by James Philip
“No matter how worrying things seem, in a month or two we might be looking back on these last few days wondering what all the fuss was about.”
“I hope so, Tom,” Margaret Thatcher declared grimly.
Jim Callaghan ran a hand through his hair.
“What is the latest on the other American battle group?”
“The USS Independence is currently oiling at Cape Town,” William Whitelaw explained. “As you know the Independence is almost as big as the Enterprise and carries nearly the same sized air group. Enterprise and Independence both carry two to three times as many aircraft as our biggest ships, and both are much newer ships than anything in our inventory apart from the Hermes, which, as I mentioned, is a bit worse for wear at present. In any event, the Independence cannot be expected, at the earliest, at Gibraltar until several days after the Enterprise.”
The Foreign Secretary was caught out by his own exhaustion for a moment: “The worst thing is the knowledge that there may be people out there,” he waved to the rafters, “who might have no other purpose in life than to destroy us and everything we stand for. We cannot argue with them. They will never see reason. They will never rest until everything is reduced to ashes.”
“That’s the thing I can’t really understand,” Jim Callaghan observed. “If these people were coming to us asking for aid or reparations, restitution of some kind I’m not exactly sure what we could do for them presently, but we wouldn’t just ignore them. Honestly and truly, I think all our problems with the Americans in the last year have been because neither of our countries really wants to go on fighting the same kind of undeclared Cold War we had before the,” he looked around at the other tired faces, “cataclysm. Given half a chance we’d all gladly beat our swords into ploughshares and make an immediate start on reconstruction.”
Margaret Thatcher nodded vigorously.
”Well said, Jim.” However, this was the briefest of contemplative interregnums. “Sadly, things are what they are, and we are where we are. As to the true nature of Red Dawn? There may well be a significant hard core of diehards, Jim,” she conceded. “But I doubt if every foot soldier, sailor or camp follower is a true believer in Red Dawn’s foul cause. Yes, perhaps the leadership – assuming Red Dawn has a formal leadership and a recognisable officer cadre – is imbued with a philosophy of nihilism and revenge. However, many, many others will almost certainly have hitched their wagon to the cause because to have done otherwise would have been to starve, or to face imminent violent death.
There was an insistent rapping at the door.
Iain Macleod, the Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland had pulled his trousers on over his pyjama bottoms, and wore an old grey sweater under his jacket. His thinning hair was sticking out at all angles from the sides of his head and he was more than a little agitated.
“Something’s happened in Greece, well, Athens, anyway. The military junta are broadcasting non-stop about being under attack by Soviet aircraft and tanks, and,” he scowled, “the Turkish hordes.”
Everybody looked at the newcomer, blinking.
“Athens is being bombarded from the sea and Piraeus is burning!”
Chapter 38
Monday 3rd February 1964
Rabat-Mdina, Malta
Clara Pullman propped herself up in the bed and ran her fingers through the thin mat of dark hair on her lover’s scarred chest. He was silent in the gloom but their thoughts were shouting in the night. Arkady Pavlovich Rykov had always been the most patient, gentle and occasionally, the most ardent of all her lovers.
“I am sorry,” the man muttered. “Did I hurt you?”
“No,” she said, leaning across him to plant a wet kiss on his brow. Their love making had ceased for a while after he was badly injured by Denzil Williams’s goons at Gibraltar two months ago. With Arkady’s restoration to more or less full fitness – for all the scars and the terrible beating he had taken on the Rock he was virtually indestructible – in the last two to three weeks they had begun again to enjoy each other’s bodies, although not with the passion of before. She had believed it was because he was still pained; how could he not be after what those bastards did to him? But tonight he had been a stranger. He had never taken her before she was ready to receive him, never, other than when she had goaded him, or been so dominant, or so rough with her. He had not ‘hurt’ her although she suspected she would be bruised in places nobody was going to see and be sore in the morning but he had abused her. He had never done that before. “You seemed so angry?”
“Not with you,” he said lowly. “Never with you. Sometimes I think that you are the only thing that stands between me and madness.”
Clara tingled with terror.
She fought to shrug off the icy hand clutching her heart.
“You are the sanest man I have ever met, Arkady Pavlovich.”
The man grunted a snort of humourless laughter.
“I have done many bad things in my life,” he confessed as he had done many times in the last year, only this time he was deadly serious. “Before the war they never touched me. In the country where I lived bad things happened every day. That was understood, expected. You are probably the only woman I have slept with who wasn’t secretly, or not so secretly, terrified of me. And now even you are a little afraid of me sometimes.”
Clara wanted to claim otherwise.
She was silent.
“Nikita Sergeyevich sent me to infiltrate the higher echelons of Krasnaya Zarya because he knew that deep down I was just like the men he feared. Khrushchev never feared the Americans; he thought all his life that the Americans were too soft and too addicted to ‘mom’s apple pie’ to prevail over the Soviet system. He believed that it was only a matter of time before International Socialism overwhelmed the West. He only ever really feared the enemies within, Red Dawn and the other factions within the Politburo, and of course, the KGB, seeking to undermine his drive to modernise and lift the Motherland out of the pit the monster Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Stalin, had left us all in. Nikita Sergeyevich sent his very own Prince of Darkness into the deepest, most evil black depths of that pit to discover the character of his coming nemesis. He knew that few men could see as well as Arkady Pavlovich Rykov in the stygian darkness of the World in which Krasnaya Zarya had been born.” He sighed. “And now even the woman I love is terrified of me.”
Clara sat up in the bed, suddenly aware that she hurt in places she did not usually hurt and involuntarily wincing.
“I am not terrified of you!” She hissed unhappily.
“No?”
“No! I love you...” Did he just say he ‘loved’ me?
“Then you love a monster.”
Clara pulled the sheets about herself as if she was cold.
“Ever since we came to this place you’ve been strange.”
“Yes,” the man agreed.
They had been on Malta a fortnight during which they had often been apart; she running errands for MI6 as if she was some kind of secretarial Mata Hari who did the office typing, shopping and driving when nobody could think of anything better to do with her; and occasionally providing female cover for one or other of Arkady’s personas in the field. She knew that her lover had been sent to Malta to hunt down Red Dawn; and to tidy up the mess left behind by Denzil Williams’s incompetence. Other than that – she knew better than to go out of her way to make her own independent inquiries - she had only the vaguest of notions as to what Arkady had actually been up to in the last two weeks. In bed he had been uncommunicative, distant.
“Red Dawn is like a disease,” he said. The man was lying on his back staring into the darkness. “Iosif Vissarionovich would have been proud of what he created. He understood that if nuclear war consumed the Motherland then the surviving splinters of the military-industrial complex and the security apparat would look for something just like Krasnaya Zarya; that they would be drawn to it like moths to the flame. Re
d Dawn corrupts and consumes everything it touches. Like gangrene, once it takes hold the limb must be amputated or the body will die a horrible, disgusting, inevitable death. The British and the Americans do not yet understand this. They still hope that they can meet Krasnaya Zarya in battle and that if they are victorious later there will be peace talks, and accommodations can be reached. But that is not the nature of the beast. I think the British are closer to understanding the evil they confront. Admiral Christopher is a man who understands that in war things happen which no rational man would normally sanction; that in time of war decency and humanity are suspended. And that sometimes in war one has to do things which will haunt one forever. The greater good is a peculiar thing; an excuse to commit untold atrocities and the Admiral is a man who understands this.”
“Atrocities? What are you talking about?”
“There were eight of them. Samuel Calleja, whom you knew about, or rather, you guessed correctly was the probable leader of the cell when we were on this island in November...”
“You were interested in his sister and she obviously wasn’t a terrorist,” Clara retorted.
“Two men in Samuel Calleja’s organisation were killed when HMS Torquay was bombed in the December raid,” the man continued, ignoring her interjection.
Clara froze; he was going to tell her everything.
“Two men were arrested by Major Williams’s associates before we returned to Malta, and three others were under what that fool regarded as ‘surveillance’,” he scoffed derisively. “I had to hunt them down. After the sinking of HMS Torquay Admiral Christopher gave me carte blanche to do whatever needed to be done to roll up and dispose of the cell. I tortured the terrorists until they had told me all their secrets, and all the secrets of everybody they had ever known.”
“Arkady, I...”
The man reached up and placed his fingers on her lips.
“And when I finished torturing them I staged their ‘deaths’ to make it look as if the Redcaps and the Army had done all the work. I choked the woman and,” he moved his fingers gently down to her chin, “and put a bullet in her brain.”
The quietness was suddenly crushing.
“I have killed many women before,” the man continued flatly. “I have tortured many women. I was never ashamed until now.”
Chapter 39
Monday 3rd February 1964
HMS Dreadnought, 91 miles SSW of Rhodes
“SUBMERGED CONTACT BEARING ZERO-TWO-SEVEN!”
Captain Simon Collingwood acknowledged the report as if he had been expecting it for some minutes. In fact, he had been expecting it for at the last two hours and was beginning to wonder if he was being a little paranoid. No, one could not command one’s Navy’s only nuclear-powered submarine and not have a paranoid streak.
“Designate submerged contact as Bandit Two.”
“Speed six knots, course two-seven-five degrees!” Then immediately, another report. “She’s very noisy, sir. She must have been sitting right under one of the bigger sailing boats. She suddenly came out of nowhere. Two screws, she’s got a worn bearing on one of them!”
HMS Dreadnought had been idling, barely maintaining steerage way in the middle of the much reduced, no doubt traumatised, dwindling number of survivors of the sailing convoy which had been tormented and mauled by the long-range gunfire of the Sverdlov class cruiser Admiral Kutuzov, and used for target practice by a loitering Krupny class destroyer. The Kutuzov and her other escorts were now below the southern horizon, the Krupny class ship – designated Bandit One on Dreadnought’s tactical plot - was slowly circling the sailing boats at a range of about eight thousand yards firing star shells to illuminate the area every ten minutes.
“Range to submerged contact estimated at two thousand yards, sir!”
That was close, too close for comfort but if the contact held her current course she would draw slowly west of north and the range would widen.
“Your hunch was right, sir,” Max Forton, the boat’s red-bearded Executive Officer grinned as he looked up from the plot.
The enemy had baited a trap for Dreadnought.
They had hoped she would intervene to stop the slaughter of the innocents; sink the Krupny class destroyer wreaking such carnage among the wooden-hulled sailing ships. But only fools rushed in where angels feared to tread, and Simon Collingwood was neither a fool nor an angel.
He had not taken the bait and there was never any possibility that he would. When you commanded a nuclear submarine you made the rules and everybody else danced to your tune. Dreadnought had crept into the huddle of broken sailing ships three hundred feet beneath the surface, slowly eased up to one hundred feet; and waited.
“Do we have a firing solution on the submerged contact?”
“Negative, sir. There’s a lot of wreckage in the water and she’s too close to one of the surviving sailing ships.”
So, the waiting continued a little longer.
After about fifteen minutes: “We have a firing solution for Bandit Two, sir!”
“Okay. We will execute attack plan Alpha,” Simon Collingwood decreed. “We will fire the Mark XX homing torpedo in Number One tube at Bandit Two and turn towards Bandit One at twenty knots. We will fire the Mark VIIIs in Number Two, Three and Four at a range of between fifteen hundred and one thousand yards.”
HMS Dreadnought’s blunt bow slowly swung around to the north.
“Firing solution for the Mark XX fish in Tube One is set, sir.”
“Very good.”
“The plot is automatically updating, sir!”
“What’s Bandit One up to?”
“Holding at seven thousand five hundred yards, sir!”
“Range to Bandit Two?”
“Two thousand three hundred yards, sir!”
“Check firing solution for Bandit Two!”
“Checked. The board is green, sir.”
Captain Simon Collingwood did not hesitate.
“Fire One!”
“The fish is running straight!”
The Mark XX had to run for approximately a thousand yards before its passive sonar guidance system kicked in. Ideally, its programmed target would be somewhere in a relatively narrow cone of sea in front of it when that happened. If there was nothing in front of it the torpedo would start searching to acquire a target and it was never a good idea to allow a dumb machine to pick its own target. Given the crowded nature of the waters nearby the Mark XX was configured to actively ping its target to confirm acquisition before reverting to silent running. Of course, if Bandit Two’s sonar men were on their mettle they would already have detected the propeller noise of the missile cruising towards them at twenty knots. Against a fast surface target like a destroyer or a frigate capable of performing violent high speed evasive manoeuvres the relatively slow Mark XX could, theoretically, be evaded, assuming that it was fired from far enough away, detected in the water early, and that the vessel under attack was already steaming fast. The diesel-electric submarine hiding among the shattered sailing flotilla attempting to spring and ambush on Dreadnought was too close and far too slow to run away or to evade a Mark XX once it had acquired target lock.
“Our fish is active!”
“Target lock!”
“Helm! Make your course zero-three-zero!”
“Revolutions for twenty knots!”
Seventy-one seconds later the dull, rumbling detonation touched the pressure hull.
“We are clear of the sailing boats!” Sang out one report.
Another man was calling down the decreasing ranges to Krupny class destroyer.
“Six thousand yards!”
“Bandit One is holding her course. Speed constant at eight knots.”
Simon Collingwood and his Executive Officer exchanged raised eyebrows.
A Royal Navy ship would have jumped to life by now; cranked up to fifteen to twenty knots, started pinging frantically in every direction. This fellow seemed to be cruising along as if nothing had happened.
Or had the Krupny interpreted the detonation as Dreadnought’s demise?
“Five thousand yards!”
“Four thousand yards!”
Still the escort lazily continued to proscribe a leisurely orbital course around the remnants of the sailing fleet.
“Perhaps, they’re all drunk?” Max Forton suggested.
There were chuckles and guffaws around the control room.
“Confirm firing solution please!” Simon Collingwood snapped.
“Confirmed!”
“Recommend a narrow spread, sir!”
“Affirmative, make it so!”
This is too easy!
The commanding officer of HMS Dreadnought was still thinking ‘this is too easy’ right up until the moment the first of two Mark XIII torpedoes crashed into the side of the four thousand ton Soviet destroyer at over forty knots. The first of the three torpedoes had narrowly missed the ship’s bow, the second smashed through her side below her bridge; the third penetrated her machinery spaces amidships. The seven hundred and twenty-two pound Torpex warheads exploded within seconds of each other. The ship ceased to exist. Less than a minute later her splintered bow and stern, floating separately apart, rapidly filled with water and sank.
“Take us down to three hundred feet!” Captain Simon Collingwood ordered tersely.
Chapter 40
Monday 3rd February 1964
Headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean, Mdina, Malta
Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Christopher paused for a moment when his flag lieutenant, Alan Hannay slid the latest signal from HMS Dreadnought in front of him.
“Excuse me a moment, David,” he apologised to his old friend, Admiral Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord as he held the telephone receiver away from his head for a moment, “I’m just receiving the latest from Dreadnought.”
His youthful flag lieutenant withdrew from the room.
“Most urgent from Dreadnought,” Julian Christopher read aloud. “Ongoing interrogation of survivors of civilian refugee fleet suggests pogroms and a reign of terror on the mainland opposite north coast of Cyprus and a simultaneous military build up. Boys and young men are being conscripted into militias, old people sent to the hills to die, women are being horrifically used and abused and military age men who refuse to join Krasnaya Zarya’s Shock Militia are being shot.”