HMS Hampshire was only still afloat that morning; limping towards Gibraltar at eight knots because she had been outrageously lucky. The first missile had struck her aft, possibly exploding on contact with the metalwork welded to her helicopter platform to accommodate her cargos of Grand Slams and Tallboys. The missile’s five hundred kilogram hollow charge, its detonation dreadfully enhanced by several gallons of unexpended liquid rocket fuel had gone off directly above the stern of the destroyer. Even though much of the energy of the blast had been expended — relatively harmlessly — above and beyond the Hampshire’s hull the huge fireball must have briefly enveloped the aft half of the ship’s five hundred and twenty foot length. Anybody on deck would have been killed instantly or blown over the side, likewise anybody in the helicopter hangar or in the mercifully empty Sea Slug magazine, or in any adjoining stern compartments would have stood no chance of survival.
The warhead of the first Styx would have ignited very much in the fashion of a giant Napalm bomb, showering the whole ship with a hideous modern version of Greek fire. An older ship with less sophisticated fire-fighting mains and kit — Hampshire had been designed for the nuclear age with the integral pipe work and powerful pumps necessary to wash ‘down’ the vessel after it had steamed through a fallout cloud — might have succumbed to those fires. As would the Hampshire if the second Styx had not over-flown her and blown up in the sea a hundred yards off her port bow as she reeled away from the first terrible blow.
HMS Hampshire had been lucky.
The Styx had gone off pretty much directly above where — had she been completed as designed with a full weapons set — her twin Sea Slug launcher was located; right on top of her lightly protected, horribly vulnerable Sea Slug magazine beneath the unarmoured helicopter deck. If Hampshire had had her complement of Sea Slugs onboard she would probably have gone up like a massive Roman candle!
By the time the limousine arrived to pick up Peter to whisk him off the Hyannis Port to ‘go sailing’ with the President, the latest casualty list from the Hampshire reported forty-seven dead and thirty-one seriously wounded.
He had recounted everything he knew to the President of the United States, including his initial analysis of why the Hampshire had not actually been sunk. The destroyer’s survival was both miraculous and a testimony to the inherent unreliability of pre-October War Soviet guided missiles technology.
That morning had been dreamlike, unreal.
Peter Christopher was going sailing with John Fitzgerald Kennedy!
And a coterie of stern-faced Secret Service men; that said, it was ‘going sailing’ on in the sense that he was on a yacht — a really big one owned by some Democratic Party bigwig; the name of Claude Betancourt was mentioned, the boat was apparently named for his daughter Gretchen Louisa — which happened to be ‘sailing’ in Nantucket Sound. He was a passenger, uninvolved in the business of hauling on sheets, ducking under swinging booms or running about the boat leaning over the side to make it sail closer to the wind. Notwithstanding, it was liberating to be on the water and to feel the sting of salt in the wind on his face.
The President, dressed in casual slacks and a Navy-style sea jacket, seemed younger and more at ease the farther the boat sailed from the shore. JFK had been looking forward to today for ‘weeks’ he confessed.
“I thought about inviting your Prime Minister onto the water,” the most powerful man in the World guffawed to his ‘special guest’. Peter Christopher was one of several, relatively youthful and junior staffers along for the ride. The others carefully kept distant from their Commander-in-Chief. “But I guess she’s not really a nautical lady!”
“No, sir,” Peter had agreed.
Inshore the Gretchen Louisa had ridden the choppy seas easily. The sun had poked brightly through gaps in the clouds and the breeze had gusted off Cape Cod. Out in the deeper water the boat had skipped and plunged as she tacked across Nantucket Sound towards Martha’s Vineyard before heading south for an hour prior to turning around for the long haul back to Hyannis Port. President Kennedy had talked of his admiration for Peter’s father — the gallant but fated America’s Cup contender of the 1930s rather than the fighting admiral who had been the bane of the US Navy in the aftermath of the October War — and how he personally missed being able to ‘get out on the water these days’.
“I wasn’t in command of HMS Talavera long enough to ever really feel the real weight of the pressure of the World on my shoulders, sir,” Peter had confided to the older man.
Out on the water the careworn, greying man of the day before had shed ten years, there was a sparkle in his green eyes and a smile came easily to his prematurely lined face.
“I think sometimes of what it must have been like for my father when he realised everything had gone wrong that last day on Malta.” Peter Christopher had opened his heart to Marija in the still of the night, but never to another living soul. “He knew he was going to die, that a lot of his people were going to die, that he had failed, and,” he stared out across the grey waves, blinking the spray from his eyes, “and that he’d probably sent me and my Talaveras to our deaths. I can’t imagine how awful he must have felt.”
Jack Kennedy nodded.
The two men were ‘alone’ in a huddle of Secret Service men next to the skipper of the Gretchen Louisa.
“Forgive my impertinence, sir,” Peter grimaced, “but I think that you are one of the few men alive who can understand what goes through a man’s mind at a time like that.”
Chapter 55
The Red Air Force had bombed Basra again last night with a force of twelve bombers but this time targeting what Lieutenant General Michael Carver’s GSO2 — General Staff Office (Intelligence and Security) — believed to be elements of two under strength Iraqi Army armoured divisions attempting to hide in the southern suburbs of the city. In typical ‘Russian style’ the bombing had been fairly indiscriminate, and the navigation of at least three of the participating bombers so faulty as to bring them well within the outer engagement envelope of the Bristol Bloodhound long-range surface-to-air missiles guarding the airspace around Abadan Island.
It had been very tempting to put a shot across the bows of the Red Air Force but the Air Defence Controller, obeying Carver’s dictum to ‘keep our powder dry until we are directly attacked’ had resisted the temptation. Every available Bloodhound in Christendom had been sent to Abadan and when those forty-one missiles were gone, that was that!
The Bloodhounds were only to be used as a last resort: specifically in the event that they or Abadan was under immediate threat of attack, or at a moment of the C-in-C’s choice.
The two Iraqi officers escorted into Michael Carver’s office were dapper, assured, but very weary men who had had a sleepless night and been sent on a mission from which they probably did not anticipate returning. They snapped to attention before the Englishman.
Brigadier Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and Major Abdul Salam Arif were the personal emissaries of the Military Governor of Basra Province. Al-Bakr was the Governor’s Chief of Staff; Arif was the acting commander of the 9th Armoured Brigade. They had been selected to ‘approach the British in Abadan’ because they both spoke excellent English.