Not least that of its leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu.
His right leg ended in a suppurating stump several centimetres above where his knee had been. The stump throbbed, ached, and frequent spasms of agony lanced up his butchered thigh and stabbed him like red hot needles in his groin and abdomen. He would have been dead but for chance. Unknown to him, one of his Securitate bodyguards had studied medicine in the 1945 war. The man had never finished his training; the Fascists having interned him during his second year at medical school in Timisoara. The man had apologised to Ceaușescu a few days ago when it was apparent that his patient had recovered sufficiently to understand what he was saying.
‘I had no surgical tools but you would have died, Comrade.’
Ceaușescu’s grip on life remained tenuous. He was a bag of bones, incapable of sitting up without helping hands.
The Greek woman’s name was Eleni.
Eleni reminded him a little of his wife, Elena, but notwithstanding her stern demeanour and obvious impatience with men in general and those around her now in particular, she seemed utterly lacking in the suspicion and meanness of spirit which had characterised his wife’s nature. Eleni had tried from the outset to be of service to him. Mostly, Ceaușescu assumed, because she realised that her fate and that of her three men folk depended on the whim of the dying leader of the bandits into whose hands they had fallen.
Before Eleni began to nurse him Nicolae Ceaușescu had been contemplating asking one of the Securitate to blow his brains out. Death would be a merciful relief. They dribbled gut-rot Ouzo into his mouth when the pain got too much for him; they had no drugs, no antiseptics, not even potable water. Although he did not want to die; anything was preferable to the living Hell to which he had been condemned. And then Eleni had begun to nurse him.
She had him moved from the dark stinking hovel where the group had been hiding, taken outside where, sheltered by a windbreak he could feel the sun on his face and she could wash him. Each morning she cleaned his stump with sea water, each day it hurt terribly but a little less than the day before. There was something about the touch of her hands on his body, contact again with gentle hands that somehow made some his suffering bearable.
Now it was Eleni’s lean, strong arms which supported him while he studied the big grey ships steaming imperiously towards the island. His strength exhausted he lowered the ancient Zeiss binoculars. A Sverdlov class cruiser, half-a-dozen smaller vessels and a second big ship sailing slightly apart from the rest of the flotilla farther out to sea trailing a long cloud of black, sooty smoke.
Eleni picked the binoculars out of his hands.
A Securitate took them and studied the approaching fleet in the failing light.
“They look like they are coming here, Boss,” the man decided unhappily.
Eleni started talking.
“What is she saying?” Ceaușescu demanded. His voice was a feeble croak.
There was a pause, and more incoherent babbling.
“She says thinks the Russians cleared the island to use it for practice…”
Before the implications of this could sink in there was a ripple of flame in the distance, livid crimson fireballs travelling quickly across the water brilliantly illuminating dark silhouettes otherwise virtually invisible in the descending gloom.
The shrieking of the four eleven-inch shells fired from the main battery of the Turkish battlecruiser Yavuz arrived moments before the projectiles smashed into the coastline about a mile east of Samothraki.
Closer inshore the side the Russian cruiser briefly disappeared behind a wall of flame and billowing smoke as all twelve of her six-inch guns belched a broadside.
“They’re practicing landing troops,” the Securitate with the binoculars suggested as the cruiser’s broadside ripped up the side of Mount Fengari two miles from the group’s exposed position.
Nicolae Ceaușescu’s mind was working overtime.
This was the first naval activity they had seen since their arrival on Samothrace. If the Soviets were about to launch Phase Two of Operation Nakazyvat these waters would surely be filled with ships heading south; cruisers, destroyers, troopships and tankers, and the skies ought to be black with aircraft. Phase Two of Operation Nakazyvat — Chastise in English — would begin with a renewed assault in the west, maskirovka, more smoke and mirrors to make the British fall back on Malta ahead of the main blow — the Schwerpunkt, the real ‘centre of gravity’ of the offensive — fell over a thousand miles to the east seventy-two hours later upon the unsuspecting, weak forces protecting Persia’s northern border with the Soviet Socialist Republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, and naval assault groups steamed down the Caspian Sea to seize a bridgehead half-way to the Persian capital, Tehran.
“We cannot stay here,” Ceaușescu decided.
Eleni must have understood what he said from the tone of his words. She spoke with voluble alarm.
“She says that the boat is still leaking and that there are too many of us, Comrade,” the Securitate translated after a short delay.
“How many can the boat hold without sinking?”
There was a further, squabbling interchange.
“Eight or nine adults. Anymore and there won’t be room to man the hand pumps and the boat might sink in a storm.”
Ceaușescu did the arithmetic.
There was no room on board the fishing boat for the crew of the helicopter.
“We’ll leave as soon as it is fully dark. We’ll leave the Air Force people behind on the island. See to it.”
An hour later with the sound of the brief burst of AK-47 fire ringing in his ears Ceaușescu was gently lowered onto the one uncluttered area of deck — between the small wheel house and the hatch to the hold — and the old, creaking, leaking fishing boat drifted into deeper water. Onboard were the two Greek men, the boy, Eleni, Ceaușescu and his four surviving Securitates.
The big ships off shore had ceased firing once it was fully dark.
The fishing boat’s mast was raised, it was too risky to start the ancient engine and besides, the fuel tank was nine-tenths empty. The canvass slapped the mast loudly before it caught the wind, the boat heeled and began to slowly edge to the east, away from the lethal grey warships hiding somewhere close by in the night.
Exhausted, Nicolae Ceaușescu fell into a nightmare tormented stupor.
His wife, Elena, was looking at him with accusative eyes. His children, Valentin aged sixteen, Zola whose fifteenth birthday had been yesterday, and twelve year old Nicu were viewing him as if he was a caged zoo animal.
“Why did you betray us, Papa?”
“I did not…”
The faces of his children faded.
He was standing next to his wife Elena in an overgrown yard and his hands were tied behind his back.
“This is your fault!” Elena was mouthing, her face a mask of contempt.
He squeezed his eyes shut as the machine gun opened fire. The noise was deafening; it seemed to go on forever. Why was there no pain?
He opened his eyes.
His wife lay at his feet, her body a broken, bloody mess.
Her eyes were alive, pits of hatred burning into his soul.
Ceaușescu could not catch his breath, his chest was constricting…
“Keep him quiet!” One of the Securitates hissed.
The Greek woman, Eleni, had her hand over Ceaușescu’s mouth. She risked lifting it for a second and when the man remained silent, she relaxed, patted his chest and then his cheek. She leaned over him, breathed in his ear muttering words of comfort which he did not understand. The woman smelled of sweat and fish but her breasts were soft and warm as she cradled his head.