Suddenly the prisoner found himself in a brightly lit windowless room which had rugs on the floor, a big desk, and maps and pictures on the walls. These latter were old-style propaganda posters but they lent the subterranean office a certain brightness of character. Curiously, there was a big upright reel to reel tape recorded loaded with two silvery eight inch spools on the right hand side of the table.
The man behind the desk did not get up.
He nodded to the guards who forced Frank Waters to sit in a hard chair, manacled his wrists behind his back, snapped to attention, wheeled around and departed.
The captive studied his latest inquisitor.
Unlike him this man was wearing clothes that actually fitted him, and which, presumably, had not been recovered from a corpse at some indeterminate time in the last few months. Moreover, the man behind the desk had been able to shave that morning, wash and brush up; Frank Waters had not done any of those things for weeks and looked and smelled rank.
“Mne soobshchili, chto vy khorosho govorite po russki razgovornuyu?”
The middle aged, grim-faced man who had made no move to rise from behind his desk asked quietly.
I am informed that you speak good conversational Russian?
“Moy russkiy yazyk luchshe, chem razgovornym, comrade!
Frank Waters retorted, a little offended.
My Russian is better than conversational, comrade!
The other man registered this with a raised eyebrow. He was obviously not in any kind of a hurry.
“My name is Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov,” he announced in Russian. “I am First Deputy Director of the Committee for State Security of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
Frank Waters was impressed; if his interlocutor was to be believed, he was talking to the number two man in the KGB. Andropov was sitting in a wheelchair and his face had about it that lopsided look that suggested it had been smashed and only partially put back together again. There was something reassuring about knowing the man in whose hands his life undoubtedly rested had had an even worse war than he had.
“How do you do, Comrade Andropov,” he retorted, barring his teeth in a wolfish smile.
To the Englishman’s astonishment the Russian’s lips twisted into what might have been a rictus grin. The moment passed.
“You were captured in the uniform of a Red Army officer, Colonel Waters. You are suspected of gross crimes against the Soviet Union. You are a war criminal. I could have you executed at any time.”
Frank Waters shrugged.
“Absolutely,” he agreed. “I wish you’d bloody well get on with it, old son!”
Andropov viewed him silently with dull, inscrutable eyes.
“The food is bloody awful,” Frank Waters went on. “And making me wear this bloody clown’s suit is the last straw!” He frowned. “Where is this by the way?” He inquired cheerfully concluding on what he hoped was a civil note. As an officer and a gentleman it behoved him to remember at all times that one was a guest in somebody else’s country. “Somewhere east of the Urals, presumably?”
“Yes, Chelyabinsk.”
“Ah, Chelyabinsk,” Frank Waters sighed. “The city that bridges the Urals to the west with Siberia in the east.” He felt a little stronger for knowing where he was; a man’s place in the landscape mattered. “Is it true that like Rome, Constantinople and Moscow this city is built on seven hills, Comrade First Deputy Director?”
Andropov gave him a disdainful look.
“I don’t know.”
“Does the Leningrad Bridge still stand across the River Miass?” Frank Waters asked. “The famous bridge of the Urals to Siberia?”
“Yes. The Yankees never bombed the city.”
Frank Waters tried to remember his geography.
“What about Sverdlovsk, that would be about two hundred kilometres north of here?”
“No, they didn’t bomb Sverdlovsk either.”
Frank Waters grimaced: “My, my, that was careless of them?”
How on earth had Strategic Air Command ignored both Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk?
Chelyabinsk was ‘the Gate to Siberia’, a crucial hub on the trans-Siberia Railway; the city that during Hitler’s War and afterwards was generally referred to in Western military colleges as ‘Tankograd’ or ‘Tank City’ because at one time it had been the home of the biggest tank factory — the S.M. Kirov Factory no. 185 — in the World.
Sverdlovsk, in Tsarist times Yekaterinburg, had been the fourth largest city in the USSR before the war. Again, since the 1940s when Soviet industry was transferred east of the Urals to keep it out of the greedy clutches of the advancing Wehrmacht, it too had been a major industrial centre as well as a key regional communications hub.
The Russians been so worried about their secrets in and around this part of the country that they had installed cutting edge surface-to-air missile defences before the October War. Missile defences so advanced that they knocked down an American U-2 spy plane flying at seventy thousand feet!
Frank Waters started to ask himself what else the masterminds in charge of SAC and the RAF V-Bomber Force had missed on the night of the war? Given that there were fully equipped Red Army tank divisions on the move south through the mountains of Iran he did not like any of the answers he thought of; because each and every one of them suggested the flyboys had missed a lot of their targets.
The First Deputy Director of the Committee of State Security was watching his prisoner with hooded, darkly suspicious eyes. Frank Waters suspected the KGB man had been intimidating people all his life because he was very, very good at it.
He was even beginning to get a little twitchy himself.
Andropov came to a decision.
His right hand disappeared under his desk, presumably to ring a bell.
Within seconds two of Frank Waters’s minders stomped into the room. There was a jangling of keys and his hands were freed by one uniformed KGB trooper, the other stood by the big clumsy reel to reel tape recorder on Andropov’s desk.
The SAS man winced as the circulation returned to his hands in an agonising rush of pins and needles.
Andropov growled at the man next to the tape recorder and the spools began to rotate.
A woman’s clear, rather pedantic oddly mesmeric voice filled the underground bunker room with hissing, hectoring urgency through the background mush of static and long-range signal attenuation.
‘The Soviet leadership is hereby given notice that any further use of nuclear weapons by it, its allies or its proxies will result in an all out strike by the United Kingdom against the forces of the Soviet Union and any surviving concentrations of population or industry within the former territories of the Soviet Union, or in any territories deemed to now be under Soviet control.’
Frank Waters recognised the voice of his Prime Minister. Once heard it was the sort of voice a fellow tended to recollect forever. Like most of his contemporaries in the Regiment and throughout the armed forces he had assumed ‘the Angry Widow’ would be a stop gap, here today gone tomorrow phenomenon, nobody had expected her to still be — literally — calling the shots six months later. But then nobody had ever expected the Prime Minister to be such a damned attractive blond bombshell either.
It was a funny old World…
‘RAF bombers stand ready at the end of their runways at four minutes notice to go to war. Other RAF bombers are airborne at this time ready to strike within minutes of the receipt of the order to attack!’
“Here! Here!” Frank Waters guffawed softly before he thought better of it. He was in no fit state to survive a new beating and it was important to be able to stand up of one’s own volition when the enemy shot one.