by James Philip
Sometime yesterday the Americans had restored the ship’s air conditioning plant to working order and for the first time, the air in the old First-Class Dining Compartment was coolly fresh, and not humidly oppressive to the First Secretary and Chairman of the Communist Party of the USSR. A less cerebral, more impulsive man might have taken this as a good omen but the Head of the Troika was not a sentimental man.
As he approached the lectern with its barrage of microphones, he raised his right hand and tapped his left breast with two fingers; a signal which prompted members of the Soviet delegation to rise to their feet and to begin to distribute the small stack of envelopes on their mission’s desk to the other representatives in the room.
Each envelope was addressed to a named delegate or ambassador, and in that recipient’s own language bore a request: PLEASE DO NOT OPEN UNTIL AFTER CHAIRMAN SHELEPIN HAS BEGUN TO SPEAK.
Among other factors, the whole United Nations enterprise had been hamstrung by the inadequacy of the translation arrangements, and a plethora of technical problems. Phones and microphones had, routinely, not worked, the relatively small cadre of US Navy and State Department translators had been unable to cope with the demand for their services, and for many delegations without an English speaker, many of the speeches and significant parts of the debates in the chaotic General Assembly had been incomprehensible. In this climate of rumbling dissatisfaction, rumour, so-called Chinese whispers, aggrieved national sensibilities and entirely natural exasperation on the part of a large number of the protagonists, had produced a febrile, volatile cocktail of mistrust and resentment, aimed particularly at the apparently disinterested organising country, the United States.
The suggestion, widely disseminated in the General Assembly, that President Nixon intended to make his one speech of the event at City Hall in San Francisco that evening before flying back to Washington, DC, threatened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Many delegations were already bringing forward their plans to depart the city. It was likely that the only thing which had stopped the majority walking out and an unseemly premature exodus, was the panoply of obstacles placed in their path.
Aircraft seats and berths on ships had been arranged for the beginning of next week, and the State Department seemed pathologically incapable of bringing forward any of its hastily botched plans.
All this the Soviet leader knew as he stepped forward.
“Dobryy den', damy i gospoda, tovarishchi i druz'ya. Menya ogorchayet, chto eta smelaya popytka,” the Soviet Leader began in Russian, his voice mechanical and seemingly lacking in inflexion.
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends. It saddens me that this brave attempt to restore a fundamental building block of the new post-Cuban Missiles War global settlement, is destined to end in failure.
Margaret Thatcher’s expression was frozen.
“It will be all right,” Tom Harding-Grayson murmured complacently. Counter intuitively, it was a non sequitur that the British Foreign Secretary was the only man in the room who was actually looking forward to Alexander Shelepin’s offering.
An aide had torn open the Soviet envelope.
To get around the problems of translation the Russians had given everybody a text in their own language – or in the case of recently ‘liberated’ or ‘independent’ former colonies, in the language of their former imperialist masters - of what their leader intended to say in the next few minutes. This was at once immensely pragmatic, and a pre-meditated slap in the face to the US ‘facilitators’ of the conference.
“We live in a deeply troubled world in which a display of restored national pride in a ruined city in Germany can raise fears of a new war,” Alexander Shelepin went on.
His delivery was flat, remorselessly bloodless as befitted a career apparatchik and former KGB technocrat. But then it was his words, not his emotions which he wanted, needed to communicate to his global audience.
Nearby, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, George Bush was scanning the pages of typescript with studious insouciance. It was unlikely that any man in America was angrier, or more humiliated by his country’s inability to competently host the ‘USS United States’ event, than the new man, who had already struck his British allies as an operator of real substance, with whom they could look forward to doing business.
“We live in a world where the legacy of the Cuban Missiles War still curses us all; and in which old enemies are still, at war with each other. That is the reality we confront. Perhaps, our enemies wish this to be so forever, if only to stop my country beginning to rebuild from the ashes. But are we to return to the days of the Berlin Wall or the Bay of Pigs? None of us has lily-white hands; none of us is without blame for the global catastrophe of October 1962.”
Margaret Thatcher noticed that her Foreign Secretary was no longer slouched in his chair; he was leaning forward, listening like his life depended on hearing every word in the original Russian as clearly as possible.
She consulted the English transcript again.
The bloody man is casting himself as an international statesman…
The Soviet Union’s one-time chief torturer was re-inventing himself as a man of peace!
“My country has a right to survive. My people have a right to be safe in their beds at night, and for their children to be fed, and to be proud of their Motherland. Please, please, do not expect me to come to a global forum and play the role of a colonial supplicant, a defeated enemy, the serf to mighty Uncle Sam.”
The Prime Minister arched an eyebrow reading ahead…
“President Nixon, where are you today? Where are you? Where are you, my friend,” he continued, “will you not look me in the eye. Will you not look me in the eye and give peace a chance?”
Margaret Thatcher was asking herself who had written this speech for the Soviet leader. And tantalisingly, how long had it been laying on the ground, waiting to be picked up while the battlefield was salted, in order that Alexander Shelepin could stand up here, today, and deliver it to the whole world?
Weeks, months?
Possibly, many months, or even a year?
She was remembering a conversation she had had with her Foreign Secretary before leaving England. She had wondered if her friend was just flying a kite, testing her out in some way.
‘Leaving Dobrynin in place in Washington, only drip-feeding arms to the Front Internationale in France, the abandonment of territory in Iraq and Iran, the failure to pursue the treaty with the People’s Republic of China,’ Tom Harding-Grayson had speculated, ‘might conceivably, amount to a deliberate attempt to reduce international tensions, Shelepin’s way of signalling that he is no Stalin, or Khrushchev or Brezhnev, or even a known hawk like Sergey Gorshkov.’
At the time, Margaret Thatcher had suspected this was unlikely, implausible interpretation of the facts. However, her friend had alluded to this theory again last night.
‘How does the attack on Villefranche fit in with that, Tom?’ She had objected.
‘Perhaps, the objective was to cripple the Front Internationale’s fleet? Perhaps, the Troika was sending us a message? True, if one of our ships had been sunk that might not have been helpful; but the Soviets had no way of knowing our ships and our aircraft would be in the vicinity at the time of the raid…’
The Prime Minister had allowed her thoughts to drift.
Faraway, in France the British Expeditionary Force, the assault brigades of the Free French Army and the Royal Navy, operating in the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean would be in action against the Front Internationale, wreaking havoc, sowing fear, death and destruction. The assault would be all out, and continue for as long as the ships and sea and the troops on land could sustain the attack.
Realistically, that gave the allied forces a few days, perhaps, a week or so – a fortnight if they were very lucky - to kick the legs out from beneath the enemy. Privately, her generals and admirals had warned her that although ‘huge damage might be inflicted on
Krasnaya Zarya, it might be over-optimistic to hope that the regime would simply collapse.’ Sir Michael Carver had counselled her that: ‘Isolating the Front Internationale in the Massif Central’ and making its southern coastal enclaves unviable,’ would be a major step forward.
Whatever happened in the next few days; hopefully, it would shame the Nixon Administration into action.
Grand strategy operates at both the military, and the political level and the Prime Minister knew her Foreign Secretary was right to advise her, time and again, that ultimately, it was the political calculus that mattered above all else.
Alexander Shelepin was no public speaker; he droned on with all the charisma of a man reading a telephone directory.
“If President Nixon was in this room, I would say to him,” he went on doggedly as all around the compartment delegates urgently turned to the next sheet of their transcripts. “Come to the Soviet Union. Fly over the wastelands. See us for what we are. Visit Sverdlovsk. Sit with us around the negotiating table and let us talk of peace, not ideological conflict or war. Let us start anew. Let us each bring blank sheets of paper to the table. Let us together begin to dismantle our great arsenals of weapons of mass destruction which have caused both our great nations such pain. Let us each, two great nations, develop in our separate ways in peace. Let us respect each other’s inalienable right to exist. Where we differ, let us differ in the future in a spirit of peaceful co-existence where formerly, we clashed and walked, like sleepwalkers, down the road to perdition a little over four years ago!”
It was hard to do a head count from where she was sitting; Margaret Thatcher guessed at least two-thirds of the people in the room got to their feet and began to applaud as the Soviet leader completed his speech.
“Don’t you dare get up and clap, Tom,” she whispered to her Foreign Secretary.
“It would be polite to at least clap,” her friend murmured.
“No!”
She glanced across to the United States’ table and to her consternation discovered that George Bush was looking directly at her. He shrugged imperceptibly, otherwise he remained studiously poker-faced. Around him his colleagues were clearly angry, embarrassed also. From where she sat the Prime Minister could not see the expression on the faces of the Nationalist Chinese, or of her French allies.
This, she decided, was probably for the best.
Chapter 53
Monday 13th February 1967
Clermont-Ferrand, France
The woman Maxim Machenaud had only ever known as Comrade Agnès did not know when the idea had lodged, weevil-like in her head. So many of the things she had done, the decisions she had taken, or perhaps realistically, had had taken for her or imposed upon her since the war, had just happened without her conscious intellectual engagement, or any act of deliberate will. In retrospect, she realised she had been operating at a primal, flight or fight level for so long that she had begun to lose her sense of self, of any real recognition of who or what she had once been. Her mind had largely switched off, existentially she had survived on her wits without reference to a moral compass, done terrible things, become callous, and behaved like a feral, cornered animal.
Obedience and survival were synonymous in the insane world of the Front Internationale’s upper circles; to be in that depraved hierarchy was a testimony to one’s capacity to shed one’s humanity like it was a redundant skin. To be close to the monster at the heart of the regime for any length of time was to sink ever deeper into a black pit of unremitting…evil.
Yet she had survived.
Not because she was pretty, or young like those whores who had betrayed the Revolution in Vichy; or even because she had convinced the madmen – and women – around her in the Auvergne that she was particularly intelligent, for had her ‘comrades’ even suspected as much, she would have probably been dead, hung or burned, shot or bayoneted to death on the execution grounds at the now cratered, wrecked, carnage-strewn airfield to the west of the city, one, two or even three years ago. No, she had survived because above all she had proven herself to be competent, efficient and unswervingly loyal, gifts few of Citizen Maxim Machenaud’s most maniacal disciples ever displayed for long.
From what she had experienced in Clermont-Ferrand, psychosis and stupidity were common bedfellows, the hallmark of the Krasnaya Zarya plague that had fallen, like a random, corrupting epidemic across the South.
Everything was suddenly falling apart, the hated Revolutionary Guard, its leadership humiliated and bloodily purged after the fiasco at Villefranche, was disorganised and panicking, its aura of invincible untouchability as ruined as key parts of the city, which itself was under assault from all sides by a population driven to desperation.
It was as if the sudden shock of the English bombing had bust a dam of long-suppressed rage; the people had turned on their overlords…
The events of the last twenty-four or thirty-six hours; she had lost all sense of time; reality was a fluid thing and she no longer trusted her short-term memory. Sometimes the mind was subjected to too much stress, there were too many conflicting horrors and nightmares got confused with the waking, here and now when exhaustion began to erode one’s sanity.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ One of the Russians had demanded as she began to strip off her filthy, bloodied Revolutionary Guard uniform.
‘I need ordinary clothes if I am going to be your guide out of the city!’ She had snarled. ‘Hurry, if we don’t move soon it will be too late!’
She had told the Russians lies.
Lies were simpler than the truth.
Nobody had Headquarters had sent her to tell the people at the Soviet Residence what was going on, or to warn them. After the Michelin Works had been wrecked by the bombs, she had known the Front Internationale had become the hunted, not the hunter, predators turned prey. She had run from the mobs, kept on running until she nearly collapsed and discovered she was close to the Soviet Residence. All she had known was that the mobs were roaming the streets turning on anybody suspected of being a member of the old regime. One moment she had been a member of the loathed Central Committee, the next hunted, a dead woman walking as she had stumbled into the rubble-strewn Place de Jaude.
She had had no ‘good’ options; so, she had snatched despairingly at the first ‘least bad’ chance of survival, knowing that the Russians had Spetsnaz and KGB troopers stationed at the Residence to protect the Commissar Plenipotentiary and his people. Conceivably, the Russians might protect her if she could convince them that she was useful to them.
The Russians had to have known, or suspected, that Maxim Machenaud had always had a plan to flee to Bordeaux; people like him spent a large part of their lives obsessing over plots and conspiracies, they never felt safe without knowing they had a bolt hole ready and waiting if everything went wrong. That was why the Front Internationale forces in the Massif Central had been bled white to build up the ‘citadel on the Garonne’, the last redoubt where, if it came to it, the enemies of the Revolution would be made to pay in blood for every millimetre of every street. The whole city was supposedly a giant booby trap; the FI had long ago, virtually abandoned the South, and thinned-out its forces in the Auvergne and belatedly attempted to turn Lyon, the regimes ‘Eastern Bastion’ into a garrison town fast sucking the life out of the surrounding countryside, a fragile bulwark against the refugees from the East but not much more.
It had been clear to Agnès, if not to the other idiots on the Central Committee, that Maxim Machenaud had seen the future coming for him last autumn as the FI’s dwindling number of volunteer fanatics, and the original Red Dawn companies withered away from hunger, disease, and the constant slow attrition of the war on the Loire Front, and slowly, inexorably drowned in the tide of humanity pressing against its eastern, Rhine flank. Last November and December, the ease with which the British had rolled up the last of the Krasnaya Zarya enclaves along the Biscay Coast and camped, threateningly on the northern bank of the Gironde Estuary, ha
d sent a jolt of panic through the high command in Clermont-Ferrand.
The reign of terror that Maxim Machenaud had turned back on to celebrate the arrival of the latest Soviet Mission, had failed to stem the bleeding, desertions had continued; even members of the Central Committee had been captured attempting to flee the city.
The woman who had called herself Comrade Agnès when, eventually she had returned to the Auvergne eleven months after the war, had sensed the brittleness of the FI’s hold over the city, interpreted Maxim Machenaud’s suddenly rampant paranoia, the ramping up again of the terror, as the symptom of that ever-increasing vulnerability. It was as if Maxim had seen his power leaking away, drip, drip, drip and had no answer but to turn inwards upon his own supporters.
The savage revenge he had meted out on the Revolutionary Guard leadership cadre for its failure to seize those useless, rust-bucket ships at Villefranche, had been an incredibly stupid, and possibly, fatal self-imposed wound. When the Red Air Force had, literally, out of the blue, bombed those recalcitrant ships of the old Mediterranean Fleet, everybody could see that the emperor had no clothes, and that he had lost control of…everything.
Maxim Machenaud had jealously hoarded the levers of power to himself, liquidated anybody who challenged him, or worse, threatened to one day rise to threaten his position. When things went wrong there was nobody left to blame but the great dictator; a thing Comrade Agnès suspected Maxim had never, ever thought about. Until, of course, it was far, far too late and nemesis was upon him.
There was an odd, cruel irony in that.
It was just a pity it had taken a river of blood and untold grief to reach this day…
It was as if the bombing had flicked a switch, fractured and splintered what little remained of the regime’s inner steel, and now, it was tearing itself apart, it was every man and woman for themselves now. The last she had heard before she slipped, quietly out of the chaos of the wrecked, burning Michelin Works, had been that terrified technicians were asking to whom they should report the panicky messages coming in from Toulon and Marseilles about men of the Naval shore brigade and workers on the street, burning the Red Flag, and attacking the Front Internationale’s offices.