The tiny fishing boat rocked violently in the wake of a big ship. Water splashed over the side, washed across the deck. Ceaușescu could hear the sound of a big ship’s engines, the swish of her stem cleaving the clear waters of the Aegean. The taint of smoke came to his nostrils.
Coal smoke…
“Start the engine!”
The boat vibrated and shook, the propeller thrashed under the stern.
Ceaușescu saw the approaching wall of iron and steel shouldering towards the tiny fishing boat in the faint moonlight. The ship was not so much slicing through the sea, as muscling it aside, a great ungainly raft of metal thrusting forward gushing sparks and cinders from her stacks.
“What the fuck is it?” Somebody asked, not quite believing what he was seeing.
And then the coal-fired leviathan built for a war that had ended forty-five years ago was upon them.
Chapter 26
Colonel-General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian, the Armenian born fifty-eight year old commander of the newly formed 1st Trans-Caucasian Front had flown over fifteen hundred kilometres to personally communicate his unhappiness to Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov.
The office of the Commander of the Soviet Armed Forces was a bare walled, austere place. The room was large and the great man’s desk was huge but other than a couple of gun metal filing cabinets and a few dusty books piled on the sill of the wide southern-facing windows, the lair of one of the three most powerful men in the post-war Soviet Union was positively nondescript.
“It is my understanding that subsequent to the,” Babadzhanian was a dapper, handsome man whom at a distance would have been mistaken for a man twenty, not six years, his superior’s junior, “er, mission to Bucharest, certain senior Romanian Politburo members remain unaccounted for, Comrade Marshal?”
Vasily Chuikov had not attempted to bully Babadzhanian. It would have been a waste of time. The man was a highly competent, driven professional whose loyalty to the Party was unquestioned and like Chuikov, Babadzhanian was a highly decorated hero of the Great Patriotic War.
Chuikov nodded. He wanted to keep this interview informal but Hamazasp Khachaturi obviously needed to clear the air so he had refrained from ordering him to sit down. Chuikov lit another cigarette.
“That bastard Ceaușescu got away,” he confirmed. “We got his wife and kids.” KGB snatch squads had seized the wives and children of other high ranking Romanian Politburo and senior military commanders in the hours before the city was wiped off the face of the planet. Good riddance! “If the bastard turns up he’ll think twice before betraying us.”
“That’s not the point, Comrade Vasily Ivanovich,” Babadzhanian retorted. “We know that the sensitive information the Securitate obtained from Comrade Politburo Member Andropov has the potential to undermine Operation Nakazyvat. It is therefore imperative that there should be no further delays in commencing Phase Two actions!”
Chuikov sighed like a bear with an ulcer.
He understood why Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin had vetoed his desire to take field command of the forthcoming operation — the ‘collective leadership’ needed him to guard their backs lest the ‘young Turks’ who had stayed loyal when Krasnaya Zarya had seemed to be the shape of things to come grew unduly restive — but it still rankled deeply. Notwithstanding that the he had fought enough battles and won enough glory for ten men in his long, bloody and extraordinarily distinguished career in the Red Army, Chuikov yearned for a glorious final curtain call. However, at the end of the day he had accepted that the best place for a man of his status and experience — and with his bad lungs and hardening cardiac arteries — was probably holding the hands of the men ultimately responsible for the fate of the Mother Country. Once he had come to terms with this there had only been one man he trusted to execute the crucial eastern element of Operation Nakazyvat.
Operation Chastise!
If Chuikov ever discovered the name of the staff officer who had thought up that name he would promote him two ranks! Other than wiping out two-thirds of their cities he could think of no better way to ‘chastise’ the Americans and their lap dog allies, the British, than by cutting their World in half and denying them the Arabian oil upon which their wealth and prosperity ultimately depended.
Phase Two: the race to the Indian Ocean.
Perhaps, the ‘collective leadership’ would let Chuikov take over the reins for Phase Three; the actual conquest of Arabia? At his age he had earned his place in the sun. He doubted Brezhnev and Kosygin would take pity on him but life was nothing if not full of surprises.
Babadzhanian stood stiffly in front of Chuikov’s desk.
“We lack strategic depth,” he reminded the man who was presently, Commander of all Soviet Land, Air and Sea Forces, Minister of Defence, First Deputy Secretary of the Soviet Union, and the third most senior surviving member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Chuikov did not care for his plethora of grand titles because he still liked to think of himself as a simple soldier’s soldier. “We cannot allow ourselves to be embroiled in static battles,” Colonel-General Babadzhanian insisted. “We must strike before the West can mobilize.”
“The KGB assures me that the West is preoccupied with its problems in the Eastern Mediterranean,” Vasily Chuikov countered. “Maskirovska, Comrade Colonel-General! Maskirovska!”
“Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti,” Babadzhanian snorted. “I don’t remember those bastards warning us Krasnaya Zarya was about to seize the Samara Military District and start shooting our last fucking ICBMs at the British!”
Chuikov did not disagree. The KGB had assured the Politburo that it was so safe to send a high-level diplomatic mission to parley with the Romanian leadership that it had sent its own Second Secretary, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov along for the ride! If Andropov ever got out of hospital he would have the analysts responsible for that appraisal publicly eviscerated. Chuikov let Babadzhanian continue uninterrupted.
“There are worrying signs that the Americans and the British are stepping up their aerial reconnaissance activities. They seem to be targeting increasingly sensitive areas.”
“The Americans haven’t sent any more U-2s,” the older man grunted. “Maybe we’ve shot them all down?”
Colonel-General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian frowned.
Chuikov chuckled and held up his hands.
“Things are what they are, Comrade,” he said, his ugly, evilly cherubic features creased, “you can’t have your precious paratroopers back quite yet. And that’s that! They are still tidying up the mess in Romania.”
Both men knew that was a laughable understatement.
The forces sent to put down Krasnaya Zarya had ended up having to block a major Yugoslav Army mechanized thrust towards the Romanian border. With Krasnaya Zarya gutted as a fighting force other, previously loyal and reliable units had crumbled and in places a rout had only been averted by an airlift of elite shock troops earmarked for Babadzhanian’s ‘Southern Push’ into the line. The Romanian ‘fuck up’ — there was no other appropriate description for what had happened in Bucharest — had already delayed the launch of Phase Two of Operation Nakazyvat by three weeks. Eight tank brigades ought to have been racing south by now. If he ever got his hands on that little shit Ceaușescu he would rip off his fucking head! The interrogation of captured senior figures in the Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej regime, including high ranking Securitates, conclusively proved the Romanians had been planning to play a double game all along. They had seen Krasnaya Zarya as a direct threat to the survival of the Romanian State, breathed a collective sigh of relief when most of the lunatics and zealots departed to rape and pillage in Greece and the Balkans; and then panicked when the missiles began to fly. By the time Kosygin, Andropov and Chuikov had flown in to Otopeni Air Base large tracts of the country were out of control, civil war was spreading like wildfire and the leadership was looking for a way out.