The Mountains of the Moon: The Gulf War of 1964 - Part 2 (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 8)

by James Philip

  Trouble came in many forms in these regions and Turnbull had been given carte blanch to ‘look for it’. Current intelligence was that in the aftermath of recent heavy Red Air Force bombing raids the Iraqi forces in Basra Province were melting away into the civilian population, that large quantities of equipment had been abandoned or sabotaged and that many areas of Basra had become self-governing ‘communes’ violently defending their boundaries. A consequence of the military and civil breakdown of order was that refugees were flooding out of the city into the marshes, down towards Kuwaiti territory, and attempting to cross the Arvand River into Iran.

  Stephen Turnbull had consciously put the bad news from the southern shore of the Persian Gulf to the back of his mind. Filed it away for future reference because it had no bearing on his immediate mission.

  HMS Tiger, Rear Admiral Davey’s flagship had broadcast a general alert to all ships reporting explosions at the Damman-Dhahran United States War Stores Depot, a subsequent ‘large’ explosion onboard the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Ammunition Ship Retainer and that ‘civilian unrest’ was currently denying ABNZ ships ‘routine’ access to the port facilities of Tarout Bay. However, other than to maintain a heightened state of alert ‘all current evolutions are to continue as planned’; which was exactly what the commanding officer of HMAS Anzac intended to do!

  Stephen Turnbull handed back the receiver.

  He turned to the officer of the watch, a red-headed Queenslander. The kid was thirteen years younger than Turnbull had been that day in February 1942 when he had watched HMS Exeter, the heroine of the Battle of the River Plate run down in a desperate stern chase by a squadron of Japanese heavy cruisers, and shot to pieces. With her battle flag streaming through the flames and smoke the great ship had fought like a lion until, in the end, she was overwhelmed. Exeter had sent away her escorts; they had fled for their lives and most had perished, either in a deluge of hideously accurate long-range naval gunfire or dive bombed and torpedoed by Japanese Navy aircraft that had owned the skies...

  “The ship will remain at Air Defence Condition One,” Turnbull ordered, breaking from the circle of his memories. “Tell the galley to bring food and drink to the men at their stations.”

  The Royal Australian Navy’s priorities for much of last year had been supporting ongoing British operations against insurgents in Borneo – essentially, safeguarding the oilfields of Brunei, vital to the Australasian economy - peacekeeping in Indonesian waters, maintaining a presence at Singapore and Hong Kong, and in assisting in the preparations for the Operation Manna convoys. Thus, although Anzac had been released from dockyard hands around the time of the Battle of Washington in December, due to manpower shortages it had not been practical to run trials or to commission her until February. On the day that the destroyer and her similarly repaired and restored sister, HMAS Tobruk, were ordered to the Persian Gulf neither ship had been fully crewed or in any way ready for sea. Anzac and Tobruk both had a ‘list’ complement of three hundred and twenty men but had departed respectively sixty-seven and fifty-three men short, necessitating stops at Adelaide and Perth to take onboard volunteers, merchant seamen, reservists and between them, over forty cadets before leaving the Australa behind.

  It had been a strange crossing of the Indian Ocean; an especially strange passage given the history of the two repaired and partially rebuilt sister ships. In September 1960, shortly before Anzac had been scheduled to go into dock to be converted to a training ship, she and Tobruk had been conducting live firing gunnery exercises off Jervis Bay on the New South Wales coast. Normally, it was customary for the vessels carrying out such ‘exercises’ to apply a six degree offset in all their fire control solutions; but on this occasion - due to an unidentified mechanical malfunction over which two of Anzac’s crew were later prosecuted – Anzac had inadvertently fired directly on Tobruk and hit her, causing several casualties and such extensive damage that, at the time, it was considered uneconomical to repair the ship.

  Prior to the October War Anzac had been converted into a non-operational trainings ship stripped of much of her armament; and Tobruk had been mothballed in a damaged condition in reserve in October 1960 at Sydney. The October War had called both ships back into service and the Soviet invasion of Iran and Iraq had sent them racing to the Persian Gulf. Two proud ships with names that invoked the gallantry and sacrifice of earlier generations of Australians in the cause of freedom were back in harness, steaming towards the sound of the guns.

  The two destroyers had moved across an empty, silent ocean, making first for Colombo in Ceylon to refuel and re-provision, to collect British code books and to escort several merchantmen carrying equipment and general supplies for the forces already in the Persian Gulf.

  Turnbull – by fifteen years the senior of two ships’ captains - had worked both Anzac’s and Tobruk’s green crews hard all the way from Victoria to Abadan. Two-thirds of his people had never been at sea for more than a few days at a time, three-quarters had no experience of combat and both ships were officered in the main by short-commission men or reservists, or boys just out of HMAS Creswell, the Royal Australian Navy College.

  Anzac was idling in the main channel.

  To the north the great river began to sweep to the west in a huge, shallow bend up to the mouth of the Karun River and Khorramshahr in the east, towards Basra another thirty miles upstream.

  Stephen Turnbull smiled to himself, vented a quiet ruminative snort.

  Nobody at HMAS Creswell had mentioned that one day he might be asked to take a three thousand ton fleet destroyer more than sixty miles up a river ‘looking for trouble’; but then he seriously doubted if any of the instructors at the College had ever envisaged any kind of World remotely like the one in which he now lived.

  Turnbull had been his father’s bane as a young man; but for the Navy he might have become a wastrel, a drifter whose life never amounted to what his World War II American friends would have termed ‘a mess of beans’. The day he had scraped into HMAS Creswell had been the making of him as a man, an officer and he liked to think, as a human being. Those now long ago days still spoke to him, providing a wealth of memories to sustain and to fortify him. He had discovered himself and God at the College and been, broadly speaking, at peace with both ever since.

  He had passed through HMAS Creswell in the late 1920s, before drastic cuts to the Navy budged during the Great Depression resulted in the establishment moved from its original Jervis Bay home, to HMAS Cerberus on the Mornington Peninsula south of Melbourne. The College had only moved back to New South Wales as recently as 1958, from whence a slew of newly trained and partly-trained fresh-faced members of the crews of the Anzac and the Tobruk had been plucked that spring; ‘plucked’ as in the sense of babies having been ‘snatched from their cradles’.

  Turnbull had run his crew ragged in the last two months knowing that in the heat of battle training and mental preparation was everything. Essential to that psychological adjustment was a blanket acceptance that war was not a thing that touched a man now and then. War was a constant; terrible things could happen at any time and exhaustion was no excuse for letting one’s guard down for a single moment.

  A man had plenty of time to sleep when he was dead.

  Stephen Turnbull scanned the immediate horizon. Hemmed in by the river banks – the nearest approximately five hundred yards to starboard – he felt the normal mariner’s claustrophobic disquiet. Above Abadan the Arvand River began to narrow. Here at Abadan it was three-quarters of a mile across, the deep water channel one to two hundred yards wide, in most places broad enough for a ship of Anzac’s size – nearly three hundred and eighty feet in length and forty-one on the beam – to turn freely, and to afford some small leeway in which to manoeuvre. Up beyond Khorramshahr, well, that was the question!

  He would have much preferred to have investigated it in the dark of the night. However, shepherding the Sydney through the shoals had taken longer than anticipated. Night or day, he had a jo
b to do. The ABNZ Squadron ‘owned’ the Shatt al-Arab and the approaches to Umm Qasr in the west and it was important that the Soviets and the Iraqis – those who had yet to run away – understood as much.

  Stephen Turnbull went to the navigation plot.

  He pondered Anzac’s erratic track up river, grimaced.

  “Right, gentlemen,” he chuckled lowly, ‘I want to anchor opposite Khorramshahr around noon. Let’s get about our business.”

  Chapter 7

  Saturday 6th June 1964

  Oak Hill, Wethersfield, Connecticut

  The forty-four year old former Soviet Ambassador to the United States of America, Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin, had first been brought to the old wood-framed house built into the side of a wooded hill over a year ago. Dobrynin had become a diplomat at the age of twenty-six in 1946 after an earlier career working for the Yakolev Design Bureau. Having previously been head of the Foreign Ministry’s America Department, he had arrived in the Washington Embassy in March 1962 mercifully unaware that his principals in Moscow had already acquired a collective death wish.

  In retrospect he had concluded that the Cuban Missiles Crisis had been badly handled by everybody; not least the USSR’s two representatives to the United Nations whose hands had been tied behind their backs by Khrushchev’s ill-judged blustering brinkmanship.

  Dobrynin had met with the late Secretary of State Dean Rusk several times last autumn at Oak Hill. It had been clear to Dobrynin that Rusk entertained worrisome doubts as to the ‘completeness’ of his country’s victory in the Cuban Missiles War, and unlike the majority of other senior cabinet members in the Administration he was greatly exercised by the viral spread of pre-war Soviet backed ‘freedom movements’ throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and in South East Asia. Rusk had hardly been the most flamboyant or the most spectacular member of President Kennedy’s new Camelot; but he had been one of the most diligent and, in retrospect, among the wisest of White House insiders.

  Rusk had been exploring ways to mitigate the resentment caused by the brazen ‘bootlegging’ and ‘piracy’ of US banks and corporations in – among other places - Nigeria, the Gold Coast, Congo, Namibia, Mozambique and Rhodesia in Africa, and Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and throughout the Indonesian achipelago in the Far East, by seeking to engage surviving Soviet overseas ‘legations’ in those countries in an ‘ongoing dialogue’. Although nothing concrete had come of their ‘dialogues’ before Rusk’s death, Dobrynin had enjoyed his regular trips to Connecticut.

  Those ‘trips’ had ceased after the Battle of Washington. Instead, he had been interviewed by crassly hostile representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and at one point, threatened with prosecution for espionage and plotting to overthrow the US Government.

  Intriguingly, three weeks ago he had been visited in New York, by the daughter of the owner of Oak Hill. Gretchen Betancourt-Brenckmann was a striking young woman increasingly in the public eye in her role as the lead defence attorney of the ring leaders of last December’s insurrection.

  She was a most remarkable young woman...

  Dobrynin had dealt with the FBI’s threats and the decidedly non-confrontational inquiries of the strikingly attractive, much vilified lawyer in the same, unflappable fashion in which he had parried Dean Rusk’s overtures. In the same way that he had no inclination to assist the US authorities in undermining legitimate freedom movements across the globe; he had no intention of co-operating with internal witch hunts.

  Oak Hill belonged to Claude Betancourt, the secretive, shadowy figure who had once been Joseph Kennedy’s, the President’s late father’s, attorney. Latterly, so far as Dobrynin could establish, Betancourt had become the eminence grise behind President Kennedy’s re-election campaign. Legend had it that he was the only man in America who had more dirt on the Kennedy family than J. Edgar Hoover, although Dobrynin doubted that he was quite the Machiavellian ‘power behind the throne’ that some Democratic Party insiders claimed. However, he was immensely wealthy, undoubtedly influential and while the Kennedy Administration survived, lurching from one crisis to another like a drunken man on a tightrope, Claude Betancourt was the only ‘fixer’ in the game.

  Dobrynin stepped out of the car, a 1962 Chrysler, flanked by his Secret Service bodyguards. Marine Corps sentries armed with M-16 assault rifles had manned the gate at the bottom of the hill leading up to Oak Hill.

  “Welcome back to Oak Hill, Ambassador,” declared the stern matronly middle aged woman who greeted the Russian on the porch.

  “It is good to see you again, Mrs Nordstrom,” Dobrynin smiled. He had used his time since the war under virtual house arrest in New York productively, honing his English and learning everything he could about his strange, somewhat conflicted hosts. “If you will forgive my impertinence, may I observe that you look well?”

  “Well,” Mrs Nordstrom - with her husband for over three decades the ‘keepers’ of Oak Hill for the Betancourt family - was not accustomed to unsolicited pleasantries. She hesitated, smiled an unlikely smile and lowered her eyes. “Thank you for saying so, Ambassador.”

  “Is Mr Nordstrom well?”

  “He has a bad chest. He is in hospital in Wethersfield, presently. He hopes to be home in a day or two.”

  “Please be sure to send him my kind regards and my best wishes for his prompt recovery.”

  “I will, Ambassador.”

  The Betancourt family summer ‘weekend’ retreat – as befitted a country hideaway where senior Democrats all the way back to FDR’s time had secretly met in conclave to foment forthcoming plots and coups - was a large, much modernised old six bedroom colonial style house dating from the middle of the last century. Walking into the lobby of the house was like walking into something out of another age. There were polished boards underfoot, ancient gas light fittings now glowing with electric bulbs, big portraits in coarse oils on the walls, and the stuffed head of an Elk; just one of a dozen mounted animal heads on the wall. In places the low oaken frames of the house might easily brain a tall man if he stood up too quickly.

  “I had the honour to meet Mr Betancourt’s daughter in New York recently,” Dobrynin told Mrs Nordstrom as the woman ushered him deeper into the house. “She seemed much recovered from her injuries. Unfortunately, I was unable to materially assist her with her present cases.”

  “Gretchen stayed with us in the spring while she was convalescing,” the woman rejoined, her voice swelling with obvious maternal pride.

  Dobrynin tried hard not to broadcast his displeasure to find the USSR’s sixty-two year old former Representative to the United Nations, Valerian Alexandrovich Zorin standing in the picture window of the lounge in which he and Dean Rusk had conferred the previous year.

  The two Russians had not met since before the Cuban Missiles War; Zorin and his co-representative - Platon Dmitriejevitsj Morozov – had been held under house arrest in the old Soviet UN legation building in New York, while Dobrynin and his staff had been transferred to a compound in Maryland thirty miles outside Washington last August. Morozov had succumbed, already broken-hearted, to the second wave of influenza which had swept through Manhattan earlier that year. The Americans called every new wave of the ‘plague’ which washed periodically across the northern states as ‘flu’ or ‘influenza’ but nobody really knew what it actually was, or when it was likely to return again. Dobrynin himself had been laid low that spring, when several older members of his staff had died.

  Back in March 1962 Zorin had viewed Dobrynin as an upstart; he had been a member of the Party almost as long as the younger man had been alive. He was old school, a product of the hardest days, a survivor of the purges and the Great Patriotic War, a man who had ridden out the Stalin years and come to an accommodation with the Khrushchev regime. When Zorin had been Ambassador in Prague in 1948 Stalin had ordered him to organise the coup d’état that toppled the last democratically elected post-1945 government. Shortly afterwards, the one remaining non-communist member of the Czech
cabinet, Jan Masaryk, had conveniently committed suicide. Masaryk’s had been a very ‘tidy’ suicide; of that variety where a man jumps from a great height in the middle of the night in his pyjamas while retaining the presence of mind to shut the window on the way out...

  Dobrynin and Zorin shook hands with stiff, cold formality.

  “You look well, Comrade Ambassador,” he murmured.

  “It is good to find you so well also, Comrade Valerian Alexandrovich,” Dobrynin replied guardedly, sensing little or none of the prickliness of their previous encounters.

  Once upon a time Zorin would have bitterly resented having to yield precedence to an upstart like Dobrynin. However, his own time had come and gone. His moment had been on Thursday 25th October 1962, two days before the Cuban Missiles War when as the USSR’s representative on the Security Council of the United Nations in New York – coincidentally a council meeting he was chairing – he had clashed with Adlai Stevenson.

  That day was etched on Zorin’s memory as if those events had been burned on his consciousness with a red hot branding iron. In the aftermath of the holocaust he had asked himself time and again if there was anything he could have done to defuse the ticking thermonuclear time bomb that day in New York.

  ‘...Let me ask you why your Government, your Foreign Minister, deliberately, cynically deceived us about the nuclear build-up in Cuba?’ Adlai Stevenson had demanded with the imperious haughtiness of a Tsarist overlord. ‘...I remind you that you didn't deny the existence of these weapons. Instead, we heard that they had suddenly become defensive weapons. But today - again, if I heard you correctly - you now say they don't exist, or that we haven’t proved they exist, with another fine flood of rhetorical scorn. All right sir, let me ask you one simple question. Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium and intermediate range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no? Don't wait for the translation: yes or no?’