by James Philip
“I am not a member of this Government, Prime Minister.”
The Angry Widow raised an eyebrow and said, without a scintilla of irony or mischief: “Mr Powell, people tell me that you have the finest mind in Parliament. I would be failing in my duty if I did not employ it in this crisis. If you have something to say on this subject, please say it now or thereafter hold your piece!”
“Krasnaya Zarya,” her bête noire said after a gap of several seconds pregnant with prickly disdain, “Red Dawn is a chimera. As the Russians say, dym i zerkala, ‘smoke and mirrors’. Maskirovka is the Russian way of life, politics and war. Maskirovka or ‘something masked’. One suspects that there are others like myself in this room who are not so easily seduced by this Red Dawn nonsense as our American friends. Krasnaya Zarya is a terroristic, anarchistic, nihilistic KGB apparat. An apparat ten times more intolerable to the surviving Soviet high command than it could ever be, in the long term, to us in the West. What better way to rid oneself of a rabble of troublesome, ungovernable malcontents and ultra-fanatical zealots than to give Red Dawn its head, let it run amok,” Enoch Powell did not quite smile, his ruined face would not permit it, but it was with a gleam of malicious satisfaction that bordered on smugness that he delivered his punch line, “and let it burn itself out like a moth drawn to a flame even as it wins for one an impregnable new fifteen hundred mile long Marxist-Leninist bridgehead, from Yugoslavia to the Levant on the northern shores of the Eastern Mediterranean.”
Chapter 17
Friday 14th February 1964
Koltsovo Airport, Sverdlovsk Oblast, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev stamped his feet on the icy ground from which twenty centimetres of overnight snow had been cleared by the penal battalions marched in from nearby camps. The gulag-fodder had had to clear the snow as it fell before it could freeze; otherwise the main runway would have been unusable. Last night there had been nearly thirty degrees of frost, this morning it was a more tolerable minus fifteen degrees.
The First Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR watched the Tupolev Tu-114 airliner as it rolled to a halt some fifty metres away. Only a handful of these magnificent machines had been completed before the Cuban Missiles War. Developed from the Tu-95 bomber, the Tu-114, with a range of over ten thousand kilometres was the fastest propeller-driven aircraft in the World. Hundreds might have been built to fill the skies had not Aviation Plant No 18 at Kuybyshev – where the aircraft was built – not been destroyed in the war. The deafening roar of the Tu-114’s four giant Kuznetzov NK-12 turbo-prop engines began to subside, the huge, contra-rotating propellers slowed.
Leonid Brezhnev waited with a grim outward equanimity that almost but not quite masked the volcanic fury that burned just beneath his apparently impenetrable emotionless carapace. He should never have trusted the fucking Romanians! The KGB had put a bullet in the traitor Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s head in his hospital bed and seized the bitch wife and children of that little shit Nicolae Ceaușescu before the Red Air Force dropped a three megaton bomb on Bucharest – or rather, air burst it a thousand metres above the centre of the city – and Romania had ceased to exist as a viable nation state.
Two sets of steps were being pushed into place.
Elena Ceaușescu, her three children, the other senior Romanian party apparatchiks and military men the KGB snatch squads had pulled off the streets of Bucharest would be disembarked from the rear of the Tu-114; Comrade Kosygin and the other survivors of the mission would receive an appropriately heroic welcome as soon as the band and the honour guard marched into position at the front of the aircraft.
Leonid Brezhnev chaffed at the delays.
He wanted to take his friend Alexei Kosygin and the valiant old soldier, Marshal Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov aside and find out what had really happened – or rather, gone so disastrously wrong – in Bucharest. What had those fucking idiots Gheorghiu-Dej and his lap dog Ceaușescu been thinking? What did they think was going to happen when they betrayed the Mother Country?
The Tu-114’s forward port door was opened and troopers in the immaculate uniforms of the 3rd Guards Tank Division began manhandling Yuri Andropov’s stretcher down the steep, treacherous steps. The doctors who had flown out to collect the much depleted delegation at Otopeni Air base had not thought Yuri Vladimirovich would survive the flight home. Originally, it had been planned that the mission would return directly to Chelyabinsk but the plan had been changed because the medical facilities in Sverdlovsk were without equal in the post-war USSR.
Before the war Sverdlovsk had been the fourth largest city in the Soviet Union; and remarkably, neither it, nor Chelyabinsk approximately one hundred and thirty kilometres to the south, had been attacked on the night of the war. The two undamaged cities, some nine hundred miles east of Moscow, had been like islands of hope in the first days after the cataclysm and since then, the bedrocks upon which the Central Committee – mainly Kosygin and he - had started to rebuild. That so much could have been achieved in so short a time; and that the potentially disastrous but essential ‘spoiling’ war in the Mediterranean and the Balkans had initially gone so well, only for all their plans to be – possibly - completely de-railed by Krasnaya Zarya madmen and those pathetic little men in Bucharest, was very nearly beyond forbearance.
Presently, Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin stood before his partner in the ‘collective leadership’. The two men exchanged the normal formal kisses, gripped hands, hard. Alexei Kosygin, looking and feeling as grey, cold and worn out as he felt, saw the murder in Leonid Brezhnev’s hooded eyes. People saw Leonid Ilyich’s leaden footed, clumsy gait and social awkwardness, misinterpreted his long silences in meetings for slowness of mind and thought. Brezhnev personified the dignified Russian bear and people wrongly assumed that Kosygin was his puppet master. However, beneath the stolid peasant mask lurked a brain the equal of any of his Politburo contemporaries and a will that was relentless, because nothing in life had come easily to Leonid Brezhnev.
Brezhnev had been born the son of a metalworker 1906 in what was now Dniprodzerzhynsk, formerly Kamenskoye in Tsarist Russia, but renamed in 1936 in honour of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police and the forerunner of the NKVD and the KGB. Brezhnev had joined the Komsomol, the Party youth wing in 1923, becoming a full member of the Party in 1929. In the 1930s he had worked as a metallurgical engineer in the steel industry of the Ukraine. During his compulsory military service he became a political commissar at a tank factory, and later a director of the Dniprodzerzhynsk Metallurgical Technical College. Like so many able men who survived Stalin’s pre-Great Patriotic War purges, after the German invasion in June 1941 he was rapidly promoted. By 1942 he was deputy head of political administration of the Trans-Caucasian Front, and afterwards of the 1st Ukrainian Front whose Political Commissar was none other than Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev...
“You look tired, Alexei Nikolayevich?” Leonid Brezhnev suggested, breaking his friend’s chain of thought.
“Ah,” the slighter, older-looking man grunted. “Next time I say ‘wait and see’, Leonid Ilyich,” he grimaced, “I will take my own advice!”
Brezhnev coughed a laugh, his breath misting instantly in the frozen air.
“The Securitate did not give you a hard time?”
“No, they were too busy with Yuri Vladimirovich. I think the clowns actually believed he was in charge of Krasnaya Zarya!”
Leonid Brezhnev looked past Kosygin.
“Where is the Comrade Marshal?”
Kosygin allowed himself a smile. Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov had drunk himself into a comatose stupor on the flight back from Romania; as had many of the other survivors. Only Kosygin and the physicist Andrei Sakharov had religiously abjured the free flowing Vodka. Sakharov had been horrified when he had learned the fate that had befallen Bucharest; he was an interesting man showing the first signs of becoming an interesting conflicted man. Kosygin
could not help wondering if the father of the Soviet H-bomb had belatedly started down the same road that Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the American A-bomb had walked when his usefulness to his masters had waned.
“Vasily Ivanovich is in almost as bad a way as Yuri Vladimirovich,” Kosygin half-smiled, raising his gloved hand in a glass raising gesture.
“Klavdia Andreyevna was beside herself with worry,” Leonid Brezhnev went on. His friend’s wife had been unwell for several weeks and it had been all he could do to persuade her not to leave her sick bed in Chelyabinsk to make the early morning journey through the snow to Sverdlovsk. “My wife is comforting her. Be assured that Klavdia Andreyevna was the first to know that your flight had departed safely from Bucharest and was being escorted by our fighters.”
“Thank you. We are lucky men to still have our wives by our sides. Very lucky men.” Yuri Andropov’s wife and children had perished in the war, as had so many of their colleagues’ spouses, offspring and siblings, parents, aunts and uncles. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had been turned into a great charnel house. The tragedy was far from over; millions of those that the thermonuclear fires had temporarily spared in October 1962 had since succumbed to the cold, hunger, disease or simply lost the will to live.
The tragedy surpassed anything experienced in the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis and it lived in the souls of the survivors; a flame that would not die. Even Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin, the toughest and most pragmatic of men hardened by a life of fear and strife in the service of the Mother Country wanted only one thing, revenge. However, not just any kind of revenge; no, he wanted vengeance upon the West of a particular flavour. Revenge of a flavour and a colour that would forever and for all time deny the ‘victors’ of the Cuban Missiles War the spoils of their victory, and eventually, perhaps, restore the Mother Country to its rightful place in the order of things. The West had not defeated International Socialism, the march of Marxist-Leninism might have been temporarily halted, briefly in its tracks, but it had not been defeated.
“The weather is supposed to clear from the south later,” the grim-faced First Secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union growled as he and Kosygin, his First Deputy Premier settled into the back of the big black armoured car for the short trip to the main terminal of Koltsovo Airport. “We’ll warm ourselves inside and drink to your return while they defrost the helicopters to take us back down to Chelyabinsk.”
“I broke my own first rule of diplomacy, Leonid Ilyich,” Kosygin confessed darkly, staring out at the row of MiG-21 supersonic interceptors beneath their camouflage shrouds in the middle distance. “I gave those bastards in Bucharest the benefit of the doubt.”
“Never again,” the other man rumbled menacingly.
“I think they eventually meant to hand us over to the West,” Kosygin added bitterly.
“As if that would have made any difference if Kennedy and the Witch had had the guts to finish off the job they started in the October attack!”
Both men understood why President Kennedy had ordered a massive first strike against the USSR in October 1962. He would have known he could win the war if he struck first and the people in Cuba, nobody knew if it was Castro’s people or Russians, had given the American President the perfect excuse to pull the trigger. There was a compellingly twisted logic to it; both men might have done the same thing had they been in John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s shoes. What they could not, and would never understand was why after landing such a devastating, crushing first blow the Americans had not struck again and completed the job. It was like a heavyweight boxer landing a punch that shattered his opponent’s jaw promptly retiring to his corner and at the moment his foe was at his most vulnerable throwing in the towel. What hunter shot a bear and walked away without checking to see if it was dead? Was it weakness, shame or hubris? The fools had not begun sending over their high-flying U-2 spy planes again until a couple of months ago; long after the time when there would have been anything on the ground for them to see! The Red Air Force was aching to shoot down the interlopers – sitting ducks - trespassing in their skies.
There were several messages awaiting the ‘collective leadership’ of the USSR when the two men shuffled into the sparsely appointed lounge of the civilian section of the control tower. The furnishings of the room – a place where VIPs could relax and be fed and watered by uniformed Interior Ministry stewards and hostesses – were faded, peeling and a little dusty. Very few civilian flights came into Koltsovo Airport these days and the military lived in their bunkers beyond the airfield boundary fence, rarely emerging during daylight hours.
Leonid Brezhnev scanned the messages.
“The Americans have done nothing!” He scoffed contemptuously. “The last intact capital city in Eastern Europe goes up in smoke and what do they do? Nothing!”
“It is early yet,” Alexei Kosygin counselled sagely. “What does our,” he hesitated, his head fogged with sudden and over-powering weariness, “our contact in Malta say?”
The First Secretary offered him the message sheets.
“There is nothing from Malta yet.”
Kosygin slumped down in one of the low leather chairs.
He nodded. “Leonid Ilyich,” he began, and against his better judgement continued, “I had a lot of time to think in that cell in Bucharest.”
“We came for you as soon as we could...”
Kosygin raised a tired hand.
“I know, I know, we knew it could go wrong but there is only so much one can plan for. Please do not concern yourself on that account.” He met Brezhnev’s eye and each man looked to the other. “We wished it to be known that we were weak and for that information to be communicated to the West; it was an essential element of the plan we have worked so hard to execute this last year. Krasnaya Zarya might have destroyed us all by infiltrating our missile forces; instead, its recklessness has allowed us to identify many previously anonymous enemies in our midst and to purge them once and for all. Assuming that the West takes no retaliatory action against us here in the Mother Country in the next few days we should be able to resume preparations for the,” his lips twisted into a parody of a sardonic smile, “the great leap forward as planned.”
Leonid Brezhnev guffawed.
“But that wasn’t what I was going to say,” Kosygin declared doggedly. “I would be lying if I said there wasn’t some small part of my brain that is trying to talk me into asking for reparations, rather than risking another global war to take what we want and what we are entitled to.”
“The British are exhausted,” the other man objected. “The Americans obviously don’t have the stomach to risk another nuclear exchange. As for the little countries that stand in our way,” a dismissive shrug of his broad shoulders, “what can they do to stop us, Comrade?”
Kosygin rubbed his eyes. They had had this conversation many times in the Politburo. Despite the antics of Krasnaya Zarya thus far everything had gone more or less to plan. The limited use of tactical nuclear weapons had achieved ‘limited’ strategic ends on the battlefield and so unsettled their enemies that nowhere, other than on the island of Cyprus had the initial assault forces failed to achieve all their objectives. Inevitably, there would be a discussion about whether the ‘Cyprus mess’ needed to be tidied up before the next phase of operations commenced but they could have that argument later. Otherwise, the military planners were more than satisfied with the outcome of the recent battles; the south western flank was secure, the combined fleet had demonstrated its existence to good effect and unexpectedly inflicted significant losses on the Royal Navy, and the next time Soviet forces took the offensive they would be unencumbered by the dead weight of the undisciplined Krasnaya Zarya horde.
Contemplating the next step south towards the warm waters of the Indian Ocean Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin took immense comfort from the knowledge that Krasnaya Zarya was being systematically liquidated, and that its surviving lunatic adherents were being rounded up an
d marched off to swell the ranks of the penal battalions responsible restoring the roads, railways and airfields vital to the defence and the reconstruction of the Mother Country.
Yet, some small part of him was still tempted to demand reparations.
Yes, he wanted to face down the murderers across a peace table.
But war was an inherently risky affair...
Chapter 18
Sunday 16th February 1964
Tigne Point, Sliema, Malta
It was a cool, windy evening in the aftermath of the short, sharp gale which had blown across the Maltese Archipelago the previous day and night. By intuitive mutual unspoken accord the lovers had nodded one to the other and risen to their feet.
‘Peter and I will go for a walk now,’ Marija had informed her family – or rather, the crowded house full of her extended Maltese-Sicilian clan – each and every member of which positively doted on their ‘little princess’.
Peter Christopher had turned up for the ‘family dinner’ at the Calleja home in the apartment at the top of Tower Street, Sliema, in a version of his dress uniform. He had mislaid his Mess waistcoat somewhere between the Battle of Cape Finisterre and HMS Talavera’s wallowing, half-sinking arrival at Oporto in December; his trousers were a couple of inches too short in the leg and rode half-way up his calves when he sat down, but fortunately his jacket was brand new, immaculately pressed and bore his new lieutenant-commander’s additional half-stripe. His shirt and trousers, both freshly laundered on the RMS Sylvania, where he and most of his crew were billeted while Talavera was in dockyard hands, were brilliantly white. Marija had beamed beatifically at him on the doorstep and nobody had seemed to notice he was kitted out in a partially borrowed rig. He had been a bag of nerves on the drive round the creeks from the Grand Harbour via Floriana, Msida, and Gzira to Sliema; in the event the whole Calleja clan had welcomed him like royalty. Marija’s mother had hugged him and clung to him with such ferocity that he thought his feet were about to lift off the floor even though that lady’s head only came up to the middle of his torso. Marija’s father had been wryly severe because he thought somebody ought to be, and had enjoyed reminding him of their only previous meeting; the occasion when Peter had gone to the Dockyard Offices fully intending to insert a large, noisy flea in the duty manager’s ear and not realised he was talking to his prospective father-in-law until it was too late. Joseph Calleja was friendly in an uncomfortable sort of way, keeping his distance. That was fair enough; their first encounter had not worked out very well for Joe and he was probably still feeling a little tender about things.