“I’ve been spying for the British since 1948,” she confessed. “But I just retired. I’m here to catch a plane back to England,” she lied. “What about you?”
“I was here to say goodbye to Marija, and…”
Rachel joined up the dots. “And a certain dashing young naval officer?” She hoped her false smile did not betray her. The younger woman’s husband, the traitor Samuel Calleja, was presently being transferred to a cell at the damaged but still functioning Royal Military Prison at Paola less than two miles from where the two women now stood. There he would be held overnight with the other condemned men.
Rosa blushed and looked down at her feet.
“Things are very strange,” she muttered, “but we have an agreement.” Her shoulders sagged and she glanced uncertainly at Rachel. “When he returns to Malta I hope things will be simpler, but…”
“My name is Rachel, by the way.”
“That’s a nice name, it is…”
Rosa stopped speaking and felt foolish.
“Jewish, yes,” the older woman confirmed. “I was born in Poland.”
“Oh, I did not mean…”
“I know you didn’t, my dear. Right now you are missing your ‘dashing young naval officer’ and you have every right to feel sorry for yourself.” Rachel took Rosa’s arm. “What you need is a truly disgusting cup of tea and I know exactly where one can be had,” she nodded towards the queue leading into the NAAFI tents erected on the other side of the ruined control tower. “And then you can to sit down and tell Auntie Rachel all about it!”
Chapter 80
A saluting stand had been erected adjacent to the hardstand allocated to SAM 26000, the flagship of the Presidential fleet of jetliners. Unseasonal winds over the Atlantic and then several extra take offs and landing due to the ‘air bridges’ the RAF was attempting the build between England and both Malta and Cyprus had delayed the landing of the President of the United States of America.
Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen, and Defender of the Faith, had used the interregnum to pick her Prime Minister’s brain to ensure that she was appraised of the most up to date information. Her First Minister’s private office was most punctilious, as befitted an institution supervised by the eminence grise of the Home Civil Service, Sir Henry Tomlinson, but in the Sovereign’s experience of these things, there was no substitute for talking to the man, or in this case, the woman in charge. Moreover, in her relatively short acquaintance with Margaret Thatcher there had never been any doubt who was in charge of the United Administration of the United Kingdom.
“We believe that there might have been as many as two thousand paratroopers dropped over the Maltese Archipelago,” her Prime Minister explained. “After the Soviet ships had stopped shelling the main island and concentrated their fire on HMS Talavera and HMS Yarmouth,” Margaret Thatcher continued with something akin to relish, “a large number of the parachutists were killed before they got anywhere near the ground. You see as soon as the bombardment ceased all our troops came out of their shelters and counter-attacked. Including members of the Malta Local Defence Volunteer force the garrison numbered about four thousand men. Obviously, many of our people were lines of communications troops but everybody had a gun. And then there were the Welsh Guards based in and around Sliema and men from the various HQ companies and so forth.”
Margaret Thatcher eyed the leaden skies and hoped the rain would hold off until the President’s long-range Boeing 707 had landed.
“We have no reliable count for the Soviet dead. We, well, mostly the Americans picked up about forty survivors from the Turkish ship, and about a hundred bodies, too. We haven’t picked up any survivors from the Soviet cruiser the Admiral Kutuzov. The First Sea Lord thinks the survivors must have been carried out to sea by the currents. Sir David thinks there might have been as many as three thousand men on the two ships. On land we’ve taken about three hundred and fifty prisoners, many of them injured, of course.”
In the distance the roar of jets engines came down to earth like a whisper of thunder.
Margaret Thatcher understood that to concentrate over much on what had been lost was a mistake, yet how could she not dwell upon the cost?
On and around a small archipelago that in total area was smaller than the Isle of Wight; nearly five thousand people had been killed or seriously injured and at least thirty percent of the population had been bombed out of their homes.
Around the parade stand the Royal Marine Commandos and the Scots Guards of the combined Royal and Prime Ministerial bodyguard dressed their lines and adopted the familiar implacable ‘they shall not pass’ expressions and postures that had become their hallmark.
The first big four-engine jet emerged from the clouds in the east after having circled twice around Brize Norton to allow other traffic to clear the airspace around the base.
At a distance the aircraft was no more than a black silhouette against a grey, gloomy backdrop in which the horizon merged with the land only a handful of miles away.
The roar of the engines approached; the aircraft sank towards the runway.
When it happened nobody quite believed it at first.
From somewhere beyond the north-western boundary of RAF Brize Norton, arching over the cluster of houses of the village which had pre-existed the airfield for centuries a brilliant blue-white flame trailed across the sky like a shooting star. However, unlike a real shooting star this incendiary object seemed to veer, this way and that, as if searching, searching…
The Royal Marines of Margaret Thatcher’s self-styled AWP — Angry Widow’s Praetorians — reacted first but only by a fraction of a second. Monarch and Prime Minister found themselves swept off the reviewing stand with their feet quite literally not touching the ground and carried by a posse of big men sprinting towards their respective armoured Bentley and Rolls-Royce.
A screamed warning and both gangs of bodyguards veered for the nearer Prime Ministerial Rolls-Royce.
The doors slammed shut.
The Queen and Margaret Thatcher looked at each other from six inches away, both crushed breathless and stunned beneath the bodies of several of their bodyguards.
Then there was a huge explosion.
A dreadful crunching, rending of metal.
And a wall of fire swept over the Rolls-Royce.
The car lurched onto its left hand side and started to roll across the unforgiving, burning tarmac.
Chapter 81
Rosa Calleja was not in any kind of daze; it was a hundred times worse than that. The fragile walls of her new life had just collapsed around her and she just wanted to scream. Except no sound would come from her lips because no words could get past her rage, shame and despair.
Sam was alive!
The man who had betrayed her, his people and everything she and all those she loved held dear was alive!
‘Samuel was captured at the Citadel in Mdina. When he was arrested he was holding a gun to Admiral Christopher’s head and in the company of a senior KGB officer,’ Rachel — the woman Rosa had known as Clara Pullman — had explained very, very gently.
It had not sunk in for a long time.
Rachel had led the younger woman to a corner where they could speak without being overheard or approached unseen.