by James Philip
“Do you think our friend Arkady Pavlovich will shed any light on it?”
Julian Christopher shrugged. Dan French was wise to mistrust Arkady Pavlovich Rykov, the mysterious, dangerous former KGB Colonel who had, supposedly, been working as a double agent for MI6 in the years before the October War. Rykov claimed he had betrayed his country and his mentor, Nikita Khrushchev, after the brutal crushing of the Hungarian uprising of late 1956 when he was ordered to infiltrate the higher echelons of the Krasnaya Zarya movement. For the man who had once been Josef Stalin’s translator at the Yalta Summit, and later groomed by Lavrentiy Beria, it had been, apparently, too much. Notwithstanding Julian Christopher’s and Dan French’s scepticism, Rykov had convinced the Secret Intelligence Service that he had belatedly discovered his conscience; and two months ago no lesser luminary than the Head of MI6, his long-time controller, had brought him in from the cold.
“I honestly don’t know, Dan,” the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean admitted candidly.
The two men were getting used to operating in a twilight haze of uncertainty. There were too many conflicting snippets of inconclusive intelligence coming across their desks; and none of their senior analysts could agree on what was actually going on. In Cyprus the Red Dawn horde had melted away from the pre-prepared defensive lines of the massively outnumbered British garrison. With the cessation of Red Dawn aerial activity over the island RAF Akrotiri had been re-opened to desperately needed re-supply and evacuation flights, and several isolated enclaves in the Troidos Mountains had re-established corridors of communication with both Akrotiri and Limassol. Julian Christopher had hoped the arrival of the first US Navy nuclear submarine in the Eastern Mediterranean, the USS Swordfish, would temporarily interdict Red Dawn’s ability to reinforce its invasion horde on Cyprus; he had not expected Red Dawn’s hitherto berserk, utterly insane onslaught to simply cease before the American SSN had fired a torpedo in anger.
The Red Tide horde’s advance had halted everywhere and now there were fragmentary reports about outbreaks of fighting in Romania and on the border between Turkish Asia Minor and the Trans-Caucasus.
None of this made any sense.
“HMS Dreadnought will secure the 2nd Submarine Squadron picket line pro tem,” Julian Christopher went on. “She’s badly in need of dockyard time but she’s still in good enough order to be the surviving Amphions’ gatekeeper and protector if the worst comes to the worst.”
“Do you think there may be more enemy subs out there with nuclear-tipped torpedoes?”
“We shall see. Personally, I don’t think a former Soviet conventional boat would have much chance of getting past the old Amphions, let alone Dreadnought. I’ve asked Rear-Admiral Detweiller to hold the USS Seawolf and the USS Skipjack fifty miles west and south of Malta until the situation is a little clearer. He’s not comfortable leaving the Swordfish ‘out on a limb’ at Cyprus but he agrees that securing our base of operations here is the key to the whole ‘ball game’.”
“Detweiller’s a good egg, they say?”
Rear Admiral Laverne Lucas Detweiller, Commander of the Enterprise Task Force, was a third generation American son of Saxon immigrants who had settled in Jones’s County, Iowa in the 1880s, originally small time dirt farmers who now farmed tens of square miles of the rolling plains of the great American ‘corn belt’. A towering, blond giant of a man with a handshake that would make a Grizzly bear wince - and subsequently count his clawed fingers - he made no bones about what he intended to do to the ‘sneaky, cowardly bastards who murdered all those fine young men on the Long Beach, the Enterprise and your ships last Friday’. Rear-Admiral Detweiller had explained that his friends called him ‘Lucas’ or just plain ‘Det’; he was an intrinsically gentle giant who had taken the attack on his flagship as a personal affront, and dealt with everybody he met, be they humble cooks in his flagship’s galley, or the C-in-C of all British and Commonwealth Forces, with robust cheerful amiability. However, if he ever got his hands on the man behind Friday’s nuclear strike he meant to ‘rip off his godammed fucking head!’
This, in the circumstances, was fair enough.
Arkady Pavlovich Rykov was waiting for Julian Christopher and Dan French when they arrived at Headquarters. The three men hurried upstairs to the C-in-C’s room.
“The first use of nuclear weapons,” the former KGB man said sombrely once the door to Julian Christopher’s office had firmly clicked shut at his back, “would never have been sanctioned by the surviving Soviet High Command.”
Julian Christopher’s eyes narrowed a little; Dan French almost choked on his ire.
“What do you mean? The surviving Soviet High Command?”
The former KGB Colonel did not bat an eyelid. When he had been a young man he had once been so terrified in the presence of Iosif Vissarionovich that he had shit himself. In comparison to his one-time master there was very little either of the – admittedly very powerful – men in the cool, still, room beneath the bastion walls of the great Citadel of Mdina would do to frighten Arkady Rykov. A man who had survived nearly ten years in the inner circle of monsters like Stalin and Beria lost the capacity to be intimidated by any normal man.
The Russian had refused the offered chair.
He would have been a fool to tell his handlers and his new clients everything; and anyway, they would not have believed him until now so what would have been the point recklessly burning through all his credit with his former enemies all at once?
He clasped his hands behind his back.
He had no choice but to speak a little of the truth; if he did otherwise their distaste for him personally and for everything he represented professionally, would inevitably begin to erode his remaining credibility. Thereafter, his situation would become increasingly untenable and his mission would inevitably end in failure.
“You must understand that I have no specific intelligence in this matter. What I say now is speculation based on my knowledge of the plans that existed in the Soviet Union before the war. You must understand also that many different plans were developed because the Soviet High Command knew that it could not win a war against the West.”
Julian Christopher shrugged, held his peace.
The Russian picked his words with meticulous care.
“The USSR is a very large country with many, many secret places that neither you nor the Americans know about. Mother Russia is a very large country with very big bomb shelters buried very deeply in its holy soil. There was no general alert or alarm before your missiles and your bombs began to fall but do you truly believe that the members of the High Command were all standing on the balcony of the Kremlin waiting for the first ground burst in Red Square?”
Julian Christopher’s gaze narrowed further.
Arkady Rykov was a lean, dapper man in his forties of no more than average height. He had let his hair grow in recent weeks to cover the livid scars on his skull. Beneath his tailored grey suit his torso was a mass of scar tissue; x-rays showed old and recent fractures of ribs, his left forearm, several cracked vertebrae, crushed fingers and a dozen small pieces of shrapnel deeply imbedded in his back. He was handsome in a swarthy way with dark eyes that could be anything to anybody, depending upon the circumstance.
“Many members of the High Command, the Politburo, or whatever you wish to call it, would probably have survived the war, Admiral Christopher,” the Russian continued. “The Soviet Union in the west ceased to exist,” he shrugged, “probably. But what of the rest of the Mother Country? Strategic Air Command and your V-Bomber Force suffered over fifty percent losses on the night of the war. You can have no idea how many of those lost aircraft were shot down before they reached their targets. Nor, I suspect, have you or the Americans had the stomach for systematically overflying all your war objectives, let alone the huge tracts of Mother Russian that you never even targeted in the first place. After the Great Patriotic War the United States Air Force crawled through th
e ruins of all the cities and factories you had bombed in Germany and produced comprehensive reports of what they found. I am unaware of any similar post-war exercise having been conducted in the last year, Admiral.”
Julian Christopher ignored the Russian’s implicit insinuation the he really ought not to have to be telling his British masters any of this because they ought to have worked it out for themselves. He said nothing.
“History does not repeat itself,” Arkady Rykov said flatly, “but it teaches us hard lessons. When the Roman Empire in the West was over-run by barbarians; it moved to the East and survived for another thousand years.”
“Very pithy,” Dan French sniped.
“But undeniably apposite, Air Vice-Marshal.”
Julian Christopher leaned back in his chair.
“So what is Krasnaya Zarya Colonel Rykov?”
The former KGB man looked at him with grudging respect.
“A wild beast that the High Command was too wise to attempt to cage, Admiral. A wild beast that it unleashed upon its enemies. A wild beast it was happy to see slavering at the throats of the monsters responsible for destroying the western half of their empire. I have no love for my former masters, you understand, but I can see no circumstances in which they would have knowingly allowed Krasnaya Zarya maniacs to seize control of any part of their surviving nuclear weapons stockpile.”
Dan French jumped up from his chair and crossed his arms across his chest.
“You’re telling us that last week’s unprovoked thermonuclear first strike was some kind of miscalculation?”
“In the eyes of the High Command more of an unfortunate accident.”
“What about the weapon that was used to destroy HMS Amphion?”
“Another accident.”
“An accident?”
Arkady Rykov met the airman’s angry glare levelly.
“I have no crystal ball, gentlemen. I am a spy and an assassin who has a somewhat more than passing acquaintance with many of the likely players in our drama. I claim to have insights into the way they think but I know very little of what must have actually happened in the remotest corners of the Mother Country since the war. I can guess, I can speculate, but I know nothing for a fact. You, on the other hand, are military men with long and varied experiences of war. Within hours of the first strike – which appears to have been launched by at best people who did not know what they were doing, or at worst, by imbeciles – fighting ceases in Yugoslavia, Greece and Cyprus and the Red Dawn naval units encountered in the Eastern Mediterranean withdraw to the north. Add this to a simultaneous immediate cessation of enemy air activity and what does this tell you?”
“The recall order went out but not all Red Dawn units got the message?” Julian Christopher offered. “That might be consistent with the reports of fighting in Romania and Bulgaria, and in the Tran-Caucasus region.”
Dan French exhaled a long breath.
“You’re telling us that the Red Dawn zealots on the ship that HMS Amphion surfaced to challenge hadn’t got the message?”
Arkady Rykov had already told his interlocutors that he did not have a crystal ball; it would have been rude and ill-advised to have reminded them of the fact.
Chapter 12
Wednesday 12th February 1964
The Citadel, Mdina
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher had been happy to offer Lieutenant Alan Hannay, HMS Talavera’s Supply Officer, a ride to the Citadel. A week ago Alan Hannay had still been his father’s flag lieutenant and he had transferred to the destroyer in such a hurry that he had left all his personal kit in his old quarters at Mediterranean Fleet Headquarters. The younger man had also intimated he would like to pay his respects ‘to Miss Calleja’, if ‘that’s all right with you, sir’, while he was in Mdina.
Since his Captain was a bag of nerves facing the prospect of finally meeting the love of his life – in something akin to privacy for the first time – he had been only too glad to bring Alan Hannay along for the ride.
“You must have met Marija dozens of times in the last couple of months,” he remarked as the old Humber bumped and jolted, rolling like a bathtub on a Channel crossing.
“I was quite friendly with Jim Siddall,” Alan Hannay explained.
“The poor chap who got blown up in Kalkara with Marija’s sister-in-law?”
“Rosa. Yes, it was a very bad business. That and Marija’s brother going missing. We were all very worried about her.”
Both men ignored the flapping ears of their red-bearded driver.
Back in the days when thirty year old Petty Officer Jack Griffin had been a humble, repeatedly demoted electrical artificer in HMS Talavera’s radar room he had appointed himself Peter Christopher’s personal guardian angel. The reasons for this were arcane and mostly incomprehensible to anybody ignorant of the two men’s history. Peter had inherited Jack Griffin when he joined Talavera at Chatham; that was several months before a one megaton ground burst on the night of the October War transformed the historic base into a flooded crater, diverted the River Medway and killed everybody who had lived within three miles of ground zero. The two men had struck up an unlikely rapport from the outset and somewhere along the line perennial black sheep Jack Griffin had turned over a new leaf. He had stopped drinking – to excess, leastways – curbed his tripwire temper, decided for the first time in his life that he wanted to ‘belong’ to ‘something, somewhere’, and had become a respected key member of Peter Christopher’s tight knit Radar and Electrical Warfare Division on the Talavera, then fitting out at Chatham ahead of her much delayed operational trials. The two men were the last survivors of Talavera’s radar room crew from the night of the October War. Most of the others had died in the Battle of Cape Finisterre, shredded when the Skyhawks strafed the crippled destroyer. Peter would probably have been dead too if Jack Griffin had not wrestled him out of high chair onto the debris-strewn deck that seconds later was awash with the blood of the dead and dying. When HMS Talavera’s previous Captain, David Penberthy, had sent Peter ashore at Oporto after the battle to recover from his minor injuries he had detailed Jack Griffin as his personal ‘steward’ and bodyguard. Subsequently, they had been posted together to the Operations Staff of HMS Hermes, thence back to Talavera at Gibraltar and since then shared the destroyer’s latest adventures off Lampedusa and the day-long terrifying fire-fighting episode beneath the raging inferno on the USS Enterprise’s flight deck.
All of which was known to Alan Hannay; which meant that he knew that in front of this particular Petty Officer, he could speak his mind without fear or favour knowing that his words would go no further than the car.
“There were those awful rumours about Marija’s brother Samuel being involved in some way with Red Dawn,” Alan Hannay explained. “It is ludicrous, but there were actually people who accused him of personally sabotaging HMS Torquay!”
Peter Christopher had been very careful to steer Talavera well clear of the buoys marking the resting places of the two sections of the sunken frigate in the Grand Harbour. It was a pure fluke that the bow section had gone down in over seventy feet of water, settling on its starboard side; and that the stern had grounded just beneath the surface under the ruins of Fort St Angelo, again in such a position as to not present a serious hazard to navigation at the neck of Dockyard Creek.
“Your father quashed all that nonsense,” Alan Hannay continued. “Fortunately, the security people rounded up the real culprits. Or rather cornered the blighters and settled their hash once and for all!” There was undisguised heat and bitterness in Alan Hannay’s words of a kind Peter Christopher had not thought his urbane, mild-mannered Supply Officer capable.
He glanced at the other man.
“I should imagine some of the chaps at HQ took the whole dreadful business to heart?”
“I should say so, sir!”
“I never realised how,” Peter hesitated, “special Marija is to people on the island. Yesterday on the dockside it was as if eve
rybody had come to see her not Scorpion or Talavera.”
“The Labour Party and the Nationalists are both courting her for all they are worth,” Alan Hannay said, not knowing if he ought to be telling his commanding officer this. Any of it. “On account of her becoming so famous leading the Women of Malta movement, I suppose, but I think it is more than that. It is the whole thing about how she recovered from the injuries she suffered during the siege in 1942, and how she trained as a nurse. I never met her before the bombing in December but after the work she did on the Sliema waterfront just after the attack, well, ever since that night she seems to have become even more of a symbol of...”
“A symbol of what, Alan?”
“I don’t know really. Of hope, I suppose. The World has changed so much from before the war that none of the old ideas really hold water these days, don’t you feel, sir?”
“Because the old ways died with the old World?”
“Something like that.”
Petty Officer Jack Griffin sighed: “Miss Calleja is a perfect little Princess. That’s what everybody says, sir.”
At Headquarters Peter Christopher attempted to pay a courtesy call on his father but discovered that the great man was ‘in conference’. Relieved, he walked the short distance to St Paul’s Square and the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women. Before they had broken from their – in hindsight, embarrassingly spontaneous and intimate clinch on Parlatorio Wharf – Marija has whispered that she was ‘on shift’ at the hospital for the next four days and or nights, he could not remember which. Holding Marija in his arms had been distracting in ways he had never experienced with another woman, and when she kissed him his mind had gone completely blank...
“Commander Christopher!” An excited young woman with wide eyes and a mop of short, unruly brown hair attempting to escape from her pale blue starched nursing bonnet exclaimed excitedly before she disappeared into the back of the building.