Red Dawn (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 4)

by James Philip

She did not have to say a word.

  “Obviously,” Tom Harding-Grayson muttered, “if one must, one must.”

  “We’ll sort something out for you,” Iain Macleod, the Minister of Information in the UAUK but still the Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, assured the man who until a few weeks ago had been the Permanent Secretary in the Foreign Office.

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly stand as a Tory, Iain.”

  James Callaghan guffawed at this development.

  “Then what will you stand as, Sir Thomas?”

  The Foreign Secretary blanched at the Deputy Prime Minister’s sardonic employment of his formal title.

  “Actually, I’ve always been a bit of a closet socialist, Jim.”

  Margaret Thatcher’s eyes became blue saucers.

  Sir Henry Tomlinson coughed.

  “Sir Thomas kept very bad company in his student days at King’s College,” he observed helpfully.

  The Angry Widow concluded that the ‘boys’ had had their fun.

  She glanced to Sir David Luce.

  “First Sea Lord, would you brief the Cabinet on the latest intelligence analysis of the situation in the Mediterranean please?”

  This had an instantly sobering effect on the meeting.

  Chapter 19

  Friday 24th January 1964

  Royal Naval Hospital Bighi, Kalkara, Malta

  Rosa Calleja was in a small airy room at the end of the first floor white-washed ward. Bright afternoon sunshine poured in through high windows. The young woman was propped up in the big bed, looking small and understandably sorry for herself. Her right eye and the top half of her head was swathed in a thick matrix of gauze and muslin bandaging, her right foot and lower leg up to the knee, resting on a pillow was encased in a thick plaster cast and her left arm was in a sling, her hand held high to her throat. There were fresh flowers in a glass vase on a small bedside table on which there was a jug of water and single tea cup. To her visitors’ surprise the patient was not wearing a hospital gown but an oversized white shirt. A sheet covered her lower body – apart from her broken lower right leg – ensuring her modesty.

  Arkady Pavlovich Rykov had wanted to ‘interview’ the woman immediately he had discovered what had happened to Lieutenant James Siddall; but he had burned too many bridges half-killing that idiot Denzil Williams and besides, Clara had talked him out of ‘turning up at the hospital and making a scene’.

  She had not mixed her language: ‘They already think you made up the stuff you told them about Red Dawn. We could both end up in prison if we are not very, very careful!’

  The former KGB man had conceded that she might have a point and it was not as if the last couple of days had been entirely unfruitful. Retracing his steps from the last time he was on Malta he had confirmed that much to his dissatisfaction that somebody – fairly recently – had clumsily manufactured the disappearance of the original surviving Red Dawn cell that he had contacted in November. Manufactured as in some imbecile had persuaded them to attempt to go to ground, which they had done with all the aplomb of headless chickens. He hated amateurs. The three missing members of that cell, two men and a woman, might already be dead, like everybody assumed Samuel Calleja was dead. Although that made more sense than their still being active on the archipelago, unfortunately he could not count on it. Samuel Calleja had thought he was running a tight ship but he was a disturbed man whose motives were liable to shift with his moods. Another amateur; albeit a relatively gifted one with ice water running through his veins.

  Clara Pullman insisted on preceding her partner into Rosa Calleja’s room.

  Clara was a wonder to Arkady Rykov.

  A walking, talking living wonder. That their paths had happened to cross in such an unlikely place – Incirlik Air Force Base near Adana in Turkey – within days of the October War had been so serendipitous that sometimes he was tempted to consider the possibility of their being some omnipotent guiding hand, godlike, in the Universe. However, every time he started thinking that way he chided himself for getting sentimental in his old age. Lucifer he could credit, a merciful God, never. In retrospect, he ought to have established Clara’s credentials before now – long before now – but it had not seemed to matter until now. It was always a mistake to become personally, or as weak-minded people called it; emotionally involved with somebody who eventually knew too much about one.

  Undeniably, Clara had finessed his work on Malta. She was right about the British not trusting him. Worse than not really trusting him, they did not actually like him and that was a problem. The death of Lieutenant Siddall, and Samuel Calleja’s disappearance had become inextricably linked to the sabotage of HMS Torquay and the people at the top – problematically, the man at the very top, Admiral Christopher - was looking to him to give him answers. He was in a bad place – he and Clara both – and he did not see an obvious way out of it. If he failed to deliver the surviving members of the ‘Red Dawn cell’ on a silver platter he did not think Admiral Christopher was the sort of man who would accept the failure; and if he served up the appropriate number of heads on the aforementioned platter then what use would the ‘fighting admiral’ have for him afterwards? Until things had taken such an unwelcome turn he had been asking himself if he still needed Clara. As things had turned out it seemed that for the foreseeable future, he needed her quite badly.

  It was Clara’s idea that they talk themselves into the hospital pretending to be friends of the Calleja family. It helped that she had trained as a nurse in her late teens and had a knack of instantly forming a rapport with practically everybody they encountered. Clara’s scheme had worked perfectly right up until the moment they entered Rosa Calleja’s room.

  Clara had thoroughly ‘briefing’ him ahead of their visit. ‘This will work much better if you pretend to be a doctor engaged by Rosa’s parents and maintain the fiction that you are a regular visitor. Consistent with this the Russian’s head was full of superfluous information about the Royal Naval Hospital Bighi.

  The hospital’s design was apparently attributed an officer of the Royal Engineers, a certain Colonel, later Major-General Sir George Whitmore. The foundation stone had been laid in March 1830 by Vice-Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm, the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet; and the main works on the original building completed some two-an-a-half years later at a total cost of around twenty thousand pounds, a veritable Prince’s ransom in those days. The East and West Wings of the hospital were built in the Doric style – that is, with Doric columns and high ceilings – and the Surgical and Fever Wings, added much later between 1901 and 1903. RNH Bighi had been the Royal Navy’s principle hospital facility in the region for over a hundred and thirty years; the reason Malta had become known to generations of servicemen as ‘the nurse of the Mediterranean’. Although the hospital had been heavily damaged by bombing in the Second World War, the British had completely rebuilt and restored it to modern standards in the latter 1940s and the early 1950s.

  Sometimes Arkady Pavlovich Rykov hated his remarkable capacity to absorb ‘facts’.

  “Commander McNeil!” Marija Calleja declared, a little vexed, looking up from a dog-eared paperback book – The Far Country by Nevil Shute - she had been reading. “If that is really your name?” She carefully placed a dried flower to mark her page, put down the book and rose stiffly from the chair on the door side of the room to confront the newcomers. “Which I doubt.” Her long dark hair was drawn back in a tightly severe pigtail, her almond eyes flashing suspicion. “You can’t come in here, anyway. Whoever you are.”

  The last time Clara had seen the other woman she had been intimidating – peacefully, politely but very effectively – a nervous young British Officer who had been sent across the road from the gates of the since destroyed, British Military Administration Headquarters on Manoel Island to detach her from her sisters in the Women of Malta movement. That day Marija Calleja had clearly been a little tired and sore f
rom standing for several hours holding a corner of a large banner which plaintively asked IS THIS HOW YOU TREAT YOUR FRIENDS? Tired and sore or not, she had radiated an aura of calm, pacific dignity that had infuriated, bewildered and embarrassed the young subaltern who had been sent out from the base to speak to her.

  “My name is Clara Pullman,” she smiled, holding out her hand.

  “How do you do, Miss Pullman,” the younger Maltese woman responded pleasantly, shaking the proffered hand. Marija was wearing a calf-length pleated brown skirt, and wore an unbuttoned thin cardigan over a plain blouse. A crucifix hung on a slender silvery chain over her girlish bust. She wore tired cork sandals, and no make-up. But then she had the sort of natural prettiness – yes, prettiness rather than outright beauty – that made foundation and face paint superfluous in practically any situation. As before Clara was struck by the calmness in the younger woman’s brown eyes, brown eyes that so desperately wanted to twinkle with mischief and questions.

  Clara half-turned to her companion, who was trying hard not to scowl.

  “As you guessed, Miss Calleja, Commander McNeil is not my friend’s real name,” she confessed. “However, we very much want to know what happened to your brother.”

  “I am sure that many people want to know what has happened to Sam,” the wartime child heroine of Vittoriosa-Birgu remarked seraphically. She switched her stare to the man standing at the attractive blond woman’s shoulder. Since their previous meeting at Fort Manoel his hair had grown to conceal the worst scars on his scalp. He was a dapper, handsome man in his forties, perhaps ten years his partner’s senior. “The last time I spoke to Commander McNeil he tried to blackmail me, or at least I think he did. He told me he was worried that I would embarrass Admiral Christopher. He gave me the impression that would be a bad thing for everybody.” Again, her brown eyes appraised the man, meeting his hard dark stare fearlessly. “Thank you for stopping the censoring of Peter’s letters. Well,” she added in qualification, “thank you if you actually had anything to do with it, anyway. I know you probably lied about that too, so why should I believe a single word that you, or Miss Pullman say to me?”

  Involuntarily, the former KGB man could not help himself mellowing.

  “Marija,” the woman in the bed whispered in a frightened, little girl lost voice. Instantly, her sister-in-law turned and went to take her right hand between her own hands. “Who are these people?”

  Clara stepped closer to the bed.

  “We are trying to find out what happened to Samuel, Rosa. We work for Admiral Christopher.”

  “Shall I make them go away, Rosa?” Marija asked solicitously.

  “Yes, no, I don’t know...”

  “My sister was very close to the explosion,” Marija explained to the visitors. She and Rosa had not even liked each other until Jim Siddall had been blown up, his life extinguished in the blink of an eye. Marija had been helpless for several hours after Lieutenant Hannay had broken the news to her. Margo Seiffert had hugged her and let her cry until she ran out of tears; and then she had come to Kalkara to be with Rosa. Whatever had happened to her brother, whoever was responsible for the death of her good friend Jim Siddall, she and Rosa were sisters now. “Her ears still ring a little, I think. If you bully her I will scream very loudly and you will both be arrested.”

  Clara bit her lip, knowing the younger woman was not bluffing.

  Her lover and partner patted her arm and stepped around her to stand before Marija Calleja.

  “My name,” he said, not bothering to affect gravitas or severity, or to entirely conceal every last trace of his childhood Moskva accent, “is Arkady Pavlovich Rykov and until the Cuban Missiles War I was a Colonel in the Special Political Directorate of the KGB reporting directly to the Chairman of the Party, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. I now work for the Head of British Intelligence in England and I, and my...”

  “Partner,” Clara said simply.

  “Partner,” the man continued, “have been sent to Malta to provide Admiral Christopher with answers.”

  Marija absorbed this, and decided not to scream her lungs out quite yet.

  “The Nikita Khrushchev?” She asked, her face scrunching into a quizzical mask.

  “He was one of a kind,” nodded the ex-KGB man.

  “Sam was,” Rosa blurted unhappily, “is a good man.”

  The former KGB Colonel gave the woman in the bed a sad-eyed look.

  “Your husband was recruited by the First Main Directorate of the Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti – the Ministry of State Security of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in April 1950.” He said it so matter of factly, conversationally that what he had said hardly registered with the two young Maltese women in the room for some seconds. ‘Some time in 1951 or 1952 he was approached by and inducted into a subversive movement within the Soviet apparat called Krasnaya Zarya. Two months ago your husband proudly claimed to me that he was one of the gunmen who assassinated the then Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Sir Douglas Holland-Martin and his wife, shortly after the Cuban Missiles War. He believed me to be a representative of the Central Mediterranean Directorate of Krasnaya Zarya, or as you would say in English, Red Dawn. In my experience there is nothing more dangerous than a man who has never believed in anything who suddenly discovers a focus for his rage.”

  Rosa Calleja started sobbing.

  Marija Calleja opened her mouth to speak but initially, no words passed her lips.

  “I do not understand?” She admitted eventually, subconsciously stroking her sister-in-law’s hand. Not waiting for a reply she turned and very gently, put her arms around her ‘sister’

  “Red Dawn terrorist cells like the one led by your brother were responsible for the outrages committed after the October War. Those outrages were calculated to force the British to crack down and imprison so many of your men folk,” Clara explained patiently. “Arkady and I believe that your brother and other members of his cell may have been responsible for the sinking of HMS Torquay; and that other members of Red Dawn on the island may have taken ‘punitive’ action against them for disobeying orders.”

  “Extreme ‘punitive’ action,” the man concurred.

  “I don’t see how Rosa or I can help you, Mr Rykov?” Marija Calleja declared quietly after bending her lips down to her ‘sister’s’ ear and murmuring words of comfort.

  “It is very simple,” the Russian informed her, “we need to know everything about your brother’s life. Everything.”

  If Arkady Rykov had not already known most of the answers what he had just told Marija would have made perfect sense. Logically, somewhere in Samuel Calleja’s past there would be clues to how and why he had died and who was, allegedly, hunting down – most likely – the other members of his cell. At his behest Denzil William’s people were, albeit sulkily, interrogating the families and friends of the other cell members; that was a complete waste of time. Stumbling across Marija Calleja at Bighi had been his first piece of real good fortune since he and Clara had arrived on Malta.

  There were tears in Marija’s eyes.

  “I loved Sam as any sister would love her brother,” she said hesitantly, “but we were not close. I was always closer to my little brother, Joe. Joe is my good friend as well as my brother. He and I, well, we understand each other but Sam,” she shrugged guiltily, “we stopped talking to each other a long time ago. We would argue, fight over anything. With Joe I never fight. I tell him off sometimes, but we never fight. I am the wrong person in my family to talk to. You must talk to my father. I think he knew Sam better than any of us.”

  Chapter 20

  Saturday 25th January 1964

  HMS Talavera, off Pantelleria, Central Mediterranean

  They had almost missed the fun, such as it was. Fifty miles south of Sardinia Captain David Penberthy had ordered the old destroyer’s second Admiralty 3-drum boiler to be ‘lit up’ and HMS Talavera had raced to join the coming battle at better that thi
rty knots. Her two shadows, always hovering out on the edge of her radar horizon, had made no attempt to maintain contact. It was as if they had known the Battle class destroyer was no longer in transit but readying herself for the fight.

  Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher braced himself against the bridge rail and focused his binoculars on the island emerging out of the haze as the rising sun burned coolly on that January morning forty-five minutes after the dawn. HMS Talavera was idling along at eleven knots, the middle ship in an ad hoc gun line of five destroyers and frigates of varying vintages.

  At the head of the line was HMS Whitby, the ten year old name ship of her class of anti-submarine frigates. Astern of her and three hundred yards ahead of Talavera was the Defender, a Daring class old-fashioned post-World War II fleet destroyer bristling with guns; astern of Talavera, the new Tribal class destroyer Nubian, and the Puma, a Type 41 anti-aircraft frigate brought up the rear. On joining the gun line David Penberthy, as senior officer present, had taken command. For all that the ‘gun line’ was a hotchpotch of ships of varying sizes, characteristics and sensor suites, the vessels shared common 4.5 inch calibre main batteries.

  Five minutes after dawn the gun line had fired a single ‘long’ ranging salvo of eighteen rounds. The shells had whistled over the island and crashed harmlessly into the sea between eight hundred and a thousand yards beyond the island. Within minutes a dozen helicopters had lifted off the deck of HMS Ocean and now Royal Marines of 42 Commando were fanning out across the rocky terrain of the former Italian territory in the Central Mediterranean.

  If everything had gone to plan similar scenes would be playing out on Lampedusa and tiny Linosa some miles to the east and south, where the fleet carrier HMS Victorious was flag ship of a much larger all arms battle group.

  The gun line was slowly moving inshore, soon the five ships would be clearly visible to the naked eye to anybody brave enough to stand on the sea wall protecting Porto Pantelleria, the main settlement on the most level, and most easterly part of the thirty-two square mile volcanic rock which sat sixty-two miles south of Sicily and thirty-seven miles north of the nearest outcrop of the Tunisian coast to the east.