Warsaw Concerto, page 34
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Margaret Thatcher had been afraid her friend was going to say that. She came to a decision.
“Has Peter been briefed yet.”
Peter, Lord Carington was First Secretary of State and her deputy, he was in charge when she was out of the country or not immediately ‘in contact’.
“That’s happening now.”
“Good. Please ask him to monitor the situation until I return to Oxford. That will be on Tuesday as planned. Just because the Soviets are playing their old games, I have no intention of dancing to their tune.”
“I think that’s the wisest thing to do,” Tom Harding-Grayson agreed. “I confess the thing that worries me most about this is how our American friends will play this.”
“I suggest you talk to Walter before you talk to Cabot Lodge,” Margaret Thatcher mandated, bringing the exchange to a conclusion.
Fifty-six-year-old Australian-born Lieutenant General Sir John Hackett, DSO, MC, had been General Officer, Commanding in Chief Northern Ireland at the time of the October War, and after recovering from illness, re-instated in that role in February of 1966.
He had heard out the Prime Minister’s terse briefing regarding the latest Soviet provocation in silence. After the Lady put down the phone nobody said a word for some seconds.
“I wondered when the beggars would risk tweaking the Tiger’s tail again, Prime Minister,” he sighed, a twinkle in his eye.
Margaret Thatcher did not know the old soldier very well – albeit her husband had recommended him to her in the most effusively glowing terms, which was not at all like him – nevertheless, he was one of those generals to whom she warmed on every encounter.
Sir Michael Carver, the Chief of the Defence Staff had cavilled when Francis Pym, supported by Peter Carington had asked for Hackett’s reinstatement in Ulster: ‘John is pretty much the most experienced, and best soldier in the Army. He might be better employed in the Middle East or in France…’
Hackett was, like Carver, a multi-facetted man. Hailing from Tipperary, educated at Geelong Grammar School in Victoria he had studied painting at the Central School of Art in London, then ‘Greats’ and Modern History at Oxford before being commissioned into the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars in 1933. Awarded a B. Litt for his thesis on the Early Middle Ages and Saladin’s campaign against the Third Crusade, he was hardly a typical soldier; he was a painter and a historian, he spoke French, German, Italian, Arabic and half-a-dozen other languages, adjuncts to a fertile intelligence that in the years after the Second War had made him one of, if not the British Army’s, foremost thinker.
Wounded in the Syrian Campaign of 1941, he had married the Austrian widow of a German in 1942 – a thing an officer had to acquire the appropriate and exceptional permissions to so do in wartime – winning a Military Cross prior to commanding ‘C’ Squadron of the 8th Hussars in the Western Desert, getting wounded again, badly burned bailing out of a wrecked tank, and acquiring the first of his Distinguished Service Orders for his part in the fight for Sidi Rezegh airfield. Recovering in Cairo he had kept himself out of mischief helping to set up the Long-Range Desert Group, the fore-runner of the SAS.
Back in England Hackett, promoted Brigadier, he had led the 4th Parachute Brigade at Arnhem, where he was wounded – for the third time in the Second War – in the stomach so badly that a German doctor had wanted to put him out of his misery by administering a lethal injection. Notwithstanding, he had survived, again, later escaping and being nursed back to health by a Dutch family.
After the Second War he had commanded, and disbanded, the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force, held staff and divisional commands in the 1950s, in 1958 been appointed Commandant of the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham ahead of his posting to Belfast in 1961. All things considered, while General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland was not, perhaps, a plum posting it was indubitably, the most demanding in the British Army and after Michael Carver, there was no more able or imaginative general officer on the Army list than John Hackett.
Margaret Thatcher raised an eyebrow in askance.
“An enemy demonstrates,” Hackett remarked, a little wryly, “when he wishes to distract one’s attention, or, and this may be pertinent in this instance, if he is too weak to risk engaging one’s main strength in open battle. People allow all those black and white newsreel films of massed Red Army tanks to deceive them into thinking that the Soviets only have the ‘hammer and anvil’ tactic; they do not. This ‘demonstration’ may be ‘smoke and mirrors’; or they may contrive to mount a major operation somewhere in Europe to embarrass ‘the West’. Their obvious next move is to threaten to or to actually invest West Germany east of the Rhine, or to make trouble in northern Italy, or the Middle East again. Their object is not necessarily to park their tanks on the Atlantic but to force us to expend treasure on our forces which your government would prefer, rightly, to spend on new hospitals, schools and general post-war reconstruction.” Hackett smiled sadly. “At some point we will end up fighting the beggars again but providing we remember that, we will probably prevail.”
Margaret Thatcher stared at him.
“Probably?” She asked.
“Yes, nothing is certain in war and we are as much at war with the Soviet Union today as we were on that night in October four years ago, Prime Minister. There used to be a demarcation line – the ‘Iron Curtain’ – we all hated it but nonetheless, recognised and respected it. Now there is a no man’s land in Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, and there can be no peace until such time as we, or our enemies, occupy it in strength. That, I suspect, is a thing the Soviets will be in no position to do for many years without beggaring themselves somewhere else. Remember, the main mission of the Red Army is to occupy the Soviet Union and as many of its clients and satellites as possible. It exists to defend the Revolution, not to conquer the World.”
The Prime Minister had the distinct impression that Hackett was viewing her with no little sympathy.
“Europe,” he went on, “is and always will be the crucible of war and peace in our hemisphere. In the past, as now, we have held the balance of power. That alone prevented German hegemony over the continent in the wars of the first half of this century, more recently, our courageous intervention in France last year prevented complete leftist hegemony over our nearest continental neighbours and, an unintended consequence, greatly bolstered the security of both Spain and Portugal in the same way our Mediterranean and Middle East Policy has partially frustrated Soviet – and Red Dawn – ambitions in that theatre of operation. The danger in former times, as now, is if we allow our focus to be distracted from Europe, Europe is the fulcrum around which our national security depends. Hong Kong was irrelevant to the security of the United Kingdom, likewise Korea, granted, tolerable if not good relations with Mainland China must be an essential long-term geopolitical objective. We have too many enemies near at home to court them overseas in the Far East or the Americas.”
Margaret Thatcher wondered if she ought to be irritated.
Here she was standing in a windswept airport terminal building being gently lectured by a soldier as to the folly of politicians playing geopolitics…
Her generals always got hot under the collar when she wanted to talk about the South Atlantic, and in a different way most of her admirals too, truth be known. The RAF did not give a fig about the Falkland Islands; those faraway rocks were ‘out of range’, and thus, nothing to do with them.
“So, what if Australia is invaded, Sir John?” She inquired, somewhat more tersely than she had intended.
“That would be very sad, Prime Minister. But,” he shrugged, “but realistically, there would not actually be an awful lot we could do about it.”
Margaret Thatcher shook her head.
“Like the Falklands all over again?”
“Quite so, Prime Minister.”
Chapter 29
Monday 19th December 1966
Alamo Heights, San Antonio, Texas
The housekeeper was Mexican and spoke very little English. She had her own room at the back of the property, a 1930s Spanish-style two-floor building meant to be full of squalling kids.
Kurt Mikkelsen had no idea if the woman, who was his own age, or a little younger, handsome rather than pretty, plump with hazel eyes which peered neutrally at him from below her long, jet-black hair, had any idea who he was, what he was, or who paid her weekly pay check. Or indeed, if she cared one way or another.
“You, Calvin?” She had asked when he knocked at the door two days ago within about five minutes of the appointed time of day.
He had nodded.
She had let him in.
“Me,” she had said, “Conchita.”
He had unhurriedly searched the house, including the housekeeper’s room, the woman following him from room to room, wordlessly. He was dusty from the road, two days hitching and walking. He needed to wash. Deciding that would wait he had walked into the bigger of the three bedrooms on the first floor, beckoning Conchita. She was hesitant, although oddly, in no way fearful. He had placed his right hand on her breast above her heart, curious to see how she reacted.
She had not flinched or drawn away.
Turning her around he had crushed her breasts in his hands.
With a sigh she had pulled up her skirts, bent over the bed and he had fucked her. Hard, the first time. Turning her on her back he had taken her greedily, less roughly the second. Afterwards, she had got up, smoothed down her dress and he had gone into the first-floor bathroom to shower, shave.
Last night Conchita had prepared tacos, this morning she had placed grits in front of him. She made good coffee and the house was clean, as was she.
The car, a 1961 Ford Fair Lane Sedan, squealed to a halt in the road, a quiet cul-de-sac in which all the buildings sat at least twenty yards back from the pavement, many like the safe house, partially obscured to pedestrians and neighbours alike by unruly, poorly tended shrubs and cacti.
Mikkelsen watched the slim, bespectacled woman dressed in blue jeans and a checked blouse pour herself from behind the wheel onto the sidewalk and straighten, unhurriedly taking in her surroundings.
She flipped the handle for the car’s trunk, retrieved two cases, each of which she planted on the tarmac while she locked up the car and took another long, thorough three-hundred-and-sixty degree look at her surroundings.
She was good, a witness would simply think she was wondering if she was lost.
Is this the right place?
She carried only one of the cases to the door.
She rang the bell and went back for the other case.
Mikkelsen did not go anywhere near the front door. Nobody in San Antonio needed to see him today, or on any other day.
He guessed the visitor was in her thirties. Her hair was straw blond, shoulder-length and a little tangled, not a thing which worried her. She wore no make-up, there were no rings on her fingers. Her face was sun-burnished, as if she lived her life outdoors.
She turned to the housekeeper.
“Déjanos, Conchita. No necesitas escuchar nada de lo que decimos. Vuelve en dos horas. Lo entiendes?”
The other woman nodded.
Leave us, Conchita. You do not need to hear anything we say. Come back in two hours. Do you understand?
The cases were in the lobby, just inside the front door.
The woman who had brought them to Alamo Heights settled in a wicker chair with her back to the wall, having viewed the Mexican depart with thoughtful eyes.
“Our struggle is to free people like Conchita,” she said when they were alone. “Have you fucked her already?”
The man raised an eyebrow, moving away from the window where he had watched the housekeeper trudge away from the building and disappear farther down the road.
“What’s it to you?”
“Nothing particularly,” she conceded. “Everything you specified is in the cases I brought today.”
“Good.”
There had been nearly $5,000 in used notes in the deposit box in Philadelphia. He had taken the key to a similar box at Texas Mutual in downtown San Antonio, and after satisfying himself that nobody had tampered with the safe box, left the out of date identity documents in place and half the $2,000 in used notes. He had been away a long time, it was hard to know who or what to trust these days.
Hopefully, when the FBI opened the deposit box, they might believe he was coming back for the money…
Mikkelsen studied the woman.
“Do you have a name?”
“You don’t need to know my name.”
“Do I see you again?”
“That’s not my call.”
The man would have been offended. He probably ought to be offended. A regular guy would have been offended. The woman was talking to him as if he was hired help but then empathy had never been his strong suit; he really did not care what anybody thought about him. Respect was a paper-thin veneer, hardly skin-deep, he saw the world without the distracting, debilitating emotiveness and sensitivities he guessed most people bore like some psychic, disabling psychosomatic curse.
Rachel had told him the difference between him and her was that she was not a psychopath. She would probably have been more worried about upsetting him if she had not already decided to kill him.
He seriously doubted if she had believed he had drowned in that boat sinking, off Cyprus. That scenario had been just plausible enough that she did not have to come after him; everything in their business was probabilities, the science of the pragmatic and the possible, and never taking dumb risks you did not have to take, ever, not even on a very, very bad day.
So, she would have thought about the reports, calculated the odds and let it go, moved on. Their profession was dangerous enough without allowing complications, uncertainties, imponderables – which in any case were somebody else’s problem – to get in the way.
A random drowning might be unlikely; it was by no means wholly improbable and sometimes people just got unlucky.
Shit happens.
Anybody who had ever been in the military, especially anywhere near combat knew that for a fact. And besides, he had been wanting to get out for a while by then. Doing what they did was problematic enough when you believed in the cause, whatever it was, and by then he was only interested in working for whoever paid best.
That was another thing he and Rachel had fallen out over.
His Company controllers had wanted him to do something about that…
Brainless fucking college kids!
All of them!
He and Rachel had been alone out there for so long they should, by rights, have turned feral. If she had finally found a way out, good for her.
He had thought he was through with the…business.
But once those bastards at Langley started thinking they owned your soul they never let go. First, they had driven him out of Venezuela, next Colombia, for a while he had based himself in Buenos Aires, after that he had tried to go to ground in Montevideo. That had not lasted either, the Uruguayan secret police had come for him one night, after that the old Nazis in Asunción had soon chased him out of Paraguay. His bank accounts frozen or sequestered, his local contacts under arrest or on the run, his former ‘masters’ had left him no option.
He had no idea exactly how his present ‘principals’ had established his availability, or how – safely – to contact him.
He presumed that even after the failed coup of December 1963, and the rebellion in the Midwest, there were still enough ‘bad eggs’ within the Company, the FBI and the multiplicity of Federal military and civilian intelligence organs, the National Security Agency, possibly even inside the Secret Service, who had never, or would ever, forgive the Ivy League elite for leading the country into disaster after disaster, to still give what remained of ‘the resistance’ some small succour.
Heck, there was a small-time crook in the White House, an acknowledged shyster at the Department of Justice, a senile old faggot in charge of the FBI, and there was a guy in charge at Langley with hands so badly stained by the sort of heinous shit that would never wash off if he lived to be a-hundred-and-one! With people like that running the show people had no right to be surprised the clowns had not noticed a lot of people had despaired of their country.
Kurt Mikkelsen was not one of them, of course.
People like him did not do patriotism.
Chapter 30
Sunday 1st January 1967
The National Cathedral, Washington DC
Sir Nicholas ‘Nicko’ Henderson, his wife, Lady Mary and their thirteen-year-old daughter Alexandra were pleasantly surprised to discover that the rain had eased by the time the service of National Memorial concluded at a little after two o’clock that afternoon.
All those present had attended solemn vigils overnight in memory of the fallen in the attacks on the cities, the unholy harbingers of the nightmare to come just one short year ago.
The United States was a land in mourning that New Year’s Day.
Everybody’s thoughts were still firmly in the dark days of the old year. In Nevada, Michigan, New York, Philadelphia, and Wisconsin, in Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri and other places without number, from coast to gleaming coast, on ships and on bases overseas, Americans were united in their prayers, their grief and their relief that they had passed through the vale of death and emerged, shaken yet reconfirmed in their manifest destiny, survivors, practically all of whom had lost a friend, a relation, a loved one in the maelstrom of the recent Civil War.
