That was it; the accusation he had never planned to voice. A taboo on a par with mentioning Stalin’s Gulag.
“I want to speak to Kosygin.”
“That’s not possible at this time…”
“I want to speak to Alexei Nikolayevich before my Government decides to drop a fucking great big bomb on your rat-faced head!”
“What, I…” Like most powerful men accustomed to being surrounded by subordinates he could cow into humiliating submission with a casual raising of an eyebrow or the utterance of a single, inoffensive word, Nicolae Ceaușescu, had no stomach for being on the receiving end of similar, or in this case, much worse medicine. He literally did not know how to deal with it. “How dare you threaten me…”
“Nobody’s threatening you!” Shcherbytsky raged. “The bombers are probably already in the air, you stupid little shit!”
“The bombers?” Ceaușescu queried, icy fingers exploring his spine with very sharp finger nails. He had heard gunfire in the streets about an hour ago, now he heard it again, much closer. Small arms fire interrupted sporadically with what sounded like an anti-aircraft cannon blazing off short bursts. His advisors had discounted the reports of Krasnaya Zarya armoured columns heading for the capital from the east and south, it was too incredible.
The neatly typed Securitate transcripts of the interrogation of Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, the so-called Commissar of the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti — the KGB — of the Provisional Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics lay partially read on his desk.
He dropped the handset of the phone back onto its rests, cutting off Shcherbytsky’s ranting.
According to Andropov, Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin was co-leader of the Central Committee of the surviving Soviet Communist Party. He and his fellow comrade in the new ‘collective leadership’ — Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev — of the post-war Soviet empire ruled over a part devastated, widely dispersed nation of perhaps as many as forty million people. From the Caucasus in the south to the Arctic in the north, and east of the Ural Mountains all the way to distant Manchuria whole cities and regions remained untouched, in some remote areas there were probably still Soviet citizens who did not yet know that there had been a war. European Russia was gone, a radioactive wasteland mostly. But in the East the Mother Country lived on, damaged but whole; and reconstruction had already begun. There was no Troika, and Krasnaya Zarya had always been the outlier, the pre-prepared shockwave cutting edge of the Soviet Union’s defences in the event of a catastrophe as annihilating as the Cuban Missiles War.
Kosygin had come to Bucharest to promise increased military and economic aide in the event the West did not retaliate. In the event of American or British retaliation the mission to Bucharest was academic because they would all be dead. If the West failed to retaliate — showing their moral weakness — the Provisional Government of the USSR had made an irrevocable decision to support the Party leadership in Bucharest and to grant Romania a seat on the newly re-constituted Politburo based in Chelyabinsk. Of course, this pre-supposed that those in the Romanian Communist Party who had collaborated with the criminals responsible for launching the unauthorised first strike against the British and others in the Mediterranean, would be purged.
Nicolae Ceaușescu picked up his phone again.
His Securitate switchboard operator asked him which number he required.
He waited until he heard his wife’s vexed voice.
“Shut up and listen, Elena,” he barked. “Take the children to the grey house. We have to get out of the city.”
“The grey house?” His wife checked. “Are things that bad?”
“Yes. I will come as soon as possible.”
He hung up.
He hit the red button on the top of the handset.
“I need my personal security detail.”
Another man would have attempted to rationalise how he had blundered into the worst mistake of his life. Not Nicolae Ceaușescu. He had been beguiled by the experts, betrayed by his friends, sold down the river by that scumbag Shcherbytsky. Krasnaya Zarya traitors and counter-revolutionaries had subverted the legitimate Government of the People’s Republic of Romania. He had been a good communist and an honest patriot; he was blameless for the unmitigated disaster that was about to befall his country. One day he would have his revenge on the traitors who had sold out the Party.
It crossed his mind that perhaps he ought to order the elimination of the Soviet prisoners. He hated loose ends, hostages to fortune. No, somebody was bound to ask for written confirmation of an order like that, there would have to be some kind of time consuming process. Andropov, Kosygin, Chuikov and the others were not anonymous nonentities. There would be questions and inevitably delays, and the one thing he was critically short of was time.
There were booted feet in the corridor.
Nicolae Ceaușescu sighed and got to his feet.
Chapter 14
“Everybody is present and correct, Prime Minister,” Sir Henry Tomlinson, the grey-haired éminence grise of the Home Civil Service, the Secretary to the Cabinet of the Government of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland as constituted by the provisions of the War Emergency Act.
Margaret Thatcher looked up from her desk in the small ante-room to the Tudor Hall of Corpus Christi College, the room assigned to host the first Cabinet meeting of her Unity Administration in Oxford.
Sir Henry Tomlinson was pleased to see that a little of the lustre had returned to the Angry Widow’s cheeks. Whether she was happy, exhausted or worried sick his Prime Minister was never less than immaculately, marvellously turned out, not one hair out of place, and to a casual observer she was always overflowing with keen intelligence, vivacious energy and enthusiasm. However, he knew her well enough — since her accession to the Premiership they had lived through harrowing and tempestuous times fraught with unimaginable dangers in which a week had seemed like months, and a month, years and aged accordingly — to know that sometimes even she was prone to the predations of human weariness and melancholy. However, this morning was not one of those times; because she had enjoyed and only recently concluded — ‘enjoyed’ was exactly the right descriptor — an uninterrupted twenty-five minute conversation with the ‘Fighting Admiral’ upon whose capable shoulders so many of their hopes rested.
“How is Mr Powell today, Henry?”
“He seems in good form,” the Cabinet Secretary reported. Unlike his Prime Minister he was not convinced that the practice of keeping one’s friends close and one’s enemies even closer was necessarily wise in all cases. The Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West, Enoch John Powell, was completely unlike any of her other high-profile detractors — presently relatively few in number — because he was never going to forgive her for being what she was; the charismatic leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party that he imagined himself to be. The man was a near genius polymath, a singular classical scholar, poet and immensely gifted linguist in his own right, a University Don at a ridiculously young age, whose ambition in his student days had been to be Viceroy of India; but it did not matter how much he talked about or claimed to be able to relate to or to connect with the man on the street, because he never would. Margaret Thatcher did not have Powell’s towering analytical intellect, or his magical public speaking aura but her outrage and her hopes were perfectly aligned with those of her millions of supporters in the country. When Margaret Thatcher spoke from the heart she was talking for her people, the British people, not for some clique of little Englanders who yearned for a return to Empire and the so-called ‘good old days’.