Warsaw Concerto, page 44
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Anatoly had been dumbfounded when he was informed that the Governor-General’s Office in Malta had placed a letter on his file confirming that: ‘Saratov, Anatoly, former Junior Sergeant, 58/73th Red Army Parachute Reg. is of proven good character and has of his own free will assisted to the best of his ability the work of the military administration,’ and that therefore, the hard-pressed authorities in England, no longer considered him to be a prisoner of war.
In fact, if he wished to so do, he was free to go home; not that this was remotely possible, or frankly, desirable since a man once captured by the enemy was forever considered suspect by his former countrymen. He soon started to feel oddly Ruski-English, working at first on a farm south of Winchester at Otterbourne for several months, and briefly as a labourer in the nearby city after clerking in the camp commandant’s office. His left arm ached maddeningly some nights; a thing that was easily borne because he knew how lucky he had been not to lose it. He knew his arm was ‘never really going to feel right again’ but that was a small price to pay for the gift of a life that ought, by rights, to have ended that day in April 1964.
One of thousands of volunteers who thronged to join the ‘World Cup Auxiliary’, as the Royal Engineers classified its temporary civilian division charged with making safe the stadia, and providing the basic local infrastructure ahead of the hosting of the 1966 Soccer World Cup in England, Anatoly had found himself the Company Commander’s secretary at Wembley Park. In a little over two years the former Soviet paratrooper had become the WCA’s chief bureaucrat in the Royal Engineer’s Tented camp at the corner of Olympic Way and Engineers’ Way at Wembley Park!
He had met his wife, Greta, soon after he began working at Wembley. At that time, much of the landscape was a wintery expanse of ruins apart from the great Empire Stadium, which had stood like a rock against the thermal blast and over-pressure wave of the nearest big bomb back in October 1962.
Greta’s mother and father, and her three younger siblings had survived the war in the West Country, in unbombed Devon and Cornwall.
Their first ‘date’ had come about when she had asked, very shyly, him if he would escort her to nearby Dollis Hill. She had promised her parents that she would try to find their old home, whatever was left of it – where she and her eldest sister had been born - while she was working at Wembley Park. It was an unlikely tryst; a walk through a shattered and burned landscape, then just beginning to green again, an omen for their shared future together. They had never looked back, a little star-crossed ever since.
Greta had been some three months pregnant by the time the couple had taken their seats in the South Stand of the newly re-named Commonwealth Stadium on 23rd July 1966 to watch the World Cup Final.
‘Wembley Park’ had since been designated as one of the first ten ‘Village Projects’ within the Greater London Destruction Zone. Anatoly, and until a couple of months before their son was due, Greta had carried on working in the much scaled-down Royal Engineer encampment, before one morning, he was called into his commanding officer’s room at the Commonwealth Stadium and asked if he was willing to volunteer for service with the British Army.
In that moment Anatoly could have been knocked down with a very small feather!
‘In a non-combat role, obviously,’ he had been cautioned. ‘You won’t be jumping out of any aeroplanes or doing any of the things modern infantrymen have to do. Not with that arm of your’s. No, you’d be employing your highly valuable administrative, organisational skills, and I daresay, your command of languages, as a translator.”
He and Greta had not had to think about it overlong.
They had already enjoyed some of the benefits of the so-called ‘military contract’, the unwritten understanding that members of the armed forces and their families – and to a degree, designated civilian support workers - got first call on housing, medical care and if the worst happened, food and medicines. That had been more important a year or two ago when everybody was rigidly living on ‘the ration’ and medical provision had been spread horribly thinly across the general population. However, even in the autumn of 1966, four years on from the war, to be fully beneath the government’s still-narrow, welfare umbrella remained a huge comfort to a young couple nervously anticipating the birth of their first child.
So, in mid-November the couple had packed their few belongings – into a single battered suitcase – bade farewell to their two rooms at the end of a leaky pre-fabricated house at Wealdstone overlooking the freshly re-opened railway line down into the centre of the wrecked metropolis, and boarded a train for the Midlands.
Anatoly had been assigned to the advance guard responsible for re-activating the mothballed World War II transit camp outside Hereford, for the arrival of as many as fifteen hundred troops at the beginning of December.
The signs at the main gate had proclaimed it as CAMP SWAINSHILL. It had become CAMP VERA less than a fortnight ago with the arrival of Major General Akhromeyev, a gaggle of his former White Brigade insurgents, and the first cadres of former Soviet prisoners of war.
The rule was that everybody spoke English; unfortunately, that was not going to happen any time soon. Presently, fluent English speakers, and writers – like Anatoly – were in a very small minority, so translators like him, were in no little demand!
Back on Malta he had discovered he had a gift for languages, granted his command of Maltese had never been great. English, he had decided was a peculiar, idiosyncratic thing yet these days he spoke it with, people said, only a very faint Russian accent. Greta, had studied French at school as a girl and hoped, as soon as little Alexei was old enough to be admitted to the Hereford Military District day care centre run by servicemen’s wives, to begin work at the camp as a translator. She had been in the typing pool at Wembley Park when they met, Greta thought that sort of work was ‘samey’, rather ‘boring’ and would much prefer to do something more ‘active’.
She and Anatoly had started trying to communicate with each other in conversational French at home. Although Greta already had a lot of words in Russian, he found that just made him lazy when he ought to be working on his English, and now, French, another language which was constantly surprising him!
Anatoly realised he had been wool-gathering.
He was not alone…
He jerked to his feet belatedly, a little shamefaced.
“Madame Bertrand,” he blurted. “Forgive me, I was…”
The woman before him was about his own height, her dark hair streaked with grey. She was slim, dressed in sober civilian tweeds to ward off the winter chills. It was of no consequence that the lady had no official standing at the Camp named for her. She was neither the boss’s wife, nor an officer of the SBV Commando yet she came and went as she pleased, working tirelessly as a translator – her English was hesitant, her Russian a little old-fashioned – and remained a figurehead for the handful of French men and women who had thus far arrived in Herefordshire. Anatoly had regarded Vera Bertrand from their first acquaintance, as the mother of the SBV Commando.
The walls of the building were paper thin.
The voices of the two men in the adjoining office were audible, partially muffled. There were gouts of laughter.
Vera Bertrand smiled.
“I’ve been thinking about how you and I get everybody talking the same language, Anatoly,” she said, confidentially.
“You and I, Madame?”
“Yes, the first thing we must do is make a list of who speaks what,” she declared, wryly amused. “Don’t you agree?”
Anatoly raised a hesitant finger.
“A moment please, Madame.” He rifled in the nearest battleship grey filing cabinet and retrieved a slim Manila file. “I have been going through the unit registration papers of our people. I have lists of who can speak, write, and their approximate level of proficiency in the three main languages – English, French and Russian – and have identified possible translator-teachers. Obviously, less than half our people have so far reported in…”
“How many translators do we have?”
“Not many,” Anatoly admitted, apologetically, as if it was his fault.
Vera Bertrand thought about it.
“I’ll have a word with Sergey,” she sighed, flashing a conspiratorial look at the much younger man. “I plan to visit all the schools in the area. I will need a driver; a handsome young man in uniform always goes down well with the children.”
Belatedly, Anatoly realised the woman was talking about him.
He had learned to drive while he was working at Wembley Park, taken to it like a proverbial duck to water, albeit mostly driving lorries.
Vera Bertrand smiled.
“We shall see if we can’t poach a few teachers, just to get us started all talking the same language!”
Chapter 39
Monday 16th January 1967
Sixth Army HQ, The Presidio, San Francisco
The Presidio’s history went back to 1776 when New Spain had seized and fortified a foothold in Alta California, then an unincorporated Spanish colonial territory. The original Spanish fort and settlement had been damaged in an earthquake in 1827, and in 1846 settlers and a small US Army detachment had crossed the Golden Gate strait and captured the promontory upon which it sat, and in no time at all it had been renamed Fort Winfield Scott.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Well, almost but not quite: after the Second War Harry Truman had offered the site – split by the road to the bridge, US Route 101, across the aforementioned ‘Golden Gate’ – to the United Nations; a proposition rejected in favour of New York. Presumably, because that was where Broadway and Bloomingdales were located.
However, reminding him that they were in San Francisco on very serious business, Dwight Christie’s companions had given him very odd looks when he had tried to lighten the mood during the FBI team’s terse ‘orientation tour’ of the headquarters complex where they were to be based over the next few days, and possibly, weeks.
None of his companions were overly interested in West Coast anecdotes, or cultural subtexts escaping from the lips of a Commie stooge and turncoat killer.
Which, to be fair, was exactly the way Dwight Christie would have felt about it if he had been in their boots.
Clyde Tolson had flown back to DC to brief J. Edgar Hoover, handing over the investigation to forty-year-old James B. Adams, the recently appointed Assistant Special Agent in charge of San Francisco. A Texan born US Army veteran, he had been an attorney and a Democrat member of the Texas House of Representatives before joining the Agency in 1951. Based in Minneapolis at the time of the October War, where he had remained in post during the siege of that half-wrecked city by rebel forces, he had only arrived in California a month ago.
Adams and Christie had never crossed paths and presently, that helped. Not much but just enough to mean that Adams occasionally got past asking himself what he was doing working with a scumbag who by everything that was right, ought to have gone to the electric chair by now.
“A man like Billy the Kid would have had good reasons for specifying the Remington,” Christie explained while he, Adams and his ever-present watchful, muscular minders waited in the sheltered firing post. In the middle-distance targets stood stiffly in the breeze whispering off the nearby Pacific despite the tall trees surrounding the range. “I’m not personally familiar with the gun. I doubt if any of you are. It’s a relatively new piece but like I said, it is reasonable to believe that Kurt Mikkelsen did not specify it randomly. That’s why I thought it might be helpful if we talked to an expert. A real expert. It may help, it may not.”
“We’re ready for you, gentlemen,” a Marine Corps sergeant with a prize-fighting slugger’s face reported respectfully. The man was in his late thirties, teak-muscled, hawk-eyed. “My name is Gunnery Sergeant Eric Adamczyk and I am responsible for your safety while you are on this range. Please stay where I can see you at all times. Do not attempt to handle fire arms unless I authorise you to so do. I have arranged for Marine Corps Marksman Corporal Luis Delgado to demonstrate the Remington Arms Model 700, US Army designation M24 .30-06 hunting – slash – sniper rifle. Corporal Delgado has been authorised to answer any questions you might have with utmost frankness.”
The sniper snapped to attention when the FBI men arrived.
Delgado was average height, sinewy, and very young, perhaps twenty at a pinch.
A dismantled M700 was laid out on a table.
Another gun, its telescopic sight fixed, lay ready for demonstration on the shelf above the low firing step, pointing down range.
James Adams turned to Dwight Christie.
“You’re the one who asked for this briefing?”
Christie looked to Corporal Delgado.
“How quickly can you get that gun ready for shooting, Marine?”
The answer was less than fifteen seconds.
“What about if you had to re-fix and check the scope?” The former Special Agent inquired, indicating the other M700.
“Another ten seconds, sir.”
“Fully zeroed in?”
“Maybe a little longer, sir.”
“Would you trust the scope if you had to re-install it on a weapon that had been in pieces a minute ago?”
“Up to about five hundred yards, yes, sir.”
“What about if you didn’t practice with the gun every day of your life?”
“Two hundred and fifty yards, sir,” the younger man replied.
“But that’s you?” Christie queried, briefly looking to Gunnery Sergeant Adamczyk. “You’re the Presidio’s trophy sniper, right, Corporal Delgado?”
A flicker of amusement touched Adamczyk’s granite countenance.
“If a man fires off several thousand rounds in his life a few days, here or there, isn’t going to take much of an edge off his shooting,” the older Marine offered.
“Permission to speak, Gunnery Sergeant?” Delgado requested.
“Proceed.”
“You could pull that post-assembly target range back to five hundred yards if you were using the .223 Model 700, sir.”
Dwight Christie thought about it.
“Higher muzzle velocity?”
“Yes, sir. The other thing you could do is fit a factory-machined bloop tube to the end of the barrel to make it easier to re-align the scope…”
The Marine hesitated, checking his slang was comprehensible to the four civilians standing in front of him.
A ‘bloop tube’ was an external extension tube, no part of which came into contact with a round fired out of the actual barrel. Correcting the re-installed telescopic sight with the markings on it would tend to reduce alignment errors, especially if one was in a hurry. The bloop tube might also suppress muzzle flash if one was shooting at night.
“A silencer would do the same sort of job, sir,” Marine Delgado added, comfortable his audience was on the same page.
Christie changed tack: “If you had your choice of any weapon, would you choose an M700, Corporal?”
“The only other similar weapon I am familiar with is the M16, sir. In combat I carry that gun as a self-protection weapon. The M700 – slash – M24 is the gun the Corps needs me to work with!”
Okay, try not to ask the wrong question a second time!
“Tell me about the M700? Good stuff, bad stuff?”
“It’s mostly good stuff, sir,” the younger man grinned. He paused, collected his thoughts. “The Model 700 was designed by Remington Arms engineer Merle Walker as a lower cost, mass-production replacement for the Model 30. The design therefore includes parts that can be turned on a lathe rather than machined, or milled, or that require working by hand. Smaller components tend to be stamped and less attention was given to the finishing of the stock.”
Dwight Christie had to suppress a smile as the young Marine recited his mantra.
“The Model 700 is a development, started back in 1948 involving several previous experimental models. Merle Walker was looking to increase accuracy by building in tighter tolerances in terms of the chamber and the bore. He achieved this by significantly reducing the leade time and by achieving a very fast lock time in the M700’s action.”
Leade was the technical term for that part of the gun’s chamber which a new round must traverse before reaching the barrel’s rifling.
Lock time is the gap between the trigger movement and the ignition of the cartridge which then explosively propels a bullet down the barrel. The shortest possible lock time was desirable because even an extra millisecond’s delay, or ‘dwell time’ will, inevitably, introduce a minute element of ‘drift’ into one’s aim ahead of the eventual discharge of the projectile.
Most bolt action rifles had lock times of up to about nine milliseconds, which was why, up until relatively recent times a gun like the nineteenth century British Martini-Henry, with a modern .303-calibre barrel liner and its legendarily lightning fast action had still been many sniper’s weapon of choice.
“What sort of lock time are we talking about for an M700?” He asked, interrupting Corporal Delgado’s flow.
“Fast, sir. Merle Walker shortened the distance the hammer and striker travels and the M700 has a powerful spring,” the youngster grinned momentarily, “that’s why anybody who messes with the action is liable to shoot his foot off. Obviously, that ‘hair trigger’ isn’t a problem in the Marine Corps. There’s talk about fitting a ‘safety’ trigger but that’s a dumb-arse idea. That’s got to take the lock time upscale…”
Realising he was talking like an enthusiastic amateur Delgado’s voice trailed off and he quirked an apologetic glance to Gunnery Sergeant Adamczyk.
“The M700’s lock time is about as short as you can get without electronic primer cartridge initiation,” the older Marine remarked. “Which means if you’ve got your target in the cross-hairs he’s history, sir.”
Chapter 40
