Chapter Six
There is no limit to the number of staff officers or advisers in either Suite, nor need the Red and Blue Suite staffs be of equal size.
The Studies Centre — now Stucen London — is a I particularly appalling example of Gothic revival, that in anywhere but Hampstead would have been too conspicuous to house secrets.
'Caledonia', for such was deeply incised on its portals, was built by a nineteenth-century ironmaster to celebrate the Royal Navy's decision to reinforce the wooden walls of England with ironclads.
It was a three-storey maroon and mustard monolith, with turrets, domes and slots for bowmen. The main staircase would not have cramped Busby Berkeley, and the marine life depicted in mosaics in the hall might well have made Disney feel quite proud,
The smell of cheap metal-polish and warm machine-oil penetrated even to Ferdy's stove-heated den, and the carbolic that they used to swab down the hall was probably what was killing the winter lettuce that I was trying to grow in the conservatory.
But it was probably the ballroom — with its glazed dome roof — that attracted the men who chose Caledonia as the Studies Centre. Most of its panelling was intact. And, although it had suffered under a decade or two of military footwear, the inlaid sprung floor would still have supported a light fantastic or two. The minstrel's gallery had been extended and glass-faced to make a long Control Room — or 'god box' — from which the Director and his staff could look down upon the War Table.
The Table took up most of the ballroom. It was well over seven yards wide and at least twelve yards long. In the bottom left-hand comer there was the tiny Jan Mayen Island. The North Pole was halfway up the left of the table, the right showed the ragged northern coast of the Soviet Union, from the Laptev Sea and the New Siberian Islands right the way down to Murmansk and a slice of Norway.
The whole Table could be folded away and replaced by other latitudes, but this was our bread and butter. Sections of the Table hinged to give access to plotters who couldn't reach far enough across Lapland to find the Barents Sea. But conveniently close to the bottom edge of the board there was the almost land-locked White Sea which sheltered Archangel, where Soviet Undersea Warfare Command had built a large underground control centre, and a powerful series of transmitters to control the Northern Fleet submarines.
Only a few hundred miles away was the Northern Fleet's HQ at Murmansk, and farther along the Kola Fjord was Poliarnyi. Ice free almost all the year round, from here came the Russian Navy's Tupolev 16s: the gigantic 'Badgers', noses full of guidance radar, slung with intelligence pods and Kennel air-breathers under each wing, so bedecked with missiles and gear that they'd had to extend the runway by five hundred metres to get them into the air. These were the boys that came sniffing into Hamish Sound and down even to the Thames Estuary and out to the Atlantic: timing the defences, listening to the radio traffic and watching the shipping all the way to eastern Canada.
From here too came the big jet flying boats, crammed with homing torpedoes and nuclear depth charges, patrolling the Northern Sea Route in summer, and in winter the Arctic ice. And here were helicopters of all shapes and sizes, from two-seaters to sky cranes. All nice kids without a doubt, but don't think they were staging their all-weather patrols in case some Russian Chris-craft owner needed winching to safety.
'Are we all here?' Ferdy asked, and waited while the last two visitors caught up with us.
It wasn't Ferdy's job to show visiting teams round the Centre, but, now that I was Schlegel's P.A., it wasn't mine either. We compromised; I stayed close to the tour while Ferdy shepherded them through the building.
They'd seen the Blue Suite, where they would sit for a week fighting the battle of the Northern seas. It was a fine room on the first floor, with chubby angels entwined each side of the fireplace and a crystal chandelier. So far the chandelier had survived the drastic changes that had made the elegant library into an Operations Room of the sort that one might find on a Guided Missile Destroyer, only with more central floor space. Adjoining it, a box room had been converted to a Sonar Control Room that we used for special tactical games that were subordinated to the main action. Today the shutters were open and Blue Ops was lighted by daylight, but tomorrow the room would be dark except for the visual disj jlays and the side-lit plastic sheets that depicted the action, bound b
The library — as we still called it — had a door opening on to the upper gallery. Its fine carved mahogany balustrade provided a place from which one could see the brightly coloured mosaic paving of the entrance hall below. It was easy to imagine it crowded with men in frock coats, talking about Dreadnoughts, and women in ostrich feathers and silk, whispering about Edward VII's love life.
The room adjoining the library, once a small bedroom, was now a conference room with closed-circuit television showing the most vital displays from Blue Ops. This was where the visitors would spend most of their time, watching the V.D.U.s and agonising over whether to resort to nuclear depth charges or abandon their advanced submarines. On the same level there were bathrooms, bedrooms, a well-stocked bar and a sentry to make sure none of the visitors tried to see what was displayed downstairs on the big War Table. For only the ballroom Table showed the true state of affairs for both sides. Blue Suite3 just like Red Suite in the basement, had only the results of reports and analysis. And that was another name for guesswork.
'For the big strategic game we often assume that the coast of northern Norway has already been occupied by the Soviet Union,' said Ferdy. 'If war came, that would be inevitable — and we believe it would be fast.'
Once he'd put it even more bluntly than that to a group of senior officers from afnorth at Kolsaas. None of them, especially the Norwegians, had proved readily convertible to Ferdy's instant strategy.
But today there were no Norwegians. I looked at them, all lined up along the War Table. Behind the two V.I.P. American admirals and their aides, there was the usual rag-bag: cocky thirty-year-olds, earnest forty-year- olds, desperate fifty-year-olds, career officers who, in their ill-chosen civilian suits, looked more like insurance salesmen. There were seldom any surprises. An elderly, soft-spoken New Zealand Captain from the purchasing commission, a bald Dutch senior intelligence officer, two American submarine Captains, fresh from a stiff tour at cincpac, a civilian war-game specialist from saclant (Striking Fleet), some embassy freeloaders and a one-eyed German who'd already confided to us twice that he'd sunk over a hundred thousand tons of Allied shipping. 'During the war, of course,' he added, but we had only his word on that.
'There's a problem with all these games,' warned one of the embassy attaches, a Canadian. 'If you don't introduce the element of chance — dice or random machine — you get no idea of what happens in war. But introduce it, and you're into the gambling business.'
I winked at Ferdy but he had to keep a straight face while this Canadian mastermind was looking at him. We'd often said that no matter how slow you lake the briefing, one of these hooray's is going to ask that very question. You could put it on the big machine and trip it for a print-out.
'It is not a war-game in that sense,' said Ferdy. He smoothed his rumpled hair. 'You do better to regard it as a historical reconstruction.'
'I don't dig you,' said the Canadian.
'Some history might be instructive, other aspects of history less so. If you learn from experience here, then that of course is splendid, but it's dangerous to start off thinking of the process as a future event.'
'Is that why your set-up is civilian operated?'
'Perhaps it is,' said Ferdy. Nervously he picked up one of the plastic plot markers from that morning's test run-through. 'Let's be clear. We don't control any Fleet elements from here and neither do we predict what they might do in any future action. Once we made a strenuous effort to stop the word 'game' being used about anything we do here — 'studies' is the operative word — but it was no use, people like 'game' better.'
'That's because your material is too out of date by the time it's ready for the Table?' said the Dutchmen.
'The material used here is collected from intelligence ships and aircraft. We probably could radio it back and have fairly recent data on the Table, but unless we processed the game at the same speed as an actual battle there would be little or no advantage.'
'I'll tell you something, Mr Foxwell,' said the German Captain, 'If, God forbid, we ever have to start
