“I sincerely hope this turns out to be worth being turned out of one’s bed in the middle of the night, Commander-in-Chief,” Iain Macleod complained, affecting a jocular tone he obviously did not feel.
Dan French had taken the chair next to Rachel. He glanced to the First Sea Lord whose barely perceptible nod indicated he should chair the meeting.
“Miss Piotrowska has been in the employ of the intelligence services for several years, gentlemen,” he explained. “Suffice to say that her credentials have been personally vouchsafed to me by the Director General of the Secret Intelligence Service.” He waved for the woman to speak.
She hesitated, taking measure of the group.
She was in a room with several intelligent, powerful men who, regardless of their vexed, tired expressions were undoubtedly listening to her every word with keen and very critical attention.
“My name is Rachel Piotrowska. Shortly before the October War Dick White sent me to assassinate the KGB Head of Station in Istanbul and Thessalonika, a man — no, a monster — hiding behind the name of Nikolai Vasilyevich Fyodorov. Insofar as the monster had a real name his masters in Dzerzhinsky Square actually knew him by his alias Arkady Pavlovich Rykov. He was personally responsible, that is with his own hands, for the murder of at least twelve British agents…”
“Come, come!” Iain Macleod objected. “MI6 doesn’t have licence to kill. That’s all Hollywood tosh!”
Rachel looked at him.
Coolly, levelly, she just looked at him for several seconds.
“You people,” she observed, mildly, “do not deserve to be protected by people like us if you really believe that, Mr Macleod.”
Airey Neave stirred. Having never really broken his connections with the Second World War secret world of MI6 and the Special Operations Executive, he had few if any illusions as to the harsh realities of the way the ‘great game’ was actually played.
“Why exactly are we interested in this Fyodorov fellow, Miss Piotrowska?”
“By the time I caught up with him he was lying badly injured in a hospital bed at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey babbling about Krasnaya Zarya and about ‘sleeper agents’ his masters had placed in the West during the 1940s and 1950s. I thought about cutting his throat anyway but that would have been churlish. Duty before pleasure,” she said quirking a misleadingly coy smile, “isn’t that what you gentlemen say?”
She had splashed water on her face and run a brush through her hair before setting out on the tortuous journey across Malta. She was aware her looks were fading, that she needed to spend time on her face and hair to still play the courtesan; but understood that all that was wasted on these men.
“So I became the monster’s mistress and very slowly I learned some of his secrets. What we know of Krasnaya Zarya, Red Dawn, what it is and what it is not true you learned from me. But Rykov only knew a part of the story. I don’t honestly think he knew that Malta would be attacked until a few hours before it happened, for example. But I’m not here tonight to tell you about Arkady Pavlovich Rykov. If you want to know about him you must talk to Dick White.”
“What the Devil are we here to talk about?” Iain Macleod demanded testily.
Rachel viewed the balding politician placidly.
“A few hours ago I was asked to go onboard the USS Charles F. Adams to assist in the processing of the survivors of the Turkish battlecruiser Yavuz. Among my accomplishments I speak several languages. Specifically, I was asked to speak to a one-legged man in his forties and the Greco-Turkish woman whom the people on the destroyer thought was probably his wife.”
Nobody told her that she was wasting anybody’s time so she continued.
“It seemed the man — who more than superficially physically resembles Arkady Rykov — had been impersonating a certain Nikolai Vasilyevich Fyodorov in order to prevent the Soviet Commissars onboard the Yavuz sending him ashore where his actual identity would be uncovered. Had his true identity been discovered by his hosts at any time since the destruction of Bucharest,” she grimaced ruefully, “shortly thereafter he would have found himself in a KGB punishment cell, presumably having sensitive parts of his anatomy methodically excised to confirm the details of his confession.”
“Very droll,” Iain Macleod grunted. “Who is this man and why do we care, Miss Piotrowska?”
“Firstly, we should care because until Bucharest was razed to the ground by a Soviet, not a Krasnaya Zarya nuclear strike, this man was First Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party of the Rumanian People’s Republic. And, secondly, we should care because he claims that he fled Bucharest specifically to make contact with the British, or the Americans, he is a little bit vague about which, to warn us that the Soviet Union is about to mount a massive ground offensive against the West.”
Sir David Luce coughed.
“Forgive me, Miss Piotrowska, I’m a little unclear as to how this man came to be on the Yavuz in the recent battle?”
Rachel frowned.
“Does it actually matter, Sir David?”
“The man sounds deranged. Being in the sea for a couple of days does that to a man.”
Airey Neave re-entered the fray.
“You sound convinced by this fellow, Miss Piotrowska?”
“That’s because I know him and you don’t, Mr Neave.”
The man who had escaped from Colditz grimaced and recollected his training as a lawyer.
“Who is he? And how do you know he is who he says he is?”
“I know him because I met him several times in Bucharest in the year before the war when I was searching for Arkady Rykov. He had the Securitate, the Rumanian Secret police in his pocket and that was very useful to Arkady Rykov.”
Around the circle of chairs the mood was sombre.
“His name is Nicolae Ceaușescu.”
Chapter 68
Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov had taken a malicious pleasure in demanding to talk to his comrades in the collective leadership in the middle of the night. The men of Army Group South were not getting any sleep tonight so neither should the men who had ordered them to undertake their ‘little route march to the Persian Gulf’. And besides things were going so much better than he — or he suspected Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian, a man who tended to dwell on all the things that could go wrong at the best of times — had hoped that he wanted to celebrate.
Babadzhanian had snatched ninety minutes sleep and gone straight into a conference with the commander of 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army. Striking while the iron was hot — red hot — the old movement plans were being scrapped and everything advanced by, in some cases, as many as seven days. Chuikov and Babadzhanian had discussed the possibility that this would lead to confusion and cause inevitable snarl ups in the logistical train; but decided that it was more important to exploit the success of the initial assault than to worry about unquantifiable ‘cans of beans’. The mountains over and through which 3rd Caucasus Tank Army on the right and 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army on the left were advancing, was hardly rich foraging ground and there were strong arguments for not antagonising the local populations; but if it came to it Babadzhanian’s men would seize whatever they needed as they moved forward. War was Hell and Army Group South was already deep within hostile territory.
It had taken the technicians in Chelyabinsk, the new capital of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics nearly an hour to set up the scrambler links and for aides to awaken Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin and Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, Vasily Chuikov’s comrades in the so-called Troika, the collective leadership which had coalesced out of the ashes of the Cuban Missiles War. The old soldier had no real illusion about his role and status within the Troika; he was there to guarantee the support of the Red Army, Kosygin and Brezhnev were the ones who really called the shots. If he had been a more ‘political’ soldier he might have put Alexei Nikolayevich and Leonid Ilyich straight on one or two things. However, he was in no way unhappy in his current boots. Having had to be talked into backing Operation Nakazyvat he now accepted that his comrades in the collective leadership — Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin and Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev were two astonishingly shrewd and devious old commissars — who sometimes actually knew what they were doing.