The words burned off the message sheet searing Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson’s numb fingers. Having been awakened to receive the news of the devastation of Tehran by a ‘city-killer’ strike, Margaret Thatcher had pressed the communication she had just received from Malta upon him without saying a word. The fact that Admiral Sir David Luce, the Chief of the Defence Staff had endorsed the message with his own imprimatur ahead of the signatures of the two Cabinet members who had accompanied him to the Maltese Archipelago the previous day made the blow even more sickening.
The Prime Minister was immaculately dressed and turned out, not a single hair out of place. The Foreign Secretary wondered if she had gone to bed that night; personally, he felt like death warmed up while she looked a million dollars.
“Willie and the others are coming over,” Margaret Thatcher explained tersely. “Clearly, we have all been living in a fool’s paradise. Yourself excluded, Tom,” she admitted grimly. “I am sorry I did not give your views the credence that they so obviously merited. I will be mindful not to make that mistake again in the future.”
Tom Harding-Grayson was too shaken to appreciate either the compliment or the promise. But for the steely implacability of the defiance in Margaret Thatcher’s blue grey eyes he would have most likely despaired. There had been some desperately dark times in the slightly more than seventeen months since the cataclysm of the October War; but none as black and hopeless as this.
Malta had almost been lost and British arms were disastrously over-stretched at the very moment a new and unsuspected deadly peril had emerged. The paper-thin rapprochement with the United States of America had failed to defend Malta, the alliance’s most strategically important base in the Mediterranean. There had been a complete — probably self-inflicted — failure of intelligence in the Middle and Near East. The Suez Canal remained blocked at Ismailia obviating any possibility of reinforcing the under strength garrisons at Abadan, Aden and elsewhere in the region now threatened by what might turn out to be an irresistible tide of Soviet tanks. The American President was flying to England later that day in a last ditch attempt to patch up Anglo-American relations, attempt to quieten his domestic opponents and to establish a working chain of command for an as yet non-existent joint military partnership on the ground in the Mediterranean; a plan which events already looked to have overtaken.
At the same time all this was going on a bunch of mad Fenians was roaming the English countryside with state of the art US-supplied surface-to-air missiles on the very day that every available transport aircraft was coming and going from Malta carrying south emergency supplies and new personnel and bringing back north heroes by the dozen and wounded and injured servicemen and civilians by the score.
Oh, and the Royal Navy had just submitted a paper to the War Cabinet recommending the deployment of submarines previously held in strategic reserve for the defence of the British Isles, on a mission to the South Atlantic to wage unrestricted submarine warfare on Argentinean naval and commercial shipping until such time as that country surrendered the territories it had so recently stolen from the Crown!
The World had gone to Hell in a handbag!
“Cheer up, Tom! The Angry Widow declared. “At least we know what we are up against now!”
The man had handed her back the message sheet and slumped disconsolately into the nearest chair.
“The Soviets have destroyed Tehran,” he reminded Margaret Thatcher. “Short of starting a new atomic war I’m not sure if we can do anything about it if they have really set their sights on the Persian Gulf.”
His Prime Minister had given him a thoughtful look.
“Right now I don’t know what we can do about it either,” she admitted candidly. “However, it seems obvious to me that there is one thing we must do.”
“Oh, what would that be?”
“Once and for all we and our American allies must draw a line in the sand!”
Chapter 72
Admiral Sir David Luce and Air Vice-Marshal Daniel French took early morning tea together on the veranda as the dawn began to break over the Maltese Archipelago. The two men had business to conclude that was best contracted divorced from political interference.
“I will carry out the tour planned for this morning,” the Chief of the Defence Staff informed the airman. “I will return to England on the first available flight out of Luqa this afternoon to report back to the Prime Minister. I also need to hold discussions with the Supreme Commander designate which, given developments overnight really won’t wait until tomorrow. The new Supremo is a sound fellow, I think. Our paths crossed several times before the war. Interesting chap, actually. General Harold Keith ‘Johnny’ Johnson. He was captured by the Japanese at Bataan and survived three years in Jap prison camps. If the politicians give him enough elbow room he’ll do a good job, I’m sure.” He focused on more immediate issues. “I have communicated my recommendation that you be confirmed as C-in-C Malta under whatever new command arrangements are decided in the coming days.”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence, sir.”
The Chief of the Defence Staff brushed this aside.
Both men were relieved that the latest news from Cyprus was much better than they had anticipated. Rear-Admiral Nigel Grenville had signalled that the enemy, having sallied from its north-eastern enclaves on the island had, his assaults exhausted and repulsed at heavy cost, started surrendering in droves and Operation Grantham had overnight ceased to be a massive amphibious landing on a hostile shore and become a huge chaotic mopping up exercise. Even stay behind guerrilla groups were laying down their weapons.
“Nigel Grenville,” The First Sea Lord went on, “is detaching Hermes, her fleet train and the 23rd Support Flotilla to return to Malta. Hermes needs time in dry dock so she’ll probably proceed to Gibraltar after she’s flown off her air group and disembarked her war supplies and all air group personnel. I’m promoting Nick Davey, Captain D of the 23rd Support Flotilla, Commodore and putting him command of all destroyers, frigates and escort vessels based at Malta. I’ll leave the minutiae of how he re-organises the rest of the Mediterranean Fleet to Nigel, who is to be promoted Vice Admiral and C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet with immediate effect — when he returns to Malta from Cyprus. Any organisational arrangements we make in the coming days will inevitably be of an interim nature pending decisions about what to do about the situation in Iran.”
Both men’s ears still rang from what they had learnt from Nicolae Ceaușescu earlier that morning. Dan French had been unsettled by the man’s uncanny — rather eerie — resemblance to the late Arkady Pavlovich Rykov; the two men could have been brothers. This despite the fact that Nicolae Ceaușescu’s features were drawn and haggard and his mouth contorted now and then with pain from the stump of his amputated right leg high above where his knee had been. Eventually, with the pleas of his guardian, Eleni, becoming ever more plaintive he had been given morphine and wheeled away but not before Rachel Piotrowska had dispassionately translated his incredible story.
First there was his headlong flight from Bucharest as Soviet troops swarmed across the city. Then there was the crash of his Mil Mi-6 helicopter on an unknown island that turned out to be Samothrace in the Northern Aegean Sea in a storm. The tale grew more incredible with every twist; the loss of his gangrenous leg, sawn off in a ruined house with a clasp knife without anaesthetic. At death’s door Eleni had nursed him back to life, just the first of many times she had saved him from death’s waiting jaws. It was all too incredible — that was the only word to describe his odyssey — for the man seemed to have more lives than a proverbial lucky cat! Escaping Samothrace with a handful of faithful bodyguards his leaking fishing boat had been run down in the night by the Turkish battlecruiser Yavuz. At each stage in the drama he had simply jumped out of one frying pan into another! Upon regaining consciousness in the sick bay of the old dreadnought he had immediately assumed the false identity of the feared KGB Head of Station in Istanbul and Thessalonika. On and on the scarcely believable saga continued. Right up to the moment the Yavuz had fired the first broadsides in the Battle of Malta…