“You knew Stalin?”
“God himself could not know Iosif Vissarionovich. I spoke to him, that is all. Some men are beyond understanding. I imagine it was the same for the men around Adolf Hitler. It is different for men like Nikita Sergeyevich. He was a man whom it was possible to know had the Americans only tried. Nikita Sergeyevich was a hard and a brutal man but not stupid. People say he drove the Americans to war. That he caused the war; I think this is wrong. Nikita Sergeyevich had fought all his life to preserve the sanctity of the motherland and the future of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I do not think he would have seen it swept away thus…”
He took another swig from the canteen.
His head was clearing.
“After the war I joined the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. I became an intelligence officer. At first in Berlin where I learned German. I speak, read and write seven languages; Russian, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. I am fluent in several others, including most of the Scandinavian languages. After Berlin I was in London, Paris, Brussels, Bonn, Copenhagen, Rome, Washington and eventually Ankara. By then my soul was tired and I’d decided to defect. I was married once, to the daughter of a brilliant man who was too close to Beria and was shot in the back of the head one night in the basement of the Lubyanka. That was after the bastards had starved him for a week, broken every bone in his hands and knocked out all his teeth, you understand. Svetlana blamed me, I think. It wasn’t much of a marriage and it too, died. She divorced me a few years back. Her and our children lived in Moscow so they are probably dead now. When the October War came I was being tortured in the basement of a safe house outside Ankara. My ‘guards’ had gone outside for a smoke a couple of minutes before the bomb went off. A couple of weeks later I met you.”
“What were we doing the last year?” Clara Pullman asked urgently, her emotions chaotic.
“We were trying to discover if Red Dawn was a figment of somebody in the Kremlin’s pre-war Vodka-inflamed imagination or a nightmare that will haunt the world for the next hundred years.”
Chapter 25
Eleven of the seventeen political ministers of the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration, the three Service Chiefs and the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Henry Tomlinson were present when, on the stroke of one o’clock the big double doors opened. The men in the room — there were no women present — shuffled to their feet, mostly from weary habit because few were paying attention to who was about to enter into their presence.
“Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth!” Barked a Guardsman, presenting arms and crashing his two large booted feet together on the wooden floor boards of the old mansion.
The proclamation and the sound of other rifles clicking metallically to the ‘present’ in the hallway outside galvanised and, for some of the ministers, came as a horrible heart-pausing shock.
Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen, and Defender of the Faith walked regally into the polished, rather faded glory of the oak-panelled former grand dining hall of the dead former Fleet Street Press magnate.
The Queen’s expression was forbiddingly stern and she didn’t make eye contact with any of the men she walked past. Only the three Service Chiefs and the Cabinet Secretary had had official pre-warning of the Sovereign’s intention — or rather, her express and indefatigable demand — to attend this specially convened meeting of the Cabinet of the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration.
The Queen was dressed like the housewife she liked to think she was at home with her family, except that the knee length blue dress was obviously a pre-war Norman Hartnell creation and her hair was freshly coiffured, and her black shoes polished to a perfect, high sheen. She wore a dark jacket with a single small glittering pin in the form of a jewelled anchor above her heart.
The Prime Minister, towering protectively above his monarch escorted her to her chair and held it for her while she made herself comfortable. Behind him Margaret Thatcher, apparently unaffected by her traumatic recent experiences in Scotland escorted a stiffly limping Vice-Admiral Julian Christopher, whose bruised and battered countenance drew many fewer looks than the fact that the fighting Admiral was leaning on the Angry Widow’s arm for support. Tom Harding-Grayson closed the door after his relatively anonymous entry into the august gathering. While Julian Christopher moved painfully to flank the First Sea Lord, Margaret Thatcher went to the empty space beside Jim Callaghan, and Tom Harding-Grayson joined his old friend Henry Tomlinson.
“Everybody should sit down,” the Queen declared. She waited patiently while the members of her Government did as they’d been commanded. When everybody was seated and all eyes were upon her she took a moment to review what she planned to say, collected her composure and began to speak in a quiet, determined soprano. The blistering outrage simmered just beneath the surface of her perfectly modulated calm.
In that moment the sound of a pin dropping on a carpeted floor a hundred yards away would have sounded like the crack of a rifle shot.
“The Prime Minister advises me that my presence at this Cabinet is in the national interest at this time of great crisis,” the thirty-six year old recently bereaved mother whose husband lay critically ill at a heavily guarded Edinburgh hospital fighting for his life made eye contacts around the table as she spoke. “That was in the minutes before the assault on Balmoral. At that time I accepted his invitation. Nothing that has happened in the interim has done anything to make me question where my duty to my people lies. In fact, I am convinced that my presence here, today, is all the more appropriate in the circumstances.” She stopped, folded her small hands before her on her lap. “The decisions that must be taken at the conclusion of this meeting will have my unreserved support. However, it is important that everybody in this room should know before we begin that I have the utmost faith in the Prime Minister and his Deputy, Mr Callaghan.”
This drew a sharp intake of breath from the Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party and several other members of his faction. However, Ian Macleod refrained from making a direct intervention.
“I have spoken,” the Queen continued, ignoring the discomfiture of several of the men in the room with her specific recognition of the Leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party as Edward Heath’s deputy, “to each of the Chiefs of Staff and assured them that they also enjoy my unqualified confidence. You will know that Sir Charles Elworthy very honourably offered his resignation following the attack on Balmoral,” he looked directly at the Chief of the Air Staff, “but I cannot allow a man so capable and so loyal to my person to resign from the very post for which he is so self-evidently so admirably qualified, Sir Charles. And that is my final word on the subject. It is clear that there are divisions in our fractured and hard hit country but no good will come of randomly denigrating good and honest men for the transgressions and failings of others.”