Koshevoi spluttered with ire.
Chuikov sniffed, and considering the outrageous, positively Machiavellian logic of the argument rather than the scarcity of the forces at his disposal.
“Babadzhanian will want your head on a stick if I give you his paratroopers, Comrade Sergei Georgiyevich,” he observed.
“I also want naval garrison troops from every port in the Black Sea,” Sergei Gorshkov told him. “Moreover, the harassing sorties into the Maltese Air Exclusion Zone must cease with immediate effect. Or if they must continue mount them at such times of day that the alarms sound in the middle of the night or when the first shifts are arriving at the dockyards.”
Koshevoi lost his temper.
“We have to gather electronic intelligence!”
“Why?” Gorshkov snapped. “Don’t you see, Comrade Colonel-General? Everybody talks about Maskirovska but sometimes I don’t think any of you know what it means. We must show the enemy the empty palm of one hand and let them study it with such concentration that they will be completely caught by surprise when we hit them with the clenched fist of the other. As we speak their ships will be leaving Malta to sail to Cyprus. Let them. Leave Malta alone. Remember the open hand, my friends. We force them to watch the open hand and then, when they are transfixed and we have drawn them into a battle in the East; we tear out their guts in the West!”
Chapter 37
The King of London was wearing an Eton top hat, a threadbare grey pin-stripe suit and waistcoat. He had a black and white striped scarf around his neck and Army boots on his feet. Although he had shaved for the occasion his hair was tousled and he had the same lean, hungry look of the hundreds of his ‘subjects’ who had lined the route into the ancient school.
A detachment of the Prime Minister’s Royal Marine bodyguard had moved into Eton College the day before. There had been harsh words but no violence, the King and his courtiers understood where the real power lay if it came to a shooting match.
Eton College had been a compromise meeting place; several locations closer to the centre of London had been mooted by the King’s representative, a red-headed woman in her thirties with a sharp tongue and an even sharper mind. Her name was Miriam Prior, before the war she had been a primary school teacher in Islington and among her own people, she was treated like a latter day saint. The Home Office had wanted to hold this first ‘plenary session’ — as Miriam Prior had styled it — in Oxford but the King of London had, through his red-headed, abrasive mouthpiece rejected this out of hand.
Two RAF Hawker Hunter jet fighters roared overhead as the Prime Minister’s armoured Rolls-Royce rumbled past the Provost’s Garden into the heart of the College complex.
“Oh dear,” Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary murmured. “All the windows seem to have gone from the Chapel.” He sighed. “And the roof appears to be open to the elements in places. I was hoping that this far out there might be a little less,” he shrugged, “damage.”
“Windsor Castle is still pretty much intact,” Sir Richard Amyatt Hull pronounced cheerfully from his backwards facing seat. The Army Chief gave every impression of enjoying his outing. “My staff was astonished these people hadn’t colonised the castle.”
“Eton College is one of their outer ‘contact’ settlements, General,” the Home Secretary told him. “They’ve experienced a lot of trouble from people in the nearby areas that escaped the worst of the bombing. Windsor Castle is currently garrisoned by a company of the Middlesex Regiment and ‘King Harold’ and his people keep well away from the place. I think they’ve learned to be self-sufficient and to be wary of people they don’t know.”
The troops ‘holding’ Windsor Castle were one of a number of small ‘forward units’ ringing the capital. Its brief was to observe and occasionally send out patrols but otherwise, simply to maintain ‘a presence’ in the no man’s land on the outer edges of the devastated lands. Similar ‘presences’ had been routinely deployed around other bombed areas; although thus far their role had been almost entirely passive. The Castle had survived the October War with only superficial damage, the town in its shadow had fared less well and remained uninhabited sixteen months after the cataclysm. After the war the survivors of the outlying regions of the bombed zones had bled into the surrounding countryside, clogging the main roads. It had been some months before a systematic attempt was made to bury the dead who had fallen along the roadsides around London…
“My people tell me that the people just up the road from here still regard these people,” General Hull waved at the crowds outside the car curiously looking in, “as unclean. Scavengers, troublemakers, disease carriers, that sort of thing. It puts me in mind of some of the things I saw after the war in Europe ended in forty-five.”
Margaret Thatcher had spoken little on the drive south from Oxford. One of the reasons she had invited the Chief of the General Staff of the Army to join the small delegation was to hear a detailed update on the deteriorating situation in Northern Ireland. Over a hundred soldiers had been killed in the last seven days, so had a score of IRA — Irish Republican Army — men and at least fifty civilians, mostly caught in the crossfire or bombings. There had also been an incident in which British troops had inadvertently — Sir Richard was fairly certain it was ‘inadvertently’ — crossed into the territory of the Irish Republic and shots had been fired at Irish troops before anybody realised what had happened. Weapons manufactured in American factories, some bearing US Army stamps and registration codes, including M-16 assault rifles and World War II ‘pineapple’ type hand grenades, had been discovered in a series of raids in Belfast and Londonderry.
“You were in Italy and then Germany in 1945, General?”
“OC 1st Armoured Division in Italy in forty-four, then 5th Division in Germany. I suppose the thing I took from those days is that no matter how smashed a society is, and the Germans were in a pretty dreadful state at the end of the war and it was probably even worse in the Russian sector, sooner or later civilised people pull themselves together and start to rebuild. These people out here,” another wave at the crowd, “whatever they look like they’ve obviously got themselves organised and made a start getting on with things. They’re probably ten times more motivated to start the rebuilding process than the people five miles up the road who got away more or less scot free on the night of the war, Prime Minister.”
“You may be right, General.”
Harold Strettle, the King of London stepped forward from a throng of hard-faced men and women.
It was then that Margaret Thatcher realised that she had seen no small children. Moreover, very few among the crowd which pressed against the cordon of heavily armed Royal Marines were older than forty, most were young adults and teenagers.
The Prime Minister sized up her host.
“Forgive me if I’m a little bit stuffy about it, Mister Strettle,” she said, quirking a smile. “But I recognise only one Monarch in this land.”
Miriam Prior had positioned herself by the right shoulder of King Harold. She was a riot of colour, her jacket a quilt of different fabrics. She seemed to be wearing purple mascara!
Margaret Thatcher guessed the man’s age to be mid-forties; it was hard to know these days.