Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  “Normally,” Paddy Ashdown explained to his new Russian comrade, ‘we’d set off on this thing in our boats carrying up to sixty or seventy pounds – say thirty plus kilos – of equipment, because we’d be planning to live off the land for an extended period. Tonight, we’ll just go in with our personal weapons, demolition charges and ropes to allow us to abseil off the roof of the U-boat pens. That’ll be a pleasant change, getting stuck in straight away without any of the normal creeping around trying to stay unseen in the landscape.’

  Getting ‘stuck in’ was clearly a thing Ashdown was looking forward to! However, while this was commendable in any soldier, Akhromeyev was thoughtful about the runaway enthusiasm with which his new British friends embraced what he viewed as a semi-suicidal enterprise. This made it all the odder that although, on balance he would rather live than die, he had no personal reservations about taking part in this ‘reckless’ mission. He had thrown in his lot with his former enemies, knew in his heart that he could never return home, and understood also that if he was to have a life worth living in ‘the West’, and to be a respected leader of those other former Red Army, Air Force and Navy men who had made similar choices, he needed to do something, ideally spectacular, to cement his standing.

  It was as simple and as cynical as that; either he grasped this transient opportunity or he, and his people, would become irrelevant adjuncts, and in time an embarrassment to their hosts in England.

  If he had to get killed to secure a place in the West for his people, well, that was a price worth paying. He just hoped that if and when he got back to Hereford to explain himself to Vera, that she would not shoot him for being such an idiot.

  Sergey Akhromeyev had decided he was going to marry Madame Vera Bertrand. He should have done it before he left England; they had been as good as man and wife for over two years, partners, each other’s closest, best friend and most trusted confidante. Yes, he ought to have tied the knot a long time ago. She would be incredibly pissed off with him if he got himself killed…

  Turning his mind back to the radically stripped down and re-focused objectives of Operation Blondie, the trouble with ‘the plan’, audacious as it was, was that it could all go horribly wrong in the blink of an eye. Not just because the best photographs they had of the old U-boat pens were twenty years old; or because the only intelligence to hand in any way strongly suggesting that they were being used as the Front Internationale’s headquarters in the city, came from one, seriously wounded prisoner. They had no way of knowing if this information was simply another piece of Krasnaya Zarya misinformation, a ruse to persuade the British to bomb the wrong buildings, or real gold dust. On the other hand, the Front Internationale leadership seemed to have a penchant for hiding underground, or under concrete and leaving all the fighting and the dying to its conscripted and terrorised foot soldiers, many of whom were only fighting under its banner because they believed their families were being held hostage.

  Sergey Akhromeyev had been fighting the twin curse of Krasnaya Zarya and the Front Internationale for a lot longer than his new British friends; and understood the nature of the beast intimately. That was why he was less worried than Paddy Ashdown’s superiors about where precisely, the leadership of the FI was likely to be found in Bordeaux. To him, it seemed axiomatic that even if the BETASOM U-boat pens were not the actual city HQ; it would be an important FI target. If it happened that the top dogs were hiding in the complex, all the better; either way attacking it, and killing as many of the bastards hiding in it, would be a good start!

  In any event, it seemed that the British were content to risk the lives of nine Royal Marines and a renegade Red Army cast-off to establish, one way or another, to establish the truth about the BETASOM base from which those Regia Marina submarines had operated from between 1941 to 1943.

  True, the RAF or the Fleet Air Arm might wreck the place with bunker-busting bombs and kill everybody inside. But then nobody would be the wiser as to whether the place had been a bomb shelter, a stores depot or a headquarters. And in any event, a bombing raid from a high enough altitude to optimise the chance of a big bomb bursting through the several metre-thick reinforced concrete roofs of the old U-boat pens would be an inherently perilous undertaking. There were known to be SS-75 high-altitude surface-to-air missile batteries defending Clermont-Ferrand and the possibility that there might be more, hidden inside the urban sprawl of Bordeaux, waiting to target high-flying bombers making precision attacks, clearly lessened the British appetite for risking scarce fast jet assets on what was, after all, a purely speculative operation.

  Akhromeyev liked the pared back economy and simplicity of the operational plan: under cover of the attack by the Eagle’s Sea Vixens and Buccaneers, the two Wessex’s, each carrying a five-man assault team, would rattle in at rooftop height from the north, using Blanquefort not as a drop point but as a way marker, and land on the roof of the BETASOM complex.

  Since there was absolutely no profit decamping from the three to five-metre thick reinforced concrete roof onto the landward side of the complex, the assumption being that the occupants would by then, understandably have locked themselves in behind half-a-metre thick steel blast doors, the strike teams were going to have to gain entrance to the facility via the ‘wet side’ of the establishment, abseiling – hopefully – onto the docksides of one or other of the eleven ‘pens’, all of which were believed to be flooded.

  Sergey Akhromeyev had blanched somewhat when he discovered that what his new comrades described as ‘abseiling’ – supposedly controlled descents on a line coiled about one’s waist – was in their parlance, actually the most reckless form of rappelling; basically, donning leather gloves and sliding, or more likely falling, down a rope, a thing he had not done for years. Now, while this might be all in a day’s work for Paddy Ashdown’s – much younger - men, all of whom were in peak physical condition, it was not going to be a lot of fun for a forty-three-year-old veteran of the great Patriotic War!

  Ashdown casually, and Akhromeyev suspected, a little sarcastically, had generously offered to ‘lower’ him off the roof.

  “Niet,” the Russian had growled. “If I fall in the water, I fall in the water!”

  “Oh, don’t do that, old man,” the Royal Marine had counselled earnestly. “You’ll almost certainly drown.”

  Akhromeyev had agreed to do his best not to do that!

  Ashdown had concisely summed up ‘the drill’ as the thrumming beat of helicopter rotors approached the landing field outside the Château Frédignac.

  “We get inside, we kill everybody, we grab any interesting paperwork, and take a few holiday snaps,” a man in each of the two sub-teams, one in each helicopter carried a small Leica camera, “and we bug out of there. No prisoners. Then we head for the pickup point on the bank of the river.”

  The helicopters were supposed to approach at ‘zero feet’ following the line of the River and lift off the survivors from a rendezvous located about a kilometre north of the BETASOM complex in the Bacalan neighbourhood of the city.

  Sergey Akhromeyev had remarked that it was all a little…haphazard.

  ‘Yes,’ Paddy Ashdown admitted, privately as the two men had briefed Edwin Bramall. However, not caring to be out-done by the Royal Marines the RAF were ‘game for it’ and the commanding officer of the 4th Tanks had been itching to ‘keep up the pressure’ on his enemies.

  Sergey Akhromeyev got the impression that his allies had got very, very used to making the best of a bad deal in the last four years. And now, at a few minutes before midnight he was clambering into the cabin of a Westland Wessex beneath slowly churning rotors as the rain began to fall.

  At times such as this a man could do no more than take a firm grip of his gun and get on with it.

  Chapter 59

  Wednesday 15th February 1967

  Clermont-Ferrand, France

  Comrade Agnès had led the Russians away from the flaring fires consuming the roof of the Cathédrale Notre-Dam
e-de-l'Assomption, initially guiding them west along Rue Blatin. She really only had the one thought: to get out of the city, better to freeze or starve to death in the woods than to be lynched from a lamp post or…worse.

  She had never been a very recognisable member of the Central Committee, active only in the under belly of the madhouse based in the heart of the old, mostly idle and abandoned Michelin Works less than a kilometre northeast of the now burning black-lava-stone cathedral. Despite her rank and two-year-long membership of the ruling council of the FI, most people outside the hierarchy assumed she was a drone-like secretary, a menial clerk dragging around after Maxim Machenaud like all the other beaten dogs. It had assisted in her quest for anonymity that she was pretty, affecting girlish attractiveness had never bothered her when she was younger, and the ravages of the new age had made all that frippery academic. She was a classic ‘Plain Jane’ in the parlance of the American academics she had rubbed shoulders with in the old days; blond, lithe not willowy, a little flat-chested, androgynous, she had always been a tom boy in her girlhood, happier in the rough and tumble games of childhood with her brother, and later, had never seen the point in embracing the coquettish ways of her much younger little sister.

  She and Aurélie had never been that close as youngsters. Her sister was eight years her junior, a big gap between sisters and by the time they had both grown up, made their own lives, it had been too late to make up for lost time.

  Edward, her brother, the younger by a mere fifteen months, had, like her, been separated from their mother in the Second War, sent to live in the country, brought up, by kindly strangers, old friends of their father. They had been strangers to their mother, who had married less than a year after the death of their father – swept off her feet by the ‘bravest of all aviators’, Aurélie’s father within a year of his death. She remembered her step-father well, maddeningly, even better than she did her own father.

  François de Seligny, the dashing, raconteur and adventurer son of a famous family, and in his spare time, the commanding officer of one of the elite fighter squadrons of the Armée de l'Air, whose Dewoitine D.520 fighter had crashed and burned in a field near Verdun less than forty-eight hours after the German’s invaded France in May 1940. Her mother had always loved that man in the way she had never loved Eddy, or her, or their father…

  Perhaps, she had blamed Aurélie for that.

  Perhaps, not.

  It had all seemed so pointless after Eddy was killed in Algeria; and then soon afterwards, the sky had fallen in and the whole world had gone to shit…

  Nevertheless, she gone to Lyon to search for her sister a year or so after the war; but nobody had heard of her, or knew what had happened to her or her husband, Pierre, who had always had such grand plans, and talked about taking his wife to live with his family in Paris…

  She had assumed that Aurélie and Pierre had gone back to Paris just in time for the bomb...

  She had never seen what Aurélie saw in Pierre, the man was a handsome, charming waster, a spoiled rich boy brought up always expecting something to turn up.

  Comrade Agnès kept walking, trudging along the track in the woods as the moisture dripped frigidly off the bare, overhanging branches.

  The Russians had followed her like children…

  Granted, cursing and complaining, spiteful bad-tempered, resentful brats desperately pretending that they were not scared shitless. Whatever they said, she just kept walking faster, trotting or jogging, stopping without warning if she sensed danger. The idiots must have honestly believed she was leading them to safety; using her intimate knowledge of the city of her birth – although they would not have known that – to spirit them to safety.

  But then that was the way those children in Hamlin had probably felt about the Pied Piper.

  Aurélie had always been the one for fairy stories.

  And why not?

  She was the pretty one, elfin with twinkling brown eyes to charm the pants of any man. Not, to be fair to her, that she had ever been that sort of girl, just different in every way to Agnès as sisters often can be except in their case, so different as to seem hardly related at all.

  Aurélie had disappeared; these days that meant she was dead, too.

  Two of the KGB troopers had fired at her as Agnès had suddenly sprinted into a narrow alleyway. One bullet had ricocheted off the brickwork and peppered her with masonry chips, filled her hair with dust and chips that had grazed her skull, and stung abominably for a few minutes. She had carried on running, following the bewildering warren of narrow streets through the old pre-Second War town, where so many of the Michelin workers and their large families had lived in polite poverty. Nowadays, hardly anybody inhabited the derelict district, which was impassable to wheeled vehicles because so many of the streets were still choked with the uncleared rubble from the fighting between the old Communist rulers, and the first Krasnaya Zarya zealots back in the winter of 1963-64.

  That old fart Jacques Duclos had had her thrown into a makeshift cell in one of the basements somewhere around here. He had known who she was; and saw in her a collaborator who could one day help him obliterate his enemies. Her crime had been to swear never to help him or his ‘filthy Stalinists’. Her reward had been a savage beating and being sentenced to starve to death, forgotten in a hole in the ground as the fighting raged above her head.

  She had left her principles, her pride and the high moral fabric of her life behind her in that stinking, slowly flooding cellar; had she done otherwise, she would have been dead these last two-and-a-half years.

  Maxim Machenaud’s people had almost killed her out of hand.

  Somehow, she had found the strength to scream: ‘Duclos condemned me to death!’

  That was enough for the surviving fanatics; after that she was for evermore, one of them.

  My enemy’s enemy is my friend…

  There had been a lot of shooting behind her as she fled through the deserted quarter, prolonged bursts of automatic fire, several explosions; and grenades going off. In the darkness she had eventually blundered out of the city onto what must have been overgrown open ground to the west. Snow had begun to fall for a while, or so she thought. Actually, it was ash blowing on the wind from the fires spreading unfettered across large swathes of the city at her back.

  That everything had gone to Hell, that all organisation and authority had collapsed around her like a building suddenly crumbling to the ground in a powerful earthquake ought to have come as a surprise to her. However, that all it had taken was a single, admittedly, devastating air raid and rumours of defeats elsewhere, scores, hundreds of kilometres away, was not, the more she thought about it strange at all. What had really triggered the disintegration of the Front Internationale’s hold over the city and by now, several hours later, probably its grip on the South was the story, possibly a rumour, that Citizen Machenaud had himself, fled. Or was it that he was making preparations to transfer the FI’s headquarters to Bordeaux, his vaunted Stalingrad on the Garonne in faraway Aquitaine?

  Agnès had been the monster’s secretary, his amanuensis, the plain, unremarkable, obedient, sexless servant to whom he dictated his thoughts. Those ‘thoughts’, recorded in a score of notebooks, were still most likely, locked in a safe in the basement of the anonymous concrete two-storey office inside the Michelin Works. Filled with ‘thoughts’ to torment any sane psyche, best treated like some terrible mis-reading of one of Grimm’s fairy tales, real and yet unreal, unless you actually had to witness the abominations described upon each page. She had been spared most of that; yet seen enough with her own eyes to be traumatised forever.

  And now, very soon, she would be dead.

  Exposure, hunger, or a marauding gang from the city would surely transport her, if not to a better place, then one without so much pain and unbearable existential angst.

  Legend had it that these woods were full of bandits, men and women who would cut one’s throat at the drop of a hat.

  As if
I would be that lucky!

  Maxim Machenaud had boasted that he had conquered France from the Pyrenees to the Loire Valley; a lie. His followers had laid claim to most of the big cities and towns, the peoples of the Biscay coastal enclaves had pledged allegiance to him and accepted his ‘ambassadors’; the country had never actually been under the control of the Front Internationale. Bordeaux had been the first major city seized by Krasnaya Zarya in mid-1963, long before Clermont-Ferrand and Lyon had nominally switched their allegiance to Machenaud’s faction of the communistic gangs vying for power in the Auvergne. In the beginning the Workers and Navy Committees that controlled the big ports had sought to create their own local ‘Soviets’; only ever nominally becoming a part of the state controlled from the Auvergne for no better reason than to end the continual bloody border ‘turf’ wars with the FI.

  Agnès had always assumed that Machenaud – a man with a brutally feral intelligence behind his mask of psychopathy - understood the limits of his power and how easily he might alienate the people in control in Toulon and Marseilles. The people of the Massif Central depended on the fish and grain sent north from the Mediterranean coastal margins to survive; that was the deal, smuggle, grow grain and fruit, and fish for the food that keeps the Revolution alive in France or face again a never-ending war. Attempting to seize those ships down at Villefranche had been a monumental blunder, a pyrrhic turning point; those ships had belonged to the commune of Toulon and by trespassing on the territory of the clans, the Franco-Italian criminal conferences which controlled much of the old Riviera coast, the Front Internationale had succeeded in doing the impossible, uniting the hole of the South against it.

  That the ships in Villefranche were now either resting on the bottom of the anchorage or had been spirited away, god only knew where, by the English, had been like holding up a huge sign saying: ‘THE FRONT INTERNATIONALE IS POWERLESS IN THE SOUTH!”