by James Philip
Michael Carver stiffly picked himself up off the floor.
There had been no gas alarm sounded so he pulled off his mask
He sniffed, looked around.
Either the Red Army was short of big guns or of ammunition, or of both. Whichever condition applied it probably meant that the massed armour of the army bearing down on Khorramshahr was also, most likely, short of fuel. The Soviets were not anticipating a long fight, or if they were, they were in no state to sustain it.
“Send to Admiral Davey,” he prefaced. “IMMEDIATE AND MOST SECRET.” He paused, composing his thoughts. “ALL PLANNED OPERATIONS ARE GO. STOP. REPEAT GO. STOP. GOOD LUCK AND DAMN THE TORPEDOES. MESSAGE ENDS.”
Chapter 47
Thursday 2nd July 1964
Foreign Ministry Annexe, Kuybyshev Prospekt, Sverdlovsk
Sixty-four year old Vasili Vasilyevich Kuznetsov, until forty-eight hours ago one of four First Deputy Foreign Ministers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had hesitated before demanding a face to face meeting with the two senior members of the newly reconstituted Troika. Under the former ‘collective leadership’ arrangements his boss, Alexei Kosygin had overseen the post Cuban Missiles War Five-year Emergency War Plan and Foreign Policy – something of an oxymoron in the present situation since the foreign policy of the Motherland had been until a few days ago to wage war in every practical way against the murderers of October 1962 – while Kuznetsov had ‘managed’ the Western European Department. In this role he had worked closely with First Secretary of the KGB Shelepin and his deputy, Yuri Andropov. In that capacity he had been instrumental in the initial post-war facilitation of Red Dawn ‘actions’ in the Mediterranean, France, and the United Kingdom; and in recent months, the dismantling of several those networks abroad and the purging of its senior officers at home. Throughout, he had proved himself to be pathologically loyal to the Party, ideologically ‘sound’ and diligent in the discharge of his duties. Given his age, deep into his sixties, he was also physically robust and able. However, since he had been inherited his old friend Alexei Kosygin’s ‘Foreign Ministry’, he was beginning to wish that, like other surviving senior members of the pre-war Party elite who had never previously aspired to the highest offices, he too had been put out to pasture in a modest country dacha.
Kuznetsov would have been perfectly happy to see out his declining years as the governor of a collective farm, or the director of road repairs for some remote province far from the dangerous tensions of the capital. He was starting to feel as if an invisible deadly plague had blown through Sverdlovsk and everybody – except him – had contracted some kind of death wish.
Even if the Americans kept to their side of the bargain Alexei Kosygin and he had brokered with US Special Emissary Thompson in Chelyabinsk, a prospect which was so unlikely as to be utterly implausible in any sane universe; what was there to stop the British sending their V-Bombers back to the Motherland to finish General LeMay’s unfinished business?
What profound lesson, for example, had the great men of the Politburo or the ‘brilliant’ men around Brezhnev, Shelepin and Gorshkov concluded from the post-Cuban Missiles experience that had convinced them that the British would meekly bow to ‘the inevitable’, and pack up their guns and go home in the Persian Gulf?
Had the brutal lessons of the Mediterranean campaign taught them nothing?
By seizing back Cyprus the British had not only outflanked Red Dawn in Turkey but re-installed their air force and their navy in the Eastern Mediterranean. The British had got close enough to Nasser in Egypt – the same Nasser a British Prime Minister had likened to Adolf Hitler and attempted to depose by force only less than a decade ago – to completely destabilise the one significant military power in the Middle East for years to come. Had his superiors learned nothing from the Battle of Malta? Yes that had been a strategic diversion, not a coup de main; so what? Practically every naval asset and nine out of every ten irreplaceable soldiers, sailors and airmen thrown into that desperate ‘master stroke’ had been lost, including over two thousand elite airborne and Spetsnaz troopers and nearly half of the airlift capability of the whole Red Air Force! As for the Red Navy; all that now survived ‘west of Suez’ were a few old submarines hiding in the Black Sea!
Even as he had been haggling over the ‘essentials’ of an Armistice with the Americans, that self-important imbecile Gorshkov had come within a whisker of scuppering the whole ‘peace process’!
What had the man been thinking torpedoing a US warship in the Arabian Sea in the middle of the most sensitive diplomatic negotiations in the history of the Soviet Union?
What was going to happen back in Philadelphia when it became publicly known that all the President’s men had, at the time of the sinking, elected not to worry about the tiny matter of sunken cruiser and the loss of over a hundred men of her crew?
Sometimes he honestly wondered if his superiors had the remotest idea what they were doing!
Did his masters have no concept of what was really going on?
The Kennedy Administration’s had come to a historic determination that the guiding principle of American policy would be the avoidance of another global war. The axiomatic corollary to this was President Kennedy needed to sell the story that he had averted a new global catastrophe and safeguarded cheap Arabian oil for US industry and consumers. If blood had to be spilled then it was supposed to be British blood; and when that happened he had to be able to make the case that sooner or later, somebody had had to put a stop to the British government’s seemingly insatiable post-imperial warmongering before they blew up the whole World!
Meanwhile, while the collective leadership had been engaged in the most sensitive and dangerous talks with the Americans since the Cuban Missiles War, the Red Navy had been pursuing its own ‘torpedo-based foreign policy’!
It beggared credulity!
Perhaps Hitler had been right; the big lies were the best...
Both Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev and Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin were looking at Kuznetsov with the thoughtful suspicion of men who had never imagined the day would come, when a faithful old Party apparatchik like him would stick his head above the parapet. Kuznetsov had never seen that day coming either; but then his reading of the telegrams and the reports pouring into the Foreign Office building on Lenin Avenue, was obviously at a complete divergence from everybody else’s.
Brezhnev and Shelepin understood that most of the people around them were predominantly preoccupied with what the recent deaths of Kosygin and Chuikov signified for them personally. In this climate of uncertainty, mistrust and naked fear they intuitively mistrusted practically everything anybody said to them unless it specifically conformed to what they had already decided coincided with their own, personal best interests. This was therefore, the worst possible time to be asking inconvenient questions.
This was especially so because each ‘leader’ had had his own entourage of faithful retainers and ambitious younger ‘Party climbers’ to nourish and promote, none of whom were senior enough to have shared their masters’ fate in the wrecked Kursk Bunker complex. Those men – and women – were presently preoccupied vying for advantage in the chaotic aftermath of the disaster, forming a volatile caucus of discontent and a fertile medium upon which the regime’s enemies might easy foment a future coup. The easiest way for one of the young ‘pretenders’ currently seeking rapid advancement into the role, job or position of a dead or seriously injured government or Party official was to show his or her ability to make problems ‘go away’.
Or to denounce anybody who was obviously better qualified...
It was in this atmosphere that Kuznetsov was doing his best to ensure that the biggest, most intractable problem facing the Motherland did not ‘go away’. In fact, right now he was brandishing it in the faces of two men who could condemn him to a penal battalion with a casual flick of the finger.
Vasili Vasilyevich Kuznetsov felt it to be his duty to become ‘a problem’ to
the ruling Troika; somebody had to speak out against the madness before it was too late.
Kuznetsov had always been Kosygin’s man, anonymous with an unblemished record; one of those loyalists who had never questioned anything, who had blindly – right or wrong - following every instruction from on high. The only thing in his favour was that because he had always been Kosygin's man, he was never going to be a viable figurehead around whom the suddenly dispossessed ‘cliques’ might collect.
“Comrades,” Kuznetsov prefaced apologetically. “Thank you for making time for this meeting.” The second level, bare-walled room in the fallout shelter was coolly clammy. The building above it was being repopulated by Ministry ‘refugees’ from Chelyabinsk and had been empty until twenty-four hours ago, surplus to requirements. Chairs had been found from somewhere and the three men sat around a table nursing glasses of Vodka. Brezhnev was already on his second glass; Shelepin had sipped distrustfully at his drink, while Kuznetsov was wistfully eying the rest of the bottle.
He sighed.
“I have only recently become aware of the full details of our somewhat,” he grimaced uncomfortably, “abbreviated recent contacts with the British and other events outside my former sphere of responsibility. You have done me the honour of appointing me to my current post,” he hesitated, feeling the thin ice cracking under his feet, “and it is my duty to advise you to the best of my humble abilities, Comrades.”
Shelepin and Brezhnev had agreed to this unscheduled ‘conference’ at this place because their staffs could not agree another suitable location at short notice. The decision to transfer the Politburo and the surviving administrative machinery of the Troika to Sverdlovsk the day after the attack on the Kursk Bunker, had risked paralysing key ministries for several days but Brezhnev and Shelepin, Andropov and others, including Admiral Gorshkov had deemed it necessary lest the attack on the Kursk Bunker was the prelude to an internal Party putsch. They were all men who had first come to prominence under Stalin, and Nikita Khrushchev had been no less conspiracy adverse than the ‘man of steel’. The maxim was that it was better to see plots and coups where there were none; than to risk missing the real thing. Everybody agreed that the British V-Bombers which flown through the Red Air Force’s defences undetected and unopposed until moments before the bombs began to drop - with terrifying precision into the beating heart of the regime – could not have struck with such pin point precision without the help of traitorous elements in the highest levels of the government. There could be no other explanation for the disaster than that counter revolutionary elements in Chelyabinsk had been working in league with the enemy. There must were traitors in their midst and Shelepin’s men were already conducting the first interrogations in the basements of KGB detention centres across the city.
At the very moment the Motherland needed to be most focussed on the business in hand in the Persian Gulf, the leadership and the whole Sverdlovsk-Chelyabinsk command zone was a chaos of arrests, suspicions and denouncements.
“It is my understanding that Comrade Gorshkov is travelling to Iraq at this time?” Kuznetsov inquired rhetorically.
The other men nodded.
“I have no military insights,” the Foreign Minister confessed, “on the situation on the ground or at sea, or in the air in the Middle East but forgive me,” he swallowed dry-mouthed, “I feel that in recent days military considerations seem to have rather overtaken ‘political’ considerations.”
Shelepin shook his head.
“Say what you mean to say Vasili Vasilyevich!” He demanded, his brow furrowing with impatience.
“Forgive me,” the older man gulped. The First Director of the KGB had been the man to whom Nikita Khrushchev had entrusted the ‘tidying up’ of the entire security apparatus of the USSR in the late fifties; the man to whom the High Command had turned to make the embarrassing evidence about what had happened in the Katyn Forest in 1940 ‘disappear’.
“It was my working assumption throughout my talks with Special Emissary Thompson that similar bilateral exchanges were going on in secret with the British. That in fact the two Imperialist aggressors were being, in effect played off against each other to our advantage.”
The other men were looking at him with blank-eyed hostility.
“Comrades,” he pleaded, knowing that like a mouse that had eventually found the courage to roar in the face of not one, but two hungry lions, he might be sealing his own fate, “this is madness.”
“Madness?” Shelepin purred threateningly.
“Comrades, I am a good Party man. I am a patriot. I am an old man, my family is gone and I do not care what happens to me personally. I believe we have confused regaining control of the Krasnaya Zarya abomination with avenging ourselves on the West; and now we have confused achieving a quick victory in the Persian Gulf with the long term interests of the Motherland. The resources we have frittered away in Iraq would have been much better invested in France to secure the Krasnaya Zarya regime in the south; a regime now possibly critically undermined by the destruction of its fleet and the blockade of the Gulf of Lions by British submarines. Likewise, if we had allowed Krasnaya Zarya to run its course, the whole of the Balkans and northern Italy would now be in our hands; admittedly, under the stewardship of zealots but nevertheless fanatics nominally under our flag. As it is our territorial gains in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Aegean and Turkey remain outflanked and threatened by British naval power, and our hold over those now mostly wasted areas is tenuous at best. The tank divisions we have ‘used up’ seizing hundreds of square kilometres of useless desert and marshland south of Baghdad ought to have been employed to secure our hold on the Anatolian littoral, Comrades. Southern France ought to have been a bridgehead from which to intimidate Franco’s Spain which would, inevitably have forced the British to devote resources they don’t have to guarantee the security of the Channel coast of Northern France. Instead, we are fighting the British in the Persian Gulf for oilfields that we don’t need. We already have the oil of the Caucasus and of Iraqi Kurdistan. Why are we bankrupting our military capabilities south of Baghdad? It is madness, Comrades!”
Leonid Brezhnev drained his glass and poured another measure of Vodka.
“We will build new tanks. We will train new soldiers,” he grunted. “I know you are a good Party man, Vasili Vasilyevich. You may even be right in your analysis. Before the Cuban Missiles War we were surrounded by enemies but we were powerful, we could afford to play the long game, to ‘spread ourselves thinly’, as they say, in many places and still be strong in many, many other places. Testing the British in the Western Mediterranean was a gamble. It was Chuikov’s idea. It was a mistake but we had no way to reinforce our French ‘friends’. Sometimes, one must throw one’s ‘friends’, particularly the fanatical ones, to the wolves. Besides, Krasnaya Zarya has served its purpose.”
Brezhnev drained his latest glass and rose heavily to his feet.
“I do not think the British will bomb us ‘back to the stone age’,” he declared morosely. “There is no profit in that for them. This they know. Hopefully, they will bomb the Americans!”
Shelepin put down his half-empty glass and stood up.
“That’s too much to hope for,” he scoffed sourly.
He eyed Kuznetsov like a cat eying a vanquished competitor, with contemptuous dismissal.
“In days to come we shall remember who was true to the Party.”
Kuznetsov had so much more he had to say yet when he opened his mouth but no words came forth.
Chapter 48
23:08 Hours
Thursday 2nd July 1964
Dulaim Province, Iraq
The two 617 Squadron Avro Vulcans had taken off from Dhahran-Damman Air Base after dusk, climbed to thirty-four thousand feet over Sinai and ‘loitered’, awaiting orders. Ninety minutes after take-off they took turns topping off their tanks from a 214 Squadron Vickers Valiant. Both Vulcans – nicknamed by their crews Just Jane and Rattle and Shake were adorne
d with appropriately lascivious fuselage art – carried a single Yellow Sun free fall bomb fitted with a Red Snow W28 one megaton thermonuclear warhead.
The Red Snow devices had been supplied to the RAF pre-October War for fitting to the Blue Steel stand-off missile then under development in the United Kingdom. The warheads carried by the two 617 Squadron Vulcans were unmodified US Mk 28 hydrogen bombs engineered to marry up with the standard Yellow Sun chassis. There had been brief debate about whether it was appropriate to employ ‘American’ weapons on this particularly ‘British’ mission; however since the only other option was to employ either the four hundred kiloton (tested) version of the Green Grass all-British bomb, or the (untested) one megaton version of the warhead which nobody knew for sure would actually initiate, matters of national pride and sovereign propriety had been set aside. In any event a four hundred kiloton warhead was not going to do the job; and a one megaton bomb that might, or might not explode when one pulled the trigger was a ‘non starter’. The decision had gone all the way back up the chain of command to Oxford, where the Chief of the Defence Staff had explained the situation to the Prime Minister and that lady had plumped for Red Snow.
The crew of Vulcan Just Jane had purloined the aircraft name and its art, a nubile young lady sitting astride a plummeting bomb, from the nose of a Lancaster bomber on which the pilot’s uncle had flown thirty missions to Germany in 1944. When a man flew with 617 Squadron the legacy of the Dambusters; Guy Gibson, Leonard Cheshire and a host of other Bomber Command legends flew on one’s shoulders like guardian angels.
Après moi le Deluge!
After me, the flood!
Dulaim Province stretched from Baghdad to the Syrian border in the northwest, and from the Jordanian border in the west to the Saudi border to the south west. Named for the tribes which had historically laid claim to much of the uninhabited, virtually uninhabitable Syrian Desert of Iraq it was fifty thousand square miles of – mostly – unpopulated wilderness. The further west one flew from Baghdad the fewer the settlements, beyond Al-Fallujah and Ramadi there was mile upon mile of...nothing.