The Burning Time (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 5)

by James Philip

  Interrogating Andropov before he was disappeared had been Ceaușescu’s idea. Gheorghe did not need to know about it, not officially. Just minutes before the Troika’s plane had touched down at Otopeni Air Base his old friend and mentor had lost his nerve. If Andropov confessed to being the leader of Krasnaya Zarya they would settle for putting a bullet in his head and dumping the body in a shallow grave out in the forest.

  Ceaușescu had put Gheorghe’s sentimentality down to his illness and had decided to treat Andropov like any other enemy of the state. The Securitates had softened him up as they would have softened up any prisoner. Ceaușescu had let them get on with it; they knew their jobs. And then without a question being asked the Russian had started confessing to something which had sounded so bizarre that it could not possibly be true.

  The Soviet Union still existed beyond the Urals.

  Not as a mere shadow of its former glory but as a diminished yet still intact state capable of and indeed, planning to make a new war against the British and the Americans. What Andropov described as large ‘strategic reserve’ forces had survived the Cuban Missiles War intact. The Russians still had missiles, tanks, jet fighters, ships and tens of thousands of soldiers; all it lacked was the reserves of fuel and ammunition necessary for a ‘long war’.

  A long war?

  What was that about?

  According to Andropov the High Command moved from city to city although the capital of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was in a pre-war bunker complex near Chelyabinsk.

  Krasnaya Zarya was just the ‘first wave’.

  Krasnaya Zarya was expendable; so expendable that the Red Army planned to crush it before it launched the coming ‘hammer blow’.

  Andropov had boasted that ‘the Red Army will roll right over whatever is left of Krasnaya Zarya’.

  Andropov had said the British were finished.

  The British had been driven out of the Eastern Mediterranean. The Yankees had been humiliated. Where had the Yankees been when their friends in Greece and Turkey needed them most? Elsewhere in the region nobody trusted the Yankees or the British to save them, they were alone. Sooner or later the Egyptians or the Persians would turn on the weakened British, safe in the knowledge that the Americans no longer had the stomach to stand behind their ‘old NATO ally’. One more kick and the fallacy of British Imperial power would ‘tumble down around Queen Elizabeth’s ears’.

  Maskirovka!

  Andropov had repeated the term time and again.

  Maskirovka!

  Something masked? Smoke and mirrors; military deception? Keeping one’s enemy guessing, persuading one’s enemy to look in entirely the wrong place? The art of catching one’s enemy unawares when the main blow falls?

  Krasnaya Zarya had successfully drawn the attention of the British, the Americans, and of the whole World to Greece, the Aegean and the Anatolian plains of Turkey. However, something had gone wrong and Krasnaya Zarya had run amok; Red Army, Air Force and Naval units had had to abandon their own war missions to put down the enemy within. Krasnaya Zarya had subverted whole formations of the Red Army, seized control of nuclear weapons, and risked drawing down a devastating, annihilating second atomic blitz on the Mother Country. Thus, the grand plan was temporarily stalled, on hold while, from the Caucasus to the Adriatic the full might of the Soviet Armed Forces was deployed to mercilessly crush Krasnaya Zarya.

  The grand plan was called Operation Nakazyvat. Operation Chastise. The scale and the breadth, vision and ambition of the strategic masterstroke described by Yuri Andropov as the fists and booted feet pummelled his twitching body, and he jerked spastically from the repeated electric shocks administered via electrodes attached to his genitals and his ears, had taken away Nicolae Ceaușescu’s breath.

  The necessity to crush Krasnaya Zarya had caused Phase Two of Operation Nakazyvat to be delayed. The Securitates had tried to find out how long the great strike was likely to be delayed. Unfortunately, Andropov did not know; he was a KGB apparatchik, not a solder and everything was strictly need to know. He guessed that Phase Two would be put back at least a month. Perhaps, five to six weeks. A lot of fuel and carefully horded munitions had been wasted by the Navy, and the elite paratrooper and tank brigades redeployed to put down the Krasnaya Zarya ‘counter revolutionaries’. A lot of men, ships and aircraft were now in the wrong place.

  According to Andropov a man with an odd sounding, possibly Armenian, name would have to ‘sort out the mess’ before he gave the go ahead to start Phase Two.

  Colonel-General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian.

  Yes, definitely an Armenian...

  Andropov said he was the best man for the job. Apparently, back in 1956 he had been the man who led the 8th Mechanized Army into the streets of Budapest to ‘extinguish’ the Hungarian uprising.

  It seemed that Colonel-General Babadzhanian commanded two Soviet Armies; 3rd Caucasus Tank Army, and the 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army, respectively assembling around the bombed cities of Volgograd – formerly Stalingrad – and Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. Both Armies had been stripped of their elite infantry shock regiments, these had been sent to ensure that Krasnaya Zarya’s assaults halted on the pre-planned stop lines in the Trans-Caucasus region, that those lines were held securely, and that the ‘war in the west did not escalate out of control’.

  Andropov was very insistent that Phase Two would be jeopardised if the ‘war in the west sucked away too many troops’ from the ‘southern push’. The Soviet Union had tens of thousands of soldiers; but not an unlimited supply of trained battle ready ‘replacements’. Conscripts were fine for manning trenches or distracting enemy fire from the ‘real professionals’. But for the tactics of ‘lightning mechanized warfare’ green conscripts were useless.

  Blitzkrieg! He had been talking about Blitzkrieg!

  ‘What do you mean? The southern push?’

  In between spitting out teeth and pissing and shitting himself, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, Director of the KGB in the Sverdlovsk Oblast, had told his interrogators everything.

  ‘The push south to the Indian Ocean!’

  While Soviet forces renewed the offensive in the east – on land in Greece and Yugoslavia, and at sea in the Mediterranean to ‘pin’ British and American forces down - two tank armies would strike south from the Caucasus, smashing down through northern Persia following the courses of the Tigris and the Euphrates through Iraq to the warm waters of the Arabian Gulf at Basra...

  Somebody raised Nicolae Ceaușescu’s fever-ravaged head and tipped cool water into his mouth.

  Most of the moisture slurped and dribbled down his chin.

  He collapsed back onto the lice-ridden straw mattress on which he had lain, helplessly soiling himself the last two days as the fever had wracked his shivering body. Now when men came into the room they leaned over him, and talked among themselves as if he was invisible.

  “We have to do something about his leg...”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “It’s turning black and it stinks bad!”

  “I’m not going to cut the fucking thing off!”

  “He’ll die if we don’t.”

  “What do we cut it off with? A couple of the guys have got hunting knives?”

  A third voice: “We haven’t got any anaesthetic.”

  “Tip some of that rot-gut ouzo down his throat.”

  “What if it makes him go blind?”

  “If he goes blind at least he won’t notice we cut off his fucking leg!”

  The voices were far away and Nicolae Ceaușescu did not know who they were talking about. His body convulsed, his thoughts twisted. What was nightmare? What was reality?

  Krasnaya Zarya...

  If only he could tell people in the West what he knew about Krasnaya Zarya...

  If only...

  “Did the bastard just say something?” A gruff voice growled.

  “Something about that fucking Russian, I think.”

  Ther
e was a harsh, barking laugh. “Andropov?”

  “That’s the one. He cried like a baby before we even got started!”

  “If we’re going to do something about his leg we have to do it now,” another man decided angrily. “We’ll need more people to hold the bastard down.”

  Sometime later a blinding light stabbed into Ceaușescu’s eyes, his head was raised, his jaw held open. Instantly he was choking on a metallic, stinging, burning liquid filling his mouth.

  They were trying to murder him!

  They were pouring battery acid down his throat...

  Blackness, nothingness.

  His head was ringing and he was gagging, literally on something tightly tied between his teeth.

  The pain was distant, but soon near.

  Like a red hot branding iron searing his bare flesh.

  And somebody nearby was screaming.

  It was a dreadful, keening animal cry of agony,

  It was several seconds before he realised the animalistic shriek was his and soon afterwards, mercifully, he lost consciousness.

  Chapter 21

  Wednesday 26th February 1964

  The Citadel, Mdina, Malta

  “I hoped I would find you here,” Arkady Pavlovich Rykov called while he was several steps away from the woman. He had not meant to surprise her but she still started in alarm. Clara Pullman had been staring into the distance, her eyes focused on the faraway great red dome of the Church of the Assumption of our Lady, St Mary. She had mentioned to Marija Calleja that she would like to learn more about Malta – practically everything on the island seemed too enchanting to be true – and her young friend had taken her Mosta yesterday. It had been a lovely afternoon; she had escaped her own preoccupations and Marija had briefly escaped the escalating preparations for her forthcoming wedding. Clara knew very little about the Maltese way of getting married, having assumed it was simply very, well, Catholic. Poor Marija’s nuptials seemed to be turning into a state wedding with a cast of hundreds, perhaps, thousands. The Times of Malta had run a front page feature about her with a quarter page picture – of Marija looking positively seraphic – with a blow by blow account of the factors determining the whys and wherefores of every aspect of the actual wedding ceremony. Marija had wanted something private in a chapel near to where she lived in Sliema, ideally in the small church in which she had worshipped her whole adult life but that was impossible because so many people wanted to attend, and the politics involved in marrying the son of the Commander-in-Chief were positively Byzantine.

  Until two days ago Marija had been at her wits end before she learned that the Metropolitan Archbishop of the Roman Archdiocese of Malta had written to her parents and to the father of the groom, graciously offering the Cathedral of St Paul at Mdina to the ‘happy couple’ on Saturday 7th March, with the service to commence at one o’clock that day ‘war exigencies permitting’. This was the happiest of outcomes – St Catherine’s Hospital for Women was situated within yards of the Cathedral – and ensured that the wedding would be ‘a true carnival’. All this Marija had confided to Clara on their afternoon out, cementing the foundations of a new friendship that the older woman, in her present situation, craved.

  Latterly, Clara’s life had become a very lonely, dangerous thing. She was mentally exhausted by constantly having to pretend to be somebody and something that she had not been for many years, and hoped never to be again. Meeting Arkady Rykov’s dull-eyed gaze she prayed he did not see straight through her.

  She cleared her throat genteelly.

  “Doctor Seiffert told me that you called yesterday when I was away from the Citadel,” Clara informed the man, her emotions roiling just beneath her carefully manufactured mask of equanimity.

  “I’ve missed you.” Arkady Pavlovich Rykov was dressed in a lightweight, somewhat creased brown suit. He wore no tie, and had about him a down at heel look. Today he did not want to be noticed or remembered, he was a master of losing himself in a crowd, merging with the background, becoming invisible unless a searcher looked him directly in the eye.

  “I shouldn’t have just moved out. That was, well,” Clara shrugged, suddenly feeling a little cold, “not fair.”

  Rykov shrugged, pursed his lips.

  “Do you know the first thing Lavrentiy Beria told me?” The KGB defector posed rhetorically.

  Clara shook her head.

  “Never tell somebody a thing that you don’t need to tell them,” the man went on, stepping up to the edge of the chest high rampart to see where she had been looking when he disturbed her.

  Clara stood beside him, avoiding physical contact.

  He had told her his darkest secrets and much later, after she had stopped being afraid; she had no longer felt many of the things she had felt for him before. Where once there had been devotion, what she had taken for love, there was an emotional void called Arkady Pavlovich Rykov. She thought she had loved him when she had not even known what his name was, she had thought she had loved him when he had almost got her killed several times, and she had tried to love him after she had learned who he was and discovered the darkest corners of his past life. Oddly, she had not stopped loving him when she witnessed him attack another man like a wild animal; it was only when he confessed he had tortured and killed women in cold blood that the part of her that had still loved him had died. He had confronted her with his evil because he had had to tell somebody before it destroyed him, consuming him from within like some excoriating poison; knowing that even as he confessed his sins that he might lose her forever. She was safe before she learned his secrets; now she was living on borrowed time.

  “Marija took me to Mosta yesterday,” Clara said distractedly. “I think she saw how miserable I was and she wanted to cheer me up. Neither of us was needed until the evening so we jumped on a bus and off we went.” Nobody at the Hospital looked at her as if she was a fading courtesan and although she had forgotten practically everything she had learned in her training at Bart’s Hospital in London just after the 1945 war, everybody was helpful, considerate, understanding without her having to say a word. “We walked around the Church of the Assumption of our Lady. We sat a while. We said our prayers, or at least, Marija did. For somebody who is so sensible and practical, she is very spiritual. I rather envy her that.”

  When she had not been taking time out to genuflect, meditate, or to pray, Marija had babbled and gossiped like a schoolgirl. The magnificent dome of the Church of the Assumption of our Lady, known locally either as the ‘Rotunda of Malta’ or the ‘Mosta Dome’ was one hundred and twenty-two feet across, making it either the third or the fourth biggest unsupported dome in the World, according to Marija. To bear the weight of the huge dome the church, which was consecrated in 1871, had thirty feet thick masonry walls. The German Luftwaffe had once – inadvertently it was believed because the Maltese were a forgiving people – attempted to destroy the church. In a day light raid on 9th April 1942 while over three hundred parishioners waited to celebrate early evening mass two bombs had struck the building; a 50-kilogram bomb that had bounced off, and a 500-kilogram device which had penetrated the dome and come to rest among the shocked congregation. Miraculously, the bomb had not exploded and after priests had shepherded their flock, none of whom had suffered any injuries in the raid to safety, a bomb disposal team had removed the offending bomb and dumped it out at sea.

  Arkady Rykov viewed her thoughtfully. The former KGB man who had been her lover for most of the last year was silent.

  “If we stayed together,” Clara said, in a virtual whisper, “deep down I would always be afraid of you.”

  Arkady Rykov digested this.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “You should go now.”

  The man made no attempt to move.

  “The British think I lied to them about Red Dawn,” he informed Clara, dispassionately. “British Intelligence was so thoroughly penetrated before the war there are men, and probably women, who will bring me down if they can
. That is the way of things.”

  “What are you telling me this, Arkady?”

  The former KGB man chuckled grimly.

  “In case we never speak again, my love.”

  Clara watched the man walk away, salty moisture blurring her vision. She turned, sniffed back her tears and looked again at the marvellous vista of the island stretched out beneath the walls of the Citadel from her eagle aerie viewpoint hundreds of feet above sea level. She stared sightlessly; unaware of the time passing. Presently, gathering clouds scudding across the archipelago from the north-west covered the sun and the breeze became biting, chilling. Shivering, Clara came down from the walls and began to make her way the short distance back to the Hospital where Margo had given her use of the top floor room next to Marija’s.

  Margo Seiffert was a strange woman; so tough and yet so protective. It was as if she understood that Clara was bruised and sad, and had automatically taken her under her wing. It began to rain as she reached out to pull the bell handle to the hospital’s main doors onto St Paul’s Square. Glancing up for no reason she caught movement at the edge of her peripheral vision, half-turned her head and saw Peter Christopher and Marija sheltering in the portico of the Cathedral. The lovers did not notice her as she disappeared into the hospital.

  “You are not angry?” Marija asked for the third time.

  “About the big wedding, no!” Peter Christopher said for the third time, adding emphasis and quiet vehemence to his reassurance.

  “The Archbishop wishes to preside during the ceremony,” Marija sighed, finally satisfied that he meant what he said, “but Father Dominic from the Church of St John’s in Sliema will assist him. I have known Father Dominic since I was this high,” she explained, lowering the flat of her right hand to approximately the level of her knees. “But you already know that...”

  That was the thing; they had been carrying on a fourteen year long conversation – letter by letter – and they had few secrets one from the other. The more familiar they became with the physical reality of actually being together, face to face, the more they realised that most of the things young lovers normally talked about was old ground, old news.