Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  Chapter 50

  Monday 13th February 1967

  Manassas, Virginia

  The rifle had arrived yesterday around noon.

  The couriers, a young couple from San Jose had been nervous; they seemed nice enough kids, just starting out and when they got home and collected it, five thousand bucks in addition to the five hundred Kurt Mikkelsen’s step-father had given them ‘for the trip’, was going to make a lot of difference to their lives.

  ‘Don’t let me hear you hurt them people, son,’ the old man had said, finishing their brief conversation. Kurt had gone down to the town, put the call through on a pay phone in the square in front of what passed for City Hall out here in the boondocks.

  ‘That ain’t my plan, Pa,’ he had replied woodenly.

  ‘I mean it, son. I need you to promise me.’

  It had taken three-and-a-half days for the boy and the girl, neither of them was much past eighteen, to drive their old Chevy across North America. They had taken it in turns driving, probably fallen asleep at the wheel more than once. The car was dusty, and they were frightened and elated all at once when he saw them drive past, brake, back-up and eventually turn onto the track south of Bull Run. He had followed them, flashed them and they had halted.

  “Stay in the car. Don’t follow me. Don’t go anywhere until I get back,” Kurt had told the kids, wearing his bad-arse face.

  Then he had taken the long, heavy case holding the disassembled Remington into the woods. Checked the kids had not followed him, before unhurriedly opening it with the key he had brought with him from California, and looked over its contents, satisfying himself that nobody had opened the case since it was closed up in San Francisco.

  He had gone back to the track.

  ‘Where are you kids going from here?’

  ‘Maybe check out DC before we head home, sir?’ The boy, a tanned, wide-eyed surfer type, had replied uncertainly.

  Mikkelsen had shaken his head.

  The girl was brunette, curvy with Latino blood; she was the one who would try to make whatever the two of them had together, work.

  ‘No. That doesn’t cut it for me,’ Kurt had told them. “You were never here. The last few days you’ve been up in the mountains screwing your brains out. You never saw me, or that box you brought me. You tell anybody about this and it’ll fuck your lives. You dig?”

  The youngsters had nodded.

  ‘Where do you want us to go, Mister?” The girl had asked, sensible kid.

  ‘Back where you came from,’ he had said. ‘Nice and easy, just so nobody ever knows you went out of state.’

  He had gone to his semi, come back with the envelope containing one thousand dollars in used notes. Also, inside the envelope was a key and a note.

  ‘The money is a bonus for getting here inside four days. The key in the envelope is for a deposit box at Wells Fargo Bank on Market Street back in San Francisco. In one month from today, my associates will place another five thousand dollars in used notes in that box.” That was a lie, the money was already there; but it was important to put a little separation between the coast to coast drive and the pay-off. That was basic field craft. “Blab a word about any of this to anybody in the next month and that money will go up in smoke.’

  Kurt had viewed the kids with cold, emotionless unblinking eyes until each had looked away.

  ‘But you won’t worry about that because you’ll both be dead.’

  He had told them to count the money in the envelope in front of him. The kids had not known whether to be yipping for joy or pissing their pants.

  ‘You can rely on us, sir,” the boy had blurted.

  ‘Today never happened, understand?’

  They understood.

  Kurt Mikkelsen had trailed the old Chevy for twenty miles west before, in the darkness he had pulled off the highway, waited twenty minutes in the event the kids were stupid enough to double back, and then driven the hour or up country to the hunting lodge in the forest where he had ‘entertained’ Clara Schouten.

  Normally, he would have found another place by now, kept moving after he had released her. However, he doubted the woman would have been able to tell the searchers anything liable to enable them to quickly, if at all, pinpoint the cabin in the woods; DC was surrounded by ‘woods’ and once picturesque, now industrialising country towns like Manassas and Bull Run. Of course, Clara Schouten would not have been able to tell her paymasters anything, if he had cut her throat the way he had planned, right up until the moment…he did not.

  He told himself that killing the woman had not actually been operationally necessary; and that leaving her wandering around the woods with her hands trussed was enough. He had wanted to send the Office of Security and that bastard Angleton a message; killing that jerk in Alexandria, and fucking the Locksmith’s secretary had sent plenty of messages!

  Right now, Angleton would be obsessing over what Clara Schouten had blabbed to him to save her life. He would be terrified that the woman had spilled the beans on one or other, perhaps all, of his current operations in DC; perhaps, that was the plan all along, to uncover his most dangerous secrets and drip-feed the poison into the media, day by day. Actually, Clara had wanted to tell him everything.

  ‘Why don’t you want to know?’ She had asked, despairing.

  ‘Would it make any difference?” He had retorted.

  Like he cared a fuck about what one bit of the US Government did to another, or all the sick games people like the Scarecrow played with all the other sick bastards in DC!

  He spent most of that afternoon cleaning and checking the balance of the Remington M24 .30-06 rifle, and the old German telescopic sight his Pa – heck, Hans was the only man he had ever known for a father – had adapted for the gun. The old guy was the best gunsmith he had ever known, a true artist.

  Neither of them had been entirely happy with the idea of modifying the Remington to permit the use of a heavy-duty screw-on silencer.

  ‘First shot may not do it, Pa,’ he had apologised. ‘Got to reckon on needing to get off two, three, four shots off and that ain’t going to happen if the mark and the whole goddamned Secret Service hears the first shot.’

  Obviously, if he missed with the first round the target and everybody else, would probably hear the ‘crack’ of the bullet rushing past, or might even feel the perturbation of the air. Some people said bullets ‘sang’ as they went by; he had never been sold on the ‘singing’ deal. He just listened to the ‘crack’ and moments later, the ‘bang’ or more likely, the ‘dull thud’ that might tell him the direction from which a shot had originated. The different sounds were to do with velocity; often a round was flying faster than the speed of sound. The ‘crack’ sound of a near miss was simply an aero-dynamic by product of the air being shouldered out of the way along the initial, supersonic trajectory of the bullet, the ‘bang’ or ‘thud’ of the gun firing, travelling only at the speed of sound, then caught up…

  Therefore, using a silencer meant the target had no idea as to which direction the bullet had come from. And no idea where to safely go to ground…

  Kurt had identified a meadow where the ground sloped gently for nearly four hundred yards protected by trees on three sides, a place where he could zero-in the Zeiss-Jena sights.

  Twilight fell as he was walking back to the cabin.

  It was fully dark when he went out to his semi, turned on the radio to catch the news on Public Service Broadcasting.

  …Lady Rachel French, the socialite wife of a senior Royal Air Force Officer Dan French gave an interview to reporters at the British Embassy a couple of hours ago. She said rumours about her parachuting out of Prime Minister Thatcher’s private aircraft over the Midwest were nonsense. She had been at the Embassy all the time, quote ‘nursing a head cold’. She said she planned the stay in DC a few more days ‘settling a little unfinished business.’ Now for the rest of the news on the hour…

  Chapter 51

  Monday 13th February 1967


  Headquarters, 4th Royal Tanks Battle Group, Blaye

  Sergey Akhromeyev had discovered that the great storm which had shut down the majority of offensive military operations, and suspended normal life over most of Northern France for better than a week, flooding not just the Gironde Estuary, but every other watercourse in Brittany, the Poitou and the ancient lands of Aquitaine south of the Garonne and Dordogne river systems and their confluence at the Gironde, had already led to several postponements in launching the original Operation Blondie.

  He and Lieutenant Paddy Ashdown had retreated to a corner of the Mess in the old, rather knocked-about Town Hall of Blaye, sat down and pored over maps of the Gironde Estuary, the Medoc and the pre-war port city of Bordeaux. Vexingly, all the maps were quite old and took little account of the post-1945 urban sprawl and the modern industrial sites which had sprung up along both banks of the Garonne.

  Operation Blondie had started life around the turn of the year as a modern-day variation on a famous Second War raid – Operation Frankton - on the port of Bordeaux led by Paddy Ashdown’s personal hero, the remarkable Major Herbert George "Blondie" Hasler, Royal Marines.

  Sergey Akhromeyev had never heard of the man, or the relatively minor ‘nuisance’ action against blockade-running merchant ships in November 1942. Apparently, the operation had been the subject of a very popular British movie, The Cockleshell Heroes, in 1955 and in Britain was proudly regarded as a classic small-scale commando raid by every Royal Marine.

  ‘Blondie’ Haslar had come up with the idea for the Second War raid, planned and led it – the name ‘Cockleshell Heroes’ came from the employment of six two-man ‘Cockle’ Mark 2 kayaks in the operation - navigating from the mouth of the Gironde Estuary over sixty miles up-river to Bordeaux. Thereupon, the limpet mines placed on the hulls of a number of ships had damaged, or sunk several of the perfidious ‘blockade runners’ at their moorings in the river. Operation Frankton had not exactly gone off without a hitch! This had only served to paint up the bravery of the men involved in the popular imagination. One of the six canoes having been damaged, launching from the casing of a submarine several miles off the coast, only two of the ten canoeist-commandos involved in the 1942 operation, had survived, of the others six commandoes had been executed by the Nazis, and another pair had died of exposure. Haslar himself, had only survived by walking all the way to the Spanish border, over a hundred miles south through enemy territory. He had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order to add to the Order of the British Empire and the French Croix de Guerre he had earned at Narvik in 1940.

  Akhromeyev thought Haslar sounded like an interesting man. Apparently, after he left the Royal Marines in the late 1940s, he had become a well-known single-handed sailor, and the inventor of a self-steering system for yachts which he perfected so well that by the time he participated in the first Observer Single-handed Transatlantic Race from Plymouth to New York in 1960, it had been adopted by the majority of his competitors. It seemed that Haslar had not cared for The Cockleshell Heroes, loathing the title of the film, the narrative of which, completely ignored the fact that a simultaneous, botched operation by the Special Operations Executive – mounted in ignorance of the Royal Marines’ raid – had very nearly resulted in his men and their brave SOE counterparts, very nearly ‘falling over’ each other.

  Operation Blondie was to be focused upon the presumed headquarters of the Front Internationale within the city’s massive concrete Second World War BETASOM U-boat pens.

  It was a little-known adjunct to the Battle of the Atlantic that at one time over twenty Italian submarines – badly needed by Mussolini to fight the British in the Mediterranean – were, to curry favour with Hitler, based at Bordeaux, the most southern of the Kriegsmarine’s bases in the Bay of Biscay. The great, complex – the acronym ‘BETASOM’ derived from the Italian Bordeaux Sommergibile (Bordeaux Submarine) - which had become operational in January 1943, hosting the 12th U-boat Flotilla, still dominated the inner basin of the port of Bordeaux, its anchorage secure behind still functioning locks isolating its waters from the tidal ebb and flow of the Garonne and the seasonal inundations of the flood plains of the Gironde Estuary.

  Like similar structures at Brest, Lorient, La Rochelle and other places along the French Atlantic coast, the BETASOM complex had been left abandoned after 1945. However, if nothing else, the old U-boat pens were magnificent bomb shelters, impervious to all but the largest conventional bombs and virtually indestructible other than by a very adjacent, very large nuclear bomb. At the end of the Second World War 617 Squadron – the Dambusters – had attacked and damaged, but not destroyed, U-boat pens at Bremen and other places with six-ton ‘Tallboy’ bombs and a handful of ten-ton ‘Grand Slams’. Post-war inspections of the U-boat pens which had been ‘hit’ by these big bombs invariably discovered that hits by single, or even by two or three ‘big bombs’ rarely caused more than local structural damage. Basically, structures like the BETASOM complex were the toughest over-ground targets imaginable. Therefore, it was hardly surprising that the Front Internationale, Krasnaya Zarya and other criminal gangs had gravitated towards the old Nazi monuments, colonised them and stocked them with weapons, food and fuel, much in the fashion of medieval warlords preparing to withstand a siege.

  In the circumstances, it was logical to assume that the people ‘in charge’ in Bordeaux would have done likewise.

  Paddy Ashdown’s original plan had been to collect intelligence on a forty-eight hour-long infiltration of the city on the way to the BETASOM complex, and once there blow up the lock gates protecting the outer basin, hoping to flood the dock complex and hopefully – because of the unnaturally high level of the Garonne - the whole area around the old U-boat pens. Or, failing that, just to blow up ‘targets of opportunity’ in the vicinity.

  Sergey Akhromeyev had hated everything about the younger man’s scheme, except that was, the use of helicopters to transfer Ashdown’s hand-picked ‘team’ of eight desperadoes across the swollen Gironde to its ‘start point’ at Blanquefort, or more specifically, a wooded area a couple of kilometres to the west of the village, which was situated approximately ten kilometres north-north-west of the FI’s suspected headquarters.

  The former Red Army man was not exactly overly enthused with the idea of a jumping off point in the middle of nowhere in a probably waterlogged, sodden landscape either. Especially, not when there was a another, much better alternative staring them all in the face.

  ‘Why don’t we just land on top of the U-boat pens?’ He had inquired.

  Paddy Ashdown thought about the proposition.

  ‘We’d all get killed before we got anywhere near the target,’ he observed, although not in a tone of voice which indicated he ruled it out simply on that basis.

  Akhromeyev had objected, albeit mildly to his objection.

  ‘Not if somebody can keep the bastards’ heads down while it’s happening.’

  The younger man pursed his lips, thinking aloud.

  ‘The Fleet Air Arm mounted several hit-and-run raids in the outskirts of the city before the storm front came over us,’ he mused out aloud. ‘Presumably the Eagle will have remained close inshore now the worst of the weather has passed over.’

  Neither man had any idea if the big carrier had steamed out into the Atlantic, searching for sea room as the storms blew through, or a sheltering port, or if she was back on station fifty miles off the mouth of the Gironde.

  The germ of an audacious plan up to the standard set by Blondie Haslar back in 1942 had, by then, begun to form in their minds but first, they needed to establish whether or not ‘keeping the bastards’ heads down’ was going to be a practical proposition.

  The two men had gone to see the 4th Tanks’ GSO3 – staff officer responsible for operations – whose office was in a requisitioned cottage nestling beneath the shelter of the old city walls. It seemed that HMS Eagle was back ‘on post’, somewhere out in the Bay of Biscay.

  Sergey A
khromeyev explained why they had wanted to know.

  ‘Um… That sounds like a jolly good way to get yourselves killed, chaps,’ they were told candidly.

  Undeterred, Paddy Ashdown and his unlikely comrade in arms continued their deliberations over hot drinks as they studied the maps strewn on the table before them. A few minutes later they heard the thunder of low-flying fast jets rocketing over the Gironde, possibly following the course of the river.

  Somewhat vexed, they had marched back to the GSO3, who was grinning like a Cheshire cat.

  ‘The Fleet Air Arm and the RAF are mounting another big show. Right now, as you’ve just heard. The High Command has decided it is time we gave those comedians in Clermont-Ferrand a wake-up call!’

  Both Ashdown and Akhromeyev were by now muttering about shades of Operation Frankton in 1942, the left-hand not knowing what the right-hand was doing, ever more united in their common purpose.

  ‘How soon can you be ready to go?’ The Russian had demanded.

  ‘Any time for tonight onwards,’ Ashdown replied without hesitation. ‘We’ve been ready to go for over a fortnight.’

  That had been two days ago.

  Chapter 52

  Monday 13th February 1967

  USS United States, San Francisco Bay

  A dozen or so delegations had either already departed, or not bothered to attend for the final session of the General Assembly. Many leaders had stormed out in protest when it was proposed that while the conference would continue for another week, or perhaps longer, the Assembly itself, would not gather again until its ceremonial dispersal on Friday.

  Alexander Shelepin planned to return home – or rather, if possible, to commence his tortuous return to Sverdlovsk sometime tomorrow. He had come to California for one reason; to deliver the speech he clasped in his right hand as he got to his feet and walked, slowly to the stage.