The door closed with a loud click.
“The man you are about to hear speaking is called Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, Admiral Christopher.”
The name was unfamiliar to the Englishman. However, he had known Arkady Pavlovich Rykov long enough to know that he was not a man overly moved to waste his superiors’ time. He said nothing, waited to be told the bad news. Given that the man Sir Dick White, the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service, had appointed Head of Station of MI6 in the Central Mediterranean had gone to the trouble of setting up a big, reel to reel, tape recorder in his office at such an ungodly hour of the morning — it was a little after five o’clock — he had every reason to believe that whatever news the defector had brought with him was probably unbelievably bad. In his experience good news in the middle of a losing war never arrived before a man had had a chance to eat a hearty breakfast.
“Yuri Vladimirovich was born in Nagutskaya, near Stavropol in the old Russian Empire in 1914. He was the son of a humble railway official. His father was of Cossack stock, his mother the adopted daughter of a Finnish-born Muscovite watchmaker. He was orphaned by the time he was thirteen but he was a resourceful boy. He worked as a telegraph clerk, and for a while as a deckhand on a Volga steamer. He graduated from the Water Transport Technical College at Rybinsk in 1936.”
Julian Christopher moved behind his desk and sat down. He didn’t invite his guest to take a chair. Arkady Rykov never accepted a seat in the presence of a superior unless he was ordered, directly and unequivocally, to ‘bloody well sit down!’
“Yuri Vladimirovich became Secretary of the Komsomol, or as you would know it in the West, the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League when he was at college in Rybinsk. By 1940 he had risen to be First Secretary of the Central Committee of Komsomol for the Soviet Karelo-Finnish Republic during which time he participated in partisan guerrilla warfare against the Finns and their German overlords. It was in those days that his ‘potential’ emerged. He was a prominent man in the Komsomol, but not so prominent as to be ‘purged’. That was a particular talent a man had to have in the Motherland if he was to gain advancement before Nikita Sergeyevich’s regime inherited the abattoir that Iosif Vissarionovich and that animal Lavrentiy Pavlovich left him.”
It wasn’t until the ex-KGB man had so efficiently and expeditiously resolved the problem presented by the surviving members of Samuel Calleja’s original Red Dawn terrorist cell, that Julian Christopher had truly understood why Dick White had recommended the man to him in such emphatic terms. But of course, when one learned that the man had been Stalin’s interpreter, Lavrentiy Beria’s assassin, and Nikita Khrushchev’s protégé it went without saying that he was exactly the man for the present situation.
Julian Christopher had asked Dick White if he trusted Rykov. The Head of the Secret Intelligence Service had hesitated.
‘No. But then it is always a mistake to trust a man,’ he’d hesitated again, ‘or a woman who has betrayed his, or her, own people. Arkady Pavlovich is one of those men one must watch at all times.’
‘Is somebody watching him at all times?’
‘Yes and no.’
That was the trouble with bloody spymasters; a man could never get a straight answer out of the blighters!
“At the time of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 Yuri Vladimirovich was Ambassador in Budapest,” Arkady Pavlovich Rykov continued. “Afterwards, members of the Politburo joked that Andropov suffered from a ‘Hungarian complex’. And why not? He had witnessed officers of the Államvédelmi Hatóság, the Hungarian secret police being dragged from their offices across the street from the Soviet Embassy, beaten, tortured and hanged from lamp posts by the mob. Until that day I don’t think it had ever occured to Yuri Vladimirovich — or to any of the ’big men’ of the post-Stalin Soviet leadership — that the poletariat that they claimed to speak for could turn on their masters so fast, or with such uncompromising brutality, literally overnight. It was Andropov who persuaded Nikita Segeyevich to crush the Hungarian rising. That was the moment Andropov realised that even the most monolithic single-party state hegemony was vulnerable to the mob. Watching those Hungarian secret policemen swinging from those lamposts in Budapest was probably what convinced Yuri Vladimirovich to throw in his lot with Krasnaya Zarya.”
“And why exactly are you telling about this man, Colonel Rykov?” Julian Christopher asked testily.
The former KGB man viewed the Englishman with dead eyes.
“Because I think that Yuri Vladimirovich is the leader of Red Dawn.”
Chapter 53
The Prime Minister jumped to her feet and fussed around a somewhat embarrassed, horribly uncomfortable Enoch Powell as the tall, gaunt man limped painfully into her temporary office. Through the window he caught a brief glimpse of Christ Church Cathedral before he turned and settled with stiff formality in the chair Margaret Thatcher insisted on holding for him. It was at once unbecoming and somehow, touching. Whatever his ideological, doctrinally political differences with the blasted woman she kept treating him like an ally! The newcomer acknowledged the other men present in the small former Don’s study off the main stairs.
Sir Richard ‘Dick’ White smiled grimly at the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West. They hadn’t had much to do with each other when they were in MI5 during Hitler’s war, but they’d known of each other and had since watched each other’s careers with interest. Dick White’s counterpart contemporary MI5, Roger Hollis, had never been flavour of the month in Edward Heath’s United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration, and lately he seemed to have been permanently sidelined shuttling between Cheltenham and Langley, Virginia, or completely ignored by the Angry Widow’s entourage. Dick White had forewarned the nation of the menace of Red Dawn; Roger Hollis had allowed that bastard Kim Philby and the other Cambridge traitors to slip through the net before the war and for all they knew, failed to uncover goodness knew how many other bad apples since.
Enoch Powell had pigeon-holed William Whitelaw, the Angry Widow’s man at Defence as a sound, amiable fellow destined for a middle-ranking career in Government. It had taken a nuclear war to advance him into the Cabinet. As for James Callaghan, he viewed him was a big man with a puny intellect barely capable of keeping his own rag tag Party in order! Conversely, Tom Harding-Grayson was a man the Member for Wolverhampton South West might have relished crossing swords with in other circumstances. The man had a mind like a razor’s edge. Sir Henry Tomlinson, the Cabinet Secretary was another man to be reckoned with. Not such a formidable intellect as his old friend, the Foreign Secretary, but a brilliant, infinitely patient, innovative strategic operator marvellously suited for his present, impossible task.
Enoch Powell eyed the reel-to-reel tape recorder, a grubby, metallic monstrosity balanced on a low table that looked as if it was about to collapse at any moment.
Margaret Thatcher addressed the newcomer.
“The listeners down at GCHQ in Cheltenham picked up this speech, or rather, diatribe, last night and again this morning. The man who is speaking is, or purports to be a spokesman for Krasnaya Zarya. GCHQ prepared a transcript but it occurred to me that as you are an accomplished linguist and a Russian speaker to boot, that it might be advantageous to listen to the recording with, if you are up to it, your translation and commentary. The transcript we have really doesn’t provide many insights, and the finer the nuances of these things can be very hard to encapsulate in black and white, don’t you agree?”