by James Philip
The Prime Minister had been informed that the ‘A’ class submarine HMS Alliance had actually been lurking submerged five miles off Ajaccio, when the Surcouf and the Cassard had slipped their moorings and gone to sea on 31st May. The submarine had been there by chance, her captain having determined to test his crew and his command by operating close inshore for three successive nights, before moving to a patrol area further up the Corsican coast. Although unable to identify either ship by name T-47 class destroyers had distinctive acoustic signatures, enabling Alliance to report that two of the three T-47s based at Ajaccio had put to sea and headed south east at fourteen knots. Alliance had made no attempt to shadow the destroyers; even running at her best speed on the surface she had no chance of keeping up with them, and had continued with her planned evolutions, maintaining a watching brief off Ajaccio Bay.
A hurried analysis of several of the most recent Canberra high-altitude photographs had revealed that at least one of the T-47s was undergoing, or had recently undergone, major modifications to her after superstructure; presumably only to her upper works because it was known that neither of the main dry docks in Ajaccio had been used since the October War. Until then nobody had attached priority to examining what might have been going on in Ajaccio. Expert photographic reconnaissance and naval intelligence analysts were in critically short supply and there was a host of other apparently more immediate ‘threat vectors’ demanding attention.
Or that at least was Peter Christopher’s trenchant explanation as he was cast in the role of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom’s senior ‘military expert’ on the spot in New Bedford overnight.
The Prime Minister had been somewhat ‘testy’ about the ‘Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean’ having been caught by surprise by ‘latest this outrage’. It had fallen to the twenty-seven year old most junior Captain in the Royal Navy to have to remind Margaret Thatcher that Admiral Cleary, the commander of the United States Sixth Fleet had more ‘electronic countermeasures and surveillance capability in a pair of the USS Independence’s Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye airborne early warning and control aircraft, than Air Marshall French at Malta possessed in the ‘whole Mediterranean’. This was a slight exaggeration but he had already learned that half-measures were wasted on his political mistress. Margaret Thatcher had not been amused to be so rudely acquainted with reality; she had however, albeit with bad grace, bowed to it.
‘Why on earth don’t we have those sort of aircraft?’ She had asked.
“I don’t know,’ Peter had confessed. ‘Perhaps, it is because we spent the money on other things? Or we couldn’t afford it?’
Afterwards, he could have sworn the Angry Widow quirked a momentary smile. It might have been his imagination because within minutes she was dictating vitriolic cables to Oxford demanding answers to questions to which Peter Christopher suspected there were no answers.
More information had trickled in during the small hours of the morning.
The Hampshire’s captain had done the only thing he could have done in the circumstances. He had called for maximum revolutions and thrown the big guided missile destroyer into a violent figure ‘eight’ evasion pattern. That is, turned one circle with the wheel hard over to port and then reversed course to starboard to prescribe another circle, and so on.
It seemed that several men on the destroyer’s upper had had the presence of mind to fire off every emergency and signal flare they could lay their hands on in an attempt to ‘distract’ the incoming missiles.
Of course, none of this helped in the least.
‘Styx,’ he had concluded soon after reading the first reports. ‘This thing was huge. Much bigger than anything we’ve got on the drawing boards or practically everything the Americans brought into service before the war.’
HMS Hampshire was only still afloat that morning; limping towards Gibraltar at eight knots because she had been outrageously lucky. The first missile had struck her aft, possibly exploding on contact with the metalwork welded to her helicopter platform to accommodate her cargos of Grand Slams and Tallboys. The missile’s five hundred kilogram hollow charge, its detonation dreadfully enhanced by several gallons of unexpended liquid rocket fuel had gone off directly above the stern of the destroyer. Even though much of the energy of the blast had been expended – relatively harmlessly - above and beyond the Hampshire’s hull the huge fireball must have briefly enveloped the aft half of the ship’s five hundred and twenty foot length. Anybody on deck would have been killed instantly or blown over the side, likewise anybody in the helicopter hangar or in the mercifully empty Sea Slug magazine, or in any adjoining stern compartments would have stood no chance of survival.
The warhead of the first Styx would have ignited very much in the fashion of a giant Napalm bomb, showering the whole ship with a hideous modern version of Greek fire. An older ship with less sophisticated fire-fighting mains and kit – Hampshire had been designed for the nuclear age with the integral pipe work and powerful pumps necessary to wash ‘down’ the vessel after it had steamed through a fallout cloud – might have succumbed to those fires. As would the Hampshire if the second Styx had not over-flown her and blown up in the sea a hundred yards off her port bow as she reeled away from the first terrible blow.
HMS Hampshire had been lucky.
The Styx had gone off pretty much directly above where – had she been completed as designed with a full weapons set – her twin Sea Slug launcher was located; right on top of her lightly protected, horribly vulnerable Sea Slug magazine beneath the unarmoured helicopter deck. If Hampshire had had her complement of Sea Slugs onboard she would probably have gone up like a massive Roman candle!
By the time the limousine arrived to pick up Peter to whisk him off the Hyannis Port to ‘go sailing’ with the President, the latest casualty list from the Hampshire reported forty-seven dead and thirty-one seriously wounded.
He had recounted everything he knew to the President of the United States, including his initial analysis of why the Hampshire had not actually been sunk. The destroyer’s survival was both miraculous and a testimony to the inherent unreliability of pre-October War Soviet guided missiles technology.
That morning had been dreamlike, unreal.
Peter Christopher was going sailing with John Fitzgerald Kennedy!
And a coterie of stern-faced Secret Service men; that said, it was ‘going sailing’ on in the sense that he was on a yacht – a really big one owned by some Democratic Party bigwig; the name of Claude Betancourt was mentioned, the boat was apparently named for his daughter Gretchen Louisa – which happened to be ‘sailing’ in Nantucket Sound. He was a passenger, uninvolved in the business of hauling on sheets, ducking under swinging booms or running about the boat leaning over the side to make it sail closer to the wind. Notwithstanding, it was liberating to be on the water and to feel the sting of salt in the wind on his face.
The President, dressed in casual slacks and a Navy-style sea jacket, seemed younger and more at ease the farther the boat sailed from the shore. JFK had been looking forward to today for ‘weeks’ he confessed.
“I thought about inviting your Prime Minister onto the water,” the most powerful man in the World guffawed to his ‘special guest’. Peter Christopher was one of several, relatively youthful and junior staffers along for the ride. The others carefully kept distant from their Commander-in-Chief. “But I guess she’s not really a nautical lady!”
“No, sir,” Peter had agreed.
Inshore the Gretchen Louisa had ridden the choppy seas easily. The sun had poked brightly through gaps in the clouds and the breeze had gusted off Cape Cod. Out in the deeper water the boat had skipped and plunged as she tacked across Nantucket Sound towards Martha’s Vineyard before heading south for an hour prior to turning around for the long haul back to Hyannis Port. President Kennedy had talked of his admiration for Peter’s father – the gallant but fated America’s Cup contender of the 1930s rather than the fighting admiral who had been t
he bane of the US Navy in the aftermath of the October War – and how he personally missed being able to ‘get out on the water these days’.
“I wasn’t in command of HMS Talavera long enough to ever really feel the real weight of the pressure of the World on my shoulders, sir,” Peter had confided to the older man.
Out on the water the careworn, greying man of the day before had shed ten years, there was a sparkle in his green eyes and a smile came easily to his prematurely lined face.
“I think sometimes of what it must have been like for my father when he realised everything had gone wrong that last day on Malta.” Peter Christopher had opened his heart to Marija in the still of the night, but never to another living soul. “He knew he was going to die, that a lot of his people were going to die, that he had failed, and,” he stared out across the grey waves, blinking the spray from his eyes, “and that he’d probably sent me and my Talaveras to our deaths. I can’t imagine how awful he must have felt.”
Jack Kennedy nodded.
The two men were ‘alone’ in a huddle of Secret Service men next to the skipper of the Gretchen Louisa.
“Forgive my impertinence, sir,” Peter grimaced, “but I think that you are one of the few men alive who can understand what goes through a man’s mind at a time like that.”
Chapter 55
Wednesday 3rd June 1964
Abadan Island, Iran
The Red Air Force had bombed Basra again last night with a force of twelve bombers but this time targeting what Lieutenant General Michael Carver’s GSO2 – General Staff Office (Intelligence and Security) – believed to be elements of two under strength Iraqi Army armoured divisions attempting to hide in the southern suburbs of the city. In typical ‘Russian style’ the bombing had been fairly indiscriminate, and the navigation of at least three of the participating bombers so faulty as to bring them well within the outer engagement envelope of the Bristol Bloodhound long-range surface-to-air missiles guarding the airspace around Abadan Island.
It had been very tempting to put a shot across the bows of the Red Air Force but the Air Defence Controller, obeying Carver’s dictum to ‘keep our powder dry until we are directly attacked’ had resisted the temptation. Every available Bloodhound in Christendom had been sent to Abadan and when those forty-one missiles were gone, that was that!
The Bloodhounds were only to be used as a last resort: specifically in the event that they or Abadan was under immediate threat of attack, or at a moment of the C-in-C’s choice.
The two Iraqi officers escorted into Michael Carver’s office were dapper, assured, but very weary men who had had a sleepless night and been sent on a mission from which they probably did not anticipate returning. They snapped to attention before the Englishman.
Brigadier Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and Major Abdul Salam Arif were the personal emissaries of the Military Governor of Basra Province. Al-Bakr was the Governor’s Chief of Staff; Arif was the acting commander of the 9th Armoured Brigade. They had been selected to ‘approach the British in Abadan’ because they both spoke excellent English.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Carver drawled, returning his visitors’ salutes with a cursory motion of his right hand. He left his uninvited ‘guests’ standing at attention. “You catch me at a busy time. I’d be obliged if you would state your business directly please.”
The abruptness of this clearly unnerved both the Iraqis.
By reputation the Military Governor of Basra, General Abd al-Rahman al-Bazzaz was, as political soldiers can sometimes be, actually a middlingly competent officer. The appearance of al-Bakr and Arif at his Headquarters now told Michael Carver that al-Bazzaz had finally seen the writing on the wall. Having had his curiosity whetted, he was interested to hear what the two visitors had to say for themselves.
“General al-Bazzaz offers an alliance with your forces, General Carver,” Brigadier al-Bakr asserted, hardly believing his master had had the bare-faced cheek to put the words in his mouth.
“An alliance?” The Englishman tried not to laugh.
“Yes, sir. Together we will halt the Russians north of Basra.”
Michael Carver thought this was a particularly fatuous statement. Nevertheless, he was an innately courteous man and he had no intention of heaping gratuitous humiliation on the two officers before him.
“What is the current order of battle of General al-Bazzaz’s forces?”
“In addition to the Basra garrison elements of the 2nd, 4th and 9th Armoured Divisions of the Iraqi National Army, in total roughly equivalent to four brigades of armour in the British Army, sir.”
Carver did not believe for a moment that al-Bazzaz could field over three hundred tanks, let alone actually ‘command’ them to do anything except hunker down. Moreover, the one and only time he had seen Iraqi armour on the battlefield six of his Centurions had chased off a force of over fifty Iraqi tanks and enabled his friend, Hassan al-Mamaleki’s then under-strength brigade to chase numerically much superior invaders all the way back across the Arvand River west of Khorramshahr.
Carver sighed.
“With such a force at his disposal General al-Bazzaz should be able to dig in north of Basra and hold back any number of T-62s,” he observed mildly, neutrally. Wild horses would not drag him into the quagmire of Iraq’s feuding ethnic and religious factions. One could not fight a war – especially one against a more powerful enemy - if one had to spend all one’s time looking over one’s shoulder, and that was exactly what campaigning in Iraq, would be like. Sooner or later, if they had not discovered it already, the Russians would understand that they had jumped barefoot into a horribly well-populated snake pit. Even with its great oilfields no western government had actually wanted to be in Iraq before the October War. The British situation on Abadan had been increasingly marginal and sooner or later, war or no war, the Iranians would have taken it back; that after all was the logic of not basing his current war plans on attempting to hold Abadan Island. The position was untenable, indefensible, like that of the mutinous, splintered garrison of Basra. The officers and men of the 2nd, 4th and 9th Armoured Divisions of the Iraqi National Army would much rather be fighting each other than the Russians, or even the Iranians or even the loathed former imperial overlords, the British. Truth be told they would much rather not be fighting anybody at all; fighting interfered with the politicking and gave the general populous, upon which they were accustomed to prey, the courage to stand up to the sad excuse for a fighting force that was supposed, when all was said and done, to be protecting them.
When the Red Army drove into Basra it would be a close run thing whether men like Brigadier Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and Major Abdul Salam Arif were captured by the Russians, shot in the back by their own men, or lynched by a vengeful civilian mob.
“Or if not an alliance,” al-Bakr went on, “then some mutually satisfactory arrangement under which senior officers, officials and their families might be allowed to pass through your lines and granted sanctuary, as it were?”
So many rats leaving a sinking ship.
“General al-Bazzaz is a very wealthy man. The treasury of the city of Basra and many ancient artefacts and...”
“Let me understand you correctly, Brigadier al-Bakr,” Michael Carver retorted, his face stiff with disgust. The bloody fools were trying to bribe him! “You want me to risk my men fighting to defend a city that General al-Bazzaz is not prepared to defend himself?”
Answer came there none.
“Or is it simply that you want to buy sanctuary for traitors?”
All the Red Army had to do was motor south from Baghdad and the whole rotten country would fall into its hands like a nightmarishly poised low-hanging fruit!
“Frankly, gentlemen, I’d rather sell my daughters into white slavery than get into bed with you.” Michael Carver shook his head. “Not only do you not have the gumption or the wherewithal to mount any kind of coordinated defence against the invader; you expect me to take any number of useless mouths into my
lines because you don’t have the guts to fight.”
The two Iraqi officers were shamefaced in an angry, blood feud sort of way as if it was Carver’s fault that were members of an army beaten before it had fired a single shot in anger against the invaders.
“Take this message back to General al-Bazzaz,” Carver decided, brusquely. “I will not permit a single Iraqi civilian or soldier into my lines. If necessary, I will fire on any such person who approaches my lines.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Good day to you, our business is concluded.”
Chapter 56
Thursday 4th June 1964
Ministry of National Security, Brasenose College, Oxford
Airey Neave had awakened that morning before dawn with an odd feeling of unease, as if he was sickening for something or had gone to bed the previous evening with pressing questions unanswered. His wife Diana had remarked upon his apparent mal de mere over breakfast but he had shrugged it off.
‘I just need a breath of fresh air. The walk to my office will do me the world of good, my dear,’ he had assured her.
His wife knew better than to press him further. For all that he had been the Member of Parliament for Abingdon – a seat he had won in a by-election – since 1953 he had never cut his personal Gordian knot with the security services. A part of his life was forever closed to her and to most of his closest friends. Some men needed their secrets and Diana had never begrudge her husband his; nor, in a strange way his attachment to the extraordinary force of nature that was Margaret Hilda Thatcher, the woman he had skilfully mentored and guided to the premiership.