by James Philip
Chapter 86
19:18 Hours
Friday 3rd July 1964
Field Command Truck, 3rd Imperial Iranian Armoured Division, Ahvaz-Khorramshahr Road
Major General Hasan al-Mamaleki and Major Julian Calder had been enjoying – well, drinking anyway – what purported to be ‘tea’ when an excitable runner brought the news of the two ‘bomb flashes’ far to the south. The Iranian tanker and the English SAS-man had looked to each other and nodded, taken one more cautious sip at the vile, muddy brew they had been attempting to ingest, put down their mugs and stood up.
There was around another hour of ‘usable’ daylight.
The time was propitious.
The Centurions, M-60s and M-48s of the 3rd Imperial Iranian Armoured Division would emerge out of the darkness of the eastern deserts and fall upon the flank, and hopefully, the rear echelons of the Red Army divisions racing down to the Karun River. Hasan al-Mamaleki’s tanks would be coming out of the darkness, and the enemy silhouetted by the light of the setting sun.
With or without the nuclear flashes in the southern sky Hasan al-Mamaleki would have given the signal to move within the next few minutes. Michael Carver had sent no word from Abadan; hardly surprising after that afternoon’s artillery bombardment. The C-in-C might be dead.
“Excalibur!” The tall, handsome man with the magnificent dark moustache barked through the door of the command truck. “EXECUTE EXCALIBUR!”
Julian Calder followed the Iranian out into the dusk.
The smoke and dust of Abadan Island was blowing north across Khorramshahr and the desert near the Iraqi border opposite Basra.
Hasan al-Mamaleki, a tall man, had momentarily added several inches to his stature in the moment of decision. The plan; his plan and Michael Carver’s plan was an exercise in crystal clear thinking. The 3rd Imperial Iranian Armoured Division and several battalions of mechanised infantry would drive for the Arvand River, trapping the enemy forces in Khorramshahr and south of the Karun River.
Stop for nothing! Drive to the west! Kill any man who stands between you and the Arvand River! If you run out of ammunition roll over the enemy! Grind him beneath the tracks of our tanks! Death to the enemy!
Ideally, Admiral Davey’s ships would sail all the way up to Basra to administer the coup de grace to the enemy; but for all the two men knew al-Mamaleki’s force was alone.
It mattered not.
Al-Mamaleki meant to drive the invaders off the holy soil of Persia or die.
Out in the desert to the north the sound of scores of tank engines firing up rumbled through the gathering gloom. In the west the sky was still bright. The setting sun threw great long shadows, as if his men were giants and the enemy, pygmies.
Neither Hasan al-Mamaleki nor Julian Calder knew what had happened at sea the previous day, or what had happened in the Faw Peninsula. They guessed the Anzac tankers around Umm Qasr had had some success in ‘pinning’ enemy formations in the Faw. They had been a little surprised that after the big attacks of the morning the Red Air Force had made itself scarce. Tacitly, they accepted that the Navy’s big ships would have been sitting ducks in the confines of the river; and that the Abadan garrison would have been ‘dreadfully knocked about’ during the day. It had been painful waiting, waiting, waiting while other brave men had fought and died...
The two flashes in the southern sky signified nothing so much as that all was most likely lost.
Out in the desert the first tanks charged west.
Al-Mamaleki and his English friend walked purposefully to where staffers had pulled the camouflage netting off Calder’s Land Rover.
It was time to follow the tanks into action.
Chapter 87
19:19 Hours
Friday 3rd July 1964
Carrier Division Seven, 29 miles south east of Kharg Island, Persian Gulf
Walter Brenckmann came to retching and fighting for breath, utterly disorientated. Each frigid wave that broke over his face reeked of aviation fuel. Guns were firing in the distance and as he bobbed up and down, his eyes slowly focussed on the unmistakable trails of rockets crisscrossing the darkening skies. None of it made any sense. In a moment so surreal that some part of his shocked consciousness knew it was wrong; he attempted, in a jumbled, muddled way to work out how he had gotten from the Polaris compartment of the USS Theodore Roosevelt listening to the big birds flush, one after the other on the night of the October War to here. Wherever here was? And then he remembered that he had been pulled off the Theodore Roosevelt last December. He was supposed to be posted to Groton ahead of the nuclear boat command course due to start in March; but no, that was wrong too...
Where was this?
He swallowed avgas-laced salt water.
Coughed, gagged, vomited in between swallowing more water.
His head cleared, confused now by a new, vaguely irritating sound. A sort of thrumming, droning noise like a swarm of angry hornets coming closer and closer; his bewilderment suddenly shot through with stabbing terror.
Instantly he was thrashing around in the cold water searching for the angry hornets and kicking away from the deeper, rumbling reverberations of the engines and churning propellers of what could only be a very big ship.
The heavy cruiser USS Boston’s towering grey stem loomed above him. Even though he knew it was useless he kicked and flailed with his arms to try and move away from the oncoming ship. The fifteen thousand ton warship was already on top of him and before he had a chance to take a deep breath her bow wave, creaming white like a surfer’s dream fell on him and he was rolling and drowning in its crest like a human cork.
All he could think of was getting away from the cruisers giant, racing screws.
It was not until he bobbed to the surface in the Boston’s wake that he finally figured out what the ‘angry hornets’ noise that he had heard - before he was run down by the fifteen thousand ton behemoth – actually was.
There were two...
No, three odd but vaguely familiar dark silhouettes skimming above the wave tops beyond the Boston. The cruiser’s anti-aircraft guns were firing but her stern mounted Terrier twin launcher was locked upright – reload position – and therefore not tracking the nearby targets.
The silhouettes of the approaching aircraft foreshortened.
Gannets!
Fairey Gannets; British anti-submarine and early-warning aircraft and the angry hornets noise was being generated by the Gannets’ Armstrong Siddeley Double Mamba turboprop engines driving their contra-rotating propellers.
The first of the Gannets – which had a passing, more streamlined and modern resemblance to old World War II era Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers – passed so close and so low astern of the Boston that its port wing tip almost hit the cruiser’s taffrail jackstay. Another flew literally under the cruiser’s bow. The Boston had to have been steaming at better than twenty-five knots but it was obvious to Walter that the Gannets had deliberately braved her formidable, bristling gun batteries to use her bulk as a shield against the rest of the fleet’s deadly arsenal of guided weapons. A third Gannet zoomed over the bridge of the cruiser and dove down to the wave tops.
Coughing, spluttering, retching Walter watched in horrified fascination as belatedly he started to piece together what he was actually seeing.
Missile trails in the sky; the crash and rattle of distant guns all around the horizon in the last full light of the setting sun, and the Kitty Hawk was turning, the lengthening outline of the huge carrier a lot less than two miles away.
The bomb bay doors of the three old-fashioned Gannets were opening.
The Boston’s 3-inch guns kicking up the sea between the aircraft and the flagship; the Gannets levelled out fifteen to twenty feet above the waves, boring in on the Kitty Hawk.
Two black shapes dropped from the southernmost aircraft, and then from the others before Walter lost sight of the attackers. Instinctively he attempted to duck his head under water as the banshee scream of
two diving F-4 Phantoms fell on the Gannets.
In some battered corner of his brain there was a quiet corner now.
If the F-4s were down here at sea level who was flying top cover?
Chapter 88
19:20 Hours
Friday 3rd July 1964
RAF Abadan, Iran
Being buried had not been a lot of fun. However, Frank Waters had been so grateful to be dug out in more or less one piece that he had put all that behind him in short order. Providing there was somebody left alive to dig a chap out a well constructed trench system was not the worse place a man could be when things got sticky. Direct hits notwithstanding, getting buried was often the big killer in trench warfare. Old soldiers told tall stories about always hearing a shell with one’s name on it; Frank Waters thought that was lot of tosh. If you heard the shell with your name on it who on earth would you be able to tell about it afterwards? He had certainly not heard the one that collapsed the communications trench around him as he was making his way back to his timorous BBC ‘comrades’. One minute he was trotting along without a care in the world and the next he was under several tons of bloody sand!
It was the sand that made the job so infernally hard for the Russian gunners. It absorbed and localised the impacts of even the biggest shells; unless a shell landed in a trench or right next to it – literally within inches of it – all that was achieved was to blow more sand into the air.
The split-second flash of the first RAF Blue Danube high in the sky scores of miles away to the south had halted the SAS-man in his tracks.
In a second the rules of engagement had changed again.
There was a second flash as he stumbled into his lost sheep.
“Was that...”
“Probably,” he declared, half answering the obvious question. As if it mattered! “Do any of you chaps know which end of a gun to hold?”
Brian Harris nodded in the gloom of the crater in which the crew had been cowering for the last few hours.
Frank Waters and the other man had turned and headed north towards the front lines at about the time big guns started firing off to the northwest. They crouched down, waiting for the incoming rounds but nothing happened.
“That must be our boys,” Brian Harris suggested.
Frank Waters listened to the cannonade.
“It sounds like the Navy are getting in on the act,” he observed, unwilling to give the Senior Service credit for anything unless there was no other possible explanation of the renewed cannonade somewhere to the north.
The two men picked up weapons – a Sten gun and an SLR, spare magazines and pocketfuls of loose rounds - from bodies lying in a gully.
Frank Waters took the Sten gun, Brian Harris the SLR.
“I got a marksman badge with a Lee Enfield,” the latter frowned as Frank Waters arched an eyebrow, and hefted the rifle. “That was over twenty years ago; in comparison this ought to be a breeze!”
The SAS man shrugged.
He preferred the Sten gun but then he was the sort of cove who had been asked to kill all the people in the room more than once; and a long-barrelled infantry SLR had never been anybody’s weapon of choice for work like that.
The big guns had reached a crescendo.
Periodically, tank rounds whistled across the lines but most of the firing was outgoing, not incoming. The distinctive bark of L7 105-millimetre cannons all along the front line contrasted with the thump of crash of bigger guns to the north. Mortars were popping, the revving engines of many, many tanks filled the air as the two men stumbled into the chaotic casualty clearing station where Lieutenant General Michael Carver and his bloodied, dwindling staff now held court.
Michael Carver was brandishing a Webley revolver in his right hand.
He looked up.
“Colonel Waters and Mr Harris of the BBC reporting for duty, sir!”
The C-in-C eyed the two ragged figures.
“That’s the spirit,” he remarked, calmly. “The ground in front of us is rotten with Russian grenadiers,” he went on unhurriedly. “We’ve got the bastards where we want them but this is going to be a very close run thing. Carry on.”
Chapter 89
19:20 Hours
Friday 3rd July 1964
South bank of the Karun River, Iran
Major General Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik imagined he felt the heat of the flash in the southern sky. Everything around him had stopped for a heartbeat, movement, sound, everything. He had been looking to the north where T-62s, armoured personnel carriers and trucks carrying ammunition, were queued nose to tail on the tracks back into the ruins of Khorramshahr, waiting to be called forward to ford the Karun River on the second of the two pontoon bridges under construction. The combat engineer companies had worked at reckless speed and several men had drowned in the muddy slow moving waters. Already Kurochnik’s spearhead was in contact with what was left of the enemy’s defence line north of the wrecked air base and burning refinery complex. A mile to the south Spetsnaz and the best of his surviving infantry units were infiltrating the refinery sprawl.
The indications were that the final artillery barrage had pulverised the enemy, and that the Red Air Force had smashed the British ships in the Arvand River.
In less than an hour it would be dark and soon after that the first American air strikes would fall on the rear of the lines his tanks were probing. Kurochnik still did not believe that; he had thought somebody at HQ in Basra was taking the piss when the signal came through. He had insisted on talking to General Kulikov; who had accused him of insubordination.
It was a funny old World when one was relying on the bloody Yankees to finish off the British because the Red Air Force in Iraq had been so beaten up in the last twenty-four hours it hardly existed anymore!
What was it the British said about the Yanks?
Something about how they always seemed to turn up when the fight was almost over?
Kurochnik turned, expecting to see a mushroom cloud rising on the southern horizon. All he actually saw was the haze and dusk merging. Okay, it must have been a relatively small bomb a long way away. Somewhere out to sea...
He blinked as a momentarily unutterably brilliant white light lit up and winked out in a second seemingly almost at the point where the land and sea met the heavens. The flash lingered on his retinas, he blinked.
‘Fuck!” He muttered, knowing that by some ill chance he must have been looking straight at the distant nuclear detonation. “Fuck!”
Kurochnik squeezed his eyes shut.
Opened them cautiously; he discovered he had spots in front of his eyes but he was not blind, and sighed a huge sigh of relief. Other men around him were doing likewise.
Two nukes somewhere out at sea?
Maybe the Yanks were finishing off the British navy?
Sweeping the seas clear of foreign competitors!
The spots in his eyes were fading as Kurochnik returned to watching the traffic jam on the northern bank of the Karun River. The sooner the second pontoon bridge was opened the better. The British had fought like lions and the battle was far from over. He could do nothing about the nuclear bombs out in the Persian Gulf; his battle was here on the sands of Abadan Island.
“Sir!” A breathless runner from the communications truck down by the river gasped.
Kurochnik relaxed a little. If somebody was bringing him bad news it meant the telephone line he had watched the being strung across the bridge was finally connected to his forward headquarters on the south bank.
“What is it?” Kurochnik demanded irritably.
Whoever allowed all those tanks and APCs to bunch up like that on the north bank ought to be shot!
“There are reports from 12th Urals Brigade, sir!”
Kurochnik’s humour dipped another degree.
The 12th Urals Brigade was one of the lines of communication units which had been stretched out most of the way north to Amarah until a week ago. Strengthened with several poorly equippe
d and untrained penal battalions and stiffened by a cadre of KGB troopers it was deployed north east of Khorramshahr along the theoretically expose flank between the foothills of the Zagros Mountains and an ‘anchor point’ four or five kilometres above the Karun River. The brigade only had a dozen T-54 tanks and a couple of companies of mechanised infantry but it was commanded by one of Kulikov’s favourites, Grigory Vasilyevich Romanov, another political soldier whose only previous ‘combat experience’ dated back to the great Patriotic War.
Something must have panicked the useless prick!
“Well, let’s hear it,” he grunted irritably. There were times he honestly thought he had spent his whole fucking career clearing up other people’s shit!
“Comrade Colonel Romanov reports contact with strong enemy armoured forces on his left hand flank, Comrade General!”
Kurochnik cocked an ear to the east.
It was the quietest quadrant of the whole sector.
“Send to 12th Urals Brigade,” he dictated with a shake of the head. “EXTEND LEFT FLANK TO THE EAST AND FIND OUT WHAT IS OUT THERE STOP REPORT AGAIN WHEN SITUATION CLARIFIED MESSAGE ENDS.”
The runner should have been dashing his instructions onto his pad for Kurochnik to sign the signal. Instead, he was staring wide-eyed past his commanding officers right shoulder.
The older man bit off a savage rebuke.
The fear in the boy’s eyes told him he was not listening.
Kurochnik swung around to find out what had spooked the kid.
In a moment he too was staring; his mouth agape.
Emerging out of the great pall of roiling grey black smoke drifting across the north of Abadan Island, the Arvand River and the southern tip of Om-al-Rasas Island in the mid stream was the terrifyingly scorched and bomb-splintered superstructure of the biggest warship Kurochnik had ever seen in his entire life. Below the ship’s bridge the numerals C20 came into sharp focus as the ship glided out of the mist and murk. Smoke seemed to leech from her superstructure and tall masts. The ship was so big, the river so narrow, impossibly shallow for such a tall, frightening vessel. The apparition moved soundlessly, ethereally cloaked in wraiths of mist as she slowly pressed up river against the current and the tide.