“Presumably, the Prime Minister discussed these and other matter with Her Majesty at Balmoral two weeks ago?”
“I couldn’t possibly speculate on the subject of the Sovereign’s conversations with her first minister, Margaret.”
Henry Tomlinson’s visitor put down her cup and saucer and wagged a finger at him. Her peers invariably interpreted this gesture as rudeness and impatience, assuming that they were being taken to task by the ‘upstart young thing in a skirt’ in their midst. However, the Cabinet Secretary understood that when Margaret Thatcher bearded him in his own lair she was in earnest and it was in his best interests to listen very closely to what she had to say.
“The Prime Minister is on very thin ice on this one,” she informed him.
“Oh, how so?”
“You and I know what probably happened to those American destroyers in the Gulf of Mexico last year, Henry,” Margaret Thatcher reminded the Cabinet Secretary, sternly. “We know that the US Navy was acting illegally in international waters. We know that what happened was their fault. We know that they launched a massive first strike against the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact Allies without informing, let alone consulting, us. We didn’t even know they’d pulled the trigger until their people in East Anglia attempted to order RAF personnel to participate in the launch of dual key Thor missiles from our bases in England, Henry. It was a miracle the entire V-Bomber force didn’t get wiped out on the ground. As for what happened to our friends in Europe! Goodness, has anybody even attempted to estimate the death toll in Germany and France and Belgium and Holland?”
Henry Tomlinson shook his head.
He said nothing.
“The point is,” his visitor declared, sadly, “that we know, we in Government, what happened but most of our own people don’t. Most of the people out there,” her left arm swept towards the tall windows and the grey countryside beyond, “think that we were the victims of a vile Soviet sneak attack and that our gallant Allies across the Atlantic did their very best to save us. Which, of course, is exactly the substance of the barefaced lie that the Kennedy administration has been peddling for the last year.” She vented a contemptuous snort. “In those brief interludes when they’re not indulging in posthumous existential public hand-wringing!”
“And now,” the man breathed, his tone less than sanguine, “they want to conquer the Moon.”
“Exactly! How long do you think it’ll take them to blow it up?”
“I think we’ll leave that one for our children to worry about, Margaret.” He gathered his courage and looked into her eyes. And asked the question: “You’d support a radical change of policy, I take it?”
“Yes,” she replied without hesitation. “Emphatically, yes. But we must take our people with us.”
Henry Tomlinson allowed himself time to digest the implications of this caveat before he asked a second, much more important question.
“Would you’d be happy for me to communicate the content of our tete-a-tete to the Prime Minister, Margaret?”
“Henry,” the Angry Widow smiled that smile that came out of nowhere to charm the hardest-hearted of men. “Far be it for me to dictate to the Cabinet Secretary what he may, or may not, communicate to his political master.”
Chapter 8
Vice-Admiral Julian Wemyss Christopher placed the dark-visored grey blue flying helmet on the Chart Room table and looked around at his assembled Flag Staff. None of them had known each other very well when he’d assumed command of the British Pacific Fleet at Hong Kong in last year. In the intervening fourteen months they’d made good — with a vengeance — that particular deficiency. The Fleet Commander implicitly trusted the professional excellence, loyalty and common purpose of all the men gathered around him. If the Chart Room table had been circular rather than rectangular a less pragmatic and hard-headed man than Julian Christopher, might have let his thoughts roam into the mists of former eras and contemplated myths and legends which had no part in this savage new epoch. However, he was not Arthur and the men around the Chart Room table were not mythic knights; they were, however, the steely core of the finest fighting fleet in the World.
The deck under their feet whispered as an aircraft was catapulted into the sky. The carrier was charging into twelve foot swells, periodically thumping into bigger waves at twenty-seven knots as she launched and recovered her fighters.
“Any developments?” Julian Christopher asked. The clumsy flying suit accentuated his tall, angular frame. His grey hair was swept back, his dark eyes questing. His voice was quiet and calm, deadly in its precision. He glanced up at the radar repeater on the aft bulkhead.
Ark Royal and her screening destroyers had moved out ahead of the merchant ships. HMS Belfast and her frigates had fallen in astern of the convoy. Other escorts flirted with the big ships on either wing of the fleet.
“We think we’ve got another Yank SSN on our starboard bow, sir. Lowestoft and Rhyl are trying to herd her to the east. We have at least three major surface units to our west, holding steady at about ninety miles on a bearing of approximately two-seven-five true.”
“Very good.” The Admiral studied the plot. Very little that had happened in the last year had enhanced his long-standing suspicion and disdain for America and all things American. The imbeciles had been buzzing his ships and making mock torpedo runs against his screening anti-submarine frigates for the last eight days. The American’s games had begun forty-eight hours after the new nuclear-powered leviathan-sized super carrier USS Enterprise had replaced the USS Midway as flagship of what the Admiralty called the ‘US Navy’s Western Approaches Squadron’. This ‘Squadron’ in question — officially designated CINCLANT Task Force 27 — had been on station for the last three months, a formidable battle group comprising at any one time at least one big fleet carrier and up to twenty other smaller warships and support vessels screened by two, sometimes as many as three nuclear attack submarines.
Soon after the October War the US Navy had withdrawn the majority of its major surface units to port and subsequently mothballed over fifty percent of its major surface units. This meant that at any one time a significantly high percentage of the USN’s combat ready assets had been wasted in maintaining a presence in the eastern waters of the North Atlantic. Maintaining such a presence was wasteful in terms of the wear and tear on ships and their crews — for every ship on station another would be undergoing repair and replenishment, or training and unavailable for deployment elsewhere — and served no strategic or tactical purpose other than to antagonise America’s former European allies. Given the reduced size of the US surface fleet it spoke volumes for the muddled geo-political thinking of the Kennedy White House; and worryingly, suggested an abysmal appreciation of the likely reaction of those former allies.
Now the idiots were playing war games!
Vice-Admiral Julian Christopher didn’t like leaving his people at a time like this but the needs of the Service came before the needs of any of its servants. Besides, in Sam Gresham, flying his Rear-Admiral’s flag on HMS Belfast, he couldn’t have wished for a better deputy.
He scanned the faces around him.