Iain was Iain Norman Macleod, the fifty year old ‘brain’ of the post cataclysm Conservative Party. At the time of the October War he had been Party Chairman and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Since the formation of the UAUK he had made the post of Minister of Information his, and resumed his pre-war role as Leader of the — newly reconvened — House of Commons. A brilliant, moody, irascible man of deep convictions he and Airey Neave had become their Party Leader’s and their Prime Minister’s, most vociferous and eloquently devoted public supporters and proponents. To the Angry Widow’s detractors they were Cassius and Brutus to her Caesar; to the Party faithful and to countless men and women in the street they were the indefatigable twin spokesmen for the new ‘one nation Unity Administration of the United Kingdom’.
Not only was Pat Harding-Grayson made of indefinably ‘sterner stuff’ than her husband — whose greatest weakness had always been his tendency to resort to the cerebral, rather than the emotional in times of direst peril — she was also a profoundly political animal with a lifelong understanding of how the game of politics was played. This meant that while she was confident that with people like Willie Whitelaw, Airey Neave and Iain Macleod at her back — assuming nothing else went catastrophically wrong in the next few days and weeks — her friend Margaret Thatcher would, if she still wanted to survive, survive the Maltese disaster. But who did Jim Callaghan, the leader of the rump of the splintered Labour and Co-operative Party have to guard his back?
“What about you with your people, Jim?” She asked.
Her husband frowned at her, mystified by her question to his friend.
“Ah,” James Callaghan murmured, meeting Pat Harding-Grayson’s concerned grey eyes in a moment replete with new respect. “Now that’s a question, isn’t it?”
Chapter 20
Commander Peter Christopher was practically out on his feet by the time the handset was pressed into his hands. He found himself alone in the Captain’s Stateroom of the guided missile destroyer. He did not trouble to hide his irritation — he was too tired to be angry — to be called away from supervising the preparations for the transfer of his wounded to the barges and launches waiting for the USS Berkeley to tie up, bow and stern, to the emergency destroyer buoys in Kalkara Creek beneath the low cliffs upon which Royal Naval Hospital Bighi had stood for over a hundred years.
“Christopher speaking,” he grunted. All that was keeping him going was strong black coffee and the two ‘pep pills’ the commanding officer of the USS Berkeley had persuaded his ship’s surgeon to prescribe him a couple of hours ago. His twisted and savagely aching right knee and ankle were heavily strapped up, his cuts and abrasions cleansed and bandaged, one or two of his deeper nicks and gashes stitched but he badly needed a bath or shower and the crisp clean new US Navy uniform his hosts had given him did not really fit him. But then nothing would feel right about anything for a long time he guessed, not after he had lost his ship.
“I am sorry to keep you waiting, sir,” a prim and proper young woman’s voice apologised at the other end of the hissing, squeaking scrambled connection, “the First Sea Lord has been informed that the secure connection has been established.”
Peter Christopher’s exhaustion and bloody mindedness lifted briefly. But only briefly. By the time Sir David Luce, the professional head of the Royal Navy’s cultured, evenly modulated voice broke into the tired spiral of his melancholy his mood had soured somewhat.
“I was told that you were wounded, Peter?”
The use of his Christian name completely disorientated the last commanding officer of the battle class destroyer HMS Talavera. Peter had only spoken to the First Sea Lord on one previous occasion, shortly after his graduation from Dartmouth.
‘I am sure you will do your family proud, young man,’ the lean, urbane man with the immaculate manners and courtly air had said, shaking his hand before turning back to continue his conversation with Peter’s father.
“Er, nothing very serious, sir. I probably look a bit of sight for sore eyes. But nothing to complain about. Nothing compared to some of the poor fellows we are about to transfer to RNH Bighi.”
Damn it! I did not intend to come across as a sulky brat!
“I apologise for the timing of this conversation, Peter,” the older man assured him calmly, severely. “I wouldn’t have placed this call if this interview could have waited for the morning.”
“No, sorry, sir,” Peter said instantly, ashamed of himself. The Head of the Navy had put a call through to him. In the aftermath of a battle the First Sea Lord could pay his men and he not greater compliment, especially at a time like this when he would have World on his back demanding to know what had gone wrong at Malta. “I’m not entirely myself, sir. Please forgive me.”
“I completely understand, Peter,” the older man said paternally. “You must be feeling dreadful at the moment?”
The younger man desperately wanted to deny it.
“Half my people are dead, missing or seriously wounded, sir.” In fact only three of his ten senior officers— Miles Weiss, Alan Rachel and his Canadian Navigator, Dermot O’Reilly — had survived the afternoon’s action and like himself, all three fell into the category of ‘walking wounded requiring hospitalization’. He took a deep breath. He needed to say what needed to be said. “You should know that my father put a call through to Talavera while we were alongside in the Grand Harbour provisioning and ammunitioning the ship in the minutes before the bombardment commenced, sir.”
“Yes,” the First Sea Lord acknowledged. “What did he tell you to do, Peter?”
“He told me to ‘cut my lines and go’, sir.”
Peter Christopher thought he heard the other man chuckle; he might have been imagining it.
“Sir?”
“My old friend probably hoped you’d run for the open sea,” Sir David Luce explained, his tone tinged with proud sadness, “but he knew you well enough to know that whatever he told you to do that you would steam towards the sound of guns at top speed, Peter.”
The younger man said nothing, a little choked. He had just been paid a very high tribute by the man whom, in the Royal Navy was if not God, then His trusted right hand man.
He swallowed hard.
“I ordered the Yarmouth to draw the enemy’s fire during Talavera’s torpedo run, sir,” he confessed, very nearly choking on the words. “I don’t know what happened to her.”