“Remind colleagues of the provisional timescale for that operation please, Sir David,” Margaret Thatcher murmured.
“Mid to late March at the earliest, Prime Minister. Assuming that is, the landing force can be assembled in Malta by that date. Realistically, the first assault wave might be going ashore on Cyprus before the end of the first week of April.”
Enoch Powell cleared his throat and spoke for the first time since the opening pleasantries before Cabinet commenced.
“What if the Krasnaya Zarya horde resumes the offensive, First Sea Lord?”
Sir David Luce looked to Margaret Thatcher.
“You may speak plainly with Mr Powell. Everybody in this room is a patriot regardless of their political affiliations or ideological differences.”
The First Sea Lord turned in his chair and met the Member for Wolverhampton South West’s one-eyed, unblinking stare.
“There is a view that the first use of strategic nuclear weapons — including the strikes on Aviano, those aimed at Malta, and possibly at least one of the strikes on Belgrade were by ICBMs launched from within the former Soviet Union — is an indication that Red Dawn may have over-stretched itself. If, as seems likely, Red Dawn now dominates, or at the very least, partially dominates or occupies a large tract of territory in an arc from Yugoslavia and Romania in the west, down through Greece around through Turkey and Asia Minor all the way to the Trans-Caucasus anchored on say, the Armenian or Georgian republics of the former Soviet Union, it is probable that they have outrun any conceivable logistics train, and perhaps, will struggle to hold the ground they have seized even in the face of guerrilla-style resistance. Much of the ground they have taken is pretty unforgiving. The withdrawal of their naval forces from the Eastern Mediterranean may have more to do with an urgent need to secure seaborne supply routes in the Aegean, the Sea of Marmara and the southern Black Sea, than supporting future offensive operations. Moreover, at this time Red Dawn seems to have completely abandoned their forces on Cyprus.”
“That is an interesting analysis,” Enoch Powell declared, his voice nasal and piercing despite his rattling lungs. “But, if I may be so bold, stunningly complacent.”
“Mr Powell,” Margaret Thatcher retorted, knowing that the First Sea Lord was too much the consummate, charming professional to slap down the gaunt, tortured man who had just insulted him. “I find your remark unfair. Sir David is briefing this Cabinet on what is actually happening rather than indulging in open-ended speculation. That is not a luxury we can afford in our current situation. Pray share with us all your reason for your last remark.”
“I am not a member of this Government, Prime Minister.”
The Angry Widow raised an eyebrow and said, without a scintilla of irony or mischief: “Mr Powell, people tell me that you have the finest mind in Parliament. I would be failing in my duty if I did not employ it in this crisis. If you have something to say on this subject, please say it now or thereafter hold your piece!”
“Krasnaya Zarya,” her bête noire said after a gap of several seconds pregnant with prickly disdain, “Red Dawn is a chimera. As the Russians say, dym i zerkala, ‘smoke and mirrors’. Maskirovka is the Russian way of life, politics and war. Maskirovka or ‘something masked’. One suspects that there are others like myself in this room who are not so easily seduced by this Red Dawn nonsense as our American friends. Krasnaya Zarya is a terroristic, anarchistic, nihilistic KGB apparat. An apparat ten times more intolerable to the surviving Soviet high command than it could ever be, in the long term, to us in the West. What better way to rid oneself of a rabble of troublesome, ungovernable malcontents and ultra-fanatical zealots than to give Red Dawn its head, let it run amok,” Enoch Powell did not quite smile, his ruined face would not permit it, but it was with a gleam of malicious satisfaction that bordered on smugness that he delivered his punch line, “and let it burn itself out like a moth drawn to a flame even as it wins for one an impregnable new fifteen hundred mile long Marxist-Leninist bridgehead, from Yugoslavia to the Levant on the northern shores of the Eastern Mediterranean.”
Chapter 17
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev stamped his feet on the icy ground from which twenty centimetres of overnight snow had been cleared by the penal battalions marched in from nearby camps. The gulag-fodder had had to clear the snow as it fell before it could freeze; otherwise the main runway would have been unusable. Last night there had been nearly thirty degrees of frost, this morning it was a more tolerable minus fifteen degrees.
The First Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR watched the Tupolev Tu-114 airliner as it rolled to a halt some fifty metres away. Only a handful of these magnificent machines had been completed before the Cuban Missiles War. Developed from the Tu-95 bomber, the Tu-114, with a range of over ten thousand kilometres was the fastest propeller-driven aircraft in the World. Hundreds might have been built to fill the skies had not Aviation Plant № 18 at Kuybyshev — where the aircraft was built — not been destroyed in the war. The deafening roar of the Tu-114’s four giant Kuznetzov NK-12 turbo-prop engines began to subside, the huge, contra-rotating propellers slowed.
Leonid Brezhnev waited with a grim outward equanimity that almost but not quite masked the volcanic fury that burned just beneath his apparently impenetrable emotionless carapace. He should never have trusted the fucking Romanians! The KGB had put a bullet in the traitor Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s head in his hospital bed and seized the bitch wife and children of that little shit Nicolae Ceaușescu before the Red Air Force dropped a three megaton bomb on Bucharest — or rather, air burst it a thousand metres above the centre of the city — and Romania had ceased to exist as a viable nation state.
Two sets of steps were being pushed into place.
Elena Ceaușescu, her three children, the other senior Romanian party apparatchiks and military men the KGB snatch squads had pulled off the streets of Bucharest would be disembarked from the rear of the Tu-114; Comrade Kosygin and the other survivors of the mission would receive an appropriately heroic welcome as soon as the band and the honour guard marched into position at the front of the aircraft.
Leonid Brezhnev chaffed at the delays.
He wanted to take his friend Alexei Kosygin and the valiant old soldier, Marshal Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov aside and find out what had really happened — or rather, gone so disastrously wrong — in Bucharest. What had those fucking idiots Gheorghiu-Dej and his lap dog Ceaușescu been thinking? What did they think was going to happen when they betrayed the Mother Country?
The Tu-114’s forward port door was opened and troopers in the immaculate uniforms of the 3rd Guards Tank Division began manhandling Yuri Andropov’s stretcher down the steep, treacherous steps. The doctors who had flown out to collect the much depleted delegation at Otopeni Air base had not thought Yuri Vladimirovich would survive the flight home. Originally, it had been planned that the mission would return directly to Chelyabinsk but the plan had been changed because the medical facilities in Sverdlovsk were without equal in the post-war USSR.