He drew up a chair beside Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.
“What has just happened?” Andrei Sakharov asked, unable to stop himself jumping to his feet. He approached the table, rested his hands on it and leaned towards the two Romanians.
Nicolae Ceaușescu gave him a coolly dismissive look.
Vasily Chuikov lit another cigarette, growling like a bear.
“The bastards just liquidated all the people who came west with us from Chelyabinsk and probably,” he raised a curious eyebrow in Ceaușescu’s general direction, seeking confirmation, “every Russian they could round up in Bucharest and the surrounding countryside.”
Nicolae Ceaușescu shrugged.
“But that’s monstrous!” Protested Sakharov.
Yuri Andropov stirred. He had seemed lost in thought while the shooting was going on. He guffawed unkindly.
“Coming from you, Academician Sakharov, the brain behind the Third Idea,” he observed sarcastically, “that is a bit rich, don’t you think?”
Andrei Sakharov recoiled, stepped back from the table as if a Cobra had unfurled its hood in front of him.
Nicolae Ceaușescu was piqued because he felt he ought to know what Andropov was talking about. He had heard the phrase the ‘Third Idea’ before, but could not tie it down and it quickly threatened to become a distraction.
“The Third Idea?” He demanded.
“It is the name the people in Moscow gave the project to build the hydrogen bomb,” Sakharov told him. “This is madness.” He waved his arms like erratic disjointed windmill sails. He glared around the poorly lit bunker in which so much condensation had formed on the walls and ceiling that water drops were periodically exploding on the table and the shoulders of the six men. “Don’t you understand anything?”
“What is there to understand, Comrade Sakharov?” The question came quietly from the lips of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who was gradually recovering from his earlier coughing fit.
“This is insane! What do you think you are doing?”
This brought forth no response.
The physicist went on.
“We are too weak to fight among ourselves. The only hope for us is if we husband all our collective resources.” He shook his head in despair. “Don’t you understand? If the British and the Americans were going to launch a retaliatory strike surely they would have done it by now!”
Chapter 5
The USS Iowa was moored outboard of her sister ship the USS Wisconsin. To reach the admiral’s day cabin on the Iowa it was, thus, necessary to traverse the superstructure and the one hundred and eight feet girth of the inboard leviathan. In the process any man who still doubted the untapped, sleeping military might of the United States of America would have had to have been blind, stupid, in denial or all three of the above to cling onto the tiniest seed of his former doubts.
It mattered not that the Iowa and the Wisconsin were mothballed, largely unmodified World War II vintage battlewagons with ten to twenty year old optics, radars and electronic suites, or that they were horribly labour intensive beasts to steam and maintain, and that without constant air cover and a dozen surface and undersea escorts to ward off air and submarine attack they were giant sitting ducks. None of that mattered because anybody taking the most casual of casual looks at the great, long, lean battleships with their upper works bristling with old-fashioned but very, very visible firepower and their nine massive sixteen-inch calibre naval rifles mounted in three suitably enormous turrets — two forward of the bridge, the third aft of the superstructure — intuitively knew with utter, unshakable certainty that nothing could withstand these ships if they were so foolish as to come within range of their guns. Such was the fallacy of the battleship myth; even twenty years after it had been blown asunder at places as far apart as Taranto in the Mediterranean, Pearl Harbour in the Hawaiian Islands, in the South China Sea, in the Sibuyan Gulf and the Pacific south of Kyushu, nobody was emotionally immune to the cast iron solidity and the unambiguously awesome power of a battleship.
Iowa and Wisconsin were among the last battlewagons built for the US Navy, coming into service in 1944, by then the age of the battleship was over and in the last year of the Pacific War they were relegated to the role of fast escorts for the American carrier task groups ranging across the vast eastern oceans, or employed as mobile artillery platforms capable of pouring screaming death and destruction upon enemy shores over twenty miles distant. In the months after the Iowas joined the Pacific Fleet the only bigger battleships ever built, the Japanese Yamato and Musashi, both twenty thousand tons heavier never came within range of their great sixteen-inch naval rifles; instead they were bombed and torpedoed into deep watery graves in attacks by hundreds of American carrier borne aircraft.
Before he disappeared out of sight into the towering castles of steel moored in the muddy waters of the Delaware River, Jack Kennedy turned and waved for the cameras. He was in no particular hurry, and invited his Vice-President to join him. The aura of their surroundings lent what they were trying to achieve credence out of all proportion to the highly questionable military utility of either the Wisconsin or the Iowa. The thirty-fifth President of the United States of America had tried to reason with his detractors, desperately attempted to woo at least some of his political enemies back onto the centre ground; and he had failed dismally, as eloquently witnessed by the fact that his Administration was at war with a sizable majority of the occupants of the House of Representatives. So be it; now he was appealing directly to the court of public opinion and he did not need to consult a public relations genius to know, that when the American people saw pictures of their President on the deck of an American battleship, they were going to feel a lot better about both him and themselves, and in all likelihood sleep a little more soundly in their beds.
Leastways, until the next disaster came along.
The Navy had spruced up the quayside flank and superstructure of the USS Wisconsin with a hurried coat of grey paint. The air stank of the freshly applied paint and Jack Kennedy breathed more easily as he followed Admiral David Lamar McDonald, the Chief of Naval Operations through the steel jungle to the gangway which linked the two battleships out of sight of the press corps. There were already men working on the decks of the USS Iowa, stringing cables high in her conning tower, anti-aircraft gun mounts were being dismantled, and two diesel generators thrummed in the lee of her forward main battery turrets. Unlike her sister ship, the Iowa was alive and in the coming days an army of workers would swarm over her like ants striving to turn the symbolic gestures of a few minutes ago into a reality that the whole World would recognise as an unmistakable signal of American resolve. When the Iowa steamed out into the North Atlantic again Jack Kennedy wanted the World to know that he was putting down a personal marker. He had not actually believed his new Chief of Naval Operations when David McDonald had told him that given Presidential priority and ‘a fair wind’, the old battlewagon could be taken out of mothballs and sent back to sea within twelve weeks and be in the Mediterranean in fifteen, without — and this was the crucial caveat — delaying the emergency reactivation of other more modern ships.
McDonald was, as Lyndon Johnson said, ‘a regular guy’, albeit ‘for an Admiral’. There was probably no higher praise in the Vice-President’s lexicon than an acknowledgement that a senior military man was ‘a regular guy’. At this very moment the US Navy’s Personnel Division was trawling Navy records for men who had served on the four mothballed Iowa class ships — the other two sisters, the USS New Jersey and the USS Missouri were laid up at the Bremerton Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility in Washington State — because the master plan was to, quite literally, crew the World War II battlewagon with ‘old hands’. Of the four ships the Iowa was in the best condition, and fortuitously, on the doorstep of the new headquarters of the national press and media corps. Although the Wisconsin had been the last of the class taken out of active service she had been extensively damaged by a big electrical fire after her mothballing and had never been repaired. Moreover, neither the New Jersey or the Missouri had been modernized since the Korean War. Given the basic soundness of the Iowa’s fabric and machinery, David McDonald had not seriously considered reactivating any of the other three ships of her class. Besides, while there were a lot of old battleship men on the Naval Reserve List it was highly unlikely that there would be enough, fit, willing and able ‘older hands’ with the necessary range of technical qualifications to enable him to magic out of thin air more than a single crew for one of the old ships.