Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  The eldest of seven children – five of whom had initially survived the Cuban Missiles War but only three, himself included remained alive today – he had been born in New Delhi, the son of an officer in the Indian Army, 14th Punjab Regiment, and a mother who had been a nurse in the Queen Alexandria’s Royal Army Nursing Corps. Brought up on a pig farm in County Down in Ulster after the Second War, he had been sent to Bedford School in England aged eleven, where his Northern Ireland accent had given rise to his nickname, a thing he had always embraced with pride, of ‘Paddy’. From earliest boyhood, always destined for a military career he had joined the Royal Marines in 1959.

  Another thing he was proud of was – because anybody who got to know him recognised he had a stubborn, contrary streak a mile wide when it came to matters of principle, what was right and what was wrong, and so forth - that his father had almost got himself court martialled on the honourable grounds that he refused to leave men behind on the retreat to Dunkirk in May 1940. Moreover, he was unrepentedly unapologetic about having never been a heart and soul team player at school. In his book, no man was no use to man nor beast if he was not true to himself.

  This mantra had long since, become his solace in a world gone mad.

  In Malaya he had seen the bodies of men and women murdered because they adhered to the ‘wrong’ religion; in an Indonesian creek he had canoed around the wrecks of a Dutch aircraft carrier and its escorts, and on the nearest shores, discovered the mass graves of the hundreds of murdered men who had survived the mining and missile attack on those gutted steel carcasses, half-sunk in the shallow inshore waters where the fleet had taken shelter in the immediate aftermath of the war to end all wars.

  Axiomatically, as soon as he got home to England, he had trained to be a swimmer-canoeist to qualify for his corps’ elite Special Boat Squadron. He had been doing his level best – off and on, with short spells back in the United Kingdom on R and R, or training in the Highlands or on Dartmoor - to thoroughly confound Her Majesty’s enemies in France, for most of the last eighteen months.

  He had heard about the former Red Army general attached to Brigadier Edwin Bramall’s staff; but not met him until that day, having been out and about in the country – on one or other of the banks of the flooded Gironde Estuary in the last fortnight – reconnoitring in preparation for Operation Blondie.

  Presently, he was not wholly comfortable delivering his report in front of Major General Sergey Fyodorovich Akhromeyev, the forty-three-year-old former Spetsnaz officer, and commander of the now defunct White Brigade, by far the most resilient and ‘awkward’ of the ‘independent’ groups that he and his men, had had the misfortune to encounter last summer and autumn.

  Ashdown had spent a month in hospital back in England after one such chance ‘meeting’ with Akhromeyev’s fighters. One of his men had not been so fortunate. Now he was being expected to treat the Russian as a friend and ally!

  Edwin Bramall had introduced the two men.

  “Lieutenant Ashdown lost a man in a skirmish with your people last August, Sergey,” the commander of 4th Royal Tanks informed the stoic Russian, who looked fit and lean in his British Army battledress fatigues. “Paddy himself was wounded in that affair.”

  “I lost good people, men and women, every time we ‘skirmished’ with your Special Forces, Edwin,” Akhromeyev retorted unapologetically. “This is a stupid bloody war and the faster we win it the better!”

  Paddy Ashdown tried not to make a habit of interrupting a conversation between two general officers, so he held his tongue, reserving judgement. He noted that Akhromeyev’s English was a little laboured, which raised questions about how well he understood what was being said to him.

  He realised the Russian was looking directly at him.

  “Operation Blondie? I wish to come along,” he frowned at Ashdown, searching for the right words, “to observe.”

  “I can’t have my chaps worrying about an observer, sir,” Ashdown retorted. “Especially, not a General!”

  Not so long ago, Sergey Akhromeyev would have reacted violently to this challenge. However, apart from the fact his new English friends would have regarded this as intolerably ‘bad form’, and just not the ‘done thing’, he accepted that intemperance on his part would do nothing to help his case.

  He grimaced, fixed the young Royal Marine officer in his level, unblinking gaze.

  “You think the war in France will go on for another six months, or a year. Maybe longer, no?”

  Both the other men nodded.

  “You are wrong. From what I have learned, and what I have seen here in the last few days, I do not believe my Commando back in Hereford,” again the Russian struggled to trawl up appropriate words, “will not be needed here. I wish to strike a blow against those FI bastards before it is all over…”

  “Operation Blondie is a raid, sir,” Paddy Ashdown protested. “A raid and no more. We go in, we knock out specific targets, we get out again, get back to base to report, debrief and update the global intelligence picture…”

  Sergey Akhromeyev groaned in mild frustration: “If it was not for the flooding the war would already be over in the west.”

  Edwin Bramall coughed.

  The three men were standing at a map table studying a relief of the Gironde Estuary, which showed the dispositions of 4th Tanks and the suspected enemy ‘strong points’ on the south bank above Bordeaux. Very little was known about the defences of the city itself. However, Akhromeyev, having had several days to assess the situation on the ground, viewed the absence of stay-behind insurgents, and the relatively small number of booby traps left behind in the villages and along the roads of the districts around Blaye, as indicative of a disorganised enemy who had left in a hurry and who did not plan on coming back any time soon.

  Therefore, now was the time to hit the enemy as hard as possible with whatever forces could be scraped together; the enemy was not just playing dead; he might already be as good as expired!

  “Besides,” Sergey Akhromeyev grunted, “I don’t want to have to go home and explain why I didn’t kill any of the bastards while I was in France!”

  Paddy Ashdown had to concede that he saw where the former Red Army man was coming from, even if he did not wholly agree with him.

  “We have some indications that the Bordeaux garrison has been reinforced since the autumn, General,” he objected. “We also suspect that supplies from outside France were probably getting into Bordeaux and the Medoc from the outside world until at least last summer. Personally, I don’t hold with rumours that the city is the Front Internationale’s ‘Stalingrad of the West’, I think that’s probably just Krasnaya Zarya propaganda; but I do think there may be tens of thousands of people still in the city and possibly a larger garrison than that of say, Clermont-Ferrand or Lyon, of as many as several thousand combat effectives…”

  Edwin Bramall called a halt to the debate before it got overly heated.

  “Paddy, you and General Akhromeyev find a quiet corner and draw me up a plan to find out what we’re up against in Bordeaux. By all means blow things up and snipe at the leadership cadre, if the beggars are identifiable. Just remember that what I really want to know is if Sergey’s ‘feel’ for what’s going on to the south and across the other side of the Estuary, is a better appreciation of the tactical situation than the one we’re working with at the moment.” He drew breath. “Whatever form Operation Blondie takes you will remain in command. General Akhromeyev, if he accompanies you will be present in a supernumerary capacity only. Any questions?”

  Chapter 47

  Sunday 12th February 1967

  USSR Lodge, The Presidio, San Francisco

  Vasili Vasilyevich Kuznetsov had got to his feet and walked out of the interminable now two-day old plenary session of the Grand Assembly. This was not on account of having to listen to the repeated contentions of most of the representatives of the smaller and all of the unaligned nations, not to mention those under the thumb of the People’s
Republic of China, that both the Soviet Union and the United States were equally to blame for the October War, and should henceforth make full restitution to ‘the whole of humanity’ for their heinous transgressions. No, he got to his feet and led his small delegation off the USS United States because he had been instructed to so do, at an appropriate juncture in the middle of a speech by a ‘country of no consequence’.

  It happened that the Prime Minister of Botswana, Sir Seretse Khama had been speaking, eloquently and with none of the bile of previous delegates, at the time Kuznetsov had risen, stiffly to his feet. Khama had been appealing for a more just world in which intellectual and natural resources were shared fairly and the latest medical and scientific discoveries were used for the benefit of all Mankind.

  Vasili Kuznetsov would have been sympathetic had such a world order been remotely feasible, which it was not because everything he had learned, during his over-long life, had taught him that the human condition mitigated against it.

  It was crystal clear that the United Nations was not going to be in any sense, ‘united’, other than on paper, here in San Francisco. The indifference of the Americans, the intransigent attitude of the British and the general atmosphere of recrimination and resentment presented towering, unassailable hurdles. Cynically, the reconstitution of the United Nations in an incarnation similar to that prior to October 1962 suited none of the big players. The international chess board had changed out of all recognition since 1945, and the Cuban Missiles War had kicked over an already discredited, failed geopolitical system. The only country that had not come to terms with this new reality was the United States.

  It had taken over an hour to get back to the ‘lodge’ allocated to Chairman Shelepin’s mission at the sprawling military base; and Kuznetsov was still in the middle of reporting the events of the depressingly predictable day aboard the great liner moored in San Francisco Bay, when Sergey Gorshkov burst into the room.

  Vasili Kuznetsov rose, respectfully but due to his increasingly arthritic knees very stiffly, almost in slow motion.

  Alexander Shelepin did not so much as arch an eyebrow.

  “Comrade Sergey Georgyevich,” he observed, with a cool detachment that in any other man an observer might have characterised as ‘laconic’, “you seem…agitated?”

  The greying Minister of Defence and second man in the Troika never quite seemed comfortable in civilian clothes; it was as if his uniform became him and he it, even though he had never gone in for the routine overkill of a chest weighed down with medals he could not possibly have earned or won.

  Gorshkov was the man who had sacrificed what was left of the Red Navy’s Black Sea Fleet and its Turkish prizes in a suicidally desperate attempt to seize Malta, and successfully drawn the eyes of the World’s off the opening moves of Operation Nakazyvat, the doomed, disastrous invasion of Iran and Iraq. He was also the man who had ordered the thermonuclear obliteration of Basra to halt the British advance into Iraq, and thereby book-ended the Motherland’s disastrous attempt to seize the oil of the Middle East. More pertinently, he was also the man who had coldly decided to stand aside while Shelepin’s coup swept away the old guard.

  It took a lot to get Sergey Gorshkov excited.

  The newcomer pulled himself together.

  “The British Minister is downstairs!”

  Alexander Shelepin frowned.

  “Lord Harding-Grayson! He says he is here to pay his respects to Comrade Alexander Nikolayevich!”

  “Is he alone?”

  “No, he came with his wife!”

  “To pay his respects?”

  “That is what he said,” Gorshkov confirmed. “In very prissy Moskva!”

  “Where is he now?”

  “In the reception room on the ground floor guarded by two of my boys…”

  Alexander Shelepin’s mind was suddenly roiling with doubts, suspicions and possibilities.

  Thomas Carlyle Harding-Grayson…

  The man who had shut the Soviet Union out of Egypt and much of the Arab world for a generation; and had somehow contrived to turn the People’s Republic of China off the one true path of Marxist-Leninism, while simultaneously somehow engineering the rebirth of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation; and, this was the really remarkable thing, convinced the Nixon Administration that it was its idea all along, was waiting downstairs to ‘pay his respects’ to his sworn enemies!

  The First Secretary and Chairman of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was half way to the door, with a still disconcerted Gorshkov stepping out of his way before his conscious brain had instructed his body to move.

  Lord Harding-Grayson and Lady Patricia were standing by the window, admiring the lights illuminating the nearest, southern tower of the Golden Gate Bridge begin to take full effect in the gathering dusk.

  The British minister’s wife, a slim, elegant, elderly woman with platinum grey hair and intelligent, perspicacious blue-grey eyes fixed Alexander Shelepin as he halted a bare arm’s length away from the couple.

  “Kak pozhivayete, tovarishch Pervyy sekretar,” she smiled, extending her pale, white right hand to the Russian leader.

  How do you do, Comrade First Secretary?

  There was nothing ‘prissy’ about the woman’s command of his mother tongue; it had a melodic Latvian lilt.

  “Moy muzh tak mnogo rasskazal vam o vas, kak priyatno nakonets vstretit' vas vo ploti!” The lady went on, smiling serenely.

  My husband has told me so much about you, it is marvellous to finally meet you in the flesh!

  “I am flattered, dear lady,” Shelepin replied in halting English. No Head of the KGB could function properly without at least a conversational grasp of that infernal language. It was, after all, the language of the Motherland’s two most implacable post-Second War foes.

  The woman beamed with pleasure.

  “Forgive me, I was afraid my Russian would make me an object of no little fun,” she confessed, reverting to her own tongue with evident relief. “I do my best to be a good Foreign Office wife but I have never had my husband’s extraordinary gift for languages.”

  Alexander Shelepin belatedly remembered he was supposed to be sizing up Lady Patricia’s husband; not allowing the mendacious old rascal – a man who would have been totally at home in any medieval Medici court – to study him at his leisure.

  He nodded to his adversary.

  Switching back to Russian: “You will understand that my people did not know what to do with you when you turned up at our door, Lord Harding-Grayson?”

  The other man grinned ruefully.

  “Given that our two missions are such near neighbours it would have been positively rude of us not to make a house call, Comrade Chairman.”

  Vasili Kuznetsov had trailed breathlessly behind his leader and was only now gathering his second wind; a lucky accident because Alexander Shelepin was looking at him expectantly.

  “This is a little irregular, Comrade Chairman,” he gasped.

  And then the most bizarre thing happened.

  The British Foreign Secretary’s wife stepped forward, past Alexander Shelepin and took a firm hold of Kutnetsov’s elbow and inquired, with convincingly genuine, maternal concern: “Tovarishch posol, vy v poryadke?

  Comrade Ambassador, are you quite well?

  “This is all quite a shock,” the veteran diplomat murmured, allowing himself to be guided to the nearest chair. His face ashen with exhaustion, beads of perspiration peeling off his brow.

  “Fear not,” Tom Harding-Grayson promised. “This is but a short visit. Just long enough to ensure that our friends and your adversaries start to question our loyalties and your motives. Diplomacy, was ever thus.”

  Alexander Shelepin understood the Englishman.

  “This conference has been, and will be, the disaster we all confidently expected it to be,” the British Foreign Secretary remarked. “But then, I doubt if any of us, will be ready to sit down around a peace table in good fait
h for many years to come. However, that does not mean it is not in our mutual best interests to cobble together an armistice of some sort. Then, at least, we can leave the future to our successors, the next generation.”

  “You speak in riddles, Comrade Minister,” Shelepin retorted with only mild irritation.

  “Tomorrow,” Tom Harding-Grayson said, abandoning artifice, “my Prime Minister, the President of the United States and,” he quirked a crooked smile, “you, Comrade Chairman, will address the General Assembly. I humbly urge you to take into account the turmoil in this country, and to reflect upon the mistakes we have all made in Western Europe and France since the Cuban Missiles War. I also urge you to take advantage of this passing moment of American vulnerability, to draw back from the brink in Europe and to give President Nixon a sign, preferably an unambiguous sign, that you are prepared to contemplate at least, a…dialogue.”

  The Soviet leader’s eyes narrowed.

  The Englishman shrugged.

  “I would not be here if I had not already concluded that your presence in the United States was not, in itself, a solemn earnest of your willingness to make concessions to achieve a lasting peace, Comrade Chairman. I simply tell you that in my opinion – for what it is worth – now is the time to be seen by the World to be making the first move.”

  Shelepin absorbed this.

  “And what of your own leader? What will she propose tomorrow?”

  “Hope, tinged with fire and brimstone, Comrade Chairman.” Tom Harding-Grayson hesitated; this was the time to turn and leave. He hesitated. “If you choose to see it in such terms, the conquest of France and the securing of that country’s eastern borders for all time, may be the limit of the United Kingdom’s territorial ambitions in Europe. Beyond that, stasis is acceptable to my government, given peace.”

  Now, he began to turn to leave, with his wife patting Vasili Kuznetsov’s arm and rising to follow.

  “Central Europe may never again be an armed camp as it was before the Cuban Missiles War,” her husband sighed, his eyes sad, “if it ever becomes what it was before that war again, then I foresee only unimaginable grief. If I may, I will leave you with this thought: the man, or the woman, who proposes a thousand kilometres neutral buffer zone between the West and the Soviet Union in Europe may well go down in history as the saviour of us all.”