Warsaw Concerto, page 54
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
The first exploratory plenary sessions between middle-ranking professional diplomats supposedly got under way on Monday, with the main circus assembling on board the USS United States the following Friday afternoon.
That all sounded horribly optimistic to Alan Hannay.
The great transatlantic liner, the unassailable holder of the prized Blue Ribbon, for the fastest crossing of ‘the pond’ was only due to anchor off Alameda Navy Base tomorrow morning.
It was odd being a mere spectator.
When he had been Peter Christopher’s chargé d'affaires, ludicrously his country’s deputy ambassador in Philadelphia for a few short months, then Naval Attaché at the Embassy he had always been in the thick of things. Ever since Peter and Marija had left for new foreign fields he had been increasingly less engaged, marking time, looking forward to re-starting his career in the real, sea-going Royal Navy.
These days, all he ever seemed to do was gather intelligence, make sure that his superiors were never blindsided, never knowingly, or avoidably caught unawares by their hosts.
“Something will turn up,” Rosa comforted him as they settled in the back of the car the Mayor’s Office had sent for them that evening.
“I shouldn’t complain,” her husband apologised. “It’s just that I feel so useless…”
Establishing that his superior, Rear Admiral Michael Pollock was yet to arrive at City Hall, he and Rosa had waited in the cathedral-like lobby. As was par for the course of late, they were accosted by numerous new arrivals, old friends and acquaintances, and made small talk for several minutes.
Fifty-year-old Pollock, the recently installed Head of the Naval Mission (West Coast) to the United States was a non-nonsense man going places in a hurry. He had been the gunnery officer of the cruiser HMS Norfolk at the Battle of North Cape in which the German battleship Scharnhorst had been sunk. By then he was a veteran of several sharp actions and of the ‘Malta run’. At the time of the October War he was coming to the end of his posting as Director, Surface Weapons at the Admiralty's shore establishment at Bath, and looking forward to taking command of the cruiser HMS Blake.
“Bloody traffic!” He complained cheerfully as he shook Alan’s hand and bent his head down to peck Rosa’s cheek. Pollock’s second wife, Marjory, and both his children by his first wife, who had sadly died in 1951, had survived the cataclysm but they were still back in England, and he had clearly welcomed the company of his youthful deputy and his Maltese wife.
He stood up straight, ignoring the throng now filling the lobby.
He fixed Alan with a wry gaze.
“Now then! I need a volunteer to fill a vacancy on an electrical engineering and weapons guidance systems course at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Mister Hannay,” Michael Pollock announced, abjuring the usual ‘Alan, my boy!’ bonhomie of their customary relations, oblivious to the continual hubbub all around them.
“Sir?” The younger man inquired respectfully.
“You need a technical specialisation if you are to – one day – command at sea in the modern world, Alan,” Pollock told him bluntly. “I suggest you acquire it here, now,” he corrected himself, “or rather, down at Pasadena. Steal a march on the competition, what!”
“You’d let me swan off just like that, sir?”
Michael Pollock looked to Rosa and laughed, almost paternally.
“Of course, I bloody would! The First Sea Lord would have me skinned alive if I made waves! Besides, think of it as the Service’s way of patting you on the back for all the good work you,” he winked at Rosa, “and your lovely wife have done for the Navy in the time you’ve been over here.”
“Yes, sir…”
“Good. I’ll have the paperwork delivered to you tomorrow morning. Caltech runs a rolling program of these courses – very intensive stuff, I gather – and the next one kicks off in about three weeks’ time. It’s a combined service thing; mostly US Air Force and Navy but with a sprinkling of brighter Army and Marine Corps types with a couple of places reserved for we Brits or our Commonwealth chums. The Air Force will accommodate you in appropriate married quarters for the duration of your time in Pasadena.” Pollock stopped, thought for a second or so. “Yes… I think that’s about it. Any questions?”
Alan Hannay was feeling somewhat concussed, struggling to take it in.
“Er, I’m sure I’ll think of something but right now…”
Rosa thought she was going to dance a most undignified jig of delight. She settled for planting a kiss on Michael Pollock’s cheek.
Chapter 50
Thursday 26th January 1967
Black Cove Municipal Pier, San Francisco
“I knew you’d catch up with me sooner or later,” the old man minding the two long rods observed. He was sitting on the decking with his booted feet swinging in thin air ten feet above the cold, green-grey water. He wore a battered old US Navy cap, and an equally weathered sheepskin coat to ward off the early morning chill. He had just renewed the bait on his second line and beside him two small fish helplessly circled in a half-full iron bucket.
“Don’t you need a permit to fish off this pier, old man?” Kurt Mikkelsen asked, squatting down beside the fisherman.
“Yeah, probably. You need a goddam permit to do anything in this goddam country, these days.”
The younger man joined him, his feet dangling over the water.
“Now that’s what I call a ship,” he offered, indicating the huge liner sliding elegantly beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, her clipper bow slicing as effortlessly through the tide as the wraiths of mist which still clung to the surface of the sea.
Even in her dowdy battleship grey livery the USS United States was a symphony in motion, the ultimate in fast transatlantic liners, the last of her kind specifically built to win and to hold the Blue Ribbon for the fastest passenger-carrying transit of the North Atlantic. And, of course, to ferry a whole Infantry Division to any part of the globe at a speed of around thirty-five knots. According to the headlines of the San Francisco papers the last couple of days the great ship had been converted to a floating hospital in 1964, and in the last couple of months rapidly restored as a five-star hotel; although from her drab paint job one would be hard-pressed to know it.
The liner’s guardship, the Charles F. Adams class guided missile destroyer USS Henry B. Wilson (DDG-7), had preceded the liner under the Golden Gate.
Mikkelsen nodded to the two men’s right at the barren hulk of Alcatraz island.
“I hear stories about what goes on over there,” he said.
“Horse shit, all of that. They say the Feds used it as a holding and interrogation facility just after the war but that sort of thing is just airhead talk. I don’t think anybody lives over there now.”
The younger man grinned.
“Maybe, they’ll re-open it just for me.”
The old man grunted a scoffing laugh.
“Maybe…”
He played his lines, Mikkelsen smoked a cigarette as they watched the USS United States slowly navigate south of Alcatraz until presently, the liner was broadside on to them. People along the shore and on the other quays and piers would be watching, staring in awe at the behemoth creeping cautiously along the deep-water channel to the Bay Bridge to enter the Lower Bay.
“I reckon she’ll moor up off Alameda,” the old man declared.
“Within sight of the Polaris boat base,” Mikkelsen retorted, wryly.
“You look tired, son.”
“I’ve been away too long.”
“That’s no lie.” The younger man flicked his cigarette butt into the water. “Can’t have been easy for you, either?”
The old man shrugged.
“I miss your Ma,” he sighed, his eyes never straying from his line as he slowly reeled it in. “In case you were wondering,” he went on, “she never guessed. All she knew was that you had trouble with the Feds – that it wasn’t of your doing – and that you weren’t coming home any time soon. The War Fever took her quickly in the end.”
The two men were silent for some minutes while the USS Unites States passed south of Alcatraz Island and followed her escort, the USS Henry B. Wilson under the Bay Bridge. A handful of small boats and yachts had come out to greet the liner, careful to keep well out of harm’s way. These things tended to be done with a lot less fanfare than before the war.
“I don’t think the Feds know where I am,” Kurt Mikkelsen’s step-father remarked. “I wouldn’t swear to it but I think I’d know if I was under surveillance. Why’d you kill that cop, son?”
“He was pointing a gun at me.”
The old man thought about it.
“That was dumb,” he said, wearily, “letting the bastards catch up with you.”
“Maybe, they’ll keep their distance another time.”
“Naw, those people, they never learn, son.”
Kurt Mikkelsen wondered if the week’s stubble on the old man’s face, the straggles of unkempt, lank hair escaping from under his cap, and the clean, albeit worn workman’s clothes were a disguise, or symptoms that he had let his standards slip. Not having seen him for so long it was hard to know what to make of his apparent physical frailty. The man he had last seen in 1959 had still been the muscle-hard Marine, clean shaven, military to a fault even in a civilian suit despite his advancing years and the lingering legacy of the wounds he had suffered on Guadalcanal and on Saipan. After that, all he had been good for was recruiting for the Corps and then, when disillusion had set in, a life lived differently…
“Forget I asked,” the old man told him. “I do what I do; you do what you do.”
That had been their pact for two decades.
Mikkelsen’s birth father had gone down on a rusty old scow carrying ten thousand tons of iron ore in a storm on Lake Michigan in November 1926 when he was a baby. His mother had re-married before he was old enough to know Hans Mikkelsen was not his real dad. Hans was the man who taught him to shoot, fish, live in the woods, to be strong, self-reliant, and not to take shit from anybody. Kurt had grown up on Army and Navy bases all over North America, and for three years, on Honolulu.
Hans went wherever the Marines sent him.
Well, right up until he damned near got killed on Guadalcanal, and thirty months later at Iwo Jima.
“Never thought we’d meet again, son,” the old man said, staring out across the grey waters of San Francisco Bay.
“That makes two of us, old man.”
“I was living in Tennessee when I got your letter. The VA forwarded it to me from Portland. How did you find me?”
“You knew I was coming to San Francisco. I reckoned you’d go fishing most mornings wherever you ended up. I checked out some of the piers opposite Oakland yesterday morning. Today, I came over this side of town…”
“You shouldn’t take risks like that, son.”
“What about you?”
“I’m an old man.”
“I tried to retire, you know.”
“Figures…”
“They came after me. They ordered somebody I cared about to end me.” The younger man sniffed at the cold air. “So, I reckoned it was time to come home. If the bastards want, they can have me. But it will cost them.”
The old man looked sidelong at Kurt.
“You and me, we’re still okay?”
“Sure. Always.”
“I love this country, son. You and me, we’ve killed too many people for the flag…”
“I never worked for the resistance, Pa.”
This prompted a bronchial sigh of relief.
“The Company used those suckers to bring me back from Brazil,” the younger man sighed. “Kind of makes you think whose side those shitheads at Langley are on, these days? You know the resistance is just a gang of arseholes like those people in Wisconsin, Commies and nigger-hating racist rednecks who think the rest of the Union still owes them for the Civil War,” the younger man said blankly. “No trade craft, arrogant as hell, a load of dumb arses. Marilyn de Witt told me everything before I ended her. Those people would sign a deal with the Devil himself to get what they want.”
“What would that be?”
“Pretty much like the Nazis, except an all-American version. They’d be the superhumans, blacks, Jews, anybody else they don’t like would be the sub-humans. First thing the arse-holes would do would be to build a wall along the Mexican border, take away the voting rights of the blacks, Latinos, Chinamen.” He sniffed the cool, salty air. “Never going to happen. If Hoover wasn’t still Director, the FBI would have done a job on these people years ago.”
“You reckon?”
“Yeah, reckon I do.”
“I’m dying, son.”
“What…”
“Cancer,” the old man said without angst, distracted momentarily by a twitch on his fishing line. He reeled in. A false bite, nothing. “Yeah, the doctors say it’s the sort of thing I ought to expect at my age. All the shit in the air we breathe doesn’t help. They wanted to operate. I don’t want them cutting me about. That’s why I come down here most days. I like fishing better than lying around waiting for it to start hurting more than it already does.”
“How long do they give you?”
“Weeks, months. I don’t hurt much yet. Don’t plan to hang around if it gets too bad, there ain’t no dignity in that. I’ve done a lot of things I ought to be ashamed of in my time, son,” he guffawed bronchially, “but underneath I’m still a Marine. Always done what I thought was right. I don’t care what you’ve got on your conscience, son. That’s between you and,” he shrugged, “whatever. I only hope there isn’t a God sitting in judgement.” He hesitated. “Of any of us!”
Chapter 51
Thursday 26th January 1967
HMS Campbeltown, Gibraltar
Lieutenant the Honourable Keith Moss, the old destroyer’s twenty-four-year-old Public School and Cambridge-educated electronic warfare officer, rushed to the bridge wing to see what the commotion on the deck below was all about just in time to witness two men dive, very much in the unfussy, approved manner, on top of a rolling 5-inch round, arresting its progress over the side of the ship with at least a yard to spare.
That was the second time that had happened in the last half-an-hour! It was not as if the ship was re-ammunitioning in a seaway; they were tied up alongside the inner mole at Gibraltar for goodness sake!
Keith Moss contemplated bawling an expletive-laden reprimand at the senior rate supervising the careless miscreants. Instantly, he thought better of it. The Captain (D) would have his guts for garters if he lost his temper again. Having progressed from being a nervy, barely competent watchkeeper to being one of the senior members of the wardroom in no time at all – the Old Man used Campbeltown to sort the men from the boys among his officers, consequently so many men had been transferred to other vessels in the Squadron that bizarrely, Moss had found himself the third most senior watchkeeper on board in practically no time flat – he had flirted with the ‘over-confident stage that every young officer goes through’, and now he was getting far too angry, far too quickly with the failings of the men around him.
Captain O’Reilly had taken him aside and very gently, firmly requested that he ‘get his act together’. He had not minced his words.
‘The next time you think about upbraiding a man in front of his subordinates take a deep breath and think about how you would react, were you in his place. That will be all.’
Moss bit his tongue.
“I say, chaps!” He called jovially. “That was well caught!”
He saw the grins on the faces of the men below him. Ammunitioning ship was no joke even in harbour and Campbeltown had virtually emptied her main battery magazines during the days of shore bombardment missions along the Biscay coast, before escorting the Victorious south.
Unlike on more modern destroyers the Fletchers’ Mark 12 5-inch 38-caliber main battery rifles did not fire ‘fixed’ rounds in which the propellent charge and the business end of the projectile, the ‘shell’, were combined into a single reload.
The ‘full-service charge’ of over fifteen pounds of smokeless or flash-less powder – the latter for employment at night – was contained in a brass case, analogous to a giant bullet casing, which when filled weighed in at just a mite under twenty-eight pounds. One of these had to be loaded for every shell, each of which regardless of type weighed in at over fifty pounds. Thus, what with one thing and another, refilling the magazines was heavy, wearying work which took its toll, especially severely on the greenest of the destroyer’s men.
“How are we doing down there?” Moss inquired.
“We’ll be done in about an hour, sir.”
“Jolly good! Carry on with the good work!”
The Squadron’s ‘work’ off the mouth of the Gironde Estuary and farther north, supporting the big ships as they systematically demonstrated against or levelled the last enclaves north of Bordeaux had been bloodless until the last couple of days.
Campbeltown and her sister the Perth had both lost men overboard manoeuvring inshore in wild seas. A gun house accident on the Dunbar had caused a premature detonation in the barrel of her No 5 rifle, seriously injuring but miraculously not killing any member of the gun crew. Then, as Task Force V1 was about to disengage and make passage for Gibraltar Victorious had lost a Buccaneer S-2 – probably because of a mechanical failure of some description – and a Sea Vixen had gone over the side of the carrier landing in appalling weather. Neither crew man had managed to eject in time.
