Warsaw concerto, p.3
Warsaw Concerto, page 3
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
If the clowns wanted to believe that they were calling the shots that was fine by him.
He had a couple of debts to call in before he left the East Coast. With a month, maybe two to kill there was no necessity to combine pleasure with work and besides, after being away for so long it was only right that he let his old friends know that he was back.
What fun was there in being invisible?
Chapter 3
Wednesday 30th November 1966
Clermont Ferrand Airport, Auvergne, France
Citizen Maxim Machenaud stood on the viewing platform in front of the execution grounds, lost in his thoughts as the flight of four Soviet transport aircraft circled and then, one-by-one, made their landing approaches out of the dull eastern sky, flitting in and out of wispy low cloud, their mottled, zig-zag camouflage making it hard to reliably identify their types from a distance.
These days they lived in a world distorted, partly hidden by camouflage, as if everything had become smoke and mirrors. In the distance the work gangs labouring to extend the main runway had automatically dropped to the ground or thrown themselves into the nearest slit trench at the first whisper of aircraft engines; and it was all Machenaud could do not to keep flicking his gaze to the skies. Which was bizarre because the British had never actually bombed Clermont Auvergne, or in fact, many places south of the general line Poitiers, Bourges, Besancon. Assuming, that was, one forgot about the recent rash of air raids on targets around Royan, Bordeaux and here and there across the Dordogne.
He tended to take the reports of these ‘terror raids’ with a pinch of salt; the sycophantic musings of comrades desperate to convince him that they were tirelessly pressing a knife to the enemy’s throat when in fact, they were living off the fat of the land and too busy fucking all the farmers’ daughters to ‘maintain the pressure’ on the few surviving dissident brigades now squeezed, slowly bleeding to death, between Front Internationale lines and the English invaders in the Loire Valley.
The Russian aircraft had circled for nearly thirty minutes.
The airfield was on the eastern edge of the old medieval city of Clermont-Ferrand. At over three hundred metres above sea level on the plain of the Limagne, safe in the heart of the Massif Central sheltered by a great chain of dormant volcanoes, the Chaîne des Puys, the city might – but for the counter-revolutionary scum of the old guard of the French Communist Party - have already been the bridgehead from which the whole of France was conquered long before the English began to prop up those so-called ‘Free French’ leeches in the north, had the Soviets held their nerve back in 1964. Instead, the bastards had cut and run, albeit not before fomenting a civil war in the lands of the Front Internationale and for a period, spiriting Machenaud’s would-be Nemesis, George Duclos – a failed old Stalinist lackey – out of his reach.
But for the fraternal interventions of his Soviet ‘allies’ he – Maxim Machenaud – and the Front Internationale might even now be the masters of Western Europe from the Atlantic to the Rhine, and from the Scheldt to the blue waters of the Côte d’Azur. However, for the moment that was a thing he would brood upon; revenge was a thing best exacted in cold blood at a time and a place of one’s own choosing and besides, right now, he needed whatever support the Russians could be persuaded, bribed or intimidated into giving him if he was going to complete the conquest of Southern France.
The brigades which had resisted, slowed the Front Internationale’s advance to the west and the north west were weakened, starving skeletons, shadows of their former ‘glory’, one by one they were crumbling, falling back before his fighters but in victory there was a potentially deadly sting. His own forces were too weak to do more than to passively occupy the land as they advanced, holding towns but unable to suppress the countryside. The disintegration of the resistance was as much to do with the hunger and disease wracking the land to the north and west, his forces were in hardly any better condition as they advanced cautiously into the dangerous vacuum left by the evaporating counter-revolutionary rebel brigades.
Worryingly, everything Machenaud knew about the British in the Nantes Sector of the ‘Loire Front’ was that they – unlike the leaden-footed leadership of the citizen Free French Army – understood and more importantly, had the will and the confidence to exploit any and all ‘gaps’, no matter how fleeting, which appeared in front of their lines.
The situation in France had been chaotic long before the British invaded the Channel ports and, probably much to their astonishment, sparked French resistance in the north. The Front Internationale had been busy fighting splinter factions of the old Communist Party, criminal groups in the mountains and fending off successive waves of heavily-armed freebooters and refugees from the east when the British first came ashore at Calais, Dunkirk, Boulogne and in Normandy.
At the time, Maxim Machenaud had still been cleaning out the stables in the Auvergne, over three hundred kilometres to the south of the deepest British violation of French soil, still preoccupied with the treachery of Sergey Akhromeyev’s Red Army turncoats in Vichy.
The fucking Russians had turned that man loose when they cut and ran the first time…
That was another thing he was not about to forget or forgive any time soon!
The First Secretary of the Front Internationale sucked in a long, calming lungful of cold air to sooth his demons.
His ‘Soviet friends’ had come back to the table that spring having apparently, ‘reviewed their options’ and realised belatedly that ‘the previous regime’s policies’ had been ‘flawed’. The so-called air bridge had been set up shortly afterwards and Red Army and Red Air Force advisors and technicians, including an under-strength engineer battalion had finally enabled Machenaud to get the most important of Clermont Ferrand’s dormant, abandoned factories back into production. Having previously cut and run, leaving the Front Internationale alone amidst a sea of encroaching enemies the Russians had returned only after he had turned the tide; fair weather friends were like that. Sooner or later the bastards would stab him in the back again but until then, he planned to bleed them for all they were worth.
The Red Air Force complained that the airfield was too well ‘masked’ in the landscape, hence the endless circling but then they were not the ones the RAF had forced to live like thieves in the night these last two years!
Several Soviet turboprop transport aircraft were already parked around the edge of the field, each buried beneath elaborate netting in individual bays protected by high and wide rubble blast berms. A couple of the hidden machines – two four-engine Antonov An12s like the first of the aircraft gliding down to the threshold – were permanently based at Clermont-Ferrand, equipped as electronic surveillance ‘platforms’ but also capable of flying supply drops and inserting Soviet-trained parachutists into hostile territory.
These latter missions were frustratingly infrequent.
The timidity of his Russian allies maddened the leader of the Front Internationale; although, he had to concede that if he had been responsible for pissing away two whole tank armies in the deserts of Iran and Iraq two-and-a-half years ago, he would probably have had pause for thought too. What had transpired in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf were lessons of history which, going forward, not unnaturally, pre-disposed him to be a lot warier of the British, than of his numerically hugely superior future Free-French enemies.
“Two Il-18s, an An-10 and that An-12,” one of Machenaud’s aides observed, pointing vaguely at the sky.
The Soviets used the Ilyushin Il-18 as a cargo-carrying workhorse; hopefully, these two would be packed with small arms and ammunition, and perhaps, medical supplies. The Russians never communicated loading manifests ahead of the twice weekly – or at this time of year, as much because of the weather in the Motherland as in Central or Western Europe, more usually weekly – ‘shuttles. Normally, there were only two or three aircraft. Supposedly, this time around the new Soviet Plenipotentiary Commissar to the Front Internationale was travelling, presumably in regal splendour on the An-12, and was bringing with him forty or fifty more useless bloody ‘advisors’; Spetsnaz and KGB hard cases rather than the doctors, skilled mechanics and weapons technicians Machenaud actually needed in the Auvergne, to start re-building the region’s vital infrastructure and to begin again to be self-sufficient.
Not that the spectre of starvation which had hung over the south throughout 1964 and 1965 was about to re-visit Clermont-Ferrand in the coming weeks. Once the British had relaxed their blockade of the Bay of Lions, accommodations had been reached with the Naval Brigades controlling the ports of the Côte d’Azur and the surviving ships of the French Navy, and food had started to flow again from Northern Italy, Corsica, Sardinia and even Northern Spain. The fascists and the Mafia did not care who they were in bed with so long as they got paid, and the Italians were so terrified of the British and the Americans that anybody who was not their real and immediate enemy was, by definition, a friend. And as for the Generalissimo’s regime in Madrid well, these days the Spanish could not get enough of the gold that had been looted from the banks of the extinct Fifth Republic in the months after the cataclysm of October 1962!
No, food was not the critical constraint any more.
Whereas, fuel and transportation were, thus, his fighters inevitably began to starve as they moved north, out of the Auvergne to challenge the fat British and ‘Free French’ interlopers…
Until recently, Maxim Machenaud had regarded the Bay of Lions, the whole Mediterranean coast from the Pyrenees to Ligurian Sea as the ‘Navy Faction’s’ problem.
Concluding an ‘if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back’ understanding with the Navy Faction which temporarily ignored the ideological divergences of the parties, had finally enabled the FI to concentrate on fortifying its northern and eastern defences, to stabilise the line above Vichy in the north and Burgundian Mâcon in the north east, and to cement its hold on the Auvergne and the industrial powerhouse of Lyon, which unlike Clermont-Ferrand had never wholly ground to a halt. However, the time was coming when Machenaud could no longer allow the Navy to sit on the side lines. The Navy and its ships were no use to him if they would not fight!
The First Secretary of the Front Internationale watched the Red Air Force transport plane squelch down onto the runway, listened to the pitch of its 4,000-horsepower Ivchenko AI-20 engines altering as the pilot cut the power and began to apply the brakes. The aircraft’s wheels threw up small rooster tails of spray as it slowed. Presently, the silhouette of the Antonov An-12 foreshortened as it turned off onto the taxiway.
Maxim Machenaud watched, silently seething.
The Russians had an irritating tendency to try to take the credit for…everything.
For example, they were convinced that they had been the saviours of the Front Internationale, responsible for alleviating the ‘supply situation’ of the last winter. In fact, the principal reason that the ‘supply situation’ had dramatically improved over the last year was that so many people had died.
Most of the dead had starved, although sickness had played its part in emptying the countryside and decimating the populations of the towns and cities. The old and the very young had borne the brunt of the famine, the most vulnerable to the cold, the outbreaks of cholera and the killer influenza that everybody called ‘war plague’ had perished en masse; only the fittest and the most resourceful had survived. Nowadays, there were no useless, unproductive mouths to feed in the south of France, and no shortage of fighters.
Nevertheless, it still galled Machenaud that the Russians – smug arrogant bastards - kept sending him political officers and KGB troopers when what he actually needed were trained lathe operators and factory hands to get the Michelin and Peugeot works in Clermont-Ferrand and the mills and factories of Lyon back into full production, metal workers and engineers to get the railways running again and salvage experts to clear and rebuild the harbours of Toulon, Marseille and to get the big ships anchored at Villefranche-sur-Mer ready to fend off the next capitalist blockade…
However, unlike in former days he contained – most of the time, leastways - his roiling existential angst behind a mask of benign forbearance.
Anybody who had known Maxim Machenaud in the bad old days of 1964 – before he had fully commanded the levers of power in the Auvergne – would have had trouble recognising him now. For one thing, he was clean shaven, attired in a business suit beneath his heavy greatcoat, with a stylish Homburg jammed down on his cropped head. He made a point of speaking softly, politely because ‘one must comport oneself according to the circumstances of the revolution’. For another, the terror had been officially abandoned over a year ago. It had served its purpose by then, Vichy had been recovered from the traitorous counter-revolutionary revisionist Akhromeyev and his whore mistress, Vera Bertrand, their Spetsnaz-officered White Brigade driven away to the north west - and briefly - free of all Soviet interference for the first time since his return to France in 1963, he had set about re-shaping the Front Internationale ‘state’ into a pragmatic, disciplined entity responsive to subtler, possibly more intrinsically Gallic command. It was enough that his people still remembered the terror and occasional reminders like the one he had organised for that afternoon had been, so far, amply sufficient to maintain the absolute obedience of his…comrades.
The rabid dog in his soul might have quietened yet the memory of what he had once been, not so long ago, lingered and that too, fitted Maxim Machenaud’s purpose perfectly.
Pure terror only carried the revolution so far; even while he was fighting a civil war with the forces of reaction and counter-revolution across the Massif Central at the height of the crisis, he had begun to project a different, fatherly, cerebral persona knowing that the terror had become counter-productive and that if the Front Internationale was to survive it must change.
And that he had to change.
But always there was the Kalashnikov in the velvet glove…
The second aircraft, one of the Ilyushin Il-18s was down and rolling as the other two transports positioned themselves for the approach over the mountains to the three-kilometre long runway.
The inner propellers of the first, Antonov An-12 were milling, feathered in the damp air as the transport maneuvered, employing alternate bursts of power on its outer turboprops.
Machenaud had attempted – without success, much to his infuriation - to discover how many of these workhorse aircraft had survived the Cuban Missiles War, or if their production lines had been restarted east of the Urals, to no effect; the Russians were as intensely secretive, defensive about such ‘vital’ intelligence as they were about each and every other aspect of the new USSR being built from the ashes of the old Motherland.
Maxim Machenaud did not take his allies’ paranoia about such things personally, understanding that some things in the Russian soul were immutable, unchanging.
He preferred to focus on the here and the now.
It was going to be fascinating to see how his guests reacted to the little welcoming ceremony he had planned for their arrival.
Behind the hastily erected reception platform the ‘execution grounds’ stretched across the southern side of the airfield. In reality, most of the dead buried in these supposed ‘killing grounds’ were victims of hunger and disease but the regime had carefully nurtured the dark fiction of this desolate place just outside the city framed by the dark brooding splendour of the Chaîne des Puys, as the execution fields.
Those looming volcanic mountains circling the city had last erupted only a few thousand years ago, a blink of the eye in geological time and there was something about them now which still breathed threat, menace.
The breeze flapped at the canvas of the big dun-coloured tent pegged out to the right of the reception platform. Two rows of five chairs were placed in front of the northern ‘long side’ of the tent and a detachment of twenty FI Revolutionary Guards uniformed in battledress ‘requisitioned’ from looted French Army stores stood guard, each several paces from his nearest fellow, looking inward.
It would present an odd spectacle for the Russians as they disembarked from their luxurious airborne chariot.
Machenaud almost had to suppress a smirk of amusement: if this latest consignment of Russians was anything like the others half of them would be too drunk to walk unaided, after several hours carousing in their flying ‘Vodka Palace’.
Latterly, the First Secretary of the Front Internationale had been at pains to present a reasonable, respectable, moderately quiescent persona to the would-be overlords but his patience had worn thin of late. He had determined that his visitors – and his own people – would benefit from the administration of a short, sharp shock to remind them who was really in control of Southern France.
Unconsciously, Maxim Machenaud licked his lips as the Antonov transport came to a halt and its engines spooled down. The other transports had headed straight towards the camouflaged revetments on the opposite side of the airfield.
Today, the overcast was low enough to permit the Antonov An-12 conveying forty-nine-year-old Politburo Member Sharof Rashidovich Rashidov and his entourage to France to take up his new appointment as Commissar Plenipotentiary to the Communist Party of the French Republic, to sit awhile on the tarmac. In the unlikely event an enemy aircraft attempted to overfly Clermont-Ferrand the lethal missiles loaded into the four S75 quadruple surface-to-air launchers in the mountains around the city – previously ordered to remain inactive - would get their first ‘outing’.
Advertising the Front Internationale’s new fangs to its enemies was not on the agenda today; but if the opportunity presented itself, well, that was another matter…
Machenaud knew little of Sharof Rashidov other than that he had come to the fore in the aftermath of the Cuban Missiles War in Uzbekistan. By reputation he was a ‘hard man’, a true believer.
