If he lived long enough he would marry that woman.
Margaret Thatcher’s friends and detractors alike called her the Angry Widow. This she knew, and made no apologies for the veracity of the handle. She was ‘bloody angry’ about what had happened at the end of October 1962 and had never made any secret of the fact.
An hour ago she had reiterated that British commanders in the field had ‘no authority whatsoever to independently deploy Arc Light’. Nonetheless, he had requested exactly that authority. The Angry Widow had not hesitated to slap him down. For all that they might be affianced — unofficially, secretly — and the unavoidable complications of their mutually shared and welcomed feelings one for the other, Margaret Thatcher had no intention of relinquishing her absolute control over Britain’s nuclear arsenal.
It was the one thing she would not trust in his hands.
‘The trigger remains locked in my handbag, Julian,’ she had declared and he had known that there was no profit in arguing the matter further. The Angry Widow had spoken and that was that!
Marija was smiling at him as if she was reading his mind.
The oddest thing was that there was something about the slight, angelic presence of Marija Elizabeth Calleja that intimidated the fighting admiral in ways that Margaret Hilda Thatcher never had, nor ever would.
Julian Christopher glanced to Margo Seiffert, with whom he had not quite contrived to have an affair many, many years ago and always rather regretted it. Margo was the third of the three uniquely extraordinary women he had encountered — in Margo’s case re-encountered after a gap of over a decade — since he had brought the bulk of the British Pacific Fleet back to home waters escorting the Operation Manna convoys. Those convoys had staved off famine and chronic fuel shortages in England; earned him his nation’s approbation and thanks, and placed him firmly within the concentric orbits of Margaret Thatcher, Margo Seiffert and now, Marija Calleja. Honestly and truly he did not know which of the three women; the feisty former US Navy Surgeon-Commander, the charismatic political saviour of his nation, or the seraphically composed Maltese girl who had triumphed over awful childhood injuries to unknowingly become a symbol of her island’s quest for freedom, confused and fascinated him the most.
Like Marija, Margo Seiffert had obviously read a little of his discomfiture in his eyes. However, for the moment Marija had eyes only for the battered, blackened silhouette of the Battle class destroyer HMS Talavera as she bumped and ground gently against the liberally strewn tyres and fenders at the seaward end of Parlatorio Wharf.
Chapter 4
The only thing that worried Nicolae Ceaușescu was that his mentor and friend — insofar as in the high command of the People’s Republic of Romania any man could afford friends — Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej would fail to seize the day. The Dictator of Romania had the surviving figureheads of the old Soviet Empire in the palm of his hand, at his mercy. Ceaușescu was sweating; his pen was slippery in his fingers. He could hardly keep still. The moment was so full of previously undreamt of possibilities. Nicolae Ceaușescu could almost feel the power sparking from the extremities of his body. His excitement was an arousal of the most visceral kind. The moment was intensely erotic…
All that needed to be done was to snatch up the telephone on the table and softly say a single word and it would begin.
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was distracted by exactly the same thought as he concentrated his attention on Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin, the man who seemed to be first among equals in the Soviet Troika which had responded to his ‘summons’ following Krasnaya Zarya’s unplanned, uncoordinated, and moronically executed nuclear strikes on the Greek, Italian, Yugoslavian, unaccountably on Egyptian targets, and insanely, upon the British forces in the Eastern Mediterranean and at Malta. Marshal of the Soviet Union, Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov sat to Kosygin’s left, and the brooding, reptile-eyed Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov at his right. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, the only other man in the bunker sat behind Chuikov, his face hidden in the shadows.
Nicolae Ceaușescu tried to catch his fellow supernumerary’s eye and failed. It irked him that while he had thick Securitate-prepared files on the three members of the Troika, he knew next to nothing about Sakharov other than that he was some kind of ‘bomb’ scientist loosely attached to Kosygin’s personal staff.
“So what is it to be?” Vasily Chuikov asked gruffly, his patience exhausted. “If you want me to drink Vodka until I piss my pants and for me to dance on the table say so now!”
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej half-smiled but it was a death mask kind of smile.
“Stalin is dead, Comrade Marshal,” he retorted lowly.
The old soldier guffawed and lit a foul-smelling cigarette. He had seen the tanks and armoured half-tracked troop carriers on the airfield perimeter road, and noted the hard-bitten look of the over-large ‘honour guard’ that had greeted the Troika on the tarmac. He had noted also the way the main runway had been blocked by more vehicles immediately the Troika’s aircraft had landed.
“So is Marshal Krylov,” Chuikov grunted dispassionately.
“Krylov?” The Dictator of Romania asked flatly.
“Nikolai Ivanovich failed in his duty to safeguard the capital of the Motherland in the Cuban Missiles War,” Yuri Andropov interjected testily. “There was little he could have done to have stopped the Yankee rockets and bombs but as Commander of the Moscow Military Districts he could, and should have ensured that the appropriate civil defence protocols were in effect before the attack.”
Nicolae Ceaușescu flinched. He wasn’t a man given to sentimentality, or for giving another man the benefit of the doubt, but there was something relentless and merciless in Andropov which gave him a very bad feeling about what would happen if Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was so unwise as to allow these people to walk out of this bunker alive.
The Dictator of Romania did not respond.
The silence dragged for several seconds.
“And then,” Andropov continued, his voice dead pan and matter of fact, “Krylov allowed his people to try to get us all killed.”
“His people?” Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej replied coldly. “You mean he allowed the Soviet personnel responsible for the care, maintenance and field deployment of a significant proportion of the viable surviving nuclear strike capability of our alliance to be seized and activated by the Krasnaya Zarya faction within your ranks?”
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had ignored Andropov and Chuikov to concentrate his spitting ire on the impassive face of Andrei Kosygin, who said nothing, knowing that his Romanian counterpart had not finished talking.
“That would be the same Red Dawn faction that we demanded that you confronted and expunged from my territory.” Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was breathing hard, loudly asthmatic, veins pulsed at his temples. His fists were clenched on the table before him. “When the British and the Americans calculate the trajectories of the missiles your people fired at them they will discover that as many as half of them were launched from Romanian sovereign territory. The sacred soil of my land!”