The mood around the table was subdued as the First Sea Lord began to detail the plans now in motion.
“The fleet carrier HMS Victorious and the commando carrier HMS Ocean departed Gibraltar last night in company with seventeen other vessels, including the Cunard liner Sylvania carrying troops, and a cadre of skilled tradesmen and their families to Malta. HMS Hermes will follow in three days time with four escorts and a convoy of seven fast merchantmen including the P and O liner Canberra. In total these vessels are transporting the equivalent of two brigades of mechanised infantry, over thirty centurion main battle tanks and over fifty other armoured fighting vehicles. The main bulk of these forces will be based, off-loaded, or cross-decked at Malta for redeployment as circumstances determine once Admiral Christopher’s initial entrenchment exercise is completed.”
This plan had raised eyebrows at the meeting, ten days ago on the morning the peace mission had set out for Washington DC.
The C-in-C Mediterranean planned to ‘tidy up the map’ by seizing the islands of Pantelleria, Lampedusa and Linosa which lay across the western approaches to his Mediterranean citadel, Malta. Presently, the islands were in the hands of local tribal juntas, ‘pirates’ who had preyed on fishermen and passing small craft, and presumably, reported all shipping and aircraft movements in the area to their clients in Sicily and Italy. Once Cyprus had been secured by a, hopefully, self-sustaining garrison and the fleet was reinforced to such a strength as to allow it to keep that garrison supplied indefinitely; Julian Christopher had his eyes on, if not occupying Crete, then neutralising it as a threat to his lines of communication in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Crete operation was unlikely to feasible for some months as many of the troops who were being transported to Malta were fresh recruits. Moreover, retaking — or even just occupying Crete — would be a major undertaking requiring a great deal of meticulous planning.
The ‘Christopher Plan’ was based on the premise that British and Commonwealth interests in the wider Middle East could only be secured from a position of military strength. At the moment the Egyptians, Israelis and the Lebanese were sitting watchfully on the sidelines. It was known that since the October War the Americans had maintained a tenuous air bridge with Tel Aviv, but this was now temporarily in abeyance.
Farther south only the presence of what were essentially isolated and beleaguered British garrisons — literally a thin red line of trapped troops and aircraft badly in need of spare parts and maintenance, supported by a handful of former Pacific Fleet destroyers and gunboats — held what was left of the peace East of Suez. The oil-rich Arabian peninsula lay undefended, its constituent nations, emirates and feudal fiefdoms constantly looking across the waters of the Persian Gulf at an unstable Iraqi state and Iran, the sleeping regional superpower ruled by a man — forty-four year old Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi — who increasingly behaved as if he was a reincarnated Persian Emperor rather than the son of a usurper who’d seized power in a military coup in the 1920s. Under the ‘Christopher Plan’ British and Commonwealth forces would eventually be reinforced at key points in the region to ‘deter the adventures’ of either the Iraqis or the Iranians. In the present circumstances it was a pipe dream and the C-in-C Mediterranean’s motives for ‘flagging the matter’ had more to do with broadening the strategic debate about what was, and what was not possible, than mandating urgent military priorities at the fringe of his area of responsibility.
“I gather there has been another sabotage incident on Malta?” Margaret Thatcher checked.
“There were two internal explosions on HMS Torquay while she was being moved out of dry dock. The wreck sank in the Grand Harbour. Fortunately, the two halves of the ship do not present an immediate hazard to navigation. The latest news I have is that an officer from the C-in-C’s personal staff was killed by a booby trap while investigating the disappearance of a dockyard employee who might, in some way, be linked to the Torquay incident.”
Margaret Thatcher nodded.
“Thank you.” She didn’t need to ask the First Sea Lord to keep her informed. She looked around the table. “Has everybody had a chance to read the digest of the survey reports on the bombed areas of greater London?”
Airey Neave raised a hand.
“We ought to follow up in strength ASAP, Prime Minister!”
“Forgive me, I completely disagree,” Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary objected politely.
“We need to strike while the iron is hot, man!” The former escapee from Colditz Castle protested.
Margaret Thatcher held up a hand to forestall a general free for all.
“Mr Jenkins,” she invited, “while the investigation and re-assimilation of the bombed areas may eventually become a military matter — or at least, a matter requiring military resources to be allocated to its accomplishment — at this time the issue falls within your remit. What is your view as to how to proceed?”
The Home Secretary blinked at her through his horn-rimmed glasses, possibly a little surprised by the genuineness of the deference in her clear soprano voice.
“It seems to me,” he prefaced, deprecatingly, “that if people have been living in the devastated areas beyond the writ of the national government for over a year I suspect they won’t take kindly to folk whom they might regard as, shall we say, freebooters suddenly marching in and cherry picking resources that they feel that they rightfully own. It is my view that we should send parties in to negotiate the return of the peoples of these regions to the, er, bosom of the nation, rather than to simply assume that they automatically ‘belong to us’. The last thing we need is another guerrilla-style war on our hands like we have in Ulster. Our priorities are to re-open the docks, yes? Everything else can wait but the sooner we get the London docks back into operation and re-open the roads between them and the rest of the country the better, yes?”
Margaret Thatcher nodded curtly.
She glanced to her friend Airey Neave. He shrugged, grimaced his impatient acquiescence.
“If you would submit plan for immediate action along the lines you have suggested for next Cabinet please, Mr Jenkins?” She searched the room for dissent. “That’s settled then. What is next, Sir Henry?”
The Cabinet Secretary was a little pained when he spoke.
“The Dreadnought Incident, Prime Minister.”
Chapter 11
If anybody else had tried to hold back Arkady Pavlovich Rykov in that moment he would have killed them. His rage was so pure, his disgust so unrepentant that he was, almost but not quite, utterly beyond reason.
“Arkady! No!” The woman’s terrified scream cut through the shimmering red haze of his lust for murder. The room had disintegrated into madness moments before, filled with cries of disbelief and alarm, and a cacophony of flying furniture and crashing sound. “No, Arkady!”
The former KGB Colonel visibly blinked back to sanity.
He was standing over the bloodied form of the man on the ground. No, not the ground. The body on the floor of the darkened office beneath the crazily swinging single light bulb.