“Spoken for?” The woman inquired, her eyes smiling. That was when Peter Christopher started getting the feeling that she knew some, if not all of his secrets. It was like having one’s pocked picked. “I know about Marija Calleja,” Clara said, putting down her coffee cup.
The man said nothing.
“And before you ask,” his companion went on, “I and the people I represent mean neither of you any harm.”
Peter Christopher’s stare narrowed. The woman was either a criminal about to blackmail him, somebody put up to this by his father to let him know that the new Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean didn’t want any kind of scandal, or she was a spook.
Clara Pullman wasn’t intimidated by the young man’s silence. Everything she knew about the tall, handsome son of the famous ‘Fighting Admiral’ confirmed that he was every inch the prototypical ‘new’ naval officer, highly intelligent, technically accomplished in his own field of radar and electronics and probably in several other specialisations, respected by his fellow officers and the men under him. Not yet half-formed he’d already been singled out within the Navy for future high command. Of course, Peter Christopher didn’t know this, or even suspect it. He wasn’t overly ambitious, didn’t crave to emulate his distinguished, somewhat estranged father, and rather like Marija Elizabeth Calleja in faraway Malta, had virtually no idea how he was seen in the eyes of others. Marija Calleja and Peter Christopher were well matched, remarkable innocents abroad in the World who needed people like her and Arkady Pavlovich Rykov to guard their backs if they were to ever go in search of their destinies.
“When you get back to your hotel this evening,” she explained. “Sober, hopefully,” a sympathetic half-smile, “you will find new orders waiting for you.” Clara began to rise from the table. “We shall meet again one day,” she promised, and walked out of the taverna.
What on Earth was all that about?
Peter Christopher thought briefly about running after the woman and demanding to know what was going on. He couldn’t move even though his mind was racing. If the woman had been going to blackmail him she’d have come straight out with it. If that wasn’t it, then whatever was going on was far too subtle for his father’s handiwork. Clara Pullman, if that was her real name, had just made contact. It was classic. She’d identified him, approached him, looked him in the eye, made her assessment and departed. And now he was a part of the Great Game.
Or am I?
Finishing his beer he paid up and walked, unhurriedly back the mile or so to his hotel, where he and his erstwhile ‘steward’, Petty Officer Jack Griffin and a score of officers and senior NCO’s from all three services were billeted. The Armada de Tagus was a genteel, old-world sort of rest house that usually catered for retired Portuguese civil servants and naval officers. It had about it the faded glory of the days when Portugal had been in the first rank of European superpowers, and like Portugal itself, the hotel had seen better times and was quietly falling down, its walls cracked and its paint flaking. He and Jack Griffin had found themselves back at the hotel after Hermes put into Lisbon a fortnight ago to offload several sick bay cases, and to take on new drafts. What had been planned as a forty-eight hour stopover had stretched, first to a week and now fourteen days and counting, when the Portuguese authorities granted permission for the carrier to undertake ‘essential maintenance’ in the sheltered waters of the Tagus Estuary. In fact the Portuguese had fallen over themselves to be of assistance and a stream of dignitaries, including António de Oliveira Salazar, the seventy-four year old Prime Minister — Dictator really — of Portugal and several of his ministers, had paid much lauded courtesy visits to the Happy H in recent days. Peter Christopher had been summoned onboard to escort the Portuguese dictator around the bridge and the flight deck since he had already met the old man, who was especially eager to be photographed again with the son of the ‘famous Fighting Admiral’. Salazar wasn’t at all what one expected a 1930s-style fascist dictator to be like; he seemed mild-mannered, professorial, more like one’s favourite elderly uncle than a contemporary of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.
Peter Christopher put those recollections aside as he tore open the slim Manila envelope waiting for him at the reception desk of the Armada de Tagus Hotel.
He was so astonished by the contents of his orders that he started reading them aloud.
“…seat booked on Flight GIB Zero-Nine…sixteenth instant.”
“Report Officer Commanding HMS Talavera on arrival at Gibraltar…”
“Assume duties of Executive Officer said ship with immediate effect…”
Chapter 3
The tall, gaunt man with the horribly scarred face wearing a black patch over his left eye moved painfully to the lectern at the front of the stage. Whereas the English industrial West Midlands had escaped the firestorm of late October 1964, the half-broken body of the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West, was a testament to the greater cataclysm that had consumed as many as eight million of his fellow countrymen and women in the first hours, and between four and five millions in the subsequent fourteen months.
Cigarette and tobacco smoke clouded the air and as the angular, grim-visaged figure of the local MP settled, his good eye scanning the ranks of the faithful in the packed auditorium as a breathless hush awaited the prophet’s words of wisdom.
Airey Neave, the forty-seven year old war hero who’d escaped from Colditz and had since December filled the post of Minister of Supply, glanced with apparent equanimity at his companion in the front row of the hall. He and Iain Macleod had declined an invitation to sit with the party of local luminaries and worthies at the back of the stage. When one voluntarily walked into a lion’s den one was best advised not to place oneself in the middle of the hostile pride.
Iain Norman Macleod, the Minister of Information and nominally, at least, still the Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, returned a tight-lipped smile This was one of those rare occasions when he felt the need of the company of a man of exactly Airey Neave’s proven mettle. In addition to escaping from Colditz Castle, Airey Neave was the man who’d read the indictments to the leading Nazis on trial at Nuremburg and was, by common consent that rarest of things, a gold-plated, universally acknowledged surviving national treasure.
Before the October War the annual meeting of the West Midlands Conservative Associations would have been a jamboree, a mostly social event. Tonight’s assembly had about it the feel of a bear pit, hence the presence of two of the Party’s ‘biggest hitters’. Neither Airey Neave nor Iain Macleod anticipated getting out of Wolverhampton Civic Hall unscathed. Tonight’s extravaganza was politics in its rawest, most brutal incarnation, red in tooth and claw. All that was missing was the certainty of pre-meditated violence against the opponents of the local hero. This evening, any violence would be entirely spontaneous. Such had always been the Tory way. Neither Airey Neave, Ian Macleod nor the new Prime Minister was prepared to surrender ground to the opponents of reason. The Government had no intention of allowing itself to be stabbed in the back by the very people who ought to be its staunchest supporters.