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

by James Philip

  “The island of Lampedusa is now in our hands,” he announced sagely. “I am glad to report that casualties were much lighter than first feared although we lost a brace of helicopters and several of our ships were knocked about somewhat. Admiral Christopher reports naval casualties as twenty-three men dead and sixty-one seriously wounded. All vessels with the exception of HMS Puma, which was hit twice in the engine room, were able to proceed to Malta under their own steam. It now seems that the island was in the hands of a group of fanatics who had expelled, or massacred, we aren’t sure which yet, every man, woman and child who had been living on Lampedusa before the late war. It was only after the expenditure of prodigious quantities of naval ordnance that the Royal Marines were able to move in and winkle out the last defenders. A dreadful business; it puts me in mind of some of the fights I was involved in, or came across after the event, in Germany during the Second War. Whole towns levelled and fanatical SS men fighting to the last man. We captured a few badly wounded men, otherwise,” he shrugged. “Senseless really.”

  “Do we think Lampedusa was in the hands of Red Dawn?” Walter Brenckmann asked.

  “We don’t know. At Pantelleria and Linosa our ships fired warning shots and the locals couldn’t throw up their hands in surrender quick enough. Obviously, we will interrogate the survivors as soon as possible. One curious thing did come to light; we found a lot of Soviet type automatic weapons and shoulder–held rocket propelled grenade launchers on Lampedusa. It sounds like a peculiar affair all round, actually.”

  “Go on,” Margaret Thatcher encouraged him.

  “Well, according to Admiral Christopher, our ships would have been handled much worse if so many of the hits on them had not been by relatively small calibre armour piercing, or solid shot. Many of the hits simply went in one side and out the other, hardly any of our destroyers and frigates having heavy plating, let alone armour.”

  “One fights with what one has at hand,” Tom Harding-Grayson offered.

  The conversation moved on.

  “The President asked me to thank you personally for facilitating the access of our survey teams to former US bases in Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire,” Walter Brenckmann said presently. “The RAF’s informal assistance to our people over the recovery of dual-key assets is also very much appreciated.”

  Margaret Thatcher was looking forward to speaking to the American Ambassador’s wife. Pat Harding-Grayson, or rather, as she was now, Lady Patricia, had invited Joanne Brenckmann to afternoon tea yesterday. The Ambassador’s wife had brought ‘cookies’ baked with ingredients she had brought all the way from her home in Boston. Pat had been touched by the gesture and apparently, had had a good ‘woman to woman’ gossip with her new American neighbour.

  “I insist that you and your wife come over for drinks one evening, Captain Brenckmann,” she said, flashing her dazzling smile. She had honestly thought her smile was just ‘a smile’ until people had remarked on how she ought to ‘flash’ it more often. Or at least that was what Iain Macleod and his people at the Ministry of Information said.

  “Joanne would enjoy that, Prime Minister,” the greying American replied.

  After Walter Brenckmann had departed the Defence Secretary turned to the Foreign Secretary.

  “HMS Blake is currently docked at Limassol awaiting delivery of the first nuclear warheads from the Akrotiri stockpile. It is anticipated that it will take up to seventy-two hours to load all thirty-eight weapons. Facilities on Malta are now ready to accommodate the, er, bombs.”

  The Foreign Secretary had had a bad feeling about the nuclear weapons store on Cyprus for as long as he had known the Akrotiri store existed. In the later 1950s the island had been a powder keg of religious and ethnic tensions; and ever since the October War the potentially idyllic island – very much set in a silvery blue sea – had been hanging off the end of perilously long and tenuous lines of communication. Added to this the previous C-in-C Mediterranean had neglected the defences of the bases on Cyprus and done nothing to reassure the neighbouring countries; Lebanon, Israel and the Alawite Syrian communities clinging to the coastal strip between Turkey and Lebanon, that the British presence on Cyprus contributed anything meaningful to the stability of the region.

  “HMS Dreadnought will be tasked to patrol the waters south of Cyprus ahead of HMS Blake’s departure for Malta. The cruiser will be escorted by three screening escorts. HMS Victorious, having been delayed by the Lampedusa affair, will refuel at Malta, and steam east to provide air cover for the Blake flotilla once it is out of range of land-based aircraft flying from Akrotiri.”

  “What is HMS Victorious’s combat readiness?”

  “Her air group remains under strength but all remaining civilian workers will be put ashore at Valletta. Ideally, Hermes would be sent directly to the Eastern Mediterranean but she is experiencing ‘technical’ problems with her boilers which currently limit her speed to only fifteen knots. Admiral Christopher proposes dry docking her at Malta as soon as possible. The other option is to send her back to Gibraltar but then she would be up to a week further away in the event of an unforeseen crisis developing.”

  Margaret Thatcher was finding her new Defence Secretary a calming, and a very safe pair of hands. His soothingly phlegmatic attitude to things was not in any way complacent, simply the rational acknowledgement of the old axiom that ‘there is only so much one can control’; and the rest is in God’s hands. He had told her, very gently, that the worst possible thing a politician can do in almost any conceivable war situation, is to contemplate interfering directly in military affairs. ‘Trust the man on the ground,’ was his motto. It was a mantra she would not have trusted herself to obey had the ‘man on the ground’ in the Mediterranean not been Julian Christopher.

  The First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce had gone to Portsmouth to confer with the Flag Officer, Channel Fleet, and to personally ascertain the status of the Navy’s two largest aircraft carriers, the Ark Royal and the Eagle, both of which were in dockyard hands. HMS Eagle was nearing the end of a major structural rebuild and modernization; HMS Ark Royal was likely to be lost to the Fleet for many months. Representatives of the De Havilland, Blackburn and Supermarine companies were also due to be in Portsmouth to explain to the professional head of the Royal Navy why HMS Victorious had had to put to sea with such a ‘scandalously depleted air group’ when so much ‘treasure, and priceless irreplaceable skilled labour, materials, scarce metals and oils and fuels of countless varieties, was being thrown at them’?

  “That blasted man Staveley-Pope,” the Angry Widow complained suddenly, “he must have been asleep on the job! How in the World could he have left all those warheads out there in Cyprus? It beggars belief!”

  “Margaret,” Tom Harding-Grayson objected, diplomatically, “I’m sure if the previous Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean knew what we know now he would have done something about it.”

  “Um!”

  “I think Tom has a point, Prime Minister,” William Whitelaw added very patiently. “Just as we can only deal with the situation before us; we must be aware that officers in the field can only form judgements on the basis of what they actually know at the time.”

  Chapter 25

  Wednesday 29th January 1964

  The Waterfront, Sliema Creek, Malta

  “I thought I’d find you here,” Joe Calleja declared in the subdued tone he had been unable to rise above in the days since the news of Lieutenant Jim Siddall’s murder. The man had saved his life once; and had been a good friend to his sister at a time when she had badly needed a friend. And now he was dead and it was likely that their brother had set the bomb that blew him into countless pieces of seared flesh and splintered bone.

  Marija glanced nervously to her brother, then looked back at the sleek, mauled grey warship moored fore and aft to big drum buoys in the middle of the anchorage less than a hundred yards away. Deeper into the Creek the big salvage barge moored alongside the wreck of HMS Agincourt
was partially hidden by the stern of the recently anchored warship. From the shrouds below her black, double bedstead radar, an enormous battle flag flapped below the port top cross brace of her great steel lattice foremast.

  Marija had dressed in dark clothes, a long dress almost down to her ankles and her hair was hidden, as was much of her face by a black muslin scarf.

  “Do you remember the night of the war when everybody came down to the Creek to watch the British destroyers trying to escape out to sea?” Joe asked.

  “Yes,” his sister replied in a whisper. “That was the night we met Jim for the first time.”

  “It seems like years ago.”

  “Perhaps, it was. I think we are all much older now.”

  “Mama said you planned to go back to Mdina tonight?”

  “Lieutenant Hannay promised to send a car later.”

  “Oh.” Joe hated to see his sister brought so low. He thought he had seen all her moods but this was different, there was a dull resignation in her. He had never seen that before, not even when as a five or six year old he had visited her in Bighi; in those days when she had been trapped – seemingly forever – in a hospital bed, often in a cage of steel that was literally holding her together, her eyes had sparkled and she had prattled about what she would do when she was well again. Always, there had been hope, a future filled with possibilities, bright and exciting. “I saw Papa had the Times of Malta, did you read the story about HMS Talavera?”

  “Yes.” Marija sniffed back a tear and forced herself not to raise her hands to her eyes to wipe away the moisture welling, welling, unstoppably like the rising lump in her throat. The British had gone insanely close inshore off Lampedusa to help the assault company of Royal Marines who had gone ashore unopposed only to be pinned down by a hail of machine gun and shoulder launched rocket fire. The ‘enemy’, or ‘pirates’ or ‘monsters’ depending on who one spoke to had opened fire on the destroyers and frigates of the 23rd Escort Flotilla, led by HMS Talavera with anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns. HMS Puma had lost all power, been forced to drop anchor to stop running aground. A hit on HMS Talavera’s bridge had badly wounded several men including the ship’s captain. Peter had assumed command not only of his own ship, but in the confusion, of the whole flotilla. Ordering the two least damaged vessels, HMS Leopard and the big old-fashioned fleet destroyer HMS Defender to lay down covering fire he had steered the Talavera between the shore and the crippled HMS Puma, secured a tow line and while Talavera’s main battery bombarded and ultimately silenced the ‘enemy’ guns at point blank range firing over open sights, had eventually hauled her wounded consort to safety into deeper water.

  Peter was a hero.

  And she was even less worthy of him.

  She had sat down to write him a letter that morning; stared at the blank sheet for minutes and then an hour, her hand paralysed. Each time she gripped the pen to start to write, no words came. She could say anything to Peter Christopher except that she did not love him; yet unless she denied that love what was the point of writing the letter? In her room at the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women in Mdina she would try again to write, to explain, to end this unbearable turmoil...

  In the gathering dusk lights were blinking on along the length of the old Battle class destroyer. Two whalers were butting up against the ferry jetty, waiting a little further along the sea wall. Talavera’s crew were swinging down a boarding ladder, forming up on the amidships deck.

  Marija thought the destroyer looked a little bit odd with the yawning gap behind her funnel where she would normally have expected to see the high, blocky deckhouse which somebody had once told her housed most of the technical marvels of the converted Fast Air Detection Battles.

  Several cars drew up opposite the ferry jetty.

  Marija forced herself to look away.

  In the Times of Malta they said the British ships had gone so close inshore off Lampedusa that the enemy guns, firing shells designed to penetrate the inclined, super-hardened thick armoured glacis plates of tanks had ripped straight through the thin hulls of the British destroyers ‘like hot knives through butter’, except where they hit something solid, then they had ricocheted around the insides of the ships like huge unstoppable bullets. She counted half-a-dozen football-sized jagged holes in the bridge superstructure and the hull beneath it. HMS Talavera’s stern looked like a cheese grater, riddled with fist-sized dark holes and blackened, here and there by small fires. The paper said only three of her men had died and only eight had been seriously wounded. Staring at the visible damage she did not know how that was possible, surely more men must have died?

  Marija was so preoccupied she did not notice, or feel, Joe’s sudden movement by her side.

  “Miss Calleja?” Alan Hannay asked anxiously. “Marija, are you all right?”

  She swung around, wild-eyed.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “No, no. You didn’t, Alan.”

  “Oh. Good. Look, the Admiral is going aboard HMS Talavera. He would be honoured if you...”

  “No!” Marija cried.

  The young officer misunderstood.

  “I’m sure they’ve quite tidied up the battle damage,” he said lamely.

  “No,” she hissed. “I cannot, I have no right. Everything is spoiled now. Don’t you see?”

  “Er, no,” the C-in-C’s flag lieutenant stammered, deeply troubled by the tears flooding down the woman’s face. “Lieutenant-Commander Christopher will be coming ashore with the Admiral. There are lots of photographers and journalists down by the ferry...”

  Marija shook her head and broke past him.

  Her brother exchanged worried looks with the British officer and ran after his sister. He soon caught up with her. The sea front was crowded and Marija was not as spritely once she met the rising slope of Tower Street.

  “The British don’t blame you, sister!” He declared breathlessly. “They don’t blame any of us. They know we didn’t have anything to do with what Sam was involved in!”

  Marija kept marching purposefully up hill.

  Joe made a grab for her elbow.

  She shook off his hand.

  “Please!” He pleaded plaintively.

  Marija halted and suddenly he was two paces beyond her before he realised she had stopped. He turned.

  “Don’t you see?” His sister implored him. “Peter is a hero and I am the sister of a monster?”

  Joe threw his arms wide; unable to express his utter incomprehension.

  “I was stupid to think he would ever love me!” She went on, spiralling into self-immolation in her despair. “Me! What was I thinking, Joe? What kind of a wife could I ever be to a man who is such a hero?”

  Joe didn’t know what to say or even if there was anything to be said.

  He pulled his sister towards him and wrapped his arms around her, in a moment she was clinging to his neck, sobbing unrequitedly, inconsolably in the failing light of the day.

  Down on the waterfront a brass band struck up.

  “How does HMS Talavera look, son?” Joe’s father asked, standing aside as his daughter stumbled into her mother’s waiting arms and the two women crabbed, hugging and crying into the kitchen. The son followed the stooped, defeated figure of his father into the living room.

  “Like she was in a real fight, Papa,” Peter Calleja’s surviving son told him. “I don’t know how they could have let her get into any kind of fight. She’s missing her CIC deckhouse, she’s got no gun directors, the mainmast is just a radio aerial, and she’s got no surface-to-air missile launcher or AS mortar. She must have had to fire her main battery in local control the other day. That’s almost like something from a World War One sea battle!”

  His father forced a haggard smile.

  “Like father like son,” he said with a soft, dreadful bitterness.

  “We met Lieutenant Hannay on the sea wall. He invited Marija to go aboard, or to meet Peter Christopher when he came ashore.�
��

  The father’s eyes clouded with remorse.

  A few minutes later Joe Calleja left the house. If he stayed in it a minute longer he would want to throw himself under a bus. He was a little guilty he could not share in his mother and father’s, or really, in Marija’s grief. He was sad about Sam, and ashamed, mostly he was spitting mad. How could that miserable, self-centred, selfish bastard do this to them all? He had murdered Joe’s friend, Jim Siddall, and worse, he might have succeeded in doing the impossible; breaking Marija’s spirit. When he had set off those bombs in the bowels of HMS Torquay, Joe hoped his brother had lived long enough to know what he had done, long enough to suffer.

  He worked his way to the sea wall, sat on the cool concrete.