Russians were a strange and fascinating people.
That much at least she had learned in her years as a spy.
Russians were strange, fascinating and fundamentally unpredictable. Therefore, she was not quite as surprised as she ought to have been when the KGB man holding a gun to the head of the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations indicated to her that he wanted to cut a deal. Of course, the man holding the Makarov pistol had not actually said that; but they both knew that was exactly what he meant because he had not yet put a bullet in Admiral Christopher’s brain.
The man could have killed her while she was dealing with Arkady Rykov if he had wanted but where was the profit in that?
The KGB man had decided that the British had fought off the assault on the building and that if she was between him and the first angry, vengeful soldiers who burst through the door his chances of staying alive were exponentially improved. When those soldiers came through that door their blood would be up and if the first thing they saw was a woman — albeit one spattered with blood and wielding a Kalashnikov — they were much less likely to roll a couple of grenades in front of them or to start blazing away with automatic rifles.
‘Kill him, Miss Pullman,’ Julian Christopher muttered with a voice that was so deeply exhausted his words were barely audible.
There were boots stomping and trampling through the building.
She was sorely tempted to kill the KGB man.
Very tempted but the killing was over.
‘Drop the gun on the floor and come around to this side of the desk!’ She barked at the KGB man. ‘Now, or I will kill you!’
The Russian was in his thirties, swarthy but dapper in an apparently military way. However, now that she had properly appraised him the woman could tell from the fit and the neatness of the man’s battledress that it lacked the feel of a lived in, fought in uniform. The man knew how to act like a real soldier but he was a fraud.
The man had slowly taken the gun away from Julian Christopher’s head and, with the muzzle pointed at the floor drawn it away to the side before dropping it. She had not seen the man flick on the safety before he discarded the weapon. It thudded onto the stone floor with a ringing metallic sound that had so alarmed the woman that she almost pulled the trigger of the AK-47.
Why does this man look so familiar?
The woman had assumed that he was going to make a grab for the Kalashnikov at the moment he dropped the pistol, just not that he would be so clumsy or so inept in his attempt. In the event he telegraphed his intentions so obviously that she was very nearly caught unawares.
He threw himself at her.
He actually tried to throw himself at her!
In her aching weariness she reeled aside.
It took her an age to regain her balance; if the man had been a professional he would have lunged at her again by then. Instead, he had rolled on the ground to break his fall and only slowly picked himself up. The fool had been worried about hurting himself when he attacked her!
The wooden stock of her Kalashnikov proscribed a short, vicious arc which connected with the back of the amateur’s neck. He slumped onto the carpet in front of Admiral Christopher’s desk like a sack of potatoes falling off the back of lorry. Just to make sure he was out cold she stamped on his left hand, so hard she heard bones crack.
She had slung the gun over her back and gone to Julian Christopher by the time the rescue party barrelled through the door.
As she had guessed the garrison of the Citadel had prevailed, eventually.
‘The Admiral has been shot and is bleeding internally,’ she had yelled, cradling the great man’s head to her breast in an attempt to hold his upper body at an attitude likely to stop him bleeding out before help arrived. She knew it was probably useless. The bullet that had hit him had entered in a relatively high, innocuous position close to the inner end of his left clavicle but it had travelled down and exited his back level with his heart, almost certainly nicking an artery on the way.
Of course, there was no doctor.
Margo Seiffert might have saved Julian Christopher if she could have got him into an operating theatre but she was dead, and he would never survive the journey to the nearest hospital with sufficiently advanced equipment and skilled surgeons.
‘What is your real name, Miss Pullman?’
A medical orderly had rushed into the office and wanted to pump an ampoule of morphine into the dying man’s arm; she had waved him away. Julian Christopher did not seem to be in great pain, if any, he was too far gone for that.
‘“I was born Rachel Angelika Piotrowska in Lodz in nineteen twenty-eight,’ she had confessed. ‘But it has been a long time since I used that name.”
“Dick White refused to tell me your real name,” he muttered, almost wryly.
“You know what spies are like, Admiral,” she whispered.
“Yes…”
Julian Christopher had coughed feebly.
“The shelling has stopped…”
“Yes,” she agreed, the tears flowing freely down her cheeks.
“The boy,” the man said. It took him several seconds to summon the strength and the will to continue. “The boy and his Talaveras must have settled the bastards’ hash…”
She had stroked the man’s brow awhile.
“Tell Peter I am proud of him…”
It was the last thing the Commander-in-Chief of all British Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations said. Forcing out those words had exhausted his final reserve of strength and he had died in her arms a few minutes later without regaining consciousness.
Chapter 9
Home Secretary’s hackles were rising. In the three months that he had been in his current post nothing — absolutely nothing — had so infuriated him as the brainless, bully boy arrogance and stupidity of MI5.
‘Dr J.W. Malling, Mr K.H.S. Meredith-Hall, Mr B.T. Terrell and Mr C.H.O. Alexander are being held incommunicado at HMP Gloucester pending the completion of a Security Service review at GCHQ Cheltenham. The four men were arrested on 15th March 1964 on suspicion of gross breaches of Section II of the Official Secrets Act…’
Forty-three year old Roy Harris Jenkins was the son of a Welsh miner who by dint of sheer intellectual acuity and determination had breezed through his years at Balliol in the late thirties and early years of the 1945 war. In the very halls where the rump Home Office now operated he had enjoyed some of the happiest days of his life. In his earlier time at Balliol he had formed many lifelong friendships, including one with the late Edward Heath; whose sad death in the White House shortly after the Battle of Washington he still deeply lamented. It had been while he was at Balliol that he had become Secretary and Librarian of the Oxford Union Society, the Chairman of the Oxford University Socialist Club and embarked on his life in politics. Albeit a life interrupted after he had achieved a First Class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1941 by four years spent in the Royal Artillery.
Illness had prevented Ted Heath recruiting him into his United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration shortly after the October War and he had been genuinely taken aback when his old friend’s successor, Margaret Thatcher, had approached him and asked him to join her Cabinet.