“We have taken casualties at sea, in the air and on land overnight, Ma’am,” Margaret Thatcher admitted. “However, the Chiefs of Staff are confident that the whole island will be in our hands within the next seventy-two hours. Inevitably, there will be a great deal of mopping up to do over the course of the coming weeks but Operation Grantham is broadly speaking, proceeding according to schedule.”
The Queen nodded, sipped her tea.
“What of the reports from Iran?”
Her Prime Minister’s face hardened.
“Our listening stations have intercepted a large volume of short wave radio traffic. In Farsi and English but also in Russian from the area of the Iranian-Azerbaijani border with the former Soviet Union, and from within and around Tehran, Ma’am.”
The Queen raised a patient eyebrow.
“The situation is very confused,” Margaret Thatcher continued. “However, it is clear that what we initially interpreted as a popular uprising, or a full scale coup d’état aimed at toppling the Shah’s government,” she hesitated, the words tasting dangerously bitter in her mouth, “is no such thing. Large numbers of men dressed in former Soviet uniforms and armed with former Soviet weaponry briefly took control of the city. Our own embassy and that of the United States and the embassies of several other countries were attacked, our diplomats murdered and our compounds ransacked. We believe that the Shah of Iran was residing at the Sa’dabad palace to the north of the capital at the outset of the attack. That Palace was over-run by the ‘invaders’ and there has been no word of the Shah’s personal fate. The latest news to hand is that Iranian Army units have entered the city and have driven the ‘invaders’ into the western suburbs around the Mehrabad Air Base, Ma’am.”
The Monarch’s brow was somewhat furrowed.
“Forgive me, you have employed the term ‘former’ in the context of troops behaving and dressed as ‘Soviet’ troops?”
“Yes,” the other woman agreed. “The distinction is one that is still being made by our intelligence analysts. However, given what happened at Malta and various other indications, I personally think that we have reached the point at which such distinctions are somewhat academic.”
“Oh, I see.”
Margaret Thatcher took a deep breath.
“I believe we may have been making our plans under a completely false premise,” she said grimly. “Further, I believe that Red Dawn, an organisation which we have previously classified as a terroristic, stay behind organ of the largely destroyed pre-war Soviet state, may be no more or less than the outrider of the surviving elements of KGB and the military machine of the USSR. I further believe, or more correctly fear, that recent events lead to the conclusion that significant, coherent elements of the ‘former’ USSR survived the war and that potentially, this is the spectre that now confronts us in the Eastern Mediterranean and, conceivably will threaten our vital strategic interests elsewhere in the World.”
“Where does the news from Iran fit into this revised ‘threat picture’?”
“I don’t know,” Margaret Thatcher conceded. “Tom Harding-Grayson has a doomsday scenario in which unstoppable Soviet tank armies crash through the mountains of Northern Iran down into the floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers in Iraq, and subsequently drive south to the Persian Gulf seizing the Kirkuk oilfields, Basra and eventually Abadan Island. Frankly, that all still sounds a little far-fetched to me, Ma’am.” Margaret Thatcher shrugged. “I hope it is far-fetched. With the Suez Canal still being blocked at Ismailia there would not be an awful lot we could do about it,” she shrugged again, “if it came to it.”
“Presumably, all reinforcements to the Persian Gulf would have to go around the Cape of Good Hope? Or all the way across the Pacific from the West Coast of America?” The Queen inquired. “That would take months, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, Ma’am. Always assuming we actually had the ‘reinforcements’ and the necessary war-fighting materiel to hand in the first place. As you will know well over half the Army’s tanks and armoured vehicles were based in West Germany at the time of the October War and the factories which produced those vehicles were mothballed last year because of the chronic post-war shortages of high-grade steels and the hundred and one other things that are required to build sophisticated modern fighting vehicles. Priority was given to warship construction and maintenance and in keeping our surviving aircraft flying, Ma’am.”
“Quite.” The Queen tried not to sound overly worried. “My word, the thought of having Russian tanks parking on the beaches of the northern Persian Gulf ready to drive into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia is hardly an appealing prospect?”
“No, ma’am,” Margaret Thatcher concurred, “it is most certainly not!”
Chapter 60
“My name is Rachel Angelika Piotrowska,” she explained unhurriedly. “You and your case officer, Arkady Pavlovich Rykov, knew me as a fading English courtesan called Clara Pullman. As it happens I was born in Lodz, in Poland in 1928, and I was just old enough to be able to kill Fascists when the war came. In 1945 the Red Army liberated Ravensbrück, where the Nazis had left me to starve to death. Despite everything I had been through I was still an innocent in some ways at the time. But then I was raped by one Red Army pig, then another, and more than once by several of the pigs at once. That was when I started ‘putting down’ Soviet ‘animals’. Like you.”
Samuel Calleja stood before her desk in the hastily set up office in one of the upper caverns of the old fortress. His hands were cuffed behind his back and he was swaying, exhausted, on his feet. He was naked apart from his stinking, soiled skivvies. Two redcaps flanked him, both hefting long night sticks.
Rachel met the man’s sullen stare with coldly unblinking eyes.
“You will tell me about your disappearing act around the time HMS Torquay was blown up?”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“No, you don’t,” she agreed.
Samuel Calleja tried to stand up straight.
“I don’t care what you do to me,” he spat.
Rachel shrugged. She nodded to the Redcap standing menacingly behind the prisoner’s left shoulder. It was a pre-arranged sign; while Samuel Calleja squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself for the first impact of a night stick across his naked back the Redcap stepped back and picked up a blanket from the floor which he shook out and draped around the shivering man’s shoulders.
“I’m not going to do anything to you, Samuel.” Rachel declared, assessing the confusion in the prisoner’s eyes as she quirked an unfunny smile. “I am not a monster like Arkady Pavlovich.”
“Then what are we doing here?”
“We’re having a nice friendly chat and once you’ve told me what I want to know you’ll feel a lot better about things.”
“You’re mad!”
“Yes, a little bit. But I’m tired of hurting people. So perhaps I’m not quite as crazy as I was a few days ago.”
The man was too weary to think clearly. He had never been trained to resist interrogation; even when he had led an assassination squad to murder the post-war Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet — and incidentally, his wife who was unfortunate enough to be in the car with him at the time — he had not actually fired a shot. The killers had been Moscow-trained thugs, Arkady’s people. His job was to make it possible for Arkady’s people to merge into the background of Maltese society, to provide places to hide their weapons and explosives, to be the guardian of their radio, a courier and postman. He had never fired a gun in anger or personally harmed a hair on anybody’s head. Moreover, he had no idea if the sabotaging of British communications and radar across the archipelago was Arkady’s doing; or even why the Russian had spared him after he had butchered all his friends…