Margaret Thatcher looked around the table at today’s membership of the War Cabinet. The regular members of the War Cabinet present were: Secretary of State for Defence, William ‘Willie’ Whitelaw, Field Marshall Sir Richard Hull, speaking for the Chiefs of Staff of the three armed services, and Airey Neave, the man her enemies now called her ‘Security Supremo’, or more unkindly Beria to her Iron Lady. Customarily, Iain Macleod, Minister of Information, Leader of the House of Commons and the Chairman of what was left of the Conservative and Unionist Party would have been present but he was currently hospitalised. He had been struck down by a mystery fever, collapsing in his office the previous evening. The Foreign Secretary, who tended to report to the War Cabinet on an ‘at need’ basis, had flown to Saudi Arabia yesterday. Today the Prime Minister had requested the attendance of Alison Munro, an increasingly familiar contributor to the War Cabinet’s deliberations in her key position at Supply and Transportation, from where she was efficiently masterminding the ongoing ‘build up’ in the Middle East.
Airey Neave was flanked by the Director General of the Security Services, Sir Richard ‘Dick’ White and his protégé Rachel Piotrowska, who had just got back from Philadelphia. The woman was due to fly out to America again with the Prime Minister on Tuesday to take up the post of Head of Station of the Security Services in the United States. Margaret Thatcher had raised an eyebrow when Airey Neave had briefed her on this appointment but otherwise let the appointment go unremarked.
Margaret Thatcher’s gaze hesitated on Rachel Piotrowska’s face.
The other woman was the same age as her; more obviously attractive despite being careless, a little languid in her manner and irritatingly elegant in whatever she wore. Tom Harding-Grayson had only given the Prime Minister the edited highlights of the other woman’s extraordinary life and career; Rachel had survived the Lodz ghetto as a child, Ravensbrück concentration camp as a teenager, and worked for British Intelligence practically all her adult life. Then there had been that bizarre, incredible Kalashnikov-wielding rampage through the Citadel of Mdina in which she had single-handedly taken on practically the whole Red Army! The Prime Minister could not forget, nor would she ever forgive — even though she knew her resentment was irrational and unworthy — the fact that it had been in Rachel Piotrowska’s arms that the man she had loved, Julian Christopher had died.
The Prime Minister’s stare shifted onto Airey Neave’s ruddy face.
“Presumably, since Miss Piotrowska is being redeployed to Philadelphia we may infer that Comrade Ceaușescu’s debriefing has been concluded, Airey?”
Her friend nodded.
“Yes. Most satisfactorily, Prime Minister. There are always loose ends to be tied up at a later date but Ceaușescu has filled in a lot of what we had only previously surmised in very general terms, and provided a wealth of other high-level intelligence. Previous damage assessment analyses of the USSR have been thoroughly reviewed and amended as a result. Ceaușescu was less helpful as to the true extent and capabilities of the ‘rump’ surviving Soviet Union, but again,” the Secretary of State for National Security shrugged, “he has provided us with any number of revealing insights. Our working assumption that perhaps two-thirds of the USSR was effectively destroyed or badly damaged was broadly correct; where we were completely wrong was in assuming that there would be very few ‘joined up’ or large contiguous areas of territory completely untouched, other than by fallout. In retrospect, we and the Americans hugely underestimated the extent to which Soviet industry beyond the Ural Mountains remains intact.”
The Prime Minister considered this for a moment. Before the October War Soviet industry had become so centralised that a dozen, or perhaps a score of nuclear strikes taking out the cities which produced most of the tanks, ballistic missiles, jet aircraft, railway locomotives and so forth would have crippled the Russians’ ability to wage offensive war every bit as effectively as laying waste the vast areas that had actually been destroyed. Sometimes, she wondered if the people who had been in charge before the war had had any idea what they were doing? All that destruction, all those lives wasted…
“What do we do with Ceaușescu now?” She asked, unable to wash the anger from her voice.
“We’ll squirrel him away,” Airey Neave reported. “We’ll dust him off from time to time; if nothing else he’ll be damnably useful as a spotter.”
“A spotter?”
Rachel Piotrowska cleared her throat.
“Nicolae was heavily involved with the Romanian Securitate, in fact he virtually owned the Secret Police in Bucharest. He is a walking ‘reference book’ that we can turn to whenever we want to identify a suspected Soviet or Eastern Bloc agent or former senior Eastern Block Communist official, Prime Minister.”
Margaret Thatcher was struck by the lilting, very Polish accent the other woman now affected. It was as if she was searching for the person she had once been before her life became a lie. According to Airey Neave she had been a courtesan and an assassin, once briefly been the favourite mistress of the dead Shah of Iran. The Prime Minister took herself to task, realising she was losing focus again.
“There was a woman with him?”
“Yes, Eleni. A Greek-Cypriot woman,” Rachel confirmed. “She is very attached to him. I feel sorry for her. She and Nicolae are being held in Scotland with several other ‘defectors’ and ‘persons of interest’ whose survival we wish to keep secret for as long as possible.”
“Thank you,” Margaret Thatcher said. “That will be all, Miss Piotrowska.”
The men in the room half-stood as Rachel departed.
Everybody settled anew and the curtain was withdrawn from the blackboard revealing a composite map of the Persian Gulf and the surrounding countries assembled from several different sheets.
The Chief of the Defence Staff rose to his feet.
Sir Richard Hull’s demeanour was that of an old soldier, calm and measured, and uncomfortably aware that everything he was about to say was hedged around with so many qualifications that if he tried to explain one-tenth of them they would still be here tomorrow afternoon before he got half-way through.
“Frankly, if we go looking for the holes in this scheme of ours,” he smiled wryly, “we will worry ourselves to death and die asking ourselves why we didn’t at least try to do something in the first place!”
“Quite so, Sir Richard,” Margaret Thatcher observed tartly.
“However, I will,” the Chief of the Defence Staff reminded her, “reiterate the point that regardless of whether the Egyptians fulfil their part of the bargain, we shall be in a fine old fix if the Saudis don’t open up the war stores depots on their territory. If they wait and see much longer then they are going to end up facing the Red Army across their indefensible northern land borders on their own.”