by James Philip
Chapter 41
Monday 17th June, 1968
8 miles NNW of Baisha Main Island, Penghu Archipelago
There were good and there were bad, very bad ways to start a new week and right now Commander John McCain III was looking down the barrel of one of the latter.
The juddering moment his A-4C Skyhawk had flown through what he reckoned, afterwards, was probably a concentrated cone of heavy machinegun fire he had concluded, coolly, calmly, intuitively that he was well and truly screwed.
Then, a few seconds later when, much to his astonishment, the aircraft was still flying – albeit not very happily with an engine that sounded and felt like it had swallowed a bag of ball bearings – he had seriously contemplated ejecting while he still had a couple of thousand feet of altitude to play with.
Nobody had been more surprised than Mister Sea Power’s one-time tearaway fighter jockey son when, another handful of seconds having whistled past, that in a fashion, the jet was still capable of manoeuvring and he had begun, very tentatively, to coax her now shaking nose around first to the south, and then the south east back out towards the grey, stormy waters of the Taiwan Strait.
By that juncture the airframe was shivering with such wretched, jolting violence that McCain had to clench his teeth to stop biting off his tongue, and it was almost impossible to focus on the controls.
He ought to have been a lot more afraid than he was, his head racing, not slowly, methodically running checks and weighing the odds. Bizarrely, he found himself thinking about that night over Upper Michigan in July 1966. There had been so much smoke and flak filling the sky it had felt like flying into the gaping jaws of Hades.
Heck, that had been a rush…
His Skyhawk had been hit so hard so fast she had died under him; one minute she was an alive, vibrant, purposeful raptor and the next disintegrating around him. There had been no time to think, just to react. He must have bugged out at a about five hundred knots, and as low as a hundred feet.
My, oh my, the ground had been damned hard!
In comparison, this was a walk in the park!
He had taken stock…
He still had aileron and rudder control, albeit mushy, heavy under his hands and feet; and he did not dare touch the throttle. He guessed he was trailing a lot of smoke; so, it was a good thing there were so few MiGs still operating this close to the coast.
He tried the radio again.
Nothing!
Once, twice he risked a glance out of the cockpit.
His wingman was still there, weaving over the top of him, parking for spells on either beam where he could be seen. The other Skyhawk’s under-wing hardpoints were empty.
Did I drop my bombs?
McCain toggled the bomb release tab.
Nothing happened.
Okay, so I dropped the bombs…
That was one less thing to worry about!
His wingman was closer now, starboard wingtip low.
Jesus, the kid ought to know not to risk getting intimate with a plane as beat up as his…
Belatedly, he recognised the other pilot was repeatedly, energetically waving at him, pointing to the left.
What the…
John McCain blinked through the cracked hardened plexiglass of his helmet visor. It was as if he had been in a dream, operating from muscle memory for the last few minutes; or however long it had been since he was hit. The slipstream was roaring into the cockpit and most of his instruments were frozen. A look down.
No blood…
Well, a few drops, nothing bad.
He had trouble focusing on the dark horizon racing towards him. Was that land?
Do I eject now?
No, that water is hellishly cold and I was lucky the last time…
The Skyhawk badly wanted to drift right; her left wing tried to roll over the top of him. There was a heart-stopping second when he was convinced the jet was going to stall out, and all of a sudden, the sea was no longer that far below him.
My ears are ringing…
He had no idea where he was; for all he knew that was a Communist held island coming up on his right quarter. The engine was losing power, he could tell because the vibration had dialled down a couple of notches and was not having to hang onto the stick so tightly.
Try to get more altitude…
He nearly dug his starboard wing tip into the sea before the Skyhawk lurched upward, bleeding speed at a stomach wrenching rate.
He put the nose down again.
The smudge of land on the horizon was racing towards him now.
There were breakers smashing on rocks.
A light house down to his left, flashed past in the blink of an eye.
An opening, spindrift flecked bay.
With more land to the left.
Finally, the A-4C’s Wright J65-W-20 turbofan expired with an explosion which kicked McCain in the kidneys and knocked the breath out of his lungs.
That must have been when he reached down and yanked on the ejection handle.
He must have lost consciousness because he came around coughing and spluttering in ice cold, gritty salt water as the surf lifted, dropped, and tugged him across a rocky beach about a hundred yards away from the fiercely burning wreck of his aircraft.
He hurt all over but that was okay.
If he did not hurt so much how would he know if he was alive, or not?
Judging by the pain he was as sure as Hell still alive!
His helmeted head went beneath the water.
He struggled, swallowing more brine.
Sitting up in the foot-deep water he reached for the chin strap of his bone dome, half-nodded, half-pulled his head out of the battered helmet and sat, staring dazedly at the waves breaking in the bay offshore.
He heard the twenty-millimetre cannon rounds lighting off in the wreck of his Skyhawk.
How many rides had he written off now?
There was that crash in training at Patuxent River; an engine failure, of the without warning, catastrophic kind, not really his fault. He had walked away from a landing ‘mishap’ in 1963; he had got into trouble over that. Self-evidently, he had taken one too many passes over those End of Day maniacs in Upper Michigan but they had given him a medal for that. So, what, this was the fourth aircraft he had broken?
I am going to be ‘Lucky John McCain’ forever after this!
Things were slowly coming back to him all the time.
Two other VA-76 Skyhawks had been hit over the target. One had blown up in mid-air, the other had gone straight in trailing a plume of grey-black smoke.
Somebody had shouted a warning about ‘MISSILE LOCK’ over the Squadron attack frequency, that must have been at about the time he flew through that seemingly impenetrable wall of tracers.
Oh, well, shit happens…
He looked up as a Skyhawk – his wingman, most likely – made a wide, circling pass, a couple of hundred feet above him. The aircraft returned, even lower, slower with its landing flaps extended for a low-speed, something less than a hundred and fifty knots pass, to have a good, long, by jet jockey standards, look at him.
Feeling sick he tried to raise his arms and wave.
The Skyhawk waggled its wings, pulled in its flaps and poured on the power to climb away from the bay.
John McCain attempted to get to his feet.
Bad mistake, he almost passed out again.
He started to crawl up the beach, not realising for several seconds that he was still in his parachute harness. He pounded feebly at the mid-chest release clasp, and shrugged out of the restraining lines.
He kept on crawling until he guessed he was above the surf line, staggered and collapsed in a heap, struggling for breath.
The pain told him his back was crocked, and possibly one or two rib cartilages well and truly ‘popped’; so, he rested.
Escape and evade…
That was going to be hard if he could not stand on his hind legs.
Where the fuck am
I?
He pondered that awhile, listening to the comforting roar of his guardian wingman’s engine overhead. The kid was going to run out of gas soon; then he would be all alone.
He was shivering uncontrollably.
If I lie here, out in the open, I am going to die of exposure.
It exhausted him for some minutes simply rising onto his knees. He started puking up seawater, and had no recollection of moving up the shingle to the partial shelter of tussock grass growing on the sodden dunes marking the start of the land beyond.
He could go no further.
His Navy Colt was still in its hip holster.
You could always rely on a Model 1911…
He made no attempt to retrieve it; that would be a good way to shoot off his own foot and he had no intention of blowing his brains out to stop the Chinese taking him prisoner.
The bastards did not kill him that easily!
His wingman swooped over him once, and again.
Very low, so low McCain caught a whiff of his tail pipe gases.
Presently, the roaring whine of its Wright J65-W-20 receded into the distance.
And John McCain lost consciousness.
Chapter 42
Monday 17th June, 1968
British High Commission, New Delhi
The Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi had been a little taken aback by how angry – incandescent, in fact – her visitor had been when the news of the latest ‘developments’ in the Western Pacific had broken over the weekend.
Unfortunately, while this had been apparent to her Chief of Staff, Major Ian Gow, MP., and the Angry Widows’ fourteen, fifteen in August, twins, Mark and Carol, it had been lost on Margaret Thatcher herself and this had detracted from the success, or otherwise, of what ought to have been a pleasantly low-key, confidential meeting between the Gandhi and the Thatcher families, and the circle of their closest advisors.
Moreover, the Indian Premier had not been impressed that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was represented by fifty-two-year-old Anthony Kershaw, the number two man, and House of Commons surrogate of Lord Thomas Harding-Grayson, with whom she had previously established a certain, collaborative chemistry and an unspoken understanding of the realities of global realpolitik. While Kershaw was a solid ‘all-rounder’ he was not the sorcerer’s apprentice that many in the Commonwealth wished he was; nor was it known how seriously – or not - his own Prime Minister took his counsel.
For his part, Kershaw was beginning to appreciate the many and varied ways in which his own Prime Minister’s manner and these days, increasingly hectoring tone tended to put people’s backs up. It did not help that because she was so assiduous in reading everything that found its way into her red boxes, and was, as a rule, so efficiently briefed by her Private Office, that she tended to think that she was an expert on an awful lot of subjects which, frankly, she was not, and was never likely to be. Of course, this was not a problem unique to Margaret Thatcher; most world leaders who had been in power – real power – for any length of time suffered the same syndrome to varying degrees. However, his Prime Minister was showing unmistakable signs that she might have been unchallenged for far, far too long by her ministers, some of whom frankly, ought to have found the spine to stand up to her a little more in the last two or three years!
Not that the Lady was out of control, it had not quite come to that yet; although, her fixation with the ‘South Atlantic Issue’, which even the redoubtable, fearless Secretary of Defence, Viscount De L’Isle had finally given ground on to the extent that he had conceded the primacy of the blasted ‘South Atlantic Planning Group’ under the supervision of the Prime Minister’s favourite admiral, Simon Collingwood, in all things to do with matters ‘below fifty degrees south’, was, to Kershaw’s mind, one of those classic drink poison before touching, thin ends of a very long wedge!
These days, even his own chief, Tom Harding-Grayson got fidgety and sometimes, very irritated, when the subject of the Falklands and South Georgia was raised but despite colleagues, Kershaw included, pleading for him to intervene, he remained oddly divorced from the ongoing farrago.
In the past, Kershaw would have quietly assumed that his chief was allowing some great, as yet obscure stratagem, or wheeze, to play itself out. Unfortunately, this time around he was rather afraid that Machiavelli’s box of tricks was empty.
‘We need to be seen to be waving a big stick or those bounders in Buenos Aires will never come back to the negotiating table,’ the Foreign Secretary would aver, politely dismissive, and then change the subject.
Why on earth the Prime Minister had seen fit to canvass Mrs Gandhi’s support for a ‘diplomatic initiative backed by the Commonwealth’ at the United Nations ‘claiming that the United Kingdom and its allies had the right to seek restitution by force of arms under its inviolable right of self-defence,’ was a mystery to the Deputy Foreign Secretary.
It was as if the PM was totally unaware how proud India was of its singular status as the leader of the non-aligned group of former Commonwealth countries – mostly the poorest ones left in the worst condition by the British withdrawal, or more correctly, its abdication of its responsibilities to its former colonies in the 1950s and early 1960s – and was never going to side with the old colonial overlords in a ‘private territorial dispute’ on the other side of the globe. Any more than Indira Gandhi could realistically expect the United Kingdom to ship several divisions of mechanised infantry, modern fighter squadrons or Royal Navy destroyers to come to her aid if there was another war with Pakistan!
True, Mrs Gandhi was grateful that British diplomatic interventions had undoubtedly cut short the war with the Chinese in the Himalayas, the quid pro quo Tom Harding-Grayson had induced the Communist Chinese to offer to hasten the haggling over Hong Kong a couple of years ago, but she well knew that if the British had not badly needed to forestall an unwinnable military crisis over Hong Kong, the ceasefire in the mountains of Kashmir and the Ladakh might never have happened, and the fighting would still be going on.
All this, Anthony Kershaw understood.
Indira Gandhi’s personal gratitude was one thing; the lingering humiliation of having to rely on the old imperial overlords to intervene to halt the war in the Ladakh – in part merely a symptom of an insoluble legacy caused by the British failure to resolve the Raj’s problems in Kashmir prior to Partition in 1947 – was another.
Kershaw was a son of Empire, born in Cairo, and educated at Eton College and Balliol, Oxford. A barrister by profession turned soldier, he had been a close friend of Britain’s first post-October War leader, Edward Heath. Within the fractious brotherhood of the 1965 National Conservative Party he was a big beast, a man elevated overnight to grandee status and although he did not customarily sit in Cabinet, as Tom Harding-Grayson’s health waned, most of his colleagues naturally assumed that he was among the Prime Minister’s innermost circle of confidantes.
This was not the case.
There had been times in the last few months when he had yearned to be just a humble tank commander back in the chaos and carnage of the Kasserine Pass in 1943, where he had won his Military Cross.
Things were so marvellously uncomplicated in those days!
Ian Gow rose to his feet when Kershaw entered the dining room that morning.
“The Prime Minister breakfasted in her rooms and is catching up on her red boxes,” the immaculate, balding man in the uniform of the Hussars explained to the newcomer.
“What are the mechanics of getting me and my team to Washington, Ian?” Anthony Kershaw inquired – not wasting time beating about the bush - as an Indian serving woman stepped forward and poured him a cup of tea.
Ian Gow frowned.
“Why ever would you want to go to DC, Tony?” This was asked collegiately, for the two men had always enjoyed the most cordial working relationship. “Goodness, we don’t want to get caught up in the riots over there!”
Anthony Kershaw could not deny that there was m
erit in what his friend had said. But public order issues aside – they were the Nixon Administration’s problem, not his – there was a bigger picture to be considered.
“Because anything is better than the PM giving the President a piece of her mind over this filthy ‘Rolling Thunder’ nonsense over the telephone, Ian,” he retorted.
The Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff was sympathetic to Tony Kershaw’s concern but resigned to the fact that there was really not a lot that he, or anybody else could do about it.
“Ah, I’m sorry, she’s dead set on that, I’m afraid. Besides, as you know, she’s not really angry – just not happy - about what is going on out there; it is more that we weren’t given due notice of it. If we had known what was in the pipe line we might have been able to beef up the naval presence at Hong Kong, for example. You know how she feels about Korea, these days, that the Communists stole it from the West, just like the bally Argentine stole our South Atlantic sovereign dependencies in 1964.”
It was a standing joke in the Party that FCO files always referred to the Falklands Archipelago as Las Malvinas, the Argentine name for the islands. It was not true but little things like that had never made much difference within the Conservative Party, even masquerading in its present, relatively light blue incarnation.
Personally, Kershaw believed that contemplating sending a task force down to the South Atlantic – let alone actually sending one - to ‘take back’ the lost possessions was, in its own way, an even crazier way to conduct foreign affairs than that currently being employed by the Americans in the Western Pacific!
And that was saying something!
The difference was that there had never been mass demonstrations, let alone riots, on the streets of British cities over the fate of the Falkland Islands Dependencies!
In fact, Joe Public, as the Foreign Secretary had been known to observe: ‘Really does not, and never did, give a fig about those islands!’
“Ian,” he tried again. “We need to be very, very careful about associating ourselves with the military actions being undertaken by the Americans in the Far East.”
