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Margaret Thatcher realised that she was staring into space.

That would never do!

“Good,” she repeated. Turning to her Foreign Secretary as she reached down to pick up her handbag from beside the leg of her chair, she asked: “What is Dick White up to, Tom?”

The unthreatening interrogative jolted Tom Harding-Grayson.

“Er,” he tried very hard not to betray his misgivings; without great success. The woman had a way of slicing through a man’s defences before he knew he was even under attack. Sir Richard ‘Dick’ White, the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service had flown out to Lisbon within hours of Special Air Mission 26000, the specially modified VC-137 Boeing jetliner normally only used by the President of the United States, returning the Prime Minister’s party to the United Kingdom, landing at Prestwick in Scotland. That had been a nice touch by the Americans and Jack Kennedy’s generosity had gone down well with the Angry Widow. The Foreign Secretary forced himself to focus on the lady’s beguiling question. “Dick felt that the nearer he was to the, er, ‘action’ the better, Prime Minister.”

“The Head of MI6’s place is in England advising me,” Margaret Thatcher declared, “not gallivanting around the World like a character in one of Mr Fleming’s scurrilous paperbacks.”

“I’ll have a word with him.”

The first time Margaret Thatcher had been briefed about Red Dawn, the Prime Minister had taken it with a pinch of salt. A very, very large pinch of salt. In the intervening weeks Red Dawn had first been a fortuitous bogeyman whose existence allowed diplomacy scope to hold back the dogs of war, and then, with a dark inevitability it had become a monster stalking and threatening the fragile peace between the old trans-Atlantic allies.

Was it really possible that the ogre of Red Dawn that loomed over the Balkans, the Aegean and Asia Minor could have risen so soon from the ashes of the Soviet Union?

She had read the transcript of KGB Colonel Arkady Pavlovich Rykov’s three debriefing sessions several times. The first interrogation had been conducted by Dick White in person, the second and third by ‘old Russia hands’ sent to Portugal by the Head of the SIS to pick holes in the defector’s narrative. According to Dick White, Rykov had scared the living daylights out of the ‘old salts’ he had sent to Lisbon to discredit if they could, the former KGB man’s warnings of a new, imminent and possibly unwinnable war.

Arkady Rykov talked about a ‘generation war’, of a terrible genie that once let out of its confinement could strike anywhere at any time. Margaret Thatcher did not know what to believe about Red Dawn; for all she knew it was a myth. The American authorities had been interrogating insurgents — or terrorists, traitors, or madmen depending upon one’s taste — captured after the Battle of Washington for several weeks now and nobody had mentioned ‘Red Dawn’ by name. When this was put to Arkady Rykov he was alleged to have smiled and said: ‘Krasnaya Zarya’ is not an organisation, it is a state of mind. I was an officer of the Komitet gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti and before that the Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, but after Hungary in 1956 in my own mind I was an avenging angel. Judge a thing not by its name but by its deeds.’

Margaret Thatcher had toyed with the idea of bringing the Russian to England. She would have liked to have met him; Dick White had counselled against it and besides, he had work for him elsewhere.

Krasnaya Zarya.

It sounded almost poetic.

Red Dawn might be a paper tiger, an invention of the mind of an embittered defector. Today she would hear what the man in whom she placed a nameless faith — Julian Christopher — thought about the reality of Krasnaya Zarya. If what was happening in the Mediterranean was simply the inevitable long-term post-war disintegration of the old order into violent chaos that was bad enough; the steps she had already sanctioned, reinforcing the fleet and the local garrisons might be sufficient to hold the line long enough for Kennedy Administration to get its house in order. If it was the case that the northern shores of the great inland sea dissolved into anarchy that was bad; but it wasn’t necessarily fatal to the United Kingdom’s vital strategic interests in the region. With the weight of American military and industrial muscle at its back the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force and the British Army might hold the line indefinitely. However, if Red Dawn was the monster described by Arkady Pavlovich Rykov, she honestly questioned whether anything short of another thermonuclear war would hold the wolf from the door.

Presently, it was time to leave for RAF Brize Norton.

Not to be outdone by their North American competitors the Rolls-Royce factory in Derby had modified a pair of Silver Shadows with armoured panels and bullet proof windows for the use of senior UAUK officials. The cars had been waiting for the Prime Minister when she arrived in Oxford that morning.

Margaret Thatcher, the Cabinet Secretary and the Foreign Secretary patted the luxurious, deeply padded seats and looked around the inside of their Silver Shadow like overgrown children inspecting an exciting new toy as the convoy set off for Brize Norton. Ferret armoured cars cleared the way ahead and brought up the rear. A Royal Marine Commando with an automatic rifle sat in the front passenger seat and overhead, a Westland Wessex helicopter hovered with machine gunners quartering the surrounding countryside pacing the vehicles on the ground.

The last time Margaret Thatcher had laid eyes on Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Christopher he’d presented a somewhat sorry sight. His face was heavily bruised, he was stiff and horribly sore with cracked ribs and he’d had unhealed burns on his arm. He’d had no time to rest or recuperate on Malta, although hopefully, being away from the northern winter would have restored the colour in his cheeks.

Goodness, here I am on the way to perhaps the most important meeting of my life and all I can think about is the twinkle in Julian Christopher’s blue-grey eyes!

Wasn’t it a funny old World sometimes?

Chapter 15

Wednesday 22nd January 1964
Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia

Even though it was not yet ten o’clock in the morning a large crowd thronged Auburn Avenue and only a police presence three ranks deep stopped the ever growing tide of humanity blocking the intersection with Jackson Street. Outside in the road a cordon of state troopers and Secret Service men guarded the hastily constructed wooden stage next to the front entrance to the Church. ABC and NBC had parked broadcast trucks across the street; technicians were struggling to run cables up to the unwieldy cameras bolted to the roofs of each vehicle. National Guardsmen milled around the back of the building, mostly out of view of the gathering crush of humanity in Auburn Avenue. Anybody with a line of sight down any of the long, straight highways leading to — more likely, passing through — this small corner of Atlanta would have seen an amazing thing, endless processions of people, white as well as black, converging on the Ebenezer Baptist Church.