“The Brits don’t want a war…”
“I spent two hours the other morning standing on a windy hillside watching British sailors cross-decking eighty or ninety pound fixed rounds off an ammunition ship in Portland Harbour. They were working as if their lives depended on it, sir. I was arrested because I saw what they were doing and I was detained just long enough not to witness the departure of the destroyer which had been filling her magazines — which I believe to have been HMS Talavera — or the departure of any of the other vessels oiling and preparing for sea that morning. I don’t personally believe the Brits want to get into a shooting war with us. However, if it comes to it they will be ready.”
Loudon Baines Westheimer II finally got a grip of his emotions long enough to realise he was being told something important that, moreover, ought to be scaring the shit out of him.
“I can’t tell Washington that, Brenckmann!”
“They’ll be starting to work it out for themselves about now, Ambassador. If you tell it to them straight that’ll be to your credit.” Sometimes you had to tell your boss things that ought to be patently obvious to him just to be able to look oneself in the mirror in the morning. “Whereas, if there is an unfortunate incident in the Atlantic they’ll start asking themselves why that Westheimer guy didn’t hit the alarm button.”
Loudon Baines Westheimer II lit another cigarette.
“You think you’re some kind of smart arse, don’t you, Walter?”
The two-war veteran in uniform viewed the sleek, self-satisfied civilian oaf who’d been appointed to go abroad and lie for his country in the land of a spurned and lately, unjustly maligned and meanly treated true friend. A little humility was too much to expect from a man like Loudon Baines Westheimer II. Likewise, any sense of some higher purpose, or any sign, however flimsy, of some real insight or understanding of the new post-holocaust world that the expenditure of a significant proportion of America’s nuclear arsenal had created. It wasn’t that Loudon Baines Westheimer II didn’t understand what his country had done; it was that he didn’t care and worse, he regarded not caring as a badge of honour that he wore with red-necked pride.
“No, Ambassador,” he said, dropping all pretence of respectful deference. “I’m just a lawyer who inadvertently ended up in the Navy. Unlike you I’ve served my country in two wars. While you were smoking cigars and joshing with all the other fat, rich old boys on your ranch in Texas, I was on the bridge of a destroyer escort on the North Atlantic, or conning a cruiser off the beachhead at Pusan. Back then I was fighting people whom I honestly believed to be my country’s enemies. Thirteen months ago we had no truer friends in Christendom than the Brits; if we’re not very, very careful we will turn them into our worst enemies. And I do mean our worst enemies because unlike the Soviets or the Chinese or the maniacs in North Korea, the Brits understand us. They understand our every idiosyncrasy, our every weakness, and most dangerous of all, they understand exactly how we fight our wars.”
Walter Brenckmann waited to be dismissed.
When it didn’t happen he dropped into the nearest chair, a Queen Ann style piece of furniture that was completely out of place in the tacky, tasteless leather bound world of Loudon Baines Westheimer II.
The Ambassador’s glare morphed into something contemplative.
“LBJ told Kennedy’s people it was too early to cut back on the military,” he said suddenly. “But nobody in Washington listens to the Vice-President. I swear to God I sometimes think the people around JFK have got chicken shit for brains, Captain.”
Chapter 18
If Vice-Admiral Julian Christopher had not previously been introduced to Queen Elizabeth II he’d have been surprised and possibly dismayed to discover how small, fragile and slender were the shoulders upon which the weight of the world currently rested.
The attractive thirty-six year old mother of three and the one last unimpeachable symbol of national unity shook the hand of the man who’d been her late Uncle’s most remarkable protégé. She met his concerned look with a wan smile.
“Please don’t fuss Julian,” she commanded softly.
“I wouldn’t dream of it, ma’am,” the tall naval officer acknowledged with a tightness in his throat and a bothersome mistiness in his eyes. He’d never expected to meet the extraordinary young woman again. He forced himself to stand to attention, bowed his head and moved on to have his hand shaken heartily by Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who’d once, briefly, served under him during his career in the Royal Navy.
“Ah, our modern day Nelson returns at last!” The younger man beamed broadly at his old Captain.
“Rather more Blackbeard, or perhaps, Long John Silver to my detractors, sir,” the Admiral chuckled.
“I can’t wait to hear about your latest adventures!” The Duke of Edinburgh was of a similar stature to the older man, leanly made and roguishly handsome. Born Prince Philip of Greece he was five years older than his wife whom he’d first met just before the Second World War when she was thirteen and he an eighteen year old very junior naval officer. He was the son of a disinherited, impoverished European dynasty, and she the heir apparent to Europe’s most ancient and prestigious royal house. “Wherever poor old Uncle Louis is now he must be jumping up and down in his grave cheering you on!”
“That’s good of you to say so, sir.”
At the Prime Minister’s bidding the presentation line had formed in an oddly eccentric order. He’d led the line but thereafter precedence of rank and hierarchy had been deliberately jumbled. After Edward Heath came Patricia and Tom Harding-Grayson, Margaret Thatcher, Alec Douglas Home and lastly, Julian Christopher.
“I hear you had a dreadful flight up from Gloucestershire, Admiral?”
It had taken the pilot four attempts to land the RAF Comet 4 at Dyce between flurrying snow and low, dangerous clouds. Julian Christopher had been seated across the aisle from Margaret Thatcher, who’d carried on reading papers from her ministerial red box throughout the nerve jangling drama as if utterly convinced that nothing on earth could harm so much as a hair on her perfectly coiffured head. They’d travelled slightly apart from the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and Tom Harding-Grayson who’d spent most of the three hour flight — normal flight time between Cheltenham and Dyce was a less over two hours but today the weather had made a mockery of the normal schedule — in low-voiced conversation. The Admiral had chatted for a while with Patricia Harding-Grayson, a charming greying woman who’d made a name for herself in the late 1940s and early 1950s writing whodunits for adults in the style of a literary Agatha Christie. Needless to say she’d been less successful than Miss Christie in what had been for her, a diverting hobby rather than a career. She was a lady who’d journeyed widely in Europe and America and had once been married to an Italian count.