Warsaw Concerto, page 56
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
“Perhaps, that is not my concern.”
Kolokoltsev pondered this for some moments.
He shrugged.
Okay, if that was the way the fucker wanted to play it…
“Fair enough.” He leaned closer to the other man, and spoke confidentially, his tone suddenly comradely as if his previous bluster had simply been for the sake of their underlings. “The people on the ships will be watching me with spy glasses. The mood on several of the big ships is, well, sensitive. We need to get on board the Jean Bart, take over. Throw a few people over the side, just to encourage the others. Once we’ve secured the flagship, the rest will be easy, the other ships will come in line. But,” he qualified, wagging a theatrical finger in Daladier’s face, “you and your boy’s will never get on board unless you play it smart. So, follow my lead and for fuck’s sake don’t try anything stupid until you’ve got enough of your people on board the Jean Bart to back us up.”
Citizen Daladier blinked at him.
“You think the idiots will resist my men?”
“Why do you think I had to come ashore to send those signals to Chairman Machenaud in Clermont-Ferrand?”
The dark tragi-comedy thickened.
“What messages?”
“The ones about the fighting condition of the fleet that Citizen Machenaud presumably considered so important that he accepted my recommendation that the fleet should be seized immediately. Isn’t that what you clowns are doing here?”
Kolokoltsev threw up his hands in exasperation.
“Fuck it! Don’t they tell you people anything!”
Daladier was blinking in obvious confusion.
“I told the people in Clermont-Ferrand that seizing the fleet was a thing that needed to be handled sensitively. The last thing we want is any of those ships out their turning their guns on us. Everything in this anchorage is at point blank range for even the smallest guns on those ships.”
Daladier was staring at him in the near darkness, his eyes wide, his mind clicking hurriedly through a slew of very bad possibilities.
Dmitry Kolokoltsev shook his head.
The fuckers had not even considered the possibility of what would happen if the fleet decided it did not want to be seized!
He turned and bawled: “Stop those morons burning those houses!”
The Russian tried not to smile.
Ah, progress at last…
Belatedly, Daladier remembered that he was the one who should have been issuing the orders.
“I was warned that you would resist any attempt to seize the fleet,” he confessed, frowning with bewilderment.
“Why the fuck would I do that?” The Russian retorted, as if he was morally offended, incensed by the slur on his revolutionary ardour. “All I want to do is take the fleet out of the hands of the useless fuckers in control out there,” he swept his right arm towards the bulk of the Jean Bart, “and use this fleet to strike a blow for the Revolution!” He shook his head, angry now. “Don’t you?”
“Well, yes, I suppose…”
“If we’d had this fleet at when we tried to invade Malta, we’d have thrown the English and the Yankees out of the Mediterranean two years ago! Fuck it! With this fleet we could sail right up the fucking English Channel and liberate the whole of northern fucking France!”
Well, if a man believed that he had to be seriously deranged but Dmitry Kolokoltsev knew that this was not the time or the place, to allow rational deliberation to impede the theatrical deliverance of his performance.
He struck again while the iron was glowing red hot.
“Right, I want you and as many of your best men as we can fit into it,” he snarled, “in my barge. Now! The people on those ships are watching. We need to make this look good! The rest of your men can get in the smaller boats and follow us out to the Jean Bart!”
The Russian swung away.
Waiting for the bullet.
Okay, I am still alive…
As he stepped down into the barge, he heard heavy footsteps behind him as men jumped onto the pontoon.
The French Navy men in grubby uniforms viewed him impassively as they stood to the barge’s wheel and throttle controls.
The barge rocked as men boarded.
Citizen Daladier stumbled against Kolokoltsev.
The Russian grabbed his arm and steadied him.
“Tell your men to sit down. And tell them to point their guns at the sky. I don’t want one of the useless fuckers accidentally shooting a hole in the boat!”
He was pleasantly surprised when the other man shouted the appropriate commands at his thugs. There were grunted protests which went on a lot longer than any decent Red Navy officer would have tolerated.
Kolokoltsev made allowances: Daladier was a maniac leading a bunch of cut-throat morons.
After a few minutes the barge churned away from the quay, then idled, holding its position.
“What are we waiting for?” Daladier demanded.
“We want to get as many of your men as possible into the other boats,” Kolokoltsev retorted wearily. “That’s a fucking battleship out there! Have you any idea how many people she’s got aboard her? Hundreds! We’ll need as many of our people to back us up as we can get into those boats!”
He pointed at the smaller launches coming alongside the pontoon.
He groaned in anguish and muttered under his breath: “Why the fuck am I having to tell you this?”
Not for the first time Dmitry Kolokoltsev fondly remembered his officer schooling, bawling out sullen men on the quarterdecks of small Red Navy gunboats on freezing winter days in the Black Sea; doubting that anything quite so marvellously developed a man’s survival instincts.
Every word the Russian said was now being addressed not to Daladier but to his half-tame predators.
“Are there any Marines on this boat?” Kolokoltsev barked, switching to French, pointedly ignoring Daladier. “Any of you? Put up your hand!”
Two men raised an arm in the gloom.
I must remember to shoot them first!
“Good. You two stick to me like glue when I go up the gangplank.”
Daladier started to protest.
The Russian brushed this aside.
“I need men with their sea legs by my side when I shoot Contra Amiral Leguay between the eyes.”
“Oh, I see…”
That is another thing…I need a gun!
A kopek to a rouble this is where I get shot…
“They took my personal weapon off me when I boarded the Jean Bart. I need a gun. Something compact that I can stash in the back waistband of my trousers!”
Nobody moved.
“How the fuck am I supposed to put a bullet between that cunt Leguay’s eyes?” He demanded with an anger bordering on incandescent rage. “If I haven’t got a fucking gun?”
Chapter 53
Thursday 26th January 1967
Forward HQ 4th Royal Tanks, Blaye, Gironde Estuary
Brigadier Edwin Bramall had not expected Sergey Akhromeyev to arrive in France for some days, so, when he was informed that the former Red Army man had reported to his headquarters that evening, he had been, well, somewhat…surprised. Albeit, in a very good way. The Russian, and for that matter, Madame Bertrand, Colonel Sebastien Betancourt, and many of the former White Brigade’s NCOs and fighters, had made strong, very favourable impressions on the commander of the 4th Royal Tanks Battle Group and the news that Akhromeyev was to be entrusted with command of the first of the new ‘overseas forces’ combat regiments, or commandos, had come as no surprise to him.
It seemed that the Russian had hitched a lift on one of the two C-130 RAF Hercules transporting sixty members of the Parachute Regiment to the Gironde Front. In the absence of an operational airfield – the Royal Engineers were working on that – the only way to get these much-needed reinforcements to Bramall’s exhausted ‘spearhead’ had been by parachute.
The Russian looked fit and well, easy in the battledress of his fellow paratroopers. He was already standing over the map table in the Battle Group Situation Room when Bramall arrived in the old chateau overlooking the muddy grey waters of the Garonne.
Akhromeyev saluted Bramall, who stuck out a hand in greeting.
“I didn’t expect you to be here for several days, Sergey,” the Englishman guffawed.
The Russian wore no badges of rank on his fatigues. However, from his demeanour it was immediately clear that he understood that despite the fact that he was a newly acknowledged major general in the Allied armies, that Bramall remained the senior man on the spot.
“The Vindrey Commando is still forming in Herefordshire,” Akhromeyev said deliberately, surprising his interlocutor with his hugely improved command of English. “We are concentrating on,” he hesitated, searching for the words, “learning to speak your language and familiarising ourselves with the operational methods of our new allies. Regrettably, the Commando will not be operational for some time,” he shrugged apologetically. “Not perhaps, until April or May. Perhaps, not by then, not at least as a,” he hesitated, ‘fully-fledged, you say?”
Bramall nodded.
“As a fully-fledged commando. Not in the sense of your Royal Marine Commandos, which I have determined to be our model.”
Bramall had heard that a couple of the paratroopers had broken ankles, and others had needed patching up. The jump to the north of Blaye had been conducted in rain and high winds. Notwithstanding, Akhromeyev looked spic and span, like he had just stepped out of a taxi.
“Might I be so bold as to ask after Madame Bertrand?” Bramall inquired solicitously.
“Vera is well. She has appointed herself as our chief translator and English teacher.” The Russian grimaced. “Women!” He added, not unfondly. “She tried to steal my best military administrator, a most able veteran who survived the Battle of Malta. To be her secretary, would you believe.”
“Did she indeed!”
Sergey Akhromeyev gestured in mild exasperation.
“Now, I have to share him with her,” he shook his head. “Women! But then you are married to one of the Angry Widow’s lieutenants, are you not?”
Edwin Bramall found himself laughing.
His wife, Miriam, was actually a Home Office Minister, responsible for overseeing and developing plans for the London Garden City Project. Bizarrely, she was also an elected Labour Party Member of Parliament.
“Ah, the difference is that Miriam would never order me to smite HMG’s enemies. I think she would much prefer that I simply talked to our foes in a very stern voice.”
Obviously, part of this was initially lost in translation.
Nevertheless, belatedly, the Russian got gist of the joke.
Bramall sobered: “I take it everybody has introduced themselves to you, Sergey?”
In fact, Bramall’s staffers had welcomed the Russian like a veritable prodigal returned. Sergey Akhromeyev marvelled at the way the English had such a baffling propensity to befriend their former enemies, as if they felt in some way that everything which had gone before had been no more than some kind of unfortunate misunderstanding and that they had wanted to be friends all along. Curiously, this insight into the character of his former enemies, helped put into perspective many things which had previously perplexed him about the British and their imperial system. Everybody else had stationed whole armies in distant fortresses to sustain their empires; the British had, wherever they could get away with it, hardly bothered to deploy more than ‘tripwire’ garrisons. They had run the whole of India and most of Africa with a few hundred District Commissioners, the willing co-operation of countless local people, and as few troops as was possible. By and large, they had trusted the subjugated to rule themselves for the greater good of the Empire and most of the time, it had worked like a charm. They had abolished slavery before anybody else, rejected serfdom at home and abroad and yet still, implausibly, clung onto their vast overseas territories right up until only a few years ago.
Just, it seemed, by being nicer to people than any of the other colonial overlords…
Of course, he accepted that it had to be more complicated than that but ever since he had thrown himself at their mercy, the English had treated him like a long lost, much-loved member of the family. Walking back into Edwin Bramall’s headquarters he had had the oddest sensation that he was re-joining a band of brothers…
“Yes. I have been briefed on the general situation along the coast and the developing tactical picture here on the north bank of the Gironde Estuary.”
Hereabouts, that estuary was easily three kilometres wide with the flood waters of the Garonne inundating low-lying ground on both sides of the estuary.
Bordeaux was the best part of sixty kilometres to the south of where Akhromeyev stood. While they had waited for Bramall to arrive, Akhromeyev’s new British ‘friends’ had been keen to tell him all about the history of Blaye.
He had been more interested in its presently disused, otherwise quickly restorable, railway link to the north and south east, the network of ill-kept but passable roads in the district, and the serviceability of the small ferry miraculously moored in the town’s ancient port.
However, to the British Army the Hundred Years War was not some distant aberration lost in the midst of the Middle Ages six centuries ago. So, the history of Blaye was a living thing, a thread that linked England to a past that was still very much a living, breathing reality.
An ancient Frankish hero, Roland was apparently buried in Blaye, which before the Cuban Missiles War had had a population of about four thousand souls. The English had burned the place down in 1352 and as witnessed by several battered, rusting road signs and mossy stone road markers, until 1961 it had been called Blaye-et-Sainte-Luc.
Opposite Blaye was Lamarque in the Medoc, with the estuary separating two regions, traditions, two different versions of France. That Blaye itself had been surrendered, or rather, abandoned to the first Special Air Service patrol to drive into it spoke volumes to the morale and the crumbling organisational coherence of the bandits and Krasnaya Zarya holdouts who had been hoping, against hope, to winter unmolested, sheltered in the valley of the Garonne, far enough from the sea to be safe from the perfidious English.
Understandably, Edwin Bramall was keen to ‘press on’, regardless of how overstretched and tired his men, and their machines, were after nearly two months of constant campaigning at the end of increasingly tenuous lines of supply. The liberation of the last of the enclaves north of the Gironde might alleviate the supply situation at some stage. Unfortunately, the destruction of Royan, which would have been the ideal resupply hub and jumping off point for renewed operations north of the Gironde, had scuppered that hope, possibly for several weeks.
That said, Akhromeyev completely understood what a fillip it had been to the 2nd Royal Tanks to have taken Blaye intact. Men could not live and fight in the worst winter weather indefinitely, now Bramall’s men had acquired an old, only half-ruined medieval fortified town that they could – from what he had seen – hold, at need, against all comers forever.
“Jolly good!” Edwin Bramall declared. “You must let me take you on a tour of the old forts hereabout, Sergey. “They are the work of Vauban. Most distinctive, absolute state of the art back in the seventeenth century. It only goes to show how preoccupied with we British and the Spaniards the French were back in those days!”
Sergey Akhromeyev frowned.
He was only vaguely interested in the works of Marshal of France Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, Seigneur de Vauban, Marquis de Vauban, Louis XIV’s great military engineer; what he was really interested in, and at that moment, was preoccupied by were the thousands of square kilometres of former bandit country now nominally ‘held down’ by Edwin Bramall’s widely-dispersed, under-strength mechanised brigade. Presently, less than ten thousand men, of whom possibly less than five thousand were combat effectives, controlled a thirty to fifty-kilometre-wide swath of coastal territory from Nantes and the Loire Valley all the way south to the Gironde Estuary. Even if he gave credence to his new allies’ claims that Free French militias were ‘popping up, here and there’ to help guard the 2nd Tanks’ ‘hanging’ two hundred plus kilometres left, or eastern flank, Edwin Bramall’s command was not so much out on a limb as teetering on the ragged edge of a cliff.
‘Don’t forget we’ve got the Navy just off shore,’ Akhromeyev had been assured.
This had not done a lot to allay his uneasiness.
Not one single iota!
Krasnaya Zarya and the robber clans who had raped this countryside over and over again in the last two years had not gone away, they had just melted into the landscape, or run away out of range of the 2nd Tanks’ guns. This far south only a tiny fraction of their ‘fighters’ had actually been killed or captured by the British. For all the talk of a general French offensive on the left of the British Expeditionary Force’s push south to the Gironde, and the exhilaration of ‘liberating’ the last coastal redoubts, the enemy was not defeated so much as simply, displaced. Even if Krasnaya Zarya retreated all the way back into the foothills of the Massif Central, leaving only weak, scattered insurgent forces in the field, come the spring the war was likely to ignite anew even more fiercely than before. If the ‘Allies’ succeeded in pushing the Front Internationale – in Akhromeyev’s mind it and Red Dawn were synonymous, inseparable – back into its bunkers in the Auvergne, defeating it, eradicating it was going to be virtually impossible. In France, Krasnaya Zarya was like a plague contagion that returned, time and again: while he suspected that the Free French understood this, he knew that the British did not.
“I’m sorry,” he groaned. “If I was out there,” he swept his arm towards the north and the east, “I would have given you Blaye, too. Let you walk in, given you time to get your feet under the table…”
His frown morphed into a brief scowl of frustration.
His English was a work in progress. Much though his dear Vera was a demanding task mistress, yet he was still struggling with the language’s inane idiosyncrasies and counter-intuitive syntax.
