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

by James Philip

  Family and friends only!

  The Pembroke Hall had been built by Australian soldiers serving on Malta in the Great War. It was a long way from the dignified environs of the Citadel or Valletta, the traditional seats of power on the archipelago, a building renovated in recent years and the setting for film and stage shows, and dances most nights of most weeks predominantly put on for servicemen and women.

  Afterwards, the newlyweds returned to Mdina.

  Peter Christopher had not visited his new wife in her cell at the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women until that night. The second floor room was Spartan. An additional single iron bedstead had been pushed against Marija’s bed and a double mattress – more a lumpy palliasse – found. So many houses had been destroyed in the December bombing, and so many soldiers, sailors and airmen had arrived on the island in the months since, that accommodation on Malta was at a premium. Nonetheless, Admiral Christopher’s suggestion that the couple spend their wedding night at the Verdala Palace had been turned down instantly; Peter was adamantly opposed to claiming any special privileges on account of his father being the Commander-in-Chief, and Marija, who had been working herself up to decline the offer rather more diplomatically had planted a kiss on her soon to be husband’s cheek in proud approbation.

  Margo Seiffert had said Peter could stay with Marija at the hospital until they ‘sorted themselves out’.

  Marija leaned against the door and it closed with a click.

  After the excitement and the terrors of the day the lovers were finally alone.

  Spying a hook by the door the man hung his cap on it.

  “You look like a fairy princess,” he observed, looking down into his wife’s almond eyes.

  “I feel like Cinderella after she found her prince, husband,” she retorted, quirking a nervy smile.

  The room was illuminated by a single bulb hanging on a chord from a grey Bakelite ceiling rose almost exactly above their heads. Strange shadows played on their faces as the light swung in the breeze filtering in through the open window.

  “You didn’t tell me that you lived like a Nun?”

  “I was a Nun until you came to Malta.”

  He buried a kiss in her hair, greedily sucked in the musky scent of her.

  “Are you tired?” Marija asked, her cheek resting against his chest.

  “A little. And you?”

  She shrugged against him, sighed deeply and eased herself away to move around him and stand in front of the bed. Awkwardly, with fingers and thumbs that were clumsy, disobedient she began to struggle with the buttons at the neck of her wedding gown. Her eyes lowered, as if in shame.

  Glancing around the room the man dropped his jacket on the one, rickety chair beside a tiny scratched desk, and started to release the studs of his shirt. His brand new dress uniform – the old one had got scorched to ruination at the Battle of Cape Finisterre – was a close fit and at times he had found the pleasant warmth of the spring day oppressive. For a million reasons it was good to let the air get to his skin again.

  “Let me help,” he decided, seeing Marija struggling and fast growing hugely embarrassed. A dozen small buttons clasped in tightly sewn, stiff button holes had completely defeated his wife. “Turn around, my love,” and he was behind her, easing the stubborn buttons free. An inch, then two, and another of Marija’s back appeared as he patiently worked his way down to her waist until presently, the sublime curve of her spine was bare for him to trace with his finger tips.

  She shivered, giggled, and his hands retraced their tingling progress.

  He eased away the mane of darkly nut brown hair and kissed the nape of her neck.

  “That is so nice...”

  He kissed again, and again.

  She stepped away, half-turned, her wedding gown threatening to fall off her slender shoulders.

  “If you had been sent away before this day,” she said, her eyes moist limpid pools, “I would not have let you go before a night like this.” She sniffed, shook her head. “Even though I was afraid of...”

  It was too much; he had to hold her and to protect her from all ills.

  The breeze was picking up in the darkness outside as it swept across the highest point of the island, the hemp drapes billowed and flapped like sails before settling, stilling anew.

  “We’re both sensible people,” Peter Christopher reminded Marija. “And we love each other to bits, so,” he hesitated, “it seems to me that the thing to do is just take off our clothes and take it from there. I know that’s not the way things happen in fairy tales or romantic novels, but we’ve got the rest of our lives to make up for that. Okay?”

  Marija nodded tight-lipped and slipped the gown off her shoulders.

  The man discarded his uniform without looking to her.

  Peter Christopher had not known what to expect; but he had steeled himself not to betray his real feelings whatever he actually saw. But that was impossible.

  Marija stuck out her jaw defiantly and slowly pirouetted, once, twice to ensure that he saw everything.

  Her abdomen and her left thigh looked like somebody had repeatedly hammered barbed wired into her naked flesh. The marks of the steel frames embedded, anchored though skin and muscle to lock her crushed and shattered leg and pelvis back together time and again as she grew and orthopaedic reconstructive techniques slowly improved, pitted her skin. She had described some of her torment in the letters, now at last he really understood what she had been through in order to become whole again and that the battle would never, ever be over.

  “You poor, poor...”

  Marija gave him a quizzical look, her discomfort and embarrassment morphing into curiosity as she studied her new husband’s naked body. He was tall, lean and athletic; whereas, she was crippled somewhat and always would be. She was disconcerted when the man dropped onto his knees. His hands stroked the outside of her thighs, his fingers roaming the livid pink of several scars and the faded tan of others.

  “Do they hurt?” He asked.

  “Sometimes the skin stretches or tightens. But no, I don’t usually hurt. I ache...”

  “And right now?”

  “My bones are a little tired. My bones always talk to me when they are tired. It has been a long day.”

  He kissed her belly and she instinctively pressed his face against herself.

  She had not imagined that could be so nice...

  “We should turn off the light,” she gasped.

  In the darkness she lay on the bed and he kissed her again, except this time in a place where she had heard that men sometimes kissed a woman but never actually expected her husband to kiss her. It was very nearly unbearably stimulating and momentarily, she worried she would lose control of her bodily functions.

  Presently, the man moved up in the bed and circled her in his arms.

  They kissed, increasingly wetly, breathlessly.

  Long before she rolled onto her back and he looked down on her beneath him she realised that everything was going to be all right.

  Chapter 32

  Monday 8th March 1964

  TNF Yavuz, Anchored off Rhodes

  In his five days as a guest of the Turkish Naval Forces – his hosts were very particular about being ‘Turkish’ not ‘Ruski’ - Nicolae Ceaușescu and the other three survivors from the small, leaky fishing boat that the battlecruiser had run down in the night off Samothrace, had been treated with perplexing respect and courtesy. However, Ceaușescu did not think that was going to go on for much longer.

  “Get that woman out of here!” The thin, cold-eyed man in the uniform of a Second-Captain in the Soviet Navy growled, waving an angry hand at the plain middle-aged woman dressed in the fatigues of a Turkish naval rating who was at Nicolae Ceaușescu’s side whenever he regained consciousness. In the last day or so he had started forcing a smile each time he awakened and discovered her sitting like a sentinel by his sick bay cot. Her expression was invariably impassive but sometimes he saw a flicker of acknowledgeme
nt in her green-brown eyes. Her name was Eleni and her ministrations had been the only thing that had kept him alive back on Samothrace.

  Eleni viewed the newcomer blankly, unmoving in her chair.

  “Get out!” The Russian barked.

  Still she did not move.

  “She doesn’t speak Russian, you idiot!” Nicolae Ceaușescu croaked in what he hoped sounded like a Moskva accent. The other man wore the tabs of a Political Officer on his immaculate uniform lapels. “Who the fuck are you?”

  For a moment he thought the man – whom he guessed to be in his thirties and had spoken with a clipped Leningrad twang, as if he was affecting airs and graces that did not come naturally to him – was going to hit him. So apparently, had the ship’s doctor and the young Turkish officer at his shoulder both of whom had stiffened with disgust and made half a step towards the Russian.

  The crew of the TNF Yavuz did not like Russians. Whenever they were within earshot of a Russian, they fell silent.

  “I am Second Captain Dmitry Kolokoltsev of the Political Directorate of the Red Navy,” the Russian said, struggling not to lose his temper.

  Ceaușescu was propped up on pillows in the narrow cot, his thoughts muddled by the regular doses of morphine the orderlies spooned into him to keep the pain from his butchered right leg at bay. He had no idea how long he had bobbed up and down on the upturned hull of the fishing boat; nor any notion of how he had come to be on it, or how he why he had not slipped off it and drowned in the sea. When the sun had come up the next morning he had been lashed to the waterlogged, wallowing wreck with Eleni, the Greek fisherman called Andris and the teenage boy called Miklos. The destroyer which had plucked the four sun-burned, dying survivors aboard like four lifeless fish the next day had looked vaguely American. Sometime that second night the destroyer had bumped alongside a much bigger ship, unloaded the survivors and a gang of other civilians and departed. Three days ago he had blinked awake clean, he had been in pain but nothing like before and his surroundings had smelled of bleach and antiseptics. There were six cots in the sick bay; two of the others were occupied by Turkish seamen; one with some kind of head injury, the other with a leg in traction. The cots nearest to Ceaușescu were empty.

  “Stand up straight when you address a superior officer, Comrade Kolokoltsev,” Ceaușescu snarled, his strength ebbing. Knowing that the big lie was always the hardest to unpick he stuck to the story he had rehearsed back in Bucharest as soon as he realised the mistake Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had made – the mistake was already Gheorghe’s not his – in betraying the Soviet Troika. He gestured at the stump of his right thigh beneath the pristine white Turkish Navy sheets. “I only just got out of Thessalonika alive. I don’t have to take this shit from some jumped up little fucker like you!”

  Second-Captain Kolokoltsev’s brow began to furrow.

  “Your superiors,” Ceaușescu went on, his words slurring from exhaustion, “will hear of your insolence...”

  “Comrade, I...”

  “I am Nikolai Vasilyevich Fyodorov,” Ceaușescu hissed, his strength gone. If Kolokoltsev had ever met the now – probably dead – Head of Station of the KGB in Thessalonika, he was a dead man. He would have worried about it if he had not just wanted to sleep. Ceaușescu shared a vague physical resemblance the KGB man, and they were of an age, give or take a year. It probably helped his subterfuge that the way he looked now his own mother would probably not recognise him. Nonetheless, if Kolokoltsev had ever actually met Major-General Nikolai Fyodorov what remained of Ceaușescu’s miserable life was likely to be very short and painful. “My name is Nikolai Vasilyevich Fyodorov...”

  He must have passed out because the Political Officer had gone when he awakened,

  Eleni gabbled something to him.

  He did not understand a single word.

  The Turkish seaman with his leg in traction coughed.

  “She said that whatever you said to that shithead,” the sailor, a man in his late twenties bit his tongue, knowing that it was the morphine talking and that this was dangerous, “frightened him,” he concluded weakly.

  “You understand what she says?” Ceaușescu asked like an idiot before he too, remembered the perils of letting the morphine coursing through his veins do his talking for him.

  “Only bits and pieces. She talks very fast.”

  “Tell her I am a very senior and very powerful Soviet KGB officer and that I will protect her.”

  This was laboriously translated.

  Eleni looked mortally offended.

  She whispered a string of urgent interrogatives towards the seaman.

  “She wants to know what’s happened to her cousin and to his son?”

  Ceaușescu’s drug-addled mind slowly circumnavigated this question. He came to a decision.

  “Call somebody.”

  There was a delay of some minutes.

  Presently, the ship’s surgeon, a lean man in his fifties with a bushy moustache stood over Ceaușescu’s bed. The man spoke pigeon-Russian, which was a mercy.

  “Doctor,” Ceaușescu asked, his voice a strangled whisper. “There were two men rescued with me and the woman. What happened to them?”

  “They are quite well.” The other man’s face told the patient that he did not know why he would ask a thing like that. “They are,” he searched for the right words, “paying their way,” he frowned, “cleaning decks?”

  “They are to be treated well,” Ceaușescu forced out.

  “Of course!”

  The seaman in traction translated for Eleni’s benefit after the Yavuz’s Surgeon had departed.

  For the first time the woman smiled; her whole face, handsome and overly lined for a woman of her age, seemed to light up and to Nicolae Ceaușescu’s astonishment, she sniffed back a tear and leaned over him, planting not one, but two kisses on his brow. Thereafter, she took his left hand in her hands, and resumed her watching brief.

  The sick bay lights were on when Ceaușescu next slowly awakened.

  Second-Captain Kolokoltsev and the Ship’s Surgeon flanked a distinguished, dapper man in a uniform that was so heavily laden with gold braid and other adornments that it threatened to drag him to the deck. This latter man had hard eyes and lips that quirked with impatience.

  He said something in Turkish.

  Kolokoltsev translated: “Orders have been received that you and your party are to remain on the Yavuz until such time as you are fit to travel home, Comrade General Nikolai Vasilyevich.”

  The old battlecruiser’s commanding officer spoke again.

  Again Kolokoltsev translated.

  “The Comrade Surgeon Commander says you will not be well enough to be transferred at sea for possibly many days, or perhaps, several weeks. The Captain apologises but it will be necessary for you and your party to stay onboard for your own safety, until this ship’s mission in forthcoming operations against the British has been discharged.”

  “I must talk to my superiors,” Ceaușescu protested. The last thing he actually wanted to do was talk to anybody who might expose him but if he did not make the right noises sooner or later Kolokoltsev would start asking questions he could not answer.

  Kolokoltsev spoke to the Yavuz’s captain, who angrily shook his head.

  “This may not be possible, Comrade General Nikolai Vasilyevich,” the Political Officer apologised, wringing his hands, “The Yavuz will be operating under conditions of radio silence. For security reasons...”

  It was all Nicolae Ceaușescu could do not to burst out laughing at his outrageous good fortune.

  Chapter 33

  Monday 9th March 1964

  Vickers Ltd Shipbuilding Yard, Barrow-in-Furness, England

  Rear-Admiral Simon Collingwood stood on the dock and stared thoughtfully along the length of the three-quarters completed pressure hull of the United Kingdom’s second nuclear-power hunter killer submarine. Beyond HMS Valiant on the adjoining slipway, the skeleton of her sister boat, HMS Warspite was taking shape. I
n the near distance men were constructing a third slipway for the construction of another, as yet unnamed vessel.

  The Vickers’s Shipbuilding Yard was much as he recollected it from his last visit, approximately eleven months ago. At that time he had been taking HMS Dreadnought out to sea to conduct her proving trials and HMS Valiant had been little further advanced that Warspite was now. The surface ships on the slipways and in the fitting out basin at the time of the October War had departed, either scrapped on the slips, commissioned or towed to other facilities to be broken up or completed, according to need.

  Unlike Dreadnought which had been equipped with a Westinghouse S5W water-cooled reactor and an American machinery set and layout; Valiant, Warspite would be British submarines. Discussions were at an early stage to utilise the latest US nuclear technology in later designs but for the moment, the Government had determined that the United Kingdom would go it alone. Expertise hard-won with the Dreadnought, including a wealth of priceless recent operational experience acquired in actual combat had convinced the Admiralty that building and operating nuclear submarines was one area in which the country might be self-sufficient. Given that there were precious few other defence-critical areas in which that could be said, it actually made a lot of sense. If Great Britain was to remain great at anything it needed to be selective; very, very selective in what it attempted to be great at. HMS Dreadnought’s first two operational patrols – the second of which was the first pre-planned war cruise by a nuclear-powered submarine – had provided ample evidence that building and fighting such boats was something the United Kingdom could still be great at. Of course, wanting to do a thing was not the same as doing it. In between entertaining the lofty ambition of going it alone in such a desperately complex and expensive game as building a nuclear undersea fleet and actually getting that fleet to sea, lay a mountainous challenge.