Alexei Kosygin nodded. “My sources inform me that you have already taken action against the terrorists responsible?”
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had ordered his troops to seize all Soviet nuclear weapons, technicians and support troops in Romania, to blockade all Soviet military formations in their bases and camps, to deny Romanian air space to Soviet aircraft and had mined the approaches to Constanta and other Romanian ports and harbours to stop Soviet vessels departing or entering his waters. In the unlikely event that the British and the Americans wanted to talk first and obliterate his country later; he had done everything he could think of to disassociate himself from the madness of the Krasnaya Zarya fanatics foisted upon him by the Troika.
Nicolae Ceaușescu sighed, unsuccessfully veiling his irritation.
At one level Ceaușescu perfectly understood his mentor’s strategy but still, he entertained nagging doubts as to the efficacy of his tactics. He had known Gheorghe was unwell for some months. His cough had become more hacking, his complexion greyer and his once limitless energy, sadly diminished. At first he had wondered if it was simply the intolerable pressure of ensuring that Romania, a relatively untouched island of the old World surrounded by a seas of chaos and destruction, remained inviolate. But that was not it. Gheorghe and he were veterans of the old regime’s prisons and internment camps. They had survived those days hardened to withstand the harshest of trials. No, his old friend was very ill, probably ailing. In these post-apocalypse times disease quickly took a man, infection was remorseless, unforgiving and the stocks of modern drugs and medical equipment Party members had been able to get access to before the war were exhausted, lost, worn out. Once a man’s health began to decline it was only a matter of time. Now at the very moment Gheorghe needed to be at his strongest Ceaușescu was afraid he would falter. And then what would happen?
That at least, was one question he knew the answer to; when Gheorghe was gone he would have to pick up the pieces.
The Dictator of Romania gathered his breath before he wheezed a sour-faced retort in Andrei Kosygin’s face.
“The Armed Forces of the People’s Republic and my Securitate have rounded up the leaders of the conspiracy. My instructions were to liquidate anybody who resisted arrest. Several of the ringleaders have been brought here to Otopeni. Mopping up operations against Soviet units sympathetic to Red Dawn continue. My forces have suffered heavy casualties in the last thirty-six hours and an attempt on my life was made as I travelled to this place. All logistical and technical operations in support of your forces on land, sea and in the air in the former territory of Bulgaria, and ongoing offensive actions in Yugoslavia and Greece have ceased. Until such time as the internal security situation has stabilized, your forces on those fronts will have to fend for themselves…”
At this point the Dictator of Romania began to cough. The others waited as the spasms wracked his stocky body. Eventually, Ceaușescu put a hand on his friend’s shoulder and handed him a fresh handkerchief. Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was spitting blood.
“Gheorghe,” his long time protégé and since the Cuban Missiles War his ever present right hand man asked gently, “perhaps, if I might…”
The older man gasped for air, nodded.
Nicolae Ceaușescu was already on his feet.
“I confess that I have little or no interest in the great game you gentlemen think that you are still playing, Comrades,” he confessed, “or in what role you believe that the Krasnaya Zarya hordes play in your twisted imaginary geopolitical chess game.”
He stepped into the pool of light above the table.
The Russians recognised the feral, calculating mind behind the cold eyes and understood instantly that the man with whom they had to deal was not a sick, angry old-school Marxist-Leninist but an utterly ruthless creature of the modern World. If they had had any doubts before now they were abruptly dispelled; the well of pity in Ceaușescu’s icy eyes was dry.
Nicolae Ceaușescu and pity were strangers.
Born the third child of an impoverished drunken, wife-beating despotic father in Scornicesti in the south of the country in 1918, he had run away from home at the age of eleven to live with his elder sister Niculina in Bucharest. Apprenticed to a shoemaker called Alexandru Săndulescu, an activist of the banned Communist Party, he had become a party member before his fifteenth birthday. His first arrest had been in 1933; in 1936 he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison. Thereafter, he had spent most of his late teens and twenties in one or other prison or internment camp. Fatefully, in 1943 at Târgu Jiu in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains he had shared a cell with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej; to whom he had quickly made himself indispensible. When the Red Army liberated Romania he had been appointed Secretary of the Union of Communist Youth. With his connections to Gheorghe and his impeccable prison faction antecedents he had risen rapidly in the Party after the 1945 war. He had swiftly become a major-general in the reformed Romanian Army; Gheorghe’s deputy Minister of Defence and most reliable ally on the Central Committee of the Party, by 1954 he was a full member of the Romanian Politburo and by the time of the October War the man most likely to succeed Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. However, nothing in politics was straightforward or in any way as easy as it subsequently seemed to outside observers. In the People’s Republic of Romania no man could advance far, let alone scale the rarefied heights to the apex of power without assiduously cultivating his own standing in the Party, and most important, assuring himself of the backing of the Securitate. No man who worried about where the bodies were buried was ever going to rise to lead his people. Nor in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s opinion did any man who entertained such qualms have any right to so do.
He patted his old friend on the shoulder.
“Yes, do it,” the ailing Dictator of Romania murmured.
Nicolae Ceaușescu picked up the handset: “Krasnaya Zarya!”
He replaced black Bakelite receiver and stood back.
And waited.
The members of the Troika exchanged quizzically comedic glances; and then as the first burst of automatic fire reverberated dully around the upper levels of the bunker complex, and bullets ricocheted off the two-inch thick armoured blast doors to the room in which they sat, their frowns turned to scowls.
The shooting went on for several minutes, its intensity soon diminishing until there were gaps of several seconds between eruptions of small arms fire. Within less than fifteen minutes only the occasional single shot was heard, distantly, muffled. During all this time the two factions in the bunker stared at each other; as if they were patiently waiting to discover whose champions had won the day even though there was never any doubt on that score.
The Troika had brought a twenty man protection squad, some of the junior members of the hastily assembled delegation carried hand guns, otherwise the Russians were lambs to the slaughter; overwhelmingly outnumbered and out-gunned by the Romanian wolves descending upon the fold.
Presently, the telephone rang.
Nicolae Ceaușescu picked it up: “This is the Deputy First Secretary Speaking. What is your report?”
The voice at the other end of the line returned: “Phase One is complete, Comrade First Deputy Secretary.”
“Good. Proceed to Phase Two.”
Nicolae Ceaușescu smiled tight-lipped.
“Certain preparations need to be completed before any of us can leave this room,” he explained. He might have been discussing a football match or the fluctuating production figures at the Timisoara Collective Tractor Factory.