by James Philip
He grunted, made a waving away gesture with his left hand.
“I’ll come around to your dacha later in the week,” Olga informed him. “Just to talk. Neither of us will be in the mood to fuck when you’ve heard what I need to tell you.”
The man opened his mouth; no words emerged.
“Now you’re going to shout at me, and order your people to throw me out of the building,” Olga hissed urgently.
He hesitated.
“Do it now, you idiot!” She scolded him. “Or your goons will get suspicious!”
Chapter 45
Tuesday 25th June, 1968
Government House, Yarralumla, Australian Capital Territories
Admiral Sir Varyl Begg, the First Sea Lord had been, frankly, astonished by the candour of Ambassador McCain that morning. That the infamous ‘little man with a big cigar’ had paid what was, to all intents, an unscheduled ‘house call’ and been welcomed by the Governor’s spouse and her Appointments Secretary with daughterly hugs, and by the Governor General himself as if he was a very old, deeply respected family friend, had further disorientated the professional head of the Royal Navy.
And then Jack McCain had briefed him on why the already faltering – the President ought to have told the Navy and the Air Force he wanted to bomb the Chinese back into the Stone Age in advance, not as an afterthought when he had already ordered it to happen, so they could organise the logistics in advance, and US industry could gear up to supply the sinews of the campaign, bombs, rockets, replacement airframes and engines, et al; the Commander-in-Chief had been a supply officer in the Second War so he ought to know that big military campaigns did not just happen, and the logistics to support I could not just be magicked out of thin air! - US bombing campaign against the Chinese Communists was going to achieve precisely nothing. Other, that was, than to comprehensively sour Sino-US relations for another generation.
Yesterday, the First Sea Lord and the still relatively youthful, undeniably most famous Royal Naval officer on the planet, had been at sea on board HMAS Anzac, a modern general purpose frigate, the guests of the C-in-C Royal Australian Navy.
He and Peter Christopher – whom for the duration of the First Sea Lord’s stay in Australia was, technically, his superior, representing as he did the whole authority and weight of the Crown - had finally had a chance to have a man to man chat.
‘The Foreign Office are talking about sending you and Lady Marija to Ottawa, or even back to Washington when Sir Nicholas Henderson finally rubs the White House up the wrong way once too often!’
The younger man’s face had fallen.
This could have been a very awkward interview; Sir Varyl’s whole trip to Australia could have been awkward, in fact. Protocol demanded he address the younger man as ‘Governor General’, or ‘Your Excellency’, or just ‘sir’, and if he so elected, his host only needed to call him ‘Sir Varyl’ or ‘First Sea Lord’ or ‘Admiral’. It did not matter that Peter was a mere captain, or he the professional head of the Royal Navy. Strictly speaking, the older man was supplicant in this particular relationship, given the context of the post the younger man currently held.
In fact, the First Sea Lord had begun by employing ‘Sir Peter’ and ‘Lady Marija’ in his dealings with the Yarralumla couple. However, his hosts had taken him aside at the earliest moment.
‘We are honoured to have you here with us, sir,’ Peter Christopher had declared. ‘We don’t stand on ceremony here, not among ourselves. Please, I’m Peter and my wife is Marija, among friends and colleagues. And I’d be much happier dropping the Governor General guff, and keeping things between us on a ‘Peter’ and ‘sir’ basis. Whatever the FCO and ‘the Palace’ think, I am still a serving Royal Navy officer.’
Needless to say, the First Sea Lord had got on famously with the Yarralumla couple, and had no illusions that they were almost wholly responsible for creating an atmosphere in which he and Jack McCain could talk with such confident frankness about the international situation, and the states of their respective navies.
Sir Varyl Begg smiled.
‘No, no, don’t worry, I’ve reminded the Foreign Secretary that I have first call on your services. What I’m about to discuss with you now, has been cleared with the Prime Minister.’
Peter had not known if that was good, or bad news.
‘I take it your views about continuing your career in the Navy are unaltered, Peter?’
The Governor General of Australia had nodded.
‘Good. The fleet is undergoing a lot of changes. Ships being decommissioned, priorities being re-assessed and so forth. The Liverpool is wasted as the Home Fleet Gunnery Training Ship; that role has passed to the Belfast, she’s done good service but she’s too long in the tooth, these days. It would cost the earth to get her fully operational again. Anyway, the Liverpool is presently in dry dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; where she is being more than somewhat modernised. Basically, she’ll be getting the same refit as the Americans gave the USS Newport News, state of the art air search, fire control and satellite communications upgrades, and a tranche of modifications – including a big deckhouse between her two funnels - so she can be employed as a flagship to better effect. The other thing they are doing is installing air conditioning, wherever they can, where there is none throughout the ship. While at Brooklyn they’ll be removing her centreline dual-purpose twin 5-inch turrets, fore and aft, mainly to reduce the additional topweight. She’ll be in dockyard hands until November. We get her back sometime around the 14th of that month. I’ve pencilled you in as her commanding officer.’
Upon hearing the news, Marija, ever practical had decided that they would travel home via the United States, and she and the children would fly to England in October or November, awaiting his return – whenever that happened – and in the meantime, ‘sort out where we will live’.
It worried him that he might not be back in England in time for the birth of their third child.
‘That cannot be helped. I married a destroyer captain, remember,’ Marija had chided him, ‘I knew what I was getting myself into!’
The First Sea Lord’s visit had been truncated by the ongoing crisis in the Western Pacific, necessitating his early departure for Washington in the early hours of last Thursday morning.
‘I never realised you both got on so well with the McCains,’ he teased his hosts over dinner the previous evening, a pleasantly relaxed, low key affair, attended by Peter, Marija, their ward, Lucy De L’Isle, the Governor General’s Secretary, Sir Murray Tyrell and his wife Ellen, and the First Sea Lord’s Secretary, forty-one-year-old Captain James ‘Jim’ Eberle, who had Mary Griffin, at last restored to something like her normal self, in giggles more than once as the evening progressed.
Sir Varyl raised a hand in apology, afraid he might have embarrassed the young lady seated opposite him at the oval dining table. However, to the contrary, Lucy smiled nothing but beatific satisfaction.
The American Ambassador’s son had been heroic, again. And lived to tell the tale. He was presently in the US Air Force Hospital at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, recovering from ‘ejection compression’ injuries to his lower back, a couple of cracked ribs and various cuts, bruises and general abrasions of the kind one inevitably sustains departing the cockpit of a stricken warplane at low level and landing in the surf of a rocky beach.
Lucy had read and re-read his brief, hastily scribbled letter – sent airmail from Manila two days ago – that afternoon, folded it and kept it close to her heart ever since.
‘We shall miss Yarralumla,’ Marija laughed.
It had been agreed with Viscount De L’Isle that Lucy would remain in Canberra after the new Governor General was installed, as a guest of the American Embassy, with the McCains acting as her guardians. The teenager was happy at her school, had made a raft of friends and not to put too fine a point on it, here in Australia she was living a much healthier, generally better life than a girl of her age might expect to live in au
sterity-wracked Britain in the foreseeable future.
Things were getting better at home; albeit only to a degree as evinced by the state of the Royal Navy which, had it not been for the US re-introduction of something akin to the Second War ‘Lend-Lease’ arrangements, would have virtually ceased to exist by now. Similarly, it was estimated that well over half the surviving United Kingdom aerospace industry was now operating as contractors for the big US players, Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Grumman and the others, and engine makers Rolls-Royce and Pratt and Whitney were practically the same company, these days, with the Kestrel, TSR2 and a slew of cutting edge projects being developed in sites in the British Isles, Canada and the United States as if the three countries were effectively, one. The military and R and D integration was a hopeful model for the rest of the recovering home economy; and the US’s way back into all those global markets – via CMAFTA – it had lost or abandoned after the October War.
However, the old country had had a terrible time of it and the new normal, bore little comparison with the good life that Lucy could carry on living here in Australia. Or, for that matter, that she might live in North America, given the scholarships several prestigious colleges had already mooted.
But all that still lay in the future.
Over that last dinner before the First Sea Lord departed, there was no talk about the disaster slowly unravelling in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits; and as for the ongoing, proudly declaimed – by President Nixon - carpet bombing of the North Korean cities by Strategic Air Command, any discussion seemed as beyond the pale, as the act itself.
Instead, the conversation revolved around the Queen’s forthcoming State Visit to Australia, and the possibility that Prince Charles, the nineteen-year-old heir to the throne, might stay on down under for one, perhaps, two or three years to study at Sydney University, or even, at HMAS Creswell, the Royal Australian Naval College.
Finally, unable to contain her curiosity longer, when this topic had been talked to death, Marija was full of questions about HMS Liverpool. The First Sea Lord had heard the Governor’s spouse was better informed on many marine engineering and practical ‘coal face’ systems issues than some of his own staffers back in Oxford; now he found himself being gently questioned by a true daughter of the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta! He was inordinately grateful that the Governor General quickly came to his aid.
Marija smiled, her brown eyes twinkling, apologised for badgering the First Sea Lord, and the conversation turned again, this time onto the subject of the forthcoming Royal visit.
The Royal Yacht, Britannia, escorted by the County class guided destroyer HMS Hampshire, and HMS Sirius, the last Leander class general purpose frigate completed before the moratorium on warship construction came into effect, would be setting out in the next few days for the United States, ahead of making passage through the Panama Canal, and transiting the Pacific, calling in at half-a-dozen islands and archipelagos, on the way first to New Zealand and then Australia.
The Hampshire had never been completed to her original design – having gone to sea without her planned Seaslug surface-to-air missile launcher or guidance systems installed – and subsequently operated as an old-fashioned, big at over five thousand tons, gunship destroyer. However, she and her sister, HMS Devonshire – the only two ships of the projected eight in class to have been completed – had both had US Mark 11 twin RIM-24 Tartar launchers installed on their sterns, suddenly turning both ships into highly capable, anti-aircraft platforms.
The Sirius was a slightly smaller version of the Royal Australian Navy’s Anzac class frigates, which used a modified Leander design to accommodate larger fuel bunkers and a slightly more robust hull design specifically to cope with the extremes of the Southern Ocean.
In yet another indication of how reliant the United Kingdom now was on the ‘special relationship’ with its refound North American ally, the US Navy had undertaken to supply all necessary logistical support while the Royal Squadron was in the Pacific, and onwards in the Indian Ocean until it reached Bombay. Thereafter, British bases at Aden, Mombasa and Simonstown would attend to the three ships’ needs on the way home to Portsmouth, via Gibraltar.
There had been talk of the Queen undertaking a world tour; but this time she and her entourage would fly home from South Africa, after only a brief visit to that increasingly strife-riven country.
‘I think it is marvellous that the Queen and Prince Philip are bringing both the princes and Princess Anne,’ Marija said. Prince Charles and Princess Anne were respectively nineteen and seventeen years old, and their infant brother, Edward, three.
‘There was a great deal of discussion about the wisdom of the whole family travelling together, of course,’ Sir Varyl confessed. ‘Things have settled down a bit in a lot of places in the last year or two; but naturally one worries. I know the Americans are worried about it, too. There was talk of one of their SSNs accompanying the Royal Squadron throughout its transit of the Caribbean and the Pacific, and other, surface warships being tasked to always be within a few hours hard steaming time of the Royal Squadron.’
The Royal Australian Navy planned to send its flagship, the Melbourne and at least two destroyers, or frigates, out to meet the Britannia and her escorts off Fiji, thirteen hundred miles north of the Royal Yacht’s first landfall on New Zealand’s North Island at Auckland, and stick with their charges until they left Australian waters nearly a month later.
The dinner had ended with the party relaxing in the cool breeze wafting across the veranda, everybody in easy, wicker chairs, except Lucy who had excused herself and on the way to her room, as was her habit, stopped off and said her goodnights to Elisabetta and Miles. Lucy had to be up early for school in the morning; although not as early as the First Sea Lord and Captain Jim Eberle.
Sir Varyl had enjoined his hosts not to get up in the middle of the night to bid him adieu, knowing of course, full well that there was nothing within his power that would stop them doing just that! Regardless, that they had a long-standing diary engagement entertaining the Governor General elect and his wife at Yarralumla the following afternoon.
‘You’ve done us, the country and the Navy, proud out here, Peter,’ he sighed, inclined his head to Marija, ‘and you too, my dear.’
‘Personally, I think all we’ve done is hold the fort, sir,’ Peter offered, nursing his brandy, like his wife’s a much watered down version of what he had offered his guests. ‘In hindsight, the time for an Australian Governor General was nigh, as they say, when we moved into Yarralumla. Not that we’d have missed it for all the world.’
That said, they were both glad that unlike many occupants of Yarralumla before them, that their term had not been the customary five-years.
But then in this new age it paid to be thankful for small mercies.
Chapter 46
Friday 5th July, 1968
Officer’s Quarters, Ukrainka, Siberia
The kid at the gate of the KGB Compound had looked a lot harder at her ID card, and back to her face – twice, and then a third time – than she had expected. Like many of the enlisted KGB troopers at Seryshevo, he was just a boy, probably recruited locally, not more than eighteen or nineteen, even if he had not lied about his age to get into the green uniform and guarantee himself three square meals a day. Out here in the borderlands where the valleys and the flood plains of the great rivers draining into the Amur had drawn boundaries from time immemorial, thousands of kilometres closer to Mongolia, Manchuria, Japan and Korea than to Sverdlovsk, the Red Army, Air Force, Navy, the KGB or any other wing of the security apparat knew better than to demand fastidious adherence, let alone comprehension of, the dialectic from its rank and file; just that a man, or a woman obeyed orders. The youth’s intense, worried, frowning scrutiny of her face, comparing it to the small, three or four year-old monochrome, grubby, creased thumbprint image on the card would, in other circumstances, have been a little comical.
The heavy make-up an
d the wig, with its flowing, tangled dark hair tumbling over her shoulders certainly made her look the part but she simply could not project the necessary harlot with a heart of gold presence required to carry the role off with any real aplomb. No, she just looked like a slut, and not actually, she had realised studying herself in the mirror, a very appealing one. Still, most men were easily pleased, especially when they were drunk. Two arms, two legs, a vagina; that usually did it for most members of the species!
Knocking at the door of his dacha, she had half-expected to find Andrei Kirov drunk, or well on the way to oblivion. It was late, dark now and apart from the nagging whispering of the insects gathering in swarms, given that there was an air base less than a couple of kilometres away, it was almost ethereally quiet; an unsettling metaphor for the decline of the Motherland. Six years ago, this place would have reverberated with the scream of jet engines near and far, the sky would have shuddered with the concussion of Tu-95s’ Kuznetsov power plants and the Amerikanskaya Mechta’s mighty sisters. Seryshevo would have been vibrantly alive every second of every hour of every day all year around. Now, she was living in a ghost town and the worst thing was that nobody cared, and the surge of renewed purpose which had infected her, and the others when Vladimir Zakharov had seduced them into his conspiracy, had long since evaporated.
Depressingly, the base Commandant’s madness had begun, like a virus, to infect everybody around him. Andrei Kirov’s entrapment was but the first of many; by the time Zakharov was finished, nobody at Seryshevo would have clean hands when the inquisitors and the torturers from the west fell upon it.
That was the true evil of a conspiracy.
Afterwards, it was very nearly impossible to tell where it began, and ended and therefore, who was guilty and who was innocent. The problem was that they were all committed; and anybody viewing their actions with the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight would instantly recognise the signs, and condemn them out of hand. Worse, even if they delayed and delayed, the conspiracy would at some stage be revealed. There was nowhere to hide. One mistake, one reckless moment would be fatal. Not just for her and the four others in on the plot but for the whole crew, and probably anybody who had worked on the Amerikanskaya Mechta in the last year. Guilt would be assumed by association and ironically, it was conceivable, that the one person who had clean hands, plausible deniability, might be Comrade Major General Vladimir Zakharov!
