when her husband was proclaimed the new Viceroy of India.
In the reddish glow of the cockpit, the pilot and copilot of the York MW-102 went through their final preflight checks. Mountbatten and two of his old wartime comrades completed one final walk around the aircraft. With him were Colonel Ronald Brockman, head of his personal staff, and Lieutenant Commander Peter Howes, his senior aide-de-camp. How many trips had they taken on the old girl, Lord Louis was thinking, good Lord, how many, from the frontline posts in the jungles of Burma to every great conference of the war.
His two friends noticed that the normally ebullient Mountbatten seemed gloomy and introspective, his mood matching the weather perfectly. It was not at all, they privately thought, remotely like him. A bit full of himself, but normally a cheery sort.
The copilot leaned out of the cockpit window and announced loudly that the flight was ready for takeoff.
'Well,' Mountbatten said to his friends with a shrug and a sigh, 'we're off to India. The world's largest powder keg. I don't want to go. They don't want me out there. We'll all probably come home with bloody bullets in our backs.'
THE VICEROY'S HOUSE IN NEW DELHI was a palace of such gargantuan dimensions that it could only be rivaled by Versailles or the Peterhof Palace of the tsars. Behind the endless parade of grand white marble columns lining the exterior facade were floors and walls of white, yellow, green, and black marble quarried from the same veins that furnished the astonishing mosaics inside the Taj Mahal.
So long were the palace corridors that, in the basement, servants rode from one end of the building to the other on bicycles. On this particularly historic morning, five thousand of those servants were giving one last polish to the marble, glass, woodwork, and brass of its thirty-seven grand salons and its three hundred and forty rooms. Gold and scarlet turbans flaring atop their heads, armies of servants whose white tunics had already been embroidered with the new Viceroy's coat of arms scurried down corridors on some final errand.
Outside, in the manicured Mogul gardens, more than four hundred gardeners toiled in the sun, perfecting the intricate maze of grass squares, rectangular flower beds, and splashing vaulted waterways. Fifty of those gardeners were mere boys whose sole job it was to shoo away unwanted birds.
And over in the stables, the five hundred horsemen of the Viceroy's personal mounted bodyguard adjusted their scarlet and gold tunics before mounting their superb black horses. The entire household was a frenzy of activity. And all of them-horsemen, chamberlains, cooks, stewards, and gardeners-were preparing for the enthronement of one of that select company of men for whom this splendid palace had been erected, the man who now approached this very moment-the last Viceroy of India.
THE STUNNING BLACK HORSES of the Viceregal Bodyguard suddenly hove into the view of countless thousands jamming the streets of Delhi, colors flying, drums beating, buglers trumpeting. The new viscount turned to his wife, Edwina, and managed a smile. Here we are at last, darling, the smile said.
Home, God help us.
He looked, people later said, like some brilliant film star in his immaculate white naval uniform. Serene, smiling, his adoring wife beside him, Louis Mountbatten rode up to the foot of the grand palace steps to lay his claim to Viceroy's House. He arrived in a gilded landau built half a century earlier for the royal progress through Delhi of his cousin George V.
As the landau pulled to a stop, the bagpipes of the Royal Scots Fusiliers began a plaintive welcome. Stepping down from the carriage, Mountbatten turned and held out his hand for the beauteous Lady Mountbatten. The roar of the crowd was literally deafening. Here was the man who had come to preserve the peace and to preserve this sad, lost country. To somehow prevent the outbreak of an unimaginable religious war that would soak the ground of India with the blood of countless millions.
FIVE LONG MONTHS PASSED, and Mountbatten had grown weary of the struggle. The endless meetings with Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah. While they argued and schemed, the political situation grew worse almost daily. The death toll among warring Moslems, Hindus, and Sikhs was mounting. Provocations on both sides abounded. A sacred cow, wandering inside a tiny Moslem village in the Punjab, was slaughtered, its bloody carcass delivered in a cart to the Hindu village across the valley. The resulting violence of that blasphemy left hundreds, perhaps thousands, dead.
India was now a powder keg with a very short fuse.
Mountbatten knew then that he could only stave off the inevitable for a very short time. He could only present a front of supreme confidence until that wretched hour when England would have little choice but to abandon her responsibilities and slip away.
It had come to this, he told his wife one night in bed: he could watch the Indian pot boil but he could not, ever, extinguish the flame beneath it.
Delhi was already gasping in the first searing blasts of the hot season. In the mornings, beyond the opened windows of his study, scorching breezes fried the dhak trees in the Mogul garden, the branches seeming to emit sparks in the sun's phosphorescent white glare.
With each passing day, there was fresh evidence of increasing violence and bloodshed. Just five days after Mountbatten's arrival, an incident between Moslems and Hindus took ninety-nine lives in Calcutta. More recently, a conflict in Bombay left forty-one mutilated bodies on the pavement. And, now, the violence flared unabated throughout the land.
Mountbatten, at his wit's end, summoned India's senior police officer to his study and asked a simple question.
'Tell me the truth, Chief Inspector. Are the Indian police capable of maintaining law and order in India or are they not?'
'No, Your Excellency, we can no longer maintain law and order.'
That night Lord Mountbatten put in a call to Buckingham Palace.
He told his King the time had come.
England must prepare at once to abandon India.
The cost in blood and treasure would be incalculable. The once great land that had been England's shining pride of empire would be ripped asunder for all time. For the glorious British Empire that had been, this was the beginning of the end.
EIGHTEEN
COUNTY SLIGO, NORTHERN IRELAND, JUNE 1979
FIVE INVISIBLE MEN SAT AROUND the battered kitchen table staring at each other through eye slits in their black balaclavas. It was a bit odd, Smith thought, all of them including himself wearing these bloody ski masks, sharing a bottle of Irish whiskey. There was no heat in the house but for what was in that bottle, so unseasonably cold on this rainy June night that they all wore leather gloves.
The two gentlemen who had transported him from the IRA pub in Belfast out to the safe house in the County Sligo countryside had been sent outdoors with a bottle of Tullamore Dew and a pair of automatic rifles. Sentry duty. He doubted they'd be disturbed.
The safe house was an old place, long abandoned. There was a crooked sign over the door, faded and peeling. The Barking Dog Inn. The old building sat deep within a thick wood at a bend in the river. Despite the shutters, there was heavy black paper taped to all the windows in the small, plain kitchen and also in the parlor filled with musty-smelling furniture, the only two rooms he'd seen. A flight of stairs led up into total darkness.
'And yer name would be?' the largest of the four heavily armed men finally asked.
'Smith,' he said automatically. It was the only name he ever used now.
'Smith?'
'Yes. Just Smith.'
'Awright, Smith. And what might yer first name be, then?'
'Mister.'
'Mister, is it? He's funny, ain't he, lads? I need your full fuckin' name, Mister Smith. We're bleeding sticklers on that kind of detail, ye can well understand.'
'John,' he said, using the first name that popped into his mind. Red rage was blooming inside him and he
