The Dark Chronicles

by Jeremy Duns

  ‘I think it is time to finish this.’

  ‘Do it, then,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter now, because we’re all going to die anyway. But that’s what you want, isn’t it? Because you arranged the attacks on the bases. I wonder if you will be able to explain it to your son when the fallout appears and his skin starts peeling away.’

  Sasha stared at me in disbelief and Yuri laughed.

  ‘He’s lying, my son,’ he said calmly. ‘He’s just a sad little traitor trying to save his own skin. Why would I initiate an attack on our own country? It would be suicide. Do I strike you as suicidal?’ He stretched out an arm at the absurdity of the idea.

  ‘It’s certainly suicide now,’ I said, ‘because the Americans will retaliate and the fallout will reach here. But it wasn’t suicide when you thought of this plan, because you and all your cronies would be safe in the bunkers beneath Moscow. I think you’re so deluded you believe nuclear war is worth it.’

  ‘And I think your mind has gone…’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’ve told me some truths, and now it’s time for your son to hear the truth about you. You planned this. I know it, because I worked in the West and nobody there is insane enough to try to start a nuclear war. But you are. I think you’ve calculated that even though both sides will be severely damaged, in the end the Soviet Union is so enormous that it will absorb the losses and continue, whereas the West will be destroyed for hundreds of years, a radioactive desert.’

  He didn’t say anything, and I watched as Sasha registered the hesitation, and in that moment saw the truth. I almost felt sorry for him.

  ‘Father?’ he said, and Yuri turned to him. He must have seen that he was disbelieved, because he gave a rueful smile.

  ‘Yes, Sasha,’ he said, ‘this is true.’ He lifted his chin. ‘But I offer no apologies – we will rise again from this.’ He turned back to me. ‘You were the trigger for it,’ he said. ‘I sent you here in 1945 to find this U-boat, remember? It’s something I have thought about for many years.’

  He’d sent me here? Had he? I thought back to my dossier, and what Yuri had written about my time in Helsinki. ‘His performance so far has been exemplary…’ Of course. I hadn’t been trying to beat the Russians to the U-boat at all, but the British. Templeton had seen the signals from SOE in Stockholm about a U-boat captain being washed ashore in the Åland archipelago, and he had reported it to Moscow. Yuri had told him they wanted to get to the body before the British, and so Templeton had sent me out here armed with a Browning and warned about possible undercover Russian agents getting in my way. Jasper Smythe had been just who he had claimed to be, a British agent, and I’d killed him thinking he was a Russian.

  ‘What was the idea of sending me here?’ I asked ‘Was it a trial run – something like that?’

  He gave a shallow smile. ‘Something like that. But I also very much wanted to get hold of the mustard gas, so I wasn’t pleased at all that you failed in that part of the mission. I came here myself and questioned the local policeman at length to try to discover where exactly you had gone. He knew very little, unfortunately. But yes, I was interested in you because you were the son of an agent I had recruited five years earlier, and you seemed to have promise.’

  Promise.

  ‘So after my operation here, you decided to set up my recruitment in Germany, using Father and the honey trap with Anna.’

  ‘Yes. But I had no idea at the time that it would work so well. You and your precious Anna! All these years later, and the woman is dead after trying to murder you, but you still can’t stop talking about her. Isn’t it amazing what we will do for love? Or what we think is love, anyway.’

  I didn’t reply to that. Not twenty yards away, Sarah was lying on the ice. But I had to stay calm with this bastard, for all our sakes.

  ‘So what did you do next?’ I asked, keeping my voice level with great effort. ‘How did you find out where the U-boat was?’

  ‘When Templeton told me you’d left the canisters behind, I was furious. But I decided there must still be a way of getting in.’

  ‘So then you came back to get the canisters,’ I said. I needed to know it all now.

  ‘No, not then. Events overtook me, and I had other things to attend to. I set up the operation to recruit you in Germany, and that took a lot of time. But I knew that the mustard gas here wasn’t going to go anywhere, and I kept it in the back of my mind to use at a later date. The existence of this weapon is just one of many secrets I have held in reserve over the years, to use when the time was right. The war came to a triumphant end and other things happened. I was decorated, and promoted, and moved departments. But I never forgot that there was a U-boat out here with a new form of mustard gas buried in it. And I thought of it again a few weeks ago, when Nixon made it clear to our ambassador in Washington that he was considering nuclear war against us. I thought he was playing games, and I knew that whatever he did, short of a nuclear strike itself, certain men close to Brezhnev would feel the same way.’

  ‘So you decided to make the game seem more real by attacking two of your own naval bases.’

  He nodded. ‘In effect. When the Americans started moving ships in the Gulf of Aden, I realized they were planning something to try to scare us. I decided to play along. I sent a couple of my men out here to get the canisters, and then they released them towards the Estonian islands. I reported it as an attack, and made sure that this was taken seriously. We sent special troops to investigate. Then Nixon sent his B-52s into the air, armed with nuclear weapons, and I realized the opportunity had finally come.’

  ‘How did you know they weren’t planning a real attack?’

  ‘They had left several of their nuclear submarines in port, where they could be attacked easily – presumably because they wanted us to receive the signal that they were raising their nuclear alert, but couldn’t risk doing it publicly because their citizens might panic and force a genuine crisis. The Americans’ actions alone would never have been enough to persuade Brezhnev to initiate a strike. But I presented the evidence in a certain way. Nixon’s threats to our ambassador, coupled with the activity of his navy, then this despicable chemical attack on our bases,’ – he smiled gently – ‘and now nuclear-armed bombers heading for our airspace… I persuaded Brezhnev to summon everyone to the bunker and informed them that as result of all this I thought we were about to be attacked by the West. Andropov and a few of the others were sceptical, as I’d suspected they would be. So I had you fetched from your cell. You performed beautifully, I must say, once again exceeding my expectations. You told us all about your operation here, confirming for everyone in the room that the chemical weapon originated from the West, just as I had argued. Brezhnev had no choice but to put us on a war footing. If he hasn’t heard from me within the next ten minutes, he will launch a tactical strike against the United States and other countries, Britain, naturally, included.’

  ‘And the Americans and the British will retaliate. Many Soviet citizens will die as a result, first in the blast, and then from the fallout.’

  He didn’t even flinch as I said it, just nodded his head. ‘It is worth sacrificing the few for the many.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m familiar with that line of thinking.’ I thought of Nigeria, where he had planned the assassination of one man in order to gain control of the country. And of Italy, where he had been content to watch many more killed in terrorist attacks. ‘But this is different, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘You’re going to sacrifice millions of people today, not just a few. The British have forty-eight Soviet cities as their initial targets. I suspect the Americans have the same, or more.’

  ‘Everything is relative,’ he said. ‘It is still a few compared to the many. The Soviet Union has two hundred and forty million citizens. A full-scale nuclear war may kill ten or even twenty million of them, but just think of the future after that. We will grow greater, and stronger. We will be in control, finally, not the West. We will never have another ch
ance like this, not now that we have agreed to this insane idea to reduce our weapons. That will help the Americans, not us. The time for us to strike is now. Out of the horror will come a new dawn.’

  His words echoed in the wind as it blasted around the island.

  I turned to Sasha.

  ‘So now you know,’ I said. ‘This isn’t a choice between me and your father, or even between East and West. This is a choice between your father and the survival of our species for hundreds of years.’

  Sasha slowly raised his pistol. He pointed it at my head, but then turned on his heels and aimed it towards his father.

  Yuri’s eyes darted towards him, but his face showed no other sign of distress.

  ‘Put that away, Sasha,’ he said, a little too casually. ‘This man is a foreign agent, and he cannot be trusted. There are things you know nothing about, and cannot comprehend. Have faith in me – I am your father, but I am also your commanding officer. We will die here together, like men, for the greater glory of the Motherland.’

  Sasha kept his gun hand steady. ‘So this was your plan?’ he said, his voice thick with suppressed rage. ‘To cut off most of our limbs in the hope we will grow a few back faster than our enemy?’

  ‘I told you to put the pistol down.’ Yuri’s voice had also turned colder. ‘There is nothing you can do about this now, and there is nothing to fear.’

  ‘But what about me, Father? How did I fit into your plan? Because it wasn’t always for us to die out here together for the glory of the Motherland, was it? It was for you to be safely underground with the others. So what about me? You planned to leave me outside to die?’

  As Sasha lifted the pistol, Yuri’s eyes dulled for a moment as he realized he had lost, and then the bullet penetrated his forehead, the sound of the shot only reaching my ears after I’d seen its impact. Yuri stood there for a moment as though nothing had happened, and then his knees crumpled as if they were made of paper and he toppled onto the ice. In the same moment, Sasha swivelled and aimed his gun at me. I threw myself towards the ground, but I was too slow and the shot caught me somewhere in the stomach.

  The back of my head hit the ice and I wondered why I couldn’t feel any pain, and then it came, spreading through me like fire, and I felt the throb of the ice below me, or perhaps it was the throb of pain, they had merged, and I waited for the darkness. So this was where it ended – in the cold and the ice of this tiny island. My eyes were still open. Although my vision was blurring, I could see two figures in front of me – Sasha and the other one – and the case between them, open now, and inside a small black unit. After some time, I heard the familiar bursts of static and then Sasha’s voice.

  ‘Moscow, this is Rook. Moscow, this is Rook. Do you read me?’

  ‘Rook, this is Moscow. We read you. Four minutes to zero hour. Okay to proceed?’

  ‘No, stand down from preliminary command, Moscow. I repeat, urgent, stand down from preliminary command. Event 12 is an accident, and I have the evidence for it. Do you read me?’

  ‘Rook, we read you. Please give details.’

  ‘Moscow, I am at the source of the accident. The Englishman was correct. I have evidence of the canisters in my hand and can see the chemical in the water. Raven has been killed in the line of duty, serving the Motherland with honour, but he confirmed this to me personally before he died. Event 12 is an accident. Please acknowledge this.’

  Seagulls shrieked in the distance, and time stretched out. How long had it been? A minute? Two? I didn’t dare count the seconds.

  And then it finally came: ‘Rook, message received. Preliminary command has now been stood down.’

  I closed my eyes. I could hear the faint echo of my teeth chattering deep in my skull and the waves lapping against nearby rocks, again and again, as they had done for eons and would now do for eons more, all being well. Yes, but what was an eon, really? I twisted my head towards the sound and prised my eyes open a fraction. I was rewarded with the view of a wave churning into an eddy of water, swirling around and then releasing and starting again, the pattern of the sea in miniature, the pattern of life, perhaps, each time different, each wave lasting such a very short amount of time. I watched, fascinated, as the foam formed on the tip of the wave, and then broke and was subsumed into the darkness of the water, never to be seen again. I was like that foam, and so was everything else.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Sasha, somewhere far above me. ‘It’s over.’

  ‘And the traitor?’ asked the other man. I closed my eyes again, and held my breath. Fingers reached around my neck, and I braced myself for the final struggle. But he was checking my pulse.

  ‘I can’t feel anything, sir. Shall I dispose of the body?’

  ‘No,’ said Sasha, the man who had been my companion on so many occasions in the pubs and parks of London. ‘The birds can feast on he and his girlfriend. But help me load my father into the helicopter. I will debrief you in the air.’

  I had a sudden vision of a field, and palm trees, and then a glimpse of a driveway in the night and Templeton in slippers peering out from his door. The boots began to crunch away from me, and then there was the sound of the helicopter’s engine and the rotors starting up and the wind howling as they took off, the noise cutting through the air until finally it had faded and there was no sound left but the lapping of the waves and a refrain running around and around in my mind.

  Timor mortis conturbat me. Timor mortis conturbat me…

  Author’s Note

  As in Free Agent and Song of Treason, I have made use of several historical facts in writing this novel. The Cold War saw several close calls regarding nuclear conflict, most notably the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962; the incident in January 1968 when a nuclear-armed B-52 crashed seven miles from an American airbase in Thule, Greenland; and various incidents in late 1983, including misread signals creating fear within the Kremlin that the NATO exercise ABLE ARCHER 83 was being used as cover for an imminent nuclear attack, which led to the Soviet missile arsenal and military being put on high alert in preparation for a preemptive strike.

  These are perhaps the best-known examples of the world coming to the brink of nuclear war, but there are others. In April 1969, after an American reconnaissance plane was shot down in the Sea of Japan, the United States placed tactical fighters armed with nuclear weapons on a 15-minute alert in the Republic of Korea to attack airfields in North Korea. In June of that year, the Americans’ contingency plans for North Korea included the possibility of an attack with 70-kiloton nuclear weapons, codenamed FREEDOM DROP.

  Another close call took place in October 1969, when President Nixon raised the United States’ nuclear alert level by launching a series of secret manoeuvres that included implementing communications silence in several Polaris submarines and Strategic Air Commands and halting selected combat aircraft exercises. The most alarming manoeuvre was Operation GIANT LANCE. At 19.13 Coordinated Universal Time on 26 October, thermonuclear-armed B-52s took off from bases in the United States and headed towards the northern polar ice cap in the direction of the eastern border of the Soviet Union, where they flew in precisely the same pattern they would have done had they been launching a nuclear strike. Several more took off the next morning.

  Officially referred to as the Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test, these measures were part of Nixon’s so-called ‘Madman Theory’: by posing as unpredictably volatile, he hoped to push the Soviet leaders into weaker positions for fear of provoking him. His objective in October 1969 was to stop the Vietnam War spiralling out of control by making it appear that the United States was considering a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The idea was that the generals in the Kremlin would be so shocked by the development that they would put pressure on the North Vietnamese to negotiate a peace settlement. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Colonel Robert Pursley both expressed opposition to the operation, fearing that the Soviets might interpret it as a real attack.

  It is not yet known how the Kremlin
interpreted Nixon’s raising of the nuclear stakes in this dramatic manner. Melvin Laird has suggested that US intelligence intercepted Soviet communications expressing concern, and this has been supported by, among others, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, who has confirmed that the leadership in Moscow was informed of the American alert. On 20 October 1969, Dobrynin met Nixon and offered to start the long-delayed Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. Further discussions of this may have helped defuse the situation: the talks went ahead in Helsinki in November. But it seems Nixon and his staff may have underestimated how preoccupied the Soviets were with their border conflict with China. On 17 October, the Chinese government was preparing to be attacked by the Soviet Union: 940,000 soldiers were moved, and China’s nuclear arsenal was readied. On 20 October, the same day Dobrynin met Nixon, authorities in Peking let it be known that they would open border negotiations with Moscow, as they were not prepared to let a ‘handful of war maniacs’ in the Kremlin launch a pre-emptive military strike over the issue. It may be that the Soviets successfully pursued their own ‘Madman’ strategy with China – it may also be that the Chinese went on alert in response to the Americans’ manoeuvres, or the Soviets’ response to them.

  Nixon halted GIANT LANCE on 30 October. Thankfully, none of the B-52s entered Soviet airspace or crashed. This is especially lucky because an after-action report revealed that several of the B-52s had been orbiting in close contact with other planes in an air traffic situation that was deemed ‘unsafe’. Had an accident taken place, the Kremlin would almost certainly have read it as an American attack, in which case global nuclear conflict would probably have ensued.

  My main sources for information on GIANT LANCE were the declassified documents about the operation and several articles by William Burr, J. E. Rey Kimball, Scott D. Sagan and Jeremi Suri. I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Suri for taking the time to answer my questions about the incident.