The grand plan was called Operation Nakazyvat. Operation Chastise. The scale and the breadth, vision and ambition of the strategic masterstroke described by Yuri Andropov as the fists and booted feet pummelled his twitching body, and he jerked spastically from the repeated electric shocks administered via electrodes attached to his genitals and his ears, had taken away Nicolae Ceaușescu’s breath.
The necessity to crush Krasnaya Zarya had caused Phase Two of Operation Nakazyvat to be delayed. The Securitates had tried to find out how long the great strike was likely to be delayed. Unfortunately, Andropov did not know; he was a KGB apparatchik, not a solder and everything was strictly need to know. He guessed that Phase Two would be put back at least a month. Perhaps, five to six weeks. A lot of fuel and carefully horded munitions had been wasted by the Navy, and the elite paratrooper and tank brigades redeployed to put down the Krasnaya Zarya ‘counter revolutionaries’. A lot of men, ships and aircraft were now in the wrong place.
According to Andropov a man with an odd sounding, possibly Armenian, name would have to ‘sort out the mess’ before he gave the go ahead to start Phase Two.
Colonel-General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian.
Yes, definitely an Armenian…
Andropov said he was the best man for the job. Apparently, back in 1956 he had been the man who led the 8th Mechanized Army into the streets of Budapest to ‘extinguish’ the Hungarian uprising.
It seemed that Colonel-General Babadzhanian commanded two Soviet Armies; 3rd Caucasus Tank Army, and the 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army, respectively assembling around the bombed cities of Volgograd — formerly Stalingrad — and Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. Both Armies had been stripped of their elite infantry shock regiments, these had been sent to ensure that Krasnaya Zarya’s assaults halted on the pre-planned stop lines in the Trans-Caucasus region, that those lines were held securely, and that the ‘war in the west did not escalate out of control’.
Andropov was very insistent that Phase Two would be jeopardised if the ‘war in the west sucked away too many troops’ from the ‘southern push’. The Soviet Union had tens of thousands of soldiers; but not an unlimited supply of trained battle ready ‘replacements’. Conscripts were fine for manning trenches or distracting enemy fire from the ‘real professionals’. But for the tactics of ‘lightning mechanized warfare’ green conscripts were useless.
Blitzkrieg! He had been talking about Blitzkrieg!
‘What do you mean? The southern push?’
In between spitting out teeth and pissing and shitting himself, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, Director of the KGB in the Sverdlovsk Oblast, had told his interrogators everything.
‘The push south to the Indian Ocean!’
While Soviet forces renewed the offensive in the east — on land in Greece and Yugoslavia, and at sea in the Mediterranean to ‘pin’ British and American forces down — two tank armies would strike south from the Caucasus, smashing down through northern Persia following the courses of the Tigris and the Euphrates through Iraq to the warm waters of the Arabian Gulf at Basra…
Somebody raised Nicolae Ceaușescu’s fever-ravaged head and tipped cool water into his mouth.
Most of the moisture slurped and dribbled down his chin.
He collapsed back onto the lice-ridden straw mattress on which he had lain, helplessly soiling himself the last two days as the fever had wracked his shivering body. Now when men came into the room they leaned over him, and talked among themselves as if he was invisible.
“We have to do something about his leg…”
“What do you suggest?”
“It’s turning black and it stinks bad!”
“I’m not going to cut the fucking thing off!”
“He’ll die if we don’t.”
“What do we cut it off with? A couple of the guys have got hunting knives?”
A third voice: “We haven’t got any anaesthetic.”
“Tip some of that rot-gut ouzo down his throat.”
“What if it makes him go blind?”
“If he goes blind at least he won’t notice we cut off his fucking leg!”
The voices were far away and Nicolae Ceaușescu did not know who they were talking about. His body convulsed, his thoughts twisted. What was nightmare? What was reality?
Krasnaya Zarya…
If only he could tell people in the West what he knew about Krasnaya Zarya…
If only…
“Did the bastard just say something?” A gruff voice growled.
“Something about that fucking Russian, I think.”
There was a harsh, barking laugh. “Andropov?”
“That’s the one. He cried like a baby before we even got started!”
“If we’re going to do something about his leg we have to do it now,” another man decided angrily. “We’ll need more people to hold the bastard down.”
Sometime later a blinding light stabbed into Ceaușescu’s eyes, his head was raised, his jaw held open. Instantly he was choking on a metallic, stinging, burning liquid filling his mouth.
They were trying to murder him!
They were pouring battery acid down his throat…
Blackness, nothingness.
His head was ringing and he was gagging, literally on something tightly tied between his teeth.
The pain was distant, but soon near.
Like a red hot branding iron searing his bare flesh.
And somebody nearby was screaming.
It was a dreadful, keening animal cry of agony,
It was several seconds before he realised the animalistic shriek was his and soon afterwards, mercifully, he lost consciousness.
Chapter 21
“I hoped I would find you here,” Arkady Pavlovich Rykov called while he was several steps away from the woman. He had not meant to surprise her but she still started in alarm. Clara Pullman had been staring into the distance, her eyes focused on the faraway great red dome of the Church of the Assumption of our Lady, St Mary. She had mentioned to Marija Calleja that she would like to learn more about Malta — practically everything on the island seemed too enchanting to be true — and her young friend had taken her Mosta yesterday. It had been a lovely afternoon; she had escaped her own preoccupations and Marija had briefly escaped the escalating preparations for her forthcoming wedding. Clara knew very little about the Maltese way of getting married, having assumed it was simply very, well, Catholic. Poor Marija’s nuptials seemed to be turning into a state wedding with a cast of hundreds, perhaps, thousands. The Times of Malta had run a front page feature about her with a quarter page picture — of Marija looking positively seraphic — with a blow by blow account of the factors determining the whys and wherefores of every aspect of the actual wedding ceremony. Marija had wanted something private in a chapel near to where she lived in Sliema, ideally in the small church in which she had worshipped her whole adult life but that was impossible because so many people wanted to attend, and the politics involved in marrying the son of the Commander-in-Chief were positively Byzantine.