by James Philip
The KGB woman interpreter very nearly choked on this.
Shelepin would have reached for his gun – had he had one – and both his comrades were very nearly as offended at the First Secretary of the KGB. However, Kosygin and Sakharov were disappointed for entirely separate reasons.
Kosygin had genuinely hoped for some kind of olive branch which might even now halt the war in Iraq; despite what Chuikov and Babadzhanian claimed it was by no means a given that ‘things would turn out all right in the end’. Operation Nakazyvat had been a reckless gamble from the outset albeit one that the collective leadership felt confident it could halt, rein in or abandon if things went wrong. In the event many things had gone wrong, yet the invasion had proceeded because the enemy had been unable, unwilling or simply oblivious to the things that had ‘gone wrong’ for Army Group South. It was now clear that the British and their ‘allies’ – Kosygin shared the Red Army’s contempt for the other ‘armies’ in the region – had no intention of coming to the rescue of Iraq, or of interposing themselves into the poisonous ongoing court infighting in Isfahan. Worse, the British had formed some kind of local pact with the Iranian Army in the Abadan Sector opposite Basra, signifying that they intended to make a stand not on the plains of central Iraq but around what, by the time Babadzhanian got there, would be an isolated island citadel. Moreover, spies in England and elsewhere had reported a slow build up of troops, light equipment and tactical aircraft based in Kuwait, Damman in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Emirates and in northern Oman within striking range of Basra and Abadan. As if this was not an ominous portent of things to come, major naval forces had recently appeared in the Persian Gulf including several small aircraft carriers and at least two cruisers. Recollecting how easily a British invasion force had eradicated Red Dawn from Cyprus in less than a fortnight, and how ferociously two small Royal Navy destroyers had thwarted greatly superior Red Navy forces off Malta there was absolutely no cause to be complacent about the fighting capabilities of ‘the British’ in the Middle East.
Kosygin had come to England hoping for, if not a way out, then at least ‘options’ to take back home. While he had no doubt that Babadzhanian’s tanks would get to the Persian Gulf, or that once dug in the Red Army would be immovable from large tracts of Mesopotamia; the problem was that a plan born out of a lust for revenge was threatening to embroil the Motherland in a never ending war with an enemy ruled by an implacable mad woman!
Sakharov’s angst was of an entirely more prosaic variety. He was a scientist who prided himself on his own personal rationalism; everybody else around the table seemed to be in the grip of some kind of dreadful ‘war psychosis’. The father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb accepted that he was partly responsible for the tragedy of the Cuban Missiles War. Ever since he had been drawn into Kosygin’s inner circle he had tried to be a small voice of reason. Tragically, nobody was listening.
“For us,” Kosygin explained wearily, “this war is a matter of survival. We lost so much in the Cuban Missiles War,” he sighed, “and you so little. We too deserve our place in the sun. In the absence of a just settlement of our legitimate demands for reparations, we will win in battle new spheres of influence. You have no more ‘right’ to be in Iran or anywhere else in the Middle East that we do. You and the Americans killed a hundred million of my people; now we will take away your oil, your prestige and in time, North Africa and the Indian sub-continent will be Russian clients.”
Margaret Thatcher listened to the waspish translation.
According to Jericho the Red Army’s seizure of Basra would be the signal for Soviet agents in Egypt, the Lebanon, Syria, and throughout the Arabian Peninsula to commence campaigns of assassinations, and to foment violent civil unrest and mutinies in the armed forces. At that time the Red Air Force would launch hit and run bombing raids on shipping in the Persian Gulf, and targets along is southern shores including Kuwait City and possibly in the Damman-Dhahran area. There were also some references to of provoking civil unrest in the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal and oddly, agents in France seemed to be planning some kind of ‘action’ against ‘ports along the English Channel coast and ‘targets of opportunity’ in the Mediterranean’. Since many of the decrypts were only partial due to problems rebuilding the interception grid – there were no listening stations in Germany or Italy, for example – it was hard to know the context, or anything much in particular about the significance of the traffic directed at or emanating from south and central France. It was not that this material was unreadable simply that it was difficult to know what to prioritise. GCHQ’s Director of Cryptanalysis, Hugh Alexander, had told the Prime Minister only a day ago the ‘really interesting thing about the French traffic is that several operators in France are communicating using the codes we captured off Malta’.
Whatever was going on in France remained a bit of mystery...
The Prime Minister gathered her wits.
“What are your terms, Comrade Kosygin?”
“For peace?”
“For a peace? Or a ceasefire?”
The Russian thought about it for several seconds.
“Abadan,” he said. “Abadan and a withdrawal of all British forces from Iraq and Iran. In those countries we demand a free hand.”
Surrendering Abadan was out of the question and if the Russians had a ‘free hand’ in Iraq and Iran the United Kingdom’s position in the Persian Gulf became untenable.
“And what do you promise in return?” She asked coldly.
“The Arabian Peninsula would become a British sphere of influence.”
“And what of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and India?”
“Syria and the Lebanon will become Soviet spheres of influence sooner or later whatever we discuss here today. As to India and Egypt, that matter may be deferred for the consideration of a general peace conference once the dust has settled.”
Less than half a century ago Margaret Thatcher’s predecessor, David Lloyd George had sat down with the other victors of the Great War and carved up the Middle East and Eastern Europe in exactly this kind of cold-blooded, obscene fashion. From the abomination of the Versailles Treaty had sprung Fascism and the seeds of a yet more terrible global war. The post-Versailles Middle East had been a disaster, nothing short of an imperialistic land grab by the victors – America, Britain and France – designed to steal the region’s oilfields. Versailles had not caused the October War, that had been Cold War psychosis, but its legacy still dominated practically all of the ‘facts on the ground’ in the Middle East. Thus it was that she found herself defending the indefensible – that vile post 1918 land grab – against an enemy who made the monsters around the table at Versailles look like babes in the wood!
“No,” Margaret Thatcher said.
Jericho had told her that the Soviets had no intention of making any kind of peace with her until they had subdued the entire Middle East and choked off the West’s oil for a generation.
“No,” she repeated.
Kosygin, Sakharov and even Shelepin frowned as if they did not believe their ears.
Had she really said that?
“No,” the Angry Widow repeated. “While I live you will never get your hands on Abadan. Never!”
She pushed back her chair.
She stood up and the Deputy Prime Minister, the Chief of the Defence Staff and Frank Waters, the latter with a broad, admiring smile splitting his handsome, weather-beaten face struggled to their feet.
“Please escort these people back to their aeroplane.” She ordered, sniffing the air like a Tigress searching for the scent of fresh prey. “They have a long flight back to Russia.”
This said she turned on her heel and walked away, her heels clicking on the stone floor of the hangar.
Chapter 45
Sunday 31st May 1964
Onboard Victor ‘The Angry Widow’, approaching RAF Akrotiri, Cyprus
Of the three V-Bomber types the Vickers Valiant, the first of the three to see service was the workhors
e, and the least radical in concept and design. The second type, the Avro Vulcan’s great delta wing made it instantly recognisable miles away, like a menacing Hell-bound black bat. The third and the most advanced – it was revolutionary and ahead of anything that anybody in the World had had on the drawing boards at the time if its first flight in 1952 – V-Bomber, the Handley Page Victor simply looked and performed like something out of a Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon movie.
The Victor was bigger, stranger looking – even than the Vulcan – and it had the mother and father of all enormous bomb bays. To the crews of No 100 Squadron, the Victor was always ‘the Beast’; because what other description would any sane aviator give to a flying machine that could haul and drop, with terrifying precision, up to thirty-nine general purpose (GP) one-thousand pounder bombs, or a pair of six-ton Tallboys, or a single ten-ton Grand Slam to a target three thousand miles away?
Last night Victor B.2 ‘The Angry Widow’, and four No. 9 Squadron English Electric Canberras had bombed Red Army concentration points and depots, two air bases close to Baghdad, and a water treatment plant and a power station within the city. Apart from being ‘painted’ by several enemy ground-based radar systems at long range and encountering minimal – negligible, actually – electronic jamming in the Baghdad area the five bombers had been allowed to get on with their business unmolested.
Now The Angry Widow was racing the dawn across the dark Eastern Mediterranean three miles below on final approach to RAF Akrotiri.
“You have the controls, Guy,” the aircraft commander declared cheerfully.
“I have the controls,” Squadron Leader Guy French acknowledged, trying very hard not to grin like a Baboon under his chaffing oxygen mask. His hands tightened involuntarily on the controls, even thought the aircraft’s automatic flight control system was still actually flying The Angry Widow.
Guy French had fallen in love with ‘the Beast’ the first time he had sat in the right hand co-pilot’s seat over a month ago. He and his fellow ‘Vulcan boys’ had regarded their immensely powerful and manoeuvrable steeds like giant Spitfires and revelled in the joy of flying an aircraft that – with its massive delta wing - was literally, unique. And then he had been exposed to a Victor B.2. ‘B.2’ because it was the second main production variant of the bomber fitted with upgraded engines and avionics to permit it to operate at altitudes above fifty thousand feet carrying the latest nuclear bombs. External fuel tanks mounted on pylons beneath each wing excepted, a casual observer would have had trouble distinguishing the B.2 from its more numerous predecessors because practically all the other upgrades and ‘improvements’ had been accommodated in a virtually unchanged airframe.
That airframe that was marvellously futuristic, superbly streamlined with four turbojet engines - Armstrong Siddeley Sapphires in the B.1, and Rolls-Royce Conway Mk201s in the B.2s like The Angry Widow – buried in the wing roots. The wings were swept back, as was the towering tail plane and beneath the nose, which came to a needle-sharp point was a ‘chin’ bulge containing the targeting radar and nose wheel assembly.
In common with earlier Handley Page bombers, a more than passing consideration had been given to the disposition of ‘the Beast’s’ five man crew. The Angry Widow’s crew were accommodated on the same deck level in a single relatively large – positively ‘roomy’ by the standards of the Vulcan and the Valiant – pressurised compartment. The three ‘backseat’ crewmen - the navigator/plotter, the navigator/radar operator, and the air electronics officer – faced rearward. As was common in the V-Bomber fleet only the two pilots had ejection seats, although in the Victor the backseat crewmen sat on ‘CO2-powered exploding’ cushions, allegedly to ‘assist in their escape from the aircraft in an emergency’.
Nobody in the RAF could actually remember any backseat crewman surviving a serious V-Bomber ‘incident’; so most backseaters did not spend a lot of time worrying about what to do if there was an ‘emergency’.
Before the October War The Angry Widow would have been decked out in the white and silver ‘flash’ camouflage of all RAF nuclear bombers; now she wore a mottled dark and buff checkerboard scheme to break up her form from overhead, while being painted eggshell blue underneath to match with the sky above.
The V-Bomber force was equipped with a common Navigation and Bombing System, or NBS in short. This equipment used information from the aircraft’s H2S, Green Satin and other radar systems to feed information into an electronic ‘bomb sight’. H2S, albeit in a rough and ready earlier incarnation, had first seen service with Bomber Command two decades ago during the Second World War. Now, backed up with Green Satin, a Doppler system which monitored the aircraft’s drift and direction, it was possible to feed very accurate wind speeds into the NBS thus converting the H2S’s ground-scanning capability into a viable precision bombing tool.
At the time of the October War The Angry Widow had been in the process of being accepted into squadron service and had sat out the cataclysm in a hardened revetment at RAF Wyton. In fact, for want of trained air and ground crews the aircraft had only recently been ‘activated’. She was therefore, a brand new machine. Whereas the Vulcan that Guy French had flown across the Baltic on the night of the war had been a typical ‘Avro plane’; cramped, stinking of leather and hydraulic fluid, hot metal, sweat and some of the time, vomit, The Angry Widow was an entirely different kettle of fish, as evilly businesslike inside as she was outwardly, and everything was cleanly modern, even the control systems. The aircraft had duplicate powered controls which transmitted the pilot’s movements through low-friction mechanical systems that artificially fed back ‘feel’ to the pilot.
Built with multiple flight surface redundancies the Victor incorporated eight separate hydraulic circuits, and the later B.2 variants were all fitted with a Blackburn Artouste airborne auxiliary power unit – effectively a small fifth engine – located in the right wing root to provide emergency power in the event of an engine problem, and high-pressure air for rapid engine start ups. The whole aircraft could be automatically ‘fired up’ ready for take-off in approximately two minutes with the press of a single button. The four main engines, Rolls-Royce Conway turbofans were so powerful that if a pilot inadvertently dropped the nose of the bomber – designed for sub-sonic flight - at high engine settings ‘the Beast’ would effortlessly blast through the sound barrier to well over Mach 1.1 within seconds.
This aircraft, The Angry Widow, equipped with the latest state of the art ECM – electronic counter measures – suite including the Red Steer warning radar module, was probably the biggest and most modern ‘beast’ on Cyprus and Guy French could hardly believe his luck being assigned to her.
Notwithstanding that in terms of both dimensions and weight the Victor was the largest of the three V-Bombers – The Angry Widow’s maximum certified operational take-off weight was around ninety tons – Guy French had once seen a Victor B.1 perform a series of loops and astonishingly, a barrel roll at the Farnborough Air Show of 1958. For such a big aircraft the lightness of her power-assisted controls and in extremis, the judicious employment of her main wing and tail plane mounted tail brakes gave ‘the Beast’ astonishing acrobatic agility. Or at least that was what Guy had been told by the old hands on 100 Squadron, chaps who generally seemed to know exactly what they were talking about. He had been fascinated to learn through the ‘squadron grapevine’ that the earlier Victors had had a curious ‘self-landing’ capability; apparently once a fellow had lined a ‘beast’ up with the runway, as the airspeed bled away close to the tarmac during final approach the aircraft would spontaneously flare as the wing encountered some kind of mysterious ‘ground effect’, allowing the tail to go on gently sinking earthward resulting in a soft landing without the pilot having to do anything other than keep the kite on the straight and narrow.
Over the target The Angry Widow had come down to twenty-eight thousand feet, approximately half her service ceiling to bomb. From over fifty thousand feet free fall bombs could go anyw
here. The boffins said NDS would put a bomb load with four hundred yards – a tad under a quarter-of-a-mile - of a target from that altitude, which was fine for a three-and-a-half ton Yellow Sun bomb fitted with a four hundred kiloton yield Green Grass warhead that was going to knock down anything within several miles of ground zero, but not so good if you wanted to wipe out a communications centre, block a road or crater a large amount of turf that the enemy planned to, or was actually moving across at the time. Theoretically, the ‘mean circular bombing error’ from below thirty thousand feet might be as low as fifty yards; which, all things considered, was ‘close enough’ if one was in the business of unloading nearly forty thousand-pound general purpose high explosive free fall bombs; with the purpose of obliterating all sentient life inside a mile-square patch of somebody else’s real estate.
Of course, down that low, one was in no man’s land if the enemy had fast jet interceptors or any kind of properly configured surface-to-air missile capability in the vicinity of the target. The intelligence people said the Russians were in a mess; and not to worry about things like that for a while. This joyous situation was not going to last so the idea was to make hay while the sun shone because Guy French, for one, had no illusions about how well fitted The Angry Widow was for real low level operations – down on the deck type sorties - against heavily defended targets.
Magnificent as she was, a ‘beast’ was not the airframe for that particular kind of dance. When it came to that sort of war things were liable to get very bloody very fast.
In the meantime he would discover sometime in the next few minutes if he was going to have to land The Angry Widow, or if she would do it for herself.
Life was good on a morning like this.
Chapter 46
Sunday 31st May 1964