“I didn’t know. I’m sorry, that’s so sad…”
They fell into quietness for the rest of the ten minute journey.
The soldier helped her down from the cab, didn’t linger.
Marija watched the Land Rover drive off down Tower Street towards the waterfront. She’d expected the normally crystal clear blue waters of Sliema Creek to be fouled with HMS Agincourt’s leaking bunker oil and was surprised to find the December sun glinting off an oddly idyllic calm sea. Across the anchorage Fort Phoenicia looked strangely normal until a more careful inspection found no silhouettes of buildings protruding above the indestructible bastion walls. The spire of the church was gone, as were the angled limestone roofs of the barrack and office blocks.
The door opened and her younger brother, Joe grinned at her.
They hugged each other, stood back.
“Ouch! You look sore,” her twenty-three year sibling decided, frowning with concern.
“I’m all right. I’m just a little tired. Margo sent me home to rest. Well, it was an order, really. She’s got quite bossy the last day or so, I suppose it must be because we’re surrounded by all those military people at the Pembroke Barracks.”
He younger brother was grinning, relieved and reassured by his sister’s chattiness.
“Apparently,” Marija explained, “because Admiral Christopher had Margo’s old Navy rank included on the written authorisation set up the hospital at the barracks she outranks practically everybody. All the soldiers tiptoe around her, it is funny really.”
Belatedly, Marija saw her brother’s knapsack just inside the door of the family’s apartment.
He glanced back down at his feet.
“They’ve taken me back on at the dockyard,” he confided, smugly.
“Does Margo know?”
“Margo knows everything!” Joe Calleja reached into the house and hefted the rucksack. He sobered a little. “There were a lot of guys killed and injured in the docks. I think everything has changed. I wish I was sure it was for the better.”
Marija’s shoulders sagged.
“Peter’s ship was attacked,” she sniffed, on the verge of a flood of tears. With Joe she didn’t need to be brave, level-headed, or reasonable unless there were witnesses and notwithstanding they were standing in a busy street with people walking by all the time, they were as good as alone. “The same night we were bombed. Nobody knows if he is alive or dead…”
Her brother embraced her very, very gently as she began to sob.
Chapter 27
“My word,” Sir Richard White, Head of the Secret Intelligence Service remarked dryly, “you’ve been a busy little bee, Tom,” he added, shaking the shorter man’s hand.
“It is a funny old World,” the Foreign Secretary agreed, waving his premier spymaster to a chair by the guttering fire which had taken the edge off the chill in the air. “I always thought ‘Red Dawn’ was one of those intelligence myths, you know, like the existence of a hypothetical Fellow of Trinity College who isn’t a KGB plant?”
The spymaster blanched at this.
“Red Dawn is a damnably better subtext for what’s been going on lately than anything anybody else has come up with, Tom.”
The two men had been friends since they had worked together in MI5 in the Second World War. Like other wartime intelligence officers their Who’s Who entries explained away their war service as ‘attached to the War Office for the duration’ or some such similarly anodyne form of words. Tom Harding-Grayson had not been alone in thinking transferring Dick White from MI5 — where he’d been respected and successful — to Head MI6, where he’d been neither, in the years before the October War, had been a blunder.
“Did you hear Kennedy’s speech last night?”
“No,” the spymaster apologised.
“He played the conspiracy card and virtually accused the US Air Force of going ‘rogue’ on him.”
“Ah, that’s not good.”
“The Yanks will parley with us but only if we hand back their POWs first.”
“I didn’t realise we were at war?” Dick White queried urbanely. “Did I miss something?”
Tom Harding-Grayson guffawed.
“The reason we’ve not attempted to deal directly with the White House is that they’ve shown very little inclination to take our calls lately, and frankly, it is the considered judgement of the UKIEA that we haven’t a clue what they actually want. You can’t negotiate with somebody who doesn’t understand their own vital strategic interests. To do so would be a recipe for disaster.”
Dick White absorbed this unhurriedly.
“My source for Red Dawn is Arkady Pavlovich Rykov,” he said in little more than a whisper.
His old friend blinked at him.
“Wasn’t there a young fellow called Rykov who was Stalin’s interpreter at Yalta and Potsdam?”
“Yes. The same man. Later he was Nikita Sergeyevich’s protégé.”
Tom Harding-Grayson’s eyes narrowed.
“He was Khrushchev’s man, too?”
“Yes. A colonel in the KGB.”
The new Foreign Secretary gave his principle spymaster a thoughtful look as if he half-suspected he was the potential victim of a particularly fiendish practical joke.
“And how long has Arkady Pavlovich been in your pocket?”
“Since the end of 1956. The way the Hungarian Rising was put down was the last straw. For the record; Rykov’s not the sort of man who is ever in anybody’s pocket, Tom,” Dick White avowed dryly. “Red Dawn was a thing of the Stalin era which, shall we say, got so out of hand that by the late fifties Khrushchev was afraid it would destabilise the entire Soviet system. I don’t know if Operation Anadyr, the attempt to base ICBMs on Cuba was a thing sponsored by members of the Red Dawn movement inside the Soviet hierarchy, of just a bad call by the Politburo, or even by Nikita Sergeyevich himself. I don’t know if Red Dawn poisoned the atmosphere in Moscow so badly that the Soviets backed themselves into a corner they couldn’t get out of over Cuba. What I do know, or more correctly, strongly believe, is that the Red Dawn movement is real and that the Soviet leadership was worried enough about it in the late fifties to attempt to systematically purge it, and when that failed to ask a man like Arkady Pavlovich Rykov to penetrate its higher echelons.”
The Foreign Secretary looked at the calm, unflappable man dressed immaculately, impeccably despite having stepped off an RAF Comet twenty minutes before knocking on his door.
“So you’re basing your Red Dawn theory on the word of a single Soviet spy who may, or may not be telling the truth?”
The spymaster said nothing.
Tom Harding-Grayson continued to analyse the problem. He and his old friend had not always seen things eye to eye, especially when it came to the Americans, and although they’d agreed to disagree more often than not, their minds didn’t operate along parallel lines. What made perfect sense to the Head of MI6 did not necessarily fit into the bigger picture Tom Harding-Grayson tried to keep in his head at all times. Spies were wont to see plots and conspiracies in the most innocent of errors, miscalculations or misplaced ambitions. That was what they were paid to do and their lives, occasionally, depended on that corrupted view of everybody else’s reality.