A Line in the Sand: The Gulf War of 1964 - Part 1 (Timeline 10/27/62)

by James Philip

  The Foreign Secretary had not worried overly if he was teaching his Prime Minister to ‘suck eggs’. It was critically important that she understood exactly what HMS Alliance had captured on the Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak.

  ‘Traffic Analysis tells one where and what one’s enemy is ‘physically’ doing; where his forces are deployed, his state of readiness and consequently where one’s own defences are the most vulnerable. It also tells one where the best place to attack him has been in the past, and might be again in the future. Traffic Analysis is so vital that frankly, without it and the ‘complete picture’ it gives you of the enemy’s strength and dispositions it is immaterial whether one can, or cannot read his coded radio transmissions. Bill Welchman, a certifiable genius by any measure, was the first man to understand this and to put his ‘big idea’ into practice. Military intelligence, all intelligence in fact, is about context. Facts tell you nothing in the absence of context; incidentally, that’s a common journalist, academic and political misunderstanding!’

  Margaret Thatcher had been positively rapt by this stage.

  ‘Alan Turing?’ She had asked.

  ‘If Bill Welchman was a certifiable genius I hardly know where to begin with Alan. Alan Turing ran Hut Eight. Hut Eight’s job was to crack the U-boat Enigma. SHARK. Turing was a truly remarkable fellow. After the war he was on the short list for the British Team at the London Olympics for the marathon, he was still one of the top five or six long-distance runners in the country even though he would have been in his mid-thirties by then. Turing was the man who designed the first electro-magnetic machine, ‘a computer’, to speed up the code-breaking process. He was the master logician who had sat down and worked out, in his own head, how such a machine would work, built it, eventually got it to work and won the Battle of the Atlantic. Granted, albeit with a little bit of help from the Royal Navy. We had had some early success reading SHARK in 1941 and 1942 but then the bloody Germans started using an extra ‘rotor’ on the naval version of the Enigma machine and breaking SHARK became exponentially more problematic. It was Bill Welchman, who by 1943 was in charge of mechanisation at Bletchley Park, as well as being the poor chump who was responsible for liaising with the Americans, who actually designed a modification to Turing’s code-breaking machine – his bombe – that speeded things up so that we could start reading SHARK again. Bill Welchman and Alan Turing became the ‘big men’ at Bletchley later in the war; with Milner-Barry and Hugh Alexander respectively taking over the running of Hut Six and Eight from about 1943 onwards.’

  Margaret Thatcher had been burning with questions.

  ‘What happened to The Wicked Uncles? Apart from Hugh Alexander, I mean?’

  Airey Neave had picked up the story at this point.

  ‘Poor Turing was driven to suicide in 1954. The local police in Manchester persecuted him because he was a known homosexual and nobody in authority who knew anything of his exemplary wartime service raised a finger to help him. The whole affair was a disgrace. Bad show all round.’

  ‘Oh, and what about Welchman and Milner-Barry?’

  ‘Bletchley Park was comprehensively dismantled after the war. A pale, penny-pinching shadow of the wartime Government Code and Cipher School was set up at Eastcote in Middlesex in 1946 but GCHQ, again in a parsimonious sort of way, wasn’t established in Cheltenham until the early 1950s. Stuart Milner-Barry joined the Treasury in 1946, I think. He was an Under-Secretary by the time of the October War. He went missing the night of the war. Bill Welchman got so fed up with the penny-pinching of the Atlee Government that he moved to the United States in 1948. The last I heard he had become an American citizen and he was a top man in the National Security Agency in Virginia.’

  And now after a gap of over eighteen long, lost years, GCHQ and one of the legendary Wicked Uncles – Hugh Alexander - who had won the Second World War, was back in business reading Jericho.

  Airey Neave was smiling like a Cheshire cat.

  The Prime Minister could not but help asking herself how much pain and grief might have been averted if governments of the day had built on, instead of throwing away everything that Bletchley Park had achieved in the seventeen lost years between the end of Hitler’s war and the disaster of the October War?

  “I hope you’re not trying to keep me in suspense, Airey?” Margaret Thatcher half-asked, half-cautioning her friend as she focused on the here and the now.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, Margaret.” The Secretary of State for National Security was having trouble stifling a chuckle. “One of the first intercepts we fully decrypted was from the forward HQ of the Red Army’s 10th Guards Tank Division describing a series of attacks on its columns along the road from Mahabad to Piranshahr by guerrillas. It seems the division’s movement schedule has been put back between four and five days and a whole mechanised corps is backing up along the road all the way back to Qoshachay and Malekan!”

  “Guerrillas?”

  “Yes. If I didn’t know better I’d start thinking the Red Army is getting acquainted with my old chum Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Harold St John Waters, VC, rather better than they’d like.”

  Margaret Thatcher looked at her former mentor with more than a tincture of incredulity in her eyes.

  “Surely one man can’t possibly be responsible for holding up a whole division for five days, Airey?”

  “Ah, well, that’s the thing,” the man guffawed cheerfully, “if what’s going on in those mountain passes between Mahabad and Piranshahr is really Frank Waters’s work, there’s no way he’s going to be satisfied holding up just one division for just five days, Margaret!”

  Chapter 23

  Wednesday 22nd April 1964

  Sarukani, Lahijan-e Sharqi District, Iran

  It was the sort of country where the only place you could hide was in plain sight. Nevertheless, it was beautiful country, especially at this time of year when the winter wind no longer blew and the heat of the mid-day sun was yet to sear the flesh of exposed faces and limbs red brown. Like an old soldier anywhere and from any age, Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Harold St John Waters, VC, was always thankful for small mercies.

  Behind the groaning, pitching and rolling old Ford six-wheeler they had ‘requisitioned’ in Mahabad four days ago the sooty black mushroom of smoke rising from the burning carcass of the T-62 slowly drifted downwind on the breeze falling off the sheer-sided mountains on the northern rim of the valley. In the seconds after the huge detonation all the other vehicles in the column had halted, Red Army officers had jumped out and stared back. The numerous local villagers caught up in the monumental traffic jam had started hitting their horns; oddly, the Russians seemed to be under orders not to do anything to alienate the civilian population, a thing that came hard to most Soviet soldiers.

  Frank Waters could see how much the Russian rank and file wanted to start shooting the grubby old men and women who peered into their trucks as if they were inspecting cattle sent to market. The invaders wanted to start taking hostages, making ‘examples’ but somebody at the top had had the common sense to not compound his present difficulties by inciting a general guerrilla insurgency along the whole length of his chaotic lines of communication. In this sort of country every household had a long rifle of indeterminate vintage in a cupboard; in this sort of country somebody was always feuding with somebody else and if people got shot well, that was just the way things were. In country like this two or three men with rifles could block the Mahabad to Piranshahr road at any point between here and the border with Iraq.

  Frank Waters and his small gang of SAS cut-throats and brigands had come across the T-62 by the side of the narrow road along the side of the valley. To the right of the road was the rubble of burned out hovels and a path leading to the foothills of near vertical mountain slopes, to the left a pattern of fields, flat on the flood plain of the valley running into the hazy south east.

  The tank had shed a track and been bulldozed off the road; its three-man crew had been easy to deal w
ith in the dark as they slept around the embers of the small fire they had cooked their rations on the previous evening. A man never called out if you cut his throat the right way. Hauling the beggars up into the turret had been harder than Waters had expected; an indication that he and his boys were not exactly in tip top shape anymore. Never mind, the turret had probably been blown a hundred feet in the air when the improvised demolition charges went off in amongst the 115-millimetre rounds stored below the dead gunner’s knees...

  It was a pity the T-62 had been short of fuel.

  Another fifty or sixty gallons of fuel would have made a nice fireball and taken out more than just the half-a-dozen nearest vehicles when the improvised demolition charges lit off. Still, one could not have everything.

  Frank Water’s stolen Spetsnaz fatigues were filthy, his unshaven face was so grimy he would have looked like a native of these parts had he wrapped a blanket around himself. It was the dirtiness and the fact of his fortnight-long unkemptness that made it so easy to blend in with the Red Army. The invaders were already filthy, tired, angry and because of the incompetence of their quartermasters, hungry. The roads down which provisions, fuel and ammunition were supposed to flow were blocked with stalled columns, and nobody had either predicted the inevitable bottlenecks, or possessed the native gumption to do anything about it. Of course, his own modest interventions and mischief-making had somewhat exacerbated the Red Army’s difficulties but honestly, whoever imagined he could simply drive hundreds of tanks and supporting vehicles down roads like these without one, destroying the roads, and two, creating the world’s worst traffic jam ought to be shot.

  “Shit!” Muttered the driver under his breath. “Those boys up ahead have got KGB patches on their collars, boss!”

  Frank Water’s did not hesitate.

  “Everybody out! Piss break!”

  This said he kicked open the passenger door to the cab of the ancient Ford and dropped stiffly to the ground. He made a big play of stretching and yawning, pulling his forage cap on and off and scratching his head as his men and the driver gathered along the hill side of the truck, ostensibly to relieve themselves, as he watched the approaching Red Army policemen. Unlike the fighting soldiers upon whom they preyed like a parasitic infestation, these fellows were spotlessly clean, immaculately turned out and pinkly well fed. Big men hefting freshly oiled Kalashnikovs.

  Frank Waters contemplated reaching for his Makarov pistol.

  No, bad idea!

  He stepped up to the nearest KGB man.

  “Chto yebat' proiskhodit, tovarishch?” He bawled angrily.

  What the fuck is going on, Comrade?

  “Identiy dokumenty, tovarishch kapitan,” the man demanded doggedly.

  Identity papers, Comrade Captain.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Harold St John Waters, VC, of Her Majesty’s 22nd Special Air Service Regiment treated this demand with the disdain he normally reserved exclusively for cavalry officers.

  “Go fuck yourself!” He yelled in the man’s face. “And salute a superior fucking officer you miserable little shit!”

  The other man, an NCO with a flat oriental face who obviously could not tell the difference between a Moskva or a Kazakh accent – Water’s knew he sometimes slipped between different accents when he shouted at somebody in Russian – flinched and thought about raising the muzzle of his Kalashnikov.

  “Where’s your commanding officer? And why the fuck aren’t you shitheads doing something about this fucking snarl up?”

  As an aside he waved for his men to get back into the truck.

  Now that they had had a look around and knew what they were up against they needed their guns.

  Frank Waters eyed the sky; it was still two hours to full darkness. This was going to get very, very bloody he thought to himself as the NCO’s commanding officer, a weasel-faced Senior Lieutenant strutted between the lorries and armoured personnel carriers trapped on the winding dust road to the west.

  The veteran SAS man took one look at the man and knew he was not about to talk his way out of this particular fix.

  He heard his men dropping down to the ground behind him; the clicks of firing pins. His four surviving troopers all had loaded Kalashnikovs. Thus far he had seen eight or nine KGB men – although there would be more nearby -plus the officer heading towards him.

  These roving KGB ‘police squads’ were usually fifteen to twenty strong.

  Fifteen or twenty of these bully boys against five SAS men; okay, that was a fair enough fight.

  The real problem was going to be the other thousand or so Red Army soldiers stuck on this stretch of road within half-a-mile of where he stood. Well, after they stopped cheering and spitting on the corpses of the dead KGB men on the ground, anyway.

  Frank Waters gazed one more time across the valley to the grey-black mountains beyond. The green of the valley floor contrasted against the darkness of the rising ground, the patchwork quilt of fields and irrigation ditches had probably not changed for hundreds of years. Alexander the Great might have ridden through this pass once, likewise the legions of Darius and Xerxes, the Safavids, the Ottomans and latterly, the sad Pahlavis had each tried to imprint their marks upon this land. When the soldiers had passed through things always went back to the way they had been before, as if nothing had ever happened. No matter how frenetically great men kicked up the dust of history, it settled again sooner or later, burying their footsteps.

  “All right! All right!” He complained testily. “I’ll give you my fucking identity documents!”

  He sighed as he reached back into the cab of the truck and his hand closed around the butt of the Makarov pistol.

  Bloody tinnitus!

  Except it was not tinnitus.

  What’s that infernal screeching sound?

  One moment Frank Waters was standing up on his hind legs idly wondering why he had not been shot yet and the next he was scrabbling under the Ford six-wheeler; and around him was absolute bedlam.

  Absolute, fiery bedlam...

  The insane, ear-rending scream was inside his head and all around him.

  The first jet flew so low over the stationary column that its engine kicked up a giant rooster’s plume of dirt and dust. Anybody who had not hit the ground and tried to get off the road or under cover was already dead and dying by then. Thirty yards behind the Ford truck a Napalm canister bloomed and its deadly modern version of Greek fire billowed and boiled down the road.

  The second jet dropped another Napalm bomb as it rocketed down the valley from north to south.

  There were further explosions, time seeming to elongate, the flashes of fire and the hammering of guns was suddenly deafening.

  And in the aftermath; there was absolute silence.

  Utter, ear-splitting silence in that horrible moment before the groans and the screams of the dying and the terribly maimed, filled every corner of Frank Waters’s shocked conscious mind.

  Chapter 24

  Wednesday 22nd April 1964

  Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, England

  Captain Sir Peter Christopher, VC sipped the sickly sweet fizzy wine – it seemed there was no Champagne left nowadays – as the ‘gala reception’ for the heroes of the Battle of Malta went on around him. He was feeling tired and a little light headed but strangely optimistic about...everything really. This was ‘odd’ given that the country was going to the dogs in a hand basket, the Americans seemed to have wiped their hands of their international commitments and practically everybody assumed that the Middle Eastern oil tap was about to be turned off forever; and there was not actually, on the face of it very much to be ‘optimistic’ about.

  Like a prize idiot he had assumed Marija’s queasy tummy and lack of appetite was probably to do with the change in the climate and the blandness of the food here in Oxford. She was a child of the sunshine and accustomed to the vegetable and fish rich diet of her native Maltese Archipelago. They had been so busy since they arrived in England – he had been a
way on the trip to Philadelphia – and what with all the events they had attended, the attention from the newspapers, the radio and the television people, he had thought it entirely to be expected that Marija would need a little time to acclimatise.

  A prize idiot...

  ‘Husband,’ Marija had explained with shy patience when he had asked her, for the umpteenth time that morning, how she was feeling after she had rushed to the bathroom to be sick that morning, ‘I am not nervous. I am looking forward to the parade and the awarding of the medals to all my brave Talaveras. My sickness is to be expected. It is nothing for you to worry about. This I know because I am a midwife, yes?’

  He had blinked at his wife like a prize idiot.

  ‘Oh,’ the penny had still not completely dropped.

  Entirely on account of the fact that he was a prize idiot...

  So Marija had had to explain further.

  ‘It is very early but I am pregnant, husband.’

  His wife’s almond brown eyes had lowered momentarily and then she had sniffed, tears forming.

  ‘There’s no doubt?’ He had blurted, like a prize idiot.

  ‘No,’ she had confirmed patiently. ‘I am a midwife, remember?’