Churchill's Triumph Read Online Free Page A

sink beneath the encrustations of age, to worm their way deep inside, exciting him, stretching the constricted blood vessels that carried purpose to his brain, flexing them, bringing him back. “Then, Monsieur Polonais,” he said, “I would like a glass of champagne. Please.”
    “As you wish,” the man replied.
    Ah, so the bugger spoke English, if with an accent, yet sufficiently well to understand orders. He disappeared for a few seconds, lurching on some crippled leg, and returned with a glass—no, confound him, two glasses! He placed one beside Churchill and was drinking from the other himself. What type of servant was this?
    Something inside Churchill persuaded him not to lose his temper, to ride the insolence, for the moment at least. He still couldn’t make out the man’s features against the brilliant light reflecting from the sea, but the servant held himself like a man of considerable age perched on but one sound leg.
    “So, what happened to your leg?” Churchill inquired.
    “Russia,” the servant replied.
    “Ah, war wound.” It seemed to help Churchill relax a little. The old days. “I used to have a valet like you. Bloody rude. Independent. Name of Sawyers. Bugger of a man. No front teeth, no hair, spoke with a bloody-fool Cumbrian accent that tied all his words in knots. But indispensable, in his own way.”
    “I remember him well.”
    “Damned fool, look what you’ve done,” Churchill snapped, as in surprise he spilled wine down the front of his blazer. He wiped himself. “What the devil did you say?”
    “You don’t recognize me, do you?”
    “From where? When?” the old man cried, growing agitated.
    “Nearly twenty years ago. In Russia.”

SATURDAY ,
3RD OF FEBRUARY, 1945 SAKI AIRSTRIP ,

SOVIET CRIMEA
    ON E
    his must be, Churchill thought, the most God forsaken place he’d ever seen, at the very edge of the earth. As they flew in for the landing he could see an army of women bent over the runway, sweeping away the snow with twig brooms. The runway itself was little more than a series of uneven concrete slabs cast upon the frozen ground, with a control tower that had been thrown together from rough-planed timber. It had a machine-gun nest on top. The insistent grayness of it all burrowed inside Churchill and froze his doubts so hard he wondered if they would ever leave him.
    Sarah Oliver, his daughter, a flight officer in the WAAF, sensed his misgivings and squeezed his hand. “Still feeling poorly, Papa?”
    The previous day he’d had a temperature of 103 degrees, not the best way to begin a hazardous journey, not for a man of seventy. But he shook his head. “I never wanted to come here, not to the Crimea. Nothing but lice and typhus plague and. . . blessed Russians. My God, I hope the whisky will last, otherwise we might end up dying in this place.”
    “So. . . why here?”
    “Had no choice. Neither did poor Franklin. A man in a wheelchair has to fly six thousand miles because Stalin refuses to travel more than six hundred. The supreme gathering of the three most powerful men in the world—in a hole like this!” He stabbed his finger at the scene outside. “If we’d researched the matter for ten years with all diligence, I swear we could have found no more miserable spot. Russia in blasted February!”
    The conference of the three Allied war leaders hadn’t yet started and already Stalin had won the first round.
    “They call you the Holy Trinity, you three,” Sarah said, smiling, trying to reassure him.
    “And Stalin says I’m the Holy Ghost,” he replied morosely, “because I’m the fool who seems to be forever flying about.” He scratched at a blob of grease on his lapel. “But I think we rather resemble the triumvirate of Ancient Rome—you remember your Shakespeare?”
    “You know I prefer more modern pieces.”
    “After the fall of Julius Caesar, the three of them—Mark Antony, Octavius, Lepidus—gathered together to carve up the world. Just like us.