Reckless Read online

  ‘What makes you think I want to do it again?’

  ‘I don’t think. All I can do is offer. Then you say yes or you say no. It’s not so complicated, really.’

  ‘I say no.’

  ‘Fine. Shame, though. You’re an absolute cracker in the sack.’

  She was gratified in spite of herself.

  ‘What a boy you are, Bobby.’

  ‘Oh, go on, Pamela. Be a pal. It won’t take long.’

  The whole idea was insane, but somehow she had run out of objections.

  ‘You promise me the world is going to end?’

  ‘Very possibly after lunch.’

  ‘All right, then.’

  They went up the stairs to Pamela’s second-floor bedroom like naughty children, leaving the picnic lunch scattered over the kitchen table. There was no time for the Dutch cap, but Bobby turned out to have come equipped with a condom.

  ‘You are so vain!’ She smacked him as they pulled off their clothes. ‘You knew I’d say yes.’

  ‘I was a Boy Scout,’ he said. ‘Be Prepared.’

  He gave the scout salute, standing grinning in his underpants. They threw themselves onto Pamela’s bed without turning back the covers. Pamela had abandoned all resistance. Suddenly his naked body was against hers, and she put her arms round him, and felt a surge of excitement.

  He was strong and eager and everything seemed simple after all. Her body awoke under the assault of his body, and she wanted him and wanted to be wanted by him.

  Then he was finished, and she wished he could have gone on longer.

  Lying there in his arms, glistening with sweat, comfortable, expecting nothing, she thought about the world ending, and wondered if she cared. In Bobby’s world you live for the moment, and then the moment passes. What then?

  He gets up and leaves you and you’re alone again, and the world doesn’t end after all.

  Bobby stirred beside her. He leaned over to check the bedside clock.

  ‘Gotta go, girl.’

  He jumped up, naked, and looked round.

  ‘One floor down,’ she said.

  While Bobby was in the bathroom, she straightened up the bed covers that had been churned up by their lovemaking. Then she took her turn in the bathroom. By the time she was dressed and down in the kitchen, Bobby had cleared the kitchen table and packed all the leftovers of lunch back into the hamper.

  ‘You’re very house-trained.’

  ‘I want to come again.’

  ‘Absolutely not. Never.’

  ‘Oh, well. You don’t know till you ask.’

  He gave her a lingering kiss on the mouth, and left.

  Pamela moved slowly about the kitchen, erasing all the evidence of their unexpected lunch. She didn’t think at all about what had taken place, because she didn’t know how to think about it.

  She went back up to her bedroom to make quite sure she and Bobby had left no tell-tale signs. Then coming down the stairs to the first floor, she opened the door to Hugo and Harriet’s bedroom. As she looked round the pretty room she tried to imagine them in it: Harriet in a nightdress, Hugo in pyjamas, folding back the ivory-coloured quilted counterpane, climbing into bed beside her. She tried to imagine them making love, as she and Bobby had just done, but couldn’t. Harriet would ask Hugo to turn out the light. She would sigh, to indicate that she was suffering from a headache but didn’t want to trouble him with it. He would say something gentle and pitying like, ‘Poor darling.’ They would sleep without touching.

  45

  ‘Which ship is closest to the line?’

  ‘The Kimovsk, Mr President. Then the Yuri Gagarin.’

  ‘How soon before one of them crosses the line?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing. They may have turned round.’

  ‘May have? Don’t we know?’

  ‘Not as exactly as we’d like, Mr President.’

  The Office of National Intelligence tracked the movement of ships on the high seas by monitoring their radio messages. Transmissions picked up by land stations in Scotland, Maine and Florida were plotted on charts to give a current position. But transmissions were only occasional. Direction and speed of sailing took time to establish and were subject to error.

  ‘Why can’t we send out planes to track them?’

  ‘That’s a big ocean out there, Mr President.’

  The Kimovsk, a lumber ship believed to be carrying SS5 medium-range ballistic missiles, was being hunted by an aircraft carrier group led by the USS Essex, with orders to stop and board. The ONI calculated the Kimovsk was close to the quarantine line, five hundred miles from the Cuban coast, and that the Essex would make contact very soon.

  More accurate information reached ExComm mid-morning that Wednesday. CIA Director John McCone brought the news.

  ‘Mr President, I have a note just handed to me that all six Soviet ships currently identified in Cuban waters have either stopped or reversed course.’

  ‘What do you mean, Cuban waters?’ said Dean Rusk.

  ‘Dean, I don’t know at the moment.’

  ‘Did they cross the line?’

  Then came more detail. The line had not been crossed. The Soviet ships had turned back.

  ‘We’re eyeball to eyeball,’ said Dean Rusk, ‘and the other fellow just blinked.’

  ‘I like that,’ said Bobby Kennedy.

  But no one knew exactly what had happened, or why. It appeared the Kimovsk had received its order to turn back at least twenty-four hours earlier, because it was now reported to be eight hundred miles from the Essex, and steaming in the opposite direction.

  The president wanted desperately not only to manage the crisis, but to be seen to manage it. He needed to show leadership and resolve. But how do you do that when you don’t know what’s going on? No one could tell him for sure what Soviet weapons there were on Cuba, or why Khrushchev had taken the risk of putting them there. He felt like a blind boxer, punching in the dark.

  Meanwhile Khrushchev was sending out crazy statements attacking him as if he was the one who had put the whole world at risk, and all those fucking messages were piling up from self-appointed sages and holy men demanding that he choose peace over war.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ muttered Kennedy to himself, hobbling on crutches across his private quarters, rooting out more painkillers. ‘I can hear the fucking guns of August.’

  These endless meetings were half killing his back. He decided to take time out to soak in a tub.

  ‘Then get the quack round to shoot me full of horse piss,’ he told his secretary Mrs Lincoln.

  As he lay in the tub in silence, away from the bickering voices of his advisers, he let the many strands of the crisis float through his mind. Maybe he was missing something.

  Over in Europe they had this idea that it wasn’t such a big deal. What was so different to the American missiles on Russia’s borders? Everyone knew you couldn’t use nuclear weapons. They were just there to show the world how big and strong you were. It was all just a big dick contest.

  Try telling that to the American people. For ten years and more we’ve scared them shitless with the Red menace that’s going to enslave the world. So now they can nuke us in our beds and we’re supposed to do nothing?

  Lying in the tub, feeling the hot water relax his muscles, he laughed quietly to himself. He got the big joke. All that Communist baloney about world domination was aimed at their own people, the Russians, to make them feel they were going through hard times for a purpose, that at the end of it all there was a bright and shining future. And all the Red scare baloney from McCarthy and Nixon and the rest was aimed at our own people, the Americans, to promote domestic political careers. We shout fire in our own backyard, but our voices carry across the ocean. Then the ones who truly believe there’s a fire are ten thousand miles away, and by the time it reaches them it’s lost its stink, and they don’t know it’s bullshit.

  So this dickhead goes and puts nukes on Cuba! You had to admire his balls. It was a
n insane thing to do, to risk a nuclear war like that. Except there was no risk. How could the president of the United States set off a global holocaust for Cuba? Whichever way you looked at it, Khrushchev had played a blinder. He must know he’d have to take the missiles down. But he was going to extract a heavy price.

  ‘It’s all about fucking Berlin,’ said the president to himself. ‘That’s the only way this makes any sense.’

  After his bath Dr Max Jacobson did his voodoo with his needle, and Kennedy was ready to go back into the bear pit and show the requisite leadership and resolve. Tommy Power was there, all fired up to give him the unanimous opinion of the chiefs of staff.

  ‘It’s going to take a full-scale invasion to remove the threat now, Mr President. And we can’t mount an operation that size overnight.’

  ‘How long do you need, General?’

  ‘Ready to go for Monday.’

  Five days. A lot can happen in five days.

  ‘Okay, Tommy. Set it up.’ To Bobby he said, ‘Try and get Bolshakov to tell us what’s going on.’

  ‘He fucked us over the U2s.’

  ‘Who else have we got? Dobrynin knows fuck all about what’s happening in Moscow. We’ve got five days to find a way out. Four days. We’ve got till Sunday.’

  *

  The 1st Armoured Division was ordered to begin the move to Florida. Fifteen thousand men had to be transported south in fleets of commercial airliners and thousands of railcars. Military aircraft began landing at Miami International Airport at the rate of one a minute. Off the Florida coast, on board the USS Okinawa, the 2nd Marine Division was practising boarding drills and studying landing maps. Operations Plan 316, the invasion of Cuba by 120,000 American troops, would be led by Marines landing on Tarara beach, east of Havana. First Armoured would land at Mariel to the west. The 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions would drop five thousand paratroopers behind enemy lines. Field hospitals were assembled to process a predicted eighteen thousand American casualties, and to repatriate the bodies of a predicted four thousand American dead.

  *

  Rupert Blundell sat in on the Chief of Defence Staff’s meeting, where the chiefs were being briefed by Frank Mottershead on the complex interlocking nature of British and American nuclear weapons.

  ‘You’ve got the B-47 bombers under SAC, and the F-101s under USAF. You’ve got the Polaris subs at Holy Loch. All these are under sole US control. The Thors are under dual control. The V-force is under our control, though for the planes to proceed past the Go/No Go line requires US authorisation.’

  ‘So if the United States goes to war,’ said Mountbatten, ‘we go too.’

  ‘We are allies, sir.’

  ‘You think Cuba’s worth a nuclear war?’

  ‘It’s not about Cuba,’ said Sir Kenneth Cross.

  ‘So what is it about? Freedom? Western civilisation? What is it we’re defending by blowing up the world?’

  ‘You know as well as I do,’ said Cross. ‘Resolve discourages aggression. They have to fear our power.’

  ‘Well, we’ll find out soon enough,’ said Mountbatten. ‘The Pentagon has set the invasion for Monday.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘We act on the prime minister’s clear orders. No mobilisation. No dispersal of the bomber force. No unusual troop movements. No actions that might be construed as aggressive, or as preparations for aggression.’

  ‘So we do nothing.’

  ‘That is correct.’

  Afterwards, when the chiefs had left, Mountbatten turned to Rupert.

  ‘I spoke to Harold Caccia at the FO last night about your friend Ivanov’s back channel idea. He cabled our man in Moscow, Frank Roberts. Roberts doesn’t have much time for Ivanov.’

  He showed Rupert the cable.

  So far as I can judge the mood here is not desperate and helpless as Ivanov suggests. Nor can I see why this junior official in London should have complete and up-to-date information on matters of highest policy outside his competence and on a situation which has developed so fast in the past forty-eight hours.

  *

  Rupert was irritated.

  ‘Of course he’s going to say that. He’s the ambassador, he’s supposed to be the channel between Khrushchev and Macmillan. The whole point is the official channels aren’t working.’

  ‘I just wanted you to see I’ve been doing what I can.’

  ‘So what now?’

  ‘We bypass the Foreign Office. I get this to the PM directly.’

  Rupert was pleased.

  ‘By the way,’ said Mountbatten, ‘I’ve put you on the list for Turnstile.’

  ‘What’s Turnstile?’

  ‘It’s the government bunker, somewhere in the Cotswolds. Highly restricted list. I’m only allowed twelve names. Consider it an honour.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Actually, if you don’t mind, I’d rather take my chances here in town.’

  ‘Me too. But someone has to be left to run the bloody country.’

  46

  By Thursday morning Rupert, along with all his colleagues, was feeling the strain of the prolonged period of heightened alert. Following the orders of the prime minister the headlines in the newspapers were concerned, but not alarmist. Life seemed to be continuing on the streets of London much as ever. This only added to the otherworldly nature of the crisis.

  By Sunday it could all be over.

  Rupert made a bet with John Grimsdale. He bet his friend the tension would be diffused by the end of tomorrow, Friday. He didn’t tell Grimsdale about the back channel in which he was involved, only that he believed there would be a negotiated settlement. Grimsdale bet that it would turn into a shooting war by Monday.

  ‘And after that?’ said Rupert.

  ‘Who knows?’ said Grimsdale. ‘I don’t see why it has to be the end of the world. Why can’t it just be another little war?’

  ‘Because this isn’t a proxy fight, like the Congo. This is the big boys in the ring.’

  ‘You know your trouble, Rupert? You’ve philosophised yourself into a corner. You want this to be an epoch-defining experiment, don’t you? Will mankind choose life or death?’

  ‘How much?’ said Rupert.

  ‘Ten bob,’ said Grimsdale.

  A message came for Rupert that there was a lady at the Ministry of Defence outer gateway asking for him. For a single blinding moment he thought it was Mary, unexpectedly returned from Ireland. But surely she would have let him know? He ran down the stairs and out into the forecourt. There, on the street side of the gate, stood his sister Geraldine.

  ‘For God’s sake, Geraldine! What are you doing here?’

  ‘I have to see you, Rupert.’

  She sounded frantic.

  ‘You can’t come in. We’re on top security alert.’

  ‘You come out, then.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  At that Geraldine burst into tears.

  ‘All right,’ said Rupert. ‘Five minutes.’

  He went out through the gate and his sister threw herself into his arms.

  ‘I’m frightened,’ she said. ‘I heard it on the one o’clock news. I had to find you. There’s something you have to do.’

  She seized his hand and led him up Whitehall, past the Houses of Parliament.

  ‘Where are we going, Geraldine? What do you want?’

  ‘It’s true, isn’t it? There’s going to be a war. I didn’t really believe it, but I thought maybe I should go to confession, just in case. So I walked down to the Carmelite church. And Rupert, there was a queue!’

  ‘For confession?’

  ‘Three cubicles working at once. And there was still a long queue, all down the side of the nave. And that’s not all.’

  She led him across the green and into the big west doors of Westminster Abbey.

  ‘Look!’

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Then he saw that there were people scattered about, kneeling in
the pews, praying. There was no service in progress. These were clearly people who had come in off the street to pray.

  ‘Do you see?’

  A lot of people, heads bowed, silent in prayer.

  ‘They’re praying,’ whispered Geraldine.

  ‘They’re afraid,’ said Rupert.

  ‘Are they right to be afraid? Will this war really come?’

  Rupert looked at his sister’s flushed face, and saw that she wanted it to come. She wasn’t afraid, she was exultant.

  ‘It might,’ he said.

  ‘If it comes,’ she said, ‘all this, the Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, the streets, the houses, all London, will be swept away, won’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘No one will survive.’

  ‘Very few.’

  ‘Then don’t you see?’ She was whispering in her intensity. ‘This changes everything. Larry must be told.’

  ‘Larry must be told?’

  ‘He has so little time. The news said it could be days. Hours, even.’

  ‘Geraldine, if there is a nuclear war, I don’t think it really matters who’s been told what.’

  ‘Will they drop a bomb on Sussex? Will she die?’

  ‘If bombs are dropped on London, the whole south-east will be poisoned by radiation.’

  ‘So she’ll die later? Slowly?’

  Rupert turned away.

  ‘Stop this, please.’

  ‘But there’s no time! You must call Larry. Tell him to come. This is his last chance to come back and make everything right again, before the end. Rupert, you must do this! I have a right to die in my husband’s arms.’

  ‘I will not call Larry, Geraldine. Now I’m going back to work.’

  She followed him out of the Abbey, running to keep up with his angry stride.

  ‘You have to call him. He won’t believe me. He’ll believe you.’

  ‘I’m not doing it.’

  ‘But can’t you see, Rupert? God is giving us one last chance. We’ve been given the warning. We must prepare our souls. Why do you think the churches are full?’

  Rupert strode on in silence. She reached for his sleeve, pulled at him.

  ‘Call Larry! Give him the chance to die with the woman he loves.’