“How are you, old man?” He inquired solicitously.
“Not so bad, David.” Julian Christopher couldn’t stop himself following up with: “How is Margaret?”
This provoked a rueful chuckle.
“The man was fourteen feet away from her and he fired five rounds from a Webley Mark IV revolver,” the First Sea Lord explained, “and completely missed her. Mr Powell, the fellow who has been giving her so much stick back home attempted to place himself between the assassin and his bête noire. One round nicked that gentleman’s right hip. Otherwise, nobody was inconvenienced. It transpired that the assassin was a fellow with a long history of mental disturbance, somewhat exacerbated by the loss of his entire family in the recent war.”
“How the blazes did the blasted man get into the hall with a loaded gun?”
“The AWP are looking into that.”
“The what?”
“The Angry Widow’s Praetorians, that’s what some of the Commandos in her protection detail call themselves.”
Julian Christopher laughed, the tension drained away.
“Dreadnought is still in contact with the Admiral Kutuzov,” he reported to the professional head of the Royal Navy. “Well, she was the last time she reported in about two hours ago. The Kutuzov is in company with two Turkish destroyers; a couple of old M class ships we transferred to them in the late fifties. The Blake and her escorts may be ready to depart Limassol as early as this evening but Operation Reclaim is on hold, at least until we establish a better picture of the tactical situation in the Eastern Mediterranean, or until all the supporting forces are in position.”
Sir David Luce ruminated.
“Do you think the Admiral Kutuzov is likely to move into a blocking position south of Crete, Julian?”
“I’ve got no idea,” his friend confessed. “There are obviously several other major surface units operating, or perhaps simply exercising in the Southern Aegean, this may be just one of several task forces patrolling the approaches to south-western Turkey.”
“Dreadnought running into the Admiral Kutuzov and the Yavuz trading practice broadsides was quite a stroke of luck. I’m not sure I’d have liked being in the Kutuzov’s place, trusting to fifty year old German optics for my salvation.”
Both men had been brought up in a big gun navy in which gunnery exercises involving shooting at another ship with a deliberate range or bearing error built into all the firing solutions, was routine. Among other things it demanded a very steady nerve. Inadvertently feeding the correct information into the gun control table — a complicated room-sized mechanical computer on a big ship — could result in disaster.
“Good lord, no! Still, it takes one back a bit, what!”
“Not all the reports of the Lampedusa action have come across my desk back home,” the First Sea Lord went on, “but your boy is evidently a chip off the old block, Julian. Taking command of the flotilla and going inshore like that to rescue the Puma! Finest traditions of the service and all that!”
In the Citadel of Mdina the two admirals, the airman and the politician went up to the old Officers’ Mess terrace on the south-eastern ramparts.
“Quite a view,” William Whitelaw exclaimed. “You can see half the island from here!”
“From the northern walls you can see the rest of the island, sir,” Air Vice-Marshall Daniel French explained. “In the olden days this place was the great bastion of Malta. Lookouts could see pirates and invaders coming from miles away. The locals would rush inside the fortress and wait until it was safe to go back outside again.”
“There’s a similar citadel on Gozo, the second largest island in the Maltese Archipelago,” Julian Christopher remarked. “At Victoria.”
Supervised by the C-in-C’s flag lieutenant, Alan Hannay, stewards served tea and biscuits as the senior officers made small talk with their political master. Then it was down to business, big maps of the Eastern Mediterranean were unrolled across the tables and the briefing commenced.
“Can you talk about the air situation first please, Dan,” Julian Christopher asked. He and his deputy met once or twice a week but otherwise their duties kept them apart. It had been Air-Vice Marshal Daniel French’s Hawker Hunter interceptors which had shot down the four 100th Bomb Group B-52s on that awful Friday in December before they had succeeded in totally wrecking the archipelago’s defences. The two men had got on well from the outset, more than that, they actually liked each other. The Royal Air Force had swiftly promoted their man once the C-in-C had unilaterally appointed the airman his deputy on Malta with ‘full powers’ to act in the event of his absence or unavailability. “The First Sea Lord and Mr Whitelaw probably won’t have heard the latest news.”
“My pleasure, sir,” Air Vice-Marshall Dan French grinned. The former Lancaster pilot and the commander of one of the first V-Bomber squadrons deported himself with a calm, cheerful confidence that imprinted his authority on everybody he met. His wife and daughter had been killed in the October War; his son, a V-Bomber pilot, had survived and he’d come to terms with his personal grief by throwing himself into his duties on Malta. Notwithstanding that he ran a tight ship and he didn’t tolerate fools gladly, he was popular and well respected by his men, and had a reputation for going out of his way to get on well with the Maltese citizens with whom he had regular dealings. “The US Air Force isn’t wasting any time extricating itself from Spanish and Italian territory. Three C-130 Hercules transports landed at Ta’Qali shortly before you arrived at Luqa. Another two are expected at Gibraltar around now. The C-130s are chock full of ground crews and all the spares they could cram in and still take off. There will be several more C-130s flights coming down from Aviano tomorrow ahead of the rest of the air group. The fast jet element of the US Air Group is six F-104 Starfighters and eight A-4 Skyhawks. There is also a U-2 based up there and two KC-135 tankers. From tomorrow the C-130s will be shuttling back and forth evacuating the two under strength battalions of Marines who have been defending the base from ‘brigands’ and ‘freeloaders’. If things go according to plan all moveable assets and personnel should have been transferred to Malta within the next seven to nine days. The Spanish situation is murkier. Franco’s people are making waves apparently. It may be that the US Air Force commander on the ground ignores the Spanish and ups and goes with everything that’s airworthy at very short notice. To cover for this eventuality the Prime Minister has made a personal approach to the Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, asking him to re-open his air space to US aircraft.” He looked to the Defence Secretary. “I imagine you know more about the political aspects of this, sir.”
William Whitelaw nodded.
“The Prime Minister has been eager for US-Portuguese relations to be ‘normalised’,” he confided. “Given the exigencies of the current situation this might well happen via the back door, as it were.” He hesitated. “What is the strength of the American air presence in the Iberian Peninsula?”
“In total about thirty serviceable aircraft of all types, sir.”
“Can they all be accommodated at Gibraltar at need?”
“Yes, but RAF Gibraltar is extremely vulnerable to Spanish interdiction, sir.”
“Quite. How would you describe your relations with our American cousins, Air Vice-Marshall?”
“Cordially robust, sir. There has been no discussion of command and control issues.”