Chelsea, London
WORRY, CONCERN, EVEN FEAR were etched onto the face of Rear Admiral Jonathan Bucknall. Early morning found him at the Royal Marsden, London’s premier hospital for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. But he was not the patient. Admiral Bucknall, a Navy man for nearly all his adult life and happily married for twenty-nine years, was at his wife’s side, watching as she slid motionless beneath the MRI scanner. A sudden scare, no need to panic, just taking precautions. And then, after the consultation, they would take their minds off things with an early lunch in Chelsea. But things turned out rather differently.
He took the phone call from Northwood out in the narrow corridor, clamping the phone to his ear while nurses squeezed past his hunched figure. It was from CJO, the Chief of Joint Operations, with the news that he had been assigned Operational Commander for a highly sensitive mission in the South China Sea. He was needed back at Permanent Joint Headquarters immediately, Bucknall was told. There had been a development and this was an urgent instruction straight from the Secretary of State.
Bucknall didn’t complain and neither did his wife. As a duty two-star officer on rotation at PJHQ, he reckoned he was lucky still to be in a job after all the recent cuts across the board. But on the hour-long car journey to Northwood he had to make a conscious effort to put his worries about his wife to one side and prepare himself for the job in hand. From the little he had been told on the phone he knew already this was going to be complicated. And quite possibly infested with Whitehall politics. Bucknall was to command an offshore maritime interdiction in the South China Sea. The sheer logistical challenge of organizing an operation of this nature thousands of miles away in a part of the world where Britain had almost no military footprint to speak of was daunting. HMS Daring and the rest of her Task Group were off-limits, he was told, not to be touched, already assigned a crucial role in providing a defensive screen along Taiwan’s west coast.
This mission was separate, off-the-books, to be run in conjunction with the Directorate of Special Forces at Regent’s Park Barracks and with input from SIS. Sensitive enough, in fact, that Number 10 wanted to be involved and that always brought its own sackload of problems, dealing with unelected special advisers and quixotic politicians who wanted all the glory if an op went well and who were nowhere to be seen when it didn’t. Then there would be an entire team at the MoD, all reporting to the Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, currently a Royal Marine general with a background in Special Forces, all working on the policy angles, supposedly in tandem with the Royal Navy ops team at Northwood but often, in his experience, pulling in a completely different direction. The days of the Navy’s Fleet Command in Portsmouth having control of an operation like this were long gone, but Fleet still needed to be ‘the force generators’, providing Northwood with whatever assets the Royal Navy could muster at short notice.
And what exactly did they have ‘in theatre’, that slightly ludicrous term for any part of the world where military operations were taking place? With Daring off-limits, the nearest Royal Navy facility was the British Defence Singapore Support Unit, more than fifteen hundred kilometres away in Singapore’s Sembawang naval shipyard, at the wrong end of the South China Sea for this op. But the base was currently empty, with its Riven-class patrol vessel somewhere in the Java Sea, an asset that was anyway unsuitable for a hostile maritime intervention of this sort. There was a survey ship, HMS Enterprise, but she was in refit at Changi. That left only one option, the ageing Type 23 frigate HMS Sutherland, currently on a port call in Manila as part of the UK’s new ‘forward leaning’ defence strategy.
‘Has this thing got a name yet?’ Bucknall asked, when he finally trotted up the stairs to the Ops Room at PJHQ and met the team he had been assigned.
‘Sir?’
‘I said, has this thing been given an operational codeword yet? I need to know what I’ve been put in charge of.’
‘It has, Admiral, yes,’ replied his chief of staff. ‘It’s Op Hamartia.’
‘Hamartia? That can’t be right. Are you sure?’
‘I’ll double check, sir, but, yes, that’s what the computer has given us.’
A look of intense disapproval came over Rear Admiral Jonathan Bucknall. At Cambridge he had read Classics. His friends had called him ‘Bookworm Bucknall’. He had forgotten most of what he’d learnt there but not everything.
And ‘Hamartia’, he remembered quite clearly, was a term introduced by Aristotle to mean ‘error of judgement’.