by James Philip
Chapter 21
02:30 Hours
Saturday 4th April 1964
Emergency Command Centre of the Military Governor of Malta, Marsa Creek
The two redcaps who had driven Rachel through the chaos of the night from the Citadel into and out of great banks of choking acrid smoke, down burning streets and past a dozen roadblocks manned by trigger-happy Maltese Local Defence Volunteers and exhausted British soldiers, seamen and airmen, had escorted her – since it was apparent she was no longer under arrest - directly into the shabby office at the end of the old, rusting seaplane hangar.
“Leave us please,” Air Vice-Marshal Daniel French directed the Redcaps without raising his voice, briefly looking up from the maps strewn across the room’s one significant piece of furniture, a workbench. He was flanked by several senior officers.
One asked: “Shall we make ourselves scarce for a few minutes, sir?”
“Yes, if you would. Find Miss Pullman a chair please, she looks all in. And would somebody find her a hot drink.” He eyed the woman’s chaffed red and puffy wrists with irritated dismay before looking her in the eye and quirking an apologetic grimace.
Rachel had obediently settled in the hard wooden chair scraped across the floor for her use. The door to the room, which must once have been the old hangar’s former flight office, clicked shut behind her.
Dan French hauled himself to his feet and came around his desk. He pulled up a second chair and sat immediately before his guest so close that they could converse in low tones. He leaned towards her, rubbed his brow and made a conscious effort to look Rachel in the eye.
She had never met the man in whose hands her life – quite literally – now lay. She had no idea if Julian Christopher had ever mentioned her mission on Malta, or even the existence of somebody remotely like her. Communications with England would be difficult right now; nothing she said could be checked for many hours, perhaps days and she had no real feel for how much trouble she might be in. Life on Malta was cheap if one was identified as a traitor. What had happened yesterday could not have happened without the collusion of a significant number of enemy fifth columnists, agent provocateurs, spies and traitors having stabbed the British and the Maltese people in the back. In Mdina while she had been down in the bowels of the Citadel she had caught snatches of conversation among the weary Redcaps, soldiers and Malta Local Defence Volunteer (MLDV) men guarding the prisoners in the cells around her. The British had their blood up and in the aftermath of battle the previous day; and stories about drumhead courts, summary executions and gruesome ‘rough justice’ were already in general circulation.
Air Vice-Marshal French was a handsome man of slightly above average height, his hair was short, well-groomed and his uniform, although creased and specked with dust and ash, was neat, trim like the man himself. He sported a neatly trimmed moustache. His eyes, green grey, were thoughtful and betrayed no sign of the anger or shock he must still have been experiencing.
The woman looked the Acting Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces on the Maltese Archipelago in the eye and was surprised to find an absence of hostility, and little or no sign of obvious mistrust. Having never been this close to the former Lancaster pilot; she now noticed the suggestion of grey at his temples and the worry lines he usually hid with a winning smile. A smile specifically designed to suggest to people who did not know him very well that he had not a single care in the world.
Rachel returned his intent scrutiny.
She knew that Daniel French was popular with his men and was respected if not liked by the leaders of the two largest Maltese political parties, the Labour Party and the Nationalists. He had established a reputation for dealing fairly with local people; his was a calm head, a firm hand on the tiller as he stood on the burning deck.
“I apologise for your incarceration, Miss Pullman,” he declared, eyeing her bruised and swollen bare wrists again for a moment before resuming his scrutiny of her face.
With the matted dry blood in her hair and a puffy left eye – she had walked into something during her killing spree without noticing it – she looked as if she had been in the ring with a prize fighter.
Incongruously, at this moment this troubled her more than somewhat.
She hated to look a mess when she was in the company of an interesting man. The airman had been Julian Christopher’s deputy but he had never been in the Fighting Admiral’s shadow.
“My name is not Clara Pullman,” she confessed, quirking a rueful smile.
“No?” The man waited. He had a million and one other horribly pressing things to do but he waited patiently for her to continue.
Grace under pressure.
“My name is Rachel Angelika Piotrowska,” she told him. Involuntarily she again half-smiled. “My mother and father always called me their little Angel. As a girl I was always Angelika.” Having opened her mouth she found it hard to stop talking. “Rachel was for my father’s mother. His family never approved of my mother. Too Russki, you see. Despite her being half-Jewish. There’s no such thing as being half-Russki; or half-Jewish. Or at least not where I was born. My mother always had too many old-fashioned airs and graces. Or that’s what everybody said.” She forced herself to shut up. “I’m talking too much.”
The man shrugged, in no hurry to betray his own agenda.
“What happened to your parents?”
“My father was a political journalist so the Soviets took him away one day and I never saw him again. My mother was one of over a hundred women and children driven into a church in Lodz which the Nazis set fire to. Some of the kids jumped from the first floor windows to escape the flames. The Germans bayoneted them to death. Leastways, that was what I think happened. I’d escaped the ghetto by then so I only know what people told me months later. It took me several years to accept that I was never going to see my father or my mother again.”
Dan French arched an eyebrow.
He said nothing, which must have been hard for him.
Rachel sighed, shuddered involuntarily.
“I have worked for the British since 1947,” she said flatly, too exhausted and too beaten down to lie. “The last time I spoke to the Director General of MI6 in Lisbon in December I told him I was finished. But he persuaded me to come back to Malta,” she shrugged, blinked back a stray tear before she collected her wits anew. “I knew it would end badly. Arkady had got into my head, you see. Everything got too personal and well, I couldn’t be who and what I was supposed to be any more. That was why Julian Christopher had his own people watching Arkady. He knew he couldn’t trust me. I couldn’t run away, of course. Where can you run on Malta? So I ran away inside my head. I really was a nurse once,” another shrug of her shoulders, a sniff and she forced herself to sit upright, “so I tried to be one again.”
“You had no inkling that what happened yesterday was going to happen?”
She shook her head.
“No. I think Arkady knew he was blown. Sending him back here to reel in his own network was too much even for a monster to bear. It would have been kinder almost to have taken him back to England, pumped him full of truth serum or whatever Dick White’s inquisitors use these days, and quietly put a bullet through his head when it was all over. Kinder, and a lot less problematic,” she concluded resignedly.
“For whom?”
“For everybody.” Rachel had wondered again what Julian Christopher had told his friend about her. “You knew about Arkady?”
The man nodded.
“But not me?”
“No, you were something of a conundrum. Obviously, I took it as read that you were a spook,” Dan French conceded, “but otherwise I knew nothing about you. Who will vouch for you, Miss Piotrowska?”
Rachel smiled; she could not stop herself smiling.
The man who found himself in command of all British and Commonwealth Forces on Malta held up a tired hand. He had just asked one of the least intelligent questions he had ever asked. Sh
e would not or could not answer his question and he had known it before he opened his mouth.
“Okay,” he murmured. “Let me be frank about this, Miss Piotrowska; my security people want to crawl all over you, your life and your career. They tell me I can’t afford to wait until secure communications are restored to England. They failed to keep Rykov under control,” he vented a disgruntled snort, “and they are looking for somebody to blame. Things being what they are I need you to give me a reason to let you walk out of this room a free woman. More than that I need to know that I can trust you. I must know what happened in the period immediately prior to your arrest. I have heard garbled stories about your, er, exploits, but I’d like to hear your version.”
Rachel very nearly giggled. It must have seemed hysterical, manic but she did not care. The balance of her mind, her sanity, was every bit as perturbed, disturbed as it ought to have been by the things she had done yesterday.
Why pretend otherwise?
“When I was thirteen,” she prefaced, involuntarily making an apologetic spreading gesture with her hands, “I killed Fascists. With a knife mostly; but once I threw a bomb into a crowded mess room. The only Germans who got out alive were on fire from head to toe. I had a gun but I let them burn. Killing a Fascist with a gun was nothing; I got more satisfaction using a knife. If I couldn’t cut their throats or stab them through the lung or heart I twisted the blade in their guts. What with one thing and another after the war I never really ‘got on’ with other young people of my own age.”
Dan French nodded his face a grim mask.
“After the Germans caught me I ended up at Ravensbrück. I was there were the Soviets ‘liberated’ the camp. I killed the first two Red Army soldiers who raped me,” Rachel added, very much as an afterthought. “That was before I realised that killing everybody who raped me was going to be, well, dumb really. There were about two million Red Army soldiers in Germany at the time. If I spent all my time killing Russians I’d starve to death. So, I stopped killing Russians.” Once more she smiled thinly at the silent, handsome man who had the power to click his fingers and to have her taken outside and shot. “For a while.”
Still the man said nothing, waiting patiently as if he knew she was beyond threats, beyond fear and that she had already realised that he was not the sort of man who was going to have the Redcaps beat any kind of truth out of her.
“Sorry, yesterday,” Rachel murmured.
Why do I feel foolish?
“When Margo Seiffert was murdered,” she went on, consciously trying to pull herself together, “it was like a switch clicking in my head. I killed as many Russians as I could,” she explained, as if it was the most rational thing. “I’d forgotten how easy it was to kill people. Especially, people who deserve it. I enjoyed it so much I nearly forgot that the only thing which would really make me feel any better was killing Arkady Pavlovich Rykov. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know where he was likely to be.”
“And you killed him?”
“Yes. It was like putting down a wild dog.”
“Why didn’t you kill the second Soviet officer in the room?”
Rachel Angelika Piotrowska looked at the Acting Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces on Malta and realised with a prick of shock that he understood nothing.
“Because he was never any threat to me.”
Her sophistry was completely lost on the Englishman. A flash of muted vexation flickered in his level gaze.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “Sorry. The second man isn’t a Soviet officer. Well, not a real one, anyway. The Soviets must have given him a uniform when they landed, or he might have had one ready for when they landed. I don’t know which.” She was making very little sense so she spelled it out for the Englishman. “He wasn’t one of the parachutists because he was already on Malta when the attack began.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because he speaks bad Moskva Russian,” she declared, “and he is Maltese.”
“You’re positive about this?”
“I met him the first time Arkady Rykov and I were in Malta. That was just before Admiral Christopher arrived on the archipelago and the big American bombing raid. Well, I say I ‘met him’, really it was more a case of ‘seeing him’ once from across the street, and another time from the other side of a crowded bar while I was supposed to be ‘minding Arkady’s back’.”
This obviously confused Dan French.
“I was Arkady’s lover and ‘agent’ but he would have killed me the moment I ceased to be useful to him. By the time we got to Malta in November he was starting to think about ending our partnership but he still needed somebody to ensure that nobody was taking an unhealthy interest in his activities. When, for example, he was meeting one of his agents...”
Rachel’s voice had trailed off because she realised she had ignored one of the two questions the man badly wanted her to answer. The time for deceit and deception was over; after yesterday her cover was ‘blown’ to smithereens even if, for a moment, she had had it within her to pick up the scattered traces of her previous life. A life that in truth, she had been running away from long before that Soviet trooper had murdered Margo Seiffert.
“Sorry, sorry,” she whispered. “The second man in the room when I killed Arkady Rykov is, was – I thought he was dead before I found him in that office in the Citadel – a Maltese citizen. His picture was in the Times of Malta two or three months ago,” she said, struggling to get to the point. “You know; when HMS Torquay was sabotaged in the Grand Harbour, remember?” She still honestly did not know why she had to tell him this.
Dan French’s eyes widened a fraction.
The most powerful man on the Maltese Archipelago was in a quandary.
Something screamed at him that he did not want to hear what he was about to hear and yet, he had to know everything.
“Who is he?”
The woman’s shoulders sagged.
“He’s Marija Calleja-Christopher’s eldest brother,” she murmured, feeling like she had stabbed her new found sister Marija in the back, “he’s Samuel Calleja.”
Chapter 22
03:50 Hours (Local)
Saturday 4th April 1964
Sa’dabad Palace, Tehran
Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the forty-four year old Shah of Iran stifled a yawn and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He sat up and listened for some seconds to the mounting thrumming drone of many, many aircraft engines high in the skies over the Sa’dabad Palace. Mohammed Reza had ascended to the Peacock Throne on 16th September 1941 when an Anglo-Soviet invasion had forced his father, the first monarch of the Pahlavi dynasty to abdicate. A ruthless and coldly pragmatic man brought up from infancy in a palace environment populated with scheming, duplicitous and positively mendacious characters that would not have been out of place in a Medici or a Byzantine court, he saw threats and plots in every shadow.
Why is my air force flying over the capital of the nation this night?
He rose to his feet and padded to the great tall windows of his bed chamber. Presently he was outside on the balcony, gazing into the darkness of the heavens. Here and there a star winked faintly through a gap in the overcast and a cool breeze blew down from the mountains north of the city.
The sky seemed alive with distant noise.
Like usurpers throughout history the Pahlavi dynasty was intensely sensitive about its legitimacy. Beneath the appearance of absolute command, of regal certitude and unquestioned authority, a crippling underlying sense of nameless insecurity touched every aspect of Mohammed Reza’s regime. His father, an army officer, had seized the throne in a coup in the 1920s and his son could never forget that he had been installed as a tame ‘place man’ by the British and the Russians; just another pawn in the ‘great game’. It mattered not that he was the inheritor of the monarchy of Cyrus the Great, King of Persia, or that he perched at the apex of a lineage stretching back over two millennia; nor did it matter that among his
numerous titles and honorifics he boasted that he was Āryāmehr, the ‘Light of the Aryans’, and Bozorg Arteshtārān, the ancient ‘Chief of the Warriors’.
The problem was that there was no blood line back to Cyrus the Great or any other Persian imperial dynasty and even after more than two decades on the throne the Shah’s grip on power was anything but assured. The reality of his situation had been brought home to him over a decade ago. After Iran’s first democratic government had been elected it had turned on him and nationalised British and American oil interests in the country, whereupon the same western ‘idealists’ and ‘statesmen’ who had pressured him into accepting and implementing so-called ‘democratic reforms’ had ruthlessly conspired with him to crush his nation’s ill-starred experiment with representative democracy. Ever since then in the eyes of many of his people, he had been no more than a Western puppet.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had never forgotten the lessons of the long drawn out excruciatingly painful and humiliating Abadan Crisis of 1951 to 1954. In the intervening years he had always striven to avoid a repetition of that conflict. Every time he thought, read or heard the name ‘Abadan’ it reminded him that oil was both his kingdom’s strength and its horribly vulnerable Achilles heel. The potential wealth of Iran’s massive oilfields – until recently thought to be mainly in the south but now known to also stretch across the northern border into Kurdish Iraq and the former Soviet Republics of the Trans-Caucasus – might one day give him a trump card at the international table. Many of his advisors believed that the October War was a god-given second opportunity to successful re-nationalise the oilfields and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s huge refinery complex at Abadan. They were fools; whatever else had changed in the post-war World the Royal Navy still bestrode the seas.
Abadan was like a running sore on the conscience of the kingdom; a wound that ought to have been lanced years ago. Nevertheless, Mohammed Reza was nothing if not a cautious man and he was wise enough to understand that in the aftermath of the October War – in the long run - history was on his side.