The President had been about to interrogate her about exactly that.
“Margaret,” he retorted, misinterpreting the woman’s employment of his Christian name as an act of conciliation. “We moved the Kitty Hawk into the Persian Gulf specifically to deter the Soviets reaching for the nuclear trigger.”
Curtis LeMay winced.
I am not hearing this!
His Commander-in-Chief had got it into his head that he was, in some bizarre sense, in the right. He honestly did not believe he was having this conversation with the same woman who had talked him out of retaliating against the Red Dawn strikes in the Mediterranean and the Balkans back in February.
LeMay had told the President that it was highly likely that the British did not yet know what had happened in the Persian Gulf; that now was the time to admit that a dreadful mistake had been made and to do whatever it took to stop the bleeding.
Unfortunately, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and his Commander-in-Chief were reading from different play books.
“Now,” Jack Kennedy continued, “if the Soviets ‘go nuclear’ we’ll all be dragged into this thing.”
“Mister President,” Margaret Thatcher replied with the patient angst that told everybody on the other end of the line that she was speaking between grinding, clench teeth. “The reason RAF V-Bombers attacked Chelyabinsk eight days ago was to ensure that the Soviet High Command could have no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that we are fully prepared to complete the work General LeMay’s boys left unfinished in October 1962. If the Soviets retaliate with nuclear weapons we will do likewise.”
That was when Curtis LeMay realized he had been right; the British still had not learned about the destruction of the Centaur Battle Group. It was not too late to…
The President was barely containing his exasperation.
“Margaret, you can’t… ”
“Further,” the British Prime Minister added, a hectoring note rising stridently in her voice, “if the worst come to the worst I will bomb the Red Army all the way back to Baghdad!”
Understandably, this prompted a horrified silence in the vault.
“Oh, shit!” This from Secretary of Defense McNamara’s trusted military assistant, General William Childs ‘Westy’ Westmoreland who involuntarily passed a hand across his face.
LeMay threw a look at Westmoreland, suspecting the despair in the younger man’s eyes was no more than a mirror of that in his own.
“Are you still there, Jack,” the woman in Oxford asked peremptorily after a gap of about ten seconds.
“Er, yes… ” The President regained his composure, his voice hardened. “I will be no part of that,” he declared.
LeMay stifled a groan.
This was like October 1962 all over again.
Except this was worse; there had been no ‘hot line’ to the Kremlin, everything had happened in slow motion. There had been an element of the blind leading the blind back then, not so now. This thing was playing out like some nightmare Greek tragedy in real time; like a race to perdition…
“In fact,” JFK declared, his voice finding a depth and strength which masked the turmoil behind it, “I must tell you now that I have already broadcast a message to the Soviet leadership disassociating myself from British actions. Via the good offices of former Ambassador Dobrynin, whom you may know elected to remain in the United States after the Cuban Missiles War, we have been in communication with the Troika, the collective leadership of the Soviet Union in recent weeks and days energetically endeavoring to defuse tensions arising from the sinking of the USS Providence in the Arabian Sea… ”
Curtis LeMay wanted to put his head in his hands.
He looked again at Westmoreland whose eyes were as wide as saucers.
The Army man shook his head, opened his hands briefly in a gesture of abject helplessness.
The transatlantic phone line hissed.
Those with keener hearing imagined they heard muffled voices, a heated discussion going on.
“Margaret,” the President prompted. “Margaret, are you still there… ”
Still, only the hissing of static.
“Margaret… ”
Jack Kennedy looked around the table.
“Somebody check the line!” LeMay commanded and some twenty seconds later a Marine stepped into the room.
“The connection is still UP, sir!”
The men in the vault waited.
“President Kennedy,” Margaret Thatcher announced, her voice quivering with what could only be the rage of a woman shamefully scorned.
Curtis LeMay realized that something else had just gone catastrophically wrong; and that it could only be that the full scale of the abomination in the Persian Gulf was now becoming evident to the British.
“I took you for many things,” the woman continued, her manner ever more excoriatingly contemptuous of her interlocutor. “Some of those things were uncharitable, others it now seems, unjustly creditworthy. As we speak the United States Navy is murdering British and Commonwealth sailors, airmen and in all likelihood soldiers in the Persian Gulf. Once again you have attacked my people without warning, their blood and the blood of all those who will die in the next few days, weeks and perhaps, years will be on your hands for all time.”
The lady was suddenly glacially calm.
“Mr President,” her tone was so implacable that it made the hairs on the necks of all the men in the room stand up in sympathy. “Once again it seems as if the United States has stabbed Great Britain in the back… ”
“Margaret, I… ”
“As we speak American airmen and sailors are murdering British and Commonwealth personnel in the Persian Gulf.”
There was a hissing silence on the line for several seconds.
“Margaret, I’m receiving news as we speak… ”
“Mr President, I will not let this stand!” Margaret Thatcher had spoken softly but to those who had heard her words it felt as if she had screamed them in their faces. “Do you hear me?”
To the men in the vault there could be no doubt that in that moment she was channeling the terrible righteous anger of her whole nation.
“Do you hear me, Mr President?”
Jack Kennedy’s ashen pallor had assumed a waxed, deathly hue.
“Yes, I hear you, Prime Minister… ”
“This will not stand,” the woman said, her voice trembling with deadly intent. “Be assured that I will use every gun, every bomb, every bullet, every weapon that I have at my disposal… ”
She broke off to snatch a ragged, spitting breath.
“Every weapon that I have. I swear I will avenge this betrayal one day. Do your worst. I will fight you with my own eye teeth if I have to!”
The man at the other end of the transatlantic line was literally lost for words.
“My own eye teeth,” the Angry Widow ground out venomously. “May you rot in Hell!”
“Margaret, I…
But the hissing static had died
And with it the impossible dream of peace.
Chapter 49
Norman Schwarzkopf had been unable to drag himself up more than a dozen of the two hundred steps up to the redoubt command post in the gallery of the State Capitol Building before he collapsed. The wound in his leg was on fire, now the medics were talking about an infection and pumping antibiotics into his feverish body.
In the distance the night pulsed with distant B-52 strikes. Periodically, the M2s up in the dome sawed and hammered. The rebels had already infiltrated the carpet bombed moonscape surrounding the city, and by swimming or floating across the lakes. They crept from bomb crater to crater, unseen, invisible from the first trench line until they were almost upon it. The bombing had killed a lot of rebels but inadvertently, it had also destroyed the continuity of the battlefield in all directions, obliterated lines of sight and all reference points and re-triangulating fire support grids had proved virtually impossible. In the crater fields snipers could creep within an arm’s length of the surviving defense works; and with nightfall the enemy had moved forward in strength, probing, pressing at both ends of the Madison Isthmus.