Warsaw Concerto, page 37
part #13 of Timeline 10_27_62 Series
It was a monstrous crock of shit.
Unfortunately, the men at the top seemed incapable of imagining any other world than the one which got blown up four years ago!
That fucking dialectic had a lot to answer for!
Not least, very soon now, one way or another, it was probably going to get thirty-eight-year-old First Captain Dmitry Alexandrovich ‘Lucky’ Kolokoltsev killed.
“Presumably,” he inquired in his clumsy French, of nobody in particular, “you will take me directly out to the flagship?”
“Yes, Mon Capitaine.”
A six or seven-metre-long barge was tied up alongside a pontoon next to the dock, its engine rumbling, idling unhappily.
Kolokoltsev stepped into it and settled, with an attempt at nonchalance on a bench looking forward as his escorts piled into the boat around him.
Soon, the barge pulled away from the land.
“Are all you guys off the Jean Bart?” He asked, affably.
This drew a few curt nods.
Okay, making conversation is a waste of time.
The battleship was an impressive sight from afar in her new grey paint, sitting like a steel rock jutting up out of the water with the guns of her forward quadruple turret jauntily elevated twenty degrees as if about to fire a salvo over the coastal mountains far into the interior.
If the twenty-thousand ton plus Yavuz – the old German battlecruiser Goeben – had been a dinosaur the Jean Bart was, by any standards, at approximately twice the sunken ship’s displacement and capable of throwing around three times her weight of broadside – a very superior kind of dinosaur. In fact, in her prime, had the French ever been able to afford to complete her as designed, and to fit her with modern, state-of-the-art, radar and gun-directors, along with the American Iowa class, the British Vanguard, the German Bismarck class, and the monstrous Yamato type dreadnoughts, the Jean Bart and her mighty sister, the Richelieu, would have been among the ultimate exemplars of their Dreadnought kind.
In her prime…
Only the French had actually built successive classes of big gun ships, the smaller Dunkerque class battlecruisers and the battleships Richelieu and Jean Bart, with their main batteries forward of their bridge superstructures, and their secondary armament concentrated aft. The British had adopted the practice for the Nelson and the Rodney back in the 1920s, but that had largely been a design expedient to keep the tonnage of those ships below the magic thirty-five thousand-ton Washington Treaty limit. Ironically, Richelieu and Jean Bart had also been initially laid down as ‘Treaty’ ships, with planned standard displacements within the 1922 treaty’s limits, although both had eventually completed weighing in at well over forty thousand tons. By any measure the Jean Bart was a leviathan, truly a castle of steel with up to 330-millimetre-thick armour shielding her flanks and her decks protected with up to 200-millimetres of cemented plate.
As the barge approached the flagship of the Villefranche Squadron the battleship began to block out the view of Cap Ferrat beyond her. Dmitry Kolokoltsev saw the great ship’s port rail begin to be populated by men, women and no, that had to be wrong…children?
Then he saw a woman with a baby in her arms, and another…
Perhaps, only one in three of the men lining the rail wore anything approximating a uniform, although many of the men and the women wore off blue or grey boiler suits beneath a miscellany of coats, caps and hats to keep out the cold breeze gusting across the bay.
Two small fishing boats were moored near the battleship’s stern, apparently unloading their catches.
Kolokoltsev wondered how the crew paid for the fish; then he corrected his thinking, realising that he was asking the wrong question because the fishermen and the fleet were one and the same thing, the one dependent, symbiotically one upon the other. The ships moored in Villefranche-sur-Mer were as much sanctuaries as weapons of war.
I ought to have paid more attention to the other vessels!
It was too late to crane his head around, or to peer at the rails of the other ships to see if they too, were menageries…
There was a stepped gangway down to a pontoon lashed alongside the midships flank of the Jean Bart. The barge clunked heavily against it in a decidedly un-naval fashion, lines were thrown and secured and the Russian found himself standing at the foot of the gangway, placing his right foot on the first rung, glancing up the cliff-like wall of the behemoth. Faces looked down on him, peering at him as if he was some exotic, alien life form from seven or eight metres above his head.
Nobody was more surprised than Dmitry Kolokoltsev when his arrival at the head of the gangway was greeted by a crisp salute from an officer – who looked like he still ought to be in school - in the immaculate uniform of a Lieutenant de vaisseau in the French Navy.
“Welcome, First Captain Kolokoltsev,” the boy intoned respectfully.
“Permission to come on board, sir,” the Russian requested in French, aware that his accent must sound execrable, if not laughable.
A very unmilitary crowd had gathered behind the tall, hook-nosed man at the boy officer’s shoulder.
“Granted,” this man said, half-smiling.
The Russian met the older man’s eye, made a guess: “Thank you, Amiral Leguay.”
Kolokoltsev realised belatedly that the Frenchman had punctiliously returned his salute and was now, astonishingly, extending his right hand in greeting.
Within moments, it got yet even more surreal.
Kolokoltsev’s eyes widened as Leguay nodded at the petite, auburn-brunette dressed in an ill-fitting midshipman’s jacket and canvas slacks, wearing plimsolls who had emerged from the crowd at his shoulder. The woman carried a notebook and pencil, which presently, was poised to record…presumably, whatever needed to be recorded.
“May I introduce my secretary, Mademoiselle Faure,” the commander of the rust bucket fleet said. “I have asked her to ensure that quarters are prepared for you and that for your convenience a Russian-speaking guide is available to you at all times, Captain Kolokoltsev.”
Dmitry Kolokoltsev was starting to get his bearings, recovering his wits. The men in the barge that brought him out to the battleship could have thrown him over the side at any time, Leguay could have – and might still, without warning – throw him in the ship’s brig, or again, simply throw him over the side…
But that had not happened yet.
He eyed the four seamen carrying old-fashioned bolt action, M1917 rifles, the so-called American Enfield type supplied to the Free French in hundreds of thousands during the Second War under Lend-Lease.
He noted that those men were properly uniformed, military-looking.
“You will be escorted at all times when you are not in your quarters, Captain,” Leguay explained, quirking an apologetic grimace. “We have so few visitors that we treasure each and every one of them.”
“Thank you,” Kolokoltsev murmured. “For your, er, consideration.”
“Aurélie,” the Frenchman began, correcting himself, “Mademoiselle Faure, will take you to your quarters so that you can settle in. You must have been travelling the best part of a day to get here from the Auvergne?”
“Nearer thirty-six hours, actually.”
“Just so,” René Leguay agreed, smiling. “Freshen up and when you are ready, Mademoiselle Faure will escort you to my state rooms. We can have a chat about…things, over luncheon.”
“I look forward to that, Amiral.”
There was a mirror in the washroom of the large cabin into which he was shown. The hatch shut behind him, he listened for the sound of it being dogged, locked, heard nothing. In the lonely quietness he could hear his heart beating. When he had stopped shaking Dmitry Kolokoltsev stared into the grey, prematurely aged face that looked back at him for some seconds from the small, bulkhead mirror.
His hosts had placed his case and his bag on the single, neatly prepared cot against the forward armoured bulkhead. There was also a clean white shirt and a pair of dark blue slacks laid out on the covers. There was a small writing table affixed to the port bulkhead, although no chair.
The Jean Bart was the third dreadnought he had stepped aboard. The first had been the Novorossiysk, formerly the Italian Conte di Cavour, officially, destroyed by an internal explosion – more likely by a leftover Second War mine – in the Black Sea in 1955.
The second of the armoured monsters he had served on had been the equally ill-fated Yavuz, of a slightly earlier vintage than the Novorossiysk, albeit never modernised in the fashion of the former Italian vessel.
Neither of those ships was constructed remotely on the scale of the Jean Bart, and already he was a little lost. This cabin was somewhere in the aft superstructure, perhaps, just above the main deck level which meant that there were probably fifteen to twenty millimetres of cemented armoured plate beneath his feet. Before he was led below, he had heard what he assumed were diesel generators, down here he had expected to feel the distant reverberation of heavy machinery, and at least a whisper from the boiler room blowers, instead, it was eerily still.
His information had been that the fleet was so short of bunker oil – and he had glimpsed for himself that all the ships had been riding unusually high on their load lines, which meant their bunkers were as good as empty – none of them dared leave a boiler fired up.
He splashed cold water in his face, attempted to slick down his unruly greying, otherwise still thick once jet-black hair. He decided he needed a shave…
There was a knock at the hatch.
“Come!”
One of the two rifle-hefting ratings who had accompanied Kolokoltsev and Mademoiselle Faure to this compartment stepped inside.
“Mademoiselle Faure’s compliments, sir,” the man explained blankly, placing a mug containing a muddy, steaming brew on the writing table. “She apologised that we have no coffee. But we make our own brew out of chicory and,” the man grinned, “other stuff, and now and then we get hold of Cognac. Not the sort of stuff you’d drink back before the war, but if you dilute it enough nobody goes blind.”
Kolokoltsev was speechless now.
The man had actually sounded…friendly.
Any moment he expected a dozen men to storm in and start to kick the shit out of him.
“What was going on?” He asked privately, baffled.
Alone again he sniffed suspiciously at the drink.
Sipped it even more suspiciously.
Coughed in surprise.
Cognac! More like gut rot!
He drank deeper, rode the vicious kick, felt the alcohol warming his soul a moment later.
Thus fortified, he broke out his shaving kit and set about making himself look like an officer ahead of his next encounter – which might easily be his last – with Contra Amiral Leguay.
Presently, he looked out into the passageway.
“I am ready to attend Amiral Leguay,” he explained to the guards.
“I’ll send word for Aurélie, sir” the older of the two men on duty reported respectfully.
It was another ten minutes before there was a gentle knocking at the hatch.
The Russian buttoned his tunic.
“What happened to your family in the war Comrade Captain?” The woman asked.
The question caught the man utterly unawares. Nobody had called him ‘comrade’ since he arrived in Villefranche-sur-Mer. He did not know which was more disconcerting.
“I was not married,” he said stiffly, then relented. “I was engaged. I think that Tatiana was with her parents at Balaklava, nobody survived that bomb. My father died at Stalingrad in forty-two, my mother ‘disappeared’, she was working in a factory in the East at the time. I went into the Red Navy when I was fifteen, I lied about my age, the Navy has been good to me…”
The woman eyed his green KGB tabs.
“No, I was not always a commissar,” he sighed. “That happened at the height of Admiral Gorshkov’s first reforms of the Red Navy, nine or ten years ago. At the time the Political Directorate badly needed men with seagoing, operational experience and I was deemed ideologically ‘sound’. Ever since, I’ve been yearning to go back to sea, as,” he hesitated, not having the least idea why he was telling a complete stranger any of this, “an honest man.”
Aurélie Faure’s grey-green eyes had fixed on his face.
“These are strange times, Comrade Captain,” she decided, with a shake of her head. “I dream of being a teacher again. I was married, just before the war. We had decided to wait a year or two before we started our family. Then the war came. I would be dead by now if I had not prostituted myself to get a berth on this ship. Now, like so many of my ‘comrades’ on board the Jean Bart, I am picking up the pieces of my lives as best I can.”
The man was silent.
“Which,” Aurélie Faure went on, “is why there are so many angry people among us, and Amiral Leguay is so careful of your safety as to ensure that there will always be trusted men between you, and those in the fleet who might wish you harm.”
They found René Leguay writing in a journal at his desk in his cabin, directly beneath the main bridge superstructure of the leviathan. He put down his pen and rose to shake Kolokoltsev’s hand anew.
“Do you want me to stay, Mon Amiral?” The woman asked.
“No, but if you could stay close at hand, please.”
The two men were alone.
Leguay smiled ruefully as he turned away and opening a wooden locker mounted at approximately chest-height on the aft bulkhead, clunked two glasses and a bottle of what looked like real, pre-war Cognac on the table, gesturing for his visitor to pull up one of the half-a-dozen hard-backed chairs.
“I hardly ever come down here,” he confessed. “I prefer the peace and quiet of my sea cabin two-thirds of the way to heaven,” he pointed upwards, “inside the upper bridge.” He popped the cork and poured generous measures into each glass. “Some mornings I roll out of my bunk and stand on the bridge wing gazing at the ‘ghost fleet’, and the beautiful coast around me and I almost convince myself that the last four years has not been an unmitigated fucking disaster.”
He pushed one glass towards the Russian, picked up the other one as he sat down.
“What about you, Citizen Kolokoltsev?”
“About me?”
“How do you and your conscience knock along together?”
The Russian shrugged, picking up his glass.
His nose told him the Cognac was the real thing…
“Seriously?” He inquired.
“Why not?” René Leguay re-joined, raising his glass to his lips, only thinking better of draining its contents in one go at the last moment.
“Seriously, I am confused, Comrade Contra Amiral,” Kolokoltsev confessed. “All I know, given the circumstances all that I can know – because was I in your place I know how I would act - is that you will never, can never allow me to return to Clermont-Ferrand to report upon the state of your…fleet.”
The Captain of the Jean Bart considered this proposition.
“This is true,” he admitted, with a Gallic shrug. “Forgive me, my question was impertinent. Perhaps, when you get to know me a little better, we may discuss such matters frankly. However, let me put my cards on the table; in the interests, let us say, of establishing a basis for our ongoing conversations?”
Kolokoltsev nodded jerkily.
“I will not permit my ships or my people to fall into the hands of the Front Internationale.” He grimaced apologetically. “In this you are either my friend, or my enemy. If you are the latter, I fear I must detain you on board, I hasten to add, as comfortably and with such dignity as is practical.” René Leguay spread his hands. “If you join the fleet then, well,” he sighed, “All things are possible…”
Chapter 33
Tuesday 10th January 1967
Alamo Heights, San Antonio, Texas
Nobody needed to tell Associate Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Clyde Tolson that he was getting too old for this…shit. He slumped heavily into the nearest chair and gazed, ruminatively at the stinking, week-old puddle of blood in which the housekeeper, an uncooperative, Spanish-speaking – likely illegal, undocumented worker, although nobody in this part of the world seemed to give a goddam about that sort of thing – woman of indeterminate middle years called Conchita, had found the dead woman.
Flies buzzed obscenely.
According to the local Medical Examiner’s report the woman had been raped, badly beaten – or tortured – before her killer had opened up her throat like she was a beef cow on an abattoir killing floor hook.
They had found the old man’s bloated, decomposing body in the trunk of the woman’s Ford Fair Line Sedan parked outside a bar in downtown San Antonio yesterday afternoon. Again, the stench and the flies had been the giveaway…
His neck was broken, several vertebrae crushed and his spinal column snapped, the fatal injury caused probably in a single twisting movement; so, he at least, had not suffered.
The woman had not been so lucky.
She was still wearing the gag her tormentor had used to silence her as he used her. Likely, judging from the black ligature marks on her wrists she had been trussed up like a Turkey for Thanksgiving Day while her killer pleasured himself.
“It’s hard to tell,” the Medical Examiner, a greying, moustachioed man clearly wishing he had retired by now, observed wearily, “I’ll know better after the autopsy but…even with the cadaver’s state of decomposition,” even though it was supposedly winter it was warm in the house, “there is obvious bruising around the victim’s genital area. Presumably, the bastard raped her repeatedly, I’d speculate, with extreme violence, before he started cutting her…”
