by James Philip
Chapter 48
Sunday 12th February 1967
Place de Jaude, Clermont-Ferrand, France
Sharof Rashidovich Rashidov had been knocked unconscious for several minutes; otherwise, he had been one of the lucky ones when the big bomb had hit and comprehensively demolished the disused Opera House on Boulevard Desaix, its now shattered, burning frontage looking out on the famous statue of Vercingetorix. Several other smaller missiles had struck, set ablaze, and briefly, swept the surrounding streets clean of life.
Several hours after the attack the city was still reeling, in chaos. Here and there big fires burned; nobody was fighting them or it seemed, making any attempt to prevent them spreading. Bodies lay where they had fallen in the surrounding streets, and out across the square, the injured one by one falling silent in the cold and the ashes, falling like wet snow onto the frigid ground.
And there were no Revolutionary Guards on the streets…
Smoke and the sick stench of scorched flesh hung in the flickering darkness like a curse, as the Troika’s Commissar Special Plenipotentiary to the Front Internationale in Clermont-Ferrand read the last decrypted reports to have been received before the raid.
The Free French were advancing in the north, slicing through the pathetic remnants of the Front Internationale’s forces everywhere. There were even reports from Krasnaya Zarya-held city of Bordeaux – Maxim Machenaud’s so-called ‘Stalingrad on the Garonne – that it too had been bombed and that there were ‘raiders fighting outside the city’.
In the near distance the small generator powering a few of the surviving lights within the blast-wracked, windowless, otherwise intact, Soviet Residence, rumbled and chugged feebly. The Mission’s communications equipment was undamaged, unfortunately, all bar one of the operatives who knew how to operate it, code and de-code traffic, were dead or maimed. Outside, only the flames lit Clermont-Ferrand and fragmentary reports apart, Rashidov had no knowledge; other than that, the attack had probably had a catastrophic impact on the whole city, likely wrecking the airport and key industrial sites, striking key depots and communication links and killed hundreds, perhaps, thousands of people…
The aviation fuel tanks at the airfield were still burning, the glow in the east dully lit up the skyline.
There was a commotion in the square.
“What happened to that bloody woman?” Rashidov demanded, irritated that he had forgot all about the member of the Front Internationale Central Committee who had surrendered herself to his bodyguards earlier…hours ago, probably yesterday evening.
“She’s still downstairs, Comrade Commissar!”
“Bring her here.”
Presently, a familiar, scarecrow woman in the fatigues of the Revolutionary Guard, was thrust into Rashidov’s presence.
“Comrade Machenaud lives,” the woman blurted. “Or at least he did when he sent me here.”
Rashidov had not risen to his feet from behind his candle-lit desk. The breeze infiltrating the room fanned and sucked at the candles, making for an eerie, ethereal atmosphere. Faraway, there was an explosion from the general direction of one of the FI’s munitions dumps in the northern part of the city.
“That is good to know,” Rashidov grunted. “What else did you come here to report to me, Comrade Agnès?”
At least Machenaud had sent him a Russian-speaker.
That might have been an accident; it all depended on how many of the lackeys in his inner circle were still alive.
“The British targeted the Michelin Works, the aerodrome and…”
The woman seemed to choke on the words.
“The First Secretary’s bunker?” Rashidov inquired sourly. Only fucking idiots built a bunker complex in plain sight with nothing else for hundreds of metres around it. The FI might as well have painted a giant cross on it!
“Yes…”
“What about my people at the Michelin Works?” The man demanded.
“Regrettably, the Red Air Force personnel accommodated at the facility were killed in the bombing.”
Sharof Rashidov was on his feet, his fists balled.
“And?” He ground out between clenched teeth.
“That is all I am able to tell you, Comrade.”
“Seriously?” The man asked, knowing he ought not to be surprised by anything in this madhouse!
“Yes, Comrade.”
“Not good enough,” Rashidov snarled. “Guards!” He yelled.
Kalashnikov-wielding green-uniformed KGB troops rushed into the room.
“Take this little piece of shit away. I want to know everything she knows about everything, and I want to know it fast. I don’t care how you get her to talk. Fuck her to death with a bayonet for all I care!”
“No!” The woman squealed as strong arms began to haul her away. “I will tell you whatever I know. That is the only reason I came here! Nobody ordered me to come here…”
“Bring her back!” Rashidov bawled, waiting until the KGB-men had dragged her half-way down to the cellars.
“What is your name?” The Commissar Plenipotentiary asked, re-taking his seat. This he asked although though he knew exactly who the woman was: she was the witch who had constantly been at Citizen Machenaud’s side in Rashidov’s time in Clermont-Ferrand. The woman who, according to who one talked to was either the madman’s ‘secretary’ or his ‘mistress’, or both. However, when one commenced an interrogation one began from the beginning, followed the standard protocol, took nothing for granted and treated the subject, at the outset, with cold contempt, as if they no longer existed as a living, breathing human being.
“Comrade Agnès…”
“Do you have a proper name, Comrade?”
This utterly bewildered the woman, it was so long since she had used her real surname, let alone her baptised name, that they sounded strange inside her head.
As if they belonged to somebody else.
If the Front Internationale had ever discovered her true identity, they would have liquidated her in a heartbeat, and yet now, she was on the verge of confessing without hesitation…as if it was the end of the world and she was running out of time to atone for her sins.
She fought to control her terror.
“Just Agnès…”
Having threatened to have the woman beaten and raped to death, Rashidov, neither a trained interrogator nor a man who owed his position to abject thuggery, retained the presence of mind to understand that information obtained without violence, or violation, would be inherently much more reliable than that squeezed out of the woman by torture.
“Tell me what do you do for Comrade Machenaud? Apart from write down everything the mad fucker says?”
“I am a translator and clerk in his secretariat…”
She knew this was not going to be enough.
“I am his whore, too…”
Rashidov sucked his teeth.
“Have you seen Citizen Machenaud since the bombing raid?”
“Yes…”
“Where is he?”
The woman hesitated, glanced anxiously at the KGB men around her.
“I don’t know. He plans to leave the city. I believe he may be in the chateaux once infested by the traitor Duclos…”
“Tell me what else you know?”
“The English have destroyed the airport and all the aircraft. They also attacked the rocket batteries in the hills. They knew where every headquarters building was located. When they bombed the power station, they dropped anti-personnel devices, many of them with delayed action fuses…”
The woman shivered uncontrollably. Her thin FI fatigues were no defence against the frigid bite of the winter evening. She was very hungry and had no need to feign her fear. In the near distance a long burst of automatic gunfire rent the night.
The woman’s eyes were hunted, haunted.
And Sharof Rashidov realised he had missed something very important.
She might not be lying.
“The bastard didn’t send yo
u here, did he?”
Comrade Agnès shook her head.
“No, Comrade Commissar.”
Rashidov waited patiently.
“It is all over,” the woman went on. “The First Secretary and his personal guards have fled the city. They will go to Bordeaux; the people there are not like they are here in the Auvergne. All our best fighters are in that place. In Bordeaux they will fight to the death.”
A man entered the room.
“Comrade Commissar,” he reported tersely. “The Cathedral is on fire. Everywhere the fires from the bombing were previously burning themselves out, there are new fires!”
There was more machine-gun fire, seemingly less than a block away this time.
Rashidov pushed back his chair, turned to his aides.
“Make sure everybody has a gun; anybody who blinks at us in the wrong way; just shoot them.”
The Commissar Plenipotentiary had heard bad things about what happened to Soviet citizens caught on the streets of Budapest back in 1956, and in a lot of other places since where law and order had broken down. If Maxim Machenaud and his crowd really had fled, the mob was likely to look for others upon whom to take their revenge.
“We can’t stay here!” He decided, fixing his stare on Comrade Agnès’s face. “How well do you know the city?”
“I lived here before the war, Comrade…”
“We need to get out of Clermont-Ferrand.” He paused to listen to the shooting, this time hundreds of metres away. “Will you help us?”
The woman nodded jerkily.
“What about our wounded, Comrade Commissar?” One of the KGB men asked quietly.
“If they can walk, they come with us.”
Comrade Agnès swallowed hard, feeling sick.
Everybody in the room knew that they could not leave the seriously wounded behind at the mercy of the mob. Within minutes the survivors of the Soviet Mission were hurrying across the Place de Jaude past the shrapnel-gouged statue of Vercingetorix, with the muffled reports of the headshots which had put the injured men and women in the cellar out of their misery, ringing dully in their ears.
Chapter 49
Sunday 12th February 1967
Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland
Colonel Caroline Constantis-Zabriski had awakened with a fierce hangover that morning to be informed that there had been a ‘change of plan’ by an unusually sheepish, Captain Erin Lambert.
‘I’m sorry, Caro,’ the younger woman had apologised. ‘If there was a good way to say this, I would. The Air Force wants you to go to San Francisco to assist the FBI.’
‘Seriously?’
Just so that there could be no misunderstanding, the orders – delivered to the Commonwealth Hotel overnight – were signed by the Chief of Staff of the US Air Force, General John P. McConnell and there were two more of Erin’s people, unmistakably military, in their civilian suits outside in the corridor when Caro eventually surfaced to go down for breakfast.
‘A sealed file will be waiting for you on the aircraft,’ Erin had explained. ‘I don’t know its subject; furthermore, you are not authorised to share anything in it with me and I am expressly forbidden to question you about its contents. I will be accompanying you to California, and remaining with you as your bodyguard but operationally I will be handing you off into the care of FBI Special Agent James B. Adams…’
Inevitably, Caroline had tried to find out what was going on.
Her friend had shrugged.
‘I don’t know, Caro.’
It got worse.
Arriving at Andrews Field they had discovered that although their flight would be stopping over – to drop off personnel, correspondence and to top off its tanks – at Offutt Air Force Base, while the aircraft was on the ground, Caro was not permitted to attempt to make contact with her husband.
The first leg of the flight, from Washington to Nebraska would be on the same Air Force DC-8 Caro had been scheduled to board all along, the second ‘hop’ to the West Coast would be on an Air Force Lockheed Jetstar. She would not get an opportunity to read the report Erin had had to sign for, in a metal attaché case, until they were in the air after take-off from Offutt.
The two women had settled in their allotted seats, Caro next to the window and Erin between her and the isle. The younger woman had debriefed her charge twice about her visit to CIA Headquarters at Langley, Clara Schouten and everything she had learned about the rogue assassin Kurt Mikkelsen, and then dragged every last nuance out of her friend’s encounter with Lady Rachel French, who seemed to her, even scarier than ‘Billy the Kid’.
“You can’t get your head around that woman ending up married to a senior British RAF officer, can you?” Caroline prompted as the DC-8 climbed away from Washington.
And not just any senior officer, either.
Air Marshall Sir Daniel French had been the Governor of Malta, and for a spell, C-in-C of all Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean, now he was the top dog in the US-UK Joint Aerospace Development Group and responsible for – give or take - all British aircraft, guided missile and airborne radar and communications research, development and operational trialling; the sort of job any US Air Force man would kill for if such a single post was ever created stateside.
Lady Rachel French had not only interrogated Caroline Constantis, undeniably, the two women had had a real conversation building on the tenuous relationship established when Caro had first interviewed the other woman at Langley.
“Yes and no,” Erin’s friend groaned. “There are two sorts of people in the world; those who are terrified of her, and those who aren’t. If you fall into the latter, very small group, and you are a man then I should imagine that she is…”
“Fascinating? Seductive?”
“If you like,” Caro conceded, staring out of the window as the clouds enveloped the climbing jetliner.
Around them were mostly service personnel returning to the Midwest, some with family members, and there were several unattached women, civilians, clearly travelling to join loved ones stationed on one or other of the great Strategic Air Command (SAC) bases, constructed miles from anywhere, out on the fastnesses of the Great Plains.
“Actually, beguiling is probably a better word,” the older woman went on, distractedly. “It is very rare to meet somebody who understands who they are. Who they really are, that is; self-knowledge can be a dreadful thing, I suppose?”
“That doesn’t sound very professorial?” Erin teased gently.
Caro turned away from the window and smiled at her friend.
“No, but then these days, I like to think I stopped being that fuddy-duddy old blue-stocking academic the last time somebody blew up the world!”
The women laughed softly.
“How’s your headache now?” Erin asked.
“I shouldn’t have drunk so much.”
Erin let this pass without comment.
“You shouldn’t have encouraged me!” Caro added.
“Not guilty. You were steaming by the time I caught up with you!”
The older woman grimaced.
The last time she had got drunk was when she was in an agony of indecision over Nathan; her feelings for him had got out of control, she was his physician and he was half her age…
That particular late mid-life crisis had turned out okay in the end. A spasm of rough, angry sex had broken the flood gates of angst for them both and afterwards, they had been…well, at peace with each other.
She had no expectation that this present ‘situation’ was in any respect, as amenable to such a happy denouement. In fact, she could do with getting drunk again right now.
Very drunk…
At Offutt Caro managed to put a call through to the married quarters she got to share with Nathan a lot less frequently of late than she would have preferred. The number diverted.
“Major Zabriski is currently unavailable, Ma’am.”
In other words, he was on duty, training, in a briefing or in the ai
r…eight miles high.
An hour later, the only passengers on board the Jetstar as it thundered down the endless runway built for SAC’s B-52s, were Caro and Erin Lambert.
At cruising altitude, the younger woman unlocked her attaché case, handed Caro the inch-thick sealed Manila folder bearing the legend TOP SECRET and moved to the rearmost of the eight seats. The aircraft had originally been designed with six but the Air Force had installed smaller, functional seats instead of the original plush, deep leather ones.
Caro, who had slept most of the way to Offutt, still felt tired and hung over.
I should definitely have stopped after the third Bloody Mary…
She broke into the envelope.
There was a letter on the front page of the file.
She read it cursorily.
Basically, it promised that if she divulged anything herein to an ‘unauthorised party’ she was going to Sing-Sing for ninety-nine years.
Yeah, yeah, yeah…
She began to speed read.
Dwight David Christie, aged forty-three…
Until December 1963 FBI Special Agent, South California…
The man had confessed to complicity in the pre-meditated murder of two fellow FBI agents and a…professional hit man…
And to working for the Soviets from 1947 onwards…
And that was just the preamble to the file!
Caro had looked up, tried to catch Erin Lambert’s eye but the younger woman was trying to nap, sensibly assuming that the next two or three hours would be the last time she got an opportunity to catch up on missed sleep for a while.
By then Caro had forgotten all about her hangover.
And a question was forming in her mind.
Dwight David Christie…
Who the Hell are you?