In retrospect it had been a catastrophic blunder to encourage the Romanians to believe that they were calling the shots; a blunder even though it had facilitated the lengthy build up to and the launching of Phase One of Operation Nakazyvat. The Politburo had accepted that sooner or later Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and that little shit Nicolae Ceaușescu would need to be put in their place. What nobody in Chelyabinsk had factored into the equation was that Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s and Nicolae Ceaușescu’s visions of grandeur verged on the megalomaniac and the psychotic.
Alexei Kosygin grunted a chuckle.
“What’s so funny?” Andrei Sakharov demanded.
“We came here to stiffen the backbone of the Romanians and it turned out that they had too much steel in their spines already.” He smiled again. “I bet the bastards don’t know even about the Tbilisi Company,” he added sardonically, glancing to Vasily Chuikov as he used the secret name of the 6th Strategic Missile Brigade.
The old soldier grinned, sharing the in joke.
Kosygin renewed eye contact with Andrei Sakharov.
“You asked me why we are so calm, Comrade Academician?” He reminded the physicist.
Sakharov responded with a jerky nod.
“We are Russians of the old school,” Kosygin explain, “the Comrade Marshal and I, you perhaps, are of the new order of things.” As he said it he did not think the physicist would understand a word he said. The man had lived a charmed, privileged life in the USSR as one of its most pampered, favourite sons. How could he possibly understand?
Kosygin, who had been born in St Petersburg thirteen years before the Revolution, had diligently worked his way up through the local Party hierarchy over the years; surviving purges and denunciations. During the Great Patriotic War against the Fascists he had been appointed Deputy Chairman of the Council of Evacuation, responsible for the removal of factories and vital war assets ahead of the rampant German armies. Later he had been the man who broke the Nazi blockade of the city of his birth — by then renamed Leningrad — by running truck convoys across frozen Lake Ladoga in winter and in 1943, laying a pipeline under its waters. However, fame and recognition was a dangerous thing in the Soviet Union of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. The closer one moved to the ‘Man of Steel’ the more impermanent a man’s life became and after the end of the Great Patriotic War, Iosif Vissarionovich had drawn him into his inner circle. Stalin saw enemies everywhere and in everything; and in the late 1940s Kosygin, Nikolai Voznesensky, the Chairman of the State Planning Committee and a First Deputy Prime Minister, and Alexei Kuznetzov, whom many saw as a possible successor to the ‘Man of Steel’, rose together through the higher echelons of the Soviet Government by sheer dint of their administrative competence and natural leadership skills. For Voznesensky and Kuznetzov, and for many others, this prominence was to prove fatal, leading to show trials and summary executions for treason. Kosygin had survived, drawn ever deeper into the dark lair of the monster until eventually; he became a key instrument in the investigation and destruction of the careers and lives of numerous other members of the Moscow elite. Terrifyingly — it still gave him the shakes when he thought about it — the old monster had actually taken him into his confidence by the end.
Kosygin had been ordered to spy on his senior comrades, men like Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, leading Politburo figures like Anastas Mikoyan and Lazar Kaganovich. Inevitably, he had become mistrusted and detested by other members of the hierarchy, despised as a pawn in Iosif Vissarionovich cruelly ruthless hands. He had lived in constant fear of his life, never leaving his home without briefing his wife exactly what to do, how to behave, and what to say, if he did not return.
Alexei Kosygin briefly contemplated explaining this to Sakharov; decided it would be a waste of time.
However, Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov was in a more expansive mood.
“You don’t know shit, Sakharov!” He declared with an oddly cheerful grimace. This said the veteran of the Russian Civil War and the victor of Stalingrad who had been Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Army at the time of the Cuban Missiles War folded his arms and lapsed into a wheezing, pugnacious silence.
Chapter 9
On the stroke of noon every civilian worker onboard HMS Talavera downed tools — literally, by very loudly dropping whatever they had in their hands on the deck — and walked off the ship.
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher, who had been working in his day cabin catching up with paperwork — ahead of transferring Talavera’s ‘office’ ashore later that afternoon — that he had neglected during the last week registered the cacophony of thuds and clanging on the deck above his head and elsewhere in the ship but thought little of it, the ship was in dockyard hands, after all, until there was a knock at his open door.
He looked up.
Lieutenant Miles Weiss, his Executive officer was wearing a boyishly troubled face.
“The locals have gone on strike, sir!”
Peter put down his pen.
“What are the ‘locals’ doing now, Miles?”
“Er, milling around on the dock.”
HMS Talavera’s commanding officer decided to take a look for himself. Jamming on his cap he headed for the door. As he made his way to the gangway he noted — with irritation — and stepped over the discarded tools and equipment on the deck.
“Detail somebody to collect all this rubbish and unblock the passageways please,” he instructed conversationally. “Have all this stuff locked away. It wouldn’t do to have any of it go missing.”
Captain ‘D’ had mentioned, albeit in passing before he allowed himself to be transported to the Royal Naval Hospital at Bighi to have his injuries properly x-rayed and assessed, to Peter that: ‘either the blighters will walk off the job and disappear for days on end, in which case they’ll decamp with all their possessions and anything else that’s not tied down; or, they’ll down tools, jump up and down on the dock and breeze back onboard shortly thereafter so they don’t lose more than an hour or two’s pay.”
HMS Talavera’s Captain and Executive Officer almost collided with Spider McCann, the destroyer’s Master at Arms at the foot of the ladder to the main deck. The ship’s senior non-commissioned officer was fit to blow a blood vessel.
Peter’s first words mollified him somewhat.
“I don’t want any civilians on my ship again until they’ve made up their minds whose side they are on, Mr McCann. Pull up the stern gangway and place guards at the shipboard end of the amidships gangway please.”
The diminutive, scarred, steely little man who had once been the Mediterranean Fleet’s bantamweight boxing champion tried hard not to smirk; he understood exactly what was going through his young Captain’s mind.
“Aye, aye, sir!”
The placards read: MALTESE JOBS FOR THE MALTESE, DOWN WITH SCAB LABOR, this last word Peter guessed was a spelling mistake, and NO SURRENDER WCADM.
He could not make out what the workers, perhaps as many as fifty, were chanting. They were yelling in Maltese.
Um, mental note to myself to stick my nose into a Maltese-to-English phrase book or to ask Marija to brief me on the more common Maltese sayings.