by James Philip
Puchkov knew he did not need to tell Kurochnik any of this. Kulikov, the Army Commander, was a well-connected Party loyalist to whom command of 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army was a stepping stone to the Chief of Staff’s post and a seat on the Politburo sometime in the next five years. Nobody doubted Kulikov was also a very competent soldier, albeit of the cautious, methodical kind; but Babadzhanian would not have sent his most trusted mad dog tank commander across the river if Kulikov was actually the hard charger he thought he was!
What needed to be done tonight and in the next day or two was a job for an old school tanker, not one of the leading members of the ‘new wave’. Left to his own devices Kulikov would feint this way and that, box clever until he saw an opening to go in for the kill; when what was needed was somebody, like Puchkov, to wade straight into the fight and deliver a quick, brutal, crushing knockout blow.
Puchkov looked at his watch.
Not long to go now.
Time was his enemy.
His artillery would run out of ammunition inside three hours if it failed to observe proper discipline. Kurochnik’s tanks had full shell racks but that was all; there were no reloads south of Baghdad. Likewise, once his tanks ran out of fuel that was that. It was a prospect which might have daunted a lesser man.
Puchkov’s own 10th Guards Tank Division was currently laagered threatening the Kuwaiti border east of the port of Umm Qasr. He had had precisely nineteen serviceable T-62s – of the one hundred and sixty he had entered Iran with three months ago - by the time what was left of the Iraqi Army had fled in panic into Kuwait. Most of the tanks he had started the campaign with lay broken, cannibalised and abandoned along fifteen hundred kilometres of impossible mountain and desert roads between the Caucasus and the Persian Gulf.
Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik was worried.
Not because he had any actual evidence that the final offensive of the Iraq War was going to be particularly bloody, or in any way problematic but because ever since Army Group South had crashed into northern Iran he had been asking himself if, and when, the enemy would make a stand.
After Abadan there was nowhere left to make that ‘stand’.
Red Army and KGB Intelligence reported that all that stood between his lines and Abadan was the remnants of several Imperial Iranian tank brigades, about fifty or sixty tanks – British supplied Centurions and American M-48s, neither of which he considered a match for his T-62s in a stand up fight – in and around Khorramshahr. The Iranians had been engaged in and significantly weakened in vicious battles first with the Iraqis, and then with their own people in the east while Army Group South had still been subduing the north. The British were known to have strengthened their garrison on Abadan Island but they had only about thirty tanks at most, a few aircraft and a couple of batteries of surface-to-air missiles; if the British had not been cowering all this time behind the water barrier of the Karun River his armour would have run straight over them without noticing them!
But still Kurochnik fretted.
It was not the pressure of having high command suddenly thrust upon him. He had been yearning for this day since he was a cadet; no, nor was it the odd sensation of separation he felt from the front, of no longer being in the rifle line with his boys. He had always known that this was inevitable someday. No, what really troubled him was a thing he had never expected at this elevated level of combat command; specifically, how easily a man could be euphorically swept along by a tide of events over which he had absolutely no control. Previously, he had exercised command on the basis of what he could see with his own eyes. He had dealt with whatever was in front of him and afterwards, worried about the next step when he got used to the idea he was still alive. In the last few weeks he had had undreamed of responsibility, the power to influence the lives and fates of tens of thousands of men, to in some small way make history; in retrospect he now realised that he had actually been in control of very little. As a battalion and regimental commander he had been in command of everything; now he was like the conductor of an orchestra, frantically waving his arms but totally in the hands of his musicians, trusting to other virtuosos.
Bizarrely, he found himself wondering what it must be like sitting on a barrel drifting down the Arvand River, gripped by the tide, his destiny to be carried inexorably down the Shatt al-Arab to the blue waters of the Persian Gulf...
“What is it?” Puchkov demanded, drawing Kurochnik aside and lowering his voice.
The former paratrooper was shorter than the towering scarred tanker.
“The last couple of days I’ve been thinking about that time in Urmia,” he confided. “Once I knew your boys were coming up the road I knew everything would turn out okay in the end.”
Puchkov scowled.
“This is a big thing,” he retorted. “You haven’t been here before. I have been here before. Any man who says he doesn’t think he’s about to put his hand into a meat grinder before a big attack is a liar, Comrade Konstantin Yakovlevich.”
The two men made eye contact, two hard, battle-tempered men neither of whom could afford the luxury of doubt.
While they had been talking both men had been peripherally aware of the constant low-level jabbering of voices, many distorted by interference and the constant tapping patter of Morse code transmissions seeping out of the nearby communications trucks.
It was several seconds before both Puchkov and Kurochnik became aware of the unnatural...silence.
A man cursed angrily from within the nearest radio lorry.
“Everything’s fucking dead...”
“What’s dead?” Kurochnik demanded irritably.
The stillness, the sudden quietness seemed horribly threatening.
“All the fucking radios, sir!”
“What about the fucking radios?”
“Everything just died...”
Chapter 54
23:15 Hours
Thursday 2nd July 1964
HMAS Anzac, Arvand River south of Abadan
The destroyer had felt its way up river like a blind man in a flood. Observing complete electrical ‘silence’ with every piece of modern communications and radar equipment physically switched off, Anzac had groped into the black waters at the entrance to the Shatt al-Arab with her captain praying that the bar had not shifted since his last reconnaissance four weeks ago. Creeping forward showing only a shaded stern lamp, Commander Stephen Turnbull had expected the Battle class destroyer to run aground at any moment.
He had queried the order forbidding the use of sonar to ‘ping’ the way ahead but been tersely informed by the flagship that ‘all ships in the gun line will observe a complete electronic blackout’.
Stephen Turnbull stalked his bridge like a caged big cat.
The sky was strangely overcast, the stars only occasionally twinkling through gaps in the clouds. On the water the darkness was stygian. It was virtually impossible to visually distinguish the banks from the stream. Every twenty minutes Anzac idled in the stream, put an old-fashioned lead over the side and plumbed the depth of the channel beneath her keel. More than once she had almost touched bottom. Behind her HMS Diamond, the big Daring class fleet destroyer sometimes ran so close that lookouts on Anzac’s stern and Diamond’s bow had no option but to frantically signal each other with hooded torches to avoid a collision. Behind Diamond the flagship, Tiger was invisible, the cruiser’s silhouette lost in the impenetrable gloom. Nobody on Anzac had any way of knowing if HMAS Tobruk or the old New Zealand cruiser Royalist were still in company.
Unable to use his sonar to keep in the middle of the deep channel, Anzac had crawled north. As midnight drew near the leading ship of the Persian Gulf gun line was less than half way to Abadan.
Turnbull was a wise enough old hand to know that Admiral Davey would not have hobbled Anzac with the electronic ‘blackout’ unless he had good reason; but it vexed him not to know what that reason was!
If crawling up the Shatt al-Arab blindfold had been the plan all along;
why the Devil had the squadron not trained for the eventuality?
Shades of the disaster in the Java Sea all those years ago...
In the face of a greatly superior enemy fleet the beleaguered ABDA – American, British, Dutch and Australian – force had been beset by confused and contradictory orders, and was eventually harried to its doom. It had taken Stephen Harper most of the last two decades to forgive the men responsible for that shambles...
Suddenly, he blinked into the night.
Was that a shooting star?
Or lightning?
Having caught exactly the same brief flash of light at the edges of their peripheral vision, the bridge lookouts had trained their glasses a point west of due north
There was another spike of light.
Not in the sky but somewhere below the horizon which fleetingly lit the heavens and subsided to black.
“Was that big nuke?” One man asked hesitantly.
In a moment Stephen Harper understood the electronic ‘blackout’.
Big bombs detonated so high in the atmosphere that their fireball barely kissed the ground miles below sometimes – given the right atmospheric conditions - radiated a massive electro-magnetic pulse of energy, an EMP which was capable of overloading and short-circuiting electronic equipment scores, perhaps hundreds of miles away. Nearer to the explosion transformers would fail, power lines burn out under massive short-lived voltage overloads, and transistors, capacitors and fuses would self-destruct or trip out. Sometimes circuitry would spontaneous catch fire if the EMP was big enough and close enough.
Arc Light...
“The flagship is signalling, sir!”
Two miles down the river and a little further to the right hand side of the main channel a big lamp was winking high on the Tiger’s bridge.
“SWITCH EVERYTHING BACK ON STOP!”
The yeoman repeating the message sounded...baffled.
“PROCEED WITH ALL SPEED TO AL SEEBA AND ANCHOR IRAN SIDE OF CHANNEL STOP!”
Past Al Seeba on the Iraq bank of the Arvand River the waterway proscribed a huge westward semi-circle. Anchored in the main channel opposite Al Seeba the gun line would be in an ideal position to provide ground controlled indirect fire support to the Allied forces on Abadan Island and around Khorramshahr.
“GUN LINE WILL ANCHOR IN LINE ASTERN IN SAILING ORDER TO PRESENT STARBOARD BROADSIDES TO THE ENEMY MESSAGE ENDS!”
Stephen Turnbull chuckled to himself in the darkness.
“Sonar!” He called. “Start active pinging. Warn the engine room to be ready to make revs for up to ten knots!”
Things would start to get really hot very soon now.
Chapter 55
23:51 Hours
Thursday 2nd July 1964
Al-Rasheed Air Base, South West Baghdad
The Defence Minister of the Soviet Union had been unceremoniously rushed to the nearest air raid shelter while the crew of his Tupolev Tu-114 made urgent preparations to get the aircraft back into the air. Things only began to calm down – a little – when there were no subsequent nuclear strikes. A few minutes before midnight Admiral of the Fleet Sergey Georgiyevich Gorshkov ordered his bodyguards to take him to the Air Defence Control Centre located on the perimeter of the air base.
“What happened?” He demanded, storming into the strangely darkened basement room beneath the old control tower. Some of the electric lights were on but all the radar screens were dead. The familiar background chatter of radio talk was absent.
The Red Air Force commander of the Al-Rasheed Air Base stamped to attention before the newcomer.
Two suspected enemy aircraft had been picked up at extreme range by forward mobile radar stations located in the Syrian Desert some one hundred and fifty kilometres west of Baghdad. Thereafter, both contacts had been tracked as they flew arrow straight courses towards central Iraq.
Neither aircraft had at any time deviated from its course.
Neither aircraft had attempted to jam ground or airborne radio and radar frequencies.
“They just kept on coming,” the base commander reported. “Even when they were ‘locked up’ by several S-75 batteries they just kept coming. No evasive manoeuvres, no counter measures. They ignored the missiles coming towards them...”
The first big bomb had gone off several kilometres above Buhayrat ath-Tharthar, a man-made two thousand square kilometre lake designed to collect and contain the spring flood waters of the Tigris, located some one hundred kilometres north west of Baghdad. The bomb had exploded roughly equidistant – some thirty-five to forty kilometres from the two nearest concentrations of population, in Samarra and Ramadi.
The second bomb had gone off above an area known as the Karbala Gap more than a hundred kilometres south east of the capital, some forty-five kilometres northwest of the nearest major town, Karbala.
Gorshkov suddenly understood what had happened and why.
The British had mounted two suicide raids to drop big thermonuclear bombs in two locations where they could be assured that there would be few, if any civilian casualties.
The RAF could have easily bombed Baghdad and Basra.
Targeting the two cities would have generated equally disruptive electro-magnetic pulses and killed thousands, possibly tens of thousands of Soviet combatants; but the British had been too squeamish to do that.
It was a lesson that Sergey Georgiyevich Gorshkov would file away in his pocket for later. In the meantime he did not need to consult a tactical or strategic genius to know that the bombing of central Iraq was anything other than the calculated prelude to some kind of massive counter attack.
Except, that made no sense at all; the British and their allies were beaten, holed up in their precious enclave on Abadan Island while their Iranian ‘friends’ squabbled amongst themselves in the deserts around Khorramshahr. True, the British had their famous V-Bombers; they had a small aircraft carrier somewhere in the Persian Gulf with a couple of dozen sub-sonic Sea Vixen and Scimitar interceptors onboard. As for their ‘surface fleet’, a collection of old destroyers and a couple of World War II type cruisers well, what use was that to anybody...
His predecessor, Chuikov had authorised the sabotage ‘actions’ against the British fleet at Damman, and if the opportunity arose for one of Gorshkov’s ‘toys’ – as he called the new, supposedly ‘unproven’ nuclear Project 659 submarines – to have a ‘pot shot’ at any ‘British ship’ encountered. Otherwise, the ABNZ squadron had been ignored by the High Command and to his knowledge, had never figured at all in Babadzhanian’s thinking.
A telephone was ringing.
Land lines would be relatively immune to EMP, with few vulnerable relays and electronic exchanges. In Iraq everything would still be mechanical, the civilian telephone network switchboards manually operated.
Another telephone rang.
The first reports were finally coming in.
Gorshkov was suddenly thinking about the Battle of Malta.
The British had been caught by surprise, and the US Navy, represented by a powerful squadron of modern guided missile destroyers which the Red Navy’s battle fleet had anticipated having to confront in Maltese waters, having unexpectedly sailed away and left the Maltese Archipelago undefended. And yet at no time had the British considered laying down their arms and surrendering; in fact, at the lowest ebb of the battle when his big ships were pouring shells onto the RAF’s airfields, the Royal Navy’s dockyards and two battalions of elite Spetsnaz supported parachute troopers were assaulting the British headquarters at Mdina, the resistance had become unyielding, reckless, and utterly irrational.
The way that old British destroyer had come roaring out of the shadow of the main island, ploughing through forests of shell splashes to get to grips with his ships had been a nightmare...
“Comrade Defence Minister,” a tremulous voice murmured, breaking into Gorshkov’s darkling premonitions.
“The enemy has bombed,” the man gulped nervily, “or rather, is still b
ombing the port of Umm Qasr and the advance units of 3rd Caucasian Tank Army laagered around it.”
There was a dreadful, sick, sinking feeling in Gorshkov’s stomach.
It was like watching that lone British destroyer charging at his big ships off Malta all over again. On and on it had come like a rabid dog worrying at the legs of a pack of enraged Brown bears, undeterred by the knowledge that a single blow from the swinging claws of either beast would surely rip off its head.
He checked his watch.
It was now one minute to midnight.
Chapter 56
00:48 Hours
Friday 3rd July, 1964
Khorramshahr, Iran
“What are we doing here?” Brian Harris had learned the folly of volunteering as a very young man in Burma twenty years ago. Volunteering had got him into the Chindits, operating behind the Japanese lines with Orde Wingate’s gang of heroes, or madmen, depending upon one’s point of view. Living off the jungle, fighting the Japanese at their own game had seemed quite a good idea until he was actually ‘in the jungle’ and the RAF, which was supposed to regularly drop supplies to the Chindits, kept dropping their supplies onto Japanese positions. Once he had extracted himself from the Chindits he found himself on the front line of the bloodiest battle of the whole Burma campaign at Kohima. What with one thing and another he had decided he had had quite enough to do with the military by the time he got back to England in the spring of 1946.
Frank Waters had asked the others if they were ‘up for a little jaunt across the Karun River’, and for reasons beyond Brian Harris’s ken – he had assumed the mad former SAS-man would have much preferred to wander around the battlefield alone - the idiots had signed up for the escapade.
‘Look, it’s got to be better than waiting for the next shell to land on our heads sitting around here beside the airfield,’ the old soldier had proposed, grinning that infuriating, toothy grin of his. Actually, he had had a point. Every few minutes the Red Army lobbed a salvo of half-a-dozen rounds into the positions of the 2nd Rifle Battalion of the New Zealanders’ Canterbury Regiment. The ‘Canterburies’, whose forward company was dug in along the river bank guarding the southern bulge of the so-called Minushahr Peninsula around which the Arvand River proscribed a two-mile wide meandering half-circle on its way south, were keeping their heads down. The shelling seemed a little aimless to a veteran like Brian Harris; several of the others felt differently, as if each round was personally aimed at them. In any event they had ‘borrowed’ a Land Rover, Frank Waters had talked them across the pontoon bridge on the Karun River and they had seen how far ‘north’ they got.