khorramshahr, was deeply impressive. It was something of an object lesson in the shrewd employment of limited resources.
The Pentagon had been closely monitoring the British and Commonwealth — mainly Australian but with significant contributions from both the New Zealand and South African governments, the latter in assuming Royal Navy duties in the South Atlantic in support of Operation Sturdee — build up in the Persian Gulf with mixed feelings.
Before the Soviet invasion of Iran and Iraq, J. William Fulbright had been talking about ‘bottling up’ the contradictions of the Middle East, and of moving towards a ‘balance of power’ that guaranteed the long-term security of American oil reserves in Saudi Arabia. All that had blown up in Fulbright’s face when the Red Army had moved into Iran; suddenly the real consequences of ‘America First’ and the withdrawal of US ground, air and sea forces from the Arabian Peninsula had come home to roost…
Peter Christopher turned to face the shorter, stockier man.
“By all means join me, sir,” he half-smiled, recognising Westmoreland.
“This is a heck of thing?” The older man remarked. The rumours about the British sending ‘an ambassador’ to the West Coast had been ripping up the corridors of the State Department for several days. With the Administration’s attention focused inward on the forthcoming Presidential race and the thrust of federal business flying in the face of two decades of State Department thinking and advice, somebody badly needed to get their eyes back on the ball.
“What’s that, sir?”
“The damned fine mess we’ve both gotten ourselves into.”
“Oh, that,” Peter Christopher murmured. “At least this conference isn’t about preventing our two countries from going to war, sir.”