Margaret Thatcher had inclined her head a little towards him and was listening with rapt attentiveness.
“Do go on, Admiral,” she demanded. “I had no idea you were such mine of information.”
Some people have a born gift for irony and some don’t. The Angry Widow was one of the latter. Her eyes told him she was a little amused; her voice conveyed not one scintilla of humour.
Julian Christopher determined to plough on regardless; that was what Admirals throughout history tended to do when they couldn’t immediately think of a better alternative: “The nearest villages are Crathie and Ballater, between six and seven miles away. The estate goes all the way to Loch Muick to the south-east. Queen Victoria built a Royal Bothy — a hunting lodge — on the shores of the Loch. The view across the Loch was one which Lord Mountbatten never tired of, I recall. Before the war the Balmoral Estate employed well over a hundred people. Even in Queen Victoria’s time it was a working estate. There were, probably still are I should imagine, grouse moors, large forestry plantations, several farms, herds of cattle, deer and ponies. Did you know there’s a distillery on the estate?”
“Is that so?”
“Have you ever come across Royal Lochnagar Single Malt whiskey?”
“I can’t say I have. My late husband was fond of a tipple.”
“I can recommend a tipple of Royal Lochnagar,” Julian Christopher continued as if he hadn’t noticed the flicker of pain in her voice. “I think there are around a hundred and fifty separate properties on the estate. Several of them are big country houses like Birkhall and Craigowen Lodge. The Royal Family would have used them for putting up guests before the war. I suspect that for reasons of security they are rarely used for that purpose these days.”
“I really didn’t realise you were so well connected with these people, Admiral?”
“I have been fortunate to have visited many places and met many interesting people in my travels, ma’am.”
The woman stared out of the window and the playful, guardedly flirting tone of the conversation became quietly serious.
“Is Her Majesty really safe here?”
“As safe as she’ll ever be,” he replied. “But no. I don’t think anywhere is safe. Not anymore.”
The Duke of Edinburgh’s small conversational circle had moved away as if to give the man and woman a little privacy. Margaret Thatcher glanced at the men locked in earnest conversation across the other side of the room for a moment.
“Will there be a coup d’état?” She asked in a whisper.
Julian Christopher contemplated the question.
“The Chiefs of Staff have given me to understand that they stand four square behind the legitimate political leadership of the United Kingdom, ma’am.”
“That, Admiral,” she retorted acidly, “was not what I asked you.”
“Forgive me I thought that was exactly what you asked me.”
The Angry Widow was silent.
“The Japanese have a saying, ma’am,” the man said after the quietness had begun to drag towards a full minute. “Which I believe seems to become more apposite with every passing day.” He hesitated. “Death is lighter than a feather but duty is like the weight of a mountain.”
“I repeat,” Margaret Thatcher hissed, “is there to be a coup d’état?”
“No,” the man sighed. “What would that achieve?”
“I don’t know! That’s why I’m asking! Please don’t treat me like an idiot, Admiral Christopher!”
“Then please do me the courtesy of refraining from asking me questions you know I cannot in all honour answer, ma’am.”
The Angry Widow’s blue eyes were fixed on his face from the instant he half-turned to look at her. There was a diamond hardness in those eyes and an unlikely yearning to be understood that intimidated and yet excited the man. For all that there was a quarter of a century between them in age he recognised the glistening light of battle in those beguiling blue eyes. He and the Angry Widow shared the souls of warriors of old.
“I,” she swallowed, the words catching in her throat unspoken, “I apologise. You will no doubt have been forewarned that my impatience, and my anger, sometimes gets the better of me.”
Julian Christopher understood that this was the one and only time they could allow themselves to differ over a matter of principle. They were each in their own ways too stiff to bend in a storm without breaking.
“All will become apparent soon enough,” he promised her, gruffly. “Then perhaps we should agree to begin again with a clean slate.”
“I hope that will be possible, Admiral.”
The man and the woman were too preoccupied with each other to react intuitively to the sudden commotion outside the building. It was only when an air raid siren began to wind up into an ear-splitting frenzied ululating banshee howl barely twenty yards away that they blinked out of their brief trance.
There was a rushing of heavily booted tramping feet accompanied by the unmistakable clinking and banging of webbing weighted with ammunition and equipment.
“Get to a shelter!”
Julian Christopher didn’t move.
He knew there wasn’t time to get to the shelter even if he’d known where it was because he’d seen the two specs coming in low across the forest in the south. Two Hawker Hunters — two beautifully honed fighting machines with fuel tanks or more likely iron free fall general purpose bombs hanging from hard points under their wings — rocketing in, closing the range at nine miles a minute. Nine miles a minute, eight hundred feet a second. There was no time to run, no time to think, to doubt, or to hesitate.
Both Ferret armoured cars opened fire with their 7.62 millimetre belt-fed machine guns at exactly the moment Julian Christopher — rediscovering the hard tackling full-back he’d been in those years when he’d played rugby for the Navy at Twickenham — hurled himself at Margaret Thatcher. The woman didn’t have time to cry out before every breath of air in her lungs was smashed from her flying body as the man dumped her unceremoniously on the floor and together, impelled by the momentum of the violent assault they rolled twice before crashing into the wall some ten feet away from the big windows. They groaned breathlessly, instinctively she attempted to struggle free.
“Stay down!” Julian Christopher commanded, his voice given a cutting edge by the pain stabbing in his ribs. I am getting far too old for this sort of thing! The woman continued to struggle, powerless to break free while the whole weight of his body pinned her down and shielded her from what he knew was likely to happen next.
Knowing that there was absolutely nothing else he could do he waited with a sick feeling in the pit of stomach for the first explosion.
Chapter 19
The man who wore the uniform of a Royal Naval Reserve Commander and presently carried identity documents in the name of William Drayton McNeill clambered out of the Land Rover onto the hard standing in the shadow of Trinity Lighthouse. A large and ever growing crowd had gathered on the southernmost point of the British Crown Colony of Gibraltar to view the drama unfolding in Algeciras Bay. His driver, a comely blond WREN Third Officer who was no more a commissioned officer in the Royal Navy than her passenger, poured herself out from behind the wheel and walked — with the upright, confident gait of a model on a Paris catwalk — around the vehicle to join the man.
Where the North Atlantic funnelled into the straits between Europe and North Africa the waves were white and angry and the air filled with sea spume. Although wintery sunshine benignly illuminated the Rock of Gibraltar, in the south dark, dangerous clouds fell upon the seas, rolling north like some great implacable beast threatening to consume the gravely wounded ship in its path. On most days the coast of North Africa was plainly visible to the naked eye. Today the southern horizon was foreshortened by storm clouds.