“Hear! Hear!” William Whitelaw concurred.
James Callaghan, the big lugubrious man who had somehow contrived to hold the core of the Labour and Co-operative Party together for the last year while being a consistent voice of sanity and moderation in government, pursed his lips and pondered whether to speak.
“What are your thoughts on this subject, Mr Callaghan?” The Queen inquired pleasantly.
The man hesitated.
“Willie,” he prefaced — everybody in the Cabinet called William Whitelaw, the hangdog-faced forty-five year old Member of Parliament for Penrith and Border ‘Willie’ because that was what he preferred, and he was the sort of genuinely personable colleague one really did not like to offend — before continuing, “knows more about this than me but we’re beginning to get fragmentary of information from the few foreign legations still operating in and around the Black Sea area, and via our listening posts…”
“Yes,” the Defence Secretary agreed affably, his brow furrowed with concentration. “Honestly and truly we really don’t know what to make of it, Ma’am,” he explained apologetically.
Margaret Thatcher was in a quandary.
She hated passing on what was at the moment mostly gossip, idle speculation and suppositions of the most unreliable kind to her monarch. She preferred to convey facts, information which she or one of her senior military or political advisors vouched to be true, or if not true, then of a ‘probable’ rather than a ‘possible’ character.
In response to the nuclear attack on Malta she had ordered a national ‘air raid drill’. The United Kingdom was divided into eleven regions, each with a military governor and its own civil defence infrastructure, and she had wanted the comfort of knowing that the if the worst happened again that her people would at least know what to do, and where to go in the event of an attack. Participation in the exercise had not been mandatory but anybody obstructing or publicly attempting to dissuade fellow citizens to take part was technically guilty of a breach of the peace under the War Emergency Regulations. The drill had taken place yesterday between seven and eleven o’clock in the evening and there had been only a few reports of civil disobedience. Regional Governors had been advised not to press charges against people whose conduct inhibited the air raid drill exercise, other than in the most egregious circumstances. For example, in those rare cases where violence had been used or threatened against fellow citizens, the police or members of the armed forces.
The ‘National Air Raid Drill’ had been mounted to follow up her address to the nation on Saturday evening. In that speech she had assured everybody that the apparent targets of the nuclear strikes had been well over a thousand miles away from the United Kingdom and that there was no indication whatsoever that subsequent attacks, either in the Mediterranean or elsewhere were to be expected, or for that matter, remotely likely. She hoped she would not be proved a liar by events but if preventing panic in the streets was the price she had to pay for compromising her scruples, then so be it.
“There are several possibilities, Ma’am,” she decided. Since the October War the Queen’s role as a constitutional head of state had ceased to be purely ceremonial. Yes, she remained the nation’s figurehead but since the outrage at Balmoral she had become much more than that. The monarchy had become the one institution — perhaps, the only one — around which all the major political and military factions within the splintered polity of the United Kingdom could unite. London, the centuries old hub around which the country and the Empire had coalesced, grown and flourished had been laid waste overnight on that last Sunday in October 1962, and with its loss some greater or lesser piece of the heart of every one of them had been ripped out and consumed by the fires of the cataclysm. But the monarchy, incarnated in the unflappable, pragmatic and fearless person of Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, and Defender of the Faith, had survived as the one, immutable talisman of a terribly wounded country. The pre-war days when the monarch was just a ceremonial figurehead were gone. In practical terms this meant that it was understood by all the parties that in the event of a major falling out within the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, the Queen would have, in effect, a final and binding casting vote. “However, I must warn you that these are possibilities, not established scenarios, Ma’am.”
“I fully understand, Prime Minister.” The Queen sipped her tea, placed her cup and saucer in her lap, smiled serenely and waited for Margaret Thatcher to continue.
“The best case scenario is that the enemy — whomsoever he may be — has emptied his locker. Red Dawn may have shot its bolt, as it were.”
“That sounds rather too much like wishful thinking to me,” the Queen pronounced. She might have been reading her Prime Minister’s mind.
“That is my view, also, Ma’am. Given that neither our own intelligence services nor the Central Intelligence Agency had any inkling that Red Dawn possessed viable…”
“Viable?”
Willie Whitelaw cleared his throat to intervene.
“Forgive the jargon, Ma’am. Viable in the sense that a nuclear weapon is, in the lingo of these things, fully generated and capable of deployment in the field. There is a huge difference between the possession of warheads and actually being able to shoot or drop the filthy things on anybody.”
“Thank you, Mr Whitelaw.” The Queen looked back to Margaret Thatcher. She knew why so many people called her the ‘Angry Widow’; and she thought it was dreadfully unfair. Of course, that was not to say that her Prime Minister had not proven herself unexpectedly adroit at turning all the nonsense about emulating a latter-day Boadicea and in the exploitation of her natural feminine good looks to the maximum effect. There was ice in the Queen’s soul every time she thought about what would have happened if that madman in Cheltenham had succeeded in assassinating Margaret Thatcher a few weeks ago. What would have become of them all? The woman was a force of nature, a phenomenon even if she did not yet know it herself.
A grateful nation had given John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough Blenheim Palace for winning the War of the Spanish Succession. The great and enduring mansion designed by John Vanbrugh and built in the relatively rare English Baroque style between 1705 and 1722 was gifted to the scion of the Churchill family for having saved the bacon of the ruling dynasty in what was probably the first ‘World War’ of the modern era. What, the Queen asked herself, would the Angry Widow’s grateful people grant her if against all the odds, she successfully led them through their present travails to the Promised Land beyond?
The Queen silently chastised herself for letting her thoughts drift.
“Quite,” Margaret Thatcher sighed, re-gathering her thoughts. “Given that we had no idea Red Dawn had access to viable nuclear weapons in the first place we can hardly make a realistic calculation as to how many more they might have up their sleeve. Logically, the fact that they had some weapons probably means that they may have others.”
“The real imponderable, Ma’am,” William Whitelaw offered, explaining their mutual frustration and the underlying root, frankly, of all their fears arising out of the turn of events in the Mediterranean in the last fortnight, “is that we have no meaningful feel for what we are actually up against in the Eastern Mediterranean and in the Balkans. Krasnaya Zarya as a stay behind terroristic entity made a kind of twisted sense but what we have actually been fighting in the Eastern Med is a twentieth century — albeit an early to middle twentieth century — military machine capable of moving significant assets from place to place without us being any the wiser. In retrospect, the enemy’s seizure of the island of Crete some months ago now seems to have been a pre-cursor operation aimed at isolating Cyprus. On the ground the first wave of Red Dawn, or whatever it is,” the Defence Secretary threw up his hands in mild exasperation, “comes upon its enemies like something reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s defence of Moscow in 1941, or the Battle of Stalingrad. Hordes of mostly unarmed or poorly armed attackers rush defences with the living picking up the weapons dropped by the dead. We have reports of assault forces driving women, children and old men before them. But, and this is the thing I believe we need to concentrate upon, in several cases the initial ‘shock tactic’ assault has been followed up by what appeared to be highly disciplined, organised, regular forces. Likewise, while the ships we have encountered in the Eastern Med are flying great big blood red flags, they appear to be exercising and operating in generally good order in a fashion that would be familiar to any man who served in the Royal Navy in Hitler’s war. Add to this the reports that our aircraft have encountered enemy jet interceptors over the Aegean, the Sea of Crete and approaching Cyprus apparently operating under the aegis of an integrated air defence system of some kind; and what we are up against ceases to look like a mere terroristic entity, but begins to assume the appearance and more than a little of the substance of a partially reconstituted Soviet military machine.”