She stared at Edward Heath. The last thirteen months had rushed by at a nightmare rush; every day she’d learned a hundred new lessons, discovered questions she’d never have asked in her old, suburban, insular political life. She had entered politics to change things, to get things done without ever really understanding either objective. It was as if her new life, her second life, had only begun on that dreadful morning after the last fireball had mushroomed over London. She had become a person she probably wouldn’t have recognised had she met new self in the old World. Yes, she’d retained many of her hard edges — that was a flaw she’d constantly fought to rectify with little success — but she’d mellowed in other ways, recognised the complexities of the real World in the same way she’d come to grips with the intricacies of industrial chemistry and the convoluted majesty of the law. The grocer’s daughter from Grantham in Lincolnshire would — had she noticed it at all — scoffed at the poignancy of Edward Heath’s quietly spoken statement of faith in a better future. However, the grocer’s daughter had become the Angry Widow in the last year; and now she’d accidentally glimpsed a vision to sustain her in the years to come.
The Prime Minister met her gaze briefly. She nodded, tight-lipped and they knew they’d understood each other perfectly in that moment even if in the future they might never again.
There was a knock at the door.
A youthful naval officer entered and handed the Prime Minister a folded note, before departing without uttering a word.
Edward Heath read for a moment.
“Portuguese warships and an ocean-going tug have rendezvoused with HMS Plymouth and HMS Talavera. The port authorities in Oporto have put all dockyard facilities at our disposal and have alerted every hospital in northern Portugal to be ready to receive casualties…”
The Prime Minister looked up.
“It seems that in the person of António de Oliveira Salazar,” he sighed, “the last of the old dictators, we have finally found a friend in Europe who is prepared to do more than talk about ‘friendship’.” The regimes in Scandinavia had mooted discussions about some kind of loose ‘mutual co-operation’ pact but this had come to nothing. The administrations running several of the Swiss cantons had radioed and sent emissaries across the dead zones of Germany offering ‘mutual defence pacts’ in exchange for food and weapons. All those contacts had hung in the air, and one by one, withered on the vine for want of succour. The UKIEA had too many problems of its own to be distracted with diplomacy. In retrospect that had been a mistake; one of many mistakes.
“Salazar isn’t Franco,” Margaret Thatcher announced.
“Next best thing!” James Callaghan muttered.
Edward Heath looked up.
“Franco murders and imprisons his enemies; António de Oliveira Salazar ostracises and ridicules them. Much as we’ve been obliged to do, Jim.”
The leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party raised his hands, not in surrender, rather to signify he hadn’t the energy to debate the point further. A friend in need was a friend indeed, they’d worry about their moral qualms another day.
Chapter 14
“The Brits have gun camera footage of the shooting down of all four 100th Bomb Group B-52s,” John McCone, the Director of the CIA reported tersely. Notwithstanding that each of the participants in the briefing had grabbed a few hours — albeit disturbed, restless — sleep the previous night, there was greyness in every man’s face that acknowledged the crisis was deepening with each passing minute. “They’ve also commenced a forensic examination of the crash site on Gozo. Thus far, they’ve recovered the bodies of four missing crew members from the sea. Third party agencies report that they have six, seven or eight B-52 crew men in custody on Malta. They’ve also got their hands on three Italians who ejected during the raid.”
John Fitzgerald Kennedy drained his coffee mug. No sooner had he placed it on the table, leaving a dark ring on the top copy of the heap of glossy monochrome U2 surveillance pictures strewn across the table, than an aide stepped forward and refilled it. The thirty-fifth President of the United States of America asked himself why he felt so calm when clearly most of his closest associates were on the verge of shitting their pants?
“You said the Brits intercepted our spy plane?” He asked calmly, not betraying how stunned he was to learn that one of his Cabinet members had been dumb enough to risk another flash point provocation in the current climate of panic.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle ‘Bus’ Wheeler gave his colleagues in the room the opportunity to answer before reluctantly, assuming responsibility.
“An RAF unarmed high-altitude Canberra reconnaissance aircraft attempted to climb to within visual identification range of our U2 sortie over the Maltese Archipelago and tracked it back to the general vicinity of its base in northern Italy, Mr President. Over Genoa Regia Aeronautica interceptors attempted to engage the Canberra but it was flying too high. Permission was sought to vector two F-104 Starfighters onto the bogey but the C-in-C US Forces in Italy ordered the ready fighters to land.” The General had brought copious notes, which he now referred to before continuing. “The Hermes Battle Group CAP successfully engaged the second U2 sortie over elements of the British force blockading the Straits of Gibraltar. Two of Hermes’s Sea Vixens, climbing several thousand feet above their known service ceiling launched four air-to-air missiles — Sidewinders we must have supplied before the war — at our aircraft which we believe to have been operating at an altitude of between fifty-four and fifty-seven thousand feet, rather than the sixty thousand plus feet specified in the mission brief…”
“The British shot down one of our most technologically advanced spy planes because it wasn’t flying at the correct mission height?” The President asked coolly.
“One theory is that the aircraft might have been experiencing technical difficulties, sir. Normally, if this was the case the mission would have been aborted. However, it was believed that the British had expended the last of their Sidewinders in the previous day’s action against the Spanish Air Force, sir,” General Wheeler continued stiffly. “This was an assumption consistent with the Hermes Battle Group standing over a hundred miles out to sea…”
Jack Kennedy had seen enough the workings of the ‘military mind’ in the 1945 war in the Pacific to know that the guiding principle in all military hierarchies was that practically every senior officer he’d ever met had been promoted several ranks beyond his competence. General Curtis LeMay was a classic example; a brilliant, press on bomber commander with a drive for organisation who was an accident waiting to happen at any rank above full Colonel. Right now in the middle of the biggest international crisis since the October War ‘the General’ was conducting an unplanned tour of inspection of Strategic Air Command bases in the mid-west; and he wasn’t taking calls!
Not even his Commander-in-Chief’s calls!
“I thought the Central Intelligence Agency owned the U2 fleet?” The President asked John McCone.
“Several aircraft are nominally on call for Department of Defence missions,” the wealthy Republican industrialist who’d been brought in to curb the excesses of the CIA replied, his tone carefully neutral.