by James Philip
There were places in Qormi, north east of RAF Luqa, where aircraft parked at dispersals, and take offs and landings could be observed during the day, so that made a kind of sense. Anybody with a good pair of binoculars in Rabat or Mdina would probably have a better view of the comings and goings at the air base. Why Qormi? Because it was easier to hide in the post 1945 war close-packed urban sprawl?
“And what else, Sam?” Rachel had not moved from her seat at the desk piled with files and loose documents.
“And coded messages Arkady Pavlovich needed to send to...”
“To where?”
“I don’t know. The code sign changed every twenty-four hours.”
“What happened to your radio?”
“It will still be in the basement of the house in Qormi. Arkady Pavlovich came to collect me the night before the invasion.”
“He told you it was an invasion?”
“Not exactly. He just knew something was going to happen. He said we had to be in Mdina when it happened.”
“Why did he take you with him?”
Samuel Calleja’s eyes clouded with new confusion.
“I mean,” Rachel observed scornfully, “it wasn’t as if you were going to be much use to him in a fight?”
The man bristled at this insult but he remained mute.
“You could have shot me three, maybe four times in Admiral Christopher’s office while I was dealing with Arkady Pavlovich,” she reminded him. “How did Admiral Christopher get separated from his men, by the way?”
“I don’t...”
“When the Soviet paratroopers assaulted the headquarters complex most of the fighting took place on the lower levels. I discovered you, Arkady Pavlovich and two dead British officers on the upper floor of the complex. The other officers had obviously been disarmed and executed.”
“I had no part of that!”
Rachel rose slowly to her feet and came around the desk. She settled in front of the man, resting the back of her thighs against the table. She folded her arms.
“Convince me,” she invited with an absolutely humourless smile.
“Arkady and I followed the second wave of troops into the building. The first wave got driven down into the cellars. There was nowhere for anybody to hide, no ways around the defenders. They all had Sten guns and grenades were going off. We ran into two officers carrying the Admiral. They were trying to walk him to somewhere safer. He’d already been shot...”
Rachel decided that sounded vaguely plausible.
“And?” She prompted.
Arkady Pavlovich forced them to carry the Admiral up the stairs. I didn’t know where we were going; I’d never been inside the headquarters, you see. When we got to the staff room outside the Commander-in-Chief’s office Arkady told the other two men to put the Admiral in a chair and then he, well...”
“Murdered them in cold blood?”
“Yes.”
“Go on.”
“We took the Admiral into the office. Arkady reckoned there would be another way out of the complex from Admiral Christopher’s office but there wasn’t. And then about a minute later you walked in.”
Rachel stared at the man and waited, knowing there was more.
“I think Arkady Pavlovich thought we could trade our lives for the Admiral’s.”
“He said that to you?”
“Yes.”
“What else did he say to you?”
“He talked about getting off the island and being picked up by a submarine but that might have been a lie. He said our comrades had done their work well and ‘blinded’ the British. I think he honestly believed that the British would surrender. He was looking forward to settling old scores.”
Rachel shivered.
Nobody had been closer to the monster that was Arkady Pavlovich Rykov than she; she would probably have been the first ‘old score’ he settled.
“Why didn’t he kill me weeks ago?” She asked, not expecting to get an answer.
“He knew he was ‘blown’. If you’d gone missing or been killed the authorities would have come straight to his door.”
Rachel levered herself away from the desk.
She stood directly in front of the man.
“Why did you betray your own people, your own family?”
“I’ve betrayed nobody,” Samuel Calleja hissed angrily. “Nothing will ever change on Malta unless the Maltese people throw off the capitalist yoke!”
Chapter 61
14:45 Hours
Sunday 5th April 1964
USS Charles F. Adams (DDG-2), 3 miles East of St Paul’s Bay, Malta
The bodies of the dead were in rows on the destroyer’s stern deck. The dead outnumbered the living by approximately two to one.
The survivors had all been from the Turkish battlecruiser Yavuz; the men who had escaped alive from the Admiral Kutuzov – if there were any – must have drifted elsewhere in another, separate little Sargasso Sea of detritus. The two great ships had gone down several miles apart and it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that while one slick of human misery had been washed inshore, the other had been swept far out to sea.
The small British minesweeper, HMS Repton had manoeuvred close alongside the USS Charles F. Adams’s starboard side so that the two captains could converse via bull horns.
“I LOOK FOREWARD TO RELIEVING YOU OF YOUR BURDEN, SIR?” The youthful lieutenant who commanded the short, broad four hundred ton minesweeper observed cheerfully.
“BY ALL MEANS, SIR!” Commander Simon McGiven replied.
In the near distance a big grey ocean going tug that was at least twice the size of the Ton class minesweeper thrust purposefully towards the two warships. The big American guided missile destroyer’s fuel bunkers were not, strictly speaking, empty but her pumps could not pump the near solid sludge left in the bottom her tanks and even if they could her boilers would probably not have been capable of burning it. Diesel generators kept the warship’s essential services running in a disabled sort of fashion but she could not steam another inch and slowly but surely she was being driven by the wind and current onto the rocky coast of the main island.
All the while the recovery of the living and the dead continued.
Forty-two year old Simon McGiven had been born in Cleveland, Ohio. His father had spent thirty years on the Great Lakes and hoped his son would be a school teacher or a bank clerk but then the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour, and the rest, as they say, was history. When the time had come to return to a civilian career that he had never wanted he had applied to stay in the Navy. His first command had been an old World War II vintage barely modernised Fletcher class destroyer; in comparison to that old charabanc the Charles F. Adams was like a racing Ferrari. Except, of course, when she was dead in the water and sometime in the next ninety minutes she was liable to be blown onto exactly the sort of lee shore that must have terrified old time sailors.
“MY ORDERS ARE TO STAND BY YOU UNTIL OUR MUSCULAR FRIEND TAKES THE STRAIN, SIR!” The kid on the bridge of the minesweeper explained.
McGiven had been about to suggest he might care to take his ship around to his port side and start hauling bodies out of the sea. However, it seemed that the kid’s superiors had informed him that his first duty and the only rule that applied today was to ensure that whatever happened, the USS Charles F. Adams did not get dashed to pieces on the rocks of the Maltese Archipelago.
“THANK YOU, SIR!” McGiven could see the party on the Minesweeper’s stern clearing gear to stand ready to shoot a line across to the Charles F. Adams’s fo’c’sle.
“I WILL HOLD POSITION TO LEEWARD AT YOUR CONVENIENCE AND STAND READY TO PASS A TOW LINE, SIR!”
McGiven waved acknowledgement and lowered his bull horn.
“There’s a survivor demanding to speak to the Captain, sir,” a peeved yeoman reported. “Funny little guy. He’s only got one leg and there’s this Greek woman with him. They’re tied together and she won’t let anybody untie them, sir.”<
br />
McGiven handed the bull horn to the bridge speaker.
“One leg?”
“Yes, sir!”
“And he’s tied to a Greek woman?” He flicked a look at the Officer of the Deck who risked a grin. McGiven ran a tight ship but he had been in command long enough – seven months – to allow his people to know that although the old man might be a slave-driving martinet, he also had a sense of humour. “This I’ve got to see,” he chuckled.
Chapter 62
17:04 Hours
Sunday 5th April 1964
Karaj, 42 kilometres WNW of the Centre of Tehran, Iran
Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong. The Red Air Force had failed to make an appearance that morning and because Colonel Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik had made the unforgivably bad mistake of actually trusting the Red Air Force, he had prematurely pulled the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment back from its forward perimeter and allowed the Iranians room in which to deploy their armour!
However, the worst thing was that because Colonel Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik, having trusted the Red Air Force to airlift the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment out of its holding positions in and around Mehrabad Air Base in western Tehran, had also allowed his men to expend practically all their ammunition by the time daylight was breaking over the wide expanse of the airfield.
‘There has been a change of plan, Comrade Konstantin Yakovlevich,’ the arsehole at HQ had said over the scrambler link – as calm as you like – as if he was sitting on the veranda of his fucking dacha! ‘Your regiment will have to hold on until later this afternoon!’
It had been getting light about then.
Staying where he was on the airfield was a bad idea.
No cover, no bullets, no hope.
Colonel Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik had hastily reviewed his options; which were few and uniformly unattractive. In ten minutes it would be fully light and it was this that mandated immediate action.
‘ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK!’
The mixed force of poorly entrenched disorganised Iranian infantry and armour holding the western side of Mehrabad Air Base where the single-strand wire mess fence separated the runway from fields dotted with mud brick and the haphazardly located old stone houses either ran away or surrendered. Four hull down Centurions never fired a shot and their crews could not wait to spring their hatches and throw up their hands.
Ever a practical man Kurochnik paraded his prisoners, some two hundred unsoldierly men in front of his newly won defensive positions and ordered them to sit down on the ground.
There was nothing quite as effective as a human shield to dissuade the enemy from mortaring and shelling one’s trenches! A hurried head count revealed that he still had over three hundred effectives, four Centurions, several jeeps and a couple of trucks, and about a hundred American made carbines including a few brand new M-16 assault rifles all with plenty of ammunition. Nobody knew how to drive the tanks but they were already well dug in, hull down and his men soon figured out how to traverse the turrets and how to shoot the big guns; guns were guns so that was child’s play. The important thing was that he had gained possession of ground that he could actually defend. Although his rear was fairly flat, open country, good for tanks, he could see for miles and nobody was going to creep up on him or surprise him. There was a sparsely built up area to the north, his right, but once he had extended a picket into the nearest building he felt secure on that flank. Directly to his left, due south there was more broken ground, useless if an enemy wanted to come at him in force.
The Iranians had sent over a Colonel to talk terms around mid-morning.
The man was an idiot; typical of the westernized playboys the Shah sent abroad to Sandhurst and West Point to be taught how to be gentlemen rather than soldiers. His uniform was immaculate, his moustache freshly manicured that morning and his boots so highly polished a real soldier could use them as shaving mirrors.
Colonel Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik had been astonished when the other man addressed him in moderately coarse Moskva Russian.
‘Lay down your arms now and we won’t cut off your balls,’ he proposed, sniffing distastefully as if he had never smelled faeces and spilled entrails in the morning air of a battlefield. ‘You will be treated as prisoners of war.’
The Soviet Union had never signed up to the Geneva Convention or any of that Hague protocols so that was absolutely the best offer Kurochnik was going to get.
The commander of the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment had put on his innocently perplexed face; the one he wore when he was dealing with particularly retarded senior Red Air Force officers.
‘I don’t have enough men to take the whole garrison of Tehran prisoner,’ he had retorted in apparent bewilderment.
‘Ah, you don’t understand my Russian?’
‘I understand your Moskva bollocks just fine, Comrade!’
The exchange had been going on in full view and the hearing of dozens of Kurochnik’s men, most of whom had started laughing. Several men started taunting the Iranian.
‘SILENCE!’ The commanding officer of the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment had bellowed like a brown bear with toothache. Turning his full attention back to the Iranian parley officer he had said, soberly: ‘I am an officer of the Red Army. I surrender to no man.’
The Iranians had mounted a piecemeal frontal attack eventually but only after they had mortared and shelled and machine-gunned the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment’s positions for over an hour. By then they had exterminated the ‘human shield’ in front of the paratroopers’ lines, literally chopping and mashing their own people to bits without in the least inconveniencing Kurochnik’s men. He had given the order to wait until the onrushing enemy reached the mangled remains of their own comrades before opening fire. It had been pure murder.
The Red Air Force had finally arrived about ninety minutes ago, randomly dumping long strings of bombs across the heart of the city, one line of projectiles falling uncomfortably close to the paratroopers’ positions sending every man diving headlong for cover.
There had been too few helicopters to life the whole regiment out of Tehran; that did not matter because four out of every ten men who had been alive that morning were dead.
Such was war.
“Nobody look back!” Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik barked as he jumped down onto the ground thirty-five miles kilometres west of where the Red Air Force had lifted him and the last men of the rearguard defending the western boundary of Mehrabad Air Base.
“NOBODY LOOK BACK!”
In that split second the whole world seemed to burn pure, blinding white.
There was no noise other than the churning of the rotors of Mil Mi-6 heavy lift helicopters which had belatedly lifted him and the last survivors of the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment rearguard out of the doomed city.
Pausing several seconds until he knew it was safe to look back the veteran soldier turned around.
“Shit!” He muttered involuntarily as he eyed the giant mushroom cloud rising above what had once been the capital city of Iran.
There was no way that was a piddling little fifteen kiloton tactical nuclear warhead!
He could see the pressure wave of the huge explosion radiating out; of Tehran there was nothing left, just churning superheated irradiated dust. The breeze plucked at his face ahead of the approaching over-pressure wave.
Nobody had told him that there had been a change of plan.
If the fucking plan had been to nuke the whole fucking city all along why the fuck had he had to leave two hundred of the finest fucking combat troops in the whole fucking world dead on the ground?
What the fuck is going on?
Chapter 63
19:35 Hours
Sunday 5th April 1964
Verdala Palace, Malta
Earlier that afternoon Peter Christopher and his wife had gone out to meet his men – and one woman, Rosa Calleja – as they clambered down from the dusty old buses req
uisitioned to bring them across the island from Kalkara. It had been an emotional reunion and there had been tears in the eyes of several Talaveras and both women. While her husband, stiffly formal in his new uniform but incapable of not constantly breaking into conspiratorial grins with his men, attempted to maintain ‘proper’ decorum; Marija felt under no such obligation. Once her husband had saluted and shaken hands solemnly she seized hands and pecked cheeks, beaming at each battered hero as he stepped down and blinked in the glare of the hastily erected arc lights outside the ‘Palace’.
Her brother, Joe, had held up a defensive hand, abjuring physical contact. The last time his sister had tried to embrace him back at Royal Naval Hospital Bighi it had almost finished him off. Marija settled for a mock hug before studying her younger sibling. The man the Admiralty Dockyards of Malta regarded as a Bolshevik trades union troublemaker was every bit as much the hero of the Battle of Malta as any man. There was a lump in her throat and she thought she was going to burst into tears again. Her brother’s emotions were not dissimilar but he had been pumped full of pain killers prior to his departure from Kalkara that he was not entirely aware of what was going on around him.
Marija and Rosa had looked at each other and embraced.
However, time had been short. The newcomers had needed watering and feeding and the staff of the Verdala Palace had been instructed to ‘spruce up’ and make everything and everybody ‘ship shape’ ahead of the arrival of the ‘VIPs from London’.
Thus it was that Peter Christopher, Alan Hannay, Dermot O’Reilly, Spider McCann, Jack Griffin, and thirteen other Talavera’s formed into a parade line in the Reception Hall of the old castle. Rosa Calleja had hung back in the shadows, desperately trying not to make eyes at or to constantly distract HMS Talavera’s former Supply Officer. Marija meanwhile had taken her place to her husband’s left in the line.