After the October War Red Dawn had literally, come out of the woodwork; risen like an evil Phoenix from the ashes of the wrecked USSR. Since the movement had been ubiquitous wherever the Soviet State had a presence; in embassies, trade legations, the KGB, the army, the air force and the navy, even in sporting and other cultural agencies, all that was missing was a guiding hand in the nightmare aftermath of the war.
‘I do not believe that there is a single guiding hand. However, there are ‘guiding hands’, more likely locally in the devastated lands, and nationally in those place less affected by the war. For example, I would predict that in the United States of America — large tracts of which survived the war untouched including Washington DC — Red Dawn has coalesced into a loosely nationalistic underground movement capable of developing complex strategies and carrying out extremely ambitious operations. Red Dawn will have insinuated itself into mainstream political parties, the military-industrial complex, local militias and extremist groups of the right, rather than the left since the FBI indiscriminately targets all left-leaning groups and largely leaves the red-neck, racist, anti-Semitic and other right wing coalitions to their own devices. Red Dawn will have a presence in governmental institutions, trades unions and on University campuses across America. I have no way of knowing how deeply any, or all of these organisations, groups and factions may have been penetrated by Red Dawn, or for that matter, the level of commitment of individual members of the Red Dawn movement to their cause. Some areas of the American state will have been hardly touched by Red Dawn; others, a minority to be sure, will have been deeply compromised. For example, National Guard formations may have been suborned, or parts of critical military command and control infrastructures perverted. It is likely that the widespread civil unrest in many parts of North America is fomented by Red Dawn sympathisers. In the United Kingdom the situation is different because although Red Dawn was probably more deeply embedded in Western Europe than was possible in the United States, the war damage in even the less relatively less heavily damaged countries like the United Kingdom and France was so severe that the movement itself would have been fractured. Martial law was declared in the United Kingdom following the October War and the UKIEA clamped down ruthlessly in the wake of the first wave of assassinations and bombings. The Provision Government of West France reacted with great violence also. Red Dawn’s own internal organisation was splintered by the war and then further fragmented by the actions of the authorities. In the devastated areas of the Mother Country, Red Dawn would exist only in the form of disparate fiefdoms, perhaps unwilling or unable to co-operate one with another. In the Balkans, Turkey and Armenia, it was inevitable that Red Dawn would find an affinity with several of the pre-existing and entrenched — for generations — competing ethnic and religious groupings. In the near future it is in this area, and perhaps in Asia Minor as a whole, that Red Dawn will pose the greatest immediate threat to the existing hegemony. If, as I expect, the surviving resources of the former Turkish State are mobilised by Red Dawn the greater part of the world’s known oil reserves will eventually fall into its hands as what is, in effect, a new Ottoman-type empire expands to engulf the whole Middle East.’
Clara had listened with horror and fascination.
‘It might be that Red Dawn burned itself out in uncoordinated spasms of violence immediately after the October War in the United Kingdom, France, Malta, Cyprus and elsewhere. On Malta, for example, ‘only a few diehards’ remain. In the United Kingdom, the surviving remnants of Red Dawn will most likely, have been subsumed into the widespread criminal sub-culture peculiar to all command economies in which the strict rationing of food, fuel and other essential supplies underpins the existence of every citizen.’ The Russian had concluded: ‘I fear for what might happen in America, but what manner of monster might emerge from Asia Minor in the coming years gives me nightmares.’
Dick White had prompted the Russian to express a view on the recent events in the Iberian Peninsula, the surprise attack on Malta and the attempted assassination of the British Royal Family.
Although the details were news to the battered former KGB Colonel; nothing he was told remotely surprised him.
‘If you are asking me if I see the hand of Red Dawn in these events,’ he’d shrugged, ‘I’d say they were consistent with the activities of a subversive movement embedded within agencies of the American government hoping to drive a wedge between the two countries which Red Dawn views as being most implacably inimical to its crusade.’
Clara had thought that ‘crusade’ was an interesting and a rather frightening word to use; and so had Dick White, who’d queried it in a moment.
‘A certain American general talks about bombing his enemies back into the Stone Age,’ he’d reminded the tall Englishman. ‘I think that gentleman misses his mark. It is not to ‘the Stone Age’ that we have bombed ourselves ‘but back towards a new World order that a mediaeval mind would well understand. A World in which war and warriors are the ruling class; a World in which ‘renaissance’ is a dirty word; a World in which people will be driven again to live in citadels; and in which the champions of Red Dawn see themselves as latter day Templars, or Teutonic Knights. Europe and the Russian parts of the Soviet Union are in ruins. Red Dawn will seek to insinuate itself into and then dominate what will inevitably become a battleground between competing religious, political and militaristic theosophies. The Americans have bombed the World we knew back into a World that has much in common with the World of the European wars of religion of the seventeenth century. Whatever happens, it is almost inevitable that there will be thirty years, perhaps more, of war in Europe, Asia Minor and the Middle East. All that we have seen so far are a few scattered, experimental ‘opening shots’ in the coming war. Red Dawn is merely flexing its muscles…’
Clara Pullman warmed herself by the stove, gazed out across the peaceful, unsullied vista of the city of Lisbon.
Dick White had been more sanguine about the future than Arkady.
‘If I learned anything from the forty-five war,’ he’d countered, ‘it was that nothing is ever quite as bad as it seems.’
The spymaster had decided that Arkady and Clara should remain in Portugal for ‘the time being’. Meanwhile, he had to go back to England. ‘I look forward to meeting you both again in due course,’ he’d promised before driving off into the night with ‘Max’.
Clara went to the big bedroom at the southern end of the villa. Thick drapes were drawn across the tall windows designed to allow the light to flood the room every morning. Without troubling to discard the plain cotton dress she’d discovered in one of the wardrobes she slipped beneath the sheets and cautiously snuggled up against her lover’s back.
He half-groaned, half-sighed in his sleep.
Clara’s thoughts wandered out across the stormy seas to where HMS Hermes and her consorts were already fighting the endless ‘future war’ that Arkady had foretold.
She wondered what would happen to the long list of names ‘Max’ had scribbled; the names of Red Dawn members, activists and ‘sleepers’ — thirty-one names — that Arkady had dictated. Wondered also, what the people behind those names were doing right now.