by James Philip
“I am the Shah of...”
The newcomer squatted down on his haunches.
“I know who you are, you stupid bastard,” he said in clumsy Farsi, the language of the Light of the Aryans’s own people. “A real man would have stood and fought!”
“Who are you?” The Shah demanded feebly.
The other man ignored the question. He got up and walked away leaving the wounded man lying on the cold ground in the shade of the big Juniper tree.
The Shah of Iran’s lower legs had become numb and he shivered.
“Let a couple of his whores look at his legs!” Shouted the man who had previously spoken to Mohammad Reza. His Farsi was coarse, like an artisan’s. “We’re going to need to get the bastard up on his feet if we’re going to do this thing properly.”
Latterly, the Light of the Aryans had greedily indulged his predilection for European women. Although he often found the company of western women irritating; their tendency towards independent thought and their irrational reluctance to invariably bend to his will or spontaneous predilections was unseemly; sexually, it made them interesting and occasionally fascinating. Of course, he was never seen in public with any women other than members of the Royal Family, and even in court circles the presence of the willowy pale skinned women who came and went from his various palaces was never officially acknowledged. The prerogatives of the Head of Warriors were his and his alone. Inevitably, there was the risk that some of the expensive European harem women he invited to reside at the Sa’dabad complex and at the other royal palaces were American or British agents but that was of little consequence. In his experiences a discreet mistress was invaluable in opening and maintaining channels of communications with friends and potential enemies alike.
Before the October War he had found one such precious woman and insofar as he harboured any real affection and respect for any ‘western whore’; sometimes he found himself thinking of her, wishing and aching, to lie with her one more time. SAVAK had told him she worked for the Americans, his contact with the Mossad had said she was a ‘British stooge’; the CIA had repeatedly warned him that she was a KGB ‘plant’.
“What will happen to us?” The woman kneeling at Mohammad Reza’s shoulder asked in a plaintive, panicky whisper in English. Another woman, standing behind her was snivelling.
“Nothing!” He grunted. “I am the Shah!” He tried to move his legs and sit up, instantly collapsing back onto the ground in agony, involuntarily biting his tongue.
Booted feet crunched heavily across the courtyard.
“We’ll have to tie the bastard to the tree trunk!”
Mohammed Reza registered the remark with the genuine disinterest of a man too deeply preoccupied with his personal world of pain to worry about what was happening around him.
“It’s too dark under the fucking tree!” Somebody objected angrily in a Moskva Russian accent that the helpless Light of the Aryans belated translated through the successive waves of pain.
“Put him over by the wall, then!”
“He’ll just fall over, sir?”
“His whores will have to hold him up!”
“What do we do with the rest of the tarts, sir?”
“Tell the boys they can do whatever they want with them!”
Mohammad Reza gasped and screamed in pain as strong hands raised him off the ground and started to drag him, much in the fashion of a sack of coal, across the courtyard.
One of the women protested.
SLAP!
She started crying.
SLAP!
It was only several minutes after he had been unceremoniously dumped in the pool of bright early morning sunshine at the base of the eastern wall of the courtyard wall that the Shah of Iran dazedly attempted to make sense of what was going on around him.
He wrinkled his nose.
I fouled myself...
Three of his whores, young western women in their twenties, who had been his guests this last week in the Sa’dabad Palace and had been due to depart after the weekend, were sitting on the dirt near him. Two were hugging each other, all three were whimpering pathetically.
In the middle of the courtyard a group of big men in camouflage battledress fatigues, each festooned with bandoliers of grenades and webbing bulging with fresh magazines for the Ak-47s or sniper rifles slung over their shoulders, were clustered around what appeared to be an unwieldy steel tripod.
He listened to women screaming in the near distance.
The Russians were raping his women...
Just like they had when they had invaded his country back in 1941; everywhere the Russians went they raped and looted. Old, young it made no difference; friend or foe an enemy’s women always became Russian whores...
Two of the soldiers were manhandling an old-fashioned movie camera onto the mounting at the top of the tripod.
And then the Shah of Iran understood what his fate was to be.
If he had not already voided his bowels he would have then...
Chapter 29
08:29 Hours (Local)
Saturday 4th April 1964
Astara, Azerbaijan
Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov stomped into the dingy command centre in the southernmost border settlement of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Astara was so far south and so close to the border with Iran that the town, the establishment of which long pre-dated the invention of the USSR, had straddled the border within living memory. Iranian Astara, just below that modern border, now lay in ruins as the leading elements of the 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army poured south through it and over it towards the Alborz Mountains. The constant rumbling roar of hundreds of engines filled the command centre.
Colonel-General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian stood to attention and saluted the Defence Minister of the Soviet Union. Vasily Chuikov’s prize fighter’s evilly cherubic gnarled face cracked into a grin that was very nearly ear to ear as he casually acknowledged the Commander of Army Group South’s salute.
He stared hard at the freshly positioned markers and arrows on the rickety plotting table in the middle of the room.
“We achieved complete surprise, Comrade Marshal,” Babadzhanian reported brusquely. “It seems that the diversionary airborne operation against Tehran was only lightly opposed and that all major objectives within the city have been taken. Amphibious operations along the Caspian coast south of the border have been unopposed and 5th Guards Tank Division is already well down the road to Talesh. Early indications are that our landing forces have established a secure beach head at Banda Anzali with negligible losses. The Navy says its gunboats have destroyed a number of small Iranian patrol craft. The advance of 5th Guards Tank Division down the coast road is being supported by several vessels carrying Katyushas.” His hand swept inland. “Airborne forces seem to have secured our lines of advance on Ardabil,” he hesitated, and added, “but there is no word yet about how successful the paratroops were securing key points around the city itself.”
Vasily Chuikov grunted like a musk ox with a stone lodged in its hoof.
Ardabil was only fifty kilometres from where the two old soldiers now stood but if the city was not taken within the next twenty-four hours Operation Nakazyvat might easily bog down in the mountains. Babadzhanian’s original operational plan was to take both Ardabil and Tabriz – the latter over four hundred circuitous kilometres by road, and the best part of three hundred across narrow, treacherous passes only negotiable by vehicles travelling in single file – by airborne force majeure. However, the ‘mopping up’ operations against Krasnaya Zarya zealots in Romania and the Balkans, and the sacrificial spoiling attack on Malta had robbed him of over thirty percent of his total available Spetsnaz and paratroopers, and just under thirty percent of his available ‘air lift’ capability. Hence, Tabriz would have to be taken after the survivors of the Ardabil and Tehran operations had been recovered, and had been given time to regroup and re-equip. At one time an alternative plan bypassing Ta
briz had been seriously mooted but Babadzhanian had stood firm; he simply could not afford to leave a major enemy city – potentially the base for an Iranian counter attack – lying unsuppressed across his lines of communication.
“No serious resistance at any point along the border?” Vasily Chuikov inquired cheerfully. The other two members of the collective leadership had specifically ‘requested’ - nobody in the post-war Soviet Union was in a position to ‘order’ the Mother Country’s most decorated and most illustrious warrior to do anything he did not want to do - not to leave Soviet territory. Chastened by the experience of what had happened to him the last time he had left the holy soil of the Mother Country to visit Bucharest, Chuikov had reluctantly acquiesced. Besides, Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian would probably have him shot if he attempted to meddle directly in the affairs of Army Group South.
Babadzhanian’s armies had operated under a number of different names prior to the start of the campaign; now 3rd Caucasus Tank Army and the 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army and all attached Red Air Force and Navy forces committed to Operation Nakazyvat came under the umbrella of Army Group South. Smoke and mirrors, Maskirovska had served its purpose; the first great blows had been struck and complete surprise achieved.
“No serious resistance yet,” the other man replied. Although he was the younger man by only half-a-dozen years in age, in looks he might have been ten to fifteen years Chuikov’s junior. “What is the news from Malta and Cyprus, Comrade Marshal?”
“Admiral Gorshkov seems to have caught the British and the Yankees with their pants down around their ankles at Malta,” Chuikov chortled wickedly. “Reports were still coming in when my plane landed.” He turned sombre. “As for Cyprus, well, that’s going as well as expected. The British have come ashore in force in the west and the south. If we hadn’t withdrawn our MiGs and out best people from the island we’d have lost them all by now. Unless the British decide to fall back on Malta – which they probably won’t - they’ll over-run the whole island in a week or two.”
Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian sighed, unable to veil his vexation.
“So what you are saying is that we pissed away all those ships and paratroopers at Malta for nothing?”
Chuikov thumped his subordinate on the back.
“We shall see. If we really have caught the British and the Americans ‘asleep at the wheel’ as our western friends say, who can say what will happen to the morale of our enemies’ civilian populations...”
Low overhead several jet fighter bombers screamed south.
In the near distance the thrumming of many, many helicopter rotors approached from the north; all the while the clanking, revving, roaring engines of tanks, armoured personnel carriers and wheeled vehicles of every size and description rolled past the command centre.
Maskirovska.
Smoke and mirrors; dym i zerkala.
Neither of the old soldiers had really believed they would get away with launching Operation Nakazyvat – Operation Chastise, the ‘push south to the sea’ – without the enemy discovering its true objectives long before the Red Army was ready to pull the trigger. Nevertheless, thus far all the early indications were that the subtle Russian art of Maskirovska had worked its charms to perfection. The long term effects of the surprise attack on the British island fortress of Malta – albeit achieved at the cost of the sacrifice of irreplaceable ships and airborne troops, not to mention the inevitable burning of practically every intelligence asset the Soviet Union possessed in the Central Mediterranean – were as yet incalculable. What was not incalculable was that Operation Nakazyvat had commenced unmolested by the British or the Americans, and apparently, completely surprised the rag tag Iranian forces protecting the Shah’s long rocky northern borders with Soviet Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Intelligence reports from within Iran had indicated the Shah had moved his best units, including two new Centurion-equipped Tank regiments from the north to the south in recent months. Apparently, according to agents in Tehran, this was to ‘intimidate the British at Abadan and the threaten Basra in Iraq’. The Shah was known to fiercely detest his Iraqi neighbours and to constantly fret about every new concentration of troops in Basra Province opposite Abadan Island. It seemed Baghdad and Tehran had been too busy watching each other to notice the danger gathering in the north.
“I expected at least token resistance on 3rd Caucasus Tank Army’s right wing,” Babadzhanian admitted. The four Tanks Corps of that Army had been split into two widely separated semi-independent commands. On the far right of the line two corps would drive down the road to Marand north of Tabriz from jumping off points at Nakhchavin and Julfa on the Armenian-Iranian border, taking advantage of the relatively good going before seizing the northern approaches to Tabriz. Joined by two corps coming over the mountains it was hoped that resistance in the city would be swiftly extinguished. The massed tank corps of both the 3rd Caucasus Tank Army and the 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army would then be funnelled through the passes of the Zagros Mountains down onto the rocky floodplains of the great rivers of the near east, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Powerful divisional strength columns would spread out across Kurdish northern Iraq, investing and subduing the cities of Mosul, Erbil, Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah, with the capture of this latter city signalling the true beginning of the push to the south.
Sulaymaniyah was the key to northern Iraq. Guarded by mountain ranges on all sides - the Azmer, Goyija and the Qaiwan ranges in the north and east, by Baranan Mountain in the south and the Tasluja Hills in the west and watered by the River Tanjaro, a tributary of the distant Tigris, Babadzhanian regarded Sulaymaniyah as the natural anchor, the pivot of the envisaged headlong blitzkrieg he had designed to sweep all before it without pausing to draw breath until Basra and Abadan were in his hands and his tanks were parked on the northern shore of the Persian Gulf.
His greatest fear was that either the British or the Americans would grasp the significance of Sulaymaniyah in time to somehow, in some way, sufficiently bolster the notoriously corrupt and inept Iraqi Army so as to enable a blocking force to be positioned around or within the city, or worse, barring the northern approaches to Baghdad to the south.
The operational plan for Operation Nakazyvat mandated the capture of Sulaymaniyah not later than D+25. If the armoured spearheads of both his Tank Armies were not rolling south by D+26 there would be no reasonable expectation of investing Abadan by D+45, or of securing a significant defensive presence along the northern shore of the Persian Gulf not later than D+55.
The calendar was his worst enemy.
The British and the Americans were not fools; sooner or later they would wake up to the threat to the oilfields of the Middle East and the inevitable total disintegration of their dreams of World hegemony. When they did finally ‘wake up’ it was not beyond the bounds of possibility and imagination that they might conceivably contrive to place sufficient firepower in his path to slow him down, or even to stop him dead in his tracks short of his objective. Everything depended upon the shock and the speed of the offensive; and upon how quickly beleaguered Iran and Iraq’s partially estranged former Imperial masters reacted.
“I still think we should have gone after the top men in Baghdad too,” Vasily Chuikov remarked philosophically.
Babadzhanian shook his head.
“Chop off one Iraqi leader’s head and another man will immediately step into his place, Comrade Marshal. If we get unlucky the new man might actually have some rudimentary grasp of military tactics!”
Chuikov guffawed asthmatically and jammed a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. An aide-de-camp rushed forward and a match flashed in the relative gloom of the makeshift command centre. The great man briefly disappeared behind a cloud of foul-smelling tobacco smoke.
“Never mind. We shall just have to settle for the head of the ‘Light of the Aryans’, I suppose!”
Babadzhanian’s normally impassive face dissolved into a short-lived half-smile. The Tehran ‘demonstrati
on’ had been taken over and reworked so often by the Combine Red Army Security Directorate that it was unrecognisable as that initially envisaged in his initial draft proposals for Operation Nakazyvat. He had had in mind a small scale airborne raid designed to terrorise the populous, assassinate key military and civilian administrators and to disrupt Iranian radio and television broadcasting stations. His modest concept had been transformed into a no holds barred attempt to ‘decapitate the Iranian state and to undermine its cohesion and fighting spirit to such an extent that it was incapable of mounting ongoing organised resistance against the Soviet forces operating in its northern provinces’.
Colonel-General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian would probably – in most if not all cases – have baulked at the extremity of the terroristic actions which both sides now countenanced as standard operating practice. Before the October War he might have been more receptive to esoteric notions of ‘the rules of war’. But ‘before the October War’ was a different time, that World no longer existed and in the Mother Country, the well of pity had run dry.
Chapter 30
11:20 Hours (GMT)
Saturday 4th April 1964
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
The city had awakened to an overcast and coldly rainy day. The rain pattered persistently against the windows, periodically thrummed hard on rooftops, overflowed blocked drains and formed puddles on roads and pavements unmaintained and unrepaired since the October War. It was so gloomy that every office and house with a functioning connection to the electricity network had lights turned on and heaters plugged in and the unusual spring load on the overstressed grid caused light bulbs to flicker constantly and now and again, whole sections of the city to go dark as transformers or generators shorted out. Inside the cloistered corridors and halls of Corpus Christi College, the new home of the Cabinet Office of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom there was a pervasive smell of dampness and the chill lingered in the fabric of the ancient buildings.