“Do we think Lampedusa was in the hands of Red Dawn?” Walter Brenckmann asked.
“We don’t know. At Pantelleria and Linosa our ships fired warning shots and the locals couldn’t throw up their hands in surrender quick enough. Obviously, we will interrogate the survivors as soon as possible. One curious thing did come to light; we found a lot of Soviet type automatic weapons and shoulder — held rocket propelled grenade launchers on Lampedusa. It sounds like a peculiar affair all round, actually.”
“Go on,” Margaret Thatcher encouraged him.
“Well, according to Admiral Christopher, our ships would have been handled much worse if so many of the hits on them hadn’t been by relatively small calibre armour piercing, or solid shot. Many of the hits simply went in one side and out the other, hardly any of our destroyers and frigates having heavy plating, let alone armour.”
“One fights with what one has at hand,” Tom Harding-Grayson offered.
The conversation moved on.
“The President asked me to thank you personally for facilitating the access of our survey teams to former US bases in Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire,” Walter Brenckmann said presently. “The RAF’s informal assistance to our people over the recovery of dual-key assets is also very much appreciated.”
Margaret Thatcher was looking forward to speaking to the American Ambassador’s wife. Pat Harding-Grayson, or rather, as she was now, Lady Patricia, had invited Joanne Brenckmann to afternoon tea yesterday. The Ambassador’s wife had brought ‘cookies’ baked with ingredients she had brought all the way her from home in Boston. Pat had been touched by the gesture and apparently, had a good ‘woman to woman’ gossip with her new American neighbour.
“I insist that you and your wife come over for drinks one evening, Captain Brenckmann,” she said, flashing her dazzling smile. She’d honestly thought her smile was just ‘a smile’ until people had remarked on how she ought to ‘flash’ it more often. Or at least that was what Iain Macleod and his people at the Ministry of Information said.
“Joanne would enjoy that, Prime Minister,” the greying American replied.
After Walter Brenckmann had departed the Defence Secretary turned to the Foreign Secretary.
“HMS Blake is currently docked at Limassol awaiting delivery of the first nuclear warheads from the Akrotiri stockpile. It is anticipated that it will take up to seventy-two hours to load all thirty-eight weapons. Facilities on Malta are now ready to accommodate the, er, bombs.”
The Foreign Secretary had had a bad feeling about the nuclear weapons store on Cyprus for as long as he’d known the Akrotiri store existed. In the later 1950s the island had been a powder keg of religious and ethnic tensions; and ever since the October War the potentially idyllic island — very much set in a silvery blue sea — had been hanging off the end of perilously long and tenuous lines of communication. Added to this the previous C-in-C Mediterranean had neglected the defences of the bases on Cyprus and done nothing to reassure the neighbouring countries; Lebanon, Israel and the Alawite Syrian communities clinging to the coastal strip between Turkey and Lebanon, that the British presence on Cyprus contributed anything meaningful to the stability of the region.
“HMS Dreadnought will be tasked to patrol the waters south of Cyprus ahead of HMS Blake’s departure for Malta. The cruiser will be escorted by three screening escorts. HMS Victorious, having been delayed by the Lampedusa affair, will refuel at Malta, and steam east to provide air cover for the Blake flotilla once it is out of range of land-based aircraft flying from Akrotiri.”
“What is HMS Victorious’s combat readiness?”
“Her air group remains under strength but all her civilian workers will be put ashore at Valletta. Ideally, Hermes would be sent directly to the Eastern Mediterranean but she is experiencing ‘technical’ problems with her boilers which currently limit her speed to only fifteen knots. Admiral Christopher proposes dry docking her at Malta as soon as possible. The other option is to send her back to Gibraltar but then she’d be up to a week further away in the event of an unforeseen crisis developing.”
Margaret Thatcher was finding her new Defence Secretary a calming, and a very safe pair of hands. His soothingly phlegmatic attitude to things was not in any way complacent, simply the rational acknowledgement of the old axiom that ‘there is only so much one can control’; and the rest is in God’s hands. He had told her, very gently, that the worst possible thing a politician can do in almost any conceivable war situation, is to contemplate interfering directly in military affairs. ‘Trust the man on the ground,’ was his motto. It was a mantra she would not have trusted herself to obey had the ‘man on the ground’ in the Mediterranean not been Julian Christopher.
The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce had gone to Portsmouth to confer with the Flag Officer, Channel Fleet, and to personally ascertain the status of the Navy’s two largest aircraft carriers, the Ark Royal and the Eagle, both of which were now in dockyard hands. HMS Eagle was nearing the end of a major structural rebuild and modernization; HMS Ark Royal was likely to be lost to the Fleet for many months. Representatives of the De Havilland, Blackburn and Supermarine companies were also due to be in Portsmouth to explain to the professional head of the Royal Navy why HMS Victorious had had to put to sea with such a ‘scandalously depleted air group’ when so much ‘treasure, and priceless irreplaceable skilled labour, materials, scarce metals and oils and fuels of countless varieties, was being thrown at them’?
“That blasted man Staveley-Pope,” the Angry Widow complained suddenly, “he must have been asleep on the job! How in the World could he have left all those warheads out there in Cyprus? It beggars belief!”
“Margaret,” Tom Harding-Grayson objected, diplomatically, “I’m sure if the previous Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean knew what we know now he would have done something about it.”
“Um!”
“I think Tom has a point, Prime Minister,” William Whitelaw added very patiently. “Just as we can only deal with the situation before us; we must be aware that officers in the field can only form judgements on the basis of what they actually know at the time.”
Chapter 25
“I thought I’d find you here,” Joe Calleja declared in the subdued tone he’s been unable to rise above in the days since the news of Lieutenant Jim Siddall’s murder. The man had saved his life once; and had been a good friend to his sister at a time when she’d badly needed a friend. And now he was dead and it was likely that their brother had set the bomb that blew him into countless pieces of seared flesh and splintered bone.
Marija glanced nervously to her brother, then looked back at the sleek, mauled grey warship moored fore and aft to big drum buoys in the middle of the anchorage less than a hundred yards away. Deeper into the Creek the big salvage barge moored alongside the wreck of HMS Agincourt was partially hidden by the stern of the recently anchored warship. From the shrouds below her black, double bedstead radar, an enormous battle flag flapped below the port top cross brace of her great steel lattice foremast.
Marija had dressed in dark clothes, a long dress almost down to her ankles and her hair was hidden, as was much of her face by a black muslin scarf.