by James Philip
“We are winning the war, Comrade Leonid Ilyich,” Chuikov chortled. Having allowed himself his fun he turned deadly serious. “Is Alexei Nikolayevich on the line?”
“Da!” Kosygin confirmed, sounding wide awake. “It is always good to speak to you Comrade Marshal. Even in the middle of the night!”
“We have decisions to make,” the old soldier informed his comrades. “We’d expected much stiffer resistance but our forward observation units are reporting the enemy falling back or melting away into the mountains ahead of us. 3rd Caucasus Tank Army is already half-way to Tabriz, the way it is looking here in Ardabil 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army may be allowed to motor west unopposed. Shit,” he grunted, allowing himself a rare moment of reflection, “after what the Air Force did to Tehran the Iranian Army might not even exist anymore. If things go on like this our spearheads might be investing Sulaymaniyah in days not weeks!”
The two ‘old commissars’ of the Troika had emphasised from the outset of the planning for Operation Nakazyvat that the object of the exercise was not simple military conquest. While Chuikov and Babadzhanian would be given a free hand to conduct their business at specific ‘way points’ in the ‘drive south’ it was recognised that ‘political opportunities’ might arise. In that event military operations would be subservient to the ‘political necessities of the moment’.
The two ‘old commissars’ were silent as they absorbed Chuikov’s meanings.
It was Kosygin who spoke first.
“What is your recommendation, Vasily Ivanovich?” He asked.
“Hit Baghdad now. Take it out before the British or the Americans know what’s hit them!”
Chapter 69
03:25 Hours
Monday 6th April 1964
Verdala Palace, Malta
Air Vice-Marshal Dan French indicated for the woman to go before him into the darkness of the walled garden. She had requested a ‘short private meeting’ but there was nowhere ‘private’ within the Verdala Palace tonight. Most of the ground floor and two thirds of the first floor had been transformed into a hospital, the reception hall was a dormitory of the men of HMS Talavera and the off duty soldiers from the palace guard, the two upper floors accommodated members of the C-in-C’s own staff, the staffs of the visiting VIPs and several hastily set up offices and communication rooms. The old castle hummed and murmured with movement and voices even at this hour of the morning.
“You wanted to talk to me confidentially, Miss Piotrowska?”
There were armed guards everywhere in the darkness,
Rachel ignored them, kept her voice low.
“There’s something you need to know,” she said, whispering. Orders had been issued to bring Nicolae Ceaușescu and the woman, Eleni, to the Verdala Palace. The two politicians, Iain Macleod and Airey Neave wanted to talk to Ceaușescu before ‘wild rumours’ were transmitted to Oxford under ‘the flag of hard intelligence’.
Dan French suppressed a groan. Something in the woman’s tone broadcast that he was not going to like what she was about to tell him.
“That sounds ominous,” he remarked.
“Samuel Calleja has made a full confession.”
Later that day, or perhaps the day after, the heroes of the Battle of Malta would be flying back to England to be feted and acclaimed. Within forty-eight hours the Queen would be pinning medals on those heroes’ chests, shaking hands and no doubt exchanging the small talk for which such investitures were famous with the wife of the man whose face would shortly be plastered across the front pages of every newspaper in the civilised World, the unrivalled star of every television news cast and Pathe report.
By the hero’s side would be his beautiful young wife, Lady Marija Calleja-Christopher smiling seraphically. They would be instantly the most famous married couple in Christendom.
Moreover, in many of the pictures there would be the battered, stocky, sheepishly grinning presence of Joseph Calleja, the communist trades union agitator and troublemaker sacked by the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta days before he rode into battle astride the torpedo tubes of HMS Talavera; and on an open, shot-torn deck launched the salvo of torpedoes that had won the Battle of Malta.
Marija and Joe; the siblings of the traitor Samuel Calleja.
Dan French held his peace a little longer as their steps carried him and his companion deeper into the darkness of the garden.
“Damnedest thing!” He muttered, exasperated in his weariness.
Rachel sensed that he was not talking about Samuel Calleja’s treachery.
“Yes,” she concurred.
“This business over Samuel Calleja, too,” the man added ruefully. He had known the ‘Samuel Calleja’ situation was going to be a fly in the ointment the moment Rachel had told him who had been in the room with Julian Christopher at the end of the fight for the Headquarters complex in Mdina. He had had a lot of other things on his mind at the time and in the intervening hours but he had not put the ‘issue’ to one side, let alone filed it away for further action at some unspecified future time and place. Keeping an impossibly large number of balls in the air at one time was what had kept him alive flying Lancaster bombers over Germany, and more than once saved his bacon flying the first operation V-Bombers. Thus it was that he had already decided what he was going to do about the Samuel Calleja problem several hours ago.
The fact that the man had belatedly made a clean breast of his crimes was irrelevant. There had never been any real doubt that he was a traitor; an enemy agent who had betrayed the Crown in time of war.
The provisions of the Treachery Act were nothing if not specific in proscribing the disposal of those found guilty under its aegis. Dan French perfectly understood the powers and duties invested in his person by the current State of Emergency on the Maltese Archipelago, the fact of Martial Law, and the responsibilities incumbent upon him.
“Does he deny his involvement in materially assisting an enemy in a time of war?” He asked.
“No.” Rachel hesitated. “What will you do with him?”
The VIPs had come out from England to bring back heroes and nobody had done more to earn their triumph back home more than Peter Christopher and his brave band of brothers; nor Joseph Calleja. The truth about Samuel Calleja’s treachery would emerge soon enough...
“The business over Samuel Calleja will wait for another day,” he said, and that was an end to it. “Nobody in this building needs to know about it for now.”
Rachel blinked in the gloom.
She had been afraid the man would ask her to quietly make the problem go away and she had not known how she would react. Friday’s bloodletting had changed who she was in ways she was still discovering; she had hurt enough people.
“Thank you for bringing this to me,” the man went on, filling the vacuum of words. “It must be hard for you to trust people at the moment.”
Rachel almost jumped with alarm.
How could he have seen through her so easily?
“A little,” she admitted.
“No harm is to befall Mr Calleja,” Dan French stated, just so there could be no later misunderstanding. “I’d be obliged if you would re-emphasise that to Major Williams on your return to Rinella please.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you. After you have spoken to Major Williams I think it would be best if you returned to Marsa Creek. Ideally I would prefer Samuel Calleja’s wife to be removed from the, er, ‘firing line’ at this time but every place on an aircraft returning to England has been allocated several times over already. Would you be prepared to take the young lady under your wing until things blow over?”
Rachel was somewhat taken aback by how far ahead the man was thinking and planning. She had presented him with an intractable problem, he had decided what he was going to do about it and was requesting her assistance in managing one relatively small element of the fallout.
“Yes. Somebody ought to look after Rosa,” she concurred.
They turned and bega
n to move towards the main building. It would be a little while before Nicolae Ceaușescu and his companion and nurse, Eleni could be transported across the island so there was no hurry. “As I said, it is the damnedest thing,” Dan French remarked again.
“The last few days have been very strange,” Rachel echoed. Since Friday she had allowed her voice and its tone to abandon the English drawl she had so carefully constructed throughout her adult life. Even to her own ear she now sounded Polish, bereft of her English vowels albeit unable to rid herself of her habitual very English syntax. It was as if she was becoming a different person, another woman.
“Yes, indeed. When things have settled down a bit,” the man flashed a smile in the dark, “might we dine together one evening do you think, Miss Piotrowska?”
Chapter 70
02:50 Hours (GMT)
Monday 6th April 1964
Bishop’s Cleeve, Gloucestershire
Seamus McCormick had no idea if the two Redcaps who had disturbed him fifteen minutes ago had raised the alarm before he emptied the magazine of his Browning forty-five into their faces and chests. In the ear-splitting silence after the hammer clicked down on an empty chamber the village around the green where he had parked up the Bedford lorry yesterday evening had remained dark, and nothing had moved. Very, very distantly a dog had barked. It had been surreal, otherwise nothing had happened.
Absolutely nothing!
But the two dead military policemen would be missed sooner or later and he did not have time to find out if they had friends in the vicinity. One of the Redcaps had fallen half-under the truck; the big lorry lurched forward over his body as he drove off.
Despite the cool of the night McCormick was sweating heavily and his mind was racing at a thousand miles an hour. One second he had been fitfully dozing in the cab; the next the gun had been bucking and kicking in his hand. He had been aware of the spent cartridges clattering off the dashboard and the windscreen, yet not recollected hearing the sound of the rounds actually firing.
What the fuck am I doing?
The question shrieked in his head.
Where am I going?
He did not know the answer to either question.
Nor did he know why he had shot the two Redcaps. For all he knew they might just have wanted a chat, a friendly chinwag to help pass the boredom of their night shift. Neither of them had pointed a gun at him...
They had looked shocked when he started shooting.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” He screamed, breaking the Bedford to a squealing halt.
He had panicked.
He had had no quarrel with a couple of squaddies with MP armbands; they were men like him, victims who had had no part in his wife, Siobhan’s murder, or in defending the guilty. His only fight was with the bastards who had sent him and thousands of men like him to make war on people who by rights ought to be his blood brothers.
He hammered the wheel in blind impotence.
He had never fired a gun in anger until tonight.
He had never killed a man until tonight.
And still there was no hue and cry. There were no flashing lights on the roads around the village. The houses by the road were dark, only the asthmatic rumbling of the Bedford’s ancient, sorely tried engine broke the quietness of the night.
What was the plan?
To get the Bedford out of sight, hidden in the trees. To find a place with a line of sight to the flight path into RAF Cheltenham. That had been the plan.
Perhaps, that was still the plan?
Seamus McCormick took a succession of long, decreasingly ragged deep breaths and waited for his heartbeat to slow down.
Hide the Bedford.
Unload the two Redeyes.
Find a launch site.
If he was discovered again then he would worry about it at the time.
He had run out of options and whatever happened he was not going to outlive this day. In that thought if in no other, there was a measure of cold comfort which might, if he was lucky, sustain him long enough to wreak his vengeance on his rulers.
Chapter 71
03:38 Hours (GMT)
Monday 6th April 1964
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
MOST URGENT MOST SECRET AND CONFIDENTIAL STOP CAPTURED INFORMANT REPORTS ATTACK ON MALTA A STRATEGIC DIVERSION STOP MAIN SOVIET REPEAT MAIN SOVIET GROUND OFFENSIVE IMMINENT OR ALREADY UNDER WAY IN NORTHERN IRAN STOP OBJECTIVE OF MAJOR SOVIET GROUND AND AIR OFFENSIVE IS TO INVADE NORTHERN IRAN AND TO PASS INTO NORTHERN IRAQ SEIZING KIRKUK OILFIELDS STOP THEREAFTER TO DRIVE SOUTH TO BAGDHAD AND THEREAFTER DOWN THE FLOOD PLAINS OF THE TIGRIS AND THE EUPHRATES RIVERS TO SEIZE BASRA AND ABADAN ISLAND AND TO EMPLACE STRONG ARMOURED BLOCKING FORCES ON THE NORTHERN SHORE OF THE PERSIAN GULF THREATENING KUWAIT AND THE ARABIAN PENSINSULAR STOP INTEND TO PERSONALLY INTERROGATE INFORMANT SHORTLY STOP FURTHER MESSAGE WILL FOLLOW AS INTELLIGENCE BECOMES KNOWN STOP SIGNED CODS MACLEOD NEAVE MESSAGE ENDS.
The words burned off the message sheet searing Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson’s numb fingers. Having been awakened to receive the news of the devastation of Tehran by a ‘city-killer’ strike, Margaret Thatcher had pressed the communication she had just received from Malta upon him without saying a word. The fact that Admiral Sir David Luce, the Chief of the Defence Staff had endorsed the message with his own imprimatur ahead of the signatures of the two Cabinet members who had accompanied him to the Maltese Archipelago the previous day made the blow even more sickening.
The Prime Minister was immaculately dressed and turned out, not a single hair out of place. The Foreign Secretary wondered if she had gone to bed that night; personally, he felt like death warmed up while she looked a million dollars.
“Willie and the others are coming over,” Margaret Thatcher explained tersely. “Clearly, we have all been living in a fool’s paradise. Yourself excluded, Tom,” she admitted grimly. “I am sorry I did not give your views the credence that they so obviously merited. I will be mindful not to make that mistake again in the future.”
Tom Harding-Grayson was too shaken to appreciate either the compliment or the promise. But for the steely implacability of the defiance in Margaret Thatcher’s blue grey eyes he would have most likely despaired. There had been some desperately dark times in the slightly more than seventeen months since the cataclysm of the October War; but none as black and hopeless as this.
Malta had almost been lost and British arms were disastrously over-stretched at the very moment a new and unsuspected deadly peril had emerged. The paper-thin rapprochement with the United States of America had failed to defend Malta, the alliance’s most strategically important base in the Mediterranean. There had been a complete - probably self-inflicted - failure of intelligence in the Middle and Near East. The Suez Canal remained blocked at Ismailia obviating any possibility of reinforcing the under strength garrisons at Abadan, Aden and elsewhere in the region now threatened by what might turn out to be an irresistible tide of Soviet tanks. The American President was flying to England later that day in a last ditch attempt to patch up Anglo-American relations, attempt to quieten his domestic opponents and to establish a working chain of command for an as yet non-existent joint military partnership on the ground in the Mediterranean; a plan which events already looked to have overtaken.
At the same time all this was going on a bunch of mad Fenians was roaming the English countryside with state of the art US-supplied surface-to-air missiles on the very day that every available transport aircraft was coming and going from Malta carrying south emergency supplies and new personnel and bringing back north heroes by the dozen and wounded and injured servicemen and civilians by the score.
Oh, and the Royal Navy had just submitted a paper to the War Cabinet recommending the deployment of submarines previously held in strategic reserve for the defence of the British Isles, on a mission to the South Atlantic to wage unrestricted submarine warfare on Argentinean naval and commercial shipping until such time as that country surrendered the territories it
had so recently stolen from the Crown!
The World had gone to Hell in a handbag!
“Cheer up, Tom! The Angry Widow declared. “At least we know what we are up against now!”
The man had handed her back the message sheet and slumped disconsolately into the nearest chair.
“The Soviets have destroyed Tehran,” he reminded Margaret Thatcher. “Short of starting a new atomic war I’m not sure if we can do anything about it if they have really set their sights on the Persian Gulf.”
His Prime Minister had given him a thoughtful look.
“Right now I don’t know what we can do about it either,” she admitted candidly. “However, it seems obvious to me that there is one thing we must do.”
“Oh, what would that be?”
“Once and for all we and our American allies must draw a line in the sand!”
Chapter 72
06:16 Hours
Monday 6th April 1964
Verdala Palace, Malta
Admiral Sir David Luce and Air Vice-Marshal Daniel French took early morning tea together on the veranda as the dawn began to break over the Maltese Archipelago. The two men had business to conclude that was best contracted divorced from political interference.
“I will carry out the tour planned for this morning,” the Chief of the Defence Staff informed the airman. “I will return to England on the first available flight out of Luqa this afternoon to report back to the Prime Minister. I also need to hold discussions with the Supreme Commander designate which, given developments overnight really won’t wait until tomorrow. The new Supremo is a sound fellow, I think. Our paths crossed several times before the war. Interesting chap, actually. General Harold Keith ‘Johnny’ Johnson. He was captured by the Japanese at Bataan and survived three years in Jap prison camps. If the politicians give him enough elbow room he’ll do a good job, I’m sure.” He focused on more immediate issues. “I have communicated my recommendation that you be confirmed as C-in-C Malta under whatever new command arrangements are decided in the coming days.”