In Corsica and throughout revolutionary France there was little news of the outside World, which most French men and women assumed to have been swept away by the war. The Provisional Government had made it a crime to possess a radio in the reconstituted prefectures under its writ, the Government dealt in printed proclamations and local rabble rousing rallies, occasionally broadcasting exhortations and calls for national fraternity to the disease-ravaged population. It was believed that Paris and the cities of the north and the east had been consumed in the fires of the war, as had the great Atlantic ports. Across the English Channel the United Kingdom was a strange and alien place. An enemy to be feared, its every attempt at communication shunned. All that mattered was the ideological purity of the revolutionary republic, which henceforth would exist apart from the rest of Europe, safe in its own ideologically pure enclave.
The piecemeal domain of the Provisional Government stretched from the Côte d'Azur in the south east nearly to the Atlantic coast of the Pyrenean Basque country in the west, inland as far north as Orleans and as far east as Dijon. Regime propaganda claimed that the wrecked Atlantic ports of Bordeaux, Royan, La Rochelle and St Nazaire were all now within the grasp of the Provisional Government and that several expeditions had returned to the Auvergne after ‘probing the radioactive ruins’ of Versailles and Paris. However, there were also rumours of independent armed communes in and around Paris, in Brest, Normandy and in and around several northern cities, and of Provisional Government’s ‘expeditions’ being bloodily repulsed; but loose talk was dangerous and nobody passed on gossip about contacts with British and German ‘search parties’ or more ominously, ‘raiding parties’.
The men on the destroyers Surcouf and Cassard operated therefore, in a regime-managed bubble of ignorance, shielded from the ongoing torment of their countrymen and women at home. For the last eighteen months both ships had been based in the unbombed haven of Ajaccio, separated from the nightmare at home, and anybody openly displaying ‘ideological unreliability’ tended to be sent ashore, never to be seen again. On Corsica, notwithstanding that martial law prevailed, if a man kept his mouth shut and repeated the right mantras then life was, if not good then tolerable. Nobody had shut the whorehouses, drink was cheap and the Navy presence was largely self-contained, and most of the time, above politics. Out at sea it was almost possible to forget that in late October 1962 the old World had been blown away and that now the very air men breathed was invisibly poisoned.
Three nights ago the Surcouf and the Cassard — two of the three surviving ships of the twelve vessel T-47 class of fleet destroyers built for the French Navy in the mid-1950s — had slipped their mornings and, darkened from stem to stern, made for the open sea.
The crews of both ships had assumed that this was just another exercise. The sudden appearance of the United States Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean in recent weeks had kept both ships in harbour while the high command decided what to do; most of the men on the Surcouf and the Cassard had assumed this mission would simply be to monitor ship movements between Gibraltar and Malta along the North African coast. It was a game they had played often, using their turn of speed — even with fouled bottoms from respectively two, and two-and-a-half years without being dry docked the Surcouf and the Cassard could sustain twenty-eight to thirty knots — to hold targets at arm’s length on their radar plots. Their orders had always been to passively observe, and to immediately disengage if a target showed hostile intent. That was all the Ajaccio Squadron had done for most of the last year; watched, listened and collected intelligence on British shipping in the Western Mediterranean basin. Anything was better than swinging around anchor cables in port week after week, month after month, doing nothing.
It was four weeks since the Cassard’s conversion had been completed and in the days since her crew had wondered if they were going to be allowed to ‘play’ with their new ‘toys’. The destroyer’s rear gun turrets had been remover and the decks plated over, and two bulky missile launching pylons and a new radar mast raised over the after superstructure. The two disassembled P-15 missiles had been stowed in the ungainly, ugly new deck house that now spoiled the ship’s formerly elegant lines aft of the second funnel.
The missile launchers which had replaced two of the three twin five-inch turrets which had been sent ashore were bulky, top heavy-looking structures normally shrouded in grey tarpaulins. Within an hour of leaving Ajaccio the ‘missile crews’ — under the direction of Russian ‘experts’ — had been ordered to begin assembling the first P-15.
It had taken nine hours to assemble and load the first missile onto the first launcher; and another five to load the second. Then the tests had begun before some thirty hours after departing Ajaccio, the missiles were fuelled and declared ‘ready’ for launch.
All the while the two destroyers had been forging south across a metre high cross swell into a fluky south westerly wind. As was customary the destroyers observed complete radio silence, communicating with each other only by signal lamp. At night they ran without lights, reducing speed to fourteen knots. On previous missions the ships of the Ajaccio Squadron had loitered south of the Balearic Islands, or ENE of the Straits of Gibraltar, or a hundred miles north of the Algerian coast and silently waited, often for as many as six or seven days. Traffic along the normal pre-war trade routes was sparse, advertised only by distant radar emissions. In past operations the Ajaccio Squadron had gathered intelligence about those radar ‘signatures’, tracked the air traffic east and west, never risking visual contact. Two months ago the Surcouf, in company with Duperre class destroyer La Bourdonnais, had inadvertently strayed into the ‘engagement envelope’ of the modern American warships escorting the old battleship USS Iowa; their radars suddenly blinded by a fog of jamming the French ships had had turned away and run north at flank speed. This first encounter with modern American vessels had been a chastening experience; running through the night with no way of knowing if the enemy was in pursuit.
Last night the two warships had crept within twenty miles of Algiers before seeking sea room before dawn. The Cassard and the Surcouf had come to battle stations two hours before dusk and both ships had made revolutions for twenty-six knots.
The Cassard shuddered; the roar of the igniting rocket motor of the P-15 Termit ship-to-ship missile screamed into nearby compartments and filtered into every corner of the three thousand ton warship at 20:08 local time that evening. Many men braced for the half-expected premature detonation of the weapon.
But there was no massive secondary, ship-wrecking explosion.
Instead, the two-ton missile climbed into the night rapidly leaving the Cassard behind in the darkness.
NATO nomenclature for the P-15 ignored the Soviet ‘Termit’ — which translated as Termite — and used the reporting name of Styx or the designation SS-N-2. The P-15 had been developed by the Soviet Raduga Design Bureau in the 1950s as part of the Soviet Union’s investment in ship-to-ship guided weapons as a quick fix to address the numerical and technical inferiority of the Red Navy’s surface and submarine fleets. The Red Navy had been wiped out in the Second World War and even by the time of the Cuban Missiles War it remained tiny in comparison to the combined US and British armadas. Hard hitting ship-to-ship missiles like the P-15 were a pragmatic attempt to even up the odds.