Warsaw Concerto, page 32
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Furnival Jones tried to put the machinations of the Free French exiles in England to the back of his mind.
“You worked for Yuri Andropov?” He asked the Russian without preamble.
“He was the one who left me and my boys to my fate in Clermont-Ferrand,” Akhromeyev shrugged as if to say: “What of it?”
“Nothing,” the MI5 man muttered, as if distracted. “Coincidentally, if our little talk today goes badly, you might well get a chance to meet – you and Madame Bertrand, also – the fellow who ordered your former chief’s torture that time he visited Bucharest. Personally, I hope not because I suspect you, both of you, can be of great assistance to us as free agents.”
Akhromeyev had taken it for granted that if the British did not get what they wanted from them that they would be at best interned, or at worst, handed over to the Free French, which probably amounted to a death sentence.
“Ah,” the acting Director of MI5 breathed, realising that there had been a misunderstanding. “No, no. Whatever happens we are not about to murder you, or anything,” he explained dispassionately. “That’s why we were so keen to bring you to England. No harm will come to either of you. We don’t do that sort of thing.”
Maurice Schumann shifted uneasily in his chair, clearly unhappy to be the junior party in the proceedings.
“It may just be,” Furnival Jones went on, “that at some stage we have to put you away somewhere safe, out of sight for the duration. Personally, I’d much prefer it if you put aside your, er, historic and or ideological differences, and whole-heartedly joined us in the fight.”
The Russian shrugged.
“I will not fight against the Motherland.”
“What about the people in the Auvergne, General Akhromeyev?”
The Russian hesitated.
“Let us not pretend,” the Englishmen said, “that Red Dawn is anything to do with the Marxist-Leninist Internationale? Or are you one of those diehards who wants to go back to the good old days of Stalin?”
Akhromeyev was silent.
The MI5 man had not expected him to simply roll over. People like Akhromeyev were comfortable in their ‘spots’ and were never in any hurry to change them. This man had been on the run for over two years from a regime which had unceremoniously abandoned him to his fate in the Auvergne. Against the odds, the White Brigade had grown and survived not by dint of its religious adherence to the tenets of Soviet theocracy but because he was a leader of men, and women, par excellence.
“Commissar Andropov of the First Directorate of the KGB left you to your fate and later your former leftist friends in Clermont-Auvergne drove you out of your stronghold in Vichy,” Furnival Jones reminded the Russian. “And thereafter, Red Dawn and their French lackeys pursued you, harrying you relentlessly until you were trapped between the British forces on the Loire to the north, the coastal enclaves of miscellaneous hostile bandit gangs to the west, the ‘brigades’ vying for territory and booty either side of the Loire ‘pocket’ to your east and the constant pressure of Red Dawn insurgents in the south. You held on as long as possible – I have no idea how you did it, one day people will no doubt write great novels about such Herculean feats - and then you came to us because you knew that if your people did not starve to death this winter, then sooner or later you would be over-run by your real enemies in the Poitou.”
Furnival Jones looked to Vera Bertrand.
“Her Majesty’s Government stands shoulder to shoulder with the brave Free French,” he re-iterated. “We are not in the business of re-fighting the Second War,” he smiled wanly, “we have quite enough on our hands as it is. Frankly, if we don’t all pull together, we shall be in a fine old pickle. A few weeks ago, the White Brigade was skirmishing with the 2nd Tanks, both sides were taking casualties daily. We were trying to kill each other. Now, perhaps, we have both come to our senses.”
The woman opened her mouth to issue an angry retort.
Sergey Akhromeyev reached over and touched her left knee.
She shut her mouth and gave the man a vexed look.
He remained silent, waiting patiently.
“There are a large number of former Soviet officers and men in the British Isles,” Furnival Jones explained. “Probably several thousand. Many of them were captured in the fighting in Iraq – where the retreating Red Army abandoned its wounded - some were taken at Malta and a relatively large number have made their way to England among refugees crossing the Channel. Some are deserters, others are members of former overseas legations trapped by the war. Many of the wounded men captured in Iraq and Iran have now found their way into civilian occupations in the United Kingdom, a few have joined the Intelligence Services, or our forces around the globe as translators and such-like. Apart from some of your people on Malta – where a lot of civilians had been murdered in cold blood, by any definition unmitigated war crimes – we have punctiliously treated your Prisoners of War decently, rigidly adhering to the Hague protocols. To be honest, we’ve found it better to release the majority of the men in our hands on-licence, parole as it were, so that they may find work, rather than to keep the poor fellows locked up in prison camps. Anyway, to cut to the chase, I am reliably informed that upward of a thousand former Red Army, Air Force and Navy personnel have freely expressed a wish to fight on our side in France.”
Akhromeyev switched his stare to Maurice Schumann but did not address him. The Frenchman was still fuming from the quiet tongue-lashing he had received some minutes before.
“How do your allies feel about this idea, Monsieur Jones?”
“In this war we are a coalition of the willing, Mon General,” Furnival Jones replied, abandoning any pretence of beating about the bush. “We are short of men. If foreign nationals in England wish to fight under our colours, it makes perfect sense for, say, a putative ‘Russian Brigade’ to be commanded by the most senior, and demonstrably, the most capable former Red Army officer to have fallen into our hands…”
“I am still a Red Army officer,” Akhromeyev objected tersely. “I am no mercenary.”
“It is our best information that your friend Yuri Andropov, reported that you deserted your post in Clermont-Ferrand. The Red Army wants your head on a stick, old man,” Martin Furnival Jones replied sympathetically. “According to poor old Yuri Vladimirovich, you left him in a fine old fix, right in the middle of a blood feud between Red Dawn fanatics and the Communist old guard who at the time were still supported by your people back in the Sverdlovsk Kremlin. Needless to say, the old guard lost that fight, and presumably, was liquidated to the last man. The way Yuri Vladimirovich told it when he got home, your ‘betrayal’ was the thing that tipped the scales and caused the Kremlin’s subsequent rift with the Front Internationale!”
“He’s lying, Sergey,” Vera Bertrand decided scornfully. “How could he possibly know that…”
Akhromeyev shook his head.
He had seen enough of the way the idiots in the Auvergne operated to know that their radio discipline would be on the criminally incompetent side of amateurish. The British or the Americans might easily have found ways into the only rarely changed transmission cyphers. Nor did he discount the possibility that the Free French, or more likely, British Intelligence had infiltrated, penetrated the murderous bureaucracy of Maxim Machenaud’s Red Dawn regime.
“Is that madman Machenaud still alive?” He asked, shutting out the clutter of his roiling emotions.
Furnival Jones and Maurice Schumann both nodded.
“Sergey?” Vera demanded.
Again, he touched her knee.
“To cover his tracks, Andropov would have denounced everybody around him, my love,” he commented sadly. He might have taken it personally but it would have changed nothing. While he did not wholly rule out the possibility that the men across the other side of the table were lying to him; he thought it unlikely. Why bring them both all the way to England if they only meant to stab them in the back? “If he survived…”
“Andropov was Commissar for Iraqi Kurdistan last year,” Furnival Jones grimaced. “Dirty job, that. The last we heard he was Party Chief out in the Russian Far East. That’s a high profile post these days because we think the Amur region is where the Red Navy is building its first generation of nuclear submarines. Since then he may have been brought back to Sverdlovsk. We still haven’t been able to sort out the latest re-organisation of the Troika and the Politburo. There is a suggestion Andropov has been appointed a Second Secretary or Deputy Prime Minister. But as I say, we haven’t confirmed that yet. Either way, dear old Yuri Vladimirovich, seems to have done quite well for himself lately…”
Akhromeyev realised he was breathing in short, forced gasps and his fists were suddenly balled. The reality of it hit him all at once. There would have been a purge of anybody who had ever been close to him, no stone would have been left unturned…
He glared at Martin Furnival Jones.
“So, do you mean to blackmail me by holding Madame Bertrand hostage?”
The Englishmen was momentarily startled, a little offended.
Or at least, he went through the motions seeming to be insulted.
“Certainly not!” He protested. “What sort of people do you think we are?”
Sergey Akhromeyev rested his elbows on the table and leaned towards Furnival Jones.
“I think that you, the English, when you need to be are the most ruthless people on Earth.”
Martin Furnival Jones half-smiled, shrugged.
“Actually, I prefer to believe that we are merely pragmatic, General,” the acting Director of MI5 conceded, dropping his pretence of high dudgeon. “I apologise if we seem ruthless. If we are ruthless, then that is simply because the October War has made us so.”
Chapter 28
Saturday 17th December 1966
RAF Nutts Corner, County Antrim, Northern Ireland
The bleak, windswept vista of the airfield was a grey panorama framed in the east by the mist-shrouded Belfast Hills as Commonwealth One – the designation of any RAF aircraft carrying either the Monarch or the Prime Minister – flared out and splashed down onto the main runway of the old Second War base which had been serving as Ulster’s primary ‘air hub’ since 1946.
The specially modified C-130 Hercules transport touched down and ran out smoothly, slowing gently without any of the excitement of the hard-braking short-landing juddering halt within a quarter-of-a-mile, for which the type was famously capable of in an emergency. The man at the controls, Wing-Commander Guy French, VC, Officer Commanding No. 10 (Transport) Squadron, responsible for the global transit of British and Allied VIPs, led by example and on his ‘kites’ all passengers ‘got a featherbed ride’. Occasionally, Guy French allowed a particularly gifted pilot to sit in the left-hand seat but whenever his never-ending battle with ‘red tape’ permitted he invariably pulled rank and ‘flew the mission’.
The ’modifications’ to this particular aircraft mostly related to the installation of state-of-the-art US Air Force navigation and communications equipment, a brand new ‘anti-collision’ radar system and two under-wing pods – ‘chaff’ dischargers – for employment in the eventuality that anybody was so crass as to aim a surface-to-air missile at the aircraft. Otherwise, much to his chagrin, the aircraft offered only bargain-basement comforts to his passengers. Within the cargo bay a dozen moderately comfortable forward-facing ‘normal’ airline passenger seats had been bolted to the floor behind the aircrew compartment bulkhead, otherwise the Hercules was ‘as standard’, unpressurized, a little draughty and at this time of year a tad chilly even with the cabin heaters full on.
“We’re down safely, Prime Minister,” Guy French reported laconically over the cabin intercom speakers as the aircraft slowed and began to turn to the right, the pitch of its four Allison T56-A-15 turboprops falling, the inners barely idling now. “It will take as three or four minutes to taxy over to civilisation. The ground controller assures me that the reception committee has unfurled a barrage of umbrellas and is standing at the ready, Ma’am.”
Despite herself, Margaret Thatcher smiled.
Beside her, her husband chortled contentedly.
For his part, Viscount De L’Isle, the Secretary of State for Defence was of that older generation who still believed that every flight one survived was a ‘good one’. The rather bumpy ninety minute ‘hop’ from Brize Norton had done little to assuage his general ‘mild peakiness’ due to a persistent heavy head cold. Although Ian Gilmore, his number two at the Ministry, had offered to stand in for him today; he would have none of it.
During the flight Margaret Thatcher had sounded out De L’Isle’s thoughts – now they had all had a proper opportunity to think about it - on the implications of the Soviets’ renewed bellicosity in Central Europe. Unsurprisingly, they both seemed to be of the same mind; basically, this was a wait and see situation which ought not to be allowed to distract from ongoing operations by British and Commonwealth forces in France, or to overly influence the level of support being extended to the Free French.
They agreed they would be guided by the ‘intelligence appreciation’ of Soviet activity in the Scandinavian, the Mediterranean, Iran-Iraq and the French theatres of operations, rather than the ‘shock-horror’ evidence of the military parades, and the clumsy political point-scoring of the Shelepin regime in the middle of a post-war wasteland.
If the United States elected to treat the ‘noises’ coming out of Russia as distant war drums, there remained was no immediate cause for panic on this side of the Atlantic. Pragmatically, the United Kingdom’s armed services were already gratuitously over-stretched, so even had she, De L’Isle or the Chiefs of Staff been in a mood to panic, or to contemplate knee-jerk responses and re-deployments – which could only tie their hands later – which they were not, it would have been very hard to find the resources necessary to grandstand on the European stage.
It was not as if the Prime Minister, or her senior ministers, regarded the ‘Berlin demonstration’ a cloud without an – albeit very thin – silver lining. It was now apparent that nowhere in the West, not even in Scandinavia where persistent low-level Soviet encroachment in the devastated Arctic borderlands between Norway and Sweden had been on the increase of late, had the pictures from Tempelhof and Checkpoint Charlie touched a raw nerve more than in Washington DC.
Thus, if and when President Nixon felt the need to be seen to be doing something to counter the Soviets’ latest move, that was all well and good. If it hastened the day that the White House entertained Oxford’s quietly mooted encouragement for the future deployment of US troops and aircraft in the UK, or even better, in France, this was all to the good. However, in the meantime, Margaret Thatcher’s Government would attempt to get on with business as usual.
In the weeks since he had joined the Cabinet, Philip De L’Isle had been immensely impressed by the force of nature that was Margaret Thatcher.
That was not to say he did not remain thoughtful about the ferocity with which she clung to certain notions; for example, her ongoing preoccupation about ‘doing something about the Falklands’, a thing constantly, often not very subtly, reinforced by the admirals. The former Governor-general of Australia was also a little chary about the way she dismissed the ‘country wing’ of the Party she had inherited from the pre-war days of Supermac; this might easily come back to haunt her at some stage. And, of course, the Lady was still a little prone to get a tad ‘emotional’ about things best considered in cold blood. This was by no means a bad thing, she was devoted to the men – and increasingly, the women in ancillary supporting roles – in the armed forces. However, it was a devotion that could be visceral, unreasoning in its passion, both a good and a dangerous thing allied to her very occasionally impetuous, dare one say, petulant outbursts. Her attack – while in what her staffers still called ‘Angry Widow mode’ - on Sir Michael Carver at Penshurst had given De L’Isle such pause for thought that, at some stage in the next few days, he planned to raise the matter with the Prime Minister. While the Chief of the Defence Staff had handled himself with impeccable decorum, fought his corner with positively leonine defiance, a lesser man might easily have taken to heart the Lady’s thinly veiled criticism of his stewardship of the nation’s defences.
Peter Carington, the First Secretary of State and Margaret Thatcher’s imperturbable loyal deputy, and the Foreign secretary, had both cautioned De L’Isle that the Prime Minister could be ‘an absolute tartar if she thought a minister was afraid to stand up to her,’ which was fortunate, the new Secretary of State for Defence reflected, because he had no intention of meekly going along with things just so that he could have a quiet life; and to her credit, he did not think the Lady would have invited him to join her at the top table of government if she had suspected, for a single moment, that he was the sort of man who would not ‘stand up to her’.
De L’Isle was hugely heartened that the Prime Minister had managed to find space in her ludicrously crowded diary to visit the troops in Northern Ireland, his head cold notwithstanding, the least he could do was to support her as best he could.
The twenty-three thousand men stationed in the six counties could not but feel damnably left out of things and generally forgotten about as it was; they had a dirty, thankless task while two thirds or more of the British Army was fighting the good fight in France or basking in the sun in the Med or the Cape or the Far East. What little the Government could do to convince the men of Home Forces, Ulster, that they had not been forgotten and were in fact, greatly valued by all and sundry in Oxford had to be done!
Besides, this would be De L’Isle’s first visit to the province since his return to England from Australia, and he was looking forward to the opportunity to talk to the ‘chaps at the coal face’. Statistically, it had been a relatively quiet year in Ulster with civilian and military fatalities in the hundreds rather than the low thousands for the first time since before the October War. That said, he did not need to read the gloomy intelligence assessments to know that tensions had steadily been on the rise since the end of the war in America that July.
