“Fleet Standing Order Number Seven remains in force until further notice,” he declared with sombre vehemence.
FSO7 specified that if the shadowing USN forces interfered with or in any way impeded the progress of the Fleet or approached within gunnery range of any of the merchant ships, his captains were authorised to use force. Moreover, the level of force that they were authorised to employ was wholly at their discretion short of deploying nuclear weapons. In a few minutes time he would surrender the nuclear prerogative — Arc Light — to Sam Gresham.
He made eye contact with his Flag Captain. Frank Maltravers had taken command of the Ark when she’d docked in Sydney. He’d been an unknown quantity to Julian Christopher but since proved himself to be a rock of a man. A former Fleet Arm pilot he’d been kicking his heels as Naval Attaché in Australia. Like Rear-Admiral Sam Gresham, the Ark’s Captain had enthusiastically signed up to turn the peace time Pacific Fleet into the efficient, war fighting machine they all known it was going to have to become. It helped that they’d been away from home when disaster struck. Or at least, it helped in the sense that they’d been able to view events in Europe and America with more distant, if only partially dispassionate eyes unscarred by the nuclear torch. As soon as the scale of the cataclysm became apparent they’d understood that an ally whose actions had led to the indiscriminate mass destruction of both friends and foes alike, was no friend at all. From that conclusion what flowed next was self evident; a friend so lacking in scruples, and apparently without moral conscience would — sooner or later — as likely consume its friends as its foes unless one stood up to it.
“Look after my Flagship while I’m away, Frank.”
“I’ll do my best not to run her aground in your absence, sir,” the huge, bearded commanding officer of the Ark Royal chuckled.
Julian Christopher half-smiled.
“Until we meet again, gentlemen,” he saluted, and the room returned his salute. “Good hunting!”
Emerging onto the windswept flight deck of the carrier the deck crew ushered Christopher to the awaiting 893 Squadron Sea Vixens. He clambered, lithely for his advancing years, up the ladder and eased himself into the navigator’s empty seat of the leading fighter. Willing hands strapped him in, adjusted the connection to his helmet, and checked his oxygen mask was correctly in place and working. There was a light tap on his helmet, a burst of static over the intercom.
“Ready to go, sir?” The pilot inquired.
Julian Christopher hit the mask switch. “Yes, carry on.”
There was another light tap on his helmet, he looked up and gave the yellow jacketed crewman a thumbs up signal. The long, polished Perspex cockpit swung down over him and locked into place.
The Sea Vixen was moving, its folded wings swinging down to the horizontal. The locking mechanisms clicked through the whole airframe, or so it seemed. The fighter jerked as the starboard catapult head dragged it forward. The twenty ton interceptor rocked on its landing gear, reverberating with the idling fury of is twin Rolls-Royce Avon Mk 208 turbojets. Glancing across to his left Christopher could just make out the twin-boom tail of his fighter’s wingman dragging onto the port catapult.
Suddenly the Avons cycled up, roaring. The nose of the fighter crouched down like a sprinter setting in his blocks before a sprint.
Christopher took a deep breath.
The next second he was pressed back into his seat as if a giant’s foot was resting on his chest. He glimpsed the grey deck race past, and then there were only the storm-tossed waters of the Bay of Biscay under the wings and the Sea Vixen was climbing steeply like a bat out of Hell. He tried to look over his shoulder to find Ark Royal, all he saw was an empty ocean.
“Pilot to passenger, are you comfortable, sir.”
“Yes, thank you.”
“We’re heading up to angels three-five for a look around before we turn for our destination, sir. Out.”
Christopher sat back to enjoy the flight.
He’d sat in the observer’s seat of a Swordfish once; that was over twenty years ago, in the Mediterranean. The Stringbag had rolled and tottered down the deck of the old Illustrious so slowly that he’d been convinced the aircraft would fall straight over the bow into the sea. But it hadn’t, it had floated into the air and slowly, surely drawn ahead of the carrier. They’d arrived at Malta after dark in the middle of an air raid, landed by the glow of the distant searchlights and the flash of bombs in the night. Compared to a Swordfish a de Havilland Sea Vixen was like something out of a Buck Rogers or a Flash Gordon cartoon. Twenty years ago he’d thought trundling off the Illustrious at sixty miles an hour was the height of scientific military technology and now here he was riding six miles high in a chariot of the gods.
He’d wondered how he’d feel about going home. The country he’d left fifteen months ago to assume command of the British Pacific Fleet at Hong Kong no longer existed. The war had come and gone so fast that few of his ships had even had time to raise steam, let alone contemplate joining the fight. In the days after the war he’d organised his ships into three battle groups based around his carriers; Ark Royal, Hermes and Ocean and sailed north into the Sea of Japan where the US 7th Fleet was known to be assisting the civilian authorities deal with the refugees from the strikes on the Sapporo and Sendai areas. The Hermes Battle Group had proceeded as far north as the Inland Sea before the Americans made it clear they didn’t want the Royal Navy trespassing in its waters. When the 7th Fleet had refused an offer to co-ordinate fleet supply train activities, Christopher, in the absence of orders from Fleet Command in the United Kingdom had reluctantly ordered his ships to sail for Australia.
It was in Australia that Christopher had learned the true dimensions of the cataclysm wrought across huge swaths of the Northern Hemisphere and first realised that potentially his ships were all that stood between his country and despair. He’d drawn up the first planning draft of what later became Operation Manna in Sydney on Christmas Eve last year. By then it was obvious that Britain’s closest military ally regarded the Pacific as an American ocean. Moreover, for unspecified reasons of ‘continental security’ the Panama Canal had been closed to all ‘armed vessels’ other than US Navy warships. The world was in shock, the nuclear genie was out of the bottle and the accepted rules of the game of international realpolitik no longer applied. In the United Kingdom nobody had the time or the inclination to think beyond the immediate challenge of surviving the brutal winter clamping down over Northern Europe as if it was the frigid harbinger of a new ice age.
The long range strategic maritime trade routes of the world had been fractured and the European wealth that had created and sustained those now fractured trade routes was lost. Worse, the old balance of power had been eliminated. Everywhere insurgency and civil war threatened. India and Pakistan’s border wars had reignited, South East Asia was literally on fire, in South America Chile and the Argentine teetered on the edge of war. The story was the same from Africa to the Middle East to the Manchurian hinterland. The old world order was broken and nobody knew how much more blood would be spilled before order was restored. Or, if order might ever be restored.
Operation Manna would not have been possible without the backing of the Australian and New Zealand governments, neither of whom wanted to find themselves friendless upon the southern extremities of the new American maritime dominion.
To Julian Christopher the geopolitical nightmare in which the old country — what was left of it — found itself was simply expressed; until such time as the Royal Navy retained mastery of the Mediterranean and reopened its trade routes to what had been the Empire, and was now more or less ‘the Commonwealth’, its survival depended almost entirely on reopening and sustaining its trans Australasian and South Atlantic sinews of commerce. In the long term a failure to re-establish the mastery of the Mediterranean or to re-establish both two key oceanic supply lines would, literally, be the death of his country.