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

by James Philip

  The man kissed the top of her head, extended an arm about her shoulders.

  “You know I’d never do anything that silly, wife.”

  Marija giggled.

  “Men always ignore what their wives tell them to do!”

  “How do you know they do?”

  When she raised her face he kissed her and after that nature swiftly took its inevitable course. Hot and bothered, half-dressed they lay together beneath the sheets until sometime later there was a knock at the door, which they ignored. The phone’s insistent overloud clanging on the bedside table less than a minute later was impossible to wish away.

  “Peter Christopher...”

  He listened half-asleep.

  “Very good,” he muttered and put the handset back in its cradle.

  Marija snuggled closer to her husband.

  “We dine in the President’s Reception Chalet at eight o’clock apparently.”

  “Eight o’clock, when’s that?”

  “Oh, er... In about an hour’s time...”

  “And hour!” Marija managed to half-shriek this in the middle of embarking upon a complacent yawn. “My hair must be a mess! I don’t know what to wear!”

  The dress she had been wearing that afternoon was creased and discarded on the floor and she almost tangled her feet in it as she struggled to her feet. This brought her back towards sanity in a hurry. The last time she had forgotten that she could not actually run she had fallen flat on her face; an hour before she ‘dined’ with the President of the United States of America it would be a very bad time to fall flat on her face again.

  Alan and Rosa Hannay were not invited to join the Presidential family for dinner. Officially, they were attached to Peter Christopher’s ‘staff’, and ‘staff’ did not get to sit at the top table. Notwithstanding, their friends saw them off on their short walk with two escorting Marines to attend the Chief Executive.

  “There are some people here from NASA,” Alan Hannay, acting as a good flag lieutenant warned his commanding officer, “visiting the President. A couple of them are going to be in on tonight’s shindig.”

  Meanwhile, Rosa was checking out Maria’s hair and making a series of encouraging noises about the dress that she had eventually selected.

  “This is Wernher von Braun,” the President declared, introducing Peter and Marija to the tall imposing man in his fifties who had stepped into their path. Wernher is Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center down at Huntsville, Alabama.”

  The older man gave the tall young naval officer a hard, guardedly curious stare as the two men shook hands. Peter Christopher’s scrutiny was of the shocked type entirely explicable given he had just been introduced to the man who had designed and built the World’s first ballistic missile. Notwithstanding the man’s previous association with Hitler and his crowd von Braun was his childhood hero. Given that these days he moved in the circles of Prime Ministers and Presidents, encountering the World’s greatest rocket scientist ought not to have knocked him off his stride. But it did, completely knock him off his stride.

  Before he was obliged to move on down the line he blurted: “My degree is in mechanical engineering and physics. I’d be honoured to visit your facility in Alabama, Mr von Braun!”

  Dinner was a blur.

  Peter Christopher had not expected to be seated at the President’s right hand any more than Marija had anticipated being placed at Jackie’s left hand.

  “What did you talk to the President about?” Marija inquired later in a dreamy voice.

  “I honestly can’t remember,” her husband confessed a little apologetically. “He spent most of the time quizzing Wernher von Braun,” who had been directly opposite the Chief Executive, for the setting had been relatively intimate with only seven guests, “about the Mercury and the Gemini Programs. I was too interested in what the Director was saying most of the time to think of anything intelligent to say for myself. How about you and the First Lady?”

  Marija and Jacqueline Kennedy had had a chat about children, Marija’s career as a nurse and midwife on Malta and, extraordinarily, the life and accomplishments of mentor and friend Margo Seiffert. It seemed that the US Navy, into which Margo had been commissioned during and just after the Second World War had belatedly learned about her career and exploits in the Mediterranean and wanted to give her some kind of posthumous award. As if that was not revelatory enough, the First Lady had offered to take Marija riding in the morning; an offer Marija had turned down mainly because the idea of getting up on a horse seemed like an infallible way of making sure she fell on her face again. The First Lady had instantly apologised, thinking she had in some way offended the younger woman; giving the impression she had forgotten she had been briefed about her childhood injuries. Whereupon, Marija had sheepishly recounted her ‘falling on my face’ story about the day she had tried to run after Peter; and for several steps succeeded before her conscious mind had remembered she could not actually run, and thereafter, she had ‘fallen on my face’.

  The President’s wife had laughed demurely.

  “These people are not our enemies,” Marija said eventually as she and her husband ambled unhurriedly back to their chalet accompanied by the ever-present Marines. “Everything looks different from where we are now but they are not our enemies, Peter.”

  “I know,” her husband said. “I know. If our people back home were over here they might understand our hosts a little better. Perhaps, you and I really can do something about building bridges while we’re here?”

  Marija nodded solemnly as they reached their chalet.

  Inside the door the couple kissed.

  “Your bones must ache?” He whispered gently.

  “A little,” she smiled shyly.

  The man swept his wife up in his arms and carried her to the bed.

  “No, no, no,” Marija laughed. “This time I must fold up my dress before we...”

  Her voice trailed away.

  “Before we do what?” Peter teased.

  Marija blushed and avoided his eye.

  Suddenly she giggled girlishly.

  “Before we do what we do!” She exclaimed happily, pulling him down on top of her.

  Chapter 40

  Wednesday 27th May 1964

  RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, England

  Forty-five year old Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin followed the others down the steps to the tarmac. There was no formal welcoming committee, no cameras, nor witnesses other than the detachment of British soldiers forming a cordon around the Tupolev Tu-114 airliner which had brought the ‘delegation’ directly from Sverdlovsk. The flight west across the Urals and the blasted wastelands of the Ukraine, White Russia, Central Europe, Germany, Holland and the North Sea had been uneventful, a sullen dispiriting affair. Even as the Red Army marched to new triumphs in Iraq the Soviet government had been forced to come, cap in hand, to its enemy. Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin had sworn on the graves of his countless murdered countrymen that he would never forget this day.

  Shelepin paused before clambering into the waiting car to look around at the great aircraft which had carried the delegation to England, sourly aware that only a handful of these magnificent machines had been completed before the Cuban Missiles War. Developed from the Tu-95 bomber, the Tu-114, with its swept back wings and a range of over ten thousand kilometres was the fastest propeller-driven aircraft in the World. Hundreds might have eventually been built to fill the skies had not Aviation Plant No 18 at Kuybyshev – where the aircraft was built – not been obliterated in the war. The deafening roar of the Tu-114’s four giant Kuznetsov NK-12 turbo-prop engines began to subside, and the huge, contra-rotating propellers slowed.

  With a shake of the head Shelepin dropped into the luxurious back seat of the Bentley beside Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin, the designated representative of the post-Cuban Missiles War ‘collective leadership’. Neither man spoke as the car picked up speed across the airfield.

  Kosygin was thinking
about the last time he had been sent abroad to defuse another potentially disastrous situation. That mission had been to Bucharest back in February after Krasnaya Zarya zealots had launched a – thankfully, a largely botched – nuclear first strike at the British, the Royal Navy and anybody else they could think of in the Balkans and Egypt. Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, Shelepin’s deputy, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, Kosygin and his personal scientific advisor, the country’s post-Cuban Missiles War premier surviving atomic physicist, Academician Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, had been seized by Nicolae Ceaușescu’s goons and thrown into a Securitate dungeon. He, Chuikov and Sakharov had survived shaken but otherwise in one piece, not so Andropov who had been beaten very nearly to death by his interrogators.

  Andropov denied ‘breaking’ under the beatings; or more correctly, he claimed he remembered little or nothing of his experiences at the hands of Ceaușescu’s men. Nobody believed him, of course. After what he had gone through he must have ‘broken’. Fortunately, the Red Air Force had demolished Bucharest with a city killer bomb soon afterwards and the truth about Krasnaya Zarya and the smokescreen around Operation Nakazyvat had remained undiscovered until the first of Army Group South’s T-62s rolled into Azerbaijani Iran.

  The whole episode still gave Kosygin nightmares and now he could not help wondering if he was walking into another, even deadlier trap. This time Chuikov, the Minister of Defence in the three-man collective leadership had stayed behind, Party Secretary and Chairman of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev having decreed that after the ‘Bucharest fuck up’ at least two members of the ‘troika’ would always remain in the Mother country.

  Kosygin turned to Shelepin.

  “I do not think this is another trap, Comrade Director,” he observed. “The British are a civilised people.”

  Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin grunted his displeasure and scowled at Andrei Sakharov who had been nodding distractedly. The physicist’s half-smile froze on his face. The man Sakharov worked for, Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and Shelepin were the last two of ‘Stalin’s men’ in the Politburo. The one, Kosygin had lived in terror at the end of the Man of Steel’s reign, but not, he suspected, Shelepin and it was probably for this reason that Brezhnev, Marshal Chuikov and likely, Kosygin also, had excluded him thus far from the collective leadership.

  Thus far being the key clause, because there was no more dangerous or secretive man in the reconstituted Union of Soviet Socialist Republics than Comrade Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin.

  Allegedly, Shelepin had been born the son of a railway official in Voronezh. Very little was known of his childhood or his youth. His surviving official biography stated that in his late teens and early twenties he had studied history and literature at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy and Literature; and that Shelepin had first come to Stalin’s attention early in the great Patriotic War as the man who had recruited the legendary partisan fighter Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, whose torture and execution by the Germans had made her a national hero. By 1943 Shelepin was a leading figure in the Communist Youth League; and after the war Stalin had appointed him head of the ill-named World Federation of Democratic Youth. Shelepin had been Director of the KGB between 1958 and 1961, when he became a First Deputy Prime Minister in Nikita Khrushchev’s regime shortly before the Cuban Missiles War. In the aftermath of the war he had been the obvious candidate to rebuild the KGB.

  Within the Politburo, the senior echelons of the Communist Party and the wider apparatus of the Soviet state, dark rumours roiled around Shelepin like an impenetrable cloak wherein evil resided. Inevitably, not every rumour was true, or could in fact be true, but if not all the mud stuck then some of the blood could never be wiped away.

  Every time Andrei Sakharov crossed the path of the First Secretary of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti it felt as if the atmosphere around him had suddenly chilled by ten degrees.

  It was said that Khrushchev had installed Shelepin at the Lubyanka – the former headquarters of the Rossiya Insurance Company building on Dzerzhinsky Square which had been taken over as the headquarters of the NKVD, or Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del – because only a man with his particular gifts could possibly ‘clean out the stables’. Latterly, one whisper claimed that Shelepin had been the man who had ‘cleaned out the stables’ after German and Polish exiles in the West had started asking awkward questions about the twenty thousand Poles murdered in the Katyn Forest in April and May 1940, over a year before Hitler invaded and conquered that part of Russia in the Second World War. Originally, the outside World had assumed the atrocity was the doing of the Germans; but not even the NKVD could keep a thing like that secret, any more than Stalin could keep the monstrous archipelago of the Gulag secret. Once Stalin was dead people had talked and those who understood how the Soviet state worked had tacitly assumed that Khrushchev must have ordered Shelepin to make sure the truth about the massacre in the Katyn Forest never surfaced. It seemed outlandish, too obscene but like so many of the stories told about Shelepin it was only when one actually met the man that one began to give them credence.

  It was a short car journey.

  Within minutes the Russian delegation was led into what looked like a big shed. Inside the structure was like windowless barn. Several chairs had been arranged for the ‘visitors’ to rest upon and a middle aged man in a careworn pinstripe suit explained in faultless Russian that there would be a short interregnum before the main plenary session commenced.

  “They want to talk to Waters,” Shelepin said as he began to pace backwards and forwards like a caged Leopard.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Harold St John Water, VC, had been whisked away in a separate vehicle the moment his feet touched the tarmac. The veteran SAS man had entertained hopes of stiff drink and square meal when he got back home but this, it seemed, was to be delayed a little longer. He recognized Field Marshall Sir Richard Hull, whom he had met several times over the years. The Russians had found him a badly fitting boiler suit that smelled of mothballs. Nevertheless, he threw the Chief of the Defence Staff a smart salute.

  “At ease, Waters,” the other man ordered. Hands were shaken. “You look all in?”

  “The bastards haven’t ground me down yet, sir.”

  Sir Richard Hull guffawed and introduced his companions.

  Margaret Thatcher shook the ragged newcomer’s hand daintily but looked at him with intelligent, vaguely mesmeric steely blue eyes that instantly tied the returning hero’s tongue. That hardly ever happened the first time Frank Waters made a lady’s acquaintance.

  The Prime Minister smiled.

  “Are you fit enough to act as our interpreter, Colonel Waters?”

  “Absolutely, Ma’am,” he retorted defiantly.

  “That’s marvellous. Just spirit!”

  Frank Waters shook the hand of the big, lugubrious man at the Prime Minister’s shoulder. He did not usually have that much time for lefties like James Callaghan, the Leader of the Labour Party and Deputy Prime Minister in the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom.

  “How do you do, sir,” he grinned toothily at the taller man. It did not cost him anything to be polite and for all he knew Callaghan might be his boss in a month or two. If war was a messy old business politics was positively dirty; a chap never knew where he stood with a bloody politico!

  Chapter 41

  Wednesday 27th May 1964

  Advanced HQ 10th Guards Tank Division, south of Sadiyah, Iraq

  Major General Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov clambered up onto the broiling armoured carapace of the T-62 at the head of the column. The rounded steel of the dome-like turret was hot enough to sear human flesh or flash fry an egg in seconds. In the distance the haze shimmered off the arid, yellow grey floor of the plain where a ribbon of greenery traced the distant path of the Dyala River, and here and there small irrigated oases dotted the landscape. Otherwise, while the tanks of the column fanned out
looking for depressions in the rocky escarpment in which to lie ‘hull down’ until the heat of the day had subsided, all he saw was empty countryside.

  The smoke from the burning Iraqi M-48s which had attempted to ambush the column an hour ago still hung over the battlefield. The enemy had clumsily telegraphed his attentions, and charged in like idiots – albeit brave idiots – with minimal infantry support and an absence of anything a real soldier would recognise as co-ordination. Puchkov’s veteran tankers had made short work of the attackers.

  The commander of the 10th Guards Tank Division had ordered his boys to laager until nightfall and driven forward to confirm what the map told him about the ground ahead. The T-62s around him were low on fuel and if they were going to dash down the road towards Miqdadiyah at sunset they needed their tanks topping off first. Miqdadiyah was only thirty kilometres north-east of Baquba. From Baquba to Baghdad was just fifty kilometres – or as little as two days fighting further down the road.

  Army Group South would reconsolidate at Baghdad, transferring every available Red Air Force aircraft south to forward bases around the city. Once Puchkov’s tanks reached Baghdad, Iraq was at the Red Army’s mercy. With just four under strength divisions – most of Army Group South was still snarled up in the Alborz and Zagros Mountains - Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian had conquered half of Iraq and those useless bastards back in Chelyabinsk were still panicking like a lot of old women!

  Puchkov heard booted feet approaching, crunching across the stony ground, looked down.

  A sweating KGB officer brandished a wad of charred papers.

  “These people,” he waved airily towards the nearest burned out M-48 Patton tank, “were Shias. That’s probably why they tried to make a stand here. There’s nothing much between here and Miqdadiyah, sir. The local Shias believe that the place was named for Miqdad ibn Aswad Al-Kindi.”