The President read between the lines, knew that the worst news was yet to come.
“Following the attack on Balmoral Castle and developments at Gibraltar the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration,” Dean Rusk interjected with an uncharacteristic tetchiness, “sent a diplomatic note informing us that it was breaking off all military and diplomatic links with us. The note also gives warning of a maritime and air exclusion zone around the United Kingdom. As of midnight last night our Ambassador and all his accredited staff in England were declared persona non grata, Mr President.”
Jack Kennedy wondered if this was all just a bad dream. Some kind of drug-fuelled hallucination brought on by the cocktail of painkillers, barbiturates and amphetamines his doctors had injected into him to get him back on his feet. He was tempted to pinch himself, or to ask somebody to slap him. Just to be sure.
Bob McNamara had been writing notes in a hard-backed notebook.
He shut the book.
Jack Kennedy’s Secretary of Defence had wearied of the charade. It was clear that none of his colleagues had a grip on the situation; and that they were each as stunned as each other. It was also blindingly obvious that relatively senior members of the nation’s intelligence and military communities were conspiring to plunge the country into a new war. Moreover, it was likely that whatever anybody in the Oval Office did now it would probably be too late to turn back the tide towards another disastrous conflict.
“I am concerned that you haven’t been briefed on the current situation, sir,” he announced, his quiet, coolly precise voice breaking through the atmosphere of near panic in the Oval Office. The country had been drifting towards this or a similar crisis since the spring. In the immediate aftermath of the war massive Federal resources had been thrown, unavailingly, at the bomb-damaged cites of the Pacific North-West and the Great Lakes, in New York State, Boston and Houston. In the beginning the shock of the war had been a great force for national unity. It hadn’t lasted. When it became apparent that rebuilding would a long and impossibly expensive business, other priorities and vested interests had come to the fore; pork-barrel politics had resumed — with a cut-throat vengeance — by the early summer and the lawlessness in and around the blasted cities had spread like some terrible, creeping blight upon the land. While in Washington bitter battles raged over which constituencies got the largest slice of the multi-billion dollar Federal Treasury-busting — Reconstruction and Renewal Program — grants, the warring Democrats and Republicans had filibustered the legislative processes of both the Congress and the Senate to a standstill, frustrating the Administration’s ability to offer vital succour not only to millions of its own people, but to hard-pressed former overseas allies like the British. The massive ‘peace dividend’ he’d delivered — or rather, was in the process of delivering — by savagely slashing the size of the armed forces had been seized upon by other Government Departments like ravening wolves upon a dying buffalo. He personally doubted that a single dollar of the massive savings freed up by his bitter infighting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff had gone to the parts of the country that needed it most. Millions of Americans and former allies alike were starving while the Administration was propping up citrus fruit growers in California, ranchers and oil men in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, and was proposing to throw untold treasure at the Space Program! Farmers in the mid-west were being subsidised to grow bumper grain crops which the idiots in Congress wouldn’t allow to be exported ‘in case of future national need’; the Government was buying thousands of tons of grain it didn’t need at inflated prices and letting it rot in silos when the survivors of the war were hungry! And now the jackasses around the Commander-in-Chief were trying to ‘protect him’ from the truth! The country would soon be bankrupt at this rate; the Administration was already morally bankrupt. It was a national disgrace and he was seriously asking himself how much longer he could, in conscience, remain a party to it. He took off his glasses, cleaned them with a pale yellow cloth. “No, that’s not true,” he corrected himself, “I am appalled that you have not been briefed on the current situation.”
Jack Kennedy thought he detected contempt behind his Secretary of Defence’s myopic eyes.
“Will somebody please tell me what is going on?” He demanded, his temper fraying.
Dean Rusk coughed.
“Yesterday evening, some hours before the British diplomatic note was received and digested by State, two Royal Navy warships were attacked off the Spanish Coast west of Ferrol. One is believed to have sunk, the fate of the other is uncertain. Shortly after the attack one of the ships, HMS Talavera, began broadcasting in the ‘clear’ that the attack had been carried out by four A-4 Skyhawks taking advantage of a decoy demonstration by Spanish aircraft which had enabled them to approach within less than a minute’s flying time of their targets without being detected.”
Jack Kennedy knew this had to be a nightmare.
His habitual poise cracked, his jaw literally dropped.
No, no, no…
“At approximately the same time at least a dozen US-supplied aircraft bearing the markings of the Italian Regia Aeronautica mounted a surprise attack on British shipping and other military targets on Malta.” Bob McNamara turned stone-faced to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “You can tell the President the rest, Earle.”
General Wheeler swallowed hard.
“We have no confirmation for this, sir,” he warned, unhappily, unwilling to look his President in the eye. “But Radio Malta is reporting that during the attack Royal Air Force fighters shot down four B-52s which had been dropping large ‘ground-penetrating earthquake’ bombs and what sounds like at least one experimental fuel-air device on key command and control facilities across the Maltese Archipelago.”
Jack Kennedy hadn’t been this horrified when he’d received the first reports of the Cuban missile strike on Galveston on 27th October 1962. At least that event had been in some way, explicable. This was…insane.
“B-52s?” He asked, wide-eyed.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff nodded.
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s not possible!”
“That’s what my people said when the reports came in,” General Wheeler agreed, his face downcast. “But the Maltese are claiming that one of the B-52s crashed on the island of Gozo, sir,” he went on, almost but not quite choking on the admission.
Chapter 4
The woman was in her late fifties or early sixties, sun-tanned and sinewy with a bird-like sudden sharpness of movement. Her head turned at the sound of another helicopter swooping down onto the makeshift landing platform almost on top of the hastily erected tents of the emergency casualty clearing station. She saw the angular figure of the base medical officer, whom to her surprise she’d found to be a more than competent surgical registrar, striding purposefully towards the pad situated between the crumbling wreckage of the nineteenth century gun pits of the Cambridge Battery.
Six Royal Marines — she could tell by their fair skins and how they sweated under the weight of combat fatigues designed for a north European winter, and webbing festooned with all manner of containers and ammunition pouches, that they were newly arrived from England — watched over the new Commander-in-Chief. Each man, even their officer, carried a Browning pistol holstered at his waist and cradled a Sterling submachine gun his hands. The Marines had flinty, suspicious eyes that never stopped quartering their surroundings.