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

by James Philip

  “Those chaps are short of ammo,” he told his companions. “They didn’t have enough rounds to flatten everything so they only hit the things they thought were going to cause them the biggest headaches. I wonder what they are expecting to find down this way?”

  The others had pressed themselves flat against the walls, attempting to make themselves invisible.

  “This is insane. We ought to get out of here while we can.”

  Brian Harris, the producer knocked this on the head.

  “No, that won’t work I’m afraid. Frank has gotten us all into a fine old mess again. Haven’t you Colonel?”

  “Oh, don’t be so wet!” The SAS man retorted cheerfully. “It’s too dark to start filming anything I suppose?”

  This was greeted with abrupt negatives.

  “Let’s start doing some words of wisdom for the radio then?”

  Nobody argued with him. The bulky tape machine was unpacked and a large, unwieldy microphone of the shape and approximate proportions of proportions of a Neolithic stone axe was pressed into Frank Waters’s hands in the darkness.

  “Tell me when you are ready?”

  Frank Waters was not the man to shirk a new challenge.

  However, he hesitated now.

  What do I say?

  Tricky, very tricky...

  Oh, I know!

  First things first! The good people at home need me to mark their cards for them. Therefore, the first thing on the agenda was a sit rep.

  “Yes, I’m ready!”

  The soundman began counting down.

  “Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Go!”

  Frank Waters took a long breath.

  “This is Frank Waters. We’re sheltering in the ruins of a town called Khorramshahr in Iran. You’ve probably never heard of this place before. No matter, it is a few miles north of Abadan and the Red Army is under the mistaken impression that Khorramshahr is ripe for the picking.”

  He paused. Nothing like a dramatic pause to lend a fellow a smidgen of gravitas; a man learned a thing or two from twenty years briefing SAS cut-throats!

  “If the enemy knew that Khorramshahr was packed full of chaps looking down the sights of the best anti-tank weaponry in service with any Army anywhere in the World, he’d be quaking in his boots. And that’s ignoring all those Iranian tanks hidden out there in the desert. Scores of the beggars, hull down and buried under so much camouflage netting you’d have to pretty much step on the bally things before you know they are there...”

  The bark of distant guns crashed out.

  Jet engines roared high above the ruined town.

  The unmistakable WHOOSH of a Bristol Bloodhound surface-to-air missile launching seemed much closer that it actually was. Within seconds another Bloodhound launched.

  “Things are starting to happen now,” Frank Waters declared cheerfully. “We have tanks shooting at each other to the north. A couple of Bloodhounds – they can hit targets twelve miles high – have just blasted off from somewhere on Abadan Island. If you listen very closely you can hear the approaching rumbling and rattling of a lot of tanks. Russian tanks! I’m reliably informed that the beggars only brought their most modern tanks, T-62s on this adventure. Mean looking beasts with a really big gun, but no match for Centurion Mark II in a straight fight. The one hundred and twenty millimetre cannons on the Conquerors back on Abadan Island will chew these fellows up at two miles. Here in Khorramshahr our boys will let the enemy come right up to us before we let them have it. The first Soviet tanks will follow the best road, the easiest contours, and the least rubble-strewn streets; once our boys have knocked them out the next wave will have to come at our positions less directly, exposing their vulnerable side armour to our guns...”

  Heavy machine guns rattled, instantly more guns were firing, chattering madly in the gloom. Multi-coloured tracer and incendiary rounds flashed and curved through the night, bullets ricocheted through the ruins like enraged, supercharged bees.

  “Goodness, these fellows seem to have arrived down here at Khorramshahr in no time at all! We must have waved them through our lines. I’ve heard hardly any of our tank guns firing yet....”

  A brilliant blue flare ignited high overhead.

  And then a second red flare.

  And every Centurion’s cannon and every anti-tank gun and recoilless rifle in the World seemed to belch forth death in the next ear-shattering, apocalyptic split second.

  Chapter 62

  02:32 Hours

  Friday 3rd July, 1964

  Abadan, Iran

  Lieutenant General Michael Carver had watched and listened from the relative safety of the observation trenches on the southern bank of the Karun River, as the Soviet spearhead had come to a fiery, very bloody juddering halt in front of Khorramshahr. The flames of burning T-62s and smashed armoured personnel carriers licked and flickered beyond the town, casting red-tinged shadows far into the desert. However, Carver knew that this was only first contact. The Red Army could afford to take casualties; this early in the battle he could not and it was this fact which banished any temptation to unleash Hasan al-Mamaleki’s armour against the Soviets’ partially exposed left flank in an immediate counter attack.

  Presently, the Soviets would be struggling to reconstruct their communications net; news of the setback – for his enemy the destruction of twenty or thirty tanks was a setback, not a disaster – south of the Railway Station at Khorramshahr would take a little while to percolate back up the line. In the meantime, the rest of the Soviet juggernaut would be rolling forward. Nobody on the Russian side would actually know what had just happened to the ‘first wave’ until the second wave found its way blocked by the wrecks of burning tanks and APCs; at such times the fog of war was nigh impenetrable. Nevertheless, the second and third waves would inexorably roll south until they encountered what was left of the first. The advance might pause but it would not stop, that was not the Red Army way.

  Theoretically, there was ‘space’ to exploit in the desert to the east of Khorramshahr but advancing on Abadan ‘around the houses’ extended the attackers’ flank. Before the enemy swung around the ‘urban obstacle’ in its path he would extend his line many miles east, hoping to bring the 3rd Imperial Iranian Armoured Division to battle. From previous encounters with Iraqi and Iranian armour the Soviets would expect to brush Hasan al-Mamaleki’s tanks aside; and therein lay the Soviets’ next first surprise.

  The enemy was not to know that Hasan al-Mamaleki had pulled his armour back over ten miles in places precisely to avoid contact with the Soviet spearheads. In fact his pickets – light tanks and a few sacrificial anti-tank units – were deployed to convince the Russians that there was absolutely no threat to their left flank.

  Carver ordered his driver to take him back to his headquarters.

  After the concentrated violence of the opening barrage which had fallen mainly on the frontier and desert positions where, until a week ago, Iranian tanks and infantry had been dug in, the shelling had become sporadic, an apparently random thing. However, although rounds were only falling on Abadan Island at a rate of only one or two a minute; already big fires were burning in the northern refinery complex.

  “Admiral Davey’s gun line has anchored in the main channel north of Al Seeba, sir,” Carver was informed as he strode into the buried operations room. “Contrary to our expectations he has encountered no opposition as yet.”

  “We launched four Bloodhounds?” The Commander-in-Chief inquired, almost as an afterthought.

  “Three against presumed hostiles approaching from the north, sir,” another staff officer reported. “One possible kill. The fourth launch was against an unidentified contact over the entrance to the Shatt al-Arab. We think this was probably one of the Kitty Hawk’s Hawkeyes. Regrettably, the target successfully evaded the missile.”

  Michael Carver went to the big composite wall map of the Abadan-Basra-Khorramshahr-Faw region, began to study it as he thought his thoughts.

  “Adm
iral Davey is on the scrambler, sir.”

  A lesser man’s heart would have sunk at this news.

  “Hello, Nick,” Carver drawled laconically into the handset he was handed.

  “Things are going to get a bit sticky, Michael,” the other man replied in similarly untroubled tones. “Further to my last signal Centaur has either been disabled or sunk and none of her birds are transmitting any longer.”

  Carver had been counting on Centaur’s air group to provide some minimal level of cover over Abadan Island, without it he had only the Bloodhounds and they were useless against low flying fast jets. The nearest air support was based hundreds of miles away in Damman. Emergency forward airstrips had been prepared in Kuwait but there was only a minimal maintenance, ordnance and re-fuelling infrastructure in place at those desert airfields; and in any event none of the Hawker Hunters or obsolete Seahawk Fleet Air Arm fighters – the latter hastily retrieved from mothballs and ferried out to the Middle East in recent weeks – had the operational endurance necessary to loiter more than a few minutes over Abadan flying from those bases in Kuwait. He was also painfully aware that none of the ships in Nick Davey’s gun line moored north of Al Seeba was equipped with modern surface-to-air missile systems.

  “Yes,” Michael Carver mused out aloud. “I think sticky is probably about the size of it, Nick. Obviously, things are happening very quickly and the situation is somewhat...fluid at the moment. That said I am minded to carry on regardless with Operation Lightfoot and its surviving naval components.”

  Nick Davey hesitated.

  “Yes, dammit!” He concurred after a gap of perhaps two to three seconds. All things considered both men recognised that they were all so far up the creek without a paddle that it was of only passing consequence how many hungry crocodiles were circling ‘the boat’. “If the bastards,’ there could be no doubt whatsoever that he was referring to the United States Navy not the Red Army, “attack Abadan or my gun line there’s precious little we can do about it. No point worrying about it.”

  It was Michael Carver’s turn to pause for the briefest of interregnums, thinking a hundred thoughts at once against the darkling background of a tactical environment that could hardly be less propitious. Before the cowardly attack on the Centaur task force in the Gulf he had been confident that given the expenditure of sufficient Allied blood he could hold Abadan for several days, possibly weeks; albeit the whole island would be comprehensively wrecked in the process. With the assistance of Hasan al-Mamaleki’s the 3rd Imperial Iranian Armoured Division he had hoped to not just blunt but to mutilate the Red Army’s striking power in the Persian Gulf. What he had never considered was the possibility that at the moment battle was joined north of Abadan, he would be threatened by an overwhelmingly powerful American naval and air force at his back.

  “We shall proceed as planned,” he determined urbanely. “My gunners will be calling on the inestimable services of your squadron shortly, Nick. There’s nothing we can do about what’s going on down in the Gulf...”

  Actually, there was something he could do about it.

  He just did not know if it was feasible or if the people back in Oxford would go along with it.

  “Good luck, Nick,” he signed off.

  Chapter 63

  02:40 Hours

  Friday 3rd July, 1964

  Al-Rasheed Air Base, South West Baghdad

  True to form the newly installed Commissar General of Iraq had gone to ground within seconds of the first air burst west of the city. There were only two underground bomb shelters on the base and First Deputy Secretary of the KGB Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov and his entourage having commandeered the deepest one, had absolutely no intention of coming out until again until it was ‘safe’.

  Defence Minister of the Soviet Union Admiral of the Fleet Sergey Georgiyevich Gorshkov was disgusted, but in no way surprised to discover that the base ‘operations centre’ was so full of men in green KGB uniforms and snivelling Party apparatchiks; that most of the Red Air Force officers and men manning the command centre responsible for all air operations in Central and Southern Iraq had been expelled from the complex to make room for the influx.

  He turned to the head of his personal security detachment, a Siberian Lieutenant-Commander of the Red Navy Security Police who had been with him at the Battle of Malta and who had no love for the Muscovite coterie cowering in the corridors of the bunker.

  “Get these fuckers out of here!”

  Gorshkov had drawn the Makarov pistol he had carried ever since he got back to Chelyabinsk in April. He brandished it to force his way through the crowd.

  “Shoot anybody who doesn’t want to move!”

  “You can’t just barge in here and start ordering my people about!” Andropov complained angrily.

  The newly appointed Commissar General had not risen to his feet on Gorshkov’s entrance. The Minister of Defence slapped his gun down on the desk between him and the KGB man and leaning towards Andropov asked: “So what’s the plan? Skulk away down here until the war’s over? Or do you plan to get off your fat arse and start doing your fucking job, comrade?”

  Andropov’s battered face coloured with anger in the pale illumination of the bunker’s naked light bulbs. The commotion in the corridor outside the room was clearly unnerving him.

  Gorshkov did not wait for a reply.

  “I’m moving all your KGB fuckers out of here so the Red Air Force controllers can get on with their jobs. We’re under attack and you and I are going to be seen above ground doing our duty!”

  “The line of command must be preserved...”

  Gorshkov picked up the Makarov.

  “I’m the line of command while we’re under attack. The Commissar General is supposed to be managing the civilian government of the Protectorate of Iraq. If you want to stay down here that’s fine by me; I’ll put a bullet between your eyes and find somebody with the guts to do their fucking job!”

  The operations room was still crowded when the two men shouldered their way through to the command table.

  “Anybody who does not have a job to do in this room get out now!” Gorshkov shouted. He stopped himself firing a shot into the roof; the bullet would have probably ricocheted around the concrete walls killing and wounding several men. At a time like this he could not afford to risk losing key men. “Anybody who isn’t in the Red Air Force get out!”

  Nobody moved.

  Gorshkov sighed, pointed the Makarov at the nearest KGB man in a green uniform and pulled the trigger. The bark of the gun was painfully loud in the confined space.

  “Who’s next?”

  Andropov was staring at him. He swallowed hard.

  “All the radio equipment is short-circuited,” he said lamely.

  “The fucking land lines will be okay. Has anybody found out what’s going on elsewhere yet?”

  No, nobody had found out anything.

  There were a lot of people at Al-Rasheed Air Base who deserved to be shot; that was a thing Gorshkov would attend to in the morning if they were all still alive when dawn broke.

  Telephones were ringing insistently.

  Two KGB troopers dragged their fallen comrade out into the corridor trailing a viscous slick of dark blood on the floor.

  “I am Gorshkov!” The Minister of Defence shouted. “I am in command. I will shoot anybody who does not obey my orders.” He knew exactly what the priorities were in the fog of confusion that must already be spreading across the whole of occupied Iraq. “Communicate by land line to all commands that the authority to deploy nuclear and chemical weapons is absolutely denied by my order under the powers vested in me by the Central Committee of the Party.”

  “We are under attack, Comrade!” Andropov hissed in his ear.

  “No, we’re not,” the dark-eyed Admiral with the boot black moustache retorted angrily. “The air bursts were precisely targeted to cause the maximum disruption to our communications net and the minimum loss of life and damage on the ground. Bagh
dad would no longer exist and we’d already be vaporised if the British had meant to hit the city!”

  Gorshkov seized Andropov’s elbow and dragged him into a corner.

  He leaned close.

  “We made a pact with the Yankees. They guaranteed that they would deal with the British if they went nuclear.”

  Andropov opened his mouth like a beached fish, sucking air and drowning all at once.

  “That’s why I’m here. To make sure nobody fucks up!” Gorshkov added. “The ground war will be over in a few hours and the Yanks will deal with the British navy and air force. That’s the deal and no matter how fucked up it is that is the deal. This is the price we pay for a ‘peace with honour’ with the Americans. That price will be paid. Operation Nakazyvat ends on the northern shores of the Persian Gulf.” He quirked a sour grin. “For five years, anyway,” he added with the scowl of a man who is tasting ash in his mouth.

  Gorshkov viewed Andropov thoughtfully for a moment.

  If the Commissar General had not already had a bowel movement he had the appearance of man who was about to have one.

  “Get your people on side,” Gorshkov grunted disgustedly and turned away.

  Fucking civilians!

  Chapter 64

  02:48 Hours

  Friday 3rd July, 1964

  USS Kitty Hawk, South of Kharg Island, Persian Gulf

  Lieutenant-Commander Walter Brenckmann had felt the deck quiver rather than jolt or flinch beneath his feet. Down in the Kitty Hawk’s darkened CIC the bulkhead lights flickered momentarily. The carrier had been turning to port, heeling one, two degrees and shortly after the ‘bump’ her wheel went over again and she settled on her new course. All seemed as before; and then the faraway grinding, thumping reverberation set the deck plates trembling and the flagship of Carrier Division Seven began to slow in the water.