Warsaw concerto, p.36
Warsaw Concerto, page 36
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
Sophie’s delivery had not been easy; such things happened, this she knew and would not have worried overmuch about it had her sister still been at hand. So, she had been sad when she ought to have been thanking merciful God for the new light He had allowed into her life.
Even when the full story of her first husband, Samuel Calleja’s treachery had emerged nobody had blamed her. She had been deluged with cards and letters of sympathy and support, everybody had understood that she was a woman grievously wronged and in America countless people, and every woman she spoke to had praised her courage.
Briefly, she had known exactly what it must be like for Marija all the time! To be the object of every gaze, under the microscope, analysed, a truly public figure for whom there were times when her life was not her own. Yet she had still fallen into sadness; forgotten how lucky she was. She had two beautiful, healthy bambinos, a husband she loved to distraction who adored her exactly the way she was – even though she was half-way to being as plump as her mother – and a life she could never have dreamed of living as a girl growing up in provincial Rabat-Mdina.
“They say that all of Germany is in ruins,” she offered. “We abandoned it after the war. Just like we did so many other places that the Russians have now moved into. Why is West Berlin different, Nicko?”
The British Ambassador guffawed to his friend.
In this car they were all among ‘family’, their words were without threat, their questions harmless.
“The Soviets tried their level best to get us out of West Berlin for fifteen years before the war; back in October 1962 the RAF and the US Air Force swear blind that they treated the city as a ‘no go’ area. The US Navy never tell anybody anything – other than under torture, obviously - but it is reasonable to assume that they treated the nine hundred or so square miles of the Greater Berlin area as a ‘de-militarised zone’ on the night of the war. So, that means it was probably the Soviets who destroyed it, notwithstanding the quarter-of-a-million of their own and their allies’ troops and goodness only knows how many innocent German civilians therein. That’s three, four, five million people who might otherwise have survived the war in an otherwise unbombed patch of territory.”
The British Ambassador shook his head in sad acknowledgement of the folly of his species.
“Ironically,” he continued, “if photographic intelligence is to be believed, West Berlin was the least heavily damaged quadrant of the city, a thing attested by the apparent lack of significant structural damage to the Nazis’ old terminal building at Tempelhof.” Nicko Henderson was getting into his flow now. “Back in the late 1930s that was one of the biggest buildings in the World, or so they say. Anyway, the point is, if,” he smiled, “there is any point at all to any of this, it is that the Soviets obviously think that if they remind us that whatever else happened in October 1962, they inherited West Berlin, that it will rattle us, the West. More so whoever is in the White House than anyone back in England, I imagine. After all, it was Jack Kennedy who went to West Berlin and tried to express his solidarity with the Germans by declaring that he too was a Berliner,” another smile, “although I think what he actually claimed to be was a small German confectionery rather than a citizen of that benighted city. It is the thought that counts… Be that as it may, one could never imagine dear old Harold Macmillan standing at Checkpoint Charlie grandstanding like that. It simply would not have played well, if at all, in the Home Counties. Middle England would have turned around and said: ‘What’s that silly old codger talking about now? He was born in Cadogan Place, that’s in Chelsea not Berlin!’
Rosa giggled and Mary Henderson rolled her eyes; both women knew the Ambassador was being whimsical because he could see that they all needed cheering up.
“Seriously, Nicko?” Rosa persisted, regaining her composure as the cars began to approach the gate to the embassy compound at 3100 Massachusetts Avenue NW. “Why are we, the British, just a little irritated by the Tempelhof thing, and the Americans are so, well…excited and angry?”
“That’s a damnably good question,” the Ambassador conceded cheerfully. “We both knew the Soviets were poking around Berlin as long ago as this time last year. Honestly, I think the main reason this is going to rumble on and on over here, and it is already a big problem for President Nixon, is that the Administration was of the opinion that the Soviet Union was in its cage for the foreseeable future and the Tempelhof demonstration rather gave the lie to that theory. Oh, and a lot of people in the State Department feel that for the Soviets to be so brazen about threatening German territory is, not to put too fine a point on it…damned rude.”
Chapter 31
Friday 6th January 1967
Albuquerque, New Mexico
The days when Greyhounds running west through the ancient tribal lands of the Zuni, Navajo and Hopi Nations to Flagstaff, Arizona and onward all the way to Los Angeles across the Mojave Desert had to travel with armed guards were a thing of the past, although schedules now built in overnight stops because some roads were still not deemed one hundred percent ‘safe’ in the hours of darkness.
However, even those remaining ‘insecure’ stretches of highway, in the hills, woods and mountains, or far out into the deserts of the American South West were shortening week by week; unless somebody had ridden Greyhounds through this country before the October War, they would not have noticed anything remotely untoward in the post-war service as the old year gave way to the new. A couple of years ago the endless open highways of the American wilderness had been threatening, lonely places; it was symptomatic of the national revival that nowadays, there was nowhere – from shining sea to shining sea – on the continent that, given a diminishingly small number of common-sense precautions, a citizen could not go.
Boldly, or otherwise.
Kurt Mikkelsen had left San Antonio ten days ago, travelling light. An old man who walked like he had spent his whole life sitting on the back of a very wide horse, had turned up at the house on Alamo heights to collect the Remington M700 .30-06 sniper rifle with which he had spent several days exhaustively familiarising himself. Out in the desert he had fired nearly a thousand rounds at targets up to twelve hundred yards away, becoming so familiar with the bolt action and the feel of the weapon that it had become an extension of his own body.
He had been worried the idiots would source only a standard .223-calibre model of the gun. Because of the heavier rounds the .30-06 only had a three or four-bullet internal magazine. The one he had been given was factory-fresh, built with a four-round magazine, the latest iteration of the constantly developing weapon which had only come into production a few months before the Cuban Missiles War.
Once Mikkelsen had established that this commission was not just another Company-sponsored stunt to bring him out of hiding, a fee had quickly been agreed: $125,000, half to be paid in diamonds, Federal bearer bonds and used US bank notes and lodged in a deposit box at the Vatican Bank in Mexico City. The balance of his fee was to be paid in Krugerrands, which were to be waiting for him in the light aircraft which would be ready to go at Hollister – ninety miles south of San Francisco - at dawn the morning after the job.
‘The job’ was still three to four weeks farther down the road; and his principals had believed he was moving on to the next safe house, in Los Angeles. Within a day or so they would realise that he had abandoned their carefully choreographed script, and that henceforth this thing would become…a living nightmare, now that he had penetrated their networks.
As for his old employers at Langley, well, they could go hang themselves because from here on in he owned the game!
By now somebody would have hit the panic button; or, started the cover up. Perhaps, both simultaneously.
Which was hardly surprising, because it would be plain to everybody that everything that they thought they knew about his mission was wrong.
‘Nothing is so terrifying to the people we work for as knowing that one of us has gone…rogue,’ Rachel had said to him once. That was in Berlin, when they were both still learning their craft. Nearly fifteen years ago…
Hell, she looked so pale and fragile in those days; so thin you were afraid she was going to blow away in a strong wind, or break if fell. People got taken in by that; especially, if they had not looked into her eyes, seen the murder gazing back like the glinting blades of stilettos.
It sounded like she had had her fun in Malta and at Wister Park; he envied her that. Now it was his turn to wash clean his soul with a carnival of blood-letting.
Those bastards who had brought him back had had no idea what they were doing.
The way he saw it, a lot of people would be shitting their pants before he was finished!
Some of them, would have started already…
Over a month before he boarded the Santa Mariana de Bilbao at Recife, he had sent instructions ahead to source, and position, the rifle he would actually use on the day, and to organise the clothes – the disguise – he would wear to gain access to his chosen sniper’s post. Sure enough, three days after he arrived in Baltimore the Boston Globe had carried confirmation that all had been arranged.
Josiah T. Hunter II, Somerville, Mass, proudly announces the forthcoming marriage of his daughter, Tricia to Daryl Heller…
Thank God for the society pages of the papers!
The disguise and the sniping post had never been more than notional. According to the radio the United Nations get-together was going to be on a ship in Oakland Bay; a couple of months ago, the smart money had been on it being at the Presidio, with meet and greets at City Hall in San Francisco. Unless, of course, it was to be down in Los Angeles or San Diego. Not that he had invested a great deal of thinking, let alone pre-planning over such peripheral issues.
The gun, on the other hand, still figured large in his plans.
Some plans needed to fail, to become known to one’s enemies; that was why redundancy was key in all a real professional’s work.
That was another thing Rachel had taught him.
‘Always remember to lay a false trail…’
Personally, he preferred to be right there, in good time, waiting for his ‘marks’ when they got to where they expected him to be. But that was just him, the way he was; a guy with his history was allowed his eccentricities and besides, he had more scores than the average guy that badly needed to be settled.
Mikkelsen had not ruled out the possibility, unlikely at this stage, so early in the game, that the Feds or even his old Agency buddies, had somehow managed to unravel every last secret of his career before the October War, and therefore, knew who he was coming for. On balance, he thought that improbable. And anyway, he was not ‘coming for them’, he expected them to come for him! So, if they were going to swoop at all – before the game truly began - it would surely have been when he went to check out that deposit box in Philadelphia.
That morning he moved to the back of the bus, sat down near the vehicle’s emergency exit. As always, he was travelling light, his battered rucksack jammed into the overhead rack. His jacket and his pants were old, a little threadbare and his boots scuffed: he was a man heading west in search of work, any kind of work would do because he had a family back in San Antonio to feed.
Today, he was Jake Sidowski, father to two young kids, a boy and a girl, and the estranged sometime husband of Consuela, the Hispanic girl he had got into trouble when he came back from Korea in 1953. He had been an artilleryman in the Army – that was why he was deafer than he ought to be for his age, forty-one – and the reason the Army had not taken him back when he had volunteered to re-enlist last January. That had screwed with his head, he had been drinking ever since…
A legend was nothing if it was not real.
Jake Sidowski and his troubles were, if not atypical these days, about as real as it got. Just to give the legend added authenticity he had ensured that Jake, his notional doppelganger until he became, as inevitably he would, somebody else, had had to disappear. Everybody back in Texas would assume the bum had finally done what he had been threatening to do for months, jumped on a Greyhound bound for California…
Nobody would miss Jake Sidowski, or remember the ordinary-looking guy he opened his heart to one night in a bar in downtown San Antonio.
Just like nobody would ever find his body, buried a mile from the nearest highway in the woods beyond Canyon Lake…
Chapter 32
Monday 9th January 1967
Villefranche-sur-Mer, France
First Captain Dmitry Alexandrovich ‘Lucky’ Kolokoltsev had started getting a sinking feeling, shortly after he had disembarked from the ancient Renault truck which had transported him along the coast road from the ramshackle aerodrome at Nice, when he had got his first sight of his ‘new command.’
Already inured to much more heavily damaged cities than the former jewel of the Riviera, and having survived a juddering, bone-jarring landing in a cross-wind, he had actually been in a contrarily fairly sanguine frame of mind until he had finally laid eyes on what those idiots in Clermont-Ferrand, and the spineless charlatans in Toulon, insisted on calling the la Flotte Méditerranéenne de la Marine de la Revolution!
The Mediterranean Fleet of the Navy of the Revolution…
All he had needed was a single glance to know, without a shadow of a doubt that, that was exactly the sort of description that gave bad jokes a really bad name!
Shit…
I just got ‘unlucky’ again…
If he could have – if it had been any kind of realistic option - he would have ordered the men around him, rigged out in a parody of pre-war French naval uniforms, to take him straight back to Nice. Except, he did not have to be a genius to figure out that they were not going to do any such thing, because they knew the moment that he got back to the Auvergne that he would spill the beans and then, their quiet lives would be well and truly, in every which way…fucked.
Standing there on the quayside in his crisp Red Navy day rig, the green KGB tabs horribly prominent on his shoulders he had felt like he had a big target painted on his back, his front, and on his forehead. It had not mattered up to then that he had been the only unarmed man in the back of the lorry, or that none of his companions had been overly talkative.
The grizzled Petty Officer in charge of the welcoming party had taken charge of his attaché case and his small travelling bag, and therefore, his service pistol also, at the airfield.
Nor had it mattered that most of his guards were dusky-skinned, of North-African descent possibly, and had viewed him with hooded, suspicious eyes. A man in his line of work; he was a Commissar, after all, notwithstanding he was also an officer of the Red Navy’s Political Directorate, signifying that he was a KGB-man first, second and last, just one with a more than passing knowledge of which end of a ship was the front and which the rear, and from which end of the guns and missile launchers the appropriate projectiles exited. This was because ten years ago he had been a watchkeeper on an ancient destroyer of the Baltic Fleet: such a rewarding job that at the time he had thought he had died and gone to heaven when his transfer to the Political Directorate at Fleet Headquarters in Leningrad had been approved…
Possibly, the most galling aspect of his present predicament was that he, one of only three survivors – that he knew about, anyway - from the sinking of the old battlecruiser Yavuz at the Battle of Malta in April 1964, should have, impossibly, survived that monumental fuck-up just to be hung out to dry now, for no good reason that he could discern, thousands of miles from the Motherland.
It was so bloody unfair he wanted to weep…
However, he did not get the impression his guards – the men around him had ceased to be his protectors when they had seen his poorly concealed horror when he looked upon their rusting fleet in the calm, tranquil, azure blue waters of Villefranche-sur-Mer – would have been any better disposed to him had he slumped down onto his knees, put his head in his hands and broken into tears.
The wintery sunshine bathing the bay, the finest natural anchorage on the Cote d’Azur, mocked the roiling dark thoughts churning in the Russian’s head.
He had told the Sharof Rashidovich Rashidov, the Commissar Special Plenipotentiary Mission Head, that in order to do a meaningful inspection of the French Fleet it would require a team of engineering, gunnery and electronic-communications specialists.
‘I was a general duties man. A deck division man, a navigator, Comrade Commissar,’ he had explained, ‘I am not qualified to judge the mechanical, let alone the combat readiness of those ships.”
Rashidov, of course, was an Uzbek, who knew nothing about boats, ships or the sea, and cared less.
‘If those bloody ships can steam under their own power and shoot their guns they can fight. That’s all I need to know!’
Kolokoltsev had not belaboured the point.
If he had not known it before – he had suspected as much - the incontrovertible evidence of the last four years was proof positive that his country’s leaders mostly had shit for brains. The bastards did not even have the common sense to know that when you were in a hole you needed to stop digging.
Here in France and in the Balkans, things had not yet gone completely bad, elsewhere the Anatolian littoral was surely going to turn into as big a snake pit as Kurdish Iraq, and these days nobody was even allowed to mention the poor sods who were trapped, slowly succumbing to hunger and the winter cold in the mountains of Iraq. As for the policy of randomly dispersing, painfully scarce Red Army assets across Europe as far west as the Rhine when there were barely enough troops at home to keep order – people tended to get troublesome when the bite of winter threatened mass starvation – was crazy.
So, what if the people most at risk of starving to death were just country folk? The surviving skilled factory-worker ‘base’ would be ‘all right’, and the Armed Forces and the Security Apparats would also be just ‘fine’. Khrushchev had had the luxury of not having to worry about feeding ‘useless’ mouths; but that time would come again one day. Until then the proletariat would have to get by as best it could; the Revolution had to be guarded, carried into foreign lands. That, after all was the ineluctable logic of the Marxist-Leninist dialectic!
