Peters nodded and said, ‘Yes, skipper, I think we can take that for granted.’
‘But as I say, if they think we – or some other German craft – present a threat to them, where will they expect us to attack?’ He answered his own question. ‘The narrows off Fehmarn I should imagine. So it is there – if the Tommies think there is any kind of a threat – that they will be ready for trouble.’ His face cracked into a disgusting parody of a smile. ‘But my dear Peters, we shall not do them that particular favour.’
‘What will we do, sir? Remember we don’t know their final destination and on that will depend, I assume, the way they will sail.’
‘Yes, I agree with you and, by the way, I have been giving that question of their final destination some thought. No matter. One thing is certain, once they get safely through the straits off Fehmarn, they’ll head straight for the open sea whatever that final destination might be – and it is there we shall be waiting for them.’
‘That light coastal craft has three times the speed of the U-23,’ Peters objected.
‘I know, but you know the Tommies? They are fools, but brave fools. What do you think the Tommy would do if we were to torpedo one of those slow fishing boats in that convoy?’
Peters’ face lit up. ‘Of course,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘The Tommies always went to the rescue of a crippled ship during the war. They never seemed to realise that they made a perfect target, trying to take on board survivors while stopped. A sensible German naval captain would simply have abandoned the civilians to their fate and gone looking for the attacker. That is standard operating procedure in the Imperial Navy – er,’ Peters corrected himself hastily, ‘that was standard operating procedure.’
‘Genau,’ the Black Baron agreed. ‘So we sink one of the fishing boats and just wait for the Tommy skipper to act the gallant knight and come to the rescue, then we slide a nasty, high explosive “tin fish” right up his foolish Tommy arse.’ He gave that awful parody of a grin, and clapped his hands together like a suddenly delighted child might do. ‘End of one Tommy!’
Five
‘Mir boudit!’ the Red Guards and the Workers’ Militia, all armed to the teeth, snapped to attention as he strode purposefully out of the big German car and started to spring up the steps of Petrograd’s Technical Institute.
‘Peace is coming,’ he said routinely and without enthusiasm, as the chant followed inside the big building, ‘Mir boudit!’
On the gallery of the floor above, it was freezing in the February cold. Petrograd, now renamed Leningrad by the new decree from Moscow, had long run out of fuel, as it had nearly of food, too. Aronson watched him as he strode inside. Trotsky, the war dictator who had created the slogan ‘Peace is coming’ to encourage his down-at-heel Red Guards to continue fighting, dressed in a kind of uniform, all leather and straps and belts, to which was attached a huge Mauser pistol. But with his pince-nez and wispy goatee, he looked to Aronson like a provincial grocer or some pen-pushing suburban clerk. Yet this man commanded the destinies of hundreds of millions of Russians.
Aronson, tall, blond and muscular, forced the look of obvious contempt from his face. It didn’t do for a chief of intelligence to reveal his feelings to anyone, even his wife or mistress – and he had both. That was how he had survived the regime of the Czar, that liberal idiot Kerensky who had succeeded him, and now the tyranny of Lenin and Trotsky.
Trotsky saw him and made a show of that purposeful walk of his in Aronson’s direction. Even when he went to the latrine, Aronson told himself, he walked like that, as if he was always in the greatest of hurries to carry out his manifold duties to the new Soviet state. He clenched his fist and cried out another of those silly slogans that his new masters were always creating, his breath fogging grey in the icy air of the gallery, ‘All power to the people!’
Trotsky shifted the briefcase he held under his right arm to his left, clenched his fist and bellowed the same slogan back at him, ‘All power to the people!’ Then he said in that rabble-rouser’s voice of his, ‘Good morning, Comrade Aronson.’
‘Good morning to you, Comrade Trotsky,’ Aronson said dutifully. ‘I have hot tea with honey in my office, waiting for you. Please come this way, comrade.’
Behind him the Latvian guards, without whom Trotsky never went out, unslung their rifles and looked suspiciously to left and right as they marched down the corridor, their boots echoing and reechoing on the bare stone. Even in the heart of the city, Cheka3 Headquarters, Trotsky anticipated a murder attempt. Aronson smiled wanly to himself. But perhaps he was right. There had been attempts on the lives of Russia’s new rulers, for they were hated with a passion by most of the country’s citizens.
They entered the office together, while the Latvian bodyguard, after making certain there was no one else in the room and that the windows were secure, set up their post outside the door. Aronson offered Trotsky the glass of tea, plus a dollop of the priceless honey which he had obtained that morning on the black market. The Army leader accepted both without comment or a word of thanks. Aronson told himself that Trotsky had soon adopted the lordly manners of the aristocracy that he and his fellow Bolsheviks had massacred two years before. Like the hated princes and serene highnesses, he accepted all things as if they were his God-given right. Gratitude and thanks were not called for.
Trotsky took a tentative sip at the steaming hot cup and said, peering over the edge of the glass through the pince-nez he affected, ‘You don’t look like an Aronson.’ His tone was suspicious.
Aronson knew why. Trotsky’s real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein and he was a Jew like many of the Party leaders. It was for that reason he had himself adopted the Jewish-sounding name of Aronson.
‘Are you a Zhid?’ Trotsky snapped when Aronson didn’t answer, using the contemptuous Russian word for a Jew.
‘Does it matter, comrade? It is merely a nom de guerre. In my business it is perhaps wise to have several names. What does it matter if I now have a Jewish-sounding one? In our Russia, as you know, many hate Jews. If my enemies think I am Jewish, let them hate me, then. The main point is that they fear me as well.’
The words seemed to take Trotsky by surprise. He frowned, considered, took a sip of his tea, smacking his thick bearded lips at the sweet taste of the honey, and changed the subject completely. ‘You have a request, but you must not talk more than a few minutes. We are fighting a war, you know. I am a busy man.’ In recent months Trotsky had affected this strange, jerky way of talking. Together with the hurried stride, he thought it made him appear a very busy man, up to his eyes in work for the ‘cause’.
Again Aronson was not impressed, but he didn’t say so. Instead he said, ‘It is about that war in Poland that I wish to speak to you, comrade.’
‘Horoscho, then proceed, comrade.’
‘As you know, comrade, the Red Army is now deep into Poland in the offensive on Warsaw.’
Trotsky looked pointedly at his watch. Time was precious, the gesture said; Aronson took no notice. He would proceed at his own pace.
‘It is, therefore, to our advantage,’ he lectured a restless Trotsky, ‘that the Polacks have other problems in the east, namely the Fritzes.’
‘The Fritzes?’
‘Yes. Under von der Goltz their Iron Division is preparing for a large-scale attack in Upper Silesia. Now it will benefit our cause if the Fritzes are successful, and are able to drive the Polacks out of that part of their country.’
‘Da, da, tovarich,’ Trotsky nodded his head briskly. ‘Yes, I can see that. When in due course, as they certainly will, the workers and peasants of Germany rise up against those bourgeois liberals of the Weimar Republic and shake off the new chains that have been placed upon them, then we shall strike and take the whole of Poland, including Upper Silesia, for Russia.’ He shook his puny fist in the air, goatee beard waggling, as if he were on a soapbox addressing the mob.
Inwardly Aronson sighed. God, he moaned to himself, how those politicos played
games! One moment he was the brisk man-of-action, the next the great rabble-rousing orator. Could they never get anything straight?
‘But what’s the problem, comrade?’ Trotsky snapped, reverting back to his man-of-action role.
‘The English are secretly trying to arm the Poles in East Poland. Our agents inform us that a stolen cargo of German weapons is on its way into the Baltic under the escort of an English light warship.’
‘Those damned imperialists, the English, and their running dogs of all nations! One day we shall put an end to their machinations as well. But continue, comrade.’
‘I have reason to believe that the Fritzes will attempt to intercept the arms convoy, but if they fail we should be prepared to take over and stop those weapons reaching the Polacks.’
‘Agreed. How?’
‘I need a striking force, comrade. You are the one who can release that striking force to me.’ Aronson smiled slightly, but his eyes did not light up. They remained as controlled and as wary as they always were.
‘But that’s virtually impossible. Every Red Guardsman is needed at the front in Poland. Our Baltic Fleet is out of action, thanks to the damned English.’ He threw out both hands in an orator’s gesture. ‘The larder is bare.’
‘Not exactly, comrade,’ Aronson said a little warily.
‘What?’
‘There are the Red Amazons, comrade.’ Trotsky flung up his hands again. ‘Those perverted females. And with an aristocrat as their commander. Boshe moi! Why does Comrade Lenin tolerate her – and them?’
‘They are proven fighters, comrade, whatever their sexual preferences are. I am sure that you agree that to judge people’s sexual tastes – normal or otherwise – is totally bourgeois.’
Trotsky’s sallow face flushed a little. He looked hard at the Intelligence man through his pince-nez. ‘Our cause is liberation,’ he mouthed another of the slogans he had coined, as if that said everything.
‘Agreed, comrade. Now the Red Amazons?’
Trotsky snapped his fingers with irritation like some village schoolmaster angry at a tardy pupil. ‘Oh, yes then, you shall have them. But not for too long, mind you. I don’t want that aristocrat – what’s her former name?’
‘Her Imperial Highness Irma de Rurik, cousin to the late Czar, his Imperial Majesty.’
Trotsky cut Aronson’s attempt at irony short with a brisk, ‘Oh, that’s enough of that aristocratic nonsense, comrade! Well I don’t want that woman lazing around here in the city, seducing young women and drinking champagne all day. You shall have her Red Amazons for one week, and then the whole perverted pack of them goes to the front. Clear?’
‘Clear, comrade.’
Trotsky shot to his feet, the man-of-action once again.
Aronson did the same.
Trotsky clenched his weak little hand. ‘All power to the people.’
‘All power to the people,’ Aronson echoed and then Trotsky was gone, followed by his leather-coated, surly bunch of Latvian bodyguards, and Aronson could relax a little and think about what had to be done next.
He stared at his image in the little steel shaving mirror he kept on top of his uncluttered desk. It was one of his few vanities, just like his sixteen-year-old mistress was. She believed he was a counter-revolutionary, as she was, and was actively planning the overthrow of the hated Bolsheviki. He did not discourage her in her belief, for he liked to play roles. Hence the many names – and the mirror.
Aronson was a handsome man, but he did not look in the mirror in order to reassure himself that he was still handsome. He stared at his reflection in the looking glass to see if his true character ever showed. He had made a basic principle of his life that he must always conceal himself from others. It was necessary if he was going to succeed, and as he stared at that blond-haired confident face, he hoped that there were many others like him in Russia in this fateful year of 1920.
Aronson loved Russia – ‘Holy Mother Russia’, as he always called his native country to himself – a whispered confidence that he would divulge to no one else, even his wife, Irina. In his lifetime Russia had been ruled by fools, even traitors; the Empress, a German besotted by the mad monk Rasputin; that weak liberal fool, Kerensky; and now this Mongol Lenin, who spent his life in exile, actively sabotaged Russia. But Russia had and would survive such rulers because he knew there were men like him, who loved the black earth of Russia and its ordinary people, drunken, downtrodden lazy wretches that most of them were. And Russia would survive because there were men like him, cunning, but determined, who placed their country first and their private interests second; men who wanted no glory, but only the welfare of Russia.
He took his gaze off the little mirror, pleased with what he had seen there and grabbed his cap, a workman’s, with a shiny black peak, his one concession to the new proletarian role that his political masters expected him to play. He cocked it at a jaunty angle, and pleased with himself, left the Cheka Headquarters and seated next to the chauffeur – it was expected of him, wasn’t it? – drove to meet the legendary Captain Rurik, commander of the Red Amazons naval air squadron.
Captain Rurik, clad in a tight-fitting black leather suit, lounged on an elegant chaise-longue, smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder. At the table next to it, an exotic-looking sergeant, probably from one of Russia’s eastern territories, her jet-black hair cropped like a man’s, was brewing tea in a samovar. The room was warm, with wood crackling in the tiled stove in the corner and Aronson could smell the odour of beef being boiled in the next room. Captain Rurik might have gone over to the proletariat, he told himself, but she still enjoyed the luxuries of aristocracy to which she had once belonged.
‘Mir boudit’ he said routinely, taking off his cap and enjoying the sudden warmth on his frozen cheeks. ‘Peace is coming.’
She looked at Aronson contemptuously.
‘Bull shit,’ she growled in a deep masculine voice. ‘Who wants peace? War is much more exciting. Isn’t it, Elena Markova?’ she said to the sergeant, and with apparent casualness, she brushed her long elegant hand against that of the sergeant.
‘Da, da, Tovarich Kommandir,’ the sergeant breathed, her eyes full of admiration for the woman on the couch, and Aronson guessed immediately that the two were lovers. The thought amused him and he smiled slightly.
‘Is there anything to amuse you?’ Captain Rurik snapped, and swinging herself off the couch with a creak of too tight leather, rose to her feet. Aronson was tall but she was a head taller.
‘No, not really,’ Aronson said and then asked, ‘May I sit down?’ adding almost apologetically, ‘I do happen to outrank you.’
‘Yes, yes sit down. But rank belongs to those who fight, not those curs who hide behind a desk in the rear. We are the fighters.’ She flung her hand out towards the window. Through it Aronson could see the women of the Red Amazons busying themselves with the seaplanes that were anchored just off the quay.
He sat down. Rurik clicked her fingers and the sergeant offered him a glass of tea and a sugar cube to put in his mouth and sip it through. ‘It is about fighting that I have come to see you, Captain Rurik.’
Her big violet eyes lit up at once. ‘Fighting,’ she exclaimed. ‘Did you hear that, Elena Markova?’
‘Yes, Comrade Commander,’ the sergeant breathed. ‘I heard. All power to the people.’
‘Where?’ Rurik asked. ‘Against the Poles?’
‘No,’ Aronson replied. He took a sip of tea through the cube, then placing the sugar on the glass saucer, said, ‘No, against the English.’
Rurik’s eyes glistened even more. ‘Against the rotten, decadent English? Have we gone to war with those plutocrats again?’
‘No.’ Swiftly Aronson explained what he thought was happening in the Baltic, and how the English were running a convoy of arms to the Poles beleaguered in Upper Silesia.
Despite her aristocratic pose and demeanour, she listened attentively, sipping her tea and smoking and not interrupting until he had fi
nished. Then she snapped simply, ‘What do you want my squadron to do, comrade?’
‘This. If the Fritzes fail to stop the English, then it will be up to you. You have the range and we can send out a tanker to replenish your machines’ petrol. In essence you are the country’s last hope of sabotaging the Polacks and weakening their resistance to our glorious Red Army in its march on Warsaw.’
That pleased her. ‘So we poor weak women—’ he smiled ‘—are of use in an emergency.’
Aronson repressed his smile. There was nothing weak about Captain Rurik and by the look of adulation in the eyes of the pretty sergeant, she was very strong in other spheres, too. ‘If you will be so kind,’ he said with a formality that he had not used since the days of the Czar – perhaps it was Captain Rurik’s aristocratic manner which made him express himself in this manner – ‘I would like you to depart after dark. You can fly after dark?’ he added quickly.
‘Of course, of course. My Amazons are among the best pilots in whole of the Red Fleet,’ she snapped.
‘Good, then after dark. There are so many prying eyes here in – er Leningrad,’ he couldn’t get used to the new name for the place, ‘who report to the Fritzes and English for money. You will fly to an area four versts south of the Danish island of Bornholm. You know it?’
She nodded coldly, but those violet eyes were wild with suppressed excitement. Her Red Amazons were going into action again and she could hardly contain herself at the thought.
‘As soon as I obtained Comrade Trotsky’s permission to use your squadron, I arranged for a small aeroplane tender to sail from its present position off the Polish coast to that area. I’ll have a messenger bring you further details – radio frequencies, exact position etc – as soon as I have them later. It will arrive off Bornholm this evening. It will supply you and your crews with all your needs. The tanker will do the rest. If the English do get through the Fritzes it will be your duty to sink them,’ he paused for effect. ‘Every last ship!’ he emphasised. ‘There must be no evidence left that we had a hand in the matter. Is that clear, comrade?’
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