Now that she’d met John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Curtis LeMay and most of the senior members of the American Administration she had concluded that there was no shortage of moral fibre and determination in Washington, just a surfeit of potentially crippling self-doubt.
The Administration had sent Special Air Mission 26000 — a modified long-range Boeing 707 variant designated a Type VC-137C Stratoliner — normally reserved for the President’s personal carriage, and a second older jet from the Presidential fleet to convey Margaret Thatcher, her entourage and her large bodyguard to Washington. She had been treated like visiting royalty since her arrival four days ago and in between the arduous negotiating sessions her hosts had been keen to ensure that she met as many members of the Administration as possible. There had never been any doubt that this afternoon the new ‘pact’, a minor rehashing of the 1958 US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement would be signed with as much fanfare as could be organised in the limited time available. What had been in doubt, was whether the ‘old allies’ would understand each other any better by that time.
“Our two great nations have fought three World Wars this century,” Jack Kennedy boasted proudly, his voice ringing melodically as it echoed down the serried loudspeakers positioned along Pennsylvania Avenue. “No two nations on Earth have such a noble history of standing up to and facing down tyranny. No two peoples have proven such an unrivalled devotion to the cause of freedom and peace in the World!”
Margaret Thatcher envied her counterpart the ease with which he connected with his people. Put the man in front of a microphone and within minutes he had his audience in the palm of his hand. The vast crowd clapped and cheered, bayed for more. A sea of raised arms waved like a great ocean in motion.
“And perhaps, no two peoples have gone through such travails and survived with their systems of government intact, their belief in the sanctity of the rule of law untrammelled and their faith in the future undimmed. We have fought together for the right to build a great new society and we owe it to our children and our grandchildren to do the right thing now!”
The Angry Widow had been lost so deeply in her thoughts that she remembered, with a shock, that she ought to have been applauding with the rest of the stage party. She put her hands together and, by her lights, quirked a self-deprecatory grimace in the direction of the President’s younger brother.
Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy returned the half-smile. He’d been wounded in the left calf when Captain Walter Brenckmann, who had subsequently appointed as the new United States Ambassador to the Court of Balmoral, had wrestled Edward Heath’s assassin to the ground. If the courageous naval officer hadn’t reacted so quickly there was little doubt that other members of the British ‘peace mission’ would have been killed or seriously injured. Ted Heath’s murderess had emptied the magazine of her ex-husband’s point four-five calibre M1911 pistol randomly around the packed Oval Office after she’d been forced to the ground. Secret servicemen had carried her out of the room screaming and writhing like somebody in the throes of an epileptic seizure. Within hours of the shooting the woman had been locked away in an asylum for her own protection.
The Attorney General had offered to give his ‘British friends’ daily updates on the condition of the woman, forty-nine year old Edna Maria Zabriski, a White House secretary. The Prime Minister had politely declined the offer.
‘Justice should take its course according to your laws and the judicial processes of the United States of America without any suggestion of intervention, or influence from outside,’ she had assured him.
It was Bobby Kennedy who’d come to her privately and asked her to rethink her decision not to speak at this ceremony. The President, it seemed, was concerned that an audience outside the United States wouldn’t understand her silence at such a ‘signal event in the history of our two countries’.
‘The President is a charismatic and accomplished public speaker and I am not,’ she had explained. ‘The steps of the Capitol Building are his natural stage. Mine will be a room in Blair House later in the evening. We both have our own constituencies and I know how best to communicate with mine.’
After the ‘Battle of Washington’ the Administration had relocated many of its departments to Philadelphia and New York. The damage to departmental buildings, the loss of archives and the death toll among key personnel was so high that in many cases, organs of Government were going to have to be rebuilt again virtually from the ground up. For example, although the US military machine remained formidable, and its command and control infrastructure superficially more or less intact, its planning, personnel, technological development, policy, training and resupply organisations were in a state of unmitigated chaos. The ships at sea, the aircraft parked at their bases and the army units in their camps and forts were like the branches of some great Redwood tree that had been unexpectedly felled. While the individual branches had survived, the trunk that delivered life-giving sap to those branches and their countless leaves had been split and severed at its base. Just paying military salaries was going to present an almost insurmountable problem in the coming weeks, and every major procurement program was going to have to be reconstructed like giant, unbelievably complicated jigsaw puzzles. The same process was going to have to be repeated across every strata of governmental activity.
Margaret Thatcher knew from personal experience how difficult that was going to be. In the United Kingdom the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration — superseded by her own Unity Administration on 1st of January — had had to re-invent a totally new form of government utilising the Emergency District System automatically enacted in the aftermath of the October War. She had been the first ‘Supply Minister’ in the UKIEA, and basically, had made up the rules as she went along. Despite her anger the Angry Widow couldn’t help herself feeling a little bit sorry for her hosts. Not least because it wasn’t until their own people had risen in insurrection, that the Administration had truly comprehended some small part of what things had been like for their ‘allies’ ever since the cataclysm.
“America has looked inward upon itself for long enough,” the President declared. “We in this continent are not an island cast adrift or in some way separated from the World. No man or woman in these United States of America is apart from the rest of Mankind. It is not our destiny to withdraw into our heartlands, or to cower behind the ramparts of our military might. It is not our destiny to be isolated from our fellow men. I thank God that we live in a nation that speaks the language of William Shakespeare. I thank God that we live under a system of law and governance mandated by the sons of the European enlightenment. And I thank God that we have been, and will continue to be the grain store of the World and the arsenal of democracy. While I live I am proud, proud my fellow Americans, to dedicate myself to the great work of renewal and freedom that lies before us all!”
Chapter 2
HMS Hermes looked like a very old ship from where Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher viewed her from across the harbour. The aircraft carrier had about her that rusting, grubby, greasy sheen that the onset of dusk couldn’t entirely hide from the most disinterested or distant observers, and he was neither. Hermes was hardly four years old and yet she’d been worked hard — almost worked to death — in the last year. Not that her down at heel appearance didn’t mean she couldn’t still, at a pinch, fight her weight. Her magazines had been partially restocked with new American air-to-air missiles, her ready lockers were stuffed with clips of forty-millimetre reloads for her Bofors guns, her tanks had been topped off with aviation and all the other oils and lubricants she needed to keep on steaming and flying her dwindling air group. Her peacetime air complement of a dozen De Havilland Sea Vixens interceptors, seven Blackburn Buccaneer low-level strike aircraft, five Fairey Gannet anti-submarine aircraft, and six Westland Wessex helicopters was reduced to seven Sea Vixens, three Buccaneers, two Gannets and four Wessex’s. Most of the surviving aircraft were over-stressed, flying literally on a wing and prayer.