I am hectoring the man!
Stop it!
She shut her eyes for a moment.
“Today, my primary purpose is simply to meet with you to learn what I can about your people and to ascertain what assistance we may be able to offer you in the immediate future. Honestly and truly, if it was the Government’s policy to brazenly reassert its control over the bombed areas of the England we would have just sent in Sir Richard’s boys and had done with it!”
That had broken the ice and a slow, tentative thaw had ensued.
They had sat down and the Prime Minister had listened intently to everything King Harold and his ‘Queen’, Miriam, had had to say. It had been a chastening experience for all concerned.
Margaret Thatcher had much to think about on the journey back to Oxford.
There was no single homogeneous ‘community’ in the capital. There were numerous ‘gangs’, mostly small and territorial, some more aggressive and xenophobic than others. ‘King Harold’s’ domain stretched from the old north-west suburbs deep into the heart of the city in the area around Westminster. The King had talked fancifully of creating an anarcho-syndicalist commune, a socialist collective; but what he had actually described was a loosely co-operative number of groups of survivors who traded across poorly defined boundaries and occasionally sent representatives to his ‘court’, which for the last couple of months had been at Eton. Life in the ruins of the city in the winter was harsh and his ‘tribe’ was not exclusively made up of the youngest and the fittest of the survivor ‘polity’.
Harold Strettle had been a Trades Union organiser working for the London Underground. On the night of the war he had been in a deep tube recovering a broken down train with a gang of seven other men. Several days later they had emerged into a nightmare changed World.
‘Nobody ever got around to burying the dead,’ he had told the Prime Minister. Of the capital’s pre-war population of several millions he guessed that somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand might still live in the city. The population shifted from place to place, constantly drifting into and out of the undamaged lands beyond the wrecked inner suburbs,
“I apologise if today’s exercise was less than productive,” the Home Secretary said, interrupting Margaret Thatcher’s rumination. “But I think it was important for the Government to be seen to be talking to what, intelligence sources inform me, is the largest, most coherent and least violent of the survivor groupings. In the longer term I think today’s encounter will bear fruit, Prime Minister. Mr Strettle’s group is the only one that talks to most of the other ‘gangs’, who in turn tolerate it because it freely trades food and other supplies with them across its borders. Hopefully, the word will now spread that Her Majesty’s Government is not insensitive to their situation and is not planning an imminent military takeover of their domains.”
“It might yet come to that, Mr Jenkins.” Margaret Thatcher reminded him. The troubles in Northern Ireland, the bottomless pit of the campaign in the Mediterranean and the need to maintain troops on home soil to secure ports and power stations against the still very real terroristic, fifth column threat posed by Red Dawn and other dissident and criminal elements, meant there was no real scope for diverting scarce military assets to repossess the ruined capital; even had that been a thing that needed to be done now, which it was not. If the nation’s fate had hung on re-opening the docks and ‘mining’ the vaults and cellars of London she would have ordered the Army in without a qualm and it did no harm to remind her Home Secretary of the fact.
“The use of force against one’s own people for political and economic ends, no matter how vital to the pursuance of the greater good of the general population,” Roy Jenkins counselled firmly, “is to start down a very slippery slope, Prime Minister.”
“I know,” she conceded sadly. “I know.”
Chapter 38
With six of her eight Babcock and Wilcox M-Type boilers lit the battleship’s four General Electric cross-compound steam turbines drove the leviathan through the night at over twenty-eight knots. Beneath an overcast sky the USS Iowa’s escorting destroyers were invisible to the naked eye, and ten miles ahead, only the all-seeing green eyes of the AN/SPS-10 surface and AN/SPS-6 air-search radars saw the USS Independence and her escorts. The big carrier had slipped her moorings in Algeciras Bay and sailed out into the North Atlantic the previous day to rendezvous with the battleship beyond sight from land. Reversing course around dusk and working up to the Iowa’s best speed, Task Force 21.1 was ‘shooting’ the eight mile wide channel between Spain and the Algerian coast.
Nobody onboard any of the ships actually believed their entry into the Western Mediterranean would go unnoticed or unremarked; the exercise was primarily designed to sharpen up and concentrate minds on the job in hand. This was no peacetime exercise, sometime in the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours British troops would be going ashore on Cyprus over two thousand miles to the east supported by US Navy SSNs — nuclear-powered hunter killer submarines — and half-a-dozen major USN surface units. The British were desperately short of carrier-born air cover; the fleet carrier Eagle and the smaller Hermes carried only sixty aircraft between them, against the eighty — including twenty-four McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantoms — of the Independence. Every man of Task Force 21.1 understood that they were coming late to the party.
Captain Anderson Farragut Schmidt felt that shared angst as much as anybody; however, his angst was balanced by a sense of immense achievement. To have succeeded in reactivating, shaking down and just getting to the Mediterranean in less than two months had been an achievement of truly Herculean proportions. The assignation of the Presidential ‘Absolute Priority’ seal to the project had done no harm, nor had the Chief of Naval Operation’s masterstroke of calling up every old battleship man on the reserve list; even so, getting the ‘The Big Stick’ — Iowa’s nickname from the days of the Korean War — operational in such a short time very nearly beggared belief. And yet here she was, steering towards the sound of the guns.
From the darkened bridge wing Schmidt watched the lights of Gibraltar receding astern as he smoked his cigarette, a Lucky Stripe. He had given up the filthy habit when he retired from the Navy. A lesser man would have been driven to drink by the stresses and strains of recent weeks, and it was not as if he was getting any younger. In a few days he would be sixty-two.
Eleven hundred miles to Malta, almost as far again to Cyprus and no telling if those sneaky Red Dawn bastards would attempt to nuke the Independence the way they had nuked the Enterprise, the Long Beach and that British carrier, HMS Victorious.