by James Philip
Instantly, he had worried about his wife spending most of the coming long day on her feet, and started looking around for several yards of cotton wool with which to wrap his beautiful princess for the next however many months it took to produce their daughter.
Marija was quietly, implacably insistent that their baby would be a girl.
Peter Christopher liked to think he was the most rational, scientific of men but if his wife said their child was a girl, who was he to argue? Marija said she had known she was carrying their daughter from the day of the Battle of Malta; before that she had only ‘suspected’ it. She had told him this news with seraphic certainty and even a prize idiot like him knew better than to press her. It seemed that Rosa, her sister-in-law, soon to be married to Alan Hannay – Peter’s father’s former Flag Lieutenant and briefly, Talavera’s Purser and Supply Officer – had already been let in on ‘the secret’.
Rosa was a little shorter than Marija, a shapely, dark-haired woman in her mid-twenties with smiling eyes that belied the dark secrets that she, Marija and Peter were sworn to keep to themselves for the rest of their lives.
For Rosa, the execution of her traitorous husband had been a merciful release from a desperately unhappy marriage, and the long weeks of doubt and suspicion following Samuel Calleja’s disappearance at the time of the sabotaging of HMS Torquay in the Grand Harbour. She had been ostracised by her own parents, been the object of a vicious whispering campaign only halted when Marija had publicly stood by her. Peter now knew that his father had put down a smokescreen of misinformation to protect both Rosa, and Marija and him, and the reputation of the Royal Navy, and to ‘disappear’ the traitor Samuel Calleja from history. His execution – as an unknown enemy soldier guilty of war crimes against the Maltese people - by firing squad at Paola Prison on the morning Peter and Marija had flown to England had completed the process of expunging his memory. In due course human remains would be discovered in the wreck of HMS Torquay, whose broken bow and stern sections still lay beneath the waters of the Grand Harbour; those remains would subsequently be solemnly identified as those of Marija’s older sibling, and the case would be closed, forever...
Peter Christopher realised he was woolgathering.
Admiral Sir Varyl Begg, the man who had stepped in the late Sir David Luce’s shoes as First Sea Lord was standing directly in front of the ‘Hero of the Battle of Malta’.
The younger man understood intuitively that he was about to be taken into the confidence of the man who was, if not ‘God’ then God’s chosen representative in the Admiralty. In a crowded room filled with a hundred conversations there was an unlikely privacy; an opportunity to communicate important matters without fuss, bother or any of the normal constraints of rank and position. In other words, this was an ideal moment to have a short, to the point, man to man talk.
“Sir Peter’s father and I never really hit it off,” the First Sea Lord confessed to Marija, who was literally, hanging off her husband’s arm while viewing him with a beatifically sunny smile as she inclined her head to listen very, very closely to every word he was about to say. “But he was undoubtedly the Navy’s finest ‘fighting admiral’.” Sir Varyl Begg grimaced. “He will be sadly missed. Notwithstanding, that is, Sir Peter is a man cast from exactly the same mold!”
“Very good of you to say so, sir,” Peter muttered, reflecting for the thousandth time that day how much easier it had been conning Talavera into the mouths of huge Russian naval rifles, than it was being compelled to present a sitting target for an endless barrage of compliments.
“How do you two feel about a two year tour of duty in the lost colonies?”
The question momentarily bewildered the tall young naval officer and his nutmeg-haired wife; both of whom peered quizzically at the older man for several seconds.
“I have come to the conclusion that your husband has fought quite enough battles for the time being, Lady Marija,” the First Sea Lord explained wryly. “Things in the Persian Gulf may or may turn out as badly as we fear they might. Whatever happens out there or in the South Atlantic, or wherever else in the World fresh disasters and tribulations occur in the future, diplomacy and the business of the Navy will continue. Life continues and it so happens that the political and the naval consensus is that Sir Peter needs to be kept as far away as possible from the sound of guns.” He smiled ruefully. “If only because whenever he hears the sound of distant artillery he has proven propensity for steaming towards it at maximum speed!”
Marija nodded.
“This is true,” she agreed seriously. “It is a thing I have chastised him about many times, Sir Varyl.”
The young woman’s intent scrutiny briefly incommoded the professional head of the Royal Navy. Marija’s gentle scrutiny had that effect on most men.
“Yes, well, absolutely,” the First Sea Lord muttered, recovering his composure and recollecting what he had meant to say next. “It happens that Sir Peter is, among officers of his rank, supremely qualified to act as the Admiralty’s ‘technical’ liaison officer to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations of the United States Navy. The post was envisaged by the US-UK Mutual Defense Treaty which we, on this side of the Atlantic, are keen not to see consigned to the dustbin of history quite yet.”
Marija was genuinely baffled and since she did not subscribe to the view that she ought to be seen but not heard when in public with her illustrious husband, asked a question before Peter could get a word in edgewise.
“But the Americans have betrayed us?”
“Yes,” Sir Varyl Begg admitted. “But we can’t afford to get carried away with newspaper headlines and suchlike. We and the Americans have more things in common than not. For example, we don’t want to be at each other’s throats, ever again. Whatever, our political leaders might say. The Royal Navy will keep transatlantic channels of communication open. At the urging of the government I am sending Sir Peter and a small supporting ‘team’ to our embassy in Philadelphia to work with Lord Franks, our ambassador, to ensure that whatever else goes wrong that we never again stop talking to our American friends.”
“Oh,” Marija sighed, suddenly afraid she was going to be separated from her husband of less than two months, again.
Peter Christopher had digested what he had been told and was immediately able to put Marija’s mind at rest.
“For extended overseas diplomatic postings it is normal for officers to be accompanied for the full duration of that service by their spouses and families, my love,” he said softly, bending his lips down to her ear. He straightened and met the First Sea Lord’s gaze. “Might I inquire as to the makeup of my ‘team’, sir?”
“Who do you have in mind, Sir Peter?”
“Alan Hannay as my number two, acting in the capacity of my personal and social secretary, sir. I’ll need a security presence, as opposed to a detail, I have in mind Chief Petty Officer Griffin to head it.”
“Griffin? The fellow who was on the torpedo tubes with Lady Marija’s brother?” The query was partly rhetorical because the First Sea Lord knew who Jack Griffin was, and his chequered history.
Marija sensed his disquiet.
“Jack won’t let us down in America,” she said in a tone which brooked no dissent.
And so it was settled.
“We’ll send you all over to New York in style on the Queen Mary,” Sir Varyl Begg declared, sealing the deal. “That will give the Ministry of Information people plenty of time to plot their ‘charm offensive’ with the Americans.”
Peter wanted to say he had hoped to have another seagoing command, that the fight was unfinished and that his place was not thousands of miles away from the action. He made no such protest; knowing it was pointless. The Navy and as importantly, the Ministry of Information wanted him mending old fences, building new bridges across the Atlantic and generally reminding all and sundry that the United Kingdom remained a going concern. Diplomatically and probably militarily, a time of famine and distrust was besetting
the two old allies; and he and Marija were being sent to the United States in an attempt to limit the damage.
“The Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State for Information will brief you fully before your departure. The Queen Mary will be sailing from Southampton on the 30th of this month.”
Alan Hannay had seen the First Sea Lord button-holing his friends and once the coast was clear he, with Rosa Calleja inseparably attached to his left arm, approached Peter and Marija.
“We are all going to America,” Marija announced.
“Oh. I thought that was enemy territory?” Alan Hannay grimaced.
Peter Christopher had been lost in his thoughts.
It had been a peculiar day all round.
First there was Marija’s marvellous news. Then the inspection of the assembled surviving Talavera’s and Yarmouths; and the parade bathed in kind, unexpected sunshine along streets thronged with waving and cheering people, the march past and salute – with Her Majesty, literally propped up, flanked by her consort, Prince Philip, and most of the UAUK’s senior members – and the investiture a little later in the great quadrangle of King’s College.
His father’s sword, flown back to England from Malta, felt odd at his side; likewise the full dress uniform adorned with a whole row of campaign and other medals he had not known he had been awarded until a day or two ago.
Two splendidly ornamented ladies in waiting had hovered – one to each shoulder – to catch the Queen if she faltered during the investiture.
The Victoria Cross hung heavily on his breast as afterwards he stood to the front of the parade beside his fellow VC, and Talavera’s former Master at Arms, Nevil Spider McCann, the man who had kept the destroyer afloat long enough to fire her torpedoes. The Queen had presented Commander John Pope’s VC to his widow, Mary, a tearfully proud brunette accompanied by her sons, aged twelve and ten. Her Majesty had spoken to the Pope boys like a fondly protective aunt, and placed a comforting arm on Mary Pope’s arm. Chief Petty Officer Stanley George who had taken command of the wrecked Yarmouth as she reeled away from the battle, had been the fourth man to receive his VC.
Joseph Calleja, cutting a somewhat paler and reduced figure from his stockier, fleshy pre-Battle of Malta self, had been the first man presented to the Queen. The Maltese dockyard electrician who had been sacked by the Royal Naval Dockyards of Malta - several days before he jumped onboard HMS Talavera when all his fellows were leaping ashore - on account of his trade union activism and openly avowed Marxist politics, had stepped shyly up to the diminutive figure of his monarch to receive his George Cross.
He had leaned close to hear what the Queen was saying to him.
He had responded in a hoarse whisper that had failed to carry to the ranks behind him; she had talked again. Their conversation had only ended after about a minute.
Joe Calleja had smiled, bowed his head and stepped back.
There had been tears in his eyes as he had walked to join Marija, who was standing a little to one side surrounded by government ministers and several large, heavily armed Royal Marines.
Brother and sister had hugged as if they had not seen each other for ten years...
Peter Christopher looked to his wife now and she returned his gaze. They were suddenly like islands in the stream, the room was moving around them, and they were uncaring, oblivious of anything but each other.
He quirked a smile and she reflected it back for they were attuned precisely to each other’s thoughts.
“Well, Lady Marija,” Peter Christopher remarked wryly, “it seems that fate has decreed that our daughter will be born in America...”
Chapter 25
Thursday 14th May 1964
Heliopolis Presidential Palace, Cairo, Egypt
Forty-six year old Gamal Abdel Nasser, since 1956 the President of the Egyptian Republic halted in the long, vaulted cloister and raised his right hand in greeting at the approach of his old friend and fellow ‘Free Officer’ from the revolutionary days of 1952.
Muhammad Anwar El Sadat, the man who was in all but name Nasser’s deputy, was a dapper, lean man in exactly the way his friend and leader was not. Where Nasser was a broad, increasingly heavy-set man who cut a commanding figure by sheer dint of his physical presence and spoke with a compelling gravitas or impassioned eloquence as the occasion required, Sadat cut a slighter figure. The same age and military generation as his friend, Sadat was a cerebral, calculating man who had only really come to the fore since the Cuban Missiles War. Previously, he had been one of several confidantes of the President, now there were those in Cairo who whispered that he was the ‘power behind the throne’. This was untrue, no man in the regime was more devoted to or loyal to Nasser than Anwar Sadat; but the rumours and the gossip irritated both men. Like many men who had come to power in a coup d’état they were intensely preoccupied with notions of ‘legitimacy’ and forever looking over their shoulders to see where the next threat was coming from.
Unseasonal south eastern winds had churned up sand storms in Sinai and buffeted Cairo in recent days and Sadat – who had been visiting the ongoing recovery and salvage work at Ismailia where the Suez Canal was still blocked by four sunken merchantmen and a Egyptian Navy frigate – had radioed the Heliopolis Palace earlier that morning warning that he might be delayed.
The two men had spoken often of the ‘unseasonal’ weather which had afflicted Egypt since the October War. Last winter the Nile floods had come early like a biblical nightmare, flooding parts of Cairo, inundating huge swathes of the Delta, killing thousands, and ever since there had been drought, absolute and dust dry, with the great Nile falling to unprecedented low spring levels. The weather was not so much ‘unseasonal’ as simply, dreadfully, ‘wrong’ as if the war had in some malevolent fashion unhinged normal Saharan and sub-Saharan climatic patterns. Flood one month and weeks of sand storms two months later; each so extreme as to make a God-fearing man wonder if the events of October 1962 had been so terrible as to anger Allah, alayhi as-salām.
Peace be upon Him...
Nasser had put back the meeting with the visiting US Secretary of State, J. William Fulbright two hours in the hope that his friend would fight his way through the sand storms by then. Important as the Secretary of State was, that evening Nasser was scheduled to address a council of restive senior Army and Air Force officers and in the present atmosphere of ‘uncertainty’, each and every one of his political imperatives revolved around the preservation of his own support and the unity of Egypt. Moreover, since these were considerations that American foreign policy and post-Cuban Missiles War military deployments had singularly failed to take into account; whatever message J. William Fulbright was bringing to Cairo in the latest round of his so-called publicity seeking ‘shuttle diplomacy’, was very low on Gamal Abdel Nasser’s personal priority list.
Nevertheless, the diplomatic niceties had to be observed.
“We’d never have kept the Americans waiting in the old days,” Anwar Sadat observed dryly as the two friends fell into step.
Their feet and those of their coterie of ever-present bodyguards – both men were at the top of the hit lists of disenchanted factions in the military and any number of religious extremist splinter factions – rang on the gleaming marble floors of the corridor.
Until as recently as 1958 the Presidential Palace located in the heart of Cairo had been the Heliopolis Palace Hotel. Built by the Heliopolis Oases Company between 1908 and 1910 in what was then open desert east of the Nile as the centrepiece of a new suburb of the capital, it had been Africa’s most luxurious hotel when it opened its doors on 1st December 1910. Designed by Belgian architect Ernest Jaspar in what purported to be the local Heliopolis style – a lavish and overblown melding of the European Neoclassical with Persian, Moorish Revival and Islamic influences – it had been constructed by the two largest civil engineering concerns in Egypt, both foreign, Leon Rolin and Company, and Padova, Dentamaro and Ferro. Internally, the hotel’s po
wer and other utilities mimicked the technological marvels becoming common in Germany, France, the United Kingdom and North America, installed lavishly with little or no expense spared. For example, Siemens and Schuepert of Berlin had been contracted to install the hotel’s cabling and modern electrical wizardry. Notwithstanding, the hotel had always been something of a white elephant, out of place and time. The Heliopolis Palace Hotel’s original French management were long gone, and within five years of its gala opening the building had become Cairo’s major military hospital, a fate it suffered again in the Second World War. Between the two World Wars and afterwards, its decline hastened by the waning of British imperial power the hotel had become a half-forgotten vanity project slowly falling into disrepair, increasingly neglected until the 1950s the Egyptian Government had begun casting around for an appropriate setting for a new Presidential Palace, a Palace fit for the leader not just of a nation that traced its lineage back to the Pharaonic epoch; but that was self-evidently the most powerful, leading Arab polity.
For its current role – if never a viable business proposition - the old hotel was perfect. It sat in a Cairo suburb surrounded by great buildings constructed in the grandiose Heliopolis Style, it looked and felt palatial inside and out, it had over four hundred rooms, a great Moorish reception hall, numerous magnificently appointed large public rooms presented like something transplanted straight from Versailles, and an enormous Central Hall which might have been created specifically to host great state occasions. The apex of the dome of the Central Hall – which had formerly been the grand dining room – stood one hundred and eighty feet high, and the lavishly decorated ceiling was supported by twenty-two Italianate marble columns. To each side of the Central Hall there were other public rooms, one planned as a banqueting hall and the other as a large billiard room. Although much of the original furniture had been lost during the World Wars, stolen or sold off to keep creditors at bay; here and there mahogany chairs and tables – supplied by Maple’s of London – survived.
