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

by James Philip

  He was that most rare thing; a good man.

  Watching from the wings Tom Harding-Grayson felt a little sorry for him, it was not enough to be a ‘good man’ if one had a fatal flaw . Michael Foot honestly believed that the pen was mightier than the sword and that there was nothing reasonable men – and women – could not resolve by means of free and frank discussion.

  The Angry Widow did not believe in any of those things.

  She believed that actions spoke louder than words.

  Michael Foot, a decent and rational man who tended to get carried away by the persuasiveness of his own rhetoric had made the mistake of assuming that his political foe, the thirty-eight year old widowed mother of twins, did not actually know what she was doing; when in fact, she had brought all her most dangerous political enemies to this one place on this day for one reason.

  One reason.

  Yes, she could lose everything with a single throw of the dice but she did not think that was going to happen. There was nothing Michael Foot could do – or wanted to do, his principles would not permit it - or say that would save the old Labour Party tearing itself apart this afternoon. Enoch Powell might yet see the trap and withdraw his hand; although that was unlikely. Even if he recognised the trap for what it was he probably would not be able to stop himself testing it.

  Michael Foot, the loquacious and honourable scion of the left, and Enoch Powell the implacable standard bearer of the right of the old pre-war Unionist cause; dinosaurs each, both racing to embrace their inevitable downfall.

  Neither man could see beyond the illusion of the attractive, feisty widow with the hectoring manner.

  Neither man saw the bare knuckle street fighter standing behind the blond bombshell’s dazzling smile.

  Chapter 25

  Monday 2nd March 1964

  Island of Samothrace, Aegean Sea

  The big ships had been sighted about an hour before sunset. It had been a warm, clear day with light winds that barely ruffled the surface of the sea. The lookout positioned high on the hillside behind the abandoned fishing village had seen the smoke first, a rising column of grey-blackness slowly emerging out of the haze. Several of the Securitates had got excited, started babbling about taking the boat out to meet the approaching ships.

  ‘They will kill us all!’ Nicolae Ceaușescu had rasped. His voice was like the rest of his emaciated, pain-wracked body, a whispering shadow. His beard had grown, his hair was a filthy tousled mess and he stank. They all stank. They were all hungry and thirsty for every well and cistern had been fouled with dead goats and dogs and cats before the island’s tormentors had dragged its original population off in big grey warships just like the one’s preparing to anchor offshore in the gathering dusk.

  Within hours of interrogating the crew of the small damaged fishing boat which had put into the port of Samothraki to make repairs over a week ago, the band of survivors had camouflaged the wreck of the Mil Mi-6 helicopter in which they had escaped from Bucharest two weeks ago. The boat’s crew, two men in their late twenties, a teenage boy and a sinewy hard-faced woman in her forties only spoke Greek but eventually Ceaușescu’s Securitate bodyguards had discovered that the ‘Russians’ had first come to Samothrace about six months ago. They had returned several times since. First ‘they came to steal our boats and our young men’. Only a few of the island’s women had been molested on that first visit; the next time the ‘big ships’ returned the ‘Russian soldiers’ had rounded up all the men and every woman was ‘violated’, even little girls. Some women were killed; the rest had been loaded onto a small rusty merchant ship while their surviving men folk were forced to watch by soldiers in Red Army uniforms carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles. Afterwards the soldiers had marched the village’s men away; there had been shooting and in the morning there were bodies floating in the water all along the shore.

  Ceaușescu had ordered his Securitates to treat the woman from the fishing boat ‘with respect’. He had been intensely irritated to learn the Securitates had beaten up the two men and the boy. How the fuck did the imbeciles think they were going to get off this fucking island? Fortunately, neither of the adults or the kid was seriously hurt, just bloody, angry and uncooperative for several days.

  The former First Deputy Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of Romania still lived, but only just. However, his pain-addled mind was slowly regaining a little of its former acuity, he had taken command of the survivors again and begun to re-assert his will over his fate.

  Once the middle-aged woman had understood she was not to be raped by her captors and that her men folk were not to be shot out of hand – and that the rough stuff had been a mistake, a misunderstanding - she had organised the boiling of water, and using gestures and drawing pictures in the sand, persuaded Ceaușescu’s bodyguards to let her men bait lines and start to fish in the shallow water around their grounded boat. The resulting supply of clean drinking water and the additional nourishment provided by sudden bounty of a large number of small fish, had marginally improved the morale and the physical condition of every member of the marooned group.

  Not least that of its leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu.

  His right leg ended in a suppurating stump several centimetres above where his knee had been. The stump throbbed, ached, and frequent spasms of agony lanced up his butchered thigh and stabbed him like red hot needles in his groin and abdomen. He would have been dead but for chance. Unknown to him, one of his Securitate bodyguards had studied medicine in the 1945 war. The man had never finished his training; the Fascists having interned him during his second year at medical school in Timisoara. The man had apologised to Ceaușescu a few days ago when it was apparent that his patient had recovered sufficiently to understand what he was saying.

  ‘I had no surgical tools but you would have died, Comrade.’

  Ceaușescu’s grip on life remained tenuous. He was a bag of bones, incapable of sitting up without helping hands.

  The Greek woman’s name was Eleni.

  Eleni reminded him a little of his wife, Elena, but notwithstanding her stern demeanour and obvious impatience with men in general and those around her now in particular, she seemed utterly lacking in the suspicion and meanness of spirit which had characterised his wife’s nature. Eleni had tried from the outset to be of service to him. Mostly, Ceaușescu assumed, because she realised that her fate and that of her three men folk depended on the whim of the dying leader of the bandits into whose hands they had fallen.

  Before Eleni began to nurse him Nicolae Ceaușescu had been contemplating asking one of the Securitate to blow his brains out. Death would be a merciful relief. They dribbled gut-rot Ouzo into his mouth when the pain got too much for him; they had no drugs, no antiseptics, not even potable water. Although he did not want to die; anything was preferable to the living Hell to which he had been condemned. And then Eleni had begun to nurse him.

  She had him moved from the dark stinking hovel where the group had been hiding, taken outside where, sheltered by a windbreak he could feel the sun on his face and she could wash him. Each morning she cleaned his stump with sea water, each day it hurt terribly but a little less than the day before. There was something about the touch of her hands on his body, contact again with gentle hands that somehow made some his suffering bearable.

  Now it was Eleni’s lean, strong arms which supported him while he studied the big grey ships steaming imperiously towards the island. His strength exhausted he lowered the ancient Zeiss binoculars. A Sverdlov class cruiser, half-a-dozen smaller vessels and a second big ship sailing slightly apart from the rest of the flotilla farther out to sea trailing a long cloud of black, sooty smoke.

  Eleni picked the binoculars out of his hands.

  A Securitate took them and studied the approaching fleet in the failing light.

  “They look like they are coming here, Boss,” the man decided unhappily.

  Eleni started talking.

  “What is she saying?” Ceaușescu deman
ded. His voice was a feeble croak.

  There was a pause, and more incoherent babbling.

  “She says thinks the Russians cleared the island to use it for practice...”

  Before the implications of this could sink in there was a ripple of flame in the distance, livid crimson fireballs travelling quickly across the water brilliantly illuminating dark silhouettes otherwise virtually invisible in the descending gloom.

  The shrieking of the four eleven-inch shells fired from the main battery of the Turkish battlecruiser Yavuz arrived moments before the projectiles smashed into the coastline about a mile east of Samothraki.

  Closer inshore the side the Russian cruiser briefly disappeared behind a wall of flame and billowing smoke as all twelve of her six-inch guns belched a broadside.

  “They’re practicing landing troops,” the Securitate with the binoculars suggested as the cruiser’s broadside ripped up the side of Mount Fengari two miles from the group’s exposed position.

  Nicolae Ceaușescu’s mind was working overtime.

  This was the first naval activity they had seen since their arrival on Samothrace. If the Soviets were about to launch Phase Two of Operation Nakazyvat these waters would surely be filled with ships heading south; cruisers, destroyers, troopships and tankers, and the skies ought to be black with aircraft. Phase Two of Operation Nakazyvat – Chastise in English – would begin with a renewed assault in the west, maskirovka, more smoke and mirrors to make the British fall back on Malta ahead of the main blow – the Schwerpunkt, the real ‘centre of gravity’ of the offensive – fell over a thousand miles to the east seventy-two hours later upon the unsuspecting, weak forces protecting Persia’s northern border with the Soviet Socialist Republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, and naval assault groups steamed down the Caspian Sea to seize a bridgehead half-way to the Persian capital, Tehran.

  “We cannot stay here,” Ceaușescu decided.

  Eleni must have understood what he said from the tone of his words. She spoke with voluble alarm.

  “She says that the boat is still leaking and that there are too many of us, Comrade,” the Securitate translated after a short delay.

  “How many can the boat hold without sinking?”

  There was a further, squabbling interchange.

  “Eight or nine adults. Anymore and there won’t be room to man the hand pumps and the boat might sink in a storm.”

  Ceaușescu did the arithmetic.

  There was no room on board the fishing boat for the crew of the helicopter.

  “We’ll leave as soon as it is fully dark. We’ll leave the Air Force people behind on the island. See to it.”

  An hour later with the sound of the brief burst of AK-47 fire ringing in his ears Ceaușescu was gently lowered onto the one uncluttered area of deck – between the small wheel house and the hatch to the hold – and the old, creaking, leaking fishing boat drifted into deeper water. Onboard were the two Greek men, the boy, Eleni, Ceaușescu and his four surviving Securitates.

  The big ships off shore had ceased firing once it was fully dark.

  The fishing boat’s mast was raised, it was too risky to start the ancient engine and besides, the fuel tank was nine-tenths empty. The canvass slapped the mast loudly before it caught the wind, the boat heeled and began to slowly edge to the east, away from the lethal grey warships hiding somewhere close by in the night.

  Exhausted, Nicolae Ceaușescu fell into a nightmare tormented stupor.

  His wife, Elena, was looking at him with accusative eyes. His children, Valentin aged sixteen, Zola whose fifteenth birthday had been yesterday, and twelve year old Nicu were viewing him as if he was a caged zoo animal.

  “Why did you betray us, Papa?”

  “I did not...”

  The faces of his children faded.

  He was standing next to his wife Elena in an overgrown yard and his hands were tied behind his back.

  “This is your fault!” Elena was mouthing, her face a mask of contempt.

  He squeezed his eyes shut as the machine gun opened fire. The noise was deafening; it seemed to go on forever. Why was there no pain?

  He opened his eyes.

  His wife lay at his feet, her body a broken, bloody mess.

  Her eyes were alive, pits of hatred burning into his soul.

  Ceaușescu could not catch his breath, his chest was constricting...

  “Keep him quiet!” One of the Securitates hissed.

  The Greek woman, Eleni, had her hand over Ceaușescu’s mouth. She risked lifting it for a second and when the man remained silent, she relaxed, patted his chest and then his cheek. She leaned over him, breathed in his ear muttering words of comfort which he did not understand. The woman smelled of sweat and fish but her breasts were soft and warm as she cradled his head.

  The tiny fishing boat rocked violently in the wake of a big ship. Water splashed over the side, washed across the deck. Ceaușescu could hear the sound of a big ship’s engines, the swish of her stem cleaving the clear waters of the Aegean. The taint of smoke came to his nostrils.

  Coal smoke...

  “Start the engine!”

  The boat vibrated and shook, the propeller thrashed under the stern.

  Ceaușescu saw the approaching wall of iron and steel shouldering towards the tiny fishing boat in the faint moonlight. The ship was not so much slicing through the sea, as muscling it aside, a great ungainly raft of metal thrusting forward gushing sparks and cinders from her stacks.

  “What the fuck is it?” Somebody asked, not quite believing what he was seeing.

  And then the coal-fired leviathan built for a war that had ended forty-five years ago was upon them.

  Chapter 26

  Wednesday 4th March 1964

  Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk Military District

  Colonel-General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian, the Armenian born fifty-eight year old commander of the newly formed 1st Trans-Caucasian Front had flown over fifteen hundred kilometres to personally communicate his unhappiness to Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov.

  The office of the Commander of the Soviet Armed Forces was a bare walled, austere place. The room was large and the great man’s desk was huge but other than a couple of gun metal filing cabinets and a few dusty books piled on the sill of the wide southern-facing windows, the lair of one of the three most powerful men in the post-war Soviet Union was positively nondescript.

  “It is my understanding that subsequent to the,” Babadzhanian was a dapper, handsome man whom at a distance would have been mistaken for a man twenty, not six years, his superior’s junior, “er, mission to Bucharest, certain senior Romanian Politburo members remain unaccounted for, Comrade Marshal?”

  Vasily Chuikov had not attempted to bully Babadzhanian. It would have been a waste of time. The man was a highly competent, driven professional whose loyalty to the Party was unquestioned and like Chuikov, Babadzhanian was a highly decorated hero of the Great Patriotic War.

  Chuikov nodded. He wanted to keep this interview informal but Hamazasp Khachaturi obviously needed to clear the air so he had refrained from ordering him to sit down. Chuikov lit another cigarette.

  “That bastard Ceaușescu got away,” he confirmed. “We got his wife and kids.” KGB snatch squads had seized the wives and children of other high ranking Romanian Politburo and senior military commanders in the hours before the city was wiped off the face of the planet. Good riddance! “If the bastard turns up he’ll think twice before betraying us.”

  “That’s not the point, Comrade Vasily Ivanovich,” Babadzhanian retorted. “We know that the sensitive information the Securitate obtained from Comrade Politburo Member Andropov has the potential to undermine Operation Nakazyvat. It is therefore imperative that there should be no further delays in commencing Phase Two actions!”

  Chuikov sighed like a bear with an ulcer.

  He understood why Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin had vetoed his desire to take field command of the forthcoming
operation – the ‘collective leadership’ needed him to guard their backs lest the ‘young Turks’ who had stayed loyal when Krasnaya Zarya had seemed to be the shape of things to come grew unduly restive – but it still rankled deeply. Notwithstanding that the he had fought enough battles and won enough glory for ten men in his long, bloody and extraordinarily distinguished career in the Red Army, Chuikov yearned for a glorious final curtain call. However, at the end of the day he had accepted that the best place for a man of his status and experience – and with his bad lungs and hardening cardiac arteries – was probably holding the hands of the men ultimately responsible for the fate of the Mother Country. Once he had come to terms with this there had only been one man he trusted to execute the crucial eastern element of Operation Nakazyvat.

  Operation Chastise!

  If Chuikov ever discovered the name of the staff officer who had thought up that name he would promote him two ranks! Other than wiping out two-thirds of their cities he could think of no better way to ‘chastise’ the Americans and their lap dog allies, the British, than by cutting their World in half and denying them the Arabian oil upon which their wealth and prosperity ultimately depended.

  Phase Two: the race to the Indian Ocean.

  Perhaps, the ‘collective leadership’ would let Chuikov take over the reins for Phase Three; the actual conquest of Arabia? At his age he had earned his place in the sun. He doubted Brezhnev and Kosygin would take pity on him but life was nothing if not full of surprises.

  Babadzhanian stood stiffly in front of Chuikov’s desk.