by James Philip
The Angry Widow’s navigator/bomb aimer wiped the sweat off his brow and grunted disgustedly.
“I don’t suppose there’s anywhere around here where a chap can get a cup of tea, I suppose?”
Chapter 39
Tuesday 30th June 1964
HMAS Anzac, alongside HMS Triumph, Tarout Bay, Saudi Arabia
Commander Stephen Turnbull marched up the seaward companionway and stepped into what had, prior to the aircraft carrier’s conversion to a heavy repair ship – basically, a floating dockyard – been the hangar deck.
HMS Triumph had been moored just far away from the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Ammunition Ship Retainer when that she blew up to avoid crippling damage. Although a number of shells and several tons of wreckage had fallen on her old flight deck, bridge, on the quayside and in the water all around her, none of the munitions had actually detonated. Although two men onboard had been killed by falling debris, less than a dozen members of her crew had suffered serious injuries and within hours of the disaster, Triumph would have been able to cast off and go to sea under her own steam.
The two blackened, twisted parts of the Retainer lay half sunken three hundred yards away, a section of her bow canted up at an outrageous angle. The operation to salvage unexploded munitions had begun within forty-eight hours and Triumph had become the clearing house for all ‘fixed’ rounds – that is rounds which incorporated their own ‘fixed’ propellant charge – and shells, recovered from the harbour and the surrounding land which had been made or declared safe by the Royal Navy clearance teams or the Royal Engineer bomb disposal experts.
“What’s it look like, Malcolm?” Anzac’s captain inquired cheerfully of his gunnery officer. Thirty year old Malcolm Speedwell was clad in grubby dungarees, sensible attire given that from the moment the destroyer had come alongside Triumph three hours ago after her high speed run back from the Straits of Hormuz he had been clambering over the ordnance stacked on the hangar deck floor.
Speedwell was a lean man with a distance runner’s physique. A reservist he had been teaching in a Melbourne school until six months ago before joining Anzac ahead of her re-commissioning trials.
The younger man pushed back his cap.
“I wouldn’t like to load any of this,” he struggled for the word, “stuff into my guns until we’ve got all the rust and muck off them, sir,” he confessed, gesturing at pallets loaded with extraordinarily filthy, oxide streaked 4.5-inch fixed semi-armour piercing and high explosive reloads. A large number of the rounds bore chalk marks, mostly ‘ticks’ but here and there one displayed a ‘cross’.
“I’m surprised there are so many left,” Turnbull chuckled. The Tobruk and a couple of the Royal Navy frigates had come in to Tarout Bay to top up their main battery magazines in the last week or so; he had been a little afraid the shelf would be bare by the time Anzac arrived.
“Tobruk must have taken the best stuff,” the other man complained, but his heart not really in it.
“We’ll take all the HE, Malcolm,” the older man declared. “Unload some of our SAP reloads if you have to. I don’t think we’re likely to get stuck into a ship to ship knockabout in these waters.”
“No, sir.”
Turnbull noted the smaller cache of rusty 6-inch fixed rounds for HMS Tiger’s main battery. The cruiser’s advanced quick firing automatic guns could theoretically shoot twenty rounds a minute, but not those rounds. The slightest imperfection in the confirmation of a reload would result in a jam, and a potentially catastrophic turret breakdown which might take minutes or even hours to put right. In the heat of battle that might be fatal.
Anzac’s two twin 4.5-inch turrets were old-fashioned, crew handled mounts. Assuming the salvaged reloads did not foul up the magazine hoists too badly the gun crews could be relied upon to sort out any problem manually.
HMNZS Royalist, the ABNZ Squadron’s other cruiser had brought all her own main battery reloads from New Zealand. Well, every single 5.25-inch HE reload and anti-aircraft proximity fuse her crew had discovered rifling through the naval ordnance depots in Auckland and Wellington in the days before she sailed for the Gulf.
“A transport came up from Aden while we were at sea, sir,” Speedwell remembered belatedly, angry with himself for not reporting it earlier. “There’s a pile of crates set aside for Anzac. Forty-millimetre ammo, sir. Some of the rounds had been in store down there in Aden for years. But it all looks in good condition. There are clips for the single barrels and loose rounds for the belt feeds on the twin mounts; probably more than enough to fill our ready lockers twice over.”
“That’s some good news at last!”
“Yes, sir.”
Turnbull left his gunnery officer to get on with his work and went in search of Triumph’s captain to pay his respects. For all that he had a well-earned reputation for being a decidedly ‘awkward customer’, Anzac’s captain did not need reminding that the last man in the Persian Gulf he wanted to upset, in any way, shape or form, was the man who ‘owned’ practically every spare part for thousands of miles in every direction.
He headed up to the disused flight deck, now crammed with lifting derricks and workshops serviced by lumpy tractors amidst a horribly un-naval tangle of pipes and power cables. He had just entered the island bridge on the starboard side of the ship when he heard the ululating wail of air raid sirens.
The banshee wailing began far away and swept closer like a wave piling up on a beach before breaking.
Onboard Triumph the ship’s klaxons sounded.
Turnbull found former carrier’s captain on the port bridge wing, binoculars slung casually around his neck and a Sten gun in his meaty hands.
“I heard you were sniffing around the four point five inch stash,” the other man chortled. “Never fear, we made sure we held enough back for chaps like you who know how to use it!”
“Very good of you, sir,” Turnbull smiled. He looked curiously at the Sten gun.
“Yes, yes! I know we’re all supposed to be cowering behind the nearest slab of armour plating,” Triumph’s captain admitted ruefully. “And I know you can’t hit a barn door at a hundred paces with this bloody thing but blast it,” he exclaimed, turning irascible as he hefted the Sten gun, “if one of the bastards comes close enough I bloody well intend to let him have it!”
Chapter 40
Wednesday 1st July 1964
RAF Abadan, Iran
“We could have all have been killed!”
The man who had voiced this somewhat hysterical complaint was the fellow the BBC had given the title of ‘producer/director’, and theoretically the man in charge of Frank Waters little band of intrepid ‘broadcasters’. The chap’s name was ‘Brian’ – Brian Harris - and he was about Waters’s own age, although clearly of a much more nervous disposition. When they were introduced ‘Brian’ had mentioned he was ‘with Monty’ in the desert; presumably hiding under the old rascal’s caravan most of the time if today’s performance was anything to go by!
“Well,” the former SAS man grinned, “there is a war going on, old man.”
The other members of ‘the crew’ – cameraman Malcolm, sound engineer Ken and boyish general factotum Robin - were of that twenty to thirty year old generation who had grown up in the Second War, done their National Service in peace time – if they were very unlucky in Korea or Malaysia – and settled into nice safe, cushy jobs at the BBC in the years before the fiasco of October 1962. At some level they had accepted that they were in a ‘war zone’; in another they clearly did not think the ‘war’ part of the ‘war zone’ had anything to do with them.
“A bloody Russian tank almost rolled over us!” Brian protested angrily, his voice breaking with angst.
“Well,” Frank Waters shrugged, trying to be diplomatic. One had to make the effort with these civilian types. “It might have if it hadn’t been blown to bits by the anti-tank boys we were with at the time.”
“That’s the last fucking time we let you drive the fucking
truck!” This from the white lipped ‘sound man’ Ken.
The old soldier was beginning to get a little vexed by the attitude of his companions. Constructive criticism and a bit of live and let live joie de vivre was one thing; it was not as if he had allowed himself to be press ganged into the BBC to be at these blighters’ beck and call. In fact, had not the Prime Minister more or less personally begged him to do the decent thing and help out the Ministry of Information in this time of national crisis, he would have dug his heels in and stayed put in England.
Or perhaps not...
Actually he did not know what he would have done. He was putty in that woman’s hands and he had not had the heart, or the least inclination to refuse her anything; what with one thing and another how could a man refuse anything to a woman who had him drooling from both sides of this mouth?
In picturing her face he was momentarily so transported to another, dream world that he completely forgot he was sitting in a dusty, fly-blown tent with four jumped up little Bolsheviks who were under the impression he worked for them.
“Frank,” Brian demanded, “are you listening to us?”
“Er,” Margaret Thatcher’s perfect countenance cruelly dissolved from his mind’s eye and he came back down to earth with a jolt. “Why, were you saying something?”
“We can’t go on this way, Frank!”
That was usually a woman’s line? Wasn’t it?
Brian Harris seemed to get a grip of his emotions.
“You three buzz off, the Colonel and I need to have a chat.”
The other Bolsheviks sloped off into the evening, muttering mutinously.
Frank Waters sighed. Things had come to a head when he had wanted to stand up and talk to the camera as the first T-62 had hoved into view in the distance. He was only trying to be helpful.
“You might be a gold-plated bloody hero, Frank,” Brian Harris explained, badly wanting to scream in his presenter’s face. “But the rest of us are mere mortals and we plan on being living mere mortals when this thing is over and done with. You might have a death wish but we don’t!”
Frank Waters scowled.
I don’t have a death wish!
I wouldn’t have lasted this long if I had!
“That’s uncalled for,” he objected sulkily. Besides, getting killed would rather mess up his plans to – hopefully, yearningly – renew acquaintance with the astonishing woman whose smile, like Helen of Troy’s had so many others in olden times, launched him on this latest odyssey.
“Is it?” Brian retorted angrily. “We’re here to tell the people back home what is going on. How the fuck are we supposed to do that if the first time we ‘go into action’ you get us all killed?”
That was a little unfair.
It was not as if he had actually waved at the nearest T-62...
“And don’t even think about telling me we got a really good shot of ‘the action’ today. It is our job to get the best possible ‘shots’ of the action every day, not just the day we all get blown to bits! War correspondent! You’re just a bloody mad man!”
In the distance there were two explosions; Red Army artillerymen zeroing in the ground, most likely while the 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army massed opposite Basra for the final assault. During the day the Soviets had mounted two separate armoured probes exploring the strength of the Iranian forward defensive positions north of Khorramshahr.
Major General al-Mamaleki’s boys had held their nerve; that had been a pleasant surprise and one that boded well for the coming days. Michael Carver had introduced him to the Iranian tanker yesterday evening and been a little put aback that the two men already knew each other.
‘I thought you were dead, Frank!’
The two old acquaintances had sized each other up for a moment. Of the two Mirza Hasan al-Mamaleki was wearing much the better, the same handsome, marvellously moustachioed, superbly kitted out soldierly man he had always been.
‘Me too, old man,’ he had chortled.
When Carver had told him that al-Mamaleki was his ‘deputy on this front with full powers to act in my name and on my behalf’, Frank Waters might, briefly, have been susceptible to being floored by a blow from a very small feather. Later he had wondered how the Australian officers he had chatted with in the Mess at the airfield felt about things, or if they even knew about it. High command was a notoriously murky thing, and all things considered he had decided it was best not to open up that particular can of worms.
“And about that gun you insist on carrying around with you everywhere?” Brian Harris was saying peevishly. “That’s just not done. You work for the BBC now, we are neutral...”
“Steady on, old man,” Frank Waters snapped. Some things were sacrosanct; personally, he had never been ‘neutral’ about anything in his whole life and he jolly well was not going to turn over new leaf now! The bloody man would be asking him not to carry the stiletto he kept strapped to the inside of his right calf next! “Dash it! It’s only a small gun!”
His Walther PPK practically disappeared into his hand!
“BBC employees do not carry firearms!”
“This one bally well does!” And there it was; his old life and his new one in direct opposition.
Brian Harris groaned, made a visible effort to calm down.
“I was terrified this afternoon,” he confessed. “We all were. You were enjoying yourself.”
“Yes.” Frank Waters confessed.
Brian took a long, ragged breath.
“Okay, let’s start again. You haven’t a clue what I’m upset about, have you?”
Frank Waters shrugged, much in the fashion of a naughty schoolboy.
“You fellows did seem a tad rattled when we were out there in the desert,” the old soldier conceded. He was not an unreasonable man, just a born awkward case. “Look,” he continued, “I’d much rather we were all chums in this but it simply won’t work unless we’re all on the same wavelength. I came out here to report from the battlefield, not from some communications trench miles away from the front line.”
A silence settled between the two men, albeit a silence broken by the faraway crump of sporadic explosions and the frequent deafening roaring of jet aircraft taking off nearby.
“Perhaps,” Brian suggested eventually, “we should try a different approach tomorrow?”
“I’m all ears.”
“How about if you and I make a private pact that in front of the others you are the boss?”
That sounded good to the former SAS man.
Far too good to be true, nevertheless he went on listening.
“And in return,” Brian went on, “you promise to look after the rest of us and to do your level best to make sure none of us gets killed?”
Frank Waters thought about it for some moments before sticking out his right hand. Solemnly, the two men shook on the compact.
Chapter 41
Wednesday 1st July 1964
Governor’s Palace, Basra, Soviet-occupied Iraq
The dysentery which had plagued Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian had laid him low again for most of the last twenty-four hours. His uniform now hung off his wasted frame like his oversized cadet kit had on the day he had, as a skinny nineteen year old, entered the Alexander Miasnikyan Unified Military School in Yerevan, Armenia at the beginning of his military career. His physical weakness was all-pervading, there was nothing he could do to stop his hands trembling and if he attempted to stand for more than a few minutes he became nauseas.
Neither Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov nor Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik betrayed any sign of having noticed the Army Group Commander’s debilitation.
“Relax, relax,” Babadzhanian muttered.
His two most trusted field commanders stood easy, waiting patiently, silently.
“I’ll keep this short and sweet,” Babadzhanian declared hoarsely, his throat feeling like it was coated with sand, his lungs burning with every breath he took. “Operations on the
western side of the Shatt al-Arab have moved from an offensive to a consolidation phase. The movement of forces south of Basra into defensive emplacements and the build up of armour and materiel ahead of a resumption of the drive south into Kuwait is beginning...”
It took him several moments to recover his breath.
“You are wasted in the Faw Peninsula sector,” he said to Puchkov. “Your division will remain where it is. It can refit and integrate replacements around Umm Qasr but I have other work for you.”
The hard-charging commander of the 10th Guards Tank Division flashed a predatory smile.
“I want you in charge of the 19th Guards Tank Corps,” Babadzhanian told him. “Kurochnik will bring you up to speed.”
Puchkov’s smile faded.
In approximately thirty hours 19th Guards Tank Corps, bulked up with two thirds of 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army’s armour was due to hurl itself at the – supposedly flimsy – Iranian Army lines north of Khorramshahr, ahead of taking on the – probably - more robust British defences at Abadan beyond the formidable water barrier of the Karun River.
“Your predecessor,” Babadzhanian explained, “wanted to delay until all 2nd Siberians’ armour caught up with Kurochnik’s boys. We don’t have time to hang around. Whatever we do we must not allow our enemies any opportunity to regroup until all the objectives of Operation Nakazyvat have been secured.”
Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik tried very hard not to frown.
There were all sorts of outlandish rumours going around as to what was going on back home. There had been some kind of major upheaval in Chelyabinsk; half the Politburo had been replaced, Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov was gone, his place taken by Admiral of the Fleet Gorshkov. There was even loose talk that there had been some kind of disaster, possibly an explosion at the Kursk bunker. The only thing he knew for certain was that Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, First Deputy Secretary of the KGB had been, or was about to be installed as the Commissar General of the new Soviet Republic of Iraq.