The whole episode still gave Kosygin nightmares and now he could not help wondering if he was walking into another, even deadlier trap. This time Chuikov, the Minister of Defence in the three-man collective leadership had stayed behind, Party Secretary and Chairman of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev having decreed that after the ‘Bucharest fuck up’ at least two members of the ‘troika’ would always remain in the Mother country.
Kosygin turned to Shelepin.
“I do not think this is another trap, Comrade Director,” he observed. “The British are a civilised people.”
Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin grunted his displeasure and scowled at Andrei Sakharov who had been nodding distractedly. The physicist’s half-smile froze on his face. The man Sakharov worked for, Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and Shelepin were the last two of ‘Stalin’s men’ in the Politburo. The one, Kosygin had lived in terror at the end of the Man of Steel’s reign, but not, he suspected, Shelepin and it was probably for this reason that Brezhnev, Marshal Chuikov and likely, Kosygin also, had excluded him thus far from the collective leadership.
Thus far being the key clause, because there was no more dangerous or secretive man in the reconstituted Union of Soviet Socialist Republics than Comrade Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin.
Allegedly, Shelepin had been born the son of a railway official in Voronezh. Very little was known of his childhood or his youth. His surviving official biography stated that in his late teens and early twenties he had studied history and literature at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy and Literature; and that Shelepin had first come to Stalin’s attention early in the great Patriotic War as the man who had recruited the legendary partisan fighter Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, whose torture and execution by the Germans had made her a national hero. By 1943 Shelepin was a leading figure in the Communist Youth League; and after the war Stalin had appointed him head of the ill-named World Federation of Democratic Youth. Shelepin had been Director of the KGB between 1958 and 1961, when he became a First Deputy Prime Minister in Nikita Khrushchev’s regime shortly before the Cuban Missiles War. In the aftermath of the war he had been the obvious candidate to rebuild the KGB.
Within the Politburo, the senior echelons of the Communist Party and the wider apparatus of the Soviet state, dark rumours roiled around Shelepin like an impenetrable cloak wherein evil resided. Inevitably, not every rumour was true, or could in fact be true, but if not all the mud stuck then some of the blood could never be wiped away.
Every time Andrei Sakharov crossed the path of the First Secretary of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti it felt as if the atmosphere around him had suddenly chilled by ten degrees.
It was said that Khrushchev had installed Shelepin at the Lubyanka — the former headquarters of the Rossiya Insurance Company building on Dzerzhinsky Square which had been taken over as the headquarters of the NKVD, or Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del — because only a man with his particular gifts could possibly ‘clean out the stables’. Latterly, one whisper claimed that Shelepin had been the man who had ‘cleaned out the stables’ after German and Polish exiles in the West had started asking awkward questions about the twenty thousand Poles murdered in the Katyn Forest in April and May 1940, over a year before Hitler invaded and conquered that part of Russia in the Second World War. Originally, the outside World had assumed the atrocity was the doing of the Germans; but not even the NKVD could keep a thing like that secret, any more than Stalin could keep the monstrous archipelago of the Gulag secret. Once Stalin was dead people had talked and those who understood how the Soviet state worked had tacitly assumed that Khrushchev must have ordered Shelepin to make sure the truth about the massacre in the Katyn Forest never surfaced. It seemed outlandish, too obscene but like so many of the stories told about Shelepin it was only when one actually met the man that one began to give them credence.
It was a short car journey.
Within minutes the Russian delegation was led into what looked like a big shed. Inside the structure was like windowless barn. Several chairs had been arranged for the ‘visitors’ to rest upon and a middle aged man in a careworn pinstripe suit explained in faultless Russian that there would be a short interregnum before the main plenary session commenced.
“They want to talk to Waters,” Shelepin said as he began to pace backwards and forwards like a caged Leopard.
Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Harold St John Water, VC, had been whisked away in a separate vehicle the moment his feet touched the tarmac. The veteran SAS man had entertained hopes of stiff drink and square meal when he got back home but this, it seemed, was to be delayed a little longer. He recognized Field Marshall Sir Richard Hull, whom he had met several times over the years. The Russians had found him a badly fitting boiler suit that smelled of mothballs. Nevertheless, he threw the Chief of the Defence Staff a smart salute.
“At ease, Waters,” the other man ordered. Hands were shaken. “You look all in?”
“The bastards haven’t ground me down yet, sir.”
Sir Richard Hull guffawed and introduced his companions.
Margaret Thatcher shook the ragged newcomer’s hand daintily but looked at him with intelligent, vaguely mesmeric steely blue eyes that instantly tied the returning hero’s tongue. That hardly ever happened the first time Frank Waters made a lady’s acquaintance.
The Prime Minister smiled.
“Are you fit enough to act as our interpreter, Colonel Waters?”
“Absolutely, Ma’am,” he retorted defiantly.
“That’s marvellous. Just spirit!”
Frank Waters shook the hand of the big, lugubrious man at the Prime Minister’s shoulder. He did not usually have that much time for lefties like James Callaghan, the Leader of the Labour Party and Deputy Prime Minister in the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom.
“How do you do, sir,” he grinned toothily at the taller man. It did not cost him anything to be polite and for all he knew Callaghan might be his boss in a month or two. If war was a messy old business politics was positively dirty; a chap never knew where he stood with a bloody politico!
Chapter 41
Major General Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov clambered up onto the broiling armoured carapace of the T-62 at the head of the column. The rounded steel of the dome-like turret was hot enough to sear human flesh or flash fry an egg in seconds. In the distance the haze shimmered off the arid, yellow grey floor of the plain where a ribbon of greenery traced the distant path of the Dyala River, and here and there small irrigated oases dotted the landscape. Otherwise, while the tanks of the column fanned out looking for depressions in the rocky escarpment in which to lie ‘hull down’ until the heat of the day had subsided, all he saw was empty countryside.
The smoke from the burning Iraqi M-48s which had attempted to ambush the column an hour ago still hung over the battlefield. The enemy had clumsily telegraphed his attentions, and charged in like idiots — albeit brave idiots — with minimal infantry support and an absence of anything a real soldier would recognise as co-ordination. Puchkov’s veteran tankers had made short work of the attackers.