Chapter 34
Wednesday 13th April
Fleet Headquarters, Norfolk, Virginia
Nobody observing Admiral Lord Collingwood. The C-in-C of the Atlantic Fleet would have concluded that he was a worried man that morning. However, as he was driven from his official residence, past the great dockyards on the western bank of the Elizabeth River, and over the King William III Bridge connecting South and North Norfolk, skirting the sprawling hectares of married quarters estates he was aware that soon the tragedies of Achilles’s loss in the Battle of the Windward Passage, and the disastrous loss of Jamaica were but the prelude to the coming catastrophe. That the Empire would, in the end prevail, he had no doubt. That was a given, not a question worthy of debate. No, the problem was the huge amount of blood and treasure that was soon going to be fed into the maw of the coming war.
The C-in-C made a big effort to broadcast his normal bluff, breezy good humour as he entered Fleet Headquarters.
“Good morning, ladies,” he smiled paternally to the gathering ranks of female secretaries and clerks, and the increasing number of WRENS now filling lower and middle ranking roles within the ever-expanding Fleet Staff. His predecessor had been the man who broke with convention and allowed women access to the periphery of operational areas; he had kicked open the door and removed all restrictions short of permitting members of the fairer sex to serve on board ships, other than as nursing staff on board Royal Fleet Auxiliaries. That said, six months ago, he had authorised a pilot program under which female officers and rates were encouraged to apply for service in His Majesty’s New England Coastguard service.
That morning he felt sick to his stomach that sooner or later, women he had sent to sea, would surely become casualties before the war was won.
“Good morning, everybody,” he called gruffly as he entered the inner, bomb-proof command centre of the Norfolk complex. Then, taking his seat at the big conference table in the room next to the Situation Room, he kicked off proceedings with his customary injunction: “Right, what else has gone wrong?”
Despite the circumstances, this drew the normal grimaces of amusement and broke the tension.
It seemed that Task Force 5.1’s air strike on the – now confirmed Dominican – enemy squadron guarding the channel between Great and Little Inagua had sunk one old ironclad light cruiser and damaged an elderly ‘battleship’. Unfortunately, three aircraft, a Goshawk and two Sea Eagle torpedo bombers had failed to return to the Ulysses.
The fragmentary news from Jamaica, courtesy of a communications detail of the ad hoc Naval Brigade thrown together in the first hours of the invasion who had escaped to the mountains, was enough to make a man’s blood boil. Kingston was on fire from end to end and the victorious Cuban and Dominican troops had embarked upon an unprecedented – in modern times – orgy of destruction. There was a suggestion that the conqueror’s object was to massacre the whole population, albeit only after all the women and girl children had been raped…
Cuthbert Collingwood listened to the reports with stoic patience, inwardly seething that his Government – the one back in London – had not seen fit to give him, or his colleagues on land or in the air the tools to put an end to this abomination.
Even without resort to Project Poseidon there were plenty of ‘tools’ absent from his war-making tool box. For example, there were no long-range bomber aircraft in New England, and the assault troops and amphibious warfare ships he needed to prosecute offensive operations against Cuba and Santo Domingo, and eventually, to take back Jamaica, were still in England!
Worst of all, very few of his ships were equipped to detect and hunt submarines, even though everybody in the Navy knew years ago that the Mexicans, and probably the Cubans also, were secretly building up their fleet of submersibles in defiance of the third-party protocols of the Submarine Treaty. Even now, there were people back in the Old Country resisting a change in fighting instructions to enable his captains to stop and search merchantmen, flying under any flag, they suspected might be disguised armed commerce raiders!
There were of course, other constraints upon his freedom of action which chaffed, more than somewhat. For the moment he would simply have to live with them.
Once the morning’s general briefing was concluded, the room cleared and Collingwood was left with his inner circle. After a short delay, the representatives of the Political Intelligence Division, a middle-aged commander and two of his analysts, quietly presented themselves to the C-in-C.
“We are confident that the whole strength of the Triple Alliance’s Southern Squadron, including four of the five vessels of the former German West Indies Squadron is concentrated in Jamaican waters, sir.”
Cuthbert Collingwood waited, knowing that there was more to come.
“This has been verified by special means, sir,” reported the slim, dark-haired bespectacled young woman in the immaculate uniform of a Second Officer of the Women’s Royal Naval Service. Collingwood was of a mind that if women were to be truly embraced by the Royal Navy, the WREN’s idiosyncratic system of ranks ought to be fully aligned. For example, the rank of second officer in the WRENs was directly equivalent to that of lieutenant in the RN.
Second Officer Madeline Fisher remained the only woman ever to have delivered or participated in a command briefing to the C-in-C Atlantic Fleet. A graduate of the WRNS College at Saltash in the English West Country, she had previously served at the Admiralty in Whitehall before, on promotion, applied for and been granted a transfer to New England, where, apparently, she had family.
Cuthbert Collingwood usually allowed references to ‘special means’, to go unremarked. But that was before the Empire was at war with a vicious and mendacious foe.
“Special means, Second officer Fisher?”
“Yes, sir. HMS Serapis is on station.”
Collingwood nodded.
He commanded everything as sea between Nova Scotia and the Equator west of the North Atlantic mid-point; except the employment and the deployment of ‘special undersea assets’, which in a funny sort of way was logical, because officially those ‘assets’ did not, and had never existed.
In precisely the same way that Project Poseidon, to which those assets unambiguously ‘belonged’, had never existed.
In fact, had it not been for the exigencies of the present situation – a war nobody wanted that was already threatening to be a nightmare – even the names of the ‘special assets’ in the C-in-C’s theatre of operations would have been denied to him.
As it was the ‘need to know’ list of persons permitted to know what Collingwood knew, presently had just eight names on it and Second Officer Madeline Fisher’s name appeared on that list above his.
Basically, the twenty-five-year-old brunette who was engaged to be married to an officer on the Princess Royal, was one of three keepers of the Empire’s dirtiest, and greatest secret. She and her two colleagues in the so-called Political Intelligence Division – PID – were the only people in New England with the keys to the encryption codes used by ‘assets’ at sea, or rather, under the sea, to communicate with their base in Scotland, and, in times of war, with authorised ‘entities’ at regional Fleet Headquarters around the globe.
Cuthbert Collingwood knew that two ‘special assets’ had been despatched to New England waters three weeks ago.