Vasily Chuikov, the Soviet Union’s most decorated living soldier had laughed contemptuously.
‘I told you this thing would get out of control!’ He had thundered. The other members of the Politburo had thought he was reaching for a gun as he stood up, his chair crashing to the floor behind him as he had leaned menacingly towards Andropov, the Politburo member responsible for co-ordinating counter-intelligence and espionage activities against the West. ‘You must have had your finger up your arse these last few weeks and your head buried in a pile of dog shit to have let things get to this stage!’
Alexei Kosygin’s partner in the post-war collective leadership of the rump Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev had looked to him and when he had nodded his assent, condemned Andropov.
‘You will do this thing, Comrade,’ he had growled. ‘Or you will personally account to the Politburo for the unauthorised use of nuclear weapons in the West.’
Now Kosygin, Sakharov and the old soldier sat on the cold floor with their backs against the wall. Other than the faint radiated warmth of the single overhead lamp the cell was frigidly clammy although their breath did not mist as it would have in the basement of the Lyubianka in Stalin and Beria’s days.
“I am confused,” Andrei Sakharov confessed.
“About anything in particular, Comrade Academician?” Kosygin asked, welcoming the opportunity to break the circle of his increasingly gloomy thoughts.
“It was my understanding that our mission to Bucharest was to assist Comrade Gheorghiu-Dej and the Romanian Politburo to purge Krasnaya Zarya elements in the region, and to clarify existing military and technical mutual support arrangements?”
Kosygin tried not to laugh too loudly as Sakharov frowned in that innocently professorial way of his. The man might be a genius but he understood nothing about realpolitik.
“We came here to intimidate the fucking Romanians!” Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Chuikov grunted irritably. “Fucking Romanians! My boys fought the bastards in the Ukraine in the Great Patriotic War! Fucking Nazi lap dogs! We always knew they’d probably betray us!”
“Not however,” Alexei Kosygin observed dryly, “quite so comprehensively, Vasily.”
The old warrior guffawed like a rutting musk oxen.
The scientist was baffled.
“Comrade Andropov has been taken away and we have been left to rot in this stinking hole in the ground,” he said, stating the patently obvious, a thing he rarely did and despised coming from the lips of others. “How can you be so calm?”
Kosygin looked at the scientist thoughtfully, envying his naivety.
The last year had prematurely aged the fifty-nine year old. Unlike his co-leader, Leonid Brezhnev he did not care to dye his hair unnaturally black or to pretend to a youthful vigour he no longer felt. He was a lean, hard man whose keen intellect was his defining strength and he acknowledged the irony of his current situation. He and Leonid Ilyich, it seemed, had done far too good a job masking the residual military and industrial strength of the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from their only remaining ally in Eastern Europe. They had kept their secrets too well! If Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and that little shit Nicolae Ceaușescu had known what they were dealing with the Securitates would not be kicking Andropov around an interrogation cell, and Kosygin and his fellow prisoners would not be killing time in a fetid basement in Bucharest. The situation would have been amusing if it had happened to somebody else.
The Romanians and their Krasnaya Zarya parasitic guests who had used Bucharest as their quasi-capital since the October War, had honestly believed they were dealing with a Troika — some kind of Party-KGB-Army junta — ruling the devastated, enfeebled ruins of the old USSR from somewhere behind the Ural Mountains. The Romanians had been willing accomplices — now it seemed they had convinced themselves they were the new overlords — willingly providing the under strength 57th and 58th Shock Brigades of the so-called Ukrainian Peoples Front bases and jumping off points for the incursions through Bulgaria and Transylvania into Greece and the Balkans. Presumably, the Romanians had imagined Krasnaya Zarya would win them relatively intact and undamaged footholds, the bridgeheads of some new latter day Roman Imperium. They had honestly believed that they could control Krasnaya Zarya! When they discovered their mistake they had panicked. They had not counted on Krasnaya Zarya poisoning the well both west and south of the Black Sea. The 61st and 63rd Shock Brigades of the Trans-Caucasus Front had were, like the Romanian-based 57th and 58th, uncontrollable, undisciplined polyglot rabbles made up of refugees from all over the former Eastern Bloc, commanded by berserkers who turned on their Soviet Military advisors — and controllers — as Phase One of Operation Nakazyvat, Operation Chastise — had achieved its objectives. When the maniacs belatedly discovered that they had never been the masters of their own destiny they had attempted to start a second global nuclear war.
The lesson of the great Patriotic War against the Nazis had been that most things go wrong most of the time. Practically everything had gone wrong in the execution of Phase One of Operation Nakazyvat; and yet, if one discounted the disaster of the bungled nuclear first strike against the British in the Central and Eastern Mediterranean, it was hard to imagine how things could have possibly worked out better. It was a mystery why the British had not retaliated after the bombing of Limassol, or after their aircraft carrier, the Victorious, was attacked with a nuclear-tipped torpedo. How could the British not retaliate after the attack on Malta? The World had gone mad! How was anybody supposed to attempt serious strategic planning in a World in which one’s enemy had the power to annihilate one in the blink of the eye and yet, did nothing? Of course, ending up in a Securitate cell in Bucharest had not been in the plan either…
Most things go wrong most of the time…
Nobody in Chelyabinsk, the current headquarters of the Provisional Government had imagined — not even in their worst nightmares — that Krasnaya Zarya fanatics would gain control of the 21st Mobile Strategic Missile Brigade emplaced around Ploesti, or worse, the 6th Strategic Missile Brigade deployed across the barren steppes east and south of the bomb-ruined city of Kuybyshev. The nine operational R-16 inter-continental ballistic missiles of the 6th Strategic Missile Brigade had represented the Provisional Government in Chelyabinsk’s last bargaining card if and when, Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev ever came to sit around a peace table with the Western mass murderers. Each of those thirty metre tall one hundred and forty ton rockets had been capable of destroying a city eleven thousand kilometres away. If the Americans or the British attacked again those eleven missiles would make little difference; but if China encroached upon the eastern frontiers of the Soviet Union — as sooner or later Mao Tse-tung was bound to do — or developed its own nuclear bomb what then would become of the Mother Country? To discover that Krasnaya Zarya had subverted the key remaining strategic thermonuclear strike capability of the USSR — spies in the United States confirmed that none of the Red Air Force’s bombers had got through to their North American targets on the night of the Cuban Missiles War and were therefore, useless in their strategic strike role — so far from its bases of operation in Romania and the Trans-Caucasus, had come as a hammer blow to the Politburo. After that, this fool’s errand to Bucharest had almost seemed, if not a good idea then the last throw of the dice.