Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had gone as white as a sheet and suffered a violent coughing fit when he started to read the key pages of interrogation transcript. Eventually, he had coughed so uncontrollably his cancerous lungs had burst and he had bled like a stuck pig, spitting gobs of blood and mucus in bubbling rivulets from the corners of his blue-tinged lips before collapsing into a coma. The strain of the last few days had been too much but Ceaușescu had little sympathy for his old friend and mentor.
Gheorghe had preventing him communicating directly with the West after Krasnaya Zarya started randomly lobbing thermonuclear hand grenades, and in hindsight, Ceaușescu realised he should have moved against Gheorghe then. In fact he ought to have moved against him after the first tactical nuclear weapon went off in Limassol Harbour. Elena, his wife, had harried him angrily over his ‘stupid sentimental attachment’ to the Dictator; but there were some men whom not even Nicolae Ceaușescu could betray at the drop of a hat. Nevertheless, he should have acted sooner because now it was almost certainly too late.
The phone on his top floor office desk rang shrilly.
He was relieved to hear the voice of the Soviet Ambassador on the other end of the line. At that moment he did not think he could cope with another vitriolic, spitfire harangue from his witch wife.
Volodymyr Vasylyovych Shcherbytsky, the man who had turned up in Bucharest last January claiming to represent the ‘diplomatic and political interests’ of the Provisional Government of the USSR, and more recently styled himself Ambassador to the Romanians for and on behalf of the Troika was a forty-five year old Ukrainian whose face wore a perpetual mask of mourning for the loss of his beloved Republic. He was an angry, disputative man who had cultivated tolerably civil relations with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. He and Ceaușescu detested each other. Were it not for the fact that Shcherbytsky’s Embassy — he had commandeered the old Soviet Embassy with a gang of refugee ex-Red Army men, of whom there had been several thousand in and around the capital by early last year — regularly greased the palms of senior Party members with gold and silver, and since the summer had secured the release of military supplies, both ancient and new from allegedly ‘abandoned stockpiles’ in the ‘dead zones’, Shcherbytsky would have been ignored, imprisoned or simply disappeared long ago. Shcherbytsky described what was left of his ‘Mother Country’ as a ‘country in name only’. He had claimed the squabbling regions beyond the Ural Mountains and in Siberia were ‘like the wild west’. Shcherbytsky had painted himself as a mobster cashing in on the chaos and publicly backed Krasnaya Zarya as the ‘best defence against the West moving in and taking over’.
Nicolae Ceaușescu wanted to put his head in his hands; he and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had been seduced by the possibility that fate had dealt their small, forgotten backwater of a nation a winning hand in the global geopolitical game. For a blink of an eye they had been the heirs to the Romans for whom their country was named; and truly dared to believe that it might conceivably be their destiny to carve out a new empire from the ruins of the surrounding lands. Offering support and bases of operation for the surviving units of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet and Krasnaya Zarya had unexpectedly given them a stack of chips in the great game. Secure in the delusion that they had the power to turn off the oxygen of men and materiel to Red Dawn at a time of their own choosing, they had dreamed of gaining a bridgehead in both the western and eastern camps. Only days ago it had seemed as if their time had come. If they seized the moment and beheaded the Troika, what stood between them and immortality? Romania might yet be more than the aggressively neutral Switzerland of the Black Sea, it might be something great. Bucharest might become the capital of a new Roman Empire…
Except it had all now gone terribly wrong. Krasnaya Zarya had infiltrated and split the regime so badly that only the loyalty of the Securitate — bought at an extortionately high price largely with Shcherbytsky’s money — had enabled Gheorghe and Ceaușescu to cling onto power. And then the missiles had started to fly again…
“What the fuck is going on?”
Volodymyr Vasylyovych Shcherbytsky’s savage interrogative hit Nicolae Ceaușescu like a slap in the face.
Contrary to what the members of the Troika had been led to believe at Otopeni Air Base no action had been taken against their entourage other than the enforced confinement of its members to a dingy run down hotel several blocks from where Ceaușescu now sat. The shooting had been for dramatic effect. The Soviet ‘delegation’ had been rounded up and a couple of Securitates had shot up the corridors of the bunker to intimidate the Troika. Ceaușescu’s loyal troops and the Securitate had had enough to do hunting down and liquidating Krasnaya Zarya activists without getting into a major fire fight at Otopeni. Ceaușescu and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had correctly anticipated that elements of the former Soviet forces that had sought sanctuary in Romania after the Cuban Missiles War would react badly to a clamp down on Krasnaya Zarya; neither of them had contemplated all out civil war erupting in the southern and eastern regions, and around the strategically vital port city of Constanta on the east coast.
But then they had not known at the time that the ‘former Soviet forces’ in their country were just the advanced guard of the whole fucking Red Army!
Ceaușescu was still struggling to come to terms with just how quickly everything had gone wrong. His ongoing bewilderment — and temptation to go into denial — was fogging his mind at exactly the moment he needed to be most alert.
Volodymyr Vasylyovych Shcherbytsky was shouting abuse at him.
“Operations against counter-revolutionary elements continue, Comrade Ambassador,” Ceaușescu parroted lamely.
“You bastards wouldn’t recognise a fucking counter-revolutionary,” thundered the irate Ukrainian, “if he pissed in your face!”
Nicolae Ceaușescu winced.
“Comrade Gheorghiu-Dej has not been well and mistakes have been made,” he said hurriedly.
“What the fuck have you done with my people?”
Until a couple of hours ago the Soviet Embassy had been surrounded by a cordon of heavily armed Securitate troopers backed up with half-a-dozen tanks. All telephone lines had been cut and access into and out of the compound around the building blocked. It was symptomatic of the disintegration of the Party’s control of the city that somebody had, somehow, contrived to restore the Embassy’s communications with the outside World.
There was a loud banging on the door of Ceaușescu’s office. Before he could say a word a harassed Securitate officer ran in and slapped a message sheet on his blotter.
Two Soviet cruisers were shelling Constanta…
Two Soviet cruisers and a battleship!
Volodymyr Vasylyovych Shcherbytsky cursed.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes, er, yes…” Nicolae Ceaușescu muttered. “Your people have been in protective custody since their arrival in Romania due to the unrest in the country following the irresponsible actions of your clients in the Krasnaya Zarya movement, Comrade Ambassador.”