Clarey looked the much bigger man in the eye.
“If you would be so good as to accompany me to my sea cabin, Admiral Detweiller.”
Rear Admiral Laverne Lucas Detweiller glowered at the man who had so recently leapfrogged him in rank. A fifty-four year old third generation American son of Saxon immigrants who had settled in Jones’s County, Iowa in the 1880s, he was a towering, blond giant of a man with a handshake that would have made a full grown Grizzly bear wince; and subsequently count his clawed fingers to make sure they were all still present and correct. Normally the most jovial and big hearted of men, throughout the Navy he was fondly referred to as ‘Det’ or ‘Luke’ by his peers. For his whole career he had been larger than life, an indefatigable Viking of a man. But not today; partly on account of Clarey’s peremptory order to ‘report on board the flagship at your earliest convenience’, partly because he had graduated Annapolis two years before ComSixthFleet and he thought the fleet command ought by rights to have been his, but mostly because he knew his thirty-six year career in the United States Navy was over.
Detweiller had been operating under direct orders from the office of the Chief of Naval Operations. While he had limited freedom of manuever within the scope of those orders his ‘over-riding consideration at all times’ was specifically ‘the safeguarding of the Maltese Archipelago with a view to ensuring that it was a secure base for future Allied operations.’ Electing to exercise all one’s ships several hours steaming time from the base that he was supposed to be and had been ordered to safeguard simply did not cut the mustard. One of the reasons the CNO had left four large modern US warships ‘swinging around their anchors’ at Malta was because the advanced radar and communications suites they carried was supposed to be filling in the gaps and backing up the unreliable and much degraded British radar defences. Those ‘radar defences’ had been targeted by Italian Regia Aeronautica US-supplied A-4 Skyhawks and by four 100th Bomb Group B-52s in early December last year and then virtually destroyed by the EMPs — electromagnetic pulses — emitted by the two Red Dawn ICBM near miss air bursts which bracketed the archipelago in February. It was recognised by all parties that without Detweiller’s ships Malta did not have a functioning air defence system, and absolutely no over the horizon radar early warning capability.
A week ago Detweiller had complained about his ships having to ‘swing around their anchors’; the Chief of Naval Operations had tersely suggested he urgently remedy the situation by sending them to sea to operate as ‘radar pickets’ as per his ‘general operational brief’. It beggared belief that Detweiller had interpreted this ‘suggestion’ as a licence to remove himself from Malta.
If Bernard Clarey had his way Detweiller ought not to be just drummed out of the service but court-martialled for neglect of duty and negligence. Moreover, had he known in advance what the ‘imbecile’ had planned he would have driven his fleet directly into Maltese waters; probably arriving off Malta at least thirty-six hours ago. The Independence’s air group would have made short work of the enemy fleet long before it got within gun range of Malta. Hell, it would have been a goddammed turkey shoot!
Instead, hundreds, maybe thousands of people on Malta were dead and the British had been left to fight what might well turn out to be the most crucial battle of the war in the Mediterranean alone! What ought to have been a stunning demonstration of American armed military might had become a gut-wrenching humiliation.
The door of the admiral’s sea cabin, a relatively spacious and luxurious space some four yards by three buried in the great steel tower of the USS Independence’s bridge superstructure, clicked shut and the two admirals paused to assess their relative positions.
“For what it’s worth,” the big man grunted, “I personally discussed and cleared my squadron’s movements with the British C-in-C.”
Bernard Clarey would have reacted angrily if Detweiller had been offering any kind of apology or explanation. He said nothing and waited for the other man to continue.
“Talavera,” he sighed. His pique at being summoned to the flagship had evaporated; it was as if setting foot on the Independence’s flight deck had brought the inevitability of his situation home to roost. “Talavera was one of the British destroyers that saved my hide,” he shrugged, “heck, all of our hides on the Enterprise when that nuke went off next to the Long Beach.”
The new commander of the US Sixth Fleet had thus far only learned the sketchiest of details of the desperate battle off the eastern shores of Malta between two hopelessly outgunned and outmatched British ships, the old World War II vintage destroyer Talavera and the newer anti-submarine frigate Yarmouth, with a Turkish dreadnought, and one, perhaps two fifteen thousand ton Sverdlov class Soviet cruisers and an unknown number — possible as many as seven or eight in total — escorting frigates and destroyers. Notwithstanding, from what he had already learned he was frankly, in awe. He honestly had not believed that in this day and age two captains could possible throw their ships against such overwhelming odds in such a way.
It was, well, Nelsonian…
“Heck, Chick,” the big man sighed, employing Clarey’s nickname throughout the higher echelons of the US Navy, shaking his head. “What I wouldn’t have given to be beside those guys when they dove at that goddammed Turkish battleship and that Sverdlov cruiser!”
Bernard Clarey nodded grimly.
There was no room for sentimentality in high command.
“I relieve you of your command, Admiral,” he intoned, taking no pleasure or satisfaction in his work. “Your kit and personal possessions will be recovered from your flagship, the USS Mahan, circumstances permitting. In the mean time you will remain onboard the Independence as a guest of the wardroom. You will be accorded all respect and privileges consistent with your rank but I must request you to understand that in any other circumstances you would be under arrest at this time.”
Rear Admiral Laverne Lucas Detweiller made an approximation of standing to his full height — if he had tried too hard his head would have hit the steel beam above it — and came to attention.
He looked the younger man in the eye.
“I made a mistake,” he said grimly. “A mistake, that’s all.”
“I know that, Det. But the way things are these days people like us can’t afford to make mistakes.”
Chapter 12
Having spent the previous evening at a reception in the Philadelphia White House, and subsequently talked long into the early hours of the morning with the United States Secretary of State J. William Fulbright, the British Ambassador had hoped to be able to enjoy a brief ‘sleep in’ that morning before he rose to commence his next eighteen hour working day. Since arriving in America in January Lord Franks had adopted a punishing regime under which he rose early and retired very, very late. Normally rising between five and six o’clock, today he had asked not to be roused until eight.
Oliver Sherwell Franks had previously been British Ambassador in Washington between 1948 and 1952; but that had been in another age when the World had seemed a safer, saner place and whatever their differences and foibles, the British and the American governments had — after a difficult period in the first years after the 1945 war — played the diplomatic game observing in the main the courtesies appropriate between old and trusted allies. When he had first been in Washington in the late 1940s India and Pakistan had just been granted independence and regardless of how botched and bloody this first great de-colonization exercise had turned out to be, the Americans had greeted it with guarded approbation. They too had once been British subjects and notwithstanding the ‘old country’ had just ‘helped them’ to win the war in Europe and to a lesser extent, the war against Japan, most Americans instinctively resented and mistrusted ‘the British Empire’ and everything it stood for.