by James Philip
Sharof Rashidovich Rashidov, the bullet-headed, blood-spattered Commissar calling the shots at the Residence had bawled for clothes to be found for Agnès.
Without self-consciousness – considerations of ephemeral niceties like feminine modesty had gone the same way as decency and reason in the last few years – she stripped naked to the waist and tugged on the shirt the Russians around her had probably removed from a corpse. In a moment she had disappeared into an over-sized fur-lined greatcoat.
And then she had led the band of Kalashnikov-armed toughs and pistol-toting Communist Party hacks out into the night.
All the while Rashidov had hurled questions at her.
Stepping out into the gunfire-shattered darkness she had, at last, begun to think clearly, weigh again her options. Running into and hiding in the Soviet Residence had bought her time, and kept her from being recognised on the streets and torn to pieces by the mob.
Now, she had lost her uniform, become again anonymous.
What twinge of guilt she had experienced knowing she was going to betray her temporary saviours at the first opportunity; had passed when the bastards had started shooting their injured comrades.
Not even the English would do a thing like that!
These people deserved whatever they got!
The Soviets had supported first one, then another even worse faction in the civil war in the South. But for the curse of Red Dawn the farms and industrial cities of the Aquitaine, the Poitou, the Limousine, the Auvergne, the Rhone, the Midi Pyrenees, the Languedoc in the south, with Provence and the Cote d’Azur, ought to have been the salvation of La Belle France. Instead, the maniacs had condemned the decimated populations of the provinces unbombed in the catastrophe of October 1962, to a never-ending nightmare of internecine predation, its peoples conscripted into berserker robber bands to fight in the north and the east, leaving its fields untilled, its factories lying silent with starvation and disease stalking the land in a year in, year out cycle of death and misery.
There were no children on the streets of Maxim Machenaud’s new Jerusalem, that Marxist-Leninist paradise on earth he talked about creating out of the ashes of the old, corrupt France.
Nobody had dared to tell the fool that the southern enclaves no longer paid more than passing lip service to the ‘madman on the hill’ in the Auvergne, or that the leadership in Lyon, and probably in Bordeaux too, considered themselves independent of Clermont-Ferrand, their ideologies having long ago, diverged from the one truth path. Comrade Agnès had never understood why the Soviets dealt solely with the Machenaud rump of the Front Internationale, or had, for reasons beyond her ken, remained convinced that there was still any such thing as the ‘Front Internationale’ as a coherent, organised regional movement. There had never really been a Front Internationale ‘state’ in Southern France, it had only ever been a gang of old Communist Party discontents, the rabble who had never found a home in the sclerotic semi-Stalinist ‘Internationale’ presided over by Jacques Duclos and his cronies in the old days.
But for Russian meddling the whole disgusting apparatus of the Front Internationale might have imploded two years ago; even under Duclos and his grasping lieutenants, life for the people of southern France could not possibly have been any worse than it had been under Maxim Machenaud.
Duclos was no iconoclast; he was an old-school leftist who probably yearned for things to be, more or less, the way they had been before the war…
Comrade Agnès tried to excise all the ‘what ifs’ from her consciousness as she led the Russians through streets turning into killing grounds, as the people of Clermont-Ferrand vented four years of pent up rage and vengeance upon their tormentors.
“Keep together!” She yelled, her voice cracking with raw fear.
“Close up!” Bawled somebody behind her. “Don’t get separated from the main group!”
Chapter 54
Monday 13th February 1967
City Hall, San Francisco
Major Sir Steuart Pringle, the commander of the Prime Minister’s personal protection squad, had been appalled when he was briefed about the security measures in place around and at City Hall and now, as he shepherded his charges through the crowds, he was a very worried man.
The problem was nothing to do with the unstinting wealth of resources their hosts had devoted to the ‘security plan’ – there seemed to be hundreds of armed San Francisco Police Department, Marines and State Troopers carrying shotguns, automatic weapons and any number and variety of handguns, nightsticks and tear gas canisters – but with the overwhelming impression of utter chaos. Nobody seemed to be in charge, or rather, nobody anybody who could be immediately identified. Moreover, while there were concentric cordons at eight hundred, four hundred and one hundred yards from the empty ground in front of the post-1906 earthquake building, civilians milled everywhere, even inside the police lines closest to City Hall where cars were continually pulling up, disgorging their human cargoes and parking up in the loom of the dazzling floodlights illuminating every arrival for the benefit of the TV cameras.
Steuart Pringle yelled at his men: “Stay in touching distance of our treasure!”
This meant that he expected his men to literally surround and protect, with their bodies, the Prime Minister. Normally, in the event of a problem, the lady forbade him to open fire in a crowd. This was something of a vexation to Steuart Pringle and his men, to whom only one thing mattered: the safety of their ‘treasure’.
‘I do not want innocent people killed or hurt because somebody sneezed at the wrong time, Sir Steuart!’
Tonight, in direct disobedience to his Prime Minister’s diktat, Steuart Pringle’s men had their Stirling submachine guns set on full-automatic with orders not to wait for his command to ‘return fire’ if there was ‘an incident’.
Nobody was going to lay a finger on a single hair of the Right Honourable Margaret Hilda Thatcher, MP, on his watch!
The press of bodies, the constant flash of camera bulbs, the rattle of shutters firing and the general hubbub of the surrounding throng was horribly, dangerously disorientating. The whole ghastly accident waiting to happen, smacked of improvisation and a profound lack of attention to detail which immensely offended Steuart Pringle’s Royal Marine soul.
The US Government had not wanted to host the United Nations re-union, a GOP Administration had squabbled with the State of California and the City of San Francisco, both controlled by Democrats, and at the last minute thrown resources at the problem as if planning and preparation were dirty words. Worse still, the Americans had refused to divulge their ‘full security plan’ for this evening’s Presidential address, citing ‘confidentiality concerns’ to anybody who had the temerity to inquire: “What the Devil is going on?”.
Steuart Pringle had strongly advised the Prime Minister to remain at the Presidio.
‘This is far too dangerous, Ma’am.’
The Prime Minister had long ago, stopped reminding her Royal Marine guardian angel that only the Queen was ‘Ma’am’, and that she was either ‘Prime Minister’ or ‘Mrs Thatcher’; but eventually given up the unequal fight last year.
‘Sir Steuart, I am not going to watch the most important speech of the year on television!’
Now, Margaret Thatcher’s AWPs were trying to pilot her safely through a chaotic melee just to reach the small, cleared space in the crowd where the TV broadcasters had set up shop.
Steuart Pringle had one arm protectively about the lady’s shoulders and the other firmly gripping the butt of his Browning .45 automatic pistol.
Like his men’s weapons, his pistol was locked and loaded, ‘safety off’.
This was one of those tricky situations where normally, he would have relied on ‘the Colonel’, Frank Waters, to take care of the really close protection ‘duty’. It went without saying that he would not have dreamed of laying hands on the lady had it not been in his professional opinion, such a decidedly dicey scenario that he was unprepared to be separa
ted from her for a split second.
Frank would not have hesitated biffing anybody who got too close to his ‘treasure’; and with a sinking heart, Steuart Pringle recognised that was exactly what the developing security foul-up might very well soon demand.
Behind their commanding officer other Marines were physically walking their charges, the Foreign Secretary and his wife, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, Ian Gow, and Sir Roy Jenkins, the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative at the – more or less – reformed, somewhat dysfunctional United Nations while others of Steuart Pringle’s men tried to create a narrow, crushed cordon sanitaire around the group.
A shadow emerged from the dazzled and stepped directly in front of Steuart Pringle and Margaret Thatcher. The shape lurched towards the Prime Minister.
Steuart Pringle’s pistol whipped the man across the face and kicked him, hard, as he went down, simultaneously, very nearly lifting his ‘treasure’ off her feet as they stepped over the writhing body on the ground. Behind him he heard his men reacting to his lead, elbowing and kicking out to clear a path through the suddenly very threatening pressing mass of bodies.
“HALT!” Steuart Pringle shouted in his most formidable parade ground voice. “RAISE WEAPONS!”
As if for emphasis several Marines re-cocked their Stirlings.
“ON MY COMMAND! ONE ROUND IN THE AIR!”
“Sir Steuart!” Margaret Thatcher protested, breathlessly, having been momentarily winded by the press of bodies.
“FIRE!”
The volley rang out in the night.
Nearby there was brief panic; farther away, that panic turned into a stampede. As the sea of surrounding bodies retreated, many falling, or barged to the ground by people suddenly fleeing the scene, Steuart Pringle regarded the stampede as ‘somebody else’s problem!’
The space around the British party miraculously widened as San Francisco PD men and women and the crowd shrank back from the crazy English.
Margaret Thatcher did not even think about pausing for the TV cameras as she and her colleagues were rushed, at the double, up the naked steps of City Hall and bundled inside the building. Later, she and Pat Harding-Grayson swore that there had been moments when their feet had not touched the ground!
Steuart Pringle took one look around, and up at the balconies surrounding the entrance hall and said: “This place is a nightmare, Ma’am. I will not allow you to go anywhere unescorted.”
More than once the Prime Minister’s husband had whispered in her ear: ‘Pringle’s a good man; if he tells you to do something, promise me that you will do it!’
There was nobody there to greet either the British or the other delegations hurrying into the building because, hearing gunfire outside, the Secret Service had already hustled President Nixon down into the basement.
Roy Jenkins surveyed the scene thoughtfully. He adjusted his glasses, sniffed a little irritably.
“We were given to believe that there was going to be some kind of reception before the President addressed us. A glass of red wine would be most acceptable, right now.”
Chapter 55
Tuesday 14th February 1967
Saint-Dizier, Haute-Marne, France
Major General Francis St John Waters, VC, picked up the field telephone while still attempting to stamp the cloying snow off his feet and lower legs. His boots felt like they were filled with ice water and he was undoubtedly, as dirty and rank as a skunk, after spending most of the last forty-eight hours with Two Corps’ advancing spearheads.
Notwithstanding it was past two o’clock in the morning and he was as sober as a Lord, the former SAS man was in impregnably good humour. He missed the lady, obviously; otherwise he was having the time of his life!
“I gather you’ve been charging about the battlefield like a proverbial blue-arsed fly, Frank?” Field Marshal Sir Michael Carver inquired laconically.
The Chief of the Defence Staff had hoped to speak directly to Alain de Boissieu but the Supreme Commander of all Allied Forces in France was not due back at HQ for another thirty minutes or so, having been visiting several forward units.
The line clicked and hissed, angrily.
However, given that the CDS was speaking from Oxford, over land lines passing around London, through Dover under the Channel to Calais, and thence over two hundred miles farther south to the forward headquarters of the 19th Chasseurs on the outskirts of the ruined town of Saint-Dizier, some forty miles south of that unit’s initial jumping off point at Chalons-sur-Marne, the quality of the connection was tolerable.
The Free French were advancing against an enemy who was melting into the snowy wilderness, surrendering in pathetic, starving, freezing penny packets and only here and there, putting up any meaningful resistance, all things considered everything was going ticketyboo.
Well, apart from the roadside bombs which periodically took out a vehicle and some or all of its occupants, and the booby traps the enemy liked to leave behind. In fact, the enemy’s gift for improvisation was proving somewhat more than an inconvenience. In a couple of towns, the enemy had pulled out leaving scores of carefully prepared very nasty surprises; everything from a half-ton culvert bomb, to fragmentation grenades set-off by tripwires concealed in the ruins.
At Vitry-le-François, north east of Saint Dizier, a town astride the road from Chalons-sur-Marne, and thus an obvious line of march for the advancing Free French forces, it was suspected that a small suicide squad had remained behind when most of the starving garrison decamped. There were accounts of insurgents barricading themselves into buildings and blowing everything up, themselves and as many of their enemies as possible.
The SAS man and the Chief of the Defence Staff had come across this sort of thing, or similar abominations, albeit on a smaller scale in Cypress, Malaysia and other places, including Ulster, in the years before the October War. Thus far, it was possible that the Front International irregulars had only mined and ‘set-up’ a small number of towns and villages situated on major roads. Hopefully, the gathering pace of the advance would make it impossible for the bastards to booby-trap the battlefield farther to the south. However, depressingly, commanders now had to assume that whenever they came upon a settlement, they must fear the worst; and inevitably, this was going to result in delays. Which, in turn, gave the defenders time to set more booby-traps…
War was, when all was said and done, a filthy business…
This Frank Waters proceeded to convey to the architect of the defeat of two whole Soviet tank armies in the Middle East, even though he was telling him pretty much what he had expected to hear. Michael Carver was the man who had, imagined and pushed for this very offensive because he had been the one man in England who had understood how enfeebled their enemies in France had become; and that they were ripe for rout. It only went to prove that it was far too easy to accentuate the negative when generally, the big picture was middlingly rosy.
From where Frank Waters stood, half-way between Paris and Strasbourg, with Free French forces advancing at will on either side of the 19th Chasseurs, there seemed to be nothing to stop the Allied armies in France from rolling the enemy all the way back to the Massif Central in the centre and Lyon on the left, with the British Expeditionary Force, still somewhat hamstrung by the need to garrison the territory it had occupied and to secure its lines of communication back to Brittany, and understandably, in a state of near exhaustion after conquering much of the Poitou and rolling up the enemy’s coastal holdouts all the way south to the Gironde Estuary, gathered its breath.
The situation on the Atlantic right of the line, was further complicated because winter storms had thus far stymied all attempts to fully resupply and to significantly reinforce Edwin Bramall’s operations-depleted 4th Royal Tanks Battle Group, presently parked on the north bank of the Garonne north of Bordeaux.
The great storm, the third of the winter had left the Poitou and Aquitaine flooded, the marshes of the Dordogne impassable and the lower Garonne and th
e Gironde Estuary in spate with towns and hamlets on both northern and southern banks isolated islands in the midst of what seemed, locally to be archetypally Biblical inundations.
Notwithstanding, Edwin Bramall had been game to do what could be done; however, all thoughts of a full-blooded crossing of the swollen waters to mount large-scale operations against Bordeaux, only ever a pipe dream, had now been abandoned for the time being.
Fortunately, ever since Alain de Boissieu had returned from England to announce the decision to go onto the offensive, a new mood of optimism had swept through the Free French high command. As for the rejuvenated Supreme Commander, Alain de Boissieu was suddenly sanguine about his forces ‘taking the strain’ while his British friends, ‘rested’ in the west. For once, practical politics and tactical reality were aligned and everybody was happy. Well, as happy as they were ever going to be. With the ‘stand-to’ in place along the Gironde Estuary line, Frank Waters chatted to the CDS about the ‘juicy little scheme’ the SAS’s rivals, the Special Boat Squadron, had cooked up; just to keep the pot boiling.
The C-in-C 4th tanks had been guarded in his reporting of this latter operation: other to say that he planned unleash some of his ‘ruffians’ on a raiding and reconnaissance in strength ‘south of the river’ Security was so tight that nobody could tell Frank Waters if Operation Blondie had even kicked off yet!
Boys will be boys!
The one thing he could say for sure about it was that Edwin Bramall would certainly have squashed it if he had thought it was any kind of fool’s errand. So, presumably, they would hear all about it when and not a moment before, they all needed to know!
There were many elements of the last couple of days operations that remained opaque to the men at the sharp end. Knowing this, Michael Carver attempted to throw much-needed illumination on the salient operations.
