“Significant damage was, however,” Julian Christopher dictated, his voice becoming colder, his spirit railing against the temperance he knew that he must exhibit at this time when all he really wanted to do was send Air Commodore French’s V-Bombers to wreak revenge on the fascist maniacs who now ruled most of the Italian mainland. “Sustained to many key installations. An unknown number of key personnel will have been killed and seriously injured in these attacks. At this time the only major viable land-based command and control facilities which remain intact are those at RAF Luqa, and the Emergency Command Centre at Rabat-Mdina which was last activated some ten years ago and has not been modernised since 1954. This said we will make the best of things. At this time I recommend against the urgent despatch of additional UK-based personnel and resources to this theatre of operations.”
Christopher stepped across to the window.
He noted the two women walking across the parade ground in his direction. A smile creased his pale lips for a moment as he recognised the one, and guessed the identity of the other, much younger woman.
“You will be in receipt of the RAF’s preliminary after action report by air courier later this evening. Please be aware that this report will confirm all — repeat all — prior indications of direct American involvement in yesterday’s attack on Sovereign British Territory. Included in the AAR will be incontrovertible evidence to this effect; namely, gun camera footage from three of the RAF Hunter fighters which engaged and shot down all four of the heavy bombers participating in the high-level element of the attack. I can further report that preliminary investigation of the crash site on the island of Gozo of one of the aircraft shot down is consistent with the gun camera evidence.”
The new Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations hesitated, before adding one last clause to the — of necessity — somewhat terse and inevitably cryptic communication he was sending back to England.
“This morning at zero — three hundred hours local I issued the following directive to all units under my command: Malta attacked by American and Italian aircraft. Within the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations all American and American-allied forces are to be treated as hostile and may be fired upon without warning.”
Chapter 3
Jack Kennedy walked stiffly into the room that had once seemed to him to be the nexus of his new Camelot. He and his knights — the best and the brightest America had to offer — were going to change the World.
Well, they’d sure done that, hadn’t they?
The thirty-fifth President of the United States hoped his hands weren’t shaking so visibly that everybody in the room would notice. Apart from his brother, none of the men who’d risen to their feet from the semi-circle of comfortable chairs and sofas arranged around the great woven representation of an American Eagle, had known — although they might have suspected — that their leader had been virtually incapacitated ever since his return to DC after delivering the ‘Moon Speech’ in Texas a fortnight ago. They’d all tacitly assumed somebody was at the wheel of the ship of state; that somebody had noticed the big iceberg on the horizon as it got bigger and bigger as the vessel went faster and faster. If Dean Rusk, or Bob McNamara, or John McCone had noticed the boat was rudderless; none of them had made a grab for the wheel and now, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was afraid it might be too late. The Administration had ceased to be ‘a team’ as long ago as the spring. He was the one who was responsible for the untold millions of dead, for the obscene blunder — if that was what it was; only history would tell — of fighting a nuclear war. He was the man at the top, technically the buck stopped with him. Of course, nothing was that simple and every man in the room felt ‘responsible’ in his own way. Or rather, as Lyndon Baines Johnson put it, ‘is working overtime trying to figure out why the other guys at the table didn’t say something sooner’. Whatever, the senior members of the Administration hadn’t been singing from the same hymn book for a long time and now it looked like the American people were going to have to pay the price.
The Vice-President wasn’t in Washington and that was a problem. Jack Kennedy and LBJ might be different kinds of men — they were certainly different kinds of politicians — who’d never be friends, let alone trust each other unless the chips were down and they had no other choice, but right now the youngest man to ever be elected to the Presidency — Theodore Roosevelt had been nine months younger when he assumed the role following William McKinley’s assassination in 1901 — badly needed the guile and the feral cunning of the man he’d beaten to the Democratic Presidential ticket in 1960.
Jack Kennedy settled cautiously into the firmly upholstered, high backed chair at the apex of the semi-circle of armchairs and sofas and waved for everybody to sit down.
“We will consider the question of why we don’t know what’s going on another time,” he declared in a flat, unmelodic monotone that conveyed to the men who’d been awaiting his arrival some small measure of the violently seething displeasure he felt for them all. Even Bobby. While he’d been in his sick bed they’d watched the shit hitting the fan and they’d done precisely nothing about it. Except, he suspected, bust their collective guts keeping LBJ out of the picture. He scowled at Dean Rusk.
His Secretary of State pursed his lips but for the moment, did not speak.
The President’s eye fell across other faces before settling on the taciturn, greying features of the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“What does the CIA have for me, John?” The younger man asked in a tone which suggested that what he was actually asking was: What has the CIA been keeping from me?
John McCone didn’t care for the younger man’s implied criticism. The former industrialist who had, notwithstanding the niggling post-war accusations of war profiteering back in the 1940s been one of the men responsible for providing the steel and guns with which the United States had won the Second World War, regarded himself as a deeply patriotic man who’d unselfishly devoted his life to public service. The President could hardly — frankly, he didn’t want to — imagine the problems he was having rooting out Allen Dulles’s hard cases at Langley. His predecessor had run the agency like a state within a state, a law unto itself. Much in the same way Edgar Hoover still ran the FBI.
John McCone cleared his throat.