The Dark Chronicles

by Jeremy Duns

  Brezhnev lit another cigarette, and gestured to Yuri that he should answer my question. Yuri straightened his back and stared at me with unalloyed hatred radiating from his hobgoblin eyes.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We would like you to tell us all you know about the West’s plans for nuclear conflict.’

  I took that in, eyeing Brezhnev’s cigarette and wishing I had my own to puff. An image flashed into my mind: the toothless grin of the old man in the stand near Sloane Square Underground as he slid a pack of Players into my waiting fingers. I shook my head free of it.

  ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ I said.

  ‘Come,’ said Yuri, and gave a slow, condescending smile. ‘You were deputy head of the Service.’

  ‘For about five minutes. I can tell you about the broad strategy, if you like, but the only people who know the details of the plans are those directly involved in them.’

  ‘In the bunkers, you mean.’

  He was trying to get me to give him something he could follow up on. I didn’t react. I noted that this seemed to be his show, since none of the others were talking. That suggested the meeting had been called on account of information received by the GRU.

  ‘You know where the bunkers are, of course?’ he said.

  ‘Not off by heart, no. I’m afraid I can’t really tell you much about “the West” as a whole. I know a bit about the British strategy, a little about NATO’s and next to nothing about the Americans’.’

  Three seats down, I saw Andropov look away and purse his lips, and guessed it was the Americans they were interested in.

  ‘Very well,’ said Yuri, his tone a little more curt. ‘Please tell us what you do know.’

  I smiled sweetly at him, stalling for time so I could work out what was going on and how to react. I could simply refuse to cooperate, of course. I didn’t much like being woken up, yelled at and fetched to an underground bunker without any explanation, and part of me was tempted to tell them where to stick it. But that would be foolish – if I didn’t appear to be trying to answer their questions sincerely, they would simply put a bullet through the back of my head. They might do it anyway, but there was a chance they wouldn’t. So swallow your pride, play nicely, sound convincing, and if you’re very lucky they won’t shoot you at the end of this and might even give you a slightly more comfortable cell.

  The difficulty was in picking precisely which pieces of information I could safely tell them. Because I did, of course, know quite a lot about the West’s plans for nuclear conflict, having been given a copy of the War Book on being appointed Head of Soviet Section in late ’65. I had also taken part in dozens of meetings over the years on the intricacies of post-strike contingency plans, including with counterparts at NATO and CIA.

  This time last year I had taken part in INVALUABLE, a top secret Whitehall exercise that had preceded NATO’s wider scenario in Bonn. It was one of a series of seemingly interminable exercises carried out by a select handful of officials to test the War Book’s contingency plans in case of an escalation to nuclear war with the Soviet Union. After a while they became a nuisance, and it was difficult to connect them with the idea of a real conflict. Was this a comparable Soviet exercise? It didn’t seem like it – nobody had been sweating this much in London.

  If so, it might be that other men in uniforms were scurrying into bunkers in other parts of the world. If the United States felt an attack was imminent, about a thousand people were to retreat to a complex of steel-protected buildings set inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Members of Congress would be evacuated to a bunker in White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, while the President would move to Camp David and the Pentagon to a facility nearby. In the event that one of their nuclear command or ground launch centres were hit or their capability damaged, a round-the-clock airborne command post codenamed ‘Looking Glass’ would take over. They also had on patrol some forty submarines, loaded with Polaris nuclear-armed missiles.

  In Britain, if ballistic missiles or some other form of explosive weapon were detected by the receivers at RAF Fylingdales or by the Royal Observer Corps, information about the objects’ radar arrays, height, speed and inclination would immediately be fed into the Threat Report Panel in Fylingdales’ operations room. If deemed a credible threat, the Home Office would be informed and could then issue the ‘Four-Minute Warning’ – so called because of the length of time between it being given and oncoming missiles reaching their targets, although it might in fact be as little as three and a half minutes.

  The warning would be broadcast by the BBC on television and radio, and sirens would be sounded across the country. The warning would advise people to stay in their own homes, and to move to their fallout rooms. In reality, as I knew from discussions on the issue, very few people would survive a sustained nuclear strike. Even if they made it to shelter within four minutes, had stockpiled a fortnight’s supply of provisions and were ‘lucky’ enough to survive the attack, after their food and water supplies had run out there would be nowhere to find more.

  In the early days, the idea had been to try to protect the public as a whole from an attack, but the emphasis had shifted to protecting only those who would be needed to reconstruct the country. One early plan had been for the Prime Minister and a small group to stay in London and beat a retreat to a network of rooms under Whitehall, an extension of those built during the last war. But that had been scrapped after two secret reports in the mid-Fifties had painted a horrific picture of the consequences of an H-bomb attack on Britain.

  Expert analysis of Whitehall’s ‘citadels’, as the bunkers were known, had revealed that they might not withstand a direct strike, and that a single explosion could also block their exits, entombing the Prime Minister and his advisers below ground. The boffins had also estimated that an attack on Britain with ten hydrogen bombs would turn much of the country into a radioactive wasteland, and kill or seriously injure sixteen million people – around a third of the population. Another thirteen million people, many of them suffering from contamination, would be imprisoned in their shelters for at least a week. Reading the reports, it was hard to see how the country would ever be able to recover.

  As a result, the plans had been changed so that if an attack seemed imminent, several days before the Four-Minute Warning led to ordinary members of the public uselessly shepherding their children into their feebly protected basements, the Cabinet, members of the royal family and senior members of the government, the military, the Service, Five and the scientific community would be evacuated to a 35-acre blast-proof bunker that had been built in the old limestone quarries in Corsham, Wiltshire, with a few hundred others retreating to underground operational headquarters around the country.

  But in ’63, Kim Philby defected to Moscow. He hadn’t been indoctrinated into the Corsham plan, but some feared he might nevertheless have got wind of it. If so, the Russians could wipe Britain off the map simply by aiming missiles at London and the bunker in Wiltshire. And so, in May ’68, a brand new plan had been put into place, known to only a handful of people.

  If it looked like a nuclear attack was imminent, instead of the ‘great and the good’ being whisked to Corsham, they would instead be split into several groups. RAF helicopters based at Little Rissington in Gloucestershire would fly to Whitehall and wait at the Horse Guards Parade for the Prime Minister and a couple of dozen others – including a few from the Service – and each group would be flown to a different location. I was earmarked to be taken to Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, to the maze of rooms built beneath it in the nineteenth century by the agoraphobic fifth Duke of Portland. The idea that central government would evacuate to Corsham had been kept in place as a cover story, a decoy to protect the new plan and to stop anyone looking for the PYTHON sites, as they had been codenamed.

  A thought crystallized in my mind. Despite the Service’s fears that Philby had blown Corsham, it seemed clear from Yuri’s questions that they did not know about it. If so, that
meant that all the money and effort to create the PYTHON plan had been a waste. I had decided not to tell them when I learned about it last spring, and I certainly didn’t want to tell them now. Apart from having lost any vestige of belief in their cause, I didn’t want to be responsible for starting a nuclear war.

  But I could tell them about Corsham, which was no longer in use, and make it seem very convincing – I had learned about it in ’65, and had even been given a tour of the place. But before I answered, I needed to find out why were they asking. Were they planning to attack the West, and if so, why?

  ‘The locations of the bunkers are not our primary concern,’ said Yuri, smiling, and I wondered for an eerie moment whether he had managed to plant a bug in my mind. ‘We’re more interested in the procedures. How long would it take for a second strike to be launched following an order from the American President, for example?’

  A cold, empty feeling crept through me. I didn’t know the precise timing of the Americans’ chain of command, but I knew that in Britain’s case HMS Resolution and two other submarines were on constant patrol with American Polaris missiles aboard, and that they were primed to be launched within fifteen minutes of an order from the Prime Minister. But that was in the event of a decision to retaliate. Yuri had asked me about a second strike: in other words, if the Americans launched a first strike on the Soviet Union and then wanted to deliver a follow-up attack. I could only think of a few reasons to ask such a question, and I didn’t like any of them.

  ‘Why do you want to know this?’ I said. ‘Is the country under attack?’

  Yuri glanced at Ivashutin, who in turn looked at Brezhnev. I kept silent, watching, waiting. They couldn’t get anything detailed out of me if they didn’t give me more information, and they’d gone to the trouble of bringing me here so presumably they wanted it. I suspected that protocol and habit made them reluctant to tell a foreigner what was going on, but it was absurd in this instance – it wasn’t as if I could tell anyone. As the moments passed, I thought I sensed this understanding make its way around the table.

  Finally, Brezhnev made a decision and nodded his head gently. Yuri took a deep breath and turned to me.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The Soviet Union is under attack.’

  I felt it like a blow to the stomach. Was it possible? It couldn’t be nuclear, I realized at once. They wouldn’t have spent the time bringing me here in that case, let alone doing so above ground. On the other hand, if it wasn’t nuclear, what the hell were we doing in this bunker?

  ‘What sort of attack?’ I said, the words forming before my mind had even processed them.

  Brezhnev tapped his cigarette against the nearest ashtray, and nodded again.

  Yuri took another breath. ‘The Americans launched a chemical attack on Paldiski and Hiiumaa yesterday,’ he said. ‘We are preparing our response.’

  Paldiski and Hiiumaa were both in Estonia, facing the Gulf of Finland. The entire area was closed off to the public as it was home to dozens of military and naval installations: Hiiumaa and the surrounding islands were rumoured to be home to sizeable artillery batteries, while Paldiski was a major nuclear submarine base. I looked around the room, taking in the collection of grey faces, the ticking clocks, the portraits on the wall and the plume of smoke spiralling from Brezhnev’s ghastly cigarette.

  ‘What sort of chemical attack?’ I said.

  ‘A serious one. Over a dozen have been seriously injured – two men have already died. We have sent specialized troops to the area, as well as a team of experts to investigate. In addition,’ – he glanced at the wall with the clocks – ‘about ten hours ago our radars picked up eighteen B-52 Stratofortress bombers shortly after they had taken off from two American Air Force bases, Fairchild in Washington and March in California. We have analysed the take-off patterns and fuel consumption to calculate the weight of the aircraft, and have concluded that they are armed with thermonuclear weapons.’

  I stared at him, and then took in the import of the large map on the table. There were lines running all over it: trajectories.

  ‘Where are they now?’

  He gave a grim smile, perhaps satisfied that I was catching up to the severity of the situation.

  ‘They have been in a circling pattern for the past few hours, but now seem to be heading straight towards our eastern border. We also have reports that KC-135 aircraft have been deployed from Little Rock in Arkansas, and we believe they will meet up with the B-52s once they reach the coast of Canada.’

  ‘For in-air refuelling.’

  He nodded. ‘The B-52s are travelling at around 800 kilometres an hour, and if they continue on their current path we expect them to cross into our airspace in just under five hours from now. That is, at noon our time.’

  My first thought was that they must be part of a patrol. Back in the Fifties, the Americans had set up a system whereby they had a dozen nuclear-armed B-52s airborne around the clock, so that if the Soviets launched a surprise attack on their bases they would still be able to retaliate. But then I remembered that had changed. Early in ’66, a USAF B-52 carrying four H-bombs had collided with a Stratotanker during mid-air refuelling over the Mediterranean. One of the H-bombs had fallen into the sea and it had taken several weeks to find it, while two of the remaining three that had fallen on land had spilled enriched uranium and plutonium over a Spanish fishing village, and had cost millions to clear up. Then last year one of the B-52s had crashed very close to their own airbase in Greenland, detonating the primary units of its thermonuclear weapons but, very luckily, not triggering a nuclear reaction. As a result of these incidents, Washington had, understandably, discontinued the airborne patrols.

  So it couldn’t be that. What the hell could it be, then, other than preparations for an attack? In-air refuelling was a bloody risky manoeuvre – one shift in the wind or mistake at the controls could lead to a crash, and this time they might not be as lucky as they had been in Greenland. I remembered a report on their Castle Bravo test on the Micronesian islands back in ’54 saying that the explosion had been around 1,500 times more powerful than the atomic bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No wonder we were underground.

  ‘Have you used the hotline?’ I said. This was the direct telex connection between Washington and Moscow that had been set up in ’63 in the wake of the Cuban crisis so that the two superpowers could communicate about accidents or unexplained incidents and avert a potential disaster.

  ‘No,’ said Yuri. ‘We do not need to ask our enemies if they have attacked us – we already know they have. Use of the hotline would alert them of this, and that we plan to retaliate. We don’t plan to warn our enemies in advance – they did not warn us.’

  I nodded, dazed. I’d attended several meetings about the setting up of that hotline. But the difference between a hypothetical situation and a real one couldn’t be starker, and the logic of his reply was clear. The hotline only made sense if you suspected it was a mistake. If you had good reason to think you were under attack, it was counter-productive to use it. The hotline was a waste of time.

  ‘You say you have evidence that the injuries in Paldiski and Hiiumaa are caused by chemical weapons. But couldn’t this be a provocation from someone else – China, for example? Or an accident of some sort?’

  He shook his head briskly. ‘No doubt we were meant to conclude it was an accident, but there can no longer be any question of that. Several people have already been affected, and the toll is rising by the hour. As all the victims are crucial to our nuclear effort, and this has happened at precisely the same time that the United States has sent several nuclear-armed B-52s towards our border, it would seem foolish to see it as anything but deliberate, and that most likely it is part of preparations for a full-scale nuclear attack.

  ‘As for the Chinese, we have finally started negotiations in Peking, so we don’t think this is their doing. We already know that the Americans are using chemical agents in Vietnam, and this follows several other signals fro
m them in the last couple of weeks that they are at an advanced state of readiness, and may be preparing to launch an attack against us. We have observed increased naval activity in the Gulf of Aden, and our ambassador in Washington was recently informed by Nixon himself that the United States is prepared to take “drastic action” as a result of our support of the North Vietnamese if the peace talks in Paris do not advance.’

  ‘Have you talked to the North Vietnamese?’

  ‘They are not under our control. They want our arms and training but don’t listen to us if we try to interfere politically, as it is their war and they feel they know better. It seems Nixon has not taken this into account, and has decided he will attack us as a result.’

  ‘But why has he not just launched a strike, then? Why attack your bases in Estonia and make it look like an accident?’

  ‘Clearly, they have identified that many of our important military installations are located in this area and have decided to sabotage them in advance of a nuclear attack. The idea of making it look like an accident was presumably so that we would not be aware that it was a precursor to a nuclear strike. They must not have thought that we would rapidly be able to confirm the type of chemical used and therefore know it’s an attack. And, of course, by making us doubt that the incident is an attack, they hope to delay our retaliation.’

  ‘Yes, but even so—’ I stopped. ‘Hold on. You say you know what type of chemical is involved?’

  ‘Yes, our researchers have examined several of the patients and have determined that it is one not found in the Soviet Union. It is mustard gas, but a form of it we have never encountered.’

  I shivered, and a ripple of horror ran through me – a new form of mustard gas.

  I looked at the map, and quickly located Paldiski on it.

  Christ Almighty.

  ‘It’s not a chemical attack,’ I said. ‘It’s a leak.’