Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  “There’s no need to look so worried, Comrade Yuri Vladimirovich,” the Chairman of the Communist Party of the USSR said after the two men had swapped the obligatory public kisses, and separated themselves from their entourages, retreating into what had once been the State Shipyard Director’s office in the ugly concrete block overlooking the derelict slips on the Pivdennyi Buh.

  The forgotten shell of two warships, destroyers still lay rusting, forgotten in the near distance.

  “It has been a while since you and I had a chance to talk in private,” Shelepin declared, his manner strangely collegiate. “You do not need to waste time convincing me of your devotion to the USSR or the Party, or to me, personally. I know that you are a good man and that your work is of immense value to the Motherland. Vladimir Yefimovich has spoken to me about the desirability of formalising the separation of policy and operational functions within the Central Office of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti. You and I, practically all of us in the Politburo, are of a similar generation. We grew up knowing only the Great Patriotic War and the iron rule of the Man of Steel. Comrade Stalin’s methods worked well in those days but that was then and this is now, the World has changed and we must change with it or,” he shrugged, “perish. Vladimir Yefimovich will speak with you on the matter of the reforms he and I have agreed to streamline the apparatus of state security. The KGB is too large, too labour-intensive and personnel will need to be redeployed to the Armed Forces and civilian policing roles. This will be painful but frankly, we can no longer support a Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti which employs more agents than the Red Army has soldiers.”

  Yuri Andropov had been horrified when his boss had warned him what was coming. That had been over a month ago, and even now he was by no means reconciled to ‘reforms’ that almost certainly meant the wholesale dismantling of large parts of the state security apparatus. It was going to be a painful business.

  “Vladimir Yefimovich assures me that you are the man to carry through the necessary reforms, Comrade Yuri Vladimirovich?”

  “It won’t be easy,” Andropov nodded. “But I am the man for the job.”

  “Good. Good. We’ll go ahead and promulgate the new organisational structure. Vladimir Yefimovich will remain Director, with responsibility for policy pending the appointment of a second Deputy Director for the Department. You will be confirmed as Deputy Director (Operations). Congratulations, I know we can rely on you.”

  The two men shook hands.

  Andropov was waved to sit down in the hard chair before the room’s one big desk. He noted that there was no dust on any surface, and that the building he had walked through seemed like a normal office, with men and women going about their normal daily business, whatever that was these days.

  The mood in the room subtly altered.

  “The Admiral,” Alexander Shelepin prefaced, everybody on the Politburo referred to the irascible force of nature that was Sergey Georgyevich Gorshkov as ‘the Admiral’, the undisputed number two man in the Troika, “wants to start building the new Black Sea Fleet here, at Nikolaev. It actually makes a kind of sense now that we’ve got the nuclear submarine program in full production on the Amur, to centralise surface warship construction here.”

  The Politburo was worried that all their eggs were in that one precious, irreplaceable ‘basket’ in the Russian Far East, so close to China and those duplicitous bastards – pseudo Marxist-Leninists, dangerously revisionist – who controlled the People’s Republic. However, Andropov knew for a fact that Shelepin did not take the recent setback in Sino-Soviet relations anywhere near as personally as many of his senior subordinates.

  “We’d be starting from scratch again if we looked to the Arctic, or the Baltic ports,” the Deputy Head of the KGB agreed cautiously.

  Murmansk and Archangel no longer existed, Leningrad was a rubble field and any ships built, or salvaged in the Baltic would be trapped there.

  “I had Mikhail overseeing a technical study of the possibilities for the Odessa-Nikolaev industrial complex,” Shelepin continued. “It looks promising.” He sighed, shook his head. “Always assuming The Admiral doesn’t get us all blown up again in the meantime!”

  Yuri Andropov blinked, wondering if he had misheard.

  Mikhail was Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, Shelepin’s thirty-five-year-old protégé, the child of a poor peasant family who had graduated from Moscow State University and made a name for himself working in the Komsomol at Stavropol before the Cuban Missiles War, an enthusiastic convert to Nikita Krushchev’s anti-Stalinization reform program. The man had been dangerously close to the Brezhnev regime and yet, survived the July 1964 upheavals without a scratch, appearing almost immediately in Alexander Shelepin’s personal retinue. Gorbachev had been the lead author of the Warsaw Concerto discussion document the Politburo had rubber-stamped in August last year; however, the implementation of the political and diplomatic objectives outlined in that provisional document had been the responsibilities of others.

  Any mistakes which may have been made were, therefore, somebody else’s fault, specifically, the over-reach of the Red Army on the ground in Western Europe, the Foreign Ministry’s determination to muscle in, transforming a domestic propaganda initiative into an international cause celebre, and most egregiously, the Defence Ministry’s ongoing unauthorised interference in the civil war in France, and less obviously, in Scandinavia. The big problem was that the Troika had lost control of the situation on the ground in Western Europe. It was not Soviet policy to risk the large-scale re-engagement of the US military on the European mainland. And it was not Alexander Shelepin’s expressed intention, or wish, to throw fuel on potential flashpoints in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the old Federal Republic of Germany, or the internecine squabbles of the various factions – rightist, leftist or criminal in Italy, Corsica, Sardinia or Sicily. The argument that by applying constant pressure to alleged ‘Western pressure points’ it must inevitably weaken and distract the Soviet Union’s enemies was, to Shelepin’s mind, specious. It was one thing to challenge western hegemony outside Europe, in Africa, or Latin America, or South East Asia but anything that looked like a resurgence of Soviet ambitions in Western Europe was clearly…unhelpful. It was probably already too late to forestall the eventual re-engagement of the United States in the affairs of Europe; a thing which might slam the door shut on any hopes of avoiding a new and disastrous Cold War that would leave the Motherland isolated and impoverished for generations.

  That path had led to the catastrophe of the Cuban Missiles War. But never again!

  Yuri Andropov had been in favour of the more aggressive stance inherent in the Warsaw Concerto policy. Right up until the moment he realised that ‘the Admiral’ had hijacked it and the Berlin ‘demonstration’ was supposed to be the end, not the beginning of the posturing. Like a good Party man; he had quickly re-adjusted. It was irrelevant if, personally, was in favour of a more aggressive – although not overly militarily provocative – stance against the West. It was his job was to run the security apparatus of the USSR, not to ponder upon or to tamper with the geopolitical chess board.

  The First Secretary and Chairman of the Communist Party had stood, framed in the window, now he settled – a little fussily – behind the big desk and scrutinised the KGB man with thoughtful eyes.

  No two men in the Soviet Union understood as well as Alexander Shelepin and Yuri Andropov that there would have been no coup of 1964, or possibly, no real opportunity to steady the ship of state, or to seriously begin to rebuild the USSR, but for Admiral of the Fleet and Defence Minister, First Deputy Secretary of the Communist Party, Sergey Georgyevich Gorshkov.

  Gorshkov had been courageously, openly – everybody thought recklessly - opposed to the Brezhnev regime-inspired insanity of the Iran-Iraq adventure which had ‘pissed away’ the Motherland’s last two tank armies and treasure so vast it was impossible to quantify in the rocky deserts of the Middle East. Nevertheless, ever the diehard patriot, it had
been Gorshkov’s brilliant counter-stroke which had very nearly destroyed British power in the Mediterranean, albeit at the cost of sacrificing most of what little remained of the Red Navy in the region; always acting as a good communist for the greater good. His daring attack on Malta had completely unbalanced the West and allowed the Iran-Iraq madness, Operation Nakazyvat - Operation Chastise – to commence with the Soviet Union’s enemies in abject disarray. Moreover, it had been Gorshkov who had stepped in and by ordering the nuclear bombing of Basra, effectively halted the disastrous land war in Iraq, almost certainly preventing the complete rout of the surviving Red Army forces in that godforsaken, blighted country.

  When presented with the news of the coming coup; back in July 1964 he had simply, stood aside, and let it happen, ordering Red Army, Air Force and Naval troops not to ‘interfere in matters of politics.’ In hindsight, that had been a masterful move; enabling Shelepin to identify, right at the outset, who was and who was not to be trusted within the military-industrial complex. But for this, the purges would have had to go on, and on, and on, possibly without end. As it was, opponents in every arm of the armed forces had been liquidated within days. Undeniably, so much of that which had been achieved in the last two-and-a-half years would have been impossible, unthinkable without Gorshkov’s support.

  Problematically, there was a growing clique within the Politburo, and around Alexander Shelepin who suspected that the Admiral now had his own agenda. And that Admiral of the Fleet, Defence Minister and Deputy First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had got a little too big for his sea boots.

  Alexander Shelepin’s people had no scruples about reporting every disconnected piece of gossip, hearsay, or malicious rumour that came their way about Gorshkov’s latest ‘initiative’ or ‘brilliant idea’, or whose arse he had just kicked, nose put out of joint or ribald comment he had voiced about the state of the Party in this or that fiefdom as he charged about the country.

  Not that Alexander Shelepin believed that a little ‘constructive tension’ within the Troika and its subservient Politburo, was necessarily a bad thing. He was perfectly content to allow Gorshkov a certain leeway in offering succour to previously neglected, Soviet-aligned freedom and rebel movements around the globe intent on destabilising West-dominated or leaning governments in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and whole-heartedly supported his ongoing large-scale ‘survey and salvage’ operations in Central Europe. Because of Gorshkov they had a greatly improved feel for the situation on the ground in Poland, East Germany, Austria and even much of former West Germany. Forward camps and depots – in a small way – had been established and much useful technology and other hardware discovered and, in some cases, recovered. Moreover, Gorshkov’s rag-tag, gunboat and three-old submarine Black Sea Fleet – its largest vessels a pair of two thousand-ton destroyers, recently, the eleven thousand ton Chapayev class cruiser Komsomolets had had to be laid up for want of spare parts at Odessa – had made the Aegean a quasi-Russian lake, and enabled the repair and reactivation of the war-damaged submarine base at Sevastopol, in preparation for the arrival of the first of the new Amur-built nuclear boats…

  Which of course, was where ambition was trumped by hard reality; a thing Sergey Gorshkov was the last man in the new Soviet Union to accept, or in any way tolerate.

  Nobody really believed any of those new nuclear-powered Pacific Fleet submarines could really evade the American blockade of the Sea of Okhotsk, let alone make the voyage submerged all the way to the Mediterranean to challenge the British. Even if they made it all the way; hardly anybody in the upper echelons of the Party really thought it was a very good idea to ‘challenge’ the British, and certainly not the Americans in an area where, clearly, they were bound to react very, very badly.

  Except Sergey Gorshkov; whom Alexander Shelepin had realised, too late, had now employed Warsaw Concerto to subvert his own plans.

  The first two leaky, accident prone vessels of the Amur-built and based Project 659 submarines – originally designed as hybrid attack-missile platforms capable of firing the P-5 Pyatyorka turbojet-powered cruise missile from deck-mounted tubes – had evaded the US blockade in mid-1964. One of those boats had probably torpedoed and sunk the American guided missile cruiser USS Providence in the Arabian Sea; nobody knew for sure because the boat which supposedly conducted the attack - the K45 - had not returned to base, and the K-59, assigned the impossible, path-finding role of attempting to steam underwater all the way to the safety of the Dardanelles and the Black Sea, was believed to have been attacked and sunk by the US in the North Atlantic, somewhere in the vicinity of the Azores. It was this operation which had been the final act of madness which had driven Shelepin to act against the old guard.

  Characteristically, once ‘the Admiral’ had got used to the idea that Shelepin had no intention of reneging on their deal, he had continued to pour resources into his Far Eastern power base. Two further, improved Project 659 boats and a pair of Project 627 hunter-killers had joined his Pacific Fleet since July 1964, and three more vessels presently under construction in hardened pens on the slips of the Leninskiy Komsomol Shipyard, at Komsomolsk-na-Amur.

  In October 1962, Amur had been targeted by at least one ICBM and at least four bomber strikes; two B-52s having been shot down within thirty kilometres of the yards. Fortuitously, the nearest big bomb had gone off twenty-three kilometres north of the yards, and the city around it had largely survived.

  Initially, in the wake of the Cuban Missiles War new construction had been hamstrung by all manner of shortages, with reactor fabrication only re-commencing eighteen months after the catastrophe. However, none of that had deterred Sergey Gorshkov; who had been pressing for the reactivation of the Nikolaev and, or smaller, Odessa yards for the last six months. Gorshkov made no secret of his big plans for his new Black Sea Fleet!

  Alexander Shelepin was of the view that the time for ‘aggressive confrontation’ at sea was not yet, nor would it be for many years to come. The enemy was far too strong at sea, in the air, and possibly, on land, also and the problem was that the irrepressible Admiral was full of plans!

  It ought to have been entirely predictable that he would try to appropriate parts of Warsaw Concerto to promote and to progress his ambitions for the new USSR. That, after all, was to be expected of the never say die, never give a millimetre attitude that Gorshkov brought to the Troika.

  Good enough is the enemy of better!

  Nonetheless, Alexander Shelepin had decided that he must risk everything to put the Motherland on a better path.

  He sighed.

  “I have informed Comrade Sergey Georgyevich that his plan to induce the Front Internationale to hand over the French Mediterranean Fleet to the Red Navy is unacceptable,” Shelepin confided to his chief secret policeman.

  Yuri Andropov raised an involuntary eyebrow: his right eyebrow. Ever since Bucharest his left eyebrow had been permanently raised, much in the fashion that the rest of his physiognomy had been rearranged, and thirteen other bones below his neck had been cracked or broken by the Securitate.

  Sergey Gorshkov had many plans, fingers in countless pies; the one-man dynamo who had single-handedly galvanised the Motherland’s shattered and, after the Iran-Iraq disaster, dispirited Armed Forces was the one person who might, conceivably threatened the First Secretary’s grip, or if he wanted, attempt to oust him. Confronting Gorshkov was a strategy fraught with dangers; unless, of course, Shelepin planned to eliminate him…

  “No. The Admiral did not take the news very well.” Alexander Shelepin scowled. “He was even less happy when I informed him that he was to order the Red Air Force to sink the French ships presently anchored at Villefranche. This, apparently, will take several days to organise; the only aircraft with the range to carry out the mission from bases east of the Urals are Tu-95s presently configured solely for strategic, nuclear roles. Sufficient of them to successfully achieve their objective, at least twenty, will need
to be assembled at Chelyabinsk before the strike can go ahead. I have instructed Comrade Sergey Georgyevich that I don’t care if we lose every aircraft, the French fleet must be destroyed by the end of the month.”

  Yuri Andropov absorbed this.

  Against his better judgement he felt obliged to offer a warning comment: “Having had dealings with the FI and its leadership…”

  “That psychopath Machenaud?”

  “Yes, Comrade First Secretary,” the Deputy Head of the KGB swallowed nervously, “Machenaud… I’m not sure I know how the Front Internationale I will react to the bombing of the fleet. My information is that the people in Clermont-Ferrand have been casting envious eyes at those ships for some time. Ever since a man called Leguay, one of their few competent Navy men, took command at Villefranche…”

  “I don’t care how the FI reacts, Comrade,” Shelepin retorted, resignedly. “They need our support and it is about time somebody reminded them of their responsibilities. The air bridge to the Massif Central can be suspended or terminated at any time. Our policy is to ‘appear’ to contest our legitimate security and other territorial grievances in respect of the Warsaw Pact members all the way up to but not beyond, the line of the Rhine.” For a moment his exasperation surfaced. “The Admiral was supposed to stop migration across that river line, not bloody encourage it!”

  Without warning, Alexander Shelepin rose to his feet and stepped to the window. Behind him, Andropov respectfully got up and hesitantly, moved to join his leader.