Kosygin and Shelepin had looked at her as if she had just disrobed and begun dancing on the table.
“That’s the sort of nonsense that caused the war over Cuba,” the Angry Widow retorted.
Margaret Thatcher had not expected this ‘conference’ to be a civil, or a necessarily productive encounter. She had demanded the Soviet authorities acknowledge her warning about the future use of nuclear weapons. A simple plain text radio transmission or a publicly broadcast unambiguous statement of policy would have sufficed; although she had secretly hoped for a renewal of face to face contact and possibly, one last chance to defuse the escalating disaster in the Middle East before she once again sent British and Commonwealth troops into battle.
Alexei Kosygin cleared his throat, irritation written in his grey eyes.
“After the First War there was Versailles, after the Great Patriotic War there was Yalta and then the United Nations experiment.” The sixty year old hero of the siege of Leningrad shrugged, as if he too was questioning whether there had been something lost in the translation of their previous remarks. “There will be a peace conference after this last war too. Or,” he shrugged again, resignedly, “there will be more wars.”
Margaret Thatcher shook her head.
“How can you talk about peace while the Red Army is invading two sovereign countries, Mr Kosygin?”
The Russian’s eyes were bleak.
“You threaten us with nuclear weapons,” he said. It was neither a question; nor an accusation. “You threaten us as if we are naughty children. This is no way to conduct international affairs.”
“Neither is putting the Shah of Iran up against a wall with a group of semi-clothed young women and mowing them all down with machine guns!” Margaret Thatcher replied angrily. “Or destroying the capital city of a country with which you were not at war with a huge nuclear bomb!”
Kosygin waited for the translation.
He shrugged, spoke sadly.
“You destroyed my country. You killed one hundred million of my people.”
“You need to tell President Kennedy that!” The Prime Minister snapped. “Not me!”
“Yet you still fight the Americans’ war for them?” Kosygin said blandly.
James Callaghan stirred by his Margaret Thatcher’s side.
He coughed.
“May I say something, Prime Minister?”
Margaret Thatcher nodded
“Of course, Jim.” She sat back and made a conscious effort to relax her shoulders, swallowing a little of the rage that was threatening to consume her.
The eyes of the Soviet delegation switched to the large, clumsy-looking figure of the Deputy Prime Minister.
“The Cuban Missiles War happened because you and our allies, the Americans, made a series of terrible mistakes. We in the United Kingdom were just caught in the middle. In any event, recriminations belong to a World that no longer exists; the thing that we have to decide today is whether we want to live in peace in the World that we actually find ourselves in.”
This prompted cold stares.
“May I ask a question?” Andrei Sakharov inquired, raising his right hand.
James Callaghan nodded ponderously.
“Why did you not retaliate when those Krasnaya Zarya zealots attacked you in the Mediterranean?”
The stillness was almost hurtful to the ear.
Margaret Thatcher did not trust herself to reply.
Jericho had blown away the last mysteries surrounding Red Dawn. Red Dawn had been a Stalinist legacy, a monster within the Soviet state but not, like the KGB had tried to convince the rest of the World, a completely rogue apparat. Red Dawn had been under the control — albeit flawed control — of the collective leadership of the new Soviet Union ever since the October War; a monstrous smokescreen for the Russians’ long planned revenge on the West. However, back at the beginning of February nobody had known that, and the ‘not knowing’ had been one of the reasons she had categorically refused to sanction an Arc Light thermonuclear counter-strike.
Every time the Prime Minister flicked a glance towards the glacially cold-eyed First Director of the KGB, Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin, she had to suppress a shiver. Shelepin and his deputy, Yuri Andropov had been the puppet masters of the Red Dawn abomination. While Andropov had paid the price for losing control of Krasnaya Zarya beast when he fell into the hands of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s secret police in Bucharest; the only reason Shelepin had not yet moved against the ‘collective leadership’ was that his own reputation, and to a degree the fear in which he was universally held in the Soviet Union, had been temporarily tarnished by his deputy’s shortcomings. If the Rumanian Securitate had not beaten Andropov so badly that he almost died on the flight back to Sverdlovsk, it would have been Shelepin’s head that was on the block.
Shelepin was the man who ran the Soviet gulag, the man who commanded the legions of penal battalions; the man who directed the slave labour camps scattered across the steppes providing the human fodder to run the new factories. Shelepin was the man who, in effect, oversaw the Soviet post-war ‘dispersed command economy’, the man who had been charged with ‘enforcing’ the Chelyabinsk-based collective leadership’s first ‘five year plan’ whose primary purpose was the rebuilding of the Soviet war economy.
It was all there, this and so much more, in the wealth of Jericho decrypts. GCHQ had been overwhelmed by the ‘gold dust’ which had fallen into its lap and every day piles of fresh intelligence piled up, mostly unread for want of qualified analysts. No matter, sooner or later the Prime Minister knew that she would need something with which to bargain, or if things went really badly, something she could sell to the Kennedy Administration. She had Jericho and Jack Kennedy had an election to win, Jericho might be the ace up her sleeve one day. Because of Jericho she had no need of existential psychic tricks, traps or powers to get inside the heads of the men sitting across the table from her because she knew exactly what they were thinking.
The Politburo, which held Kosygin, Brezhnev and the old soldier, Chuikov, in a loose but nevertheless threatening head lock; was getting cold feet about the war in Iran and Iraq and had ordered Kosygin to attempt to sow division in the ‘capitalist camp’ and to explore the possibility of persuading the ‘Angry Widow’ to step aside in the Persian Gulf.
The British threat to ‘go nuclear’ had grabbed the attention of the Soviet leadership but it had not panicked it; because the Soviets had never stopped fighting the October War.
“The Tehran strike was the first use of nuclear weapons by one sovereign nation against another since the October War,” Margaret Thatcher said softly. “As you say, the strikes in February were the work of zealots.”
Sakharov understood the distinction perfectly.
His companions regarded the distinction as being irrelevant.
“The Arabs will not fight against us,” Shelepin announced disinterestedly. “Soon the Red Army will be in Baghdad,” he clasped and unclasped his pale hands on the table. “And then, Basra. Do you really think you can stop us taking Abadan. Or anything else that we choose to take in the Arabian Gulf?”
Kosygin sniffed.
“Unless you want another nuclear war?”