The Foreign Secretary shook his head, hoping to clear out some of the cobwebs.
“No matter how worrying things seem, in a month or two we might be looking back on these last few days wondering what all the fuss was about.”
“I hope so, Tom,” Margaret Thatcher declared grimly.
Jim Callaghan ran a hand through his hair.
“What is the latest on the other American battle group?”
“The USS Independence is currently oiling at Cape Town,” William Whitelaw explained. “As you know the Independence is almost as big as the Enterprise and carries nearly the same sized air group. Enterprise and Independence both carry two to three times as many aircraft as our biggest ships, and both are much newer ships than anything in our inventory apart from the Hermes, which, as I mentioned, is a bit worse for wear at present. In any event, the Independence cannot be expected, at the earliest, at Gibraltar until several days after the Enterprise.”
The Foreign Secretary was caught out by his own exhaustion for a moment: “The worst thing is the knowledge that there may be people out there,” he waved to the rafters, “who might have no other purpose in life than to destroy us and everything we stand for. We cannot argue with them. They will never see reason. They will never rest until everything is reduced to ashes.”
“That’s the thing I can’t really understand,” Jim Callaghan observed. “If these people were coming to us asking for aid or reparations, restitution of some kind I’m not exactly sure what we could do for them presently, but we wouldn’t just ignore them. Honestly and truly, I think all our problems with the Americans in the last year have been because neither of our countries really wants to go on fighting the same kind of undeclared Cold War we had before the,” he looked around at the other tired faces, “cataclysm. Given half a chance we’d all gladly beat our swords into ploughshares and make an immediate start on reconstruction.”
Margaret Thatcher nodded vigorously.
”Well said, Jim.” However, this was the briefest of contemplative interregnums. “Sadly, things are what they are, and we are where we are. As to the true nature of Red Dawn? There may well be a significant hard core of diehards, Jim,” she conceded. “But I doubt if every foot soldier, sailor or camp follower is a true believer in Red Dawn’s foul cause. Yes, perhaps the leadership — assuming Red Dawn has a formal leadership and a recognisable officer cadre — is imbued with a philosophy of nihilism and revenge. However, many, many others will almost certainly have hitched their wagon to the cause because to have done otherwise would have been to starve, or to face imminent violent death.
There was an insistent rapping at the door.
Iain Macleod, the Chairman of the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland had pulled his trousers on over his pyjama bottoms, and wore an old grey sweater under his jacket. His thinning hair was sticking out at all angles from the sides of his head and he was more than a little agitated.
“Something’s happened in Greece, well, Athens, anyway. The military junta are broadcasting non-stop about being under attack by Soviet aircraft and tanks, and,” he scowled, “the Turkish hordes.”
Everybody looked at the newcomer, blinking.
“Athens is being bombarded from the sea and Piraeus is burning!”
Chapter 38
Clara Pullman propped herself up in the bed and ran her fingers through the thin mat of dark hair on her lover’s scarred chest. He was silent in the gloom but their thoughts were shouting in the night. Arkady Pavlovich Rykov had always been the most patient, gentle and occasionally, the most ardent of all her lovers.
“I am sorry,” the man muttered. “Did I hurt you?”
“No,” she said, leaning across him to plant a wet kiss on his brow. Their love making had ceased for a while after he was badly injured by Denzil Williams’s goons at Gibraltar two months ago. With Arkady’s restoration to more or less full fitness — for all the scars and the terrible beating he had taken on the Rock he was virtually indestructible — in the last two to three weeks they had begun again to enjoy each other’s bodies, although not with the passion of before. She had believed it was because he was still pained; how could he not be after what those bastards did to him? But tonight he had been a stranger. He’d never taken her before she was ready to receive him, never, other than when she’d goaded him, or been so dominant, so rough with her. He hadn’t ‘hurt’ her although she suspected she’d be bruised in places nobody was going to see and be sore in the morning but he had abused her. He’d never done that before. “You seemed so angry?”
“Not with you,” he said lowly. “Never with you. Sometimes I think that you are the only thing that stands between me and madness.”
Clara tingled with terror.
She fought to shrug off the icy hand clutching her heart.
“You are the sanest man I have ever met, Arkady Pavlovich.”
The man grunted a snort of humourless laughter.
“I have done many bad things in my life,” he confessed as he had done many times in the last year, only this time he was deadly serious. “Before the war they never touched me. In the country where I lived bad things happened every day. That was understood, expected. You are probably the only woman I have slept with who wasn’t secretly, or not so secretly, terrified of me. And now even you are a little afraid of me sometimes.”
Clara wanted to claim otherwise.
She was silent.
“Nikita Sergeyevich sent me to infiltrate the higher echelons of Krasnaya Zarya because he knew that deep down I was just like the men he feared. Khrushchev never feared the Americans; he thought all his life that the Americans were too soft and too addicted to ‘mom’s apple pie’ to prevail over the Soviet system. He believed that it was only a matter of time before International Socialism overwhelmed the West. He only ever really feared the enemies within, Red Dawn and the other factions within the Politburo, and of course, the KGB, seeking to undermine his drive to modernise and lift the Motherland out of the pit the monster Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Stalin, had left us all in. Nikita Sergeyevich sent his very own Prince of Darkness into the deepest, most evil black depths of that pit to discover the character of his coming nemesis. He knew that few men could see as well as Arkady Pavlovich Rykov in the stygian darkness of the World in which Krasnaya Zarya had been born.” He sighed. “And now even the woman I love is terrified of me.”
Clara sat up in the bed, suddenly aware that she hurt in places she didn’t usually hurt and involuntarily wincing.
“I am not terrified of you!” She hissed unhappily.
“No?”
“No! I love you…” Did he just say he ‘loved’ me?
“Then you love a monster.”
Clara pulled the sheets about herself as if she was cold.
“Ever since we came to this place you’ve been strange.”
“Yes,” the man agreed.
They had been on Malta a fortnight during which they had often been apart; she running errands for MI6 as if she was some kind of secretarial Mata Hari who did the office typing, shopping and driving when nobody could think of anything better to do with her; and occasionally providing female cover for one or other of Arkady’s personas in the field. She knew that her lover had been sent to Malta to hunt down Red Dawn; and to tidy up the mess left behind by Denzil Williams’s incompetence. Other than that she had only the vaguest of notions as to what Arkady had actually been up to in the last two weeks. In bed he had been uncommunicative, distant.