“It is all a bit far-fetched, old man,” he said presently, clasping his hands together and casting his gaze into the dwindling glow of the embers in the hearth. Getting by on the same coal ration as the ordinary worker and his family was problematic at this time of year and the winter hadn’t really bitten yet. “I’ll grant that it offers an explanation for some of our troubles.”
“Rykov’s most recent intelligence comes from the Levant, Tom. Red Dawn is a more coherent and tangible movement in that part of the World. If Red Dawn has significant tentacles and capabilities in Western Europe and North America, the animal may be a completely different beast. Perhaps, a more opportunistic, disjointed force simply exploiting the civil and military dislocation caused by the October War. Remember, Red Dawn was not created by Stalin as a political instrument; more as an ongoing blight upon humanity after he was dead. Hitler tried to do the same thing at the end of the forty-five war. Remember how obsessed we and the Americans were about the so-called Alpine Redoubt that hundreds of thousands of fanatical Nazis were supposedly going to hold onto for all time? The only difference is that Hitler died too soon to do more than inflict scorched earth on his own people; Stalin had the best part of a decade to get Red Dawn off the ground, a decade in which to exploit the simmering ethnic and religious tensions in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the World. Nearly a decade in which to lay the foundations of a movement whose central raison d’être is to promote a virulently nihilistic antidote to everything the Western World has stood for since the Renaissance.”
The Foreign Secretary smiled bleakly.
“Goodness, we’ll make a philosopher of you yet, Dick.”
The spymaster leaned towards his friend.
“Tom, if half of what Arkady Rykov has told me is true our current difficulties are as nothing to what is to come.”
There was a knock at the door.
A young woman in a shabby dress stole into the room and handed Tom Harding-Grayson a slim Manila folder with a much overwritten cover, and departed as swiftly as she had appeared. The Foreign Secretary opened the file.
“Excuse me a moment, Dick,” he murmured distractedly as he perused the contents of the file marked ‘Urgent and Immediate’. After a few moments he reached for the phone on his desk. “I’d like to speak to Captain Brenckmann in my office please. Yes, as soon as possible. Thank you…”
Dick White waited patiently.
“Something’s going on in Washington,” his friend told the spymaster, looking up from the file. “We’re intercepting radio broadcasts reporting a large number of explosions and sustained gunfire around government buildings including the Pentagon and fighter bombers over-flying the city.”
“A coup, perhaps,” the Head of MI6 speculated.
“Is that really likely?” Asked the other man, in no way discounting the idea.
“Ninety percent of North America was untouched by the October War. However, the perceptions of most Americans I have met in the last year is that their country was ravaged as badly, if not worse, than any other ‘democracy’. This, and the fact that the war changed the rules of the political game by removing America’s one unifying ‘enemy’, the Soviet Union, has bred a somewhat febrile atmosphere in which many of the more extreme elements in American Society — to paraphrase a senior member of the US intelligence community, ‘back-woodsmen, miscellaneous crazies and religious nuts’ whose numbers have been swelled by disaffected ex-servicemen summarily dumped back into civilian life by the so-called ‘peace dividend defence cuts’ — have moved filled the vacuum left by what I suspect future historians will probably term ‘the great American democratic deficit’.”
“Go on,” the Foreign Secretary prompted.
“The situation is made for a movement like Red Dawn to exploit. Federal mismanagement of the immediate aftermath of the October War reignited the ‘states rights’ issue in Massachusetts and the Carolinas and even, to a degree in New York State, and of course in the Pacific north-east. Perhaps, the most de-stabilising of the handful of Soviet strikes was the one that destroyed large areas of Chicago. Notwithstanding that the American industrial base was, and remains, so vast and so riddled with redundancies, the balance of industrial and therefore, economic power has shifted, become more diverse and in time will create a far more resilient and probably, much wealthier America. But in the meantime the American people are suffering a period of rapid re-adjustment. Unemployment has soared despite the drive to return to pre-war levels of production because the inefficiencies in the system are suddenly being ruthlessly purged. With all the non-jobs and sinecures being squeezed out of the US economy it isn’t surprising that there should be widespread industrial discontent. Don’t forget that profound racial tensions were bubbling up in the Deep South before the October War. The burgeoning Civil Rights movement led by charismatic figures like Martin Luther King hasn’t gone away, in fact, the events of the last year have served to drive forward the struggle for equality. In such a climate it is hardly surprising that with an intensely partisan political system and large areas of territory under a variety of kinds of martial law, or no law at all, that the ‘crazies’ should start ‘coming out of the woodwork’. Personally, I thought the process of societal disintegration would take longer in the States. Several years, perhaps. However, that a major insurrection might be in progress at this time, relatively speaking so soon after the October War speaks to me of the influence of a guiding hand. Red Dawn might well be that guiding hand.”
Tom Harding-Grayson’s eyes narrowed.
“You don’t sound very surprised to hear about explosions and gunfire and fighter jets flying over Washington DC, Dick?”
“I’m not. My analysis was that it was bound to happen sooner or later.” He shrugged apologetically. “If I’d come to Sir Alec Douglas-Home, your predecessor, or to you as Sir Alec’s principle advisor with this before now you’d have sent me away with a flea in my ear. You’d probably have accused me of being alarmist.”
“Perhaps,” his friend conceded. Dick White was right; dear old Alec Douglas-Home would never have taken the spymaster seriously again if he’d come to him with a hypothesis linking Red Dawn to a future armed insurrection in America.
“I’d never dream of sending a fellow like you away with any kind of flea in his ear, Dick,” Tom Harding-Grayson remonstrated dryly.
“You know what I mean, Tom.”
There was a new knock at the door.
Captain Walter Brenckmann was tired and dishevelled in his crumpled US Navy uniform and he hadn’t shaved for thirty-six hours. He’d just been roused from a troubled sleep having despaired of the quixotic mission the British envisaged for him when they’d brought him back to Cheltenham. His one ‘conversation’ with ‘his people back home’ had been an unmitigated disaster in which he’d said one thing to Dean Rusk and Bobby Kennedy and the US Secretary of State and the Attorney General had heard another. He’d tried and failed to rationalise that misbegotten trans-Atlantic telephone exchange; politicians always only heard what they want to hear. He’d had a shot at trying to get the fools in Washington to understand what was going on and he hadn’t just blown it, he’d made things worse. Listening to the President’s State of the Union Address he’d asked himself how soon the missiles would be flying and when the first bombs would fall.
The newcomer viewed the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service warily.
“This is Sir Richard White, Head of MI6,” Tom Harding-Grayson announced unnecessarily.