by James Philip
“What about this man Babadzhanian?” The Prime Minister pressed him. “Is he some kind of superman. Like Rommel?”
Frank Waters shook his head.
“No. But he’s their best man. He’d have been one of their best tankers before the October unpleasantness, but no, he’s no Rommel or Guderian, or Patton for that matter. But then he doesn’t have to be. There’s nothing to stop him motoring all the way down to the Gulf, is there?”
Frank Waters only belatedly became aware that Airey Neave was giving him a very strange look and that the Prime Minister had gone tight-lipped.
Like an old fool he mistook the writing on the wall.
“The Iraqis will wait until the Russians own the whole shop,” he blundered on, “before they start nibbling at the fringes and stealing knick-knacks from the Red Army’s depots. Our garrison at Abadan will be up a creek without a paddle, if it isn’t already. Eventually, there will be a civil war in Iran now the Shah is gone. With what’s going on in Egypt we can forget about Nasser getting involved; as for our ‘friends’ in Arabia, well, if you’ll forgive my bluntness, they’d as soon stab us in the back as fight to save a neighbour whose oil fields are in competition with their own...”
Airey glanced to his wife, then to Margaret Thatcher.
“Frank’s just your man for wreaking havoc behind one’s enemy’s lines,” he smiled, “but not always so strong on grand strategy.”
“True,” the soldier conceded affably. “Pray tell me what I’m missing, oh wise one?” He invited his old friend, grinning broadly.
“I thought you wanted to dive back into the fray, old man?”
Oh, bugger! Frank Waters said silently as the main course – mutton and some kind of cabbage adorned with the ubiquitous turnip - was served. If he had not worked it out for himself already, he now knew that Airey Neave had got his hooks into him. Mistakenly, he had thought the Regiment was being sniffy about his leaving his chaps to their fate in Iran; actually, the chaps back at Stirling Lines had obviously been warned off.
“I’m not a bally desk wallah, old man.”
“None of us are as young as we once were, Frank,” Diana Neave observed gently.
Nicholas Ridley cleared his throat.
“It has been put to me that in this modern age of film, radio, and television it ought not to be beyond the wit of my Ministry, and the BBC, at some stage in the near future, to bring stories from ‘the front’ to the ‘home front’ in hours or days, rather than weeks. I’m thinking of the sort of thing that Barry Lankester is pioneering...”
“Lankester? Isn’t he the chap who did that Battle of Malta movie?”
“Yes, practically every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom has now seen that ‘movie’, and I daresay many tens of millions of people throughout the Commonwealth and in the United States where the big television networks engaged in a most unseemly bidding war for the rights to show it first.”
Airey Neave confirmed Frank Waters’s worst fears.
“Your fighting days are over, old man. Take it from me, retirement in the Home Counties isn’t much fun these days. You can come and work for me, or you can try your hand as a war correspondent with Nick’s outfit? What’s it to be, Frank?”
The old soldier scowled, said nothing.
He prodded his mutton with his fork; the tired flesh was as unappetising as his prospects and he barely trusted himself to speak.
The Prime Minister cleared her throat daintily.
“Now, now, Airey,” she chided mildly. “I’m sure Colonel Waters will need a little time to think things through. He has only recently survived a great ordeal, it is hardly reasonable to expect him to be thrust immediately upon a new course in life.”
“I am quite recovered, Prime Minister,” Frank Waters objected feebly.
“That is most gratifying to hear, Colonel,” Margaret Thatcher cooed.
The lady is flirting with me!
No, I must be imagining it.
Stop grinning like a Baboon, man!
“It takes more than a week or two in a KGB dungeon to knock a chap off his stride, dear lady!”
Oh, no! I didn’t just say that, did I?
However, the Prime Minister was smiling benignly.
“Well, in that case,” she declared. “There’s no reason for you not to be on the first plane leaving for the Persian Gulf,” she commanded, “bright and early tomorrow morning, Colonel Waters.”
Right then he would have lopped off his right arm if she had asked him so to do.
“Right ho,” he had mumbled dazedly.
Chapter 19
Friday 12th June 1964
HMS Alliance, 23 miles East of Canet-en-Roussillon, Western Mediterranean
“TWO HUNDRED FEET UNDER THE KEEL, SIR!”
Lieutenant-Commander Francis Barrington opened his mouth to acknowledge the report but before a sound escaped his lips the control room deck beneath his feet made a passable attempt to step several inches sideways. A moment later the thunderous detonation of the single depth charge made the submarine’s pressure hull ring like a badly cracked bell.
Closer than the first attempt!
“Wheel amidships!” He ordered coolly. “Make our heading zero-seven-zero!”
The commanding officer of Her Majesty’s Submarine Alliance resisted the temptation to look up at the compartment’s ceiling as the French frigate churned unhurriedly over the top of the boat.
He tried not to cringe as each sonar pulse burrowed into the ocean deeps; or to tense in readiness for the squealing, gravel-dragging echo of its contact with the steel shell of the submarine.
If the ship above them dumped another solo depth charge, or heaven forefend, a pattern of four, six or eight half-ton charges like she ought to have done right at the beginning of the hunt, Alliance was doomed.
Michael Philpott, the submarine’s second-in-command stepped across to join his captain at the telescope stand.
“According to the boat’s Jane’s Fighting Ships,” he announced, with the cheerful insouciance of a man discussing the latest football scores, “the pennant number seven-two-one indicates that chummy up above is the Touareg, as we thought, sir. She’s one of the Buckley class destroyer escorts the Americans transferred to the French just after the forty-five war. Not all of the ships the Yanks transferred were fitted with Hedgehog launchers but they were all designed to carry up to two hundred depth charges.”
Barrington nodded.
He was silently counting, very slowly.
One thousand and one.
One thousand and two.
One thousand and three.
One thousand and four.
He listened hard to the 3-bladed eight-and-a-half feet diameter cast manganese-bronze propellers driving the French warship away from Alliance at eleven knots.
One thousand and five.
One thousand and six.
One thousand and seven.
One thousand and eight.
It was almost more than he could do not to demand of the man on the hydrophones: “Charges in the water yet?” But he held his peace, and went on counting.
One thousand and nine.
One thousand and ten.
One thousand and eleven.
One thousand and twelve.
“Port ten!” He whispered urgently. “Come to zero-two-zero!” He patted Michael Philpott’s shoulder and moved across to stand behind the man on the hydrophones. He bent down to quietly speak, very confidentially in the man’s ear. “Tell me as soon as she turns. I need to know whether she goes right or left.”
Barrington went back to the plot table.
“The surface target has re-commenced a general sonar sweep, sir!”
He heard the pinging of the French frigate’s sonar drifting into the distance; and went on redrawing and fine-tuning his plans.
“Make our depth one-five-zero please, Number One.”
The submarine sank slowly into the deeps of the Gulf of Lions as she tu
rned on a northerly heading.
“Touareg?” He prompted his second-in-command.
“She was formerly the USS Bright, Skipper. She was built by the Western Pipe and Steel Company at the San Pedro Bay Shipyard. That’s the modern port of Los Angeles, I think. Completed in 1944, and handed over to the French in November 1950.”
Barrington grimaced.
“She’s a long way from home now.”
The Touareg’s screws had very nearly receded beyond the range of human hearing.
Alliance steadied on her new course.
“The bottom shoals without warning in these parts, Skipper,” Michael Philpott remarked.
“Yes. The people upstairs,” Barrington rolled his eyes to the bulkhead, smiled ruefully, “know that too, Number One.”
“The Touareg is turning, sir!” Hissed the hydrophone operator. “Turning LEFT. Repeat. TURNING LEFT.”
Francis Barrington sighed.
“I don’t think the chap on the bridge of that ship has played this particular game of cat and mouse before tonight,” he remarked, just loud enough for everybody in the control room to hear it.
If the French captain had a Hedgehog launcher he would have used it on his first attack run.
The Hedgehog – or as it was more prosaically known, the ‘Royal Navy Anti-Submarine projector’ – had been developed in the middle years of the 1939-45 war to overcome two apparently insuperable problems faced by all surface ships attacking submerged targets. The first of these problems was that sonar contact with a submerged target was lost as the attacking ship got to the crucial phase of its depth charge run; the obvious solution was to find a way of ‘throwing’ depth charges ahead of the attacking ship while it still held the target submarine in its sonar beam. The second problem was that dumping large bombs over the stern of a ship into the water ‘around’ where one thought a target was located was an inherently inefficient means of destroying the said target; since it relied upon the hydrostatic shockwaves of relatively distant explosions to damage targets, rather than employing the much more efficacious method of directly ‘hitting’ the target.
Hedgehog solved both problems.
Firstly, it could be discharged at a submerged target while that target was still locked in the beam of the ship’s forward looking active sonar; and secondly, a single hit by a round fired from it was almost always sufficient to breach the pressure hull of a submerged submarine.
In essence, the hedgehog was no more or less than a large multiple ‘spigot mortar’ capable of discharging some or all of its twenty-four sixty-four pound contact-fused rounds a distance of up to three hundred yards ahead of the vessel upon which it was mounted. Each seven-inch calibre round had a warhead of thirty-five pounds of Torpex. Experience in the Second World War was that whereas conventional depth charge attacks resulted in one kill in every sixty attacks; attacks by Hedgehog-equipped escorts had achieved a kill rate of better than one in six U-boats.
The Touareg ought to have used its Hedgehog and then run over Alliance’s sinking corpse with a full pattern of at least eight big half-ton depth charges set to detonate half-way to the bottom. Instead, the captain of the frigate had minced around for over an hour before he started speculatively dropping single charges into the water; very much as if he thought he was on a training exercise or he did not actually believe a single word his sonar men were telling him.
The French must have got a radar fix on Alliance’s snorkel and come to investigate. If they did not know what they were looking at or did not credit that an enemy submarine could be operating so close inshore, perhaps his counterpart on the bridge of Touareg had convinced himself he was chasing shadows?
“All stop!” Barrington commanded. The tone of his voice was suddenly agate hard. “Try to hold her at this depth please without turning the screws, Number One. Pass the word, all quiet; as quiet as the grave please.”
Alliance was already running ‘silent’; it did no harm to warn the crew that their captain had switched from evasion to hunter-killer mode.
The Touareg was searching in the deeper water to the south.
Barrington considered his options.
His orders were to remain on station undetected for as long as possible monitoring French and Spanish naval activity either side of the border. Now that the enemy knew – or at least strongly suspected – that Alliance was in the area his mission had altered. His rules of engagement permitted him to defend himself, or to take offensive action against enemy warships ‘as necessary’.
The Touareg had dropped a couple of depth charges on him; now she was attempting to re-acquire her lost target. The next time Alliance was detected by the frigate’s sonar there might not be an accommodating thermocline between her and the Touareg, conveniently deflecting the sonar beam and persuading his counterpart that he was chasing phantoms.
“Range to target?”
“Four thousand yards, sir!”
“Calculate a firing solution for the Mark Twenty in the aft starboard tube, Number One.”
The Mark Twenty twenty-one inch torpedo was a passive sonar homing torpedo with a two hundred pound warhead and a range of over ten thousand yards. Once upon a time Francis Barrington would have regarded loosing off a ‘fire and forget’ missile at one’s foes and stealthily creeping away to have been an underhand sort of way to wage war.
Damnably un-English!
But that was then and this was now.
The French had come within a whisker of sinking the County class destroyer HMS Hampshire in an unprovoked sneak attack. Here in the Mediterranean any French warship was fair game until such time as Flag Officer Submarines at Malta told Alliance’s captain differently.
If he could lurk unseen beneath a transient thermocline that had no right to be where it was, and cold-heartedly sink his hunter at the flick of a button, so be it. Much though he considered himself to be a passably decent, moral man, Francis Barrington was not about to lose sleep over doing his duty.
Chapter 20
Saturday 13th June
Camp David, Catoctin Mountains, Maryland
In appearance Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy had aged ten years in the last six months. In August the President of the United States of America was going to have to fight for his political life in New Jersey in a hotly contested Democratic Party Convention; and right now it was anybody’s guess whether Hubert Humphrey or Eugene McCarthy, would beat his brother Jack to the nomination. That was bad enough but what was ten times worse was that even if Jack got nominated, the latest Gallup Poll showed him trailing behind independent Southern Democrat George Wallace in the South – which he had to carry to have any chance of re-election – and practically everywhere else he was locked in a losing race with whichever of the likely Republicans – Nelson Rockefeller, Barry Goldwater, Henry Cabot Lodge or perhaps, even Richard Nixon who had yet to declare for the race - might eventually win the Great Old Party’s nomination. In the circumstances the choice of Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall to host the Convention in August was wholly appropriate because the outcome was nothing short of a winner takes all crap shoot!
Unlike his younger – by over two decades – fellow Administration member, fifty-nine year old Secretary of State J. William Fulbright looked relatively fit and healthily tanned from his recent perambulations around the Mediterranean and the Middle East. He was a man who gave every indication that he was relishing the crisis management of his country’s much weakened foreign policy hand. While others close to the President, National Security Advisor McGeorge ‘Mac’ Bundy and CIA Director John McCone, continued to press for a more ‘pro-active stance’ in the Middle East and South East Asia, and a ‘more conciliatory approach’ to former NATO, Australasian and southern African ‘friends’, he had insisted on a policy based on ‘the facts on the ground’ that implicitly recognised that there were no circumstances in which the United States would risk another global war. The homeland had suffered enough already. Whereas, the dramatically revised
‘Soviet picture’ which was slowly emerging from the first snippets of British Jericho material, the renewed discussions with Ambassador Dobrynin and one-time Soviet United Nations Representative Zorin, had alarmed – panicked actually – several of the President’s other men, Fulbright had taken the changing geopolitical realities in his stride. The very fact that the Red Army was capable of putting two thousand tanks and a quarter of a million men in the field in Iran and Iraq spoke eloquently to the reality of the World situation; the Jericho ‘windfall’ had simply confirmed what they already suspected.
Moreover, the fact that the British were in effect, demanding payment ‘on the barrel’ for every small consignment of raw Jericho material, and were still haggling about the price to be paid for the encryption keys to the bulk of the encoded transcripts thus far supplied to the National Security Agency, had eroded what little was left of his patience with the ‘old country’.
Fulbright was not a man who liked to agree with the CIA – on anything in general or particular – but he was beginning to come around to Langley’s point of view about Margaret Thatcher’s increasingly bellicose administration in Oxford, England.
The day was coming when something would have to be done about ‘that woman’!
Bobby Kennedy drained his cup of coffee and like a condemned man rose stiffly to his feet, shot his cuffs and straightened his shoulders, ready to walk to the gallows.
Fulbright collected his papers and filed them unhurriedly into a slim attaché case which he put under his arm as he got to his feet. If Bobby Kennedy had had to walk the hard yards he had in his two decades in the Senate he would not have been half as spooked as he was this morning.
Okay, Turner Catledge of The New York Times and Ben Bradlee of Newsweek had the story that, quote ‘senior Administration figures have been in discussions with representatives of the Soviet Government’. In Fulbright’s opinion the Administration ought to have been ‘in discussions’ with Dobrynin and Zorin the day after the October War; and that the President had vetoed any attempt to re-open Dean Rusk’s abortive post-war dialogue until recently was, in retrospect, a bad mistake. The only thing that had really surprised Fulbright was that some idiot in the CIA had not already blabbed to the media about Jericho.