by James Philip
His travel warrant specified that he had a bunk booked on the night train for Scotland where he was to report to the South Atlantic Planning Group based at Auchtermuchty, nine miles north of Glenrothes.
It seemed his attachment to the SAPG was initially, to only be up to and including 31st December 1968.
“Your future employment is a matter of no little discussion at the Board of Admiralty,” the Vice Chief of the Naval Staff had chuckled, otherwise giving nothing away.
It seemed there was a suggestion – no more – that he might be posted to Ottawa as Naval Attaché, although that was a post usually filled by a married man because inevitably, ‘there is a social side to the job in friendly countries.’
“I am planning to marry later this summer, sir,” he had re-joined, unaccountably embarrassed.
“Oh, good show,” Simon Collingwood had offered in congratulation, before glancing unspoken apology to widower Peter Hill-Norton, who, in turn, waved away his colleague’s concern.
“Simon was once the most confirmed of all bachelors, you know,” he had confided to O’Reilly.
They were three sea dogs, men of not so dissimilar ages, veterans of many fights to whom, now and then, the common uniform that they wore meant more, in such private meetings as this, than the number of rings on their sleeves.
“Getting married was the best decision I ever made,” the submariner agreed.
“A widow,” O’Reilly explained, in his turn. “She’s based at Portsmouth. We’ve known each other a while but while I was CO of the Campbeltown, it would not have been…appropriate.”
Both admirals had clapped him on the back.
Oh, well…
O’Reilly would have proposed to Lottie even if she had not invited himself to make an absolute pig of himself in bed with her: which he had, to the accompaniment of much oddly thrilling, girlish giggling and miscellaneous sighs and groans, repeatedly, on three of the last four nights.
Waking up in a tangle of warm arms and legs with a woman who clearly appreciated his rough-hewn manly virtues, such as they were, albeit unpractised for many years, had been unutterably blissful. On the down side – if there was one, which he seriously doubted – married to Lottie he suspected he would get fat fast if she made him a cooked breakfast each morning; however, he would worry about that another time.
The problem was, that not even the freshness of his memories of holding his naked, soon wife-to-be in his arms could entirely extirpate the tendrils of doubt exploring his thoughts as he had walked to the gates of the Headington Quarry compound, where he hoped to flag down a cab to take him back to his lodgings in the city.
He had heard fellow officers compare the Falklands with Wales, or the Brecon Beacons, and South Georgia to the Mull of Kintyre, and habitually disparage the Argentine Navy.
However, had lived and worked in the South Atlantic, visited Stanley, sailed small boats around the archipelago, walked the streets of Buenos Aires, even learned a little of the local lingo. He prided himself of knowing at least a little about ‘the enemy’ and the vagaries of the Southern Ocean. Unlike most of the men who talked so loosely about what might await the Royal Navy down below fifty degrees south, he had a pretty damned good idea what they would be up against if Operation Downwind ever got off the ground.
The mountains of South Georgia reared thousands of feet above bottomless freezing fjords, the old, abandoned whaling stations clung to shorelines in the shadow of Alpine-like glaciers and at this time of year snow buried everything, the wind howled across the razor-back ridges and a man could do nothing but seek cover until each successive storm blew through. Even on a fine day, Katabatic winds might suddenly fall from the mountains and turn previously glassy calm sheltered waters into a maelstrom of icy spindrift.
And as for the Falklands, from his recollections of those parts of the archipelago he had seen, and set foot upon, the islands were nothing like Wales, even in the brief southern summer – broadly speaking November to February – the wind often blew so hard there were no trees, and the interior, ‘the camp’, was a huge peat bog broken by mountains taller than all bar two or three in England and Wales. Stanley, the capital, was cut off from the rest of East Falkland by a ring of hills and mountains up to fifteen hundred feet high, and the ‘camp’, was a swampy, tussock-grassed wilderness where the enemy could see you coming miles away. There were no roads to speak of outside Stanley, just a few tracks impassable to anything other than a four-wheel drive vehicle with a driver who knew exactly what he was doing.
The last few seasons he had been down to the South Atlantic, when he had conned pelagic whale catcher boats into Stanley Harbour for repairs, he remembered the Falklands as a place mainly inhabited by penguins and sheep, and perhaps, a couple of thousand islanders, an aging population constantly undermined by the tendency of local young women to persuade a visiting Royal Marine – usually a thirty to forty man garrison which was refreshed or replaced every six to twelve months – to rescue them from the dreariness of life so far from civilisation.
Most of the population had lived on East Falkland, two-thirds at Stanley, with the next biggest settlements being at Goose Green and Darwin. Elsewhere, like at Fitzroy on the south coast, handfuls of hardy folk eked out livings on the unforgiving land. Kelp, sea weed, was a source of animal feed, which could also be dried and burned, or processed for fertiliser. Most of the islanders burned peat to heat their homes. Until the October War, life for the ‘Kelpers’ must have been more like living in the nineteenth than the twentieth century.
It was hardly surprising that the islands were poor, their population aging, slowly diminishing as the young folk looked for a better life somewhere far, far away from the ends of the earth.
Dermot O’Reilly did not need anybody to tell him that the Argentines had probably mistreated the Falkland Islanders, that was a given. Troops shot to pieces in opposed amphibious landings were not likely to have been on their Sunday-best behaviour in the aftermath of the experience. And it was not as if the Argentine military and police were renowned for treating their own people with kid gloves. As to how much credence he gave to some of the more hysterical newspaper reports about atrocities and the mistreatment of the Kelpers, including murder and rape; there he reserved judgement. Most of the Argentines he had encountered on his travels were regular guys, just like him. Hopefully, once he got to Scotland, he would learn the real story, not the one adorned and twisted by political rhetoric and post-imperial jingoism, transmitted to the public by a hysterical press.
That said, regardless of how daunting the notion of taking back the Falklands seemed to him, viscerally, if not intellectually, he knew that there were a lot of people in the fleet who still, genuinely believed that the Navy had unfinished business down in the South Atlantic. The only thing that he had not, self-evidently, recognised was that the feeling was also embraced by the men at the top.
Not that this altered the fact that any enterprise to attempt to re-stage D-day eight thousand miles from home was on the face of it, so irrational as to be madness.
It would take an amphibious operation on the scale of the Suez fiasco, or perhaps those conducted by the US Navy in its island-hopping campaign across the Pacific in the Second War. The scale of the undertaking would have to be breath-taking, easily the biggest opposed landing on a hostile shore since D-Day in June 1944.
Where was the Navy going to get the carriers it was going to need to ensure local air superiority over the Falklands when the troops went ashore?
How many troops – and all their equipment, and supplies for say, a three to six month campaign - would have to be transported?
Conventional wisdom held that one needed a three-to-one advantage to assault an enemy in prepared defenses – the Argentines had had four years to ‘prepare’ their emplacements – so, if for the sake of argument they had a garrison of ten thousand men on East Falkland (West Falkland was largely uninhabited and uninhabitable bar a few island settlements and tiny fis
hing inlets), we will need to transport over thirty thousand fully equipped troops to the South Atlantic and somehow get them ashore…
Do we even have that many troops – the equivalent of five or six infantry brigades, two whole divisions - to spare?
And if we do, what about the ships to ferry them a third of the way around the world and to support them when they are ashore?
He had waved down a taxi, an old London black cab strangely out of place in Oxford, and slumped into the back seat.
And why am I being sent to Scotland to talk about all this with a bunch of bloody submariners?
‘Bloody Hell,’ he thought to himself, ‘what’s Mister and Misses O’Reilly’s little boy gone and got himself into now?’
It was a second before, to his chagrin, he realised that he had inadvertently spoken his musings out aloud.
Chapter 38
Friday 14th June, 1968
Officers’ Quarters, Ukrainka-Seryshevo Air Base, Siberia
Andrei Kirov did not usually get blind drunk. His huge frame soaked up alcohol like a sponge and it was very hard for him to drink beyond what other, frailer mortals considered to be a happily cheerful, numb plateau of relatively mild inebriation.
That first morning back at Seryshevo he had the hangover without the benefit of overnight oblivion, his head hurt, his vision was – literally – spotty, and he still had not decided how to play what was left of his less than stellar career in the KGB, and his most likely from here on in, middlingly miserable existence.
After his traumatic interview with First Secretary Kryuchkov he had contemplated blowing out his brains. He had loaded his Makarov service pistol, placed it on the rickety table in his cell-like lodgings in the harbour KGB House close to the HQ building, and stared at the PM - Pistolet Makarova – semi-automatic for a long, long time. All he had to do was put the muzzle in his mouth, bite down on it and squeeze off a 9-millimetre round and it would be over.
But no, he was never going to go out that way.
Why make it easy for the bastards?
As for his ‘mission’ to deliver Vladimir Alexandrovich Kryuchkov a coup early in his spell in the Far East, well, that was never going to happen although it went without saying, that he was going to have to go through the motions, and make it look good, too. If he did not the axe could fall any day; and later was always preferable to sooner.
The strangest thing was that despite everything, he was still curious to unravel exactly what was going on.
Whoever had set him up had not done it just for fun, just for a laugh. Whoever was responsible – he took Kryuchkov’s assertion that it was General Zakharov with a pinch of salt, he might simply have reported something reported to him to cover his own back – must have known they were playing with fire. An embittered Political Officer could do a lot of damage, especially out here in the wilderness with no immediate superior to crack down on him if he took matters into his own hands.
He still commanded a twenty-man security detachment, and had the power to confine suspected enemies of the people to the base, pending investigation. In the good old days, he could have got away with murder; and worried about justifying it later. He was accountable to nobody at Seryshevo, strictly speaking he was outside the command hierarchy, the personal representative of the Party on the frontline of the ideological struggle, the nominated local defender of the Marxist-Leninist dialectic.
That, of course, was just the latest cruel joke that life had played on him because the more he thought about it, the more he realised that whatever gloss he put on it, he was the one who was looking down both barrels, waiting for somebody else to pull the triggers.
So, in the meantime, what was to stop him spreading a little of his misery around?
The comedians at Seryshevo had fucked with him; so, why not repay the compliment before his own people gave him the pre-dawn knock on the door?
The uniform he recovered from the cupboard of his dacha smelled musty. From which he concluded that his batman obviously had not thought he was coming back. His quarters had not been aired or cleaned other than a cursory tidy up, probably the day after he departed for Vladivostok.
It was already warm and a little humid when he left for the base. At the main gates he went into the guardhouse and ordered both of the KGB troopers supposed to be on watch with the Red Air Force men, outside. Albeit, only after bawling them out, cowing them into cringing submission for the dishevelled state of their uniforms.
He felt a little better after that.
At the Administration Block he knocked once and walked straight into Vladimir Zakharov’s office.
The base Commandant looked up.
“Ah, they told me you were back.”
Andrei Kirov was beyond the normal civilities.
“No thanks to you or the fucking Air Force!”
Zakharov sat back in his chair and reached for a cigarette, which he lit unhurriedly before fixing the younger man in a glacial gaze.
Kirov, meanwhile, loomed above his desk angry-eyed, much in the fashion of a Brown bear sizing up his next meal.
The older man had had no way of knowing exactly how the base Political Officer’s masters would handle the matters he had placed before them. Well, that he had ‘placed’ in a very roundabout way via contacts in Komsomolsk and a couple of old friends back in the Chelyabinsk Military District.
For that matter, he had had no idea what use 37th Air Army Headquarters would make of the dossier he had sent them at the beginning of May. Customarily, even in the old days these things were sometimes ignored or conveniently miss-filed; nobody wanted to end up in the middle of a three-way, Red Air Force- KGB-Party fight.
Nonetheless, he had hoped he had seen to last of the KGB man. But now he was back, looking angry.
The thing was to find out what had happened in Vladivostok.
Clearly, Kirov had not been packed off to a labour battalion, or posted elsewhere but from the way he was looming over him now, with murder in his eyes, he had been sent back to Seryshevo if not in disgrace, then under a cloud. Or rather, given that the KGB was an apparat utterly without shame, he was under at the very least, a shadow for embarrassing his superiors.
Vladimir Zakharov prided himself on being nimble on his feet; his first plan had failed, he needed to come up with another plan.
“If it makes you feel any better,” Zakharov remarked, “I suspect my enemies have made plans for me once I leave Seryshevo. I am one of yesterday’s men. Sometimes, I do not believe our new masters understand that we no longer live in the country that went to war in 1962.” He sighed, unsure whether the other man was listening to a word he said. “I don’t mean because we were defeated; I mean because after the disaster in Iran and Iraq in 1964, the Motherland abandoned the path of Revolution. Even the Yankees understand that; why else would they make peace with us? You feel yourself to be betrayed. Join the club, Comrade Major Kirov. Here at Seryshevo you are in good company.”
The younger man’s eyes had narrowed in suspicion.
Tellingly, he had taken half-a-step back from the desk.
“So, what? You were the one who set me up, why?”
Vladimir Zakharov shrugged.
The man was brighter than he looked; but then he had always assumed as much.
“I planted a few seeds of doubt about you. I had no idea if they would take root. I strongly suspect that the only person who is really ‘setting you up’, is your new boss back in Vladivostok. That is the nature of our system; its most profound evil. We are a people who have lost our soul, Comrade Commissar. Now, like rabid dogs, we turn on each other.”
Andrei Kirov was sorely tempted to put his hands around the other man’s neck and squeeze…
What I really need is homespun Vodka bottle philosophy!
“It was the Yankees who did this to us,” Zakharov continued. “We ought to make them pay for it but our leaders have already surrendered. Some of us think it is our duty to carry on the fight.”
&
nbsp; “And stabbing me in the back is what? A good start?”
“I had my reasons. You must not blame Olga…”
“Why? Because she was just following orders?”
Zakharov shook his head.
He quirked a crooked smile: “You think I ordered her to sleep with you? How little you know our beautiful missile queen.”
The KGB man was in no mood to believe anything the older man said. Nonetheless, his face creased with questions before he remembered why he had marched into the base commander’s office.
“I don’t know what your game is, Comrade General. But I’ll find out and trust me, you’ll regret ever fucking with me!”
Chapter 39
Friday 14th June, 1968
Nettlecombe Avenue, Southsea
Lottie Richards had attended a long-planned Mess function that evening before walking the mile or so from the gates of the Naval Base to her home. There were always shore patrols on the streets and providing one was not out after about eleven at night a woman alone was normally perfectly safe. In any event, that evening she had been accompanied most of the way by friends who had, one by one, peeled off to head for their own billets or homes, leaving her alone for only the short, last stretch, when she turned south, down Nettlecombe Avenue.
She was lucky, the Navy paid the rent for her one up, one down slice of a part-modernised old three bedroom house. Because it was a Navy house the other two officer tenants kept to themselves, and it was quiet usually. She had had the option of living on one of the hurriedly thrown up, prefabricated quarters on the Gosport side of Fareham Creek, or at the new Portsea Navy Estate; but preferred the normality of knocked about, neglected Southsea where sometimes, if one closed one’s eyes and dreamed a little, one might almost believe one was still living in the world before the cataclysm.
She had explained that to Dermot.
He had confessed to her, guiltily, that if he was being honest about it, the October War was the best thing that had ever happened to him.