Timeline 102762 Main 05 The Burning Time by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B00WTUB1PM
Published: 2015-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

Monday 2nd March 1964

Island of Samothrace, Aegean Sea

The big ships had been sighted about an hour before sunset. It had been a warm, clear day with light winds that barely ruffled the surface of the sea. The lookout positioned high on the hillside behind the abandoned fishing village had seen the smoke first, a rising column of grey-blackness slowly emerging out of the haze. Several of the Securitates had got excited, started babbling about taking the boat out to meet the approaching ships.

‘They will kill us all!’ Nicolae Ceaușescu had rasped. His voice was like the rest of his emaciated, pain-wracked body, a whispering shadow. His beard had grown, his hair was a filthy tousled mess and he stank. They all stank. They were all hungry and thirsty for every well and cistern had been fouled with dead goats and dogs and cats before the island’s tormentors had dragged its original population off in big grey warships just like the one’s preparing to anchor offshore in the gathering dusk.

Within hours of interrogating the crew of the small damaged fishing boat which had put into the port of Samothraki to make repairs over a week ago, the band of survivors had camouflaged the wreck of the Mil Mi-6 helicopter in which they had escaped from Bucharest two weeks ago. The boat’s crew, two men in their late twenties, a teenage boy and a sinewy hard-faced woman in her forties only spoke Greek but eventually Ceaușescu’s Securitate bodyguards had discovered that the ‘Russians’ had first come to Samothrace about six months ago. They had returned several times since. First ‘they came to steal our boats and our young men’. Only a few of the island’s women had been molested on that first visit; the next time the ‘big ships’ returned the ‘Russian soldiers’ had rounded up all the men and every woman was ‘violated’, even little girls. Some women were killed; the rest had been loaded onto a small rusty merchant ship while their surviving men folk were forced to watch by soldiers in Red Army uniforms carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles. Afterwards the soldiers had marched the village’s men away; there had been shooting and in the morning there were bodies floating in the water all along the shore.

Ceaușescu had ordered his Securitates to treat the woman from the fishing boat ‘with respect’. He had been intensely irritated to learn the Securitates had beaten up the two men and the boy. How the fuck did the imbeciles think they were going to get off this fucking island? Fortunately, neither of the adults or the kid was seriously hurt, just bloody, angry and uncooperative for several days.

The former First Deputy Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of Romania still lived, but only just. However, his pain-addled mind was slowly regaining a little of its former acuity, he had taken command of the survivors again and begun to re-assert his will over his fate.

Once the middle-aged woman had understood she was not to

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