Ceaușescu did not know how a Political Officer, a Commissar no less, like Dmitry Kolokoltsev had failed to work out that not only was he not Nikolai Vasilyevich Fyodorov, the former Head of the KGB in Greece but that he could not possibly be him. The only credible explanation that he could think of was that the man must have been dropped on his head when he was a baby. Had the idiot not talked to Eleni, or her cousin or his son? The moment Kolokoltsev heard about the helicopter, or the dead Securitate bodyguards Ceaușescu would be at his mercy.
‘The ship is approaching the Maltese Archipelago, Comrade Director,’ the dolt reported. Kolokoltsev had kept as far away from the one-legged alleged KGB man as he could in the last few weeks; he ought to have been getting as close as possible. Because that was what you did when you knew that one day your superiors would ask for proof that the man who had claimed to be Nikolai Vasilyevich Fyodorov really was the missing KGB Head of Station in Thessalonika.
Ceaușescu had asked to remain in the battlecruiser’s sick bay after the Yavuz’s surgeon had said he was sufficiently recovered to be moved into a cabin — presumably, vacated by one of the ship’s officers — where he and Madam Eleni might enjoy more privacy. The last thing Ceaușescu wanted was to be seen by other members of the crew; or any other Soviet stooges like Kolokoltsev idly roaming around the vessel. There would be a whole slew of Soviet minders on the battlecruiser, getting in the way, lording over the Turks. Any one of the bored, inquisitive Soviet personnel onboard the ship — few of whom would have any meaningful duties other than to spy on their hosts — might recognise him. He did not want to risk that. The sick bay was the safest place. What he had not anticipated — and could not have planned for anyway — was what might happen if the ship actually got into a battle.
Now he knew.
It seemed like his luck had finally run out.
‘What do you mean? Approaching the Maltese Archipelago?’
Second-Captain Kolokoltsev had looked at him as if he was mad.
‘I’m sorry. I thought you knew, Comrade Director?’
They’d changed the plan for Operation Chastise!
‘When the fuck did attacking Malta get to be included in Phase Two?’ Ceaușescu had demanded, hoping he had recovered his previous error. ‘Fuck! I only knew what was going on up until the Thessalonika bomb!’
‘The High Command must have changed the plan after that,’ agreed the Russian.
It was only after the Political Officer had departed that Ceaușescu’s attention was drawn to the curved wall of the compartment into which he, Eleni and the other occupants of the sick bay had been transferred. The hairs on the back of his neck began to stand up on end.
The curve in the wall was the armoured barbette of one of the battlecruiser’s amidships 11-inch main battery turrets. That meant that the turret’s magazine must be almost directly beneath his feet!
There were mattresses on the deck.
Eleni patted one and he carefully eased himself down beside her.
On the second day he had been aboard the Yavuz the ship’s surgeon had operated on his stump; cleaning out bad tissue and tidying up the mess the bungling Securitates had made of amputating his gangrenous lower right leg. The last time he had dared to look the stump was pink, healing. The pain had mostly ceased although it was hard to tell because every few hours he swallowed more morphine. However, he had started feeling better in the last few days and his appetite had returned despite the slop they fed him. He could hardly believe that any navy in the world could still feed its men salted meat, hardtack and some kind of spicy gruel that made him want to gag if he forgot to ignore the stench.
Eleni touched his arm, and opened her mouth to speak.
She had learned a few words of Russian, each of which she pronounced like she had a mouth full of marbles. She hesitated, her face contorted as she struggled to think of the word…
The battlecruiser lurched to a momentary halt.
The whole ship rang like a dulled bell.
Ceaușescu’s heart missed a beat and he almost bit his tongue.
Another salvo. He knew it was only a four gun salvo because when the Yavuz fired a full eight gun broadside it was like the whole World was about to cave in around him.
“We safe?” Eleni asked calmly in the horrible quietness after the salvo.
Nicolae Ceaușescu’s ears were ringing, the Greek woman’s voice sounded as if she was shouting into a cushion. His ears cleared suddenly.
“We safe?” She asked again.
The peculiar thing was that what he really wanted to say was ‘yes’. The woman had been his constant companion and nurse for over a month. But for her ministrations he surely would have died back on Samothrace. Later he would surely have drowned had she not clung to him on the upturned hull of the fishing boat. Since they had been onboard the Yavuz she could have betrayed him at any time. Yet she had not; and here she was asking him for comfort.
“We are inside a big metal box,” he tried to explain, speaking very slowly and illustrated his words with hand gestures. “Very thick metal,” he went on. “Nothing can get through it. All of ship get blown up but we still all right…”
He could tell she did not understand what he was saying.
Nonetheless, Eleni nodded.
She clasped his hand and leaned against him, genuflecting repeatedly with her free hand until the crash of the next outgoing salvo thundered so deafeningly everybody in the compartment thought for a moment that the ship had just blown up.
Chapter 41
Admiral Sir Julian Christopher the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations saw the dust and smoke shrouding RAF Luqa and knew, that whatever happened in the next few minutes and hours his career was destined to end in ignominy.
“Sir,” he was being told, “you need to get under cover. The Citadel is an obvious target…”
Julian Christopher was not listening.
Now that he had realised what was going on the full extent of his negligence and his failures of judgement was write plain for all to see. However, that did not change the fact that he remained the only man with the authority to do something about the unfolding disaster.
He scanned distant Valletta, now partially lost in the mid-day haze and the drifting cloud of smoke and dust from what had been, only minutes before, the most strategically important Royal Air Force base in the World. He imagined he saw the falling waterspouts of shells bursting in the waters of the Grand Harbour and explosions splashing across the packed streets of the Maltese capital. New smoke and dust was rising from beyond Valletta, perhaps from Birgu and Senglea. He saw the flash of the impacts as he swung his glasses into the south; and another salvo of huge shells plunging into the heart of RAF Luqa.
The first radar station had dropped off the grid at about two that morning; some kind of electrical fire. A few minutes later the secure lines to the air defence station on Gozo had been cut, and other stations were automatically tasked to provide coverage of the northern sector of the Air Defence Zone.
At around the same time the conventional, diesel-electric submarine, HMS Artful, operating west of Syracuse in the Ionian Sea as the northernmost picket of the 2nd Submarine Squadron’s tripwire picket line guarding the eastern approaches to Malta, had encountered two small tramp steamers and at three that morning, the leading vessels of a force of slow moving ships moving in convoy towards the Maltese Archipelago. Presumably, this ‘convoy’ had slipped around the western tip of Crete under the cover of the recent storms and cloudy conditions which had hamstrung the Canberra reconnaissance missions flown daily from Luqa. The possible ‘invasion force’ had come as a nasty surprise but he had immediately requested that the recently arrived nuclear hunter killer submarine USS Permit, acting as a goalkeeper behind the line of ‘A’ class boats, should be despatched to investigate and if necessary, engage the possible ‘invaders’.