by James Philip
Those Centurions – including twenty-three up-gunned Mark IIs - were priceless. Although eight thousand troops had so far been flown into Kuwait, Abadan and Dhahran from the United Kingdom and Cyprus as yet, no heavy equipment had reached the Persian Gulf from England or the Mediterranean. Moreover, apart from the cruiser HMS Tiger and a few smaller ships which had made best speed around the Cape taking nearly a month to reach the Arabian Sea, no significant naval reinforcements other than the Centaur and the ANZAC contingent had yet reached the theatre.
Last night the Australian High Commissioner had proudly reported that a second consignment of eleven Centurion tanks – previously mothballed Mark Is of Korean War vintage – were loading onboard a ‘fast transport’ at Sydney bound for the Gulf sometime in the next few days.
Sir Richard Hull was no less impressed with the ANZAC contribution than his Prime Minister but he could not allow himself to be carried away with the ‘good news’. Once the full ANZAC contingent was ashore Michael Carver would have a very capable single armoured ‘brigade’, supported by a British infantry ‘brigade’ guarding Kuwait and the approaches to north eastern Saudi Arabia. In other words he would have an approximately ‘division-sized’ formation in position to halt an ‘Army’ that outnumbered his units by somewhere between three-to-one and six-to-one in tanks, artillery and men. Potentially, the situation of the Abadan Garrison was much, much worse. Carver had thirty or so tanks and about four thousand men under his direct control; if the local Iranian commanders let him down the Red Army would wash over his handful of Centurions like a tsunami.
“The other problem with the Saudis,” the Chief of the Defence Staff went on, “is that unless they permit either or both of our, and the promised Egyptian forces expected to start arriving in theatre before the end of June to move to jumping off points west of the Kuwaiti border we will not be able to properly exploit the opportunities presented by that ground.”
Margaret Thatcher gave him a vexed look.
“May I be honest with you, Prime Minister?” The soldier inquired, smiling sternly.
“Of course, Field Marshall.”
“Without the Egyptians, or the Saudis any other course of action other than static in-depth defence in Kuwait will be impractical. In that event sooner or later the Soviets will out flank our line and we shall be in a fine old mess. At Abadan everything depends on the Iranians.”
Willie Whitelaw stirred uneasily, his jowly features rolling with angst.
Operation Lightfoot, Michael Carver’s ambitious plan to ‘Cannae’ the Red Army north of Basra remained a pipe dream. Presently, it was much more likely that the only viable strategy was going to be to dig in along the northern border of the Emirate of Kuwait, withdraw from Abadan and attempt to deter the Russians from interdicting seaborne trade – the passage of tankers – in the Persian Gulf with air and sea power. It was a strategy of last resort and in many ways of despair, that only delayed the evil day when the Soviets extended their malign influence over the entire Arabian Peninsula.
“We have exchanged one unreliable ally for a whole gang of new unreliable allies?” The Defence Secretary gloomily offered to the room at large.
The Chief of the Defence Staff politely dismissed this.
“Possibly, Minister. The situation of the ground is what it is.”
The Secretary of State for Defence grunted. Normally a jovial, phlegmatic man his temper had become strained in recent weeks. He had been weakened by illness last year and looked prematurely aged, nearer sixty than fifty, even though he was still not yet forty-six.
“Forgive me, you know your business better than I, Sir Richard.”
Sir Richard Hull grimaced.
“Assuming the co-operation of significant Iranian forces and the presence, if not the whole-hearted participation of Egyptian and or Saudi armoured forces, at the very least I believe we have a fifty-fifty chance of giving the Soviets a dreadful fright. As to destroying the Soviet presence south of Baghdad,” he shrugged, “and winning any kind of total victory, the odds against that are much longer.”
Then a thought occurred to him out of the blue and the ghost of a smile quirked at his pale lips.
“Our chances of winning a new Cannae in the deserts and marshes above Basra may be very remote,” he confessed, whimsy still twinkling mischievously in his grey eyes. “But then if somebody had said to me before the Battle of Malta that but for the actions of a pair of small Royal Navy warships whose captains had been previously given leave to remove themselves from the battlefield, in charging headlong at a vastly superior enemy force, Malta would have been lost,” he guffawed softly, “frankly, I would not have believed a word of it, Prime Minister.”
Sir Richard Hull spread his arms wide.
“Who am I to throw cold water on Operation Lightfoot?”
Chapter 36
Sunday 24th May 1964
‘Kursk’ Bunker, Chelyabinsk
Two things had surprised Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Harold St John Water, VC, since his capture in the Zagros Mountains by KGB troopers. Firstly, apart from at the beginning shortly after his capture, nobody had tried any real rough stuff; and secondly, that after his surprise encounter with Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian, he had received rudimentary medical treatment and been given enough food and clean water to keep body and soul together while he contemplated his next move.
Notwithstanding, it was still his working assumption that he could be taken out and shot at any time. There was a war going on and when all was said and done he had been caught behind enemy lines, not only wearing a stolen uniform but with the dog tags of a dead Spetsnaz captain around his neck. Understandably, his captors had been very, very interested in how he had come by those!
‘The poor chap was already dead,’ he had explained apologetically. ‘Sorry, nothing to do with me.’ Which was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, insofar as it went. He had not personally killed the man.
The irksome thing was that he had no idea whatsoever what had happened to his boys. After the air attack on the traffic jam east of Piranshahr he had regained consciousness on the roadside being prodded by the muzzles of a couple of Kalashnikovs. The sky had been obscured with oily black and grey smoke and the atmosphere had positively reeked of seared human flesh.
The Russians had asked him about his ‘comrades’ between desultory beatings – not nice but once you curled up into a foetal ball and got into the rhythm of rolling with as many of the blows as possible, it was a bit like being at the bottom of a scrum in particularly hard fought rugby match – but Waters had got the distinct impression his boys had either made themselves scarce in the commotion or they were dead. Which was a bit of a shame; the Regiment hated it when a commanding officer walked back into Stirling Lines in Herefordshire on his own. The 22nd Special Air Service Regiment was very finicky about things like that. It was decidedly bad form losing all one’s chaps and having the gall to survive to tell the tale because that was not the stuff of the right kind of Regimental legends. That sort of thing that was regarded as very bad form in the Mess, of an order of blaggardly behaviour on a par with seducing a fellow officer’s wife, or worse, one or more of his teenage daughters. If the worst came to it, it was generally accepted – pretty much without exception – that is was de rigor for a fellow to die with his chaps, no ifs and no buts, and woe betide any man who transgressed that most scared of unwritten Regimental laws.
Basically, the way Frank Waters looked at it, the Russians would be doing him a middlingly big favour if one morning they took him outside and shot him. He had had a bloody good innings and all things considered his long-suffering wife Shirley, and eight year old son, Harry, whom he had not laid eyes on since late 1959 would probably not miss him. He knew they had survived the October War; they had been in the Welsh Marches the night the balloon went up and his brother Eric, a sickeningly honourable good egg of a man had taken them in soon afterwards. Eric had been in the
Navy in the Second War, later he had gone into the Civil Service. Now young Harry and his mother lived with Eric somewhere in the hills outside Sheffield...
Yes, it would be much better for everybody concerned if he got shot, ideally attempting to escape because he had no intention of eking out a miserable declining existence in some fetid ice cold Soviet gulag.
With this in the back of his mind finding himself unceremoniously bundled onto a draughty old Soviet turboprop transport aircraft two days ago had come as something of an unwelcome shock. Likewise, the fact that ever since boarding that aircraft he had been chained by the left wrist to one or other of four tough-looking green-uniformed KGB military policemen.
The KGB men had been ordered not to talk to him and vexingly, they were self-evidently, very, very good at ‘guarding’ problematic prisoners. These boys appeared not to notice the stench when he moved his bowels, ignored his attempts to make small talk in various Moskva idioms and generally treated him like an idiot child. Equally infuriatingly, none of his KGB minders carried a personal weapon of any description so there was absolutely no chance of relieving any one of them of the same! To cap it all three of the four KGB policemen were twice his size and the fourth, a smaller species of Russian bear, was easily half as big as him again; even had he not been in a somewhat emaciated, weakened state these gorillas would have laughed themselves silly if he tried any funny stuff.
That morning he had been presented with an unbelievably badly tailored brown suit, baggy skivvies and a shirt that was so itchy it might as well have been made of hair, a pair extensively darned woollen socks and scuffed, much worn black shoes and ordered to: ‘Get dressed!’
He was unchained while he dressed.
The trousers were so roomy he had to hold them up with one hand, and the shoes painfully pinched his feet. Once he was re-attired he was re-chained to the biggest of his guards.
“No funny business!” He was told in English.
“Perish the thought, old son,” he had grinned.
His guards looked at him as if he was something malignant they had just scraped off their boots.
The walls of the bunker complex were bare, sweating concrete and the soles Frank Waters’s shoes and those of his booted escorts clumped leadenly on the damp stone floors of the corridors down which they marched.
Suddenly the prisoner found himself in a brightly lit windowless room which had rugs on the floor, a big desk, and maps and pictures on the walls. These latter were old-style propaganda posters but they lent the subterranean office a certain brightness of character. Curiously, there was a big upright reel to reel tape recorded loaded with two silvery eight inch spools on the right hand side of the table.
The man behind the desk did not get up.
He nodded to the guards who forced Frank Waters to sit in a hard chair, manacled his wrists behind his back, snapped to attention, wheeled around and departed.
The captive studied his latest inquisitor.
Unlike him this man was wearing clothes that actually fitted him, and which, presumably, had not been recovered from a corpse at some indeterminate time in the last few months. Moreover, the man behind the desk had been able to shave that morning, wash and brush up; Frank Waters had not done any of those things for weeks and looked and smelled rank.
“Mne soobshchili, chto vy khorosho govorite po russki razgovornuyu?”
The middle aged, grim-faced man who had made no move to rise from behind his desk asked quietly.
I am informed that you speak good conversational Russian?
“Moy russkiy yazyk luchshe, chem razgovornym, comrade!
Frank Waters retorted, a little offended.
My Russian is better than conversational, comrade!
The other man registered this with a raised eyebrow. He was obviously not in any kind of a hurry.
“My name is Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov,” he announced in Russian. “I am First Deputy Director of the Committee for State Security of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
Frank Waters was impressed; if his interlocutor was to be believed, he was talking to the number two man in the KGB. Andropov was sitting in a wheelchair and his face had about it that lopsided look that suggested it had been smashed and only partially put back together again. There was something reassuring about knowing the man in whose hands his life undoubtedly rested had had an even worse war than he had.
“How do you do, Comrade Andropov,” he retorted, barring his teeth in a wolfish smile.
To the Englishman’s astonishment the Russian’s lips twisted into what might have been a rictus grin. The moment passed.
“You were captured in the uniform of a Red Army officer, Colonel Waters. You are suspected of gross crimes against the Soviet Union. You are a war criminal. I could have you executed at any time.”
Frank Waters shrugged.
“Absolutely,” he agreed. “I wish you’d bloody well get on with it, old son!”
Andropov viewed him silently with dull, inscrutable eyes.
“The food is bloody awful,” Frank Waters went on. “And making me wear this bloody clown’s suit is the last straw!” He frowned. “Where is this by the way?” He inquired cheerfully concluding on what he hoped was a civil note. As an officer and a gentleman it behoved him to remember at all times that one was a guest in somebody else’s country. “Somewhere east of the Urals, presumably?”
“Yes, Chelyabinsk.”
“Ah, Chelyabinsk,” Frank Waters sighed. “The city that bridges the Urals to the west with Siberia in the east.” He felt a little stronger for knowing where he was; a man’s place in the landscape mattered. “Is it true that like Rome, Constantinople and Moscow this city is built on seven hills, Comrade First Deputy Director?”
Andropov gave him a disdainful look.
“I don’t know.”
“Does the Leningrad Bridge still stand across the River Miass?” Frank Waters asked. “The famous bridge of the Urals to Siberia?”
“Yes. The Yankees never bombed the city.”
Frank Waters tried to remember his geography.
“What about Sverdlovsk, that would be about two hundred kilometres north of here?”
“No, they didn’t bomb Sverdlovsk either.”
Frank Waters grimaced: “My, my, that was careless of them?”
How on earth had Strategic Air Command ignored both Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk?
Chelyabinsk was ‘the Gate to Siberia’, a crucial hub on the trans-Siberia Railway; the city that during Hitler’s War and afterwards was generally referred to in Western military colleges as ‘Tankograd’ or ‘Tank City’ because at one time it had been the home of the biggest tank factory – the S.M. Kirov Factory no. 185 – in the World.
Sverdlovsk, in Tsarist times Yekaterinburg, had been the fourth largest city in the USSR before the war. Again, since the 1940s when Soviet industry was transferred east of the Urals to keep it out of the greedy clutches of the advancing Wehrmacht, it too had been a major industrial centre as well as a key regional communications hub.
The Russians been so worried about their secrets in and around this part of the country that they had installed cutting edge surface-to-air missile defences before the October War. Missile defences so advanced that they knocked down an American U-2 spy plane flying at seventy thousand feet!
Frank Waters started to ask himself what else the masterminds in charge of SAC and the RAF V-Bomber Force had missed on the night of the war? Given that there were fully equipped Red Army tank divisions on the move south through the mountains of Iran he did not like any of the answers he thought of; because each and every one of them suggested the flyboys had missed a lot of their targets.
The First Deputy Director of the Committee of State Security was watching his prisoner with hooded, darkly suspicious eyes. Frank Waters suspected the KGB man had been intimidating people all his life because he was very, very good at it.
He was even beginning to get a little twitchy himself.
Andropov came to a decision.
His right hand disappeared under his desk, presumably to ring a bell.
Within seconds two of Frank Waters’s minders stomped into the room. There was a jangling of keys and his hands were freed by one uniformed KGB trooper, the other stood by the big clumsy reel to reel tape recorder on Andropov’s desk.
The SAS man winced as the circulation returned to his hands in an agonising rush of pins and needles.
Andropov growled at the man next to the tape recorder and the spools began to rotate.
A woman’s clear, rather pedantic oddly mesmeric voice filled the underground bunker room with hissing, hectoring urgency through the background mush of static and long-range signal attenuation.
‘The Soviet leadership is hereby given notice that any further use of nuclear weapons by it, its allies or its proxies will result in an all out strike by the United Kingdom against the forces of the Soviet Union and any surviving concentrations of population or industry within the former territories of the Soviet Union, or in any territories deemed to now be under Soviet control.’
Frank Waters recognised the voice of his Prime Minister. Once heard it was the sort of voice a fellow tended to recollect forever. Like most of his contemporaries in the Regiment and throughout the armed forces he had assumed ‘the Angry Widow’ would be a stop gap, here today gone tomorrow phenomenon, nobody had expected her to still be –literally – calling the shots six months later. But then nobody had ever expected the Prime Minister to be such a damned attractive blond bombshell either.
It was a funny old World...
‘RAF bombers stand ready at the end of their runways at four minutes notice to go to war. Other RAF bombers are airborne at this time ready to strike within minutes of the receipt of the order to attack!’
“Here! Here!” Frank Waters guffawed softly before he thought better of it. He was in no fit state to survive a new beating and it was important to be able to stand up of one’s own volition when the enemy shot one.