Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  There were no heads of state, no Prime Ministers at this first session; sensibly, they would only take their turn later when the dirtiest of the double-dealing was over and the United Nations was either reborn, or splintered anew.

  “Consistent with its approach to the position of our French allies, with whom we are presently waging a war against the evil forces of Krasnaya Zarya in southern France and along the Rhine; my government applies the same judgement of Paris,” Tom Harding-Grayson smiled wanly, “to the ongoing Chinese dilemma.”

  There was renewed head shaking around George Bush; who simply nodded, as if totally immersed in his thoughts and unprepared to offer hostages to fortune.

  “Who speaks for China? Or who speaks for the greater part of the Chinese polity?” The British Foreign Secretary let the question hang in the air for a moment. “Who indeed? If there is to be only one China on the Security Council, surely, it is reasonable for the voice that speaks for ninety-five percent of all Chinese, to be the one that rightfully speaks for the Chinese nation? And that, is the view of my government.”

  Clearly, a lot of people who ought to have known better, had honestly not seen this coming.

  Tom Harding-Grayson shamelessly added another element to the shock in the room.

  “One is also bound to ask: what is the value of a Security Council which excludes the most populous democracies on the planet?”

  No, very few people had seen that coming!

  “After the People’s Republic of China, India is the most populous nation on the globe. What of her inalienable rights to be heard?”

  “Seriously?” Somebody on the US table asked, angrily.

  “Unlike Ambassador Bush and the gentleman from Taipei,” Tom Harding-Grayson continued, for all his talk of ‘respect’, referring to the representative of Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist Chinese ‘republic’ with barely veiled contempt, “we view the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic’s membership of the Permanent Five of the Security Council as a non sequitur. Let us not forget that the Grand Alliance of the Second War years might have been victorious but for the Soviet Union; either that or we’d still be fighting that war today, which surely would have been a catastrophe even worse than that of the war of 1962!”

  He shifted the microphone, a large, lumpy stainless-steel implement from his right to his left hand as his arm threatened a spasm of cramp.

  “Sincerely, I welcome the delegation of the Soviet Union to this international forum. It is my most profound hope that it has come to America to cement the global peace. If this is so, then I promise that the United Kingdom will treat with them with the utmost good faith. Further to this, my Prime Minister has asked me to extend an unconditional invitation to Chairman Shelepin to meet with her here in San Francisco, or in England, or if he prefers, at a place and at a time of his choosing, in the Soviet Union. We were co-belligerents in a war which resulted in the death and misery of millions of our own people a little over four years ago, it is our duty to ensure that nothing like that ever happens again.”

  The British Foreign Secretary was still a little irritated that his French opposite number, Maurice Schumann, had elected to issue a formal complaint about the Red Air Force attack on the Villefranche Squadron, and the Sverdlovsk Kremlin’s ‘succouring’ of the terrorists ‘infesting my country’. Much as he understood the Frenchman’s angst; it was unhelpful to express it publicly in this arena.

  Of course, George Bush had parroted a familiar line; spoken of grand peace treaties, the assignation of blame and demanded the retrenchment of alleged Soviet infiltration globally in general, and particularly in Latin America with the blithe arrogance of a man who had read; but obviously not inwardly digested the now comprehensive CIA and US Air Force damage assessment reports of what had become of Soviet military and industrial capacity.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Tom Hardin-Grayson went on. “I will not pretend that the United Kingdom does not have its own, pressing issues to bring to this Assembly. The European security situation remains the biggest single obstacle to reconstruction in my country. Likewise, instability throughout the Mediterranean and the Middle East poses national and international threats to ourselves, and many of those nations represented in this room.”

  He sighed.

  “And there remains, the question of the illegal seizure of British crown territories in the South Atlantic and Antarctica by force majeure, by the Argentine in April 1964, the deaths of British servicemen in Argentine hands and the deaths and mistreatment of civilians in the following months. I must, sadly, give this Assembly, notice, and the Argentine due warning, that my government will pursue justice and restitution in this matter without let or hindrance in the months and years to come.”

  Chapter 42

  Saturday 11th February 1967

  Soviet Residence, Place de Jaude, Clermont-Ferrand

  Sharof Rashidovich Rashidov, the Troika’s Commissar Special Plenipotentiary to the Front Internationale, had only just returned to the city from Maxim Machenaud’s command bunker at the airport when the sirens began to sound.

  He demanded to know if there had been further reports from Northern France while he had been away; there had been nothing of substance since the flurry of mostly garbled, panicky messages of the morning.

  The enemy had attacked around Angers and Troyes, and ‘in great strength’ with ‘tanks and rolling artillery barrages’ in the Champagne towards St Dizier, and ‘broken out of the Ardennes’ supposedly ‘sweeping towards the Rhine!’

  There had also been less panicky reports from units in West Germany detailing a series of air attacks on depots, vehicle parks and communications targets, with the enemy apparently homing in on transmissions from radio wagons and even individual backpack radio sets.

  It was alleged that Napalm had been employed in several of these strikes but then it was not as if the Red Army was going to squeal about that in public, given that it had no right to be anywhere near the Rhine…

  Rashidov knew – well, he was convinced – that the Front Internationale had a much better idea what was going on to the north and the east, and probably, even an approximate tactical ‘feel’ for the real weight, and lines of advance of the enemy. Albeit, Rashidov’s own advisors were scoffing at the foolishness of the ‘Frenchies and their English lackeys’ going on the offensive while the tail end of the recent blizzards were still blowing through ‘the battlefield’, and battering at the foothills of the Massif Central.

  Foolish or not, from the chaos surrounding Maxim Machenaud that afternoon; the ‘Frenchies’ down here in the Auvergne were seriously rattled. Not so much caught on the hop, unawares, as completely taken by surprise and suddenly, badly in need of real leadership.

  The Commissar Plenipotentiary did not think that Citizen Machenaud and his motley crew of bully boys and lickspittles had the remotest idea what ‘leadership’ actually meant.

  Sharof Rashidov’s quiet suggestion to the ‘leader’ of the Front Internationale that perhaps, he might consider going on the radio to broadcast an upbeat rallying cry to his people, had been brusquely rejected. Instead, the idiot had begun to rant about issues which had suddenly become at best peripheral, and at worst, irrelevant. Somebody was about to set fire to his castle; it was far too fucking late to obsess about the colour of the paint on the battlements!

  And now the sirens were sounding across the city.

  It was starting to get dark; dusk swiftly turned to cold night at this time of year.

  “Comrade Commissar, we should go to the basement!”

  Rashidov scowled in exasperation.

  Sometimes, it was like being surrounded by old women!

  There had been an air raid warning drill; a desultory affair in which hardly anybody hurried anywhere and was over inside twenty minutes, shortly after Rashidov and his people had flown into Clermont-Ferrand. But none since; despite – what had been thought to be low-level skirmishing, rather than serious - fighting in the north and the British a
dvances down the Biscay coast. There had been no actual air raids inland, or anywhere within the Massif Central, or the south. Despite the air raids on Bordeaux, the Front Internationale’s last surviving bastion in the west; the clowns in Clermont-Ferrand were convinced the English would never bomb the city, or any of its southern, Mediterranean enclaves!

  Sharof Rashidov and his military experts thought that was not so much wishful thinking, as the self-evident manifestation of a worsening delusional psychosis. The only reason the British had not bombed targets in ‘the south’ was probably because, thus far, they had not got around to it. Clearly, any escalation of the war in the north was likely to signal a sea change in the enemy’s operational thinking, and therefore, it was inevitable that Clermont-Ferrand, Lyon and the big cities on or near the coast, Toulon, Marseilles, Nice, Perpignan and other targets, like rail yards, docks, road bridges and suchlike would soon come in for the same sort of medicine the RAF had meted out to the Chelyabinsk bunkers and key infrastructure objectives in Iraq a couple of years ago.

  Needless to say, Maxim Machenaud was totally unreceptive to this line of argument!

  The First Secretary of the Front Internationale was concerned only with ‘the threat’ of further attacks by the Red Air Force!

  It was…unbelievable.

  The man was insane!

  The two surviving interned Tupolev Tu-95s, both of which had suffered splinter damage from near misses over the Riviera: in one case a punctured fuel tank, and in the other suffered damage to the control surfaces and control cables of its starboard wing, had, in accordance with mission orders eschewed any attempt to immediately make the return journey to the Soviet Union and put down at Clermont-Ferrand to assess and if possible, to make repairs. This was the safest course before attempting the long flight back to their bases in the Chelyabinsk Military District. Both bombers had been moved to the western side of the aerodrome where around them, massive blast berms were still in the process of construction. Their crews, fourteen men and two women, notwithstanding Rashidov’s angry protests, were still being held incommunicado in a disused block at the FI’s headquarters in the old Michelin plant.

  Having spent most of the afternoon kicking his heels waiting for Maxim Machenaud to make an appearance the two men had had a blazing row. The Frenchman had ranted about Soviet betrayals; Rashidov had demanded, yet again, the release of his imprisoned personnel, and information about the fate of several other Red Air Force crewmen suspected to have bailed out of the crippled bomber which had crashed attempting an emergency landing at Clermont-Ferrand.

  Eventually, he been allowed to see – but not speak to or approach closer than a few metres - the sixteen prisoners, or more correctly, hostages. The crews of the two bombers looked hungry and dirty, and were being held in a cold room with a bucket for a communal toilet but had otherwise, not yet been harmed.

  Maxim Machenaud had thrown a an even more violent tantrum when Rashidov had angrily renewed his complaints and warned him that ‘our alliance hangs by a thread’.

  The general tenor of the debate had proceeded to go faster and faster downhill after that, if such a thing was even possible.

  Machenaud had threatened to start executing the Red Air Force prisoners, one every day that a supply plane failed to land at Clermont-Ferrand; Rashidov had told him that if that happened, he would be held personally responsible!

  Sharof Rashidov had turned on his heel. He had no intention of wasting further time arguing with a sick man in a dank, stinking cellar, when the priority of the moment was to compose a communication with Sverdlovsk confirming what his masters already knew: that any ongoing investment in the alliance with the FI was futile.

  The time had come to engineer Maxim Machenaud’s downfall or to leave the FI to its fate. His opinion was that overthrowing Machenaud would be a less than straightforward project, and bloody to boot because the hardcore leadership of the Revolutionary Guards – scum of the earth but well-armed and used to all the privileges of belonging to a well-fed, feared elite – would probably put up a fight. There were hundreds of Soviet military ‘advisors’, many of them Spetsnaz trained and equipped; unfortunately, they were spread all over the south of France, and assembling in and around Clermont-Ferrand ahead of a coup to unseat Machenaud, would be almost impossible to conceal, and thus, the element of surprise could not be assumed.

  An assassination might work, it all depended on how the Revolutionary Guard’s dispersed command structure responded. The formation had no identifiable chief, each troop or company had its own leader, command hierarchy and broadly speaking, loathed and distrusted all the other troops and companies. For all Rashidov knew, if anything happened to Maxim Machenaud, they might simply liquidate his delegation, or simply hold him hostage. Then everybody would be back to square one again; and he would be in a cell at the old Michelin Works.

  So, he planned to do what all good apparatchiks did in a situation like the one he found himself in. He was going to pass the decision upstairs and await instructions from the ‘big men’ in Sverdlovsk.

  As to his recommendation to the Troika, that was easy: there comes a time when you simply have to admit to yourself that you cannot argue with a rabid dog. Maxim Machenaud had to go; or the mission in France ought to be abandoned.

  In retrospect, now he was back in the relative safety of the mission’s headquarters, the only thing which surprised the Commissar Plenipotentiary was that after his stand-up shouting match with Maxim Machenaud, he had not, personally, been taken hostage by the little shit.

  Perhaps, he reflected sourly, somewhere in some unscrambled corner of the maniac’s head he retained the memory of Leonid Brezhnev’s decision to obliterate Bucharest when the Rumanians had – for reasons nobody had ever satisfactorily explained to him but which probably had a lot to do with the local Party leadership having suffered some kind of communal psychotic episode – arrested two visiting members of the then Troika, and tortured that arsehole Yuri Andropov to within an inch of his death.

  The sirens were wailing all across Clermont-Ferrand, their unsynchronised banshee cries rolling in discordant waves from one horizon to the other, confined within the ring of mountains surrounding the ancient city.

  But now there was another sound.

  A fast approaching whistling scream…

  Sharof Rashidov barged past the men around him and stepped out onto the cobbles of the Place de Jaude, just at the moment the first two jets thundered overhead so low that tiles showered down around him, and across the square, were ripped off and lifted into the air by the back draft of the ultra-low-flying bombers’ thundering turbofans.

  Rashidov heard the tiles crashing down, hardly noticed a man standing next to him grunting, and collapsing onto the ground. The deafening roar of another pair of big, dazzle camouflaged aircraft, their under-wing hard-points laden with evil black bombs and what looked like the sort of missile pods carried by the latest MiG-17 and 21 ground-attack variants he had seen demonstrated at the ranges in the Chelyabinsk Military District last year, rocketed over the roof tops at breakneck, impossible speed less than three or four hundred metres away.

  He felt the first big explosion through his feet as the earth flinched and the supersonic pressure waves rattled windows before he heard it, a massive, rumbling detonation, the prelude to a drum roll of smaller, repetitive thudding, thumping impacts.

  Some part of Sharof Rashidov’s mind registered that what he was hearing was a long – a very long line - of bombs striking the earth, or more likely, the tarmac of the airport, three or four kilometres away.

  Another pair of fast jets raced across the Place de Jaude.

  Rashidov guessed the attackers were using the square and the nearby cathedral as way markers, possibly flying as close as possible to the great twin spires – the most visible position markers in the whole city – to draw them precisely to their targets.

  But the bombs he was hearing falling were not from those aircraft…

 
A second drum-roll of detonations was walking across the volcanic soil of the Auvergne, a little farther away to the east.

  “They’re shooting off SS-75s,” a man said, tugging at Rashidov’s sleeve.

  Trailing boiling pillars of grey smoke, multiple missiles were ascending into the darkening heavens in search of prey eight miles high. One, two…three four; with at least two widely separated launchers firing salvoes converging on an unseen target…

  All the while the sirens were still sounding, a little forlornly, redundantly now.

  Faraway, heavy anti-aircraft cannons began to saw at heavens.

  There was a new whistling sound.

  And a deathly, ear-splitting shriek.

  And then an eerie silence, as the falling bomb sliced through the sound barrier and fell, dragging the impossible cacophony of its fall behind it, knifing down silently to all those unknowingly beneath its terminal dive.

  The next thing Sharof Rashidov knew he was being picked up off the ground. He gazed in shocked bewilderment at the randomly strewn bloody body parts in the near distance, the great swath of destruction across the other side of the Place de Jaude, before an impenetrable bank of roiling grey smoke choked with pulverised masonry dust roiled over the carnage and he lost consciousness…