Warsaw Concerto, page 43
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Ahead of his ‘rounds’ he shaved, donned his best uniform.
Dmitry Kolokoltsev and Aurélie Faure remained on the bridge wing.
“You shouldn’t feel guilty about being lucky, Comrade First Captain,” the woman consoled the Russian.
“Do you see through me so easily?”
“No. All of us are survivors. We are all very lucky in our own ways to still be alive. And even luckier to be with people who care, just a little, about us. I think that is why the British are so terrible; why they fight with such fearlessness. They have survived and they are united by it. There is a lesson for us all in that, do you not think?”
Dmitry Kolokoltsev was briefly lost for words.
“René will not send you back to those animals in the Auvergne,” the woman promised him.
Kolokoltsev laughed uncomfortably.
“I’m afraid that it may be that sending me back to Clermont-Ferrand may be the only way to delay those idiots forcing the fleet to fight the British.”
He became aware that Aurélie Faure was looking at him with suddenly very hard eyes.
“No. The thing that ties us all together is that we never send anybody back to those bastards. We might starve together, or be sent out there,” she waved her arm towards the mouth of the bay and the open sea beyond, “but we never send anybody back to those people.”
Kolokoltsev wondered if his disorientation was simply because he was talking to a woman who was neither afraid of him, or was trying to kill him.
“You forget things,” he muttered.
“And some things you cannot ever forget,” she re-joined, oddly sympathetic.
They lapsed into quietness, gazing out into the night.
The wind tore gaps in the overcast, stars began to twinkle in the infinite jet blackness of the heavens.
“I am not the Amiral’s mistress,” Aurélie said quietly. She spoke slowly, clearly because she realised the man was nowhere near as fluent in her native language as he pretended. “But I am his woman. I would be his any time he clicked his fingers, but…”
She breathed a heavy sigh, shivering as if suddenly cold to her core.
“But that cannot be because he must be above all the things his people take for granted. He is their leader. He is married to his fleet; that is why, whatever happens, and whatever awaits us, the people on those ships out there in the night, will follow him.”
The woman made as if to leave.
She hesitated.
“You should take those green KGB tabs off your uniform. Or at least let the ship’s tailor make you up a jacket in the French style. It would be a sign of good faith; that you are now one of us.”
Chapter 38
Friday 13th January 1967
Camp VERA, Herefordshire
After the storm had come the snow, a thirty-six-hour blizzard which had left man-high drifts piled against the sides of the Nissan-hutted barracks and red-brick administration and commissary blocks of the old, re-activated Territorial Army base some miles west of the county town of Hereford.
The second ‘great storm’, although of itself nothing wholly out of the ordinary to former Red Army Paratrooper Junior Sergeant Anatoly Saratov, had nevertheless, trapped him at the base since the weekend. Thus, it was with huge relief that he eventually managed to get a call through to Hereford, where his wife, Greta, and new-born – well, three-week old son, Alexander Hannay Saratov – had sat out the ‘storm’ in the couple’s claustrophobic, rather shabby but comfortably cosy married quarters.
Twenty-four-year-old Saratov had just put down the telephone handset when the commanding officer of the Setsial'naya Brigade, Vindrey Commando marched into the room on his way to his office.
He jumped to his feet and came to attention.
“Relax, Anatoly.” Major General Sergey Akhromeyev growled; his Muscovite accent relaxed. “Did you get through to Hereford?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Everything is all right?” Back in the old days it would never have occurred to Akhromeyev to take such a particular interest in the life, or even the general welfare of one of his men, especially a non-combat effective like the man who was the de factor brigade clerk of the still forming SBV Commando. Nowadays, the personal touch was second nature to him. It would never again be enough for him to simply issue orders and to expect them to be automatically, blindly obeyed by men he hardly knew, and understood less.
“Yes, sir. Thank you. Greta and young Alexei are fine.”
“That’s good.” Akhromeyev patted the younger man’s shoulder, and grinned supportively. Again, that was thing he would never have done before he walked into Vichy two years ago.
The voices of the men in the gangs clearing the snow outside – making paths through the whiteout - filtered into the office. Now and then shovels clanged or scraped on concrete or stone. Like Akhromeyev, Anatoly wore newly issued British Army battledress, his sleeves proudly bearing his bright sergeant’s stripes.
His pride was tinged with regret; the arm he had smashed at Malta would never again knit together well enough for him to be a real soldier. This was a thing Greta had taken him to task over, reminding him that several of the score or more other, non-combat rankers he now commanded in the base secretariat and commissary, the SBV Commando’s administration platoon, carried much worse injuries than he did, and that ‘the thing is to serve as best one can!’
She was right about most things.
In fact, Greta was usually right about all the things that were actually important…
“It is not like the winters at home here,” Akhromeyev chuckled.
“No, sir.”
“Carry on.”
As soon as his commanding officer began to settle in his adjacent room – his door wide open – another thing no senior Soviet officer would have ever done ‘back home’, Anatoly went into the adjoining anteroom, where the brigade’s typists worked and asked – he had discovered that one rarely ‘ordered’ or ‘commanded’ in the British Army, other than in the fiercest of battle situations – if somebody would organise a pot of strong black coffee for the ‘the boss’.
As he returned to his office the tall, still gaunt figure of Colonel Sebastien Betancourt, the second in command of the SBV, made his entrance, stiff-limbed but as ever, Gallically affable.
“Hello, Anatoly,” he grinned. “I think the boss is expecting me?”
The visitor knocked at the open door and went inside, with Akhromeyev rising to greet him. Shortly afterwards, a pot of coffee was delivered by a petite, girlish blond secretary, like many of the women in the typing pool the daughter or wife of a British serviceman serving in the area, or whose unit, posted overseas was nominally based in Herefordshire.
Thus far, only some four hundred of the men and women listed to join the Commando had arrived at Camp VERA, the bad weather of the last week having delayed trains and buses transporting further cadres to Herefordshire; but in the next few days Anatoly expected the pace to pick up with a vengeance.
Presently, he – newly-minted Sergeant Anatoly Saratov - was the man keeping the records, and thus constantly updating the numbers, of the personnel thus far assigned to the Commando.
That morning’s planned ‘head count’ included 769 former Red Army, Navy & Air Force personnel including 15 women who had sworn allegiance to the Queen, volunteering for service with British and Commonwealth forces in the British Isles, France, Belgium. Holland or Denmark. Additionally, a total of 227 men and 63 women of General Akhromeyev’s White Brigade had also opted to continue to serve under him, and were expected to join the Commando by the end of the month, pending lengthy and demanding medical examinations of the sort that Anatoly himself, had barely scraped through with ‘non-combatant status’ stamped on his enlistment papers.
General Akhromeyev, Anatoly had found out, was a practical man: ‘Modern warfare demands that fighting men must be supported in the field by a mobile version of the system available to them at their home camp. Not all our people will carry guns but every man or woman fit, and willing to serve will be given the opportunity to join the SBV Commando.’
Before the October War, the notion that hundreds of Anatoly’s fellow Red Army comrades might one day ‘volunteer’ to put on British uniforms would have been…unthinkable. It still seemed strange and yet, his own experience was salutary and somehow, made it all seem logical, sensible.
His was one of countless bizarre stories.
He was an orphan of war born sometime in April or May 1942 somewhere in the Saratov Oblast of the Soviet Union. Aged about three months old he had been taken from the arms of a dying woman who, with her last breath, had pleaded for somebody to take her baby.
‘Anatoly’ was the name given to him at the orphanage in Chelyabinsk where he grew up, and he was ‘Saratov’ because that was where his existence had first been registered in the Soviet Union.
Anatoly had illegally volunteered to join the Red Army aged fifteen, joined the Cadet Corps and at seventeen reported to the Moscow Military District for parachutist training. He was a lean, sinewy man, five feet six or seven in height, preternaturally tough, accustomed to taking hard knocks and bouncing straight back up to his feet ready to carry on fighting. He had been perfectly at home living the rough and tumble, brutal life of a lowly soldier in the Red Army and taken immense pride in being accepted into the elite airborne forces.
By the time of the October War, Anatoly was a corporal in the 73rd Airborne Regiment serving in the Sverdlovsk Military District. Throughout 1963, his unit operated as normal infantry, engaged on policing duties in Georgia and Azerbaijan. In November 1963, the 73rd was deployed to Bulgaria, then to the Yugoslav border at the start of 1964. Thereafter, it was embroiled in almost continuous operations against the ‘Red Dawn insurgency’ in Transylvania and later in and around Bucharest.
The 73rd had been given one hour to ‘go to ground’ before the Red Air Force nuked the Rumanian capital, snuffing out the ‘counter-revolutionary betrayal’ of its leadership, whom it seemed were about to conclude some kind of treacherous counter-revolutionary pact with the Americans. Or at least, that was what they were told afterwards. In common with fighting men in any army, Anatoly and his comrades had only ever got a partial, distorted account of what was actually going on in the world beyond the confines of their immediate battlefield.
That made it a lot harder to have a conscience.
Elements of the 73rd had been sent to put down another counter-revolutionary insurgency in Istanbul. That had been a vile, dirty business, exterminating Krasnaya Zarya fanatics, fighters, their women and children, burning the whole city to the ground…
Eventually, the 73rd Airborne Regiment, hollowed out by seventy percent casualties was amalgamated with another decimated regiment, the 58th, and ordered to prepare for a new deployment in Greece.
Then, out of the blue, the news came through that every available airborne unit was to attack Malta and literally, the next night the 58/73rd Airborne and the survivors of several other similarly exhausted, smashed up parachute units were herded onto a fleet of transport aircraft.
The whole operation was a complete crock of shit.
The Navy was supposed to bombard the island’s defences to Hell and back again: ‘As soon as you hit the ground shoot anything that moves!!
That was the plan.
The whole plan…
There had been no maps of Malta, no intelligence whatsoever about strong points or the forces the airborne assault force was likely to encounter on the ground.
One officer had told Anatoly’s section that: ‘There are so many Soviet agents on Malta that we’ll be welcomed with open arms and all the fighting will be over by the time we jump!’
In the event, Anatoly had been shot while he was swinging beneath his billowing parachute high above what he later learned was the village of Kalkara. A bullet had shattered his left arm above the elbow and when he hit the ground, he had smashed his right ankle. He had only regained consciousness in the back of a lorry, a prisoner in agony surrounded by dead, dying and badly wounded men. Through the unbearable miasma of pain, he had yearned for somebody to put a bullet in the back of his neck and end it all.
But then he had heard women’s voices and felt gentle hands, checking his body for other, unseen wounds. One woman had knelt beside him, stroked his face and whispered comforting words to him. Another woman had got very angry when the men transferring him out of the truck had dropped him on the dusty verge outside the hospital.
The face of the woman who had comforted him on that short, nightmare, jolting journey to the nearest hospital – which turned out to be at Royal Navy Bighi high above the Grand Harbour and Kalkara Creek – had lived with him forever.
He had only discovered her identity about a year later when by chance he saw her picture in a newspaper. It transpired that the two young Maltese women who had protected and ministered to him, and to many other terribly injured friends and foes alike that dreadful day in April 1964 had ‘gone on to other and better things’; they were none other than the wife of the British Ambassador to the United States and her then sister-in-law Rosa, who had since married Commander Alan Hannay, the British Naval Attaché.
Anatoly had written to Rosa Hannay care of the Embassy in Philadelphia, a brief missive simply thanking her ‘for my life’. He had thought he was dead and she had given him hope.
Rosa Hannay’s return letter had not reached Anatoly for over six weeks. He had not really expected her to reply at all, so he was doubly surprised and pleased to receive her warm, chatty reply. Unprompted, she had filled in many of the missing details of that day, including how she and her ‘sister Marija’ – who was a nurse and midwife - had been given the job of ‘deciding which men or women should be moved immediately to the open air ‘assessment area’ where doctors decided who should be rushed first to the over-whelmed operating theatres, and had patched up other, horribly injured men and women as best they could as each ambulance arrived at RNH Bighi’; and how at one stage Marija had had a ‘polite disagreement’ with two Royal Marines who had wanted one of their own ‘lightly injured’ friends to ‘jump the queue’ ahead of Anatoly.
Extraordinarily, the next letter he received from Philadelphia was from Lady Marija Calleja-Christopher herself, and as remarkably, that lady’s tone had been no less personable than her sister’s.
The Ambassador’s wife had explained that as a child and a teenage girl she had been a ‘guinea pig’ for exactly the same sort of surgery that had probably saved his left arm, and that she was most keen to learn more of the details of his recovery while sympathising with him that ‘sometimes your bones will ache’.
During his first year in captivity recovering from his injuries on Malta, Anatoly had become fluent in English, although not so voluble in Maltese which despite his best efforts, he found…very nearly impossible. Initially treated at the Royal Naval Hospital Bighi, undergoing three separate operations to rebuilt his upper left arm before transferring to the SS Canberra, which was anchored in the Grand Harbour serving as a hospital ship for those less seriously ill and in the initial stages of recuperation and rehabilitation.
Once he, and other of his comrades had been admitted to RNH Bighi, he had been – to his astonishment - treated like any other patient. Later, on board the Canberra the British made a half-hearted, token show of guarding their Russian prisoners, recognising that if any man attempted to escape, he would probably be lynched long before help arrived.
The British had summarily executed any Red Army man they suspected of killing civilians, or members of the garrison who had attempted to surrender but the brief blood-letting was long over by the time Anatoly fully returned to the world of the living. In all he had remained on Malta some fifteen months, three months on the sick list, and another three on light duties during which time he began working as a volunteer translator for the Military Administration of the archipelago. During the last eight months of his time on Malta he was designated as a ‘non-combatant trustee’, and effectively, allowed to come and go from his billet without restriction ‘on licence’.
In his head he had ceased to be a soldier – or rather, a paratrooper of the 73rd Airborne Regiment of the Red Army - the moment he regained consciousness on 3rd April 1964; for him the war was over. Strictly speaking, much of the work he did for his captors on Malta would have been deemed treachery back home; unashamedly, he had aided and abetted the enemy but the kindness of Rosa Hannay, his personal angel of mercy, and later the fairness and well, innate decency, of the people into whose hands he had literally fallen, had changed…everything.
Of course, not all his fellow prisoners of war felt the same way but that was their problem, not his. By the end of his time on Malta, although he was virtually a free man, he had not really known what to expect when, along with the majority of the other prisoners on the archipelago, he was transferred to England when the Canberra eventually returned to her home port of Southampton so that she might be refitted ahead of resuming her previous, civilian career with the P and O Line.
However, within days of landing in the British Isles, the Army had processed Anatoly into a holding camp on the South Downs near Winchester where he learned, that notwithstanding the supposedly strict rules about civil ordnances concerning non-fraternisation with enemy prisoners, that the camp was no kind of prison. He was issued with a ration book, clothes coupons – ‘how you dress is your business, Mister Saratov, but we expect all persons to maintain the highest possible standards of personal hygiene while in our care’ – and informed that if wished to make himself available for ‘suitable employment’, he would be free to come and go as he pleased.
