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

  If he lived long enough he would marry that woman.

  Margaret Thatcher’s friends and detractors alike called her the Angry Widow. This she knew, and made no apologies for the veracity of the handle. She was ‘bloody angry’ about what had happened at the end of October 1962 and had never made any secret of the fact.

  An hour ago she had reiterated that British commanders in the field had ‘no authority whatsoever to independently deploy Arc Light’. Nonetheless, he had requested exactly that authority. The Angry Widow had not hesitated to slap him down. For all that they might be affianced – unofficially, secretly – and the unavoidable complications of their mutually shared and welcomed feelings one for the other, Margaret Thatcher had no intention of relinquishing her absolute control over Britain’s nuclear arsenal.

  It was the one thing she would not trust in his hands.

  ‘The trigger remains locked in my handbag, Julian,’ she had declared and he had known that there was no profit in arguing the matter further. The Angry Widow had spoken and that was that!

  Marija was smiling at him as if she was reading his mind.

  The oddest thing was that there was something about the slight, angelic presence of Marija Elizabeth Calleja that intimidated the fighting admiral in ways that Margaret Hilda Thatcher never had, nor ever would.

  Julian Christopher glanced to Margo Seiffert, with whom he had not quite contrived to have an affair many, many years ago and always rather regretted it. Margo was the third of the three uniquely extraordinary women he had encountered – in Margo’s case re-encountered after a gap of over a decade – since he had brought the bulk of the British Pacific Fleet back to home waters escorting the Operation Manna convoys. Those convoys had staved off famine and chronic fuel shortages in England; earned him his nation’s approbation and thanks, and placed him firmly within the concentric orbits of Margaret Thatcher, Margo Seiffert and now, Marija Calleja. Honestly and truly he did not know which of the three women; the feisty former US Navy Surgeon-Commander, the charismatic political saviour of his nation, or the seraphically composed Maltese girl who had triumphed over awful childhood injuries to unknowingly become a symbol of her island’s quest for freedom, confused and fascinated him the most.

  Like Marija, Margo Seiffert had obviously read a little of his discomfiture in his eyes. However, for the moment Marija had eyes only for the battered, blackened silhouette of the Battle class destroyer HMS Talavera as she bumped and ground gently against the liberally strewn tyres and fenders at the seaward end of Parlatorio Wharf.

  Chapter 4

  Monday 10th February 1964

  Otopeni Air Force Base, People’s Republic of Romania

  The only thing that worried Nicolae Ceaușescu was that his mentor and friend – insofar as in the high command of the People’s Republic of Romania any man could afford friends - Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej would fail to seize the day. The Dictator of Romania had the surviving figureheads of the old Soviet Empire in the palm of his hand, at his mercy. Ceaușescu was sweating; his pen was slippery in his fingers. He could hardly keep still. The moment was so full of previously undreamt of possibilities. Nicolae Ceaușescu could almost feel the power sparking from the extremities of his body. His excitement was an arousal of the most visceral kind. The moment was intensely erotic...

  All that needed to be done was to snatch up the telephone on the table and softly say a single word and it would begin.

  Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was distracted by exactly the same thought as he concentrated his attention on Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin, the man who seemed to be first among equals in the Soviet Troika which had responded to his ‘summons’ following Krasnaya Zarya’s unplanned, uncoordinated, and moronically executed nuclear strikes on the Greek, Italian, Yugoslavian, unaccountably on Egyptian targets, and insanely, upon the British forces in the Eastern Mediterranean and at Malta. Marshal of the Soviet Union, Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov sat to Kosygin’s left, and the brooding, reptile-eyed Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov at his right. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, the only other man in the bunker sat behind Chuikov, his face hidden in the shadows.

  Nicolae Ceaușescu tried to catch his fellow supernumerary’s eye and failed. It irked him that while he had thick Securitate-prepared files on the three members of the Troika, he knew next to nothing about Sakharov other than that he was some kind of ‘bomb’ scientist loosely attached to Kosygin’s personal staff.

  “So what is it to be?” Vasily Chuikov asked gruffly, his patience exhausted. “If you want me to drink Vodka until I piss my pants and for me to dance on the table say so now!”

  Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej half-smiled but it was a death mask kind of smile.

  “Stalin is dead, Comrade Marshal,” he retorted lowly.

  The old soldier guffawed and lit a foul-smelling cigarette. He had seen the tanks and armoured half-tracked troop carriers on the airfield perimeter road, and noted the hard-bitten look of the over-large ‘honour guard’ that had greeted the Troika on the tarmac. He had noted also the way the main runway had been blocked by more vehicles immediately the Troika’s aircraft had landed.

  “So is Marshal Krylov,” Chuikov grunted dispassionately.

  “Krylov?” The Dictator of Romania asked flatly.

  “Nikolai Ivanovich failed in his duty to safeguard the capital of the Motherland in the Cuban Missiles War,” Yuri Andropov interjected testily. “There was little he could have done to have stopped the Yankee rockets and bombs but as Commander of the Moscow Military Districts he could, and should have ensured that the appropriate civil defence protocols were in effect before the attack.”

  Nicolae Ceaușescu flinched. He wasn’t a man given to sentimentality, or for giving another man the benefit of the doubt, but there was something relentless and merciless in Andropov which gave him a very bad feeling about what would happen if Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was so unwise as to allow these people to walk out of this bunker alive.

  The Dictator of Romania did not respond.

  The silence dragged for several seconds.

  “And then,” Andropov continued, his voice dead pan and matter of fact, “Krylov allowed his people to try to get us all killed.”

  “His people?” Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej replied coldly. “You mean he allowed the Soviet personnel responsible for the care, maintenance and field deployment of a significant proportion of the viable surviving nuclear strike capability of our alliance to be seized and activated by the Krasnaya Zarya faction within your ranks?”

  Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had ignored Andropov and Chuikov to concentrate his spitting ire on the impassive face of Andrei Kosygin, who said nothing, knowing that his Romanian counterpart had not finished talking.

  “That would be the same Red Dawn faction that we demanded that you confronted and expunged from my territory.” Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was breathing hard, loudly asthmatic, veins pulsed at his temples. His fists were clenched on the table before him. “When the British and the Americans calculate the trajectories of the missiles your people fired at them they will discover that as many as half of them were launched from Romanian sovereign territory. The sacred soil of my land!”

  Alexei Kosygin nodded. “My sources inform me that you have already taken action against the terrorists responsible?”

  Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had ordered his troops to seize all Soviet nuclear weapons, technicians and support troops in Romania, to blockade all Soviet military formations in their bases and camps, to deny Romanian air space to Soviet aircraft and had mined the approaches to Constanta and other Romanian ports and harbours to stop Soviet vessels departing or entering his waters. In the unlikely event that the British and the Americans wanted to talk first and obliterate his country later; he had done everything he could think of to disassociate himself from the madness of the Krasnaya Zarya fanatics foisted upon him by the Troika.

  Nicolae Ceaușescu sighed, unsuccessfully veiling his irritation.

  At one level Ceaușescu perfectly understood his
mentor’s strategy but still, he entertained nagging doubts as to the efficacy of his tactics. He had known Gheorghe was unwell for some months. His cough had become more hacking, his complexion greyer and his once limitless energy, sadly diminished. At first he had wondered if it was simply the intolerable pressure of ensuring that Romania, a relatively untouched island of the old World surrounded by a seas of chaos and destruction, remained inviolate. But that was not it. Gheorghe and he were veterans of the old regime’s prisons and internment camps. They had survived those days hardened to withstand the harshest of trials. No, his old friend was very ill, probably ailing. In these post-apocalypse times disease quickly took a man, infection was remorseless, unforgiving and the stocks of modern drugs and medical equipment Party members had been able to get access to before the war were exhausted, lost, worn out. Once a man’s health began to decline it was only a matter of time. Now at the very moment Gheorghe needed to be at his strongest Ceaușescu was afraid he would falter. And then what would happen?

  That at least, was one question he knew the answer to; when Gheorghe was gone he would have to pick up the pieces.

  The Dictator of Romania gathered his breath before he wheezed a sour-faced retort in Andrei Kosygin’s face.

  “The Armed Forces of the People’s Republic and my Securitate have rounded up the leaders of the conspiracy. My instructions were to liquidate anybody who resisted arrest. Several of the ringleaders have been brought here to Otopeni. Mopping up operations against Soviet units sympathetic to Red Dawn continue. My forces have suffered heavy casualties in the last thirty-six hours and an attempt on my life was made as I travelled to this place. All logistical and technical operations in support of your forces on land, sea and in the air in the former territory of Bulgaria, and ongoing offensive actions in Yugoslavia and Greece have ceased. Until such time as the internal security situation has stabilized, your forces on those fronts will have to fend for themselves...”

  At this point the Dictator of Romania began to cough. The others waited as the spasms wracked his stocky body. Eventually, Ceaușescu put a hand on his friend’s shoulder and handed him a fresh handkerchief. Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej was spitting blood.

  “Gheorghe,” his long time protégé and since the Cuban Missiles War his ever present right hand man asked gently, “perhaps, if I might...”

  The older man gasped for air, nodded.

  Nicolae Ceaușescu was already on his feet.

  “I confess that I have little or no interest in the great game you gentlemen think that you are still playing, Comrades,” he confessed, “or in what role you believe that the Krasnaya Zarya hordes play in your twisted imaginary geopolitical chess game.”

  He stepped into the pool of light above the table.

  The Russians recognised the feral, calculating mind behind the cold eyes and understood instantly that the man with whom they had to deal was not a sick, angry old-school Marxist-Leninist but an utterly ruthless creature of the modern World. If they had had any doubts before now they were abruptly dispelled; the well of pity in Ceaușescu’s icy eyes was dry.

  Nicolae Ceaușescu and pity were strangers.

  Born the third child of an impoverished drunken, wife-beating despotic father in Scornicesti in the south of the country in 1918, he had run away from home at the age of eleven to live with his elder sister Niculina in Bucharest. Apprenticed to a shoemaker called Alexandru Săndulescu, an activist of the banned Communist Party, he had become a party member before his fifteenth birthday. His first arrest had been in 1933; in 1936 he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison. Thereafter, he had spent most of his late teens and twenties in one or other prison or internment camp. Fatefully, in 1943 at Târgu Jiu in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains he had shared a cell with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej; to whom he had quickly made himself indispensible. When the Red Army liberated Romania he had been appointed Secretary of the Union of Communist Youth. With his connections to Gheorghe and his impeccable prison faction antecedents he had risen rapidly in the Party after the 1945 war. He had swiftly become a major-general in the reformed Romanian Army; Gheorghe’s deputy Minister of Defence and most reliable ally on the Central Committee of the Party, by 1954 he was a full member of the Romanian Politburo and by the time of the October War the man most likely to succeed Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. However, nothing in politics was straightforward or in any way as easy as it subsequently seemed to outside observers. In the People’s Republic of Romania no man could advance far, let alone scale the rarefied heights to the apex of power without assiduously cultivating his own standing in the Party, and most important, assuring himself of the backing of the Securitate. No man who worried about where the bodies were buried was ever going to rise to lead his people. Nor in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s opinion did any man who entertained such qualms have any right to so do.

  He patted his old friend on the shoulder.

  “Yes, do it,” the ailing Dictator of Romania murmured.

  Nicolae Ceaușescu picked up the handset: “Krasnaya Zarya!”

  He replaced black Bakelite receiver and stood back.

  And waited.

  The members of the Troika exchanged quizzically comedic glances; and then as the first burst of automatic fire reverberated dully around the upper levels of the bunker complex, and bullets ricocheted off the two-inch thick armoured blast doors to the room in which they sat, their frowns turned to scowls.

  The shooting went on for several minutes, its intensity soon diminishing until there were gaps of several seconds between eruptions of small arms fire. Within less than fifteen minutes only the occasional single shot was heard, distantly, muffled. During all this time the two factions in the bunker stared at each other; as if they were patiently waiting to discover whose champions had won the day even though there was never any doubt on that score.

  The Troika had brought a twenty man protection squad, some of the junior members of the hastily assembled delegation carried hand guns, otherwise the Russians were lambs to the slaughter; overwhelmingly outnumbered and out-gunned by the Romanian wolves descending upon the fold.

  Presently, the telephone rang.

  Nicolae Ceaușescu picked it up: “This is the Deputy First Secretary Speaking. What is your report?”

  The voice at the other end of the line returned: “Phase One is complete, Comrade First Deputy Secretary.”

  “Good. Proceed to Phase Two.”

  Nicolae Ceaușescu smiled tight-lipped.

  “Certain preparations need to be completed before any of us can leave this room,” he explained. He might have been discussing a football match or the fluctuating production figures at the Timisoara Collective Tractor Factory.

  He drew up a chair beside Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.

  “What has just happened?” Andrei Sakharov asked, unable to stop himself jumping to his feet. He approached the table, rested his hands on it and leaned towards the two Romanians.

  Nicolae Ceaușescu gave him a coolly dismissive look.

  Vasily Chuikov lit another cigarette, growling like a bear.

  “The bastards just liquidated all the people who came west with us from Chelyabinsk and probably,” he raised a curious eyebrow in Ceaușescu’s general direction, seeking confirmation, “every Russian they could round up in Bucharest and the surrounding countryside.”

  Nicolae Ceaușescu shrugged.

  “But that’s monstrous!” Protested Sakharov.

  Yuri Andropov stirred. He had seemed lost in thought while the shooting was going on. He guffawed unkindly.

  “Coming from you, Academician Sakharov, the brain behind the Third Idea,” he observed sarcastically, “that is a bit rich, don’t you think?”

  Andrei Sakharov recoiled, stepped back from the table as if a Cobra had unfurled its hood in front of him.

  Nicolae Ceaușescu was piqued because he felt he ought to know what Andropov was talking about. He had heard the phrase the ‘Third Idea’ before, but could not tie it down and it q
uickly threatened to become a distraction.

  “The Third Idea?” He demanded.

  “It is the name the people in Moscow gave the project to build the hydrogen bomb,” Sakharov told him. “This is madness.” He waved his arms like erratic disjointed windmill sails. He glared around the poorly lit bunker in which so much condensation had formed on the walls and ceiling that water drops were periodically exploding on the table and the shoulders of the six men. “Don’t you understand anything?”

  “What is there to understand, Comrade Sakharov?” The question came quietly from the lips of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, who was gradually recovering from his earlier coughing fit.

  “This is insane! What do you think you are doing?”

  This brought forth no response.

  The physicist went on.

  “We are too weak to fight among ourselves. The only hope for us is if we husband all our collective resources.” He shook his head in despair. “Don’t you understand? If the British and the Americans were going to launch a retaliatory strike surely they would have done it by now!”

  Chapter 5

  Monday 10th February 1964

  USS Iowa, Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility, Philadelphia

  The USS Iowa was moored outboard of her sister ship the USS Wisconsin. To reach the admiral’s day cabin on the Iowa it was, thus, necessary to traverse the superstructure and the one hundred and eight feet girth of the inboard leviathan. In the process any man who still doubted the untapped, sleeping military might of the United States of America would have had to have been blind, stupid, in denial or all three of the above to cling onto the tiniest seed of his former doubts.