by James Philip
South of Kharg Island, the chosen patrol area of Carrier Division Seven dusk was between 19:30 and 20:00 hours and if the aircraft carting the big bombs to the Gulf were to ‘dive bomb’ their moving targets they had to see what they were doing courtesy of their pilots’ Mark I human eyeballs.
Initially, the Canberras had been going to come screaming down from altitude but in the final plan they were tasked to come in at maximum thrust at wave top height, skipping their bombs towards the big carrier’s escorts and loosing off rockets. Any fighters that got past the Kitty Hawk’s F-4 Phantoms and her gate-keeping cruisers’ long-range Talos and Terrier surface-to-air missile batteries would make strafing and mock dive bombing attacks on targets of opportunity.
All of which was to occur with minutes – ideally immediately after – the two Blue Danubes lit up, hopefully within as little as fifteen to twenty miles of the Kitty Hawk. It was taken as read that the two nuclear bombers roaring in on arrow straight tracks would be easy meat for the US Navy’s missile defences; hence both aircraft would activate their Blue Danubes over Sinai set to initiate at an altitude of three thousand feet. The theory was that the longer the Yanks waited to get a ‘clean kill’ the worse it would be for them!
Guy French still had not really worked out what was likely to happen when he dropped the port wing tip of The Angry Widow and pointed her needle sharp nose at the Kitty Hawk. The best advice available was that extending the air brakes just before ‘kicking off’ the evolution might delay the moment when the wings came off.
The operations officer had also speculated that releasing bombs at around seven or eight thousand feet might give The Angry Widow a ‘fighting chance’ of pulling up before she went into ‘the drink’; but since nobody had ever been so insane as to do anything like this in ‘a beast’ his diffidence on this subject was entirely understandable.
Guy French had concluded that all in all the best thing seemed to be to make sure the flight deck of the Kitty Hawk was filing the windscreen in front of him by the time the wings ‘came off’.
Chapter 83
17:55 Hours Local
Friday 3rd July 1964
HMS Tiger, Arvand River
The Red Army artillery barrage had walked all the way down Abadan Island and all the way back up it again three times before finally, it slackened, and after nearly two-and-a-half hours petered away. By then the whole eastern shoreline was shrouded by an impenetrable cloud of smoke, ash, rubble dust, sand and the vile stench of the great oil tanks burning out of control.
While the wrath of Hell was ploughing up what had once been the jewel in Great Britain’s post 1945-war Imperial Crown, HMS Tiger and her smaller consort, HMAS Anzac had been making copious amounts of smoke and ‘playing dead’ in the fog of battle.
“It is time, sir,” Captain Hardress ‘Harpy’ Lloyd, the cruiser’s commanding officer observed at Rear Admiral Nicholas Davey’s shoulder.
“Signal Anzac to cut her chains and follow Tiger up river please.”
Stephen Turnbull and his brave Australians would not like that but Tiger – even in her presently somewhat careworn condition – was a significantly tougher nut to crack than a thin-skinned fleet destroyer. Tiger had over three inches of side armour protecting her vitals from shell fire, a couple of inches of hardened plate strengthening her main bulkheads, one to two inches of armour on her turrets, and the same on the roofs of her magazines. Although her armament and electronic systems were very modern, her construction was classic Second World War vintage, her hull stiff, a tad over-engineered in an attempt to ensure structural integrity in the event of major battle damage. She was built to take punishment, a lot of punishment, before she went down; Anzac was not and the destroyer’s speed and manoeuvrability were no use to her thirty or forty miles up a river in enemy held territory.
“Anzac has acknowledged, sir.”
“Very good. Take us up river please, Captain.”
The two warships had moored several hundred yards below the point where the Arvand River began to turn to the north around the great flat promontory of Minushahr ‘island’ which jutted out of the eastern side of Abadan. In times past the river had flowed directly to the sea where now, only a narrow stream separated the two ‘islands’, before some cataclysmic event, possibly an earthquake or simply one of the periodic great floods of the Euphrates and the Tigris upstream had carved another path through the deserts and marshlands. Everything south of Basra and for twenty or thirty miles to the east and west was the same vast delta formed by the outflow of the rivers of ancient Mesopotamia. Even at Basra the Arvand was tidal, and the land all the way north to Al Qurnah was only a thirteen to fourteen feet above notional ‘sea level’ in the Gulf.
Tiger slowly drew abreast of the Anzac.
Hats were waved as the men on each ship studied the damage to the other with sombre reflection.
Nick Davey raised a speaking trumpet to his lips.
The ships were so close he could have bellowed across the distance between them without assistance.
“ALL THE WAY TO OM-AL-RASAS, ANZACS!”
Stephen Turnbull stood at the starboard bridge rail of the destroyer and saluted.
“WHEN TIGER OPENS FIRE DON’T STOP FOR ANYTHING, STEPHEN!”
The last two ships of the ABNZ gun line had been charged with filling the Karun River with Russian dead. If necessary Nick Davey was prepared to steam Tiger into the mouth of the river and hold the enemy back with his ceremonial sword...
Which reminded him!
He turned and bellowed over his right shoulder.
“Would somebody go to my sea cabin and find my bloody sword please?”
The sword was unlikely to be much utility in a fight in which the cruiser’s 6-inch guns were firing over open sights at an enemy at point blank range.
But one never knew!
And it was always prudent to be prepared.
Chapter 84
19:02 Hours
Friday 3rd July 1964
Karun River, Abadan
The British had blown up their pontoon bridge across the river in such a hurry that they had left their robustly engineered anchoring posts in position on both banks. The bulldozers had had to push the wrecked T-62s, BTR-40s and 50s out of the way but now the first tanks were crossing the river. Already over a thousand infantrymen had been ferried onto the southern back and were advancing, with squads of combat engineers through the shattered defence lines.
From where he stood Major General Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik could see half-a-dozen knocked out British tanks, and all the nearby trench lines caved in. There were bits and pieces of bodies all around him, already the dead meat was bloating and festering, and flies swarmed.
The artillery barrage had knocked the stuffing out of the British and Australian troops holding the southern bank of the Karun River. After putting up a token resistance the defenders had melted away and much of the bridging operation had gone ahead at breakneck speed inconvenienced only by occasional mortar and sniping.
Kurochnik was no tanker but he could tell that the enemy had gone to a lot of trouble to dig in their armour and zero in their artillery, and much as he was loath to admit it he was still a little unnerved by last night’s nightmare. Any Army on earth other than the Red Army would have broken and run when it ran into the firestorm around Khorramshahr Station; and when the fight was over the enemy had withdrawn in good order, like wraiths in the night. His boys had rooted out the British Centurions in the end; but by God that had been dirty business. At least two of the six brewed up tanks they had examined in the ruins had only been knocked out only after they had run out of ammunition!
He surveyed the battlefield.
Hopefully, the British had done their worst. Very little was moving in the south. The enemy’s desultory counter-battery shelling had stopped an hour or so ago. The haze and the smoke made it seem as if it was already dusk, although sunset was still over an hour off. He planned to send his armour forward t
o probe what was left of the British defence line three kilometres south of the Karun River; overnight he would build a brigade strength battle group south of the river that ought to be easily capable of finishing the job in the morning.
His orders to halt at the British main line of defence chaffed somewhat. Now was the time to press home the advantage, to get the job done. He had discounted his intelligence staff’s concern about rogue Iranian Army units out in the eastern desert; Kurochnik was not going to waste time worrying about a few rag heads and bandits roaming around the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. If the last twenty-four hours had taught him anything it was that his main enemy was in front of him.
His Corps Commander, Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov, a typical thick-headed tanker who had obviously bashed his head once too many times on the roof of a turret – he was tall man with a much scarred head which strongly supported this thesis – had been similarly scathing about the ‘Iranian intelligence’.
Kurochnik had not spoken to Puchkov for several hours and things had been so fucked up last night and earlier that day that for all he knew the man was dead. Kurochnik had come down to the Karun River ahead of the bridging operation because most of his spearhead commanders were dead or wounded, and in their absence it was vital that somebody got a grip. Reassuringly, by the time he arrived things were under control and preparations were well in hand, the British armour and anti-tank guns having pulled back before the creeping barrage wiped them out. Since then anything caught above ground on Abadan Island was dead.
The shell-cratered ground would make for slow going tomorrow.
That was war; a messy affair.
“I want that bloody communications cable laid back to the forward communications exchange!” Kurochnik yelled at a passing staffer. Down on the pontoon bridge he watched two men trailing lines along the side of the roadway. He needed to talk to Army HQ; the fucking plan kept changing and something had happened to Marshal Babadzhanian because Kulikov, the commander of 2nd Siberian Mechanised was suddenly calling all the shots.
“A couple more Centurions got caught in the open when the last barrage came in,” he was informed by a man with KGB tabs on his battledress lapels. “With the tanks we’ve found knocked out here and the ones in Khorramshahr that means the enemy has lost at least sixteen. We don’t think the British had more than thirty or so to start with, Comrade General.”
Kurochnik scowled at the other, much younger man.
From what he had seen so far one British tank was worth five or six of his. It was not that the T-62 was in any way defective, it was just that the British hardly ever got into a straight fight with his armour. Always, they fought hull down on ground of their choosing and design.
“Do we know what happened to the big ships the British steamed up the fucking river yet?” Kurochnik demanded.
The naval shelling from the Arvand River had decimated several rear echelon units south of the Basra industrial area. A couple of small ammunition dumps had blown up and the tracks down to Khorramshahr – the dirt roads hardly dignified any other description – had had to be cleared by bulldozers. By now the hundreds of grotesquely mutilated bodies piled in the sand by the roadside would be alive with the flies.
“The Air Force claim they sank them all, sir!”
Chapter 85
19:17 Hours
Friday 3rd July 1964
Carrier Division Seven, 29 miles south east of Kharg Island, Persian Gulf
Two McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantoms were being hauled forward onto the bow catapults as the Kitty Hawk worked up to twenty-five knots on her three undamaged shafts. The great ship had an odd feel, as if she was in a slight cross sea and wind as her giant rudders corrected for the lateral drift caused by the massive power differential of her two port screws against the surviving starboard screw.
Not that the frenetic activity on the flight deck made a great impression on Lieutenant Commander Walter Brenckmann, the former Fleet ASW Officer, as he followed the other dissenters from the carrier’s wardroom towards the waiting Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King.
Rear Admiral Bringle had ordered the officers and men who had requested to be relieved of duty be quarantined, removed from his flagship lest they spread mutiny. Of the men transferring off the Kitty Hawk to the fast transport Paul Revere (APA-248), Walter was the most senior man and therefore, it seemed, the man most likely to be made an example of when he got home. He had been summoned before Bringle less than ten minutes ago and informed that he was ‘going to regret this for the rest of his life’, and that ‘the Navy will never forgive you’.
Walter had refused to dignify the threat with an acknowledgement.
“You need to put this on, sir,” the loadmaster growled respectfully, holding out a Mae West. “Before I can allow you to board the aircraft, sir.”
This broke Walter out of his brooding.
“Thank you.”
A man behind him helped him don the lifejacket, patted it down and checked it was securely fastened.
“You may board the aircraft, sir.”
As he put his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder the man who had adjusted his Mae West spoke lowly.
“Good luck, sir.”
Walter was in a daze, staring out of the open main fuselage hatch as the helicopter lifted off the deck. Below him the biggest warship in the World was resuming flying operations, having been wallowing at a dead stop over three hours that afternoon while clearance divers inspected her underwater damage. Over forty aircraft had been brought up on deck; F-4 Phantom supersonic interceptors, A-4 Skyhawks and A-6 Intruders strike aircraft, a second E-2 Hawkeye to relieve Hawkeye Zero-One which had been continuously on patrol over Southern Iran monitoring the battle for Abadan Island. As he watched a North-American A-5 Vigilante nuclear strike bomber rolled off the Kitty Hawk’s starboard aft elevator.
Having been confined to his quarters since his initial interview with Captain Epes, Walter had no specific knowledge of the operations planned for the coming night; he had just known that in all good conscience he could be no part of whatever fresh atrocity was planned. To have acted otherwise would have been to dishonour the uniform he had worn with pride his whole adult life.
“Shit!” Somebody cried out.
Walter blinked, looked around.
“Albany just cleared her Talos rails!”
Although the cabin door was dogged open, normal practice for a short ‘hop’ between ships in good weather, Walter’s field of vision was restricted to what was visible directly in front of him. The Sea King banked, its pilot seeking to get down low enough to disappear off the Kitty Hawk’s anti-aircraft escorts’ radars. Walter suddenly saw the grey smoke drifting away from the ungainly looking missile cruiser. Before he could assimilate what he was seeing a thousand yards beyond the Albany the five thousand ton Coontz class guided missile destroyer William V. Pratt, flushed a pair of Terrier surface-to-air birds from her stern rails.
Walter started doing the basic math.
There was no other way to make sense of what he was watching.
The Bendix Rim-8 Talos missile system had a theoretical rage of approximately a hundred miles. Although initially designed to combat Kamikaze style attacks or World War II guided munitions like the German Henschel Hs 293 glider bomb and the deadly Fritz X, it was capable of hitting targets above seventy thousand feet at ranges unthinkable back in 1945. However, given that it was a beam-riding weapon that only switched to onboard semi-active radar target acquisition mode for terminal guidance it was impractical to use the weapon effectively at anything like its maximum range. Talos was launched with a solid fuel booster that fired up a ramjet capable of powering the three-and-a-half ton thirty-eight feet long missile to speeds of up to Mach 2.5. Its three hundred pound warhead was proximity fused to destroy anything flying within a hundred yards of it when it detonated...
Walter went on doing the math.
He assumed the Albany had flushed its Talos launchers under local control; the near
est Hawkeye was a hundred and fifty miles away, and the effective reach of the cruiser’s AN/SPW-2 missile guidance radar and the AN/SPG-49 tracking system was around fifty nautical miles. No, belay that, maybe up to sixty assuming the British had only limited ECM coverage of the northern Gulf.
Okay, assume the target is incoming at around five hundred plus knots; that would be closing the range at eight or nine miles per minute. Target lock takes what? Sixty seconds, so the target is fifty miles out by that time. Assume Albany had two Talos reloads hot and ready to go on the rails. How long does a Rim-8’s internal guidance box take to spool up? Thirty seconds? Go with that. The target is nearer forty that fifty miles out by then. Talos hits maximum acceleration and intercept speed three to four seconds after launch; from that moment it and the target are closing at around Mach 3, give or take a couple of hundred knots an hour, an intercept rate of more than two thousand miles an hour in layman’s language. That’s a closing speed of thirty-three or four miles per minute and the target is forty plus miles out. Therefore, impact is in seventy to eighty seconds. The target could be a lot less than thirty miles away by then...
The cabin of the Sea King lit up as if a destroyer’s searchlight had been beamed directly into it.
Walter Brenckmann had never been near a nuclear explosion.
But he knew what that light signified.
He had calculated thirty miles; if he was right the blast overpressure wave would hit the helicopter in between three and four minutes time.
He started counting.
At the time it never occurred to him that any aircraft could fly within less than twenty miles of Carrier Division Seven without being challenged and engaged.
One thousand and one.
One thousand and two.
One thousand and three...
The cabin lit up a second time.
The Sea King lurched sidelong; its main rotors dipping into the iron grey waters.