Fortunately, the Mil Mi6 was a new, robust machine. If it had not been they would all have been dead by now. One stray pot shot from the ground had ricocheted around the cockpit, missing both the pilot and co-pilot before disabling the compass. Another hit, unsuspected until its consequences were self-evident, had resulted in a partial hydraulics failure and a fuel leak. By then it was pitch dark, a storm had enveloped the craft and they were flying on fumes. It was only in the morning when a party was sent to investigate the nearest village that it was discovered that they had crash-landed on the Greek island of Samothrace.
That was five mornings ago. Ceaușescu’s bodyguards had carried him to the nearest settlement, the eerily deserted port of Samothraki. Many of the sun-baked one room houses had been burned, some had been destroyed by explosives, there were bullets pocking the walls. However, other than a few bodies decomposing in the ruins there was little trace of the people who had lived in the shadow of Mount Fengari, rising over five thousand feet into the clear blue Mediterranean skies. From the shore they saw several small boats sunk in the harbour, otherwise the moorings were empty. They had found a little tinned food, dried fruit and fish, some ragged cloth that could be torn into bandages, catgut to sew up his wound, but nothing else of any utility except firewood from the smashed houses. Now the food was gone and every fresh water cistern they had discovered had been fouled with the carcasses of dead animals.
Nicolae Ceaușescu wanted to lash out.
The idiots had brought him to the wrong fucking island!
He had wanted to shoot the pilots. He would have ordered it without a moment’s hesitation — even though a quick clean death was better than the traitors deserved — had not some small voice whispered in his head, counselling caution. There were only nine survivors in his group, few enough to defend him if they encountered hostile forces, or to carry him.
The pain in his leg had grown steadily worse each day. Feverish perspiration bled off his brow and soaked his increasingly filthy clothes. Even his wife, Elena, had betrayed him. If she had listened to him she would have known where to go in an emergency, not wasted time arguing the toss. But no, she always knew best. His lifetime of experience within the Party, most of it within its higher echelons counted for nothing. Only Elena knew the infallible paths to the top. Nothing he achieved was ever quite good enough for Elena…
The plan had been to fly to Thasos where there was known to be a well-equipped and highly organised communist guerrilla group fighting the Military Junta in Athens. They might have provided him with a boat and a crew to head south. He had to get to somewhere with a radio so that he could talk to the British or the Americans, and somewhere far enough away from the hub of Krasnaya Zarya’s operations that his signal would not draw down the vengeance of the horde down about his head.
Krasnaya Zarya!
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had been a fool, duped by his former Soviet masters. Why had he not seen through the lies? Now at last he understood why Gheorghe had been so sentimental about the business of bringing the Troika to Bucharest. Gheorghe had never wanted the Securitate to lay a finger on the members of the Troika. Yes, they had agreed Andropov would have to be disappeared; beyond that, they could afford to be civilised about things. That was what Gheorghe had decided. The members of the Troika were not their enemies, simply men who did not understand the new realities of their own situation. A short, sharp object lesion should suffice while the Romanian Army and the Securitate brought Krasnaya Zarya back under control. The important thing was to be able to go to the West with clean hands; stabbing former allies in the back was a price well worth paying if it saved their necks.
Interrogating Andropov before he was disappeared had been Ceaușescu’s idea. Gheorghe did not need to know about it, not officially. Just minutes before the Troika’s plane had touched down at Otopeni Air Base his old friend and mentor had lost his nerve. If Andropov confessed to being the leader of Krasnaya Zarya they would settle for putting a bullet in his head and dumping the body in a shallow grave out in the forest.
Ceaușescu had put Gheorghe’s sentimentality down to his illness and had decided to treat Andropov like any other enemy of the state. The Securitates had softened him up as they would have softened up any prisoner. Ceaușescu had let them get on with it; they knew their jobs. And then without a question being asked the Russian had started confessing to something which had sounded so bizarre that it could not possibly be true.
The Soviet Union still existed beyond the Urals.
Not as a mere shadow of its former glory but as a diminished yet still intact state capable of and indeed, planning to make a new war against the British and the Americans. What Andropov described as large ‘strategic reserve’ forces had survived the Cuban Missiles War intact. The Russians still had missiles, tanks, jet fighters, ships and tens of thousands of soldiers; all it lacked was the reserves of fuel and ammunition necessary for a ‘long war’.
A long war?
What was that about?
According to Andropov the High Command moved from city to city although the capital of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was in a pre-war bunker complex near Chelyabinsk.
Krasnaya Zarya was just the ‘first wave’.
Krasnaya Zarya was expendable; so expendable that the Red Army planned to crush it before it launched the coming ‘hammer blow’.
Andropov had boasted that ‘the Red Army will roll right over whatever is left of Krasnaya Zarya’.
Andropov had said the British were finished.
The British had been driven out of the Eastern Mediterranean. The Yankees had been humiliated. Where had the Yankees been when their friends in Greece and Turkey needed them most? Elsewhere in the region nobody trusted the Yankees or the British to save them, they were alone. Sooner or later the Egyptians or the Persians would turn on the weakened British, safe in the knowledge that the Americans no longer had the stomach to stand behind their ‘old NATO ally’. One more kick and the fallacy of British Imperial power would ‘tumble down around Queen Elizabeth’s ears’.
Maskirovka!
Andropov had repeated the term time and again.
Maskirovka!
Something masked? Smoke and mirrors; military deception? Keeping one’s enemy guessing, persuading one’s enemy to look in entirely the wrong place? The art of catching one’s enemy unawares when the main blow falls?
Krasnaya Zarya had successfully drawn the attention of the British, the Americans, and of the whole World to Greece, the Aegean and the Anatolian plains of Turkey. However, something had gone wrong and Krasnaya Zarya had run amok; Red Army, Air Force and Naval units had had to abandon their own war missions to put down the enemy within. Krasnaya Zarya had subverted whole formations of the Red Army, seized control of nuclear weapons, and risked drawing down a devastating, annihilating second atomic blitz on the Mother Country. Thus, the grand plan was temporarily stalled, on hold while, from the Caucasus to the Adriatic the full might of the Soviet Armed Forces was deployed to mercilessly crush Krasnaya Zarya.