Enoch Powell nodded mechanically.
He hated the way the woman got under his skin!
“If I can be of service,” he shrugged. “So be it.”
The tape began to play, the big spools whirring softly.
The voice was beset with static burps and hisses. It was a level, evenly-paced voice delivering a scripted, charmless monologue with a disconnected indifference. It was a voice almost totally without empathy, or humanity. This much every listener could divine without knowing a single word of conversational Russian.
“This man has spent a lot of his life in the Moscow milieu,” Enoch Powell decided. “Perhaps, he came from the Stavropol Region. There’s a trace of something else in there, too. A suggestion of a Karelo-Finnish accent?”
Margaret Thatcher blinked at this.
It was all she could do not to stare at him, in fact.
How could he tell that much from the man’s first three or four sentences?
The terribly scarred, half-blind man who regarded himself as her dedicated bête noire within the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, had immersed himself in his task. He began to translate, his version pointedly more colloquial than the bald transcripts on the laps of the other men in the room.
“For over a year we have been girding our loins for the great patriotic battle to avenge the firestorm inflicted upon us by the sworn enemies of International Socialism. They attacked us when we were in our beds. They murdered our women and our children without mercy. They struck like cowards and now they will pay for their genocide.”
There was no applause, nothing but the voice. A voice that was as remorseless and unforgiving as the mind of the man behind it.
“There can be no peace treaty with the murderers. There will be no peace with the murderers. The Motherland might be in ruins but from its ruins the survivors will have revenge. While the Great Satan America has wiped its bloody hands this last year we have been gathering…”
Enoch Powell scowled momentarily.
“Do we know who this apparatchik is?”
“Andropov,” Tom Harding-Grayson told him. “Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, he was appointed to the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union just before the October War. He was the Soviets’ Ambassador in Budapest in 1956.”
“Oh,” the politician breathed, thinking his thoughts. He carried on translating. “Our purpose is revenge. Our password is revenge. Our creed is revenge. The Americans waged war on our women and children so we shall wage war on their women and children. In Istanbul the forces of the old regime tried to stand before us. We went into battle driving their women, their children, their old and their sick before us into the muzzles of their guns. That will be our way of war. No mercy! Scorched earth!”
Enoch Powell looked around the room.
“This could be one of Stalin’s speeches rehashed?”
“Quite so,” the Foreign Secretary concurred.
“The American puppet regime in the Mediterranean tried to resist us on the island of Cyprus. Our great horde has driven them from their bolt holes into the mountains and forests where they think they are safe. The British have abandoned the people of Cyprus to our justice, our retribution, our vengeance. When we over run the British in their enclaves we will burn their children alive and ravage their women. Those who survive will become our slaves.”
The Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West shook his head.
He continued to translate for several minutes and then the low key harangue changed a gear and for the first time Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov’s voice shook with something like real emotion.
“The army, the navy and the air force of the New Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has fallen on the uncontaminated lands of the American lackeys in Turkey, Greece and the island of Cyprus. This is but a beginning, a first flexing of the sinews of Krasnaya Zarya. Our Motherland is desolated so we shall seize new lands as yet undefiled by the curse of radioactive death. We shall take such lands as we please and subdue them to our will. To the peoples of Yugoslavia, Italy, and to the peoples of the Middle East I say turn upon your infidel overlords and join our crusade. When Krasnaya Zarya has conquered the Mediterranean Basin we will turn south and devour the canker of the Jewish State forever. Turn upon the British interlopers in your midst now or become our enemies in the coming struggle.”
“Oh, God,” Tom Harding-Grayson groaned. “Now the blighters are trying to whip up a bloody jihad against us!”
“That is hardly likely to happen in the current situation,” Enoch Powell retorted, his ear tuned to the dreary tone of Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov’s discourse. The man had a text that ought to be burning off the page and electrifying the ether as it was broadcast but mostly, he droned like a sulky schoolboy forced to recite Sophocles. “Notwithstanding that most of the Arab countries of the region will be riddled with stay behind former Soviet apparatchiks, some of whom will no doubt be Red Dawn vipers in the nest.”
He concentrated hard for a moment.
“Too the oppressed people of Malta; I command you to rise up against your Imperialist jailors. Cut their throats while they sleep. Burn them in their houses. Attack them on the streets. Hang the pro-consul Christopher from a lamp post, drag his collaborators out onto the streets and stone them…”
Enoch Powell took a ragged breath.
“I think the man is barking mad,” he remarked dryly.
Chapter 54
Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher rested his elbows on the forward bridge rail and tried to zero-in his binoculars on the approaching American ships. Two days earlier than expected the USS Enterprise and her nuclear-powered consort, the fifteen thousand ton cruiser USS Long Beach were creaming east at twenty-eight knots. Even miles away the great bulk of the Enterprise stood out of the water like a fast moving steel island. The outlines of the approaching carrier and the unique, unmistakable, high, box-like superstructure of the cruiser were like shining beacons of new hope.
“Scorpion is signalling, sir!”
The twenty-seven year old captain of the Battle class destroyer acknowledged this and waited.
“The Squadron will form up in line astern and make revolutions for fifteen knots!”
The five destroyers of the 7th Destroyer Squadron had quartered the rendezvous point at twelve knots for the last five hours, now as dusk hurried towards them from the east the two US Navy superships rushed ever nearer. McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantoms had been overflying the British destroyers for the last three hours, orbiting, occasionally disappearing to the north or the south. Talavera’s double bedstead Type 965 air search radar had been painting other aircraft, each squawking old-fashioned NATO friendly IFF codes. It wasn’t so much like the cavalry arriving to save the day, as one’s old friends belatedly turning up to help one defend his house with a very, very big stick.
HMS Talavera’s position in the welcoming gun line was at its stern, as befitted her commanding officer’s lack of seniority and the ship’s somewhat reduced combat effectiveness. Unlike the other destroyers in the Squadron, Talavera had no meaningful electronic warfare capability, no surface-to-air missiles or anti-submarine mortars.