The Burning Time (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 5)

by James Philip

  In response to the nuclear attack on Malta she had ordered a national ‘air raid drill’. The United Kingdom was divided into eleven regions, each with a military governor and its own civil defence infrastructure, and she had wanted the comfort of knowing that the if the worst happened again that her people would at least know what to do, and where to go in the event of an attack. Participation in the exercise had not been mandatory but anybody obstructing or publicly attempting to dissuade fellow citizens to take part was technically guilty of a breach of the peace under the War Emergency Regulations. The drill had taken place yesterday between seven and eleven o’clock in the evening and there had been only a few reports of civil disobedience. Regional Governors had been advised not to press charges against people whose conduct inhibited the air raid drill exercise, other than in the most egregious circumstances. For example, in those rare cases where violence had been used or threatened against fellow citizens, the police or members of the armed forces.

  The ‘National Air Raid Drill’ had been mounted to follow up her address to the nation on Saturday evening. In that speech she had assured everybody that the apparent targets of the nuclear strikes had been well over a thousand miles away from the United Kingdom and that there was no indication whatsoever that subsequent attacks, either in the Mediterranean or elsewhere were to be expected, or for that matter, remotely likely. She hoped she would not be proved a liar by events but if preventing panic in the streets was the price she had to pay for compromising her scruples, then so be it.

  “There are several possibilities, Ma’am,” she decided. Since the October War the Queen’s role as a constitutional head of state had ceased to be purely ceremonial. Yes, she remained the nation’s figurehead but since the outrage at Balmoral she had become much more than that. The monarchy had become the one institution – perhaps, the only one – around which all the major political and military factions within the splintered polity of the United Kingdom could unite. London, the centuries old hub around which the country and the Empire had coalesced, grown and flourished had been laid waste overnight on that last Sunday in October 1962, and with its loss some greater or lesser piece of the heart of every one of them had been ripped out and consumed by the fires of the cataclysm. But the monarchy, incarnated in the unflappable, pragmatic and fearless person of Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, and Defender of the Faith, had survived as the one, immutable talisman of a terribly wounded country. The pre-war days when the monarch was just a ceremonial figurehead were gone. In practical terms this meant that it was understood by all the parties that in the event of a major falling out within the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, the Queen would have, in effect, a final and binding casting vote. “However, I must warn you that these are possibilities, not established scenarios, Ma’am.”

  “I fully understand, Prime Minister.” The Queen sipped her tea, placed her cup and saucer in her lap, smiled serenely and waited for Margaret Thatcher to continue.

  “The best case scenario is that the enemy – whomsoever he may be – has emptied his locker. Red Dawn may have shot its bolt, as it were.”

  “That sounds rather too much like wishful thinking to me,” the Queen pronounced. She might have been reading her Prime Minister’s mind.

  “That is my view, also, Ma’am. Given that neither our own intelligence services nor the Central Intelligence Agency had any inkling that Red Dawn possessed viable...”

  “Viable?”

  Willie Whitelaw cleared his throat to intervene.

  “Forgive the jargon, Ma’am. Viable in the sense that a nuclear weapon is, in the lingo of these things, fully generated and capable of deployment in the field. There is a huge difference between the possession of warheads and actually being able to shoot or drop the filthy things on anybody.”

  “Thank you, Mr Whitelaw.” The Queen looked back to Margaret Thatcher. She knew why so many people called her the ‘Angry Widow’; and she thought it was dreadfully unfair. Of course, that was not to say that her Prime Minister had not proven herself unexpectedly adroit at turning all the nonsense about emulating a latter-day Boadicea and in the exploitation of her natural feminine good looks to the maximum effect. There was ice in the Queen’s soul every time she thought about what would have happened if that madman in Cheltenham had succeeded in assassinating Margaret Thatcher a few weeks ago. What would have become of them all? The woman was a force of nature, a phenomenon even if she did not yet know it herself.

  A grateful nation had given John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough Blenheim Palace for winning the War of the Spanish Succession. The great and enduring mansion designed by John Vanbrugh and built in the relatively rare English Baroque style between 1705 and 1722 was gifted to the scion of the Churchill family for having saved the bacon of the ruling dynasty in what was probably the first ‘World War’ of the modern era. What, the Queen asked herself, would the Angry Widow’s grateful people grant her if against all the odds, she successfully led them through their present travails to the Promised Land beyond?

  The Queen silently chastised herself for letting her thoughts drift.

  “Quite,” Margaret Thatcher sighed, re-gathering her thoughts. “Given that we had no idea Red Dawn had access to viable nuclear weapons in the first place we can hardly make a realistic calculation as to how many more they might have up their sleeve. Logically, the fact that they had some weapons probably means that they may have others.”

  “The real imponderable, Ma’am,” William Whitelaw offered, explaining their mutual frustration and the underlying root, frankly, of all their fears arising out of the turn of events in the Mediterranean in the last fortnight, “is that we have no meaningful feel for what we are actually up against in the Eastern Mediterranean and in the Balkans. Krasnaya Zarya as a stay behind terroristic entity made a kind of twisted sense but what we have actually been fighting in the Eastern Med is a twentieth century – albeit an early to middle twentieth century – military machine capable of moving significant assets from place to place without us being any the wiser. In retrospect, the enemy’s seizure of the island of Crete some months ago now seems to have been a pre-cursor operation aimed at isolating Cyprus. On the ground the first wave of Red Dawn, or whatever it is,” the Defence Secretary threw up his hands in mild exasperation, “comes upon its enemies like something reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s defence of Moscow in 1941, or the Battle of Stalingrad. Hordes of mostly unarmed or poorly armed attackers rush defences with the living picking up the weapons dropped by the dead. We have reports of assault forces driving women, children and old men before them. But, and this is the thing I believe we need to concentrate upon, in several cases the initial ‘shock tactic’ assault has been followed up by what appeared to be highly disciplined, organised, regular forces. Likewise, while the ships we have encountered in the Eastern Med are flying great big blood red flags, they appear to be exercising and operating in generally good order in a fashion that would be familiar to any man who served in the Royal Navy in Hitler’s war. Add to this the reports that our aircraft have encountered enemy jet interceptors over the Aegean, the Sea of Crete and approaching Cyprus apparently operating under the aegis of an integrated air defence system of some kind; and what we are up against ceases to look like a mere terroristic entity, but begins to assume the appearance and more than a little of the substance of a partially reconstituted Soviet military machine.”

  “Oh,” the Queen observed, not really caring to contemplate the range of geopolitical complications which would arise if this was true.

  Margaret Thatcher spelled out the most intractable of those complications.

  “If this is the case then it seems obvious to me that significant parts of the former Soviet Union may not have been as badly damaged as we previously believed.”

  “What you are saying is that we mi
ght be facing is a wounded Soviet monster determined to wreak revenge on us all?” The monarch prompted.

  “Yes,” the other woman confirmed. “We have asked our American allies if additional reconnaissance assets are available to properly assess the situation in the areas of the former Soviet Union that we know to have been less heavily attacked during the October War. Unfortunately, it seems that the CIA’s pre-war spy satellite program was one of the victims of the Kennedy Administration’s ‘peace dividend’ cutbacks last year. This means that apart from our own Canberra photo-reconnaissance aircraft and a pair of U-2s, all of which had ceased operating over Soviet territory after the Gary Powers’ Incident in 1960 because of their proven vulnerability to ground launched missile attack, we have no real way of establishing the ‘facts on the ground’ in the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Black Sea Area or, frankly, anywhere in central or eastern Russia.”

  “Oh, dear,” the Queen frowned. “Presumably, we have information garnered from intercepted communications and foreign legations in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans? Although, I don’t suppose there can be many of those left, surely?”

  “The Norwegians and the Swedes attempted to maintain a token presence in Bucharest and Belgrade, Ma’am.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Currently, there are reports of heavy fighting north of Bucharest and of an unprecedented clamp down in the city by the Romanian Secret Police and Army. There also appears to be widespread fighting in the western provinces of the country.”

  William Whitelaw added: “the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanta is either closed or blockaded. We don’t know which. The people at Cheltenham are speculating that if the warships we’ve observed operating in the Aegean and elsewhere had been docked at Constanta, or perhaps, Varna in Bulgaria, our intelligence coverage of these areas has been so ‘spotty’ that they could actually have been there all this time without us being any the wiser.”

  “What do the Americans make of all of this?” The Queen asked, putting her darkest forebodings to the back of her mind.

  “I think it would be safe to say that they are still assimilating developments, Ma’am,” Margaret Thatcher replied, a little tongue-in-cheek.

  Chapter 8

  Tuesday 11th February 1964

  Securitate Headquarters, Bucharest

  Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin had not so much lost track of time as not bothered to try to keep track of it in the first place. The Securitate bruisers who had roughed them up at Otopeni Air Base before bundling them into the back of the truck for the ride back to the city had confiscated their watches, trouser belts, ties and shoes, and emptied their pockets. The Securitates had not blindfolded or hooded them because they obviously did not care if their prisoners saw or understood where they were being taken; he had not made up his mind if this was a good or a bad sign. The four of them; Kosygin, his fellow Politburo comrade Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov and his country’s post-Cuban Missiles War premier surviving atomic physicist, Academician Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov had been thrown – ‘thrown’ as if they were four sacks of coal - onto the bare, filthy unforgiving tiles of the floor of the three by two metre cell buried somewhere below the streets of the capital. A single glaring electric bulb swung from a short cable just inside the rusty, impregnable iron door; the only cell furniture was a rusty metal bucket. The bucket was the Securitates’ solitary concession to the elevated status of their ‘guests’; it seemed likely that the normal toileting option it offered the occupants of the cell was a small circular drain covered by a mould encrusted grill situated approximately in the centre of the dungeon.

  The stench of faeces and urine had overwhelmed that of vomit some hours before a squad of Securitates had entered the cell and dragged Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov away. If Andropov had not already pissed his pants he would have then. It was odd that it was always the same men who so loudly advocated ‘the way of discipline’ and the most immediate and brutal suppression of ‘ideological deviance’, who were invariably the first to piss their pants when they were actually on the receiving end of the ‘iron fist measures’ they championed. Kosygin had never trusted Andropov; the man had lost his nerve watching the mob stringing up Hungarian secret policemen outside the Soviet Embassy in Budapest in 1956. Andropov had been the one who had persuaded Nikita Sergeyevich to crush the uprising. Khrushchev had not wanted to do it because it smacked of a return to the ways of the Stalin era, then only three years in the past. Andropov – as Soviet Ambassador in Budapest and therefore the man on the spot – had forced his hand. With the benefit of hindsight Kosygin believed that the Cuban Missiles War would never have happened but for the Hungarian disaster. Afterwards, the West had recoiled at the brutality of the supposedly reformist, altered post-Stalin Soviet bear.

  Andropov had not wanted to make that Krasnaya Zarya speech because he knew that it was the sort of thing that could so easily come back to haunt him. KGB apparatchiks like Yuri Vladimirovich always preferred to keep their own hands as clean as possible.

  Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev had insisted: ‘Fuck it! You have to take responsibility for something sooner or later if you’re going to any fucking use around here, Yuri Vladimirovich!’ Andropov had twisted and turned like an eel, insisting that a Red Army man should be identified as the head of Krasnaya Zarya.

  Vasily Chuikov, the Soviet Union’s most decorated living soldier had laughed contemptuously.

  ‘I told you this thing would get out of control!’ He had thundered. The other members of the Politburo had thought he was reaching for a gun as he stood up, his chair crashing to the floor behind him as he had leaned menacingly towards Andropov, the Politburo member responsible for co-ordinating counter-intelligence and espionage activities against the West. ‘You must have had your finger up your arse these last few weeks and your head buried in a pile of dog shit to have let things get to this stage!’

  Alexei Kosygin’s partner in the post-war collective leadership of the rump Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev had looked to him and when he had nodded his assent, condemned Andropov.

  ‘You will do this thing, Comrade,’ he had growled. ‘Or you will personally account to the Politburo for the unauthorised use of nuclear weapons in the West.’

  Now Kosygin, Sakharov and the old soldier sat on the cold floor with their backs against the wall. Other than the faint radiated warmth of the single overhead lamp the cell was frigidly clammy although their breath did not mist as it would have in the basement of the Lyubianka in Stalin and Beria’s days.

  “I am confused,” Andrei Sakharov confessed.

  “About anything in particular, Comrade Academician?” Kosygin asked, welcoming the opportunity to break the circle of his increasingly gloomy thoughts.

  “It was my understanding that our mission to Bucharest was to assist Comrade Gheorghiu-Dej and the Romanian Politburo to purge Krasnaya Zarya elements in the region, and to clarify existing military and technical mutual support arrangements?”

  Kosygin tried not to laugh too loudly as Sakharov frowned in that innocently professorial way of his. The man might be a genius but he understood nothing about realpolitik.

  “We came here to intimidate the fucking Romanians!” Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Chuikov grunted irritably. “Fucking Romanians! My boys fought the bastards in the Ukraine in the Great Patriotic War! Fucking Nazi lap dogs! We always knew they’d probably betray us!”

  “Not however,” Alexei Kosygin observed dryly, “quite so comprehensively, Vasily.”

  The old warrior guffawed like a rutting musk oxen.

  The scientist was baffled.

  “Comrade Andropov has been taken away and we have been left to rot in this stinking hole in the ground,” he said, stating the patently obvious, a thing he rarely did and despised coming from the lips of others. “How can you be so calm?”

  Kosygin looked at the scientist thoughtfully, envying his naivety.r />
  The last year had prematurely aged the fifty-nine year old. Unlike his co-leader, Leonid Brezhnev he did not care to dye his hair unnaturally black or to pretend to a youthful vigour he no longer felt. He was a lean, hard man whose keen intellect was his defining strength and he acknowledged the irony of his current situation. He and Leonid Ilyich, it seemed, had done far too good a job masking the residual military and industrial strength of the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from their only remaining ally in Eastern Europe. They had kept their secrets too well! If Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and that little shit Nicolae Ceaușescu had known what they were dealing with the Securitates would not be kicking Andropov around an interrogation cell, and Kosygin and his fellow prisoners would not be killing time in a fetid basement in Bucharest. The situation would have been amusing if it had happened to somebody else.

  The Romanians and their Krasnaya Zarya parasitic guests who had used Bucharest as their quasi-capital since the October War, had honestly believed they were dealing with a Troika – some kind of Party-KGB-Army junta – ruling the devastated, enfeebled ruins of the old USSR from somewhere behind the Ural Mountains. The Romanians had been willing accomplices – now it seemed they had convinced themselves they were the new overlords – willingly providing the under strength 57th and 58th Shock Brigades of the so-called Ukrainian Peoples Front bases and jumping off points for the incursions through Bulgaria and Transylvania into Greece and the Balkans. Presumably, the Romanians had imagined Krasnaya Zarya would win them relatively intact and undamaged footholds, the bridgeheads of some new latter day Roman Imperium. They had honestly believed that they could control Krasnaya Zarya! When they discovered their mistake they had panicked. They had not counted on Krasnaya Zarya poisoning the well both west and south of the Black Sea. The 61st and 63rd Shock Brigades of the Trans-Caucasus Front had were, like the Romanian-based 57th and 58th, uncontrollable, undisciplined polyglot rabbles made up of refugees from all over the former Eastern Bloc, commanded by berserkers who turned on their Soviet Military advisors – and controllers – as Phase One of Operation Nakazyvat, Operation Chastise - had achieved its objectives. When the maniacs belatedly discovered that they had never been the masters of their own destiny they had attempted to start a second global nuclear war.