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

  The lesson of the great Patriotic War against the Nazis had been that most things go wrong most of the time. Practically everything had gone wrong in the execution of Phase One of Operation Nakazyvat; and yet, if one discounted the disaster of the bungled nuclear first strike against the British in the Central and Eastern Mediterranean, it was hard to imagine how things could have possibly worked out better. It was a mystery why the British had not retaliated after the bombing of Limassol, or after their aircraft carrier, the Victorious, was attacked with a nuclear-tipped torpedo. How could the British not retaliate after the attack on Malta? The World had gone mad! How was anybody supposed to attempt serious strategic planning in a World in which one’s enemy had the power to annihilate one in the blink of the eye and yet, did nothing? Of course, ending up in a Securitate cell in Bucharest had not been in the plan either...

  Most things go wrong most of the time...

  Nobody in Chelyabinsk, the current headquarters of the Provisional Government had imagined – not even in their worst nightmares – that Krasnaya Zarya fanatics would gain control of the 21st Mobile Strategic Missile Brigade emplaced around Ploesti, or worse, the 6th Strategic Missile Brigade deployed across the barren steppes east and south of the bomb-ruined city of Kuybyshev. The nine operational R-16 inter-continental ballistic missiles of the 6th Strategic Missile Brigade had represented the Provisional Government in Chelyabinsk’s last bargaining card if and when, Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev ever came to sit around a peace table with the Western mass murderers. Each of those thirty metre tall one hundred and forty ton rockets had been capable of destroying a city eleven thousand kilometres away. If the Americans or the British attacked again those eleven missiles would make little difference; but if China encroached upon the eastern frontiers of the Soviet Union – as sooner or later Mao Tse-tung was bound to do – or developed its own nuclear bomb what then would become of the Mother Country? To discover that Krasnaya Zarya had subverted the key remaining strategic thermonuclear strike capability of the USSR – spies in the United States confirmed that none of the Red Air Force’s bombers had got through to their North American targets on the night of the Cuban Missiles War and were therefore, useless in their strategic strike role - so far from its bases of operation in Romania and the Trans-Caucasus, had come as a hammer blow to the Politburo. After that, this fool’s errand to Bucharest had almost seemed, if not a good idea then the last throw of the dice.

  In retrospect it had been a catastrophic blunder to encourage the Romanians to believe that they were calling the shots; a blunder even though it had facilitated the lengthy build up to and the launching of Phase One of Operation Nakazyvat. The Politburo had accepted that sooner or later Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and that little shit Nicolae Ceaușescu would need to be put in their place. What nobody in Chelyabinsk had factored into the equation was that Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s and Nicolae Ceaușescu’s visions of grandeur verged on the megalomaniac and the psychotic.

  Alexei Kosygin grunted a chuckle.

  “What’s so funny?” Andrei Sakharov demanded.

  “We came here to stiffen the backbone of the Romanians and it turned out that they had too much steel in their spines already.” He smiled again. “I bet the bastards don’t know even about the Tbilisi Company,” he added sardonically, glancing to Vasily Chuikov as he used the secret name of the 6th Strategic Missile Brigade.

  The old soldier grinned, sharing the in joke.

  Kosygin renewed eye contact with Andrei Sakharov.

  “You asked me why we are so calm, Comrade Academician?” He reminded the physicist.

  Sakharov responded with a jerky nod.

  “We are Russians of the old school,” Kosygin explain, “the Comrade Marshal and I, you perhaps, are of the new order of things.” As he said it he did not think the physicist would understand a word he said. The man had lived a charmed, privileged life in the USSR as one of its most pampered, favourite sons. How could he possibly understand?

  Kosygin, who had been born in St Petersburg thirteen years before the Revolution, had diligently worked his way up through the local Party hierarchy over the years; surviving purges and denunciations. During the Great Patriotic War against the Fascists he had been appointed Deputy Chairman of the Council of Evacuation, responsible for the removal of factories and vital war assets ahead of the rampant German armies. Later he had been the man who broke the Nazi blockade of the city of his birth – by then renamed Leningrad – by running truck convoys across frozen Lake Ladoga in winter and in 1943, laying a pipeline under its waters. However, fame and recognition was a dangerous thing in the Soviet Union of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. The closer one moved to the ‘Man of Steel’ the more impermanent a man’s life became and after the end of the Great Patriotic War, Iosif Vissarionovich had drawn him into his inner circle. Stalin saw enemies everywhere and in everything; and in the late 1940s Kosygin, Nikolai Voznesensky, the Chairman of the State Planning Committee and a First Deputy Prime Minister, and Alexei Kuznetzov, whom many saw as a possible successor to the ‘Man of Steel’, rose together through the higher echelons of the Soviet Government by sheer dint of their administrative competence and natural leadership skills. For Voznesensky and Kuznetzov, and for many others, this prominence was to prove fatal, leading to show trials and summary executions for treason. Kosygin had survived, drawn ever deeper into the dark lair of the monster until eventually; he became a key instrument in the investigation and destruction of the careers and lives of numerous other members of the Moscow elite. Terrifyingly – it still gave him the shakes when he thought about it –the old monster had actually taken him into his confidence by the end.

  Kosygin had been ordered to spy on his senior comrades, men like Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, leading Politburo figures like Anastas Mikoyan and Lazar Kaganovich. Inevitably, he had become mistrusted and detested by other members of the hierarchy, despised as a pawn in Iosif Vissarionovich cruelly ruthless hands. He had lived in constant fear of his life, never leaving his home without briefing his wife exactly what to do, how to behave, and what to say, if he did not return.

  Alexei Kosygin briefly contemplated explaining this to Sakharov; decided it would be a waste of time.

  However, Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov was in a more expansive mood.

  “You don’t know shit, Sakharov!” He declared with an oddly cheerful grimace. This said the veteran of the Russian Civil War and the victor of Stalingrad who had been Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Army at the time of the Cuban Missiles War folded his arms and lapsed into a wheezing, pugnacious silence.

  Chapter 9

  Wednesday 12th February 1964

  Admiralty Dockyard, French Creek, Malta

  On the stroke of noon every civilian worker onboard HMS Talavera downed tools – literally, by very loudly dropping whatever they had in their hands on the deck – and walked off the ship.

  Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher, who had been working in his day cabin catching up with paperwork – ahead of transferring Talavera’s ‘office’ ashore later that afternoon – that he had neglected during the last week registered the cacophony of thuds and clanging on the deck above his head and elsewhere in the ship but thought little of it, the ship was in dockyard hands, after all, until there was a knock at his open door.

  He looked up.

  Lieutenant Miles Weiss, his Executive officer was wearing a boyishly troubled face.

  “The locals have gone on strike, sir!”

  Peter put down his pen.

  “What are the ‘locals’ doing now, Miles?”

  “Er, milling around on the dock.”

  HMS Talavera’s commanding officer decided to take a look for himself. Jamming on his cap he headed for the door. As he made his way to the gangway he noted - with irritation - and stepped over the discarded tools and equipment on the deck.

  “Detail somebody to collect all this rubbish and unblock the passageways please,” he instructed co
nversationally. “Have all this stuff locked away. It wouldn’t do to have any of it go missing.”

  Captain ‘D’ had mentioned, albeit in passing before he allowed himself to be transported to the Royal Naval Hospital at Bighi to have his injuries properly x-rayed and assessed, to Peter that: ‘either the blighters will walk off the job and disappear for days on end, in which case they’ll decamp with all their possessions and anything else that’s not tied down; or, they’ll down tools, jump up and down on the dock and breeze back onboard shortly thereafter so they don’t lose more than an hour or two’s pay.”

  HMS Talavera’s Captain and Executive Officer almost collided with Spider McCann, the destroyer’s Master at Arms at the foot of the ladder to the main deck. The ship’s senior non-commissioned officer was fit to blow a blood vessel.

  Peter’s first words mollified him somewhat.

  “I don’t want any civilians on my ship again until they’ve made up their minds whose side they are on, Mr McCann. Pull up the stern gangway and place guards at the shipboard end of the amidships gangway please.”

  The diminutive, scarred, steely little man who had once been the Mediterranean Fleet’s bantamweight boxing champion tried hard not to smirk; he understood exactly what was going through his young Captain’s mind.

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  The placards read: MALTESE JOBS FOR THE MALTESE, DOWN WITH SCAB LABOR, this last word Peter guessed was a spelling mistake, and NO SURRENDER WCADM.

  He could not make out what the workers, perhaps as many as fifty, were chanting. They were yelling in Maltese.

  Um, mental note to myself to stick my nose into a Maltese-to-English phrase book or to ask Marija to brief me on the more common Maltese sayings.

  “What’s WCADM stand for, sir?” Miles Weiss asked.

  “Workers’ Committee of, or for, I don’t know which off the top of my head, the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta.”

  “Oh, of course. My word, odd how a little brush with industrial strife puts one in mind of what it was like back home in the good old days before the war? I suppose in those days we’d have called this a ‘wild cat strike’, what?”

  Peter Christopher was not really listening.

  He was looking at the vaguely familiar face of the stocky, smiling man with the tousled black hair who was orchestrating the chanting and seemed to be the leader of the striking workers. The chanting slackened in intensity as some of the men on the dock caught sight of the tall figure of Talavera’s youthful commanding officer.

  Then others were pointing.

  The chanting collapsed; only one or two voices desperately attempted to stir up the last dregs of flagging enthusiasm. The cheerleader turned and was a little surprised to find the destroyer’s captain striding down the gangway towards him.

  “I was wondering when I’d bump into the famous Joseph Calleja?” The Englishman chuckled wryly as he stuck out his right hand in greeting to his prospective brother-in-law.

  Joe Calleja was caught unawares and meekly extended his own hand to meet that of the taller man’s.

  “I, er...”

  “This is a thing, isn’t it?” Peter declared, taking off his cap and running his fingers through his thick fair hair. “I’ve met you father, of course, and I was rather hoping to be introduced to you at yesterday’s ceremonials?”

  The shorter man glanced at his feet.

  “I was banned from Parlatorio Wharf. Most of the other members of the Workers’ Committee, too...”

  “Oh, that’s a bad show.” Peter Christopher sighed. Miles Weiss had joined him on the dock, no quite knowing what to make of things. His commanding officer made the necessary introductions. “Oh, this is Joe, Marija’s brother, Number One.”

  “How do you do?” HMS Talavera’s Executive Officer inquired pleasantly, offering his hand in the same way Peter had moments earlier.

  Again, to his discomfort Joe Calleja found himself taking his enemy’s hand in friendship.

  “Goodness,” Peter groaned, “this is dashed awkward. In any other circumstances I’d have had you manhandled to the Wardroom to down a few stiff ones to, er, celebrate our first acquaintance, Joe. But...”

  “I thought you’d have already gone ashore,” Joe Calleja confessed sheepishly.

  “No, unfortunately I’ve got reams of paperwork to do first. We’ve been a bit short-handed since that business off Lampedusa. Poor old Miles,” he grinned at his Executive Officer, “and I doing two or three men’s jobs at present. Still, that’s the Navy; one does what one must do and all that. And now you and your chaps have put another spoke in the wheel. I promised Marija I’d try to get over to Mdina this afternoon. Obviously, that isn’t going to happen now.”

  Joe Calleja shifted unhappily on his feet.

  “Oh, no,” he muttered, looking past the two British officers.

  Peter Christopher followed his look.

  A dozen booted and baton-wielding Dockyard Policemen were marching purposefully towards No 2 Dry Dock.

  “Those fellows look as if they mean business. What’s the form here?” He asked his soon to be brother-in-law.

  “I don’t know. Admiral Christopher brought in a new Dockyard Superintendent yesterday.”

  “Number One,” Peter suggested casually. “Would you be so good as to find out what those fellows are up to please?”

  Miles Weiss hurried to intercept the newcomers.

  Peter Christopher, knowing that he was standing within earshot of several of the striking workers leaned towards Joe Calleja. “As I say, this is dashed awkward. Meeting this way,” he almost whispered. “Nevertheless, it is as well that we understand each other from the off, what?”

  The two men were edging away from the crowd.

  Joe Calleja’s eyes were a little suspicious for a moment.

  “I’m a fairly uncomplicated sort of chap,” Peter went on. “Life is complicated enough without making things any more complicated, that’s my motto. That said right now, as we stand here passing the time of day, there are three things which I need to tell you. I apologise in advance if any of those three things put your nose out of joint but well, life is like that sometimes and personally, I try not to hold grudges. But that’s just me, Joe.”

  “Three things?”

  “Firstly, you and your chaps have just downed tools repairing the latest battle damage to my ship in a time of war. That is irresponsible and frankly, not clever...”

  “What about the jobs of my members?”

  “I’m happy to argue about that at another time. Today I am Her Majesty’s Ship Talavera’s Captain and frankly, I don’t care. You chaps are either on our side or you’re not. That’s not a thing we need to argue about because you either are or you are not. On my side, that is. The proof, as it were, is in the pudding!”

  Peter glanced down the dockside to where Miles Weiss had halted the advance of the police detachment but was now engaged in an animated discussion with the suited foreman who seemed to be in charge of the men in uniform.

  “Secondly, the equipment your chaps left blocking my passageways and generally making my ship look untidy is presently being collected and securely stowed away by the Master at Arms. As per War Emergency Admiralty Dockyard Regulations any tools, equipment or materials left unattended or unsecured on one of Her Majesty’s Ships in a theatre of war, as defined by the said act, is forfeit and shall henceforth be treated as prize. That is, it may be sold to the highest bidder with the funds thus garnered being paid back into the coffers of HM Treasury.”

  “Nobody’s ever...”

  “Yes,” Peter agreed affably. “Well, obviously, we’ll have to leave the niceties to the lawyers. I’m just a humble sea dog, Queen’s Regulations are what they are and I am bound to follow them. Sorry, I can be very stubborn sometimes.”

  Joe Calleja tried and failed to scowl.

  “So can Marija!” He warned.

  “Which brings me to my third point. Instead of tidying away my desk ahead of shipping T
alavera’s files ashore this afternoon, I find my plans for the rest of the day up in the air and at some stage later today Marija is going to start worrying about why her fiancé has failed to make an appearance.”

  Miles Weiss returned.

  He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder.

  “Those fellows want to lock Mr Calleja’s ‘troublemakers’ out of the yards, sir.”

  Joe Calleja visibly bristled at the new threat.

  Peter cleared his throat.

  “Bloody Hell!” He complained, his exasperation barely contained. “I’m never going to get ashore at this rate!”

  This was Miles Weiss’s cue to hurl an accusative look at Joe Calleja.

  “What am I supposed to do about it?” Marija’s brother protested.

  HMS Talavera’s Executive Officer briefly lost his temper: “Get back to bloody work, you idiot!”

  Peter Christopher was afraid the other two men would come to blows.

  He put a hand on Joe Calleja’s shoulder.

  “May I have a chat with your workers please, Joe?”

  The smaller man felt as if he ought to object; in the end he mutely acquiesced.

  “Look, chaps,” Peter began. “I’m a new boy when it comes to what goes on here. I don’t know anything about your grievances, or how much substance there is in your fears for your jobs when it comes to the newcomers who are being shipped out here from the United Kingdom. There is probably a time and place to talk about these things but this isn’t it. I am the Captain of a damaged ship and I need you to repair her so that I can take her to sea again in defence of these beautiful islands. I need you to do that now please.” He waved at the policemen poised to eject the strikers from the dockyard. “Stop messing around and go back to work and I will deal with those fellows.” He sniffed the cool spring air. “Thank you for listening.”