The Dark Chronicles

by Jeremy Duns

  *

  My eyes were stinging from the lack of sleep but all my senses bristled as I drifted through the silent world, staring out through the small window of the facepiece. Shoals of ghostly white fish flapped around me, their eyes and the tips of their fins glowing eerily, and I longed to reposition the mouthpiece, as one edge of it was cutting into my gums. It took me over two hours to find the boat, by which time my legs were exhausted from kicking and my arms felt numb. It was not quite on the shoreline, but in the stretch of islets leading into it. I remembered Templeton’s words: ‘It should be relatively easy to get to.’ Yes, it had been – if you weren’t the one doing the diving.

  The U-boat looked vast, and as though it had been there for years rather than a month. Seaweed had already begun to wrap itself around the conning tower, and several inches were already buried in drifted sand. I approached it very slowly: Templeton had told me it could carry fourteen torpedoes and up to twenty-six mines. It looked to have been split roughly into two parts, with most of the damage in the middle section.

  I swam past the gun deck and then floated down towards where I thought the main storeroom should be. The whole section was scrunched from the damage, but there was a narrow gap in the main hatch and, with some difficulty, I managed to haul it open and swim through.

  It wasn’t the storeroom, but the crew’s quarters. The men were already starting to bloat, but I could see that some of their hands and chests looked like they were rotting away, and realized with a fright that they were burns, and that the mustard gas canisters must have leaked. Templeton had told me I had to obtain the canisters by any means, but we hadn’t discussed what would happen if my only way of doing so would involve coming into contact with their contents, which could be fatal. I cursed myself for being so intimidated by his briefing that I hadn’t asked such a basic question, but it was too late for that now.

  I turned away from the sight of the men, and as I did I saw the canisters. There looked to be twenty or thirty of them: large steel drums with ridges around the centre. I could see where the lids of a few had come away and a yellowish-brown liquid had started to seep out. The operation was a bust. There was no rescuing any of this for Templeton – it was too bloody dangerous. But perhaps I could secure the place so that the Soviets wouldn’t be able to get hold of the stuff either? I looked around and saw that several lengths of steel piping had fallen away from the walls. I leaned down carefully and picked one up. Could I block off the hatch? I looked towards it, and my stomach seized at the sight.

  The hatch was closed.

  I quickly swam towards it, willing myself to breathe normally and keep calm. The currents must have swung it shut after I’d swam through, and it now seemed to be completely jammed. I shoved my shoulder against it, and it buckled slightly – but stayed put. On the third shove, when it still didn’t open, I realized I was going to die. I was shut at the bottom of the Baltic with these corpses, and before too long would become one myself. All I could think was how unfair it was that my life should end here. I hadn’t experienced anything yet – I’d never even been in love. I kicked my legs at the hatch in a final frantic gesture, and the hinge moved forward and caught a current, and I rushed through the tiny space before it sealed behind me again, slamming shut finally on the occupants of U-745.

  I didn’t have the canisters, but I was free. Free – and alive.

  IV

  October 1969, Moscow

  I shivered at the memory of the cold water and the dead eyes of the crewmen. I had tried to banish thoughts of the operation for years, although it had occasionally featured in my nightmares. My brief time in Finland had given me my first glimpse of a world in which we were as ruthless as our enemies and were already betraying our allies. It was also a source of personal shame: I had failed to complete the operation, and had killed a man to boot, although I had justified the latter to myself as being a matter of my life or his. I now wondered if some repressed feelings of guilt about Smythe had eased the Soviets’ recruitment of me a few months later. Possibly – but I would probably have succumbed to Anna’s charms anyway.

  I had worried how to break the news to Templeton, but in the event he hadn’t seemed overly concerned. He’d listened patiently to my debriefing, then asked a few questions, mainly about the precise position of the hatch when I’d left it. He wanted to know, of course, if it was firmly shut so that nobody else would be able to get in. I assured him this was the case, and persuaded myself it was, too, although a nagging doubt came to me in my dreams in the following weeks that it had not fully closed behind me.

  He told me that Smythe was certainly an NKVD man, as there was nobody of that name at the Legation in Stockholm, and told me to put it out of my mind. ‘They may still be our allies technically,’ he said, ‘but make no mistake – for all intents and purposes, they are our enemies now. He threatened to compromise your mission, and would certainly have tried to shoot you had the positions been reversed. Indeed, it sounds as though he was about to. You did the right thing – I would have done the same.’ I handed over von Trotha’s orders, and was dismissed. He never mentioned the operation to me again.

  I had stayed on in Helsinki for a few more weeks, but then the Soviets entered Berlin and everything started happening very fast. I travelled to Stockholm to see Mother, this time taking an aeroplane, but it was a wasted journey, as she had simply stared through me with a blank gaze, drool spilling grotesquely from her mouth. On returning to Helsinki, Templeton pulled me in to his office and told me I was wanted back in London. I took the next flight from the airport, landing in a bank of fog. I spent a couple of weeks kicking my heels in Baker Street and wondering what I was supposed to be doing, before I was handed a coded cable from agent 2080 – Father – in which he requested I join him immediately at a farmhouse ten miles outside Lübeck, in the British Zone of Germany.

  That operation had eventually brought me here, to this depressing conference room beneath Moscow. The men seated around me had listened in chilly silence as I had described my actions in 1945, but it didn’t take long for them to respond. Suslov was the first to speak, and he addressed himself to Yuri.

  ‘Is this your promised breakthrough?’ he said with undisguised contempt. ‘I am unimpressed. Why should we believe anything this man says? Of course he will argue that this is an accident, in order to stop us from attacking the West. In this situation, his loyalties aren’t with us. He’s useless – worse than Philby.’

  That was interesting: they had already asked Philby. It made sense he hadn’t been much help, as it had been years since he’d been involved in this sort of discussion in London, and by most accounts he was now a drunken wreck of a man – not that I was a shining example. But it put my presence here in a new, rather more unpleasant light: it seemed that it had been Yuri’s brainwave to summon me, and it wasn’t proving a popular decision.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said to Suslov, and he swivelled to look at me. ‘It would take a lot for me to argue that you should launch a nuclear attack on the West, but it’s got nothing to do with patriotism. Nobody can win that war.’

  ‘If I may, General Secretary,’ broke in Yuri, ‘it seems that this man’s testimony may provide some of the answers we seek. He has told us that as a member of British intelligence he was sent to Finland to capture German chemical weapons at the end of the war, so that they could be used against us after it. As it seems that those very same chemical weapons are now being used against us, can it be plausible that the West is not involved? Surely the most likely scenario is that the British have returned to this sunken submarine and retrieved the mustard gas.’

  I took a breath to calm myself. Had my recounting of my operation in Åland in 1945 just made Britain a target for a nuclear strike?

  ‘Nobody knew the location of the U-boat apart from me and my immediate superior,’ I said. ‘And he is dead.’

  ‘But he will have filed a report,’ said Yuri, his forefingers pressed against his chin. ‘As a
result of your defection to us, your old colleagues in London will have investigated every document connected to your career, I think. Presumably they found a report on this from 1945, and decided to act on it.’

  I stared at him. Could that have happened? He was right that they would have searched through everything. Could they have dug up reports Templeton had written for SOE in 1945? It was possible – they would certainly have been looking through his files. But most of SOE’s files had been destroyed after the war, and it was hard enough even to find a Service file from those days. I thought of the canisters again, and of the liquid slowly seeping from them.

  ‘The Service doesn’t operate like that,’ I said. ‘If they had retrieved the mustard gas, they wouldn’t have attacked your nearest submarine base with it. Nobody in the West has any interest in provoking a nuclear conflict.’

  Ivashutin, the GRU head, gave a laugh as dry as a lizard’s cough. ‘Come, what sort of fools do you take us for?’

  I turned to face him. ‘I’m quite serious. The possibility of a surprise attack has been discussed, naturally – it’s raised every few years, usually by one of the more belligerent generals, and usually when you lot have done something that annoys us. Then the call goes up: “Why don’t we just hit the Russians, hard and fast?” But wiser heads always prevail. The relevant experts at NATO have calculated that a first strike would not be enough to disable you completely, and would simply result in you striking back. Until we come to a point where one side’s forces seriously outweigh the other, the logic of deterrence still holds. But even if you don’t subscribe to that view, this is clearly an accident – just look at the distances.’

  I pulled the map on the table nearer to me and turned it to face Ivashutin. ‘The U-boat sank here. Here are Paldiski and Hiiumaa. They’re less than fifty miles away. It’s obvious that the gas has leaked from the submarine and the currents have carried it to the shores of these bases, just as they carried Captain von Trotha’s body.’

  Ivashutin smiled. ‘Or perhaps that was what we were meant to think. After all, your former colleagues in London know that you are in Moscow and are likely to tell us all this. Our bases are heavily fortified: leaking chemical weapons into the water nearby is an ingenious way of breaching the security.’

  ‘What if he is right, though?’ said a new voice, and I scanned the table to locate it – Andropov, the KGB chief. ‘What if the Americans are simply conducting an exercise with the B-52s, and the incidents in Paldiski and Hiiumaa are accidental?’

  ‘All of them occurring at the same time?’ said Brezhnev. ‘That seems very unlikely.’

  Andropov switched on an obsequious smile. ‘Indeed, General Secretary. But it may still be the case. Are we sure we want to risk the consequences if Comrades Ivashutin and Proshin are wrong in their assessment? If the West is really about to launch a surprise attack on us, what is their motive?’

  Yuri’s jaw muscles showed through his cheeks as he struggled to stay calm. ‘Perhaps they feel sure they will be able to survive and win a protracted nuclear conflict,’ he said carefully.

  Ivashutin nodded. ‘Yes, or perhaps they have underestimated our capability to retaliate. Perhaps putting a man on the moon has made them think they are invincible.’

  Nobody laughed, and I understood it wasn’t supposed to be a joke. So the Americans must have finally pulled it off since my arrival here, the great journey finally realized. I remembered last year’s INVALUABLE exercise in Whitehall with a chill. Its imagined scenario to trigger a nuclear conflict had been that hawks in the Kremlin had been emboldened by placing a man on the moon. Now that event had apparently taken place, but it was the Americans who had done it. Could it be that hawks in Washington, newly elevated by the glory of beating the Soviets to the moon, had got hold of Nixon and persuaded him that a surprise strike was achievable? It was unthinkable, surely.

  But there were nuclear-armed B-52s heading towards the Soviet border.

  ‘My department takes the view that the West wants us to follow precisely your logic, Yuri Vladimirovich,’ Ivashutin was saying. ‘We think that this is a surprise attack that is designed to destroy us through our own uncertainty over whether or not we should retaliate. If we live to survive this, perhaps we should consider such a strategy ourselves.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ said Brezhnev. ‘All of you.’

  The room hushed immediately. The GRU and KGB hated each other’s guts. They were wholly separate agencies, with competing structures in Moscow and embassies around the world. Both operated within and outside the Soviet Union, but the KGB spent most of its time wading in the weeds of individual espionage operations while the GRU was generally concerned with the big picture, including the biggest of all, the threat of an attack on the Soviet Union. This was the GRU’s case, but from the way Andropov was speaking he appeared to have Brezhnev’s ear more than Ivashutin.

  This was peculiar, because Ivashutin was an old pal of Brezhnev’s, and had been handpicked by him to head the GRU after Serov had been dismissed in ’61 following the discovery that Penkovsky was working for the Service and CIA. Perhaps there was still some residual stain on the GRU’s reputation as a result. Until that point, it had been almost invisible to the outside world, but Penkovsky had given the West a mass of information, some of which, I had discovered on becoming Head of Soviet Section, had helped avert nuclear war during the Cuban crisis.

  There was no love lost between Andropov and Ivashutin. As I knew from personal experience, the KGB had recently sabotaged a major GRU operation in Nigeria – and presumably Andropov had been behind that.

  ‘Is this possible?’ Brezhnev said, addressing Yuri. ‘Could it be that the events at these bases are the result of a chemical leak?’

  ‘It is possible, General Secretary,’ he conceded, glaring at me. ‘But as you yourself pointed out, considering the Americans’ actions it would seem too great a coincidence—’

  ‘It is not a coincidence,’ I said. ‘It’s an accident, and one that was bound to happen sooner or later. The Baltic is strewn with volatile chemical weapons, as you well know, because many of them were dumped there by you.’

  ‘Is this true?’ said Brezhnev.

  ‘That was Zhukov’s doing, General Secretary,’ piped up Grechko. ‘He ordered the practice when he was in command of the administration in Germany after the Great Patriotic War. But that was not until ’47 or ’48, and if I recall correctly it was not done anywhere in this area, but near the islands of Gotland and Bornholm.’

  ‘It sounds like the sort of thing Zhukov would think up,’ Brezhnev said. ‘It’s as well he retired when he did.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Grechko, seizing the opportunity to take another kick at one of his predecessors. ‘But he was not alone in the mistake: the British, French and Americans also dumped chemical weapons in the Baltic. Occasionally, some come to the surface, but I think I’m right in saying that this has never happened anywhere near these particular bases.’

  Yuri nodded. ‘That is correct, esteemed comrade. This is confirmed in the latest report by the investigating scientists, who have never even encountered this type of mustard gas before. I have also never heard of any attempt by either the British or ourselves to obtain such a weapon.’

  ‘Someone notified your people in Helsinki about the U-boat captain in 1945,’ I said, ‘and they sent an agent out there to get to him. There will be a report on it in your files.’

  ‘We don’t have time to dig around in archives,’ said Brezhnev. ‘We must make a decision now.’ He pushed his chair back and walked to the wall behind him, staring at the false window as though it were a real one looking out on the skyline of Moscow. Habit, I supposed. ‘Comrade Grechko,’ he said finally, addressing himself to the wall. ‘What course of action do you advise?’

  Grechko didn’t hesitate. ‘As you know, General Secretary, we have just completed the “Zapad” war game. One of our conclusions was that the West would be foolish to engage in any sort of preliminary war
and would in reality be much more likely to defeat us with a surprise nuclear attack. It seems that they have come to the same conclusion. If they are indeed preparing to launch against us, I believe our best strategy is to launch our own attack before they do.’

  He used the word kontrapodgotovka, a counter-preparation strike that would disrupt the enemy’s first strike. But, of course, that assumed that the Americans were indeed planning a first strike.

  Brezhnev nodded.

  ‘If the Americans launch their weapons, how much notice will we have?’

  Grechko grimaced. ‘We estimate that our radars would detect the missiles between fifteen and seventeen minutes of them hitting their target, General Secretary.’

  ‘And how long will it take us to launch our missiles if I give the order to do so?’

  ‘The 8K84s do not have their warheads attached, General Secretary, and once they have been armed they need to be warmed up for a few hours before they can be launched. But once they are primed and warmed up, the Strategic Rocket Forces can launch within seconds of receiving your signal.’

  ‘Exactly how many hours does it take for the 8K84s to warm up once the warheads are attached?’

  ‘Three hours, General Secretary.’

  Brezhnev turned, and I saw that a pool of sweat had formed on his forehead. He drew a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and mopped at it unthinkingly.

  ‘Attach the warheads,’ he said.

  Grechko’s face flushed.

  ‘Right away, General Secretary.’

  He picked up the telephone nearest him, spoke into it for a few seconds and then replaced it.

  I stared at the men around me, dumbfounded by the mounting madness. From memory, 8K84 was the Soviet name for the SS-11 intercontinental ballistic missile. Grechko had used the phrase predvaritel’naya komanda on the telephone: that was the preliminary alert command, given to combat crews as a trigger to prepare nuclear weapons for the next order, the neposredstvennaya komanda, or direct command to launch.