by James Philip
She squeezed his hand for the others had brought sad news from Bighi. Another Talavera had died of his wounds that morning and Miles Weiss, the destroyer’s Executive Officer, had not yet regained consciousness following an emergency operation to relieve what had turned out to be a massive sub-cranial haematoma. Miles had seemed fine – albeit a little dazed - until several hours after the battle, and then he had begun to exhibit symptoms of a mild concussion which had got progressively worse. He had had some kind of epileptic fit while he was being taken into the operating theatre.
“Admiral Clarey has had to return to his flagship,” Captain Lionel Faulkes, a veteran U-boat hunter from the days of the Battle of the Atlantic in Hitler’s War who having retired from the Navy in June 1962, now found himself the senior surviving Royal Navy staff officer on Malta. He had arrived shortly ahead of the VIPs. Faulkes was the man who had patiently, with great charm and pragmatic dexterity guided Peter Christopher and Talavera’s Navigating Officer, Canadian Lieutenant Dermot O’Reilly through the hasty preparation of the official ‘After Action Report’ of the ship’s part in the Battle of Malta the previous night.
Faulkes ran his eye down the line, smiled at Marija and returned his full attention to the tall young man who was about to become - somewhat reluctantly – a national hero.
“Air Vice-Marshal French will be accompanied by the First Sea Lord, Sir David Luce, Mr Neave, the Secretary of State for Supply, and Mr McLeod, the Secretary of State for Information and the Leader of the House of Commons.” Behind him the film crew which had arrived with a crowd of journalists – who were milling around outside in the courtyard – was setting up, installing still more dazzling lights. The first two planes into RAF Luqa had carried over fifty doctors and nurses and several tons of medical supplies. The VIPs’ aircraft had likewise been packed with medical supplies and transported several dozen ‘experts’, mainly Royal Engineers to the archipelago. “I will do my best to stop this thing becoming a scrum,” Captain Faulkes promised. “You will be introduced to each of the VIPs in turn by the Acting C-in-C; thereafter you will escort the aforementioned VIPs down the line introducing each man to Sir David Luce. The other VIPs will follow you and the First Sea Lord as you progress down the line. If you would introduce each man,” he glanced to Marija, “and your good wife in a moderately declamatory fashion so that each VIP catches each name that would be most helpful, Commander.”
“I shall do my best, sir.”
Captain Faulkes was shorter by nearly a head than Talavera’s former commanding officer and significantly more than twice his age, his grey hair thinning and his eyes a little rheumy. His was a very old head on a body wearied by a life leavened with more than its fair share of spills and privations. But for a quirk of fate might have died with so many of his friends and colleagues at Mdina two days ago. He felt the loss of the Fighting Admiral as any friend would; the Navy had lost its finest son and yet when he looked at Peter Christopher he now found himself looking at a youthful reincarnation of the father.
The King is dead; long live the King!
Lionel Faulkes had never married. His naval career had been everything to him and he had never wanted for company; the countless friendships he had formed in peace and war had been the real joy of his life. Wherever he went or looked in Navy circles he saw and was found by true friends, such was the real underlying, virtually indestructible strength of the Navy. Within those circles he had always been an oddly bookish man, the butt of many well-meant jibes for his scholarly conversation and carefully considered opinions and perspectives. After the 1945 war, his general health and constitution having been somewhat impaired by having had two ships sunk under him, he had become a career ‘staffer’. He had been an instructor at Dartmouth when Peter Christopher had scraped through by the skin of his teeth, much to his father’s infuriation at the time. Faulkes had not actually taught the boy but his father had asked him to ‘keep an eye on the lad’, so he had, albeit from afar and nothing which had happened to that apparently callow, unfocused youth, had subsequently surprised him. In most of the ways that mattered Peter Christopher had already been his father’s son back in those days at Dartmouth; he just had not realised it. He was a natural seaman with an innate eye for the weather and sea conditions, a born ship handler even when he was messing about in a skiff on the River Dart in the shadow of the Britannia Royal Naval College on the hill above it. He had always been the sort of man others followed; it was simply that he had only latterly accepted in full the terms of his contract with the Royal Navy. Back at Dartmouth he had still been trying to be a civilian in uniform.
‘Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep, even so I will endure… For already have I suffered full much, and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war. Let this be added to the tale of those.’
He wondered if the VIPs who were about to march into the Verdala Palace truly understood that they had just found their young Odysseus freshly returned from the Trojan Wars?
There was a commotion outside, the bawled commands of a drill sergeant and the sound of booted feet coming to attention on granite flagstones.
And then events began to blur.
Admiral Sir David Luce stood before his old friend’s son.
Salutes were exchanged and firm handshakes clasped and held.
Peter Christopher was hardly aware of the anonymous men in suits behind the professional head of the Royal Navy.
“May I have the honour of introducing you to my wife, Marija, sir?”
“It would be my honour, Sir Peter.”
The younger man hesitated. His father’s baronetcy had been hereditary. He remembered somebody telling him that in Lisbon in what seemed like another lifetime long before he had ever set eyes upon Marija. He tried to be properly formal but afterwards he could not actually remember what he said next.
Marija stepped forward to greet Sir David Luce.
The older man tried not to beam like an idiot but it was impossible.
“How do you do, Lady Marija?” He inquired, clinging onto his composure only from habit.
Chapter 64
20:59 Hours
Sunday 5th April 1964
Forward HQ of 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army, Ardabil, Iran
Colonel General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s mood was such that even the arrival of Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, the Minister of Defence in the ruling collective leadership of the Mother Country, could do little to dampen his growing elation.
“Comrade Konstantin Yakovlevich managed to get over three hundred of his men out before the Red Air Force finally got its act together at Tehran,” the younger of the two most heavily decorated surviving heroes of the Great Patriotic War – by a mere six years in age but in appearance ten to fifteen years – reported with a wolf-like smile. All real tank men needed to have the soul of a wolf, to have the steely resolve to exploit a chink in the enemy’s defences with ruthless, predatory hunger. Babadzhanian had casually come to attention when his superior had stomped into the luxurious, opulent surrounding of the mansion of the former governor of Ardabil. Now he relaxed and led the newcomer to the map table – until yesterday the Iranian Military Governor of Ardabil’s banqueting table – and waved at the high rocky plain south of the great barrier of the Alborz Mountains stretching all the way from the Caucasus to Afghanistan. “Kurochnik says the Air Force used a big bomb?”
Vasily Chuikov’s wickedly cherubic wrinkled features momentarily displayed a flash of irritation.
“The aircraft they were going to send in the morning crashed on take-off. They loaded the only available ‘fully generated’, whatever the fuck that means,” he complained like a disgruntled football coach whose star forward has just missed an open goal, “bomb onto another Tu-95. It took them all day to get the bloody thing working. They didn’t realise it was over twenty times ‘bigger’ than the plan called for until they were half way to the target! Fucking idiots!”
Colonel General Ha
mazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian had mandated the destruction of western Tehran and of Mehrabad Air Base; it seemed the Red Air Force had demolished the whole city. It made little or no difference to the ongoing conduct of Operation Nakazyvat whether a Hiroshima sized bomb in the range fifteen to twenty kilotons had been employed or a three hundred kiloton weapon had been deployed over Tehran. Other than in the sense that if he had known the Red Air Force was going to obliterate the city anyway, he would not have wasted the lives of several hundred of his best – and in the current situation, irreplaceable - airborne troops in a demonstration primarily designed to decapitate the Shah’s regime, and to humiliate and break the will of the Iranian people to resist. That was the trouble with the Red Air Force, the word ‘proportionality’ had never appeared in any of its manuals!
Nevertheless, Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s mood was optimistic. He had specified a ‘limited tactical nuclear strike’ on Tehran, hoping that such a strike might be ‘tolerated’ by the British and the Americans if and when it became advantageous to repeat the medicine on Baghdad. The use of such a large ‘city killer’ warhead on a capital city might make repetition of the gambit problematic; but that was a thing he would worry about another day.
Today, his armoured spearheads were already well down the road from the Armenian border to Tabriz and after a brief overnight consolidation, leading elements of the 3rd Guards Tank regiment would soon be pushing west from the ever-expanding ‘Ardabil Defence Zone’ towards distant Tabriz from the east. Colonel Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik’s fifty percent butcher’s bill in Tehran apart, casualties had thus far been negligible.
“Still nothing from the British or the Americans?” Babadzhanian asked, looking up from his maps.
“Nothing,” Chuikov chuckled so deeply it was surprising that the window panes did not vibrate in sympathy. “The Malta demonstration still has them shitting in their pants, Comrade Hamazasp Khachaturi!”
Chapter 65
22:35 Hours
Sunday 5th April 1964
USS Charles F. Adams (DDG-2), Kalkara Creek, Malta
Rachel Piotrowska had been vexed to discover that she had only been asleep a little over an hour an hour when she was awakened. Within minutes she was being escorted down to the jetty in Rinella Creek for the short passage by boat beneath the low Bighi cliffs towards the silhouettes of the nearest of the two big modern American guided missile destroyers.
Beyond the USS Charles F. Adams her sister ship, the USS Berkeley was slowly backing out into the Grand Harbour, having cast off her lines from the long low bulk of the oiler beyond. She sounded her steam horn several times as she began to glide past the nearer destroyer.
It was a clear night and all around the anchorage lights twinkled.
But for the filthy flotsam and jetsam drifting in Kalkara Creek and the taint of burning everything was eerily normally.
Onboard the Charles F. Adams Rachel was taken directly to the small Captain’s day cabin on the bridge of the American destroyer.
“Commander Simon McGiven,” the dapper man with the receding hairline and firm dry handshake said introducing himself as he rose from the papers he had been shuffling on his narrow, neat desk. “Thank you for coming onboard, ma’am. My Operations Officer is processing the survivors we picked up this afternoon. They all seem to be off the Yavuz, the old Turkish dreadnought. But,” the destroyer’s commanding officer shrugged, “we’ve got one guy, well, him and his female companion, actually, who might be of interest to your people at the Joint Interrogation Centre. I say ‘might’ because frankly, we can’t make out a lot of what he’s been saying and the woman doesn’t seem to speak English or Russian or any kind of Greek that any of my people can make head or tale of. You are a linguistic specialist, I gather?”
Rachel Angelika Piotrowska stifled a yawn.
She was still dressed in the over-sized, coarse, itchy battledress top she had been given the day before. She had since found a vest to wear beneath it and swapped her Army issue trousers for blue slacks she had seen lying on a pile of washed clothes at the Joint Interrogation Centre. She knew she must look odd wearing this particular trousseau with hopelessly impractical cork sandals on her feet and her hair a hopeless mess...
“I am an intelligence analyst attached to the C-in-C’s personal staff,” she parroted. It would not do to tell the commanding officer of a United States Navy warship that she was a spy working for, and only for, the Director General of MI6. “I speak many languages. Hopefully, I may be able to help.”
The one-legged man lying in the sick bay cot might have been in his forties or fifties. The hard faced woman with sun-bleached fair hair was a little younger. Both of the survivors realised immediately that Rachel walked into the sick bay alcove deep within the aft superstructure of the American destroyer that, at last, somebody was taking them seriously.
The woman was clutching the man’s right hand in both her hands like her life depended upon it. She instantly began to babble at Rachel and the bespectacled, studious looking man in his early thirties whom she had been introduced to as Lieutenant-Commander Felix Kocinski. Kocinski, Rachel had discovered was the son of second generation Polish emigrants to the United States; he spoke a little pigeon Polish and had a very limited ‘phrase book’ vocabulary of the sort of flowery old-fashioned Russian that might have been spoken in Leo Tolstoy’s time.
Rachel found herself staring at the man in the sick bay cot.
With an effort she clenched her teeth to stop her mouth hanging agape.
Disconcertingly, the man in the cot registered her momentary shock; but made no attempt to speak or remark upon it. Presumably, because like any apex predator he knew that the scent of blood was the first, not the last act in any hunt.
Rachel tried not to think about the long burst of fire from her Kalashnikov walking Arkady Pavlovich Rykov back across the room in the Citadel at Mdina; or how his broken body had jerked to a halt against the wall and slid down to the floor...
Her discomfiture was brief, fleeting; concealed in an instant.
She was fully in control by the time she settled on the hard chair Lieutenant-Commander Kocinski gallantly drew up for her. She held up her hand for the other woman to stop talking. After a few moments there was relative silence. Deep in the ship the hull gently hummed with the noise of distant generators and the rushing of the fire room blowers. The sick bay stank of disinfectant and outside the alcove – a small side compartment with three narrow cots – everything was bustling activity.
She pointed to herself and said in a random Russian dialect used throughout the Ukraine and in the border territories with the former Warsaw Pact allies bordering the Black Sea: “My name is Rachel. I am an interpreter. I speak Russki, English, Bulgarian, Rumanian, and a little Greek, but only of the islands...”
“I am Eleni,” the woman survivor of the sinking of the Yavuz blurted. “My family fish... We captured by Roma soldiers... We sunk by Turkish ship... We taken onboard...”
Rachel translated for the benefit of the Operations Officer of the USS Charles F. Adams.
“She is a Turkish Cypriot,” she explained in passing. “She was once married to a Greek fisherman from Samothrace who died some years ago in a storm...”
Lieutenant-Commander Kocinski wanted to ask a raft of questions but Rachel shook her head. Now that her initial shock had subsided she was studying the face of the man in the bed and he was returning her stare with a cool calculation that seemed wholly wrong.
Rachel felt as if she knew him and he was looking at her as if he knew her; and yet that was impossible and they both knew it.
His resemblance to Arkady Pavlovich Rykov was uncanny.
Do I know this man?
He seemed to recognise her and understanding this – intuitively, or by some unspoken sign between the two of them – the Greek woman instantly shut her mouth.
“Eleni is a little bit distraught,” Rachel said softly to Kocinski. “I’m sure you have a mi
llion things to do, Commander. Perhaps, if you left us alone? I’ll give you a full report of everything I learn later.”
The man hesitated.
“As you wish, Miss Piotrowska.” He departed leaving the hatch dogged open.
Rachel pursed her lips and tried to remember where she had seen the man in the bed.
“Russki?” She frowned. “Roma?”
The man who could have been Arkady Pavlovich Rykov’s twin brother snorted a barely audible grunt of what his eyes told her was exasperated incredulity.
“The World has gone fucking mad,” he sighed in Rumanian in a hoarse whisper before he started coughing up the last dregs of the muck he had swallowed in all the hours he had been in the water.
Eleni babbled at him incoherently.
“What is she saying?” The man asked presently.
“She wants to know if you and I are old friends,” Rachel reported sourly.
The man in the cot vented a feeble guffaw of amusement.
For the benefit of his companion he shook his head.
My life is turning into a fucking comedy of errors...
He had no idea how he had found himself in the water a couple of hundred metres from the capsized hull of the Yavuz with a dozen other people; or how he and Eleni had ended up clinging to a raft, or later lashed together either side of a what must have been some kind of steel drum or buoy. He had wanted to succumb to the cold so badly but the bloody woman would not let him sleep...
And now he was onboard an American warship being interrogated by the mistress of the most dangerous man he had ever known, the former KGB Head of Station in Istanbul; the same man whose persona he had stolen to escape the retribution of his old Soviet friends...
Chapter 66
21:50 Hours (GMT)
Monday 6th April 1964
Bishop’s Cleeve, Gloucestershire