“Sir Henry,” Margaret Thatcher invited, magisterially as was her wont on these occasions, “would reiterate the agenda for today’s Cabinet please?”
“It will be my pleasure, Prime Minister,” replied the wily grey old fox who oversaw the complex workings of the great machine of state that was the Home Civil Service. Sir Henry Tomlinson looked up from his notebook. “Item one; the combined war situation review compiled by the Chiefs of Staff Committee and the Joint Intelligence Committee to be presented by Admiral Sir David Luce. Item two; the crisis in Northern Ireland. Item three; a Home Office report on the approach to establishing contact with survivors living in the Greater London area and how to plan for the re-opening and reconstruction of key economic and industrial assets within that area. Mr Jenkins will speak to this. Item four; any other business.”
“Thank you, Sir Henry.” The Prime Minister looked to Admiral Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord. “Sir David, you have the floor.”
Fifty-eight year old Admiral John ‘David’ Luce was the man who had, in the last months of the pre-October War World, overtaken his old friend Julian Christopher — to whom he had been junior his entire career — in the race to be pencilled in as the next professional head of the Royal Navy. When the incumbent First Sea Lord had disappeared in the cataclysm, he had stepped directly into his current role approximately six months early. At the same time, Julian Christopher had become the hero of the nation bringing home the Operation Manna convoys; when, but for the war, he would have already been quietly retired from the service.
The First Sea Lord shrugged off his weariness and nodded acknowledgement to his political mistress, the woman whom, without the implicit support of the Chiefs of Staff, could not and indeed, would not have risen to or accepted the burden of the Premiership. Not that there had ever been any real question of Sir David Luce, or the other Chiefs of Staff at the time — Air Marshal Sir Charles Elworthy, or General Sir Richard Hull — interfering in the succession following the assassination of Edward Heath. Her Majesty the Queen had spoken and the Chiefs of Staff of were honourable men to whom the very thought of acting counter to the wishes of their sovereign monarch was anathema.
Sir David Luce took a final glance at his notes.
“The situation of our forces in Malta remains stable,” he began, trying not to sigh with relief. He was a former submariner who had taken part in the abortive bloody fiasco of the Dieppe Raid in 1942, and later worked on the staff that planned and executed the Normandy Landings in June 1944. He had commanded the cruisers HMS Liverpool and HMS Birmingham in the early 1950s, the latter during the Korean conflict. Afterwards, he was Director of the Royal Naval Staff College and Naval Aide de Camp to the Queen. A once lean, now thin, forthright but immensely charming man, his intuitive understanding of the nuances of the political niceties had smoothed his path to high command. Before leaving London to raise his flag in the Pacific, Julian Christopher had wished him well, prophetically forecasting that if the worst comes to the worst ‘you are the best man to handle a crisis at home; I always wanted to go down in history as a fighting admiral’. It had been meant as a private joke and taken as such at the time, lately, the First Sea Lord thought about that conversation most days. David Luce was confident that if he put his mind to it he could charm the back legs off a donkey; but had never doubted that Julian Christopher was the only man for the job in Malta.
“The consensus of opinion is that the suicide ship which caused the loss of HMS Amphion with all hands was probably a Red Dawn vessel which had failed to receive a signal to desist its offensive mission in the confusion following the nuclear strikes on targets in the region the previous week.”
He turned a page.
“We now have a more comprehensive after action report on the nuclear strikes and our own casualties in the theatre since hostilities commenced some weeks ago.”
The tiredness washed over him at moments like this when the true scale of the madness was writ so large.
“Greece,” he prefaced. “The city and port of Thessalonika was destroyed by a large, relatively low altitude airburst on the landward side of the main conurbation. At least three hundred thousand people probably died. Given that the city was under bombardment from land and sea at this time, our presumption is that a large number of the assaulting troops must also have been killed in the strike. We think this is a reasonable assumption because Red Dawn operations in this area ceased after the strike. Elsewhere in Greece it seems as if Athens and the port of Piraeus have fallen to Red Dawn forces. A pall of smoke still hangs over the area. As of this time yesterday, sporadic outbreaks of fighting are ongoing within a twenty mile radius of the city. Our hypothesis is that most of the Greek islands in the Aegean are in Red Dawn hands but that other than Athens and perhaps, a few isolated mainland ports, Red Dawn has no other significant bridgeheads on shore. Notwithstanding, the situation in Greece, as elsewhere in the region is chaotic.”
Another page.
“Adriatic and Balkans,” Sir David Luce said, looking up and making eye contacts around the table. “Aviano Air Base appears to have been targeted by a Hiroshima-sized air burst. In the range of fifteen to twenty kilotons, that is. The attack came some hours after the last American military personnel had departed the area. There had been concerns in Malta that usable, or shall we say, recoverable US military assets might have been left behind at Aviano due to the haste with which the US Air Force evacuated the base. However, since it seems the air bust was only several hundred feet above the western end of the main runway our worries on this score are no longer pertinent.” He paused briefly, book-ending another paragraph of his briefing. “We have very little intelligence on the nuclear strikes in the Belgrade area. It is likely that a weapon in the megaton range went off above the south-eastern suburbs of the city and that several; as many as three, Hiroshima-size airbursts were aimed at airfields and military concentrations in the vicinity of the city. It was first believed that Sarajevo had also been targeted but aerial reconnaissance confirms that the city is undamaged at this time. Our general analysis is that the Red Dawn mechanised columns which entered Yugoslavian territory from both Romanian and Bulgarian territory are still engaging defending forces as many as fifty miles inside Yugoslavian territory. One thing we did not actually believe when we first detected it was,” he shook his head, “the almost total cessation of air operations in support of the — supposedly — Red Dawn ground forces operating in Greece and Yugoslavia. The same thing happened over Cyprus, but I will come to that in a moment.”
The First Sea Lord spoke with a quietly clear voice that carried to all corners of the room; he was a man who had never needed to say a thing twice. People tended to listen to what David Luce said the first time.
“Crete, the Aegean and the general naval situation north of the line Crete — Cyprus, and Cyprus,” he went on. “We believe Crete is in the hands of Red Dawn and has been for several weeks. Aerial reconnaissance indicates very few centres of population have avoided major degradation. Our best guess is that some form of scorched earth policy may have been applied to the island and the greater part, perhaps all, the populations of most of the major towns massacred or driven out.”
Both the female labour MPs sitting as observers gasped.
Enoch Powell’s composure was glacial.
“There is evidence that several — I hasten to add, not all — of the Greek Islands in the Aegean may have suffered the same fate. Cyprus,” the First Sea Lord went on. “The warhead that badly damaged Limassol harbour and sank HMS Blake was another Hiroshima-sized device. HMS Blake currently lies on her port side capsized to a list of about sixty-five degrees in about thirty to forty feet of water, meaning that a substantial part of the vessel is still above water. I can confirm that some three hundred and fifty survivors from her crew are safe at RAF Akrotiri, largely due to the selfless actions of local fishermen and rescue boats sent out from Akrotiri. HMS Blake had thirty-eight nuclear warheads recovered from the former CENTO stockpile at Akrotiri onboard at the time she sank. Observations of the wreck confirm that no attempt has been made by unauthorised third parties to board, or to salvage the warheads or any other part of the wreck.”