The Fighting Admiral’s son had style.
It was around noon when the destroyer surged through the wide gap between the lighthouses marking the ends of the northern and southern breakwaters of the Grand Harbour and, with a bone in her teeth, sprinted out to sea.
Doctor Margo Seiffert found Marija and Rosa sitting on the grass staring out to sea at the retreating destroyer. Stiffly, she joined them in the sunshine in the garden. She felt a little guilty that she still had not got around to properly thanking Marija for smoothing over things with the senior people at the hospital.
“I made sure I stayed well away from Surgeon Captain Hughes’s office,” she assured her protégé quickly. In fact she had walked most of the way around the Royal Naval Hospital Bighi to make absolutely certain she did not encounter anybody she was likely to upset. “They’ve developed your x-ray, Rosa,” she announced.
Both the younger women waited expectantly.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get you some cotton wool to put in your ears.”
Rosa did not immediately understand what this had to do with the x-ray of her lower left leg, and frowned.
Marija touched her arm.
“The electric saws are very loud,” she said sympathetically, speaking from long experience.
“You shouldn’t walk home,” Margo went on. “Hopefully, we can find you a wheelchair. You won’t want to put much weight on the leg for a week or two but it should be as right as rain this time next month.”
The older woman gazed out to sea.
She loved coming back to Bighi where she had worked for so many years with Surgeon Captain Reginald Stephens. Marija gave her too much credit; Reggie had been the one whose infinitely patient, methodical, god-gifted surgeon’s hands had eventually put her back together. After Reggie had died Margo had not returned to Bighi for over three years; she could not face it, instead she had buried herself in her all-consuming project in Mdina. The Women’s Hospital had actually been Reggie’s idea and it could never have got off the ground back in the late 1940s without his support. He had pulled strings, called in favours, wined and dined the people that mattered, quietly championed the cause of the ‘auxiliary nurses of Malta’. She hoped that the man who had been, belatedly, the love of her life approved of what she was doing now. Often, Margo was afraid she was spreading herself too thinly, wearing herself out but what else could she do? There was so much to be done and so little time. Today she had been at her desk in Mdina at dawn, worked for two hours, jumped in a car to come to Bighi, stopping off on the way to meet Dom Mintoff, the Leader of the Maltese Labour Party; ostensibly to stop his people intimidating the families of the men and women she was attempting to recruit into the Medical Directorate of the Malta Defence Force. The man was polite, charming in the insincere way of all born politicians. Mintoff had made the right noises and this morning, and for a change he had not surrounded himself with his obligatory coterie of heavies, so perhaps, that was progress. After that meeting she had walked straight into the orthopaedic clinic at Bighi. Women and children before lunch; men in the afternoon. This evening she had a meeting scheduled with the Commander-in-Chief’s ‘logistics staff’ about equipment and facilities for the MDF Medical Directorate, then she was hoping to catch up on whatever had happened, or gone wrong in her day long absence from the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women.
It did not help her cause that delegation had never been her strong suit. Delegation always felt like abdication…
Margo blinked.
In the distance the ululating banshee howl of air raid alarms was shrieking across the waters of the Grand Harbour and creeping ever closer, each siren picking up and re-broadcasting the dreadful clamouring of its nearest neighbour as the dreadful sound surged around and between the great ships moored below the women like grey castles of steel floating on a sparkling azure carpet in Kalkara Bay.
Marija was already helping Rosa to her feet.
Chapter 36
Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov was nothing if not an extraordinarily pragmatic man. He had spent his entire adult life fighting one or another war; he had survived purges and bullets alike, always treating his survival with the phlegmatic insouciance of a man to whom physical danger meant little. His recent experience in the dungeons of the Romanian Securitate had been no more than a curious adjunct to a life of violence. He was not a personally violent, or a vindictive man. To the contrary, he was a professional soldier who understood that taking things personally was almost invariably a bad mistake. Taking things personally blurred one’s judgement and besides, revenge was a dish best served cold.
Southern Front General Order S/07/114/X ordering the rounding up and ‘disposal’ of all Romanian citizens and former members of the Romanian Armed Forces in the Istanbul Military District arose not from the anger — which Chuikov still harboured at his treatment in Bucharest, or on account of the indignities meted out to his comrades, First Deputy Prime Minister Kosygin and to Second Secretary of the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti Andropov — but because when one found a nest of vipers in the grounds of one’s country dacha, a wise man stamped it out without stopping to ask each individual snake if they meant to bite one. The ongoing arrests and summary executions constituted no more than a sensible exercise in military good housekeeping.
“The action was necessary, Comrade Marshal,” the man with the wrinkling, sly peasant’s face agreed, “but those Krasnaya Zarya fanatics systematically wiped out the KGB in this part of the World before they remembered they were supposed to be launching Phase One of Operation Chastise. I am having to employ military police units and several battalions of regular troops. A lot of the people we’re after were in bed with Krasnaya Zarya and this city is rotten with deserters and traitors.”
Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov was not unsympathetic to his subordinate’s problems. Command of the Soviet ground and air forces in the West was a poisoned chalice and only a good man — a man loyal to the very core of his being to the Party and the Revolution — would have accepted it in the first place.
Back in late October 1962 Turkey had ceased to be a country by the time the bombs had stopped going off. The Anatolian heartland of Asia Minor had fallen into tribal chaos in the days after the war and subsequently, the apparatus of the old Turkish state had survived only in Istanbul, where elements of the army and navy had briefly coalesced around the rump of the former regime. Elsewhere, ethnic and religious violence had swiftly destroyed the connective tissue of the nation. Krasnaya Zarya had eventually seized Istanbul as if it was a ripe, low hanging fruit and brought a brutal and merciless rule of law to its streets. Senior Turkish military men had gladly allowed themselves to be incorporated into the conqueror’s ranks; how else would they have survived? The remnants of Turkish army units had been incorporated into the Krasnaya Zarya horde, and officers from the Soviet Black Sea Fleet put in command of many of the obsolete and near obsolete ships and submarines — Western hand me downs — that had once been the guardians of the Hellespont.
Fifty-nine year old Colonel-General Petr Kirillovich Koshevoi had commanded a corps at Stalingrad. His troops had been among the liberators of Sevastopol, and later captured Konigsberg in that war. At the time of the Cuban Missiles War he had been the Commander of the Kiev Military District, buried in his command bunker outside the city for nearly a week after the attack. For Koshevoi no sacrifice was too high to avenge the suffering of the Mother Country.