“Oh,” the Queen observed, not really caring to contemplate the range of geopolitical complications which would arise if this was true.
Margaret Thatcher spelled out the most intractable of those complications.
“If this is the case then it seems obvious to me that significant parts of the former Soviet Union may not have been as badly damaged as we previously believed.”
“What you are saying is that we might be facing is a wounded Soviet monster determined to wreak revenge on us all?” The monarch prompted.
“Yes,” the other woman confirmed. “We have asked our American allies if additional reconnaissance assets are available to properly assess the situation in the areas of the former Soviet Union that we know to have been less heavily attacked during the October War. Unfortunately, it seems that the CIA’s pre-war spy satellite program was one of the victims of the Kennedy Administration’s ‘peace dividend’ cutbacks last year. This means that apart from our own Canberra photo-reconnaissance aircraft and a pair of U-2s, all of which had ceased operating over Soviet territory after the Gary Powers’ Incident in 1960 because of their proven vulnerability to ground launched missile attack, we have no real way of establishing the ‘facts on the ground’ in the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Black Sea Area or, frankly, anywhere in central or eastern Russia.”
“Oh, dear,” the Queen frowned. “Presumably, we have information garnered from intercepted communications and foreign legations in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans? Although, I don’t suppose there can be many of those left, surely?”
“The Norwegians and the Swedes attempted to maintain a token presence in Bucharest and Belgrade, Ma’am.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Currently, there are reports of heavy fighting north of Bucharest and of an unprecedented clamp down in the city by the Romanian Secret Police and Army. There also appears to be widespread fighting in the western provinces of the country.”
William Whitelaw added: “the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanta is either closed or blockaded. We don’t know which. The people at Cheltenham are speculating that if the warships we’ve observed operating in the Aegean and elsewhere had been docked at Constanta, or perhaps, Varna in Bulgaria, our intelligence coverage of these areas has been so ‘spotty’ that they could actually have been there all this time without us being any the wiser.”
“What do the Americans make of all of this?” The Queen asked, putting her darkest forebodings to the back of her mind.
“I think it would be safe to say that they are still assimilating developments, Ma’am,” Margaret Thatcher replied, a little tongue-in-cheek.
Chapter 8
Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin had not so much lost track of time as not bothered to try to keep track of it in the first place. The Securitate bruisers who had roughed them up at Otopeni Air Base before bundling them into the back of the truck for the ride back to the city had confiscated their watches, trouser belts, ties and shoes, and emptied their pockets. The Securitates had not blindfolded or hooded them because they obviously did not care if their prisoners saw or understood where they were being taken; he had not made up his mind if this was a good or a bad sign. The four of them; Kosygin, his fellow Politburo comrade Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov and his country’s post-Cuban Missiles War premier surviving atomic physicist, Academician Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov had been thrown — ‘thrown’ as if they were four sacks of coal — onto the bare, filthy unforgiving tiles of the floor of the three by two metre cell buried somewhere below the streets of the capital. A single glaring electric bulb swung from a short cable just inside the rusty, impregnable iron door; the only cell furniture was a rusty metal bucket. The bucket was the Securitates’ solitary concession to the elevated status of their ‘guests’; it seemed likely that the normal toileting option it offered the occupants of the cell was a small circular drain covered by a mould encrusted grill situated approximately in the centre of the dungeon.
The stench of faeces and urine had overwhelmed that of vomit some hours before a squad of Securitates had entered the cell and dragged Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov away. If Andropov had not already pissed his pants he would have then. It was odd that it was always the same men who so loudly advocated ‘the way of discipline’ and the most immediate and brutal suppression of ‘ideological deviance’, who were invariably the first to piss their pants when they were actually on the receiving end of the ‘iron fist measures’ they championed. Kosygin had never trusted Andropov; the man had lost his nerve watching the mob stringing up Hungarian secret policemen outside the Soviet Embassy in Budapest in 1956. Andropov had been the one who had persuaded Nikita Sergeyevich to crush the uprising. Khrushchev had not wanted to do it because it smacked of a return to the ways of the Stalin era, then only three years in the past. Andropov — as Soviet Ambassador in Budapest and therefore the man on the spot — had forced his hand. With the benefit of hindsight Kosygin believed that the Cuban Missiles War would never have happened but for the Hungarian disaster. Afterwards, the West had recoiled at the brutality of the supposedly reformist, altered post-Stalin Soviet bear.
Andropov had not wanted to make that Krasnaya Zarya speech because he knew that it was the sort of thing that could so easily come back to haunt him. KGB apparatchiks like Yuri Vladimirovich always preferred to keep their own hands as clean as possible.
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev had insisted: ‘Fuck it! You have to take responsibility for something sooner or later if you’re going to any fucking use around here, Yuri Vladimirovich!’ Andropov had twisted and turned like an eel, insisting that a Red Army man should be identified as the head of Krasnaya Zarya.