Warsaw Concerto, page 57
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
“Then,” he went on grimly, “I would start to prey on your outposts, I would mine the roads. The people I had left inside the town would start to slit the throats of your soldiers, and to poison the water supplies…”
“I agree entirely,” Edwin Bramall said tersely. “A lot of my chaps, including most of the fellows in this room have experience in Malaya, Borneo, Aden, Cyprus,” a half-smile, “and in Northern Ireland. Before the October War most of us had spent our whole careers dealing with nationalists, rebels, insurgents, religious fanatics, communist guerrillas, you name it, we’ve come up against it. So, I agree, there is absolutely no reason why this campaign should be any different.” He shrugged. “Except, thus far, it has been different. This isn’t like any of those other places. This is very like France, Belgium, Holland and frankly, Western Germany was in 1944 and 1945, even when we were rolling into Germany in those days we were coming as liberators. It is the same here. Oh, I don’t doubt that there are hold out fanatics who mean to, and will, at some stage, do us harm but they will be in a shrinkingly tiny minority…”
Sergey Akhromeyev thought the Englishman was being childishly naïve.
Bramall was reading his thoughts.
“Sadly, the pre-war population of this region was driven out, preyed upon by outsiders. Within weeks Free French troops will backfill for my forces, fill the current voids in the countryside. If we were campaigning in high summer the enemy might easily exploit the delay; nature as they say, abhors a vacuum but at this season, even Krasnaya Zarya fanatics are not immune to the cold and the wet.” He paused, unflinchingly met the Russian’s gaze. “One other thing, Sergey,” he went on, very quietly, “if this, or other places turns into an ‘Alamo-type trap’ we shall not defend it to the last man as so many courageous American soldiers attempted to do in their Midwest last year. No, we shall move back, wasting everything behind us.”
“Everything?”
Bramall nodded.
“If we have learned anything in the last four years it is that we must be as ruthless, sometimes even more ruthless, than our enemies.”
The Russian accepted this without further comment.
He would think his thoughts; Bramall could believe whatever he wanted to believe.
“Why did you want me to come down here?”
The Englishman grinned.
“This summer we are going to have to do something about Bordeaux,” he announced, beckoning the Russian to follow him around to the other side of the map table. “Ideally,” he continued, “without raising the place to the ground and without having to resort to a full-scale siege and or frontal attack. My suggestion to General Hunt, the C-in-C of the BEF, is that we use commandos like the one you’re putting together outside Hereford, and fighting columns based around SAS, Special Boat Squadron, Parachute Regiment types and Royal Marines, to ‘harry’ the countryside around Bordeaux, and the upper valley of the Garonne…”
“To cut off the city?”
“Yes, the Navy will look after the river side of things, the Air Force will keep the defenders up every night, we on the ground will besiege the city, but indirectly with relatively small, very mobile forces. Bordeaux is the key to Acquitane and isolating the Western flank of the Massif Central…”
The Russian stared at the map.
He looked up, grinned.
“You don’t need me to kill anybody just yet, then, Edwin?”
“No, no, but I need you to be familiar with the ground. To have worked up your general scheme of operations. Mostly, I want you to get to know my staff and to thoroughly familiarise yourself with the way the British Army does things, and how best to employ the SBV Commando.”
Sergey Akhromeyev bared his teeth in amusement.
“We both know that my people are expendable,” he said simply.
“Do we?” The other man shot back. “Your people will be wearing the same uniforms that my people are wearing!”
Akhromeyev had never seen Bramall get angry before.
The Englishman scowled: “How dare you assume that the British Army regards any of its people as expendable!”
The Russian’s eyes had narrowed.
“I am not a British officer…”
It was then that Edwin Bramall realised that Akhromeyev had been testing him, exploring if the bonhomie was more than skin-deep. He scowled, still vexed.
“If you wear the bloody uniform you – and your people - will bloody well get the respect that uniform bloody well entitles you to, General Akhromeyev!”
Chapter 54
Thursday 26th January 1967
Jean Bart, Villefranche-sur-Mer, France
There were four lookouts on the observation platform just below the battleship’s main battery gun director giddily high in her armoured bridge. Until a few minutes ago the light of the setting wintery sun had glistened through the now leaden overcast across the lenses of their powerful Zeiss binoculars as they watched everything that was happening on the corniche around the bay, the narrow roads and tracks up into the hills and particularly, what was going on at the main loading dock.
Now, only the headlamps of the cars and lorries – probably every serviceable vehicle in the entire Nice district – dazzled the lens of the glasses watching every, increasingly dim and indistinct, movement on the dock on the western side of the anchorage.
Contra Amiral René Leguay passed his glasses to the diminutive, elfin figure standing next to him in the gathering dusk. Aurélie Faure leaned her elbows against the bridge guard rail to steady herself as she peered intently into the gloom at the point where the sea met the land.
The battleship was riding, as near to unmoving as any ship on the water can possibly be, on shortened anchor chains aligned almost perfectly parallel to the quayside breakwater where seemingly hundreds of Revolutionary Guards milled and kicked their heels, and the backed-up lorries and cars which had brought them from Nice and beyond now completely gridlocked practically every road around, and leading down to the bay.
Leguay and his Navigator, a ridiculously youthful lieutenant, barely old enough to be a cadet, had triangulated the distance from the centreline of the Jean Bart to the dockside to be between six hundred and ninety-seven to seven hundred and one metres. A point or so to the north the looming bulk of the bow of the Clemenceau partially obscured the view of the main coast road to the west from deck level but not from here, up in the Gods.
Yes, this was definitely the best seat in the house!
René Leguay sighed.
Soon it would be time for Aurélie and he to give up their vantage point and begin the long trek down to the main deck and the head of the gangway.
“Dmitry must be a better talker than we gave him credit for, Mon Amiral,” the woman said softly. Even now, even though by rights she ought to be half-paralysed with terror, she was meticulously respectful to Leguay in front of their people.
“They seem to be milling around,” she added thoughtfully.
“Dmitry probably didn’t want the bastards straggling all over the anchorage…”
René Leguay turned and punched buttons on the old-fashioned com relay box welded to the armoured bulkhead behind him.
He heard his gunnery officer’s acknowledgement.
Unlike the navigator, ‘Guns’ was a grizzled veteran. He had been on the Dunkerque at Mers-al-Kebir in July 1940 when the British had sunk the old battleship Bretagne and killed over a thousand Frenchmen. He had been drunk most of the last year and only started to sober up when Leguay and Dmitry Kolokoltsev had briefed him on their plan.
‘One of the guns is bound to blow up and kill everybody in the turret,’ Capitaine de Corvette – Lieutenant Commander - Serge Benois had observed sourly, then with a grimace declared: ‘better to go out that way than in a fucking labour battalion in the mountains!’
René Leguay suppressed a grin as he thought about it.
Then he reminded himself that this was serious…
“Aurélie and I are about to go down to welcome our guests. You do what you have to do the moment the first boarders reach the top of the gangway. We won’t speak again until this thing is over, Benois.”
The other man grunted.
“We’ll see each other on the other side, Mon Amiral!”
Aurélie Faure handed back Leguay’s binoculars.
He slung the strap over his head, took one last look around and waved for the woman to precede him. This high in the superstructure everything narrowed and all the ladders were narrow, vertical, treacherous. While Aurélie moved with the sure-footedness of an alpine gazelle he was always barking his shins and acquiring new welts and contusions on his skull and arms moving around up here in the fighting top.
It had taken nearly two hours to load the four 380-millimetre 45-calibre Modèle 1935 rifles of the forward quadruple main battery turret that afternoon.
The great two thousand seven hundred and forty-six-ton turret had lain dormant, a no-go area of the ship for much of the last four years. Serge Benois had inspected it now and then, running cursory tests on the powder hoists and shell lifts, but none of the pneumatic breech blocks had been opened in the last six months. Another problem had been that the turret’s guns had been elevated to a jaunty twenty degrees for the ship’s return to Villefranche from Toulon; to attempt a full loading cycle they needed to be declined to an angle of just six degrees.
‘Anybody watching – assuming they’ve got half-a-brain – will know that might mean we’re putting rounds in the chamber,’ Serge Benois had pointed out, stating the patently obvious.
‘I’d rather have bullets in the barrels than not, when those bastards arrive,’ Leguay had retorted, somewhat tersely.
So, this evening rifles 1 and 2 were loaded with high explosive rounds, barrel 3 with an armour-piercing shell and 4 with what they guessed was a twenty-year-old star shell. The drive motor of the Shell Room revolving table carrying each eight hundred and eighty-four-kilogram projectile to the shell hoist had shorted out after the first three rounds were ‘hoisted’, which meant that the crew had had to make do with the shell next to the lift. Which had happened to be a giant firework not a ship-killer.
Once each shell had been rammed into its rifle, three propellent bags, each weighing over sixty kilograms – a standard ‘combat charge’ for a so-called ‘full bore’ shoot would have been four bags but Leguay and Benois had quietly agreed between themselves not to tempt fate even farther – had been jammed into the chamber hard up behind each shell, and the breech closed and locked in position.
With a full combat charge, rounds exited the barrel at a speed of eight hundred and thirty metres per second, with the reduced charge they might lose about ten percent of that velocity; not a thing that mattered overly when the target was a little over half-a-kilometre away, rather than twenty or thirty miles down range!
Of course, they still had no idea, nor could they, whether the forward turret would actually traverse off the centreline when the button was pressed. In theory, the massive structure was capable of traversing at a rate of five degrees per second: meaning it would take at least sixteen seconds – assuming everything went according to plan – to swing through the ninety or so degrees necessary to come to bear on the quay from which the Admiral’s barge had just cast off.
It had been tempting to bring the three 152-millimetre calibre Modèle 1930 canons of the port, quarterdeck mounted secondary battery into action as soon as possible. For one thing, they were confident that this turret was in reasonable working order, and for another, it could traverse faster, reloading was not going to be an insuperable problem and its forty-nine-kilogram high explosive shells fired over open sights at point blank range, hitting their targets at a velocity of over eight hundred metres per second, would wreak immense havoc.
However, René Leguay was determined to retain a tiny modicum of tactical flexibility right up until the very last moment. And anyway, if things started going wrong ahead of schedule every working gun that could bear on the enemy would be brought into action pretty damned quickly.
His only real worry was somebody pulling the trigger too soon.
If that happened a lot of those bastards kicking their heels on the corniche, at the dockside, and presently ransacking decent citizens’ houses would probably get away. Which would be a problem because once the fleet opened fire on the bastards there was no going back, and it would take several days to evacuate the bay.
The other problem, the one he could do absolutely nothing about, was the possibility that First Captain Dmitry Kolokoltsev, might already have sold them all out.
René Leguay eventually reached the deck with only a couple of new bruises. He looked up to meet the stares of the men and women manning the anti-aircraft guns clustered in the shadow of the funnel. It was very dark now, and the handful of lights showing along the side of the ship were unnaturally dazzling. In the distance there were more fires consuming the once picturesque villas on the distant hillsides.
The gangway had been moved forward thirty metres during the day. Where it had been before, the over-blast shock wave from the triple 152-millimetre guns would have blown the side party over the rail. Not that anybody that close to the guns would have still been alive by then…
Low sand-bagged revetments had been strategically positioned on the open deck to provide the battleship’s hand-picked reception committee somewhere to hide when the World blew up around them.
“Don’t make me order you to go below,” Leguay murmured, sidelong out of the corner of his mouth, to the woman at his side.
“I won’t go,” she said simply.
“Aurélie…”
His plea fell on deaf ears.
The woman turned to face him, defiance written in her whole being, her hands balled into fists as if she was preparing to fight off any attempt to drag her below into the safe, armoured cocoon below decks.
“I’d rather die with you than go on living.”
This came as a little bit of a shock to Leguay.
“Oh,” the man mouthed, lost for words. Nobody had ever said anything like that to him: how was he supposed to react? “But…”
“If you die, we’ll never get out of this place,” the woman continued. “You’re the one who is holding everything together. And besides, I think I love you!”
Aurélie Faure shrugged.
“Sorry, I should have said that before.”
The man grimaced.
“Better late than never.” He would have said something sentimental but he knew, he just knew, she already knew exactly how he had felt about her for some time now. He chuckled lowly. “When this is over you and I will have a lot of catching up to do.”
Aurélie Faure quirked a wry smile in the night.
“I shall look forward to that, Mon Amiral.”
René Leguay wondered why all the angst had mysteriously leeched out of his system, he was unafraid, at peace with himself and the world for the first time in years.
He glanced behind them at where rifle-wielding men hid behind their sandbagged positions on the otherwise empty midships deck. Above them anti-aircraft guns sat unmoving in their open steel tubs, their crews also crouching, squatting or laying down out of sight, ready to jump up in an instant. The whole ship felt like a gigantic coiled spring, as if the energy was relentlessly building up to such a pitch that surely, it must explode any minute.
Aurélie reached out and took Leguay’s hand.
He, decked out in his best uniform, she in her boiler suit, a small, slight figure beside his tall, gangling presence, would have looked like an odd couple, holding hands in the light of day.
But it was fully night, now.
Aurélie coughed, clearing her throat.
“For what it’s worth I don’t think Dmitry will betray us.”
Chapter 55
Thursday 26th January 1967
Hôtel de Ville, Châlons-sur-Marne, France
Frank Waters had not really appreciated the magnitude of what had happened to France in the wake of the October War until the last few days. He guessed a lot of people in the United Kingdom – England particularly – had not unnaturally been too preoccupied with their own woes to worry overmuch about the fate of their nearest European neighbours. London, Liverpool and places from Kent to Hull to Morecombe Bay had been destroyed and, they now knew, that about a third of the pre-war population of the ‘English Counties’ had died in the cataclysm; by comparison, the initial shock had been statistically, at least in terms of headline casualties – in the dreadful calculus of these things, possibly one in every seven French men, women and children had perished as against one in three in England - not been as devastating on the other side of the English Channel.
Nevertheless, on the morning after the war, Paris had been two-thirds gone, Amiens, Lille, Reims, Strasbourg and Metz obliterated. Although the north eastern departments were in chaos, it seemed that elements of the French Army had tried and failed to take control; by mid-spring of 1963 there had no longer been any semblance of national government and with the influx of a flood of refugees across the Rhine from the shattered German lands, everything had eventually fallen apart in the year after the war..
Whereas, by some miracle the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration had held things together in that terrible winter of 1962-63; there had been no comparable recognised authority, or governmental entity in France, the French people had divided into tribes and civil war had been the inevitable consequence. Malignant cancers like Krasnaya Zarya, their sometime bedfellows the Communists, and elsewhere local workers’ committees, land owners, politicians with surviving local power bases, the rich and the self-important, had staked out fiefdoms large and small and of course, and as always happens when a country disintegrates into chaos, it was the ordinary citizens – the innocent majority - who suffered the worst. Nothing quite so terrible, so disastrous had happened to the French people since the fourteenth century and even then, at the height of the Hundred Years’ War, the nightmare had never gripped, at one and the same time, the entire nation.
