Julian Christopher paused to look around the courtyard his staff had requisitioned as a car park.
“Young Hannay was going to look into the history of this place,” he remarked, waving up at the first and second floor balustraded balconies and the high arched neo-classical windows of the old abandoned hospital.
“I can help you there,” Dan French guffawed. “Its location just inside the Citadel gates gives the game away.”
“Oh,” the men had urgent business but they were old hands who knew that it was best not to rush towards the sound of the guns without first catching one’s breath. “How so?”
“The original building on this spot was a ‘Universita’, or ‘Government House’. It was ideally located to regulate traffic in and out of the main gate and presumably, if need be to tax whatever was coming in or going out of the Citadel. When the gate was rebuilt in the early eighteenth century the then Grand Master, Manuel de Vilhena — a Portuguese gentleman, I believe — forked out from his own pocket to create the palace we see around us now. Until the mid-fifties we were using it as a hospital. The Connaught Hospital, so named because His Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught stumped up the readies to fund the conversion work. Before the October War there was talk of turning it into a museum of some kind.”
Julian Christopher grinned broadly.
“My word,” he sighed, “I never knew you were such a font of local knowledge, Dan!”
“Well, I’d hate to think I was working for a fellow who knew all my secrets!”
The two men laughed. Out of earshot of their subordinates they were comfortable in their unforced informality. They fell into step for the short walk across the Citadel to the Headquarters of Mediterranean Command beneath the western ramparts.
“This is a Hell of a thing,” the airman, the younger man by a decade or so observed. The eventual safe arrival of the USS Enterprise in the Grand Harbour, and that morning of several of her conventionally powered escorts — left behind fuelling and provisioning at Gibraltar while the two American ‘nuclear’ warships, the carrier and her escorting cruiser, the USS Long Beach forged on ahead — and the unanticipated stalling of all enemy offensive action in Cyprus and the Balkans following Friday’s nuclear strikes, had given Mediterranean Command a short opportunity to draw breath. However, the attack on HMS Amphion and the temporary breaching of the 2nd Submarine Squadron’s picket line chillingly echoed what had happened to HMS Blake in Limassol Harbour. Neither man, nor any of their closest advisors knew what to make of the incident one hundred and fifty miles west of Malta. But for the fortuitous presence of HMS Dreadnought in the vicinity of the missing Amphion, the one Royal Naval vessel in the Mediterranean capable of guarding, almost single-handed, the eastern approaches to the Maltese Archipelago, both men would have been significantly less sanguine.
“It is a little bizarre,” his C-in-C agreed. “Our best intelligence is that all Red Dawn major surface units have withdrawn into the Sea of Crete or are heading back to their bases in the northern Aegean. Why the blazes would the blighters blow a hole in the Amphions’ picket when they’ve got nothing within several hundred miles to put through it?”
“Do you think our friend Arkady Pavlovich will shed any light on it?”
Julian Christopher shrugged. Dan French was wise to mistrust Arkady Pavlovich Rykov, the mysterious, dangerous former KGB Colonel who had, supposedly, been working as a double agent for MI6 in the years before the October War. Rykov claimed he had betrayed his country and his mentor, Nikita Khrushchev, after the brutal crushing of the Hungarian uprising of late 1956 when he was ordered to infiltrate the higher echelons of the Krasnaya Zarya movement. For the man who had once been Josef Stalin’s translator at the Yalta Summit, and later groomed by Lavrentiy Beria, it had been, apparently, too much. Notwithstanding Julian Christopher’s and Dan French’s scepticism, Rykov had convinced the Secret Intelligence Service that he had belatedly discovered his conscience; and two months ago no lesser luminary than the Head of MI6, his long-time controller, had brought him in from the cold.
“I honestly don’t know, Dan,” the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean admitted candidly.
The two men were getting used to operating in a twilight haze of uncertainty. There were too many conflicting snippets of inconclusive intelligence coming across their desks; and none of their senior analysts could agree on what was actually going on. In Cyprus the Red Dawn horde had melted away from the pre-prepared defensive lines of the massively outnumbered British garrison. With the cessation of Red Dawn aerial activity over the island RAF Akrotiri had been re-opened to desperately needed re-supply and evacuation flights, and several isolated enclaves in the Troidos Mountains had re-established corridors of communication with both Akrotiri and Limassol. Julian Christopher had hoped the arrival of the first US Navy nuclear submarine in the Eastern Mediterranean, the USS Swordfish, would temporarily interdict Red Dawn’s ability to reinforce its invasion horde on Cyprus; he had not expected Red Dawn’s hitherto berserk, utterly insane onslaught to simply cease before the American SSN had fired a torpedo in anger.
The Red Tide horde’s advance had halted everywhere and now there were fragmentary reports about outbreaks of fighting in Romania and on the border between Turkish Asia Minor and the Trans-Caucasus.
None of this made any sense.
“HMS Dreadnought will secure the 2nd Submarine Squadron picket line pro tem,” Julian Christopher went on. “She’s badly in need of dockyard time but she’s still in good enough order to be the surviving Amphions’ gatekeeper and protector if the worst comes to the worst.”
“Do you think there may be more enemy subs out there with nuclear-tipped torpedoes?”
“We shall see. Personally, I don’t think a former Soviet conventional boat would have much chance of getting past the old Amphions, let alone Dreadnought. I’ve asked Rear-Admiral Detweiller to hold the USS Seawolf and the USS Skipjack fifty miles west and south of Malta until the situation is a little clearer. He’s not comfortable leaving the Swordfish ‘out on a limb’ at Cyprus but he agrees that securing our base of operations here is the key to the whole ‘ball game’.”
“Detweiller’s a good egg, they say?”
Rear Admiral Laverne Lucas Detweiller, Commander of the Enterprise Task Force, was a third generation American son of Saxon immigrants who had settled in Jones’s County, Iowa in the 1880s, originally small time dirt farmers who now farmed tens of square miles of the rolling plains of the great American ‘corn belt’. A towering, blond giant of a man with a handshake that would make a Grizzly bear wince — and subsequently count his clawed fingers — he made no bones about what he intended to do to the ‘sneaky, cowardly bastards who murdered all those fine young men on the Long Beach, the Enterprise and your ships last Friday’. Rear-Admiral Detweiller had explained that his friends called him ‘Lucas’ or just plain ‘Det’; he was an intrinsically gentle giant who had taken the attack on his flagship as a personal affront, and dealt with everybody he met, be they humble cooks in his flagship’s galley, or the C-in-C of all British and Commonwealth Forces, with robust cheerful amiability. However, if he ever got his hands on the man behind Friday’s nuclear strike he meant to ‘rip off his godammed fucking head!’
This, in the circumstances, was fair enough.
Arkady Pavlovich Rykov was waiting for Julian Christopher and Dan French when they arrived at Headquarters. The three men hurried upstairs to the C-in-C’s room.