The ‘main’ roads hereabouts in Gloucestershire were narrow, rutted ribbons navigating in careless loops around ancient field boundaries and hemmed in by unkempt hedgerows. In the dark he had swung the clumsy Bedford lorry off the Winchcombe Road at the first gate and begun to pick his way along a dirt track up the side of a steep hill. Once or twice he had thought the Bedford would topple onto its side, or slide back down the impossible incline but he had been in such a panic, in the grip of such an unreasoning desperate madness, that he had pressed on and on until the winding track ended in what had seemed, in the darkness, an impenetrable black tree line on the down slope of a ridge he knew the truck would never re-climb.
Normally, he was a man who carefully weighed the odds.
But now he felt hunted.
In the last darkness before the dawn he had shut his eyes and driven the Bedford straight into the woods until with a sickening thud it had come to a dead stop. He had been driving only at a few miles per hour; even so his head had cracked hard against the windscreen.
Seamus McCormick had recovered consciousness in the dawn half-light on the ground beside the driver’s cab door.
Miraculously, the lorry was lodged so deep into the copse that it was invisible from outside the tree line, and as miraculously at full daybreak two Hawker Hunter fighters had swooped over the wood clearly making a final approach to RAF Cheltenham. Both aircraft had passed almost exactly over his head at a height he estimated as being about seven to eight hundred feet.
So low he could have taken out either of the fighters out with a point blank tail pipe shot with his Redeyes!
Point, shoot and kill!
Chapter 78
“Preliminary indications are that local defectors and traitors, mostly immigrants smuggled onto the Maltese Archipelago from Italy and Sicily since the October War, assisted by Soviet saboteurs landed by enemy submarines succeeded in disabling the air defence system of the islands in the thirty-six hours before the attempted invasion of Malta. It is clear that our enemies knew that Malta was denuded of its normal defences and therefore unusually vulnerable. I am informed that critical elements of the radar defences of the archipelago had been badly damaged during the December raid on Malta, and rendered largely inoperative by the effects of the electromagnetic pulses emitted by the large atomic airbursts in the region in February, and were therefore more susceptible to sabotage, local disruption and sophisticated jamming than they otherwise would have been. However, this only partially explains how the garrison of Malta could be so completely taken by surprise in this day and age.” It was all she could do not to shout to the rafters that the United States Navy was supposed to have been covering the known gaps in the Maltese Archipelago’s early warning radar network. “This is a question deserving of detailed further scrutiny but a question which palls into insignificance in the light of subsequent events.”
Margaret Thatcher’s tone was unapologetic.
“Like the bloody Yanks leaving us in the lurch!” A man bawled from the benches opposite. “Again!”
There was a massive outburst of agreement, angrily and repeatedly growled, bawled and rumbled from all around the Prime Minister.
She raised her right hand.
“There was never any formal understanding that United States Navy vessels would stand sentinel outside the Grand Harbour while Operation Grantham proceeded!” She thundered at the heckler. “The US Navy undertook to maintain a force in Maltese waters at all time and that is exactly what it did! That it so happened that this force was exercising to the west rather than the east of the Maltese Archipelago at the time of the attack is merely a cruel trick of war. How often in the past have similar misfortunes beset out own fleets?”
There were more derisive cries from the drab men and women flanking the leader of the putative ‘Socialist Labour Party’, Michael Foot. Their leader was oddly silent, seemingly lost in his thoughts.
Margaret Thatcher wondered if her two greatest opponents in the Commons, Enoch Powell and Michael Foot understood that what she was prepared to say publicly about the causes of the catastrophe in the Mediterranean and what she was likely to say to Jack Kennedy’s later that afternoon were two entirely different things?
“Wounded Malta is again a functioning base for operations. RAF Luqa is back in action, the Grand Harbour and the Admiralty Dockyards are open for business. Roads are being cleared and power and telephone services are being restored. Every aircraft which has left this country bound for Malta has carried doctors, nurses and other essential workers and vitally needed supplies of all kinds to the Mediterranean. A reciprocal airlift of badly injured men and women to hospitals in the United Kingdom has now begun. At the same time our American friends and allies,” this she very nearly spat in the face of her detractors, “have instituted an ‘air bridge’ between the USA and Prestwick in Scotland accelerating the inflow of medical and other war supplies. In the Central Mediterranean the United States Sixth Fleet commanded by Vice-Admiral Clarey from his mighty flagship the USS Independence is guarding Malta and American aircraft are now maintaining a two hundred mile air exclusion zone around the archipelago. Air Vice-Marshal French, the acting C-in-C following the death in action of Sir Julian Christopher,” the name caught in her throat for a jarring moment, “pays the highest possible tributes to our American allies for their part in assisting HMS Talavera and HMS Yarmouth and the ongoing selfless help to Malta that the ships of the Sixth Fleet are providing.”
Aware that she had become hectoring Margaret Thatcher stopped talking for a count of five seconds.
“However, I have to tell the House that but for the heroism of the much reduced garrison of Malta, the fortitude of the Maltese people and the extraordinary feats of the men of HMS Talavera and HMS Yarmouth, we might today be debating how best to mount an operation to recover the Maltese Archipelago from enemy hands.” She looked around the hall and over her shoulder to her own supporters on the Government benches. “And in that circumstance I would no longer be your Prime Minister.”
Chapter 79
Rachel Piotrowska saw the young Maltese woman watching the second Comet 4 rush down the runway and soar into the air and approached her, guessing that right now she probably needed a shoulder to cry on.
Rosa Calleja tried to put on a brave face.
“Hello, Clara,” she said forcing an unconvincing smile.
“Ah,” Rachel sighed, feeling guiltier than ever. “Clara’s not actually my real name.”
This momentarily distracted the younger woman from her melancholy. She frowned.
“I don’t…”
“Peter Christopher was right all along about me. Up until a couple of days ago I was ‘a spook’.”
This utterly baffled Rosa.
Seeing this Rachel took pity on her.