In the dark days that followed as the Americans had brazenly attempted to justify their aggression his heart had hardened and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had discovered, to his own astonishment, an inner moral streak he had done his best to discard back in the bad old days of Stalin. One simply did not abandon one’s friends. Whatever their faults the Soviets had liberated his country from the Nazi yoke, and given it back a limited independence of a sort that it had never previously had in all its long history. Besides, how long would his own people tolerate the Party if he severed his links to the recent Marxist-Leninist past? And in that event how long would he and his regime last? The idea of a rushed show trial and its inevitable denouement; with he, his family and his closest associates lined up against a wall for the convenience of a hurriedly assembled firing squad, had little appeal to him. So on that day after the war and in the days and weeks that followed, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had offered the hand of friendship and succour to the arrogant, imbecilic, neo-Tsarist retards who had — without consulting him — ignored his advice, his diplomatic pleading, and now started a second, and even more unnecessary, war with the British and for all he knew, the Americans.
“You expected to be arrested?” Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej asked, nonplussed.
Had there been a security leak?
It was all he could do not to turn to look at his deputy.
“Yes,” Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov said irritably. “If I was in your place that is what I would do, Comrade.”
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej knew the time for talking was over, that he needed to act. Now! And yet he hesitated. Was there another way? He had expected the Troika to obfuscate, to seek to placate him, to want to assure him that what had happened was some kind of aberration. Instead, the three men were looking at him as if he was something they had just scraped off the soles of their shoes.
“What purpose would that serve?” He asked.
If the Russians knew what awaited them, then the carefully laid plans to buy off the British and the Americans with the heads of the men who had allowed their Krasnaya Zarya surrogates to launch an unprovoked nuclear strike seventy-two hours ago, had already have failed.
Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov chuckled so lowly and deeply that it seemed unreasonable that the walls did not vibrate in sympathy.
The Dictator of Romania looked at him with widening eyes.
Now he understood.
Decency, honour, patriotism were things that he had honestly believed belonged to another era, another century. He had not suspected his erstwhile allies — let alone these three men — capable of such things. Perhaps, he had been wrong?
What else have I been wrong about?
“Even,” he said eventually, suspecting that all was lost, “if I presented your heads on a silver platter to that witch Thatcher and that playboy Kennedy do you really think it would make any difference?”
Again, he looked to the telephone.
Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin shrugged as he considered the proposition. He genuinely did not know if their heads would — as a sacrificial offering — be sufficient prevent a new and final, utterly devastating rain of thermonuclear fire from burning down the rest of Mother Russia.
“I don’t know,” he confessed.
Chapter 2
The Marine Corps band played ‘Hail to the Chief’ as the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America clambered stiffly out of the armoured limousine onto the chilly Philadelphia quayside. John Fitzgerald Kennedy took a moment to get his bearings. While he was doing this he waved to the jostling crowd of photographers and journalists crushed three or four deep to his left. He waved and he smiled that god-given, marvellously insouciant confident smile that had, against all the odds, allowed him to reconnect again with the American people in the frantic weeks since the Battle of Washington. Then he turned to face the reception party — several of his most trusted military commanders and a small clutch of loyal, or as LBJ called them, ‘tame’ Senators and Congressmen — awaiting him beneath the towering superstructure of the nearest of the two sleeping leviathans.
The idea of holding the ‘council of war’ onboard one of the two Second World War battlewagons mothballed at the Philadelphia Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility, had originated from the office of the new Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral David Lamar McDonald. Like many of the ‘suggestions’ that emanated from the new CNO’s office, this one was a real humdinger.
Jack Kennedy straightened, waved again and flashed a new smile at the exploding camera flashes, allowing his Vice-President time to emerge from the other side of the Presidential car and stride up to his shoulder before he stepped closer to the baying Press pack. People used to tell him that having LBJ around only ‘made sense’ because the Texan ‘made him look good’; the naturally handsome younger man with the charismatic touch and the beguiling voice, with the older, rock-solid figure covering his back. The President’s younger brother, Bobby — who had detested and mistrusted Lyndon Baines Johnson until the unifying events of recent weeks had finally sorted the men from the boys in the Administration — had been openly talking about dropping LBJ from the Presidential ticket before the Battle of Washington.
Bobby was the angrier, more impulsive of the two Kennedy brothers.
Sometimes, Jack Kennedy asked himself if Bobby’s righteous idealism and his willingness to pick fights that he knew in his heart he could not win, would have survived a period of active serve. He had loved his own time in the Navy — not the pain of his injuries, obviously, just everything else about those days in 1943 and 1944 in the Pacific — but the experience had tempered him in ways he doubted his brother, seven years his junior, comprehended.
LBJ touched the President’s shoulder; the old stager was a consummate political professional. For the younger man to be able to strut his stuff with his customary panache he needed to know exactly where his Vice-President was without having to constantly turn and check. Unknowingly, the two men — separated by only eight-and-a-half years in age but before the Battle of Washington by seemingly unbridgeable differences in temperament, political outlook and upbringing — had become, overnight, the nation’s darlings, America’s favourite double act. The country’s changing mood even threatened to permeate the Byzantine internecine machinations of the House of Representatives, recently transferred to Philadelphia from battle-scarred Washington DC. Jack Kennedy had called the House of Representatives’ bluff and every day new ‘loyalists’ returned to the fold, seeking terms, hoping to limit and mitigate the ‘collateral damage’ that their previous ‘honest misjudgements’ had done to their future political careers. There was a long way to go before Congress was going to be ‘onside’ but in the last few days the spectre of a renewed nuclear war in Europe had concentrated the minds of the waverers marvellously.