The Dark Chronicles (69 page)

‘The locations of the bunkers are not our primary concern,’ said Yuri, smiling, and I wondered for an eerie moment whether he had managed to plant a bug in my mind. ‘We’re more interested in the procedures. How long would it take for a second strike to be launched following an order from the American President, for example?’

A cold, empty feeling crept through me. I didn’t know the precise timing of the Americans’ chain of command, but I knew that in Britain’s case HMS
Resolution
and two other submarines were on constant patrol with American Polaris missiles aboard, and that they were primed to be launched within fifteen minutes of an order from the Prime Minister. But that was in the event of a decision to
retaliate
. Yuri had asked me about a second strike: in other words, if the Americans launched a first strike on the Soviet Union and then wanted to deliver a follow-up attack. I could only think of a few reasons to ask such a question, and I didn’t like any of them.

‘Why do you want to know this?’ I said. ‘Is the country under attack?’

Yuri glanced at Ivashutin, who in turn looked at Brezhnev. I kept silent, watching, waiting. They couldn’t get anything detailed out of me if they didn’t give me more information, and they’d gone to the trouble of bringing me here so presumably they wanted it. I suspected that protocol and habit made them reluctant to tell a foreigner what was going on, but it was absurd in this instance – it wasn’t as if I could tell anyone. As the moments passed, I thought I sensed this understanding make its way around the table.

Finally, Brezhnev made a decision and nodded his head gently. Yuri took a deep breath and turned to me.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The Soviet Union is under attack.’

I felt it like a blow to the stomach. Was it possible? It couldn’t be nuclear, I realized at once. They wouldn’t have spent the time bringing me here in that case, let alone doing so above ground. On the other hand, if it wasn’t nuclear, what the hell were we doing in this bunker?

‘What sort of attack?’ I said, the words forming before my mind had even processed them.

Brezhnev tapped his cigarette against the nearest ashtray, and nodded again.

Yuri took another breath. ‘The Americans launched a chemical attack on Paldiski and Hiiumaa yesterday,’ he said. ‘We are preparing our response.’

Paldiski and Hiiumaa were both in Estonia, facing the Gulf of Finland. The entire area was closed off to the public as it was home to dozens of military and naval installations: Hiiumaa and the surrounding islands were rumoured to be home to sizeable artillery batteries, while Paldiski was a major nuclear submarine base. I looked around the room, taking in the collection of grey faces, the ticking clocks, the portraits on the wall and the plume of smoke spiralling from Brezhnev’s ghastly cigarette.

‘What sort of chemical attack?’ I said.

‘A serious one. Over a dozen have been seriously injured – two men have already died. We have sent specialized troops to the area, as well as a team of experts to investigate. In addition,’ – he glanced at the wall with the clocks – ‘about ten hours ago our radars picked up eighteen B-52 Stratofortress bombers shortly after they had taken off from two American Air Force bases, Fairchild in Washington and March in California. We have analysed the take-off patterns and fuel consumption to calculate the weight of the aircraft, and have concluded that they are armed with thermonuclear weapons.’

I stared at him, and then took in the import of the large map on the table. There were lines running all over it: trajectories.

‘Where are they now?’

He gave a grim smile, perhaps satisfied that I was catching up to the severity of the situation.

‘They have been in a circling pattern for the past few hours, but now seem to be heading straight towards our eastern border. We also have reports that KC-135 aircraft have been deployed from Little Rock in Arkansas, and we believe they will meet up with the B-52s once they reach the coast of Canada.’

‘For in-air refuelling.’

He nodded. ‘The B-52s are travelling at around 800 kilometres an hour, and if they continue on their current path we expect them to cross into our airspace in just under five hours from now. That is, at noon our time.’

My first thought was that they must be part of a patrol. Back in the Fifties, the Americans had set up a system whereby they had a dozen nuclear-armed B-52s airborne around the clock, so that if the Soviets launched a surprise attack on their bases they would still be able to retaliate. But then I remembered that had changed. Early in ’66, a USAF B-52 carrying four H-bombs had collided with a Stratotanker during mid-air refuelling over the Mediterranean. One of the H-bombs had fallen into the sea and it had taken several weeks to find it, while two of the remaining three that had fallen on land had spilled enriched uranium and plutonium over a Spanish
fishing village, and had cost millions to clear up. Then last year one of the B-52s had crashed very close to their own airbase in Greenland, detonating the primary units of its thermonuclear weapons but, very luckily, not triggering a nuclear reaction. As a result of these incidents, Washington had, understandably, discontinued the airborne patrols.

So it couldn’t be that. What the hell could it be, then, other than preparations for an attack? In-air refuelling was a bloody risky manoeuvre – one shift in the wind or mistake at the controls could lead to a crash, and this time they might not be as lucky as they had been in Greenland. I remembered a report on their Castle Bravo test on the Micronesian islands back in ’54 saying that the explosion had been around 1,500 times more powerful than the atomic bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No wonder we were underground.

‘Have you used the hotline?’ I said. This was the direct telex connection between Washington and Moscow that had been set up in ’63 in the wake of the Cuban crisis so that the two superpowers could communicate about accidents or unexplained incidents and avert a potential disaster.

‘No,’ said Yuri. ‘We do not need to ask our enemies if they have attacked us – we already know they have. Use of the hotline would alert them of this, and that we plan to retaliate. We don’t plan to warn our enemies in advance – they did not warn us.’

I nodded, dazed. I’d attended several meetings about the setting up of that hotline. But the difference between a hypothetical situation and a real one couldn’t be starker, and the logic of his reply was clear. The hotline only made sense if you suspected it was a mistake. If you had good reason to think you were under attack, it was counter-productive to use it. The hotline was a waste of time.

‘You say you have evidence that the injuries in Paldiski and Hiiumaa are caused by chemical weapons. But couldn’t this be a provocation from someone else – China, for example? Or an accident of some sort?’

He shook his head briskly. ‘No doubt we were meant to conclude it was an accident, but there can no longer be any question of that. Several people have already been affected, and the toll is rising by the hour. As all the victims are crucial to our nuclear effort, and this has happened at precisely the same time that the United States has sent several nuclear-armed B-52s towards our border, it would seem foolish to see it as anything but deliberate, and that most likely it is part of preparations for a full-scale nuclear attack.

‘As for the Chinese, we have finally started negotiations in Peking, so we don’t think this is their doing. We already know that the Americans are using chemical agents in Vietnam, and this follows several other signals from them in the last couple of weeks that they are at an advanced state of readiness, and may be preparing to launch an attack against us. We have observed increased naval activity in the Gulf of Aden, and our ambassador in Washington was recently informed by Nixon himself that the United States is prepared to take “drastic action” as a result of our support of the North Vietnamese if the peace talks in Paris do not advance.’

‘Have you talked to the North Vietnamese?’

‘They are not under our control. They want our arms and training but don’t listen to us if we try to interfere politically, as it is their war and they feel they know better. It seems Nixon has not taken this into account, and has decided he will attack us as a result.’

‘But why has he not just launched a strike, then? Why attack your bases in Estonia and make it look like an accident?’

‘Clearly, they have identified that many of our important military installations are located in this area and have decided to sabotage them in advance of a nuclear attack. The idea of making it look like an accident was presumably so that we would not be aware that it was a precursor to a nuclear strike. They must not have thought that we would rapidly be able to confirm the type of chemical used and therefore know it’s an attack. And, of course, by making us doubt that the incident is an attack, they hope to delay our retaliation.’

‘Yes, but even so—’ I stopped. ‘Hold on. You say you know what type of chemical is involved?’

‘Yes, our researchers have examined several of the patients and have determined that it is one not found in the Soviet Union. It is mustard gas, but a form of it we have never encountered.’

I shivered, and a ripple of horror ran through me – a new form of mustard gas.

I looked at the map, and quickly located Paldiski on it.

Christ Almighty
.

‘It’s not a chemical attack,’ I said. ‘It’s a leak.’

It was past midnight when there was a sharp knocking on my door. I opened it to see Templeton, dressed in a hat and topcoat, peering at me.

My first thought was that Father had been killed in action and he had come to inform me, immediately followed by a flash of shameful hope I might be right. As a boy, I had lain awake in my bed sickened and fascinated by fantasies of his death, and in recent months my mind had slipped back into this reflex of momentarily wishing for the worst news. At first it had disturbed me, but now I dismissed it for what it was: just a trick of the mind exacerbated by the tensions of the war.

‘Meet me in the lobby in five minutes,’ Templeton said, and there was a look in his eyes that spoke of conspiracies rather than condolences. ‘In full uniform, please.’

I nodded and shut the door. Having dressed hurriedly, I raced down the carpeted staircase, wondering what would await me at the foot of it.

I had arrived in Helsinki a few months earlier, and was not enjoying it. I’d had a frustrating war. Shortly after leaving school I had been recruited into the Special Operations Executive, and had been put through rigorous training. After narrowly missing out on taking part in several operations, Father had arranged for me to be attached to the platoon guarding Churchill at Chequers. This sounded
impressive, but the novelty of being close to the man as he chomped his cigar and chugged down brandy soon faded – the job mostly consisted of patrolling the house and grounds with a Tommy gun, and following him in a convoy of trucks and motorcycles whenever he went for a stroll.

I had finally seen some real action in 1944, when I was dropped into France as part of a Jedburgh team, but the operation had been cut short after just a few weeks when it had become clear that the cell we had been sent to contact had been betrayed to the Germans.

After that, I’d been sent out here. I suspected Father had heard something about my time in France and had had a word in someone’s ear to whisk me out of the line of fire. In 1941, before the Legation in Helsinki had been evacuated by the Finns and relocated to Lisbon, he had briefly served as the military attaché out here, and I’d visited him and helped out around the place during one Long Vac, delivering messages in between the endless cocktail parties.

Finland had by now surrendered to the Soviets for the second time but we had yet to restore diplomatic relations with them, so rather than returning to the Legation I had been posted on to the staff of the Allied Control Com mission, which was operating out of the Hotel Torni, a hideous watchtower-like building overlooking the centre of Helsinki. The Commission had been established to supervise the Finns’ compliance with their armistice with Moscow and, although Allied in name, was almost completely dominated by the Russians. There were two hundred of them and just fifteen Brits, who were under firm instruction from London not to antagonize the Russians. Finland was part of the Soviet sphere, at least until the end of the war.

None of the Brits spoke any Finnish, and it had been deemed a sound idea if someone could be found who did. My previous few weeks flitting about the Legation had presumably been on file, but nobody seemed to have realized that while my mother was a Finn, she was in fact a Swedish-speaker. As a result, I was fluent in Swedish but knew no Finnish at all.

On arrival, I had discovered that it made little odds anyway. The British contingent was led by Commodore Howie of the Royal Navy, but I reported to Colonel Colin Templeton, an old friend of Father’s from Cairo whom I’d met a couple of times on school holidays. Officially the Army’s representative, he was in reality an SOE officer and, despite being given the rank of lieutenant-colonel, I was his dogsbody. With every passing day, I resented the position all the more. My few weeks in France had nearly got me killed, but I had finally tasted action and was desperate for more. I was twenty years old, and the war was still raging elsewhere in Europe, while I spent my days in a hotel typing up the minutes of meetings about the minutiae of diplomatic protocol.

‘Is it Japan, sir?’ I asked Templeton as we stepped out of the hotel lobby and into the chill night air. The Americans had just fire-bombed Tokyo, destroying half the city, and I had spent the day collating reports on the situation. But Templeton shook his head.

‘I’ll explain in the Ghost,’ he said, as we showed our passes to a sentry and crossed the courtyard.

The Ghost was a battered old Chevrolet, a former Finnish Army staff car that he had commandeered for his personal use. Every inch of its exterior had been whitewashed, including the windows, a legacy of its use at the front early in the war. Templeton had left it in this condition partly because he enjoyed the eccentricity of it, and partly because the camouflage suited his purposes. His instructions from London were for his presence here to be as invisible as possible: in a city often covered in snow, the Ghost allowed him to do just that.