Whoever was responsible for that had to have been insane!
The British Broadcasting Company — the BBC — and Malta Radio, as well as a number of independent news wire services and the correspondents of several international papers had confirmed the substance of the reports flooding into Langley from all over the Mediterranean.
While a force of Regia Aeronautica US-supplied A-4 Skyhawks went in at sea level, targeting ships, dockyard installations and strafing at will, four 100th Bomb Group B-52s had dropped several bunker busting precision munitions and at least one ‘experimental thermobaric’, or ‘fuel air’ bomb on key headquarters and command and control installations in and around the fortress port city of Valletta. As many as three to four thousand British service personnel and Maltese civilians had been killed or seriously wounded and the Archipelago’s medical and emergency services had been completely overwhelmed. It was possible that more people had been killed on Malta last Friday than in the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941.
Not the least chilling aspect of the affair was the ease with which the small number of aircraft defending the Maltese Archipelago had — despite being taken by surprise — shot down half the attacking A-4s and all four of the 100th Bomb group B-52s. Given that the Administration had spent the last year trying to dismantle large chunks of the US military machine, the Director of the CIA shuddered to think how a full blown war between America and its old, seemingly spurned and betrayed ally might unfold. The only reason he could think of that the British had not already retaliated was because they were still too astonished.
McCone collected his papers, stuffing them into an old attaché case.
Right now nothing was more important than getting his foot inside the White House door before the Kennedy boys turned the current disgraceful debacle into the next World War.
He had no idea how he was going to talk sense into the head of a President who was dead set on opening up the CIA and the Pentagon to a no holds barred investigation by the FBI, the NSA and the Secret Service. This would never have happened while FDR, Harry Truman, or Ike had been in the White House! How bad did this have to get before the Vice-President got involved? John McCone stopped what he was doing, forced himself to take a series of steadying, sobering deep breaths.
What terrified him most was that if he, as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency no longer knew who to trust in Washington, what did that say about the rest of the country?
Chapter 43
The nearest human settlement was over three hundred miles north-north-west of the USS Sam Houston as she steamed at sixteen knots at a depth of one hundred and eighty feet beneath the storm-tossed waters of the wintery North Pacific. The worst of the storm was lashing the handful of cabins on Umnak Island in the Aleutians, the home of a dozen or so families, while the submarine cruised serenely east. In another day Commander Troy Simms would order his vessel to run to the north to pass through the chain of islands separating the Bering Sea from the Pacific to take up his appointed ‘deterrent patrol’ station.
The USS Sam Houston was travelling through an eerily empty ocean, alone in the deep waters already over two thousand miles east of the American North-West, almost as far north of Hawaii, and fifteen hundred miles west of the Russian Kamchatka Peninsula. Troy Simms command could not possibly have been more independent, he could not have been operating farther from home, or any more out on a limb but then that was what being the skipper of a Polaris boat was all about and he loved it. Right now Troy Simms was living the dream and life would never be so good again, and because he was the man he was he enjoyed every single minute of the dream; having solemnly resolved not to regret its passing when as was inevitable, sooner or later, it ended and he moved on to his next duty post.
Skippers of Polaris missile submarines were a breed apart.
Normal mortal men would have quailed at the burden resting on Troy Simms’s broad shoulders. However, the commanding officer of the USS Sam Houston embraced those burdens like old trusted friends in whose company he could safely relax. Even when the going got tough, he effortlessly broadcast calm, unruffled authority.
The boat’s Gold crew had been onshore at the time of the October War; he had wondered a lot about what it had really been like for his Blue crew counterpart when the order to fly his birds was decoded?
Now he began to understand how he must have felt.
Two hours ago the raised alert level signal had been received.
DEFCON 2.
Troy Simms had retired to his cabin to open his sealed ‘war orders’.
Part of him did not want to believe what was happening; the other told him to do his duty. Wishing things to be otherwise was useless. It did not matter that the US Navy still deployed, at any one time, between three and five Polaris boats in the Eastern and Northern Pacific, in range of an enemy supposedly annihilated over a year ago.
The USS Sam Houston would not be in range of Soviet territory for some hours, although what was actually left to hit on the barren Kamchatka Peninsula was anybody’s guess. The signals officer and the missile officer were running the operations order through the decoder; maybe the targeting co-ordinates would enlighten him.
A little over half-an-hour later he was indeed enlightened.
He combined the decrypted signature of the missile officer section of the operations order with his own and then, patiently deciphered the rest of the sequence.
Even as the plain text decode unravelled before his eyes he was paraphrasing his orders.
Await further COMMAND DECISION.
In the meantime make preparations to implement either ALPHA or BETA operational directives.
OP ORDER ALPHA: patrol the Eastern Bering Sea and program the birds to over fly the Sea of Okhotsk to strike targets on Sakhalin Island and across Eastern Siberia.
OP ORDER BETA: transit Bering Strait at best speed, proceed under the Arctic ice cap to the Norwegian Sea to a position north of the Shetland Islands to strike targets in the British Isles…
Chapter 44
Gretchen Betancourt did not like to be kept waiting. Not even by the United States Under Secretary of State George Ball. She had arrived in good time for her appointment, just early enough to have leisure to briefly study the outward architectural characteristics of the imposing Main State Building that she had so assiduously read up about that morning in a public library close to her Cathedral Avenue apartment. That morning there had been two kinds of people on the streets; those rushing around like the World was about to end, and those people who just wanted to get inside as fast as possible. A lot of people seemed to have left the city because getting a taxi that day had presented none of the usual problems.
The Washington Post had graphic descriptions of the bomb damage on Malta, pictures of the ships which had been sunk or damaged — in their former glory rather than their present bombed condition — and the editor of the Post had penned a long, rather more than moderately excoriating article speculating that the Spanish dictator, Franco, must have had a brainstorm picking a fight with the British over Gibraltar. It came as something of a surprise to Gretchen that the British Empire, in the form of small colonies and dependencies sprinkled around the world still actually existed. Gibraltar a little piece of England in the Mediterranean, and ‘gallant Malta’ were still firmly attached to the mother country by some invisible post-imperial uncut natal umbilical cord. There were also British outposts on Cyprus, all over the Middle East and in the South Atlantic. All of which was incidental to the ludicrously unlikely — positively slanderous and unpatriotic, un-American — claim in the Post, in other newspapers, on the radio, and less explicitly enunciated on television news broadcasts, that the Malta ‘atrocity’ had actually been perpetrated by US-supplied fighter-bombers, and US Air Force strategic bombers…