Julian Christopher was a man who’d never had much time for politics of the non-service variety or for politicians in general; privately, he was of the opinion that the situation called for putting a few of the more useless articles up against a wall and shooting them. Realistically, he couldn’t think of any other way to encourage the others to start doing the right thing.
“Are you angry, Admiral Christopher?” Margaret Thatcher asked before the older man realised he’d briefly lost himself in his thoughts.
He blinked at the woman.
He saw the prim, attractive housewife, noted the handbag on the floor by her chair, and for some seconds he was unable to reconcile that Margaret Thatcher with the one who’d just asked him the most subversive question he’d ever been asked in his whole life.
She knew!
His eyes must have betrayed him because Margaret Thatcher nodded, wordlessly.
Julian Christopher raised his tea cup to his lips, sipped thoughtfully and placed the cup and saucer back on the tray on the table separating him from the remarkable woman who’d so effortlessly shattered the steely carapace of defences he’d spent a lifetime perfecting.
Nobody was planning a coup.
Not as such.
The Army, the Navy and the RAF would have had to have formed a common view, set up several staff committees to thrash out the details of a proper coup d’ tat, and even in these dreadful times the Generals, Admirals and Air Marshalls weren’t ever going to sanction anything that crass. Besides, in the Army one could never get any two regimental staffs to agree about anything, likewise in the Navy submariners and destroyer men were different animals, and in the RAF bomber and fighter men fiercely defended their respective bailiwicks. No, it was more informal than that and provoked rather than plotted, by the strategy paper he’d submitted to the Admiralty on the subject of ‘Medium-term Operational Contingencies subsequent to the conclusion of Operation Manna’. It seemed his old friend David Luce, the First Sea Lord had circulated the document — intended at that stage only as a general briefing document to feed into the ongoing strategy review post-October 1962 — to the other Chiefs of Staff and that eventually, it had found itself in the Prime Minister’s in tray where it had sat, festering for some weeks and months until…what? Now there was a question! Suddenly, everything had changed, he’d been summoned home ahead of his Fleet and plunged into the melee of what passed for politics in Cheltenham.
“Do you know what the Prime Minister is planning?” Margaret Thatcher inquired.
Julian Christopher shook his head.
“It is my understanding that he has not confided his specific intentions to the Chiefs of Staff.”
“You surprise me?”
The man grudged a half-smile.
“The Chiefs of Staff will stand behind the Prime Minister whatever lawful steps he mandates under the War Emergency Powers Act.” Those powers were of a summary and somewhat draconian nature.
Margaret Thatcher was genuinely surprised.
“The Chiefs of Staff have given the PM a blank cheque?”
“That is my understanding, Madam.”
“Goodness me…” Her amazement was short-lived. “Isn’t it odd how at times like this that one finds oneself recollecting all those occasions on which one has tweaked the tail of the man in whose hands one’s life now rests?”
“It is a funny old world,” the man agreed.
“Isn’t it just.” There was no fear or doubt in Margaret Thatcher’s face. If anything, her jaw was jutting defiance.
Chapter 12
Captain Walter Brenckmann USN (Reserve) let the old Zeiss binoculars hang on the strap from his neck and straightened his cap on his head. His companion, a crew cut twenty-five year old Marine Lieutenant from Dearborn, Ohio carried on looked at the activity in the anchorage below. On the other side of the car the two officers’ guardian angels, Marines carrying M16 rifles and holstered 1911 pattern Colts under their coats paced uncomfortably on the exposed hillside as full daylight threatened to break through the angry, scudding overcast that seemed so low that they could almost reach up and touch it.
“What do you see, Lieutenant Devowski?” Asked the older man.
“A lot of activity, sir.”
“And?” Walter Brenckmann pressed his new aide. Karl Devowski came with his new post as acting Naval Attaché to the Embassy of the United States of America to the Court of Balmoral.
“And what, sir? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” The Marine put down his glasses and stood to attention as he addressed his superior.
Walter meant to tell the kid to stop doing that; hadn’t got around to it yet.
He waved airily at the great sweeping panorama of the finest natural harbour in Northern Europe that the brightening of the day was gradually revealing below them as they watched.
“In 1914 the British assembled their entire Fleet in this anchorage; three dozen dreadnoughts and battlecruisers, fifty cruisers, and literally hundreds of destroyers and smaller warships. Column upon column of grey ships. I believe it was Winston Churchill who coined the phrase ‘castles of steel’ to describe the lines of battleships. In 1914 the British were the pre-eminent naval power in the world but that war wasn’t eventually won by seagoing ‘castles of steel’.”
“No, sir,” the Marine Lieutenant rejoined tersely. “It was won by Pershing’s doe boys smashing the German Army in the forests of the Argonne, sir!”
Walter Brenckmann stifled a sigh of resignation.
Kids today were so well educated that they knew absolutely nothing!
“Actually, in the autumn of 1918,” he corrected the kid, “while Pershing’s green Army was bogged down in the Argonne the French were pinning the Germans in front of them while the British defeated, in detail, what remained of the fighting strength of the enemy to such good effect that they broke through the supposedly impregnable Hindenburg Line and in so doing, forced the German surrender.”
“But we…”
“We came three years late to that war in the same way we came two years late to the next world war twenty-four years later. The Brits forgave us that. The Brits have forgiven us a lot over the years. They won’t ever forgive us for what happened last year.”
“Even if that’s true, sir,” the younger man observed, primly respectful, “I don’t see that it is going to be a problem.”
The Acting American Naval Attaché waved again at the vista before the two men.
“What do you see, Lieutenant?” He asked again with a fatherly patience.
“I see a lot of water and not many ships, sir.”
“Ah, but what are those ships doing?”
Lieutenant Karl Devowski raised his glasses to his eyes.
Two older ‘C’ Class destroyers were oiling, one to each side, of a rust-streaked tanker in the middle of the anchorage. Inshore of them one of the rebuilt air defence Battle class destroyers was cross-decking ammunition from what looked like a requisitioned tramp steamer of pre-WWII vintage. Even from the best part of a mile away he could tell the ammunition ship was having trouble holding station. The anchorage was so large it seemed to have its own special sea conditions. Protected from the south west gale by the bulk of Portland Bill and the long ribbon of Chesil Beach which linked the island to the coastal town of Weymouth, the wind swirled across the bay stirring a low, eddying swell within the eastern breakwaters that enclosed the seaward side of the anchorage. The Battle class destroyer with her high lattice masts was rolling slowly and the ammunition ship’s stern kept sliding northward. At one point the two ships had broken apart and come together again. Periodically, the destroyer churned her port screw to press closer to the merchantman.