“What’s the latest head count?” He asked the careworn blond woman who had assumed the role of his secretary and chief translator overnight.
“Eighteen Maltese men and five women,” Rachel Angelica Piotrowska reported, looking up from her notes and the neatly piled sheaf of Prisoner of War Reception and Identification Control Sheets she had collected in the last few hours. “And thirty-two officers and senior non-commissioned other ranks of the 38th and 39th Guards Airborne Regiments of the Red Army.”
“How the fuck are we supposed to interrogate all those bastards?” Williams complained, slumping down into a chair in front of the woman’s desk. He fixed her with a ruminative stare; she did not seem to be half the bitch he had thought she was when she was with Arkady Rykov but he was not about to make the mistake of underestimating her a second time. Not if the stories coming out of Mdina were half-true…
She gave him an unsympathetic look.
“One at a time, Major,” she suggested dryly. Already her voice was flecked with accentuations which hinted at her Polish childhood. After years affecting the tone and manners of an upper middle class Englishwoman there was no longer any need for pretence.
“Very funny!” He had never seen the woman without make up, roughed up, not entirely ‘on show’ as if she was about to step onto an international catwalk and he was asking himself where he had seen her before, years ago long before she was on Comrade Arkady Pavlovich’s case.
“What would you rather do? Shoot them all?”
“Yes, well, I seem to recall that you made a pretty good start on the job the other day in the Citadel, Miss Piotrowska.”
Rachel did not have the energy to glower at him.
“That was in combat, Major.”
“Um…” He grunted, rose to his feet. “What would you do if I started breaking the rest of Samuel Calleja’s fingers?”
The woman’s expression became bleak. The Acting C-in-C’s orders regarding prisoners had been explicit. Regardless of the status of ‘detainees’ — be they suspected agent provocateurs, saboteurs, spies, fifth columnists, or simply captured soldiers in uniform — ‘all prisoners will be treated with decency and their physical and medical needs given appropriate priority’. On the subject of interrogation methods ‘Gestapo tactics’ were without exception, forbidden.
Dan French had asked her to make that crystal clear to Major Williams.
She had been able to soften the pill be adding that: ‘those prisoners of war and Maltese traitors clearly guilty of committing war crimes against the civilian population, or self-evidently guilty of treachery will be summarily executed under the powers vested in me [as Acting C-in-C Malta] in due course.’
That had cheered up Denzil Williams more than somewhat.
“Samuel Calleja’s admission documentation indicates he was processed into this ‘Centre’ without obvious physical injuries other than a bang on the head and an injured left hand. If he subsequently sustained significant additional harm you would have to explain exactly how he sustained those injuries.” She put down her pen, sat back in her chair. The coarse fabric of the over-sized battledress tunic and trousers she had been issued with the previous evening itched and scratched, she felt shapeless and somehow diminished in the uniform and the heavy shoes that she had been given hurt her feet. “Don’t you think enough people have been,” she shrugged, “damaged on this island in the last forty-eight hours?”
The man scoffed derisively.
“We have most of the people responsible for ‘damaging’ our friends and comrades and murdering God alone knows how many helpless innocent civilians sitting in our cells!”
Rachel said nothing.
“What do you think your friend Arkady Pavlovich Rykov did to the poor sods he brought here so he could cover his tracks?”
“I don’t know what he did to them,” she lied. Arkady had tortured and murdered at least one woman in the dungeons of Fort Rinella. Other men he had killed. She understood now that he had done it to stop his victims betraying him and that Julian Christopher had compelled him to do it because he wanted the men responsible for the terrorist killings, atrocities and the sabotage of HMS Torquay liquidated before the poison spread via Samuel Calleja to envelope the rest of his family, and eventually, by tainting his own son, his and the Royal Navy’s good name. At the time she had accepted it as a necessity of war; Arkady’s victims had been members of his own Krasnaya Zarya cell; all except Lela Catana-Perez, whose only crime now seemed to have been that she had had the misfortune to have been unknowingly married to a Red Dawn conspirator. In retrospect she now knew that if she had ever been so unwise as to have left the monster alone with Rosa Calleja, it was likely a similar fate would have befallen her.
Julian Christopher had been an honourable, moral man confronted with an impossible choice but he had not hesitated. He had done what was necessary because he understood that the true evil of war is the terrible things one’s enemies force one to do.
“Don’t you?” The Denzil Williams taunted Rachel, backing away until he found the cold, unyielding end wall of the cell appropriated as the ‘Admin Room’ for the ‘Centre’. “Admiral Christopher would have given us carte blanch with all these bastards. Dammit, he wouldn’t have wasted time and resources we don’t have guarding POWs, he’d have had the whole lot of them put up against a wall and shot!”
Rachel did not think that this was remotely likely.
Over three and hundred and fifty Soviet soldiers, including scores of wounded men, had laid down their weapons and surrendered. A few were still on the run; they were being hunted down like dogs. Those fit to work had been organised into gangs to assist in rescue operations or placed at the disposal of the Royal Engineers attempting to put the main runway at Luqa back into commission. At least thirty Soviet paratroopers were under guard at Royal Naval Hospital Bighi, many suffering from dreadful life-threatening injuries.
“No, he wouldn’t have had anybody shot,” she declared. “We have to be better than our enemies otherwise what right do we have to survive?”
“That’s too deep for me.”
The woman wanted to slap him.
“You shouldn’t have had Arkady beaten to a pulp at Gibraltar,” she snapped at Denzil Williams.
“You mean I should have killed him?” The man inquired acidly. “Rather than just roughing him up?”
Rachel rose from behind her desk and crossed her arms tightly across her breasts as if she was suddenly cold.
“You forced Dick White’s hand, you imbecile!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Because you almost killed Arkady Pavlovich, Dick White had to make it look like an accident. He had to travel to Portugal to make it look like he was bringing him in from the cold. Arkady told him nothing that I hadn’t already passed on to him via other channels. Have you any idea how hard it was to persuade Arkady to come back to Malta to dismantle his own networks. You and I would both be dead by now if he hadn’t been forced to do that to maintain his cover!”
Rachel turned away.
Why are men so obtuse sometimes?
“Yes, that’s all very well,” the man protested indignantly. “The way I see it all he did was take out a few expendable assets he knew were already blown. What about the people we’ve got locked up downstairs? He didn’t roll up their networks?”
“They weren’t working for Rykov, you…”
Why are some men so obtuse and so stupid all the bloody time?
“What are you talking about?”