Eight Miles High

by James Philip

  “Get weaving, chaps. Nobody knows we’re here yet!”

  Sergey Akhromeyev was sorely tempted to remind the younger man that the whole of Bordeaux knew they were ‘here’ by now, and that once the defenders got bored shooting up the wreck of the rapidly sinking Wessex out in the basin, they would – with their blood well and truly up – surely come looking for the survivors from the two helicopters.

  Acrid smoke drifted, biting his throat and stinging his eyes.

  He stole a glance at the port around him: there were fires burning a hundred metres away, otherwise the city was blacked out, wholly dark.

  Two of the other five men on the roof had secured lines.

  One man had already thrown himself over the edge.

  Another swiftly followed.

  “You next!” Akhromeyev was commanded. A rope had been tied around his waist as he stared at the distant fires. The next thing he knew he was jerked to a gut-wrenching, agonising stop and he was swinging, winded, struggling to catch his breath, with his feet two or three feet above the water, his torso a sea of fire. He felt as if every bone in his body had just been jarred out of its socket.

  He remembered the hand in the small of his back.

  They had thrown him over the side of the bunker…

  A body slid down a second rope right beside him.

  They really did that!

  The other man swung into him, hard.

  They threw me over the edge…

  Something rasped painfully against his ribs and he was being pulled sideways. Iron-strong hands grasped him and without consciously contributing to the process in any way, he was standing, swaying unsteadily on solid ground. Another man thumped down behind him.

  “Everybody okay?” Paddy Ashdown asked cheerfully.

  In acknowledgement there was a metallic chorus of gun breeches being snapped back.

  Belatedly, Sergey Akhromeyev, operating on muscle memory, locked and loaded his Kalashnikov.

  “Jolly good!” Ashdown declared in a hoarse whisper. “Follow me, chaps!”

  While he and Paddy Ashdown had been drawing up their plans, the Russian had offered the thought to the young Royal Marine officer, that if the old U-boat pens were really being used as a headquarters, then it was likely that all the heavily armed troops in the vicinity would be posted outside, guarding it. Thus, if they – he and the nine Royal Marines - could get inside the complex quickly, the raiding party would have a short ‘honeymoon’ period in which they might conceivably encounter very little, or if they were very lucky, no serious resistance, before the men guarding the complex realised what was going on.

  The dream scenario was that all the external blast doors would have been automatically closed when the air raid started, totally isolating the less heavily armed ‘insiders’ from the ‘tough guys’ outside.

  ‘We will know if we are attacking the right place if it has its own generators, because inside it will be reasonably well-lit.’

  There were dim lights, night lights, at the inner end of the pen. The four surviving SBS men and their Russian ‘guest’ were drawn to them like moths to the fire.

  Of course, had the defenders taken the elementary step of shutting and barring the doors to the old U-boat docks; that would have been it, game over.

  However, finding the heavy steel door wide open, possibly rusted in position since the Second War, the Marines around Sergey Akhromeyev whooped with delight almost but not quite under their breaths.

  Nonchalantly lobbing a grenade ahead of him, pausing momentarily to wait for the sharp, ear-splitting detonation in the confined space, Paddy Ashdown plunged into the smoke, his men following without hesitation with the eagerness of hunting dogs desperate to get to the front of the pack.

  Kill everybody; take no prisoners…

  Sergey Akhromeyev almost immediately stepped over the bullet-riddled, dead and still twitching bodies of dying Revolutionary Guards in their grey-black fatigues.

  Shadows moved in the gloom in a side passage.

  His Kalashnikov bucked in his hands.

  Ahead of him the Royal Marines quickly, efficiently, mercilessly cleared room after room, each seemingly identical, white-washed, now damp-infested concrete-walled cubes. Some had desks, other were clearly store rooms, one or two had bunks or palliasses on the floor, most now were sprayed with the blood of Revolutionary Guards. There were dead women, too. There was no way of knowing if they were Front Internationale stooges, ‘comrades’, whores or merely innocents caught up in the madness.

  Suddenly, the strike team emerged into a long, low compartment, probably long ago a workshop with lathes, hoists; there were narrow rail tracks criss-crossing the floor, strong points in the roof and several doors leading off it, presumably into offices and store rooms.

  The thump of a generator reverberated around the complex.

  The lights were turned down low, somewhere air was being circulated by a pump. Already the atmosphere was tainted with cordite and the unmistakeable iron tang of blood.

  In one of these rooms they discovered several men in the green of the FI leadership cadre cowering in a corner behind a shield of four shivering, half-naked terrified women.

  Paddy Ashdown signalled Akhromeyev to stay with him.

  “This seems to be the central area of the bunker,” he observed, coolly, addressing the other three Marines. “Everybody will have gone to ground now. Root around a bit, if the bastards try to retake this area fall back, otherwise, anybody who doesn’t look like a combatant gets a chance to surrender. Search everybody. If in doubt, shoot first and ask questions later. Any questions?”

  He turned back to the women and the scum of the earth hiding behind their skirts.

  Calmly, he pointed the barrel of his Sterling at the group with his right hand as he retrieved a grenade from his webbing with his left, and pulled the pin with his teeth.

  “If any of you miserable beggars,” he barked in French, “are armed, lay down your weapons now. If you shoot me, I will drop this grenade and you’ll all be blown to bits!”

  Weapons clunked to the concrete floor.

  “Ladies, go outside please!” Then, without looking at him he said to the Russian. “Frisk the women for weapons. Don’t be shy about it.”

  Akhromeyev stepped aside to permit the four women to file out of the room. Outside, he herded them against the nearest wall, waved for them to face it.

  “Hands on the wall, spread your legs! Stand still!” He barked in French, the language which had become very nearly native to him in the last few years.

  He searched each woman, careless of their modesty. One woman snivelled, flinched, the others were as still as statues.

  The Russian stepped back two paces and lowered his Kalashnikov.

  “I am sorry,” he said gruffly, stepping back. “I have lost too many friends to madmen and women they ought to have searched to take risks. You may turn around now. Over there, go over there. Don’t move from there,” he directed, pointing at an abandoned pile of metalwork nearby. “Keep out of the way. We will not harm you.” He hesitated. “You are safe now. Nobody will molest you. We are British Commandos.”

  The women, a pair in their twenties or thirties, he guessed, and two, possibly barely pubescent teenage girls, were all dressed like tarts for the entertainment of the ‘great men of the Revolution’.

  The women were dirty, the kids had been crying, and any fool could tell that none of them had had a square meal for a long time.

  One of the other SBS men stuck his head around the door of the room where Ashdown was mulling whether to shoot one of his prisoners; so as to encourage the others to talk.

  There’s a comms centre down the corridor, we reckon most of the bastards went down to the level below when the shooting started. They’ve locked themselves in. There’s nobody else around, Boss,” he reported to Paddy Ashdown. “The whole place is locked down tighter than a duck’s arse. I reckon they’ll need demolition charges to break through the blast
doors on the landward side.”

  Ashdown gave orders for the external exits, of which there were three, to be patrolled by one man, and the door to the lower-level bunker to watched by another. Sergey Akhromeyev and the remaining Marine were, meanwhile, to start searching the complex for maps, documents, and…food and water.

  Both men reported back within less than ten minutes.

  They had located other offices and a small, surprisingly well-stocked food store. There was running water in the taps, they assumed, piped from a rainfall tank somewhere in the roof structure.

  “Right,” the man running Operation Blondie declared, “there’s been a change of plan. Unfortunately, our rides back home won’t be waiting for us. So, we might as well try to contact base and make ourselves comfortable. And when it happens, stand by to repel borders.”

  He looked around the faces of the other men.

  Made eye contacts.

  Nodded.

  “In the meantime, Sergey and I will have a nice, cosy little chat with our green-coated friends.”

  Chapter 62

  Wednesday 15th February 1967

  HMS Campbeltown, Toulon

  HMS Stirling had very nearly run down the submarine which had suddenly surfaced less than a mile off its port quarter. The destroyer had fired two salvoes from its forward 5-inch rifles before it was seen that the vessel’s - which turned out to be the Roland Morillot - crew were desperately waving white sheets from her conning tower, and precariously from her wave-swept casing. Later, it was discovered that the submarine’s commanding officer had been attempting – without success - to radio his surrender for some thirty minutes before, as a despairing gesture, he decided to surface before the surrounding warships, all actively ‘pinging’ the depths, got around to raining depth charges on his head.

  The Stirling’s captain had put the wheel over at the last minute and missed, literally by a coat of paint, the stern of the wallowing submersible.

  It seemed that the French Navy had wrested back control of Toulon from the handful of Revolutionary Guards, and Front Internationale zealots who had not fled during, or shortly after the previous night’s bombardment of the port, public buildings, the main railway station and two road junctions north of the city. Apparently, several ‘big shells’ had landed inside the barracks complex of the hated Front Internationale storm troopers, with one, apparently penetrating a packed bomb shelter killing everybody inside it.

  The Task Force Commander had come over the TBS and suggested to Dermot O’Reilly, that ‘as you did such a good job at Villefranche, I think that you’re just the man to receive the surrender of Toulon!’

  The Campbeltown’s Captain had politely thanked Rear Admiral Henry Leach for his ‘kind consideration’. The two men had chortled briefly, and then after a short conversation with John Treacher on the Kent, two other ships had been detailed off to ‘escort’ the Campbeltown into Toulon, while the Kent would linger, threateningly on the horizon due south of the port.

  Just in case…

  Although sunset was supposedly over an hour distant the light was fading fast as Campbeltown, followed by the Leander class frigate Galatea, and the Stirling began to round the long, thin breakwater guarding the approaches to what had been, prior to the October War, the largest naval base in the Western Mediterranean.

  People were on the sea wall at Point de la Vieille less than a hundred yards to port, and flags were waving. A signal lamp flashed erratically from the emplacements of Fort Balaguier, a little over half-a-mile to the north west.

  The main batteries of the Campbeltown and her two consorts were trained fore and aft, albeit their crews were closed up at action stations, and all watertight doors were firmly dogged shut throughout all three ships. The two Fletchers’ air search and gunnery radars turned from side to side, the Galatea’s Type 965 bedstead revolved slowly, and the merest plume of grey haze rose from the stacks of the three warships. With their paintwork battered and rust streaked, the three British ships must have looked battle-hardened, threatening, ready for anything; the Fletchers bristling with guns, the Galatea with her clean lines, tall radar mast and helicopter hangar, a contrast in modernity.

  “Mister Keith,” O’Reilly grinned. “You have the Deck.”

  “I have the Deck, aye, sir!” The younger man acknowledged, stepping over to the binnacle to re-check the angle to the line of buoys marking the deep-water channel.

  Dermot O’Reilly stepped out onto the port wing of the bridge.

  He gently tapped the shoulder of the youthful yeoman manning the Aldis lamp as the destroyer began to turn to the north, to enter the main harbour.

  The Campbeltown’s captain swung the lamp towards Fort Balaguier, briefly glimpsing the silhouette of Fort Napoleon on the rising ground inland.

  He clattered out a message.

  “VIVE LA FRANCE!”

  He noted the yeoman he had displaced watching, learning.

  The signaller on shore replied.

  “I think that fellow said ‘welcome’ or ‘liberation’,” he remarked to the man next to him, grinning wolfishly.

  O’Reilly re-sent VIVE LA FRANCE!

  “Think you can send that?” He asked the yeoman, who nodded. “Good man,” Dermot O’Reilly chuckled. “Every time somebody signals, return ‘VIVE LA FRANCE’.”

  “Vive la France, aye, sir.”

  O’Reilly went back inside, waited until the rudder was amidships and reclaimed the Deck.

  “Mister Keith,” he declared cheerfully, apparently without a care in the world. “Find me a dock to come alongside. I’m buggered if I’m going to get my feet wet tonight!”

  Campbeltown was scarcely making headway as she drifted north, almost parallel to the breakwater passing Fort de l'Éguillette to the west where a rusting merchantman lay half-capsized against a derelict quayside.

  Dermot O’Reilly knew that the French had attempted to scuttle their fleet at Toulon when the Germans occupied Vichy France in 1942. The big ships had been salvaged but he had no idea whether there were more recent wrecks lurking beneath the cold grey surface of the waters around him.

  “Switch on our running lights, Mister Moss,” he said, stepping forward to raise his binoculars to his eyes and to peer into the gathering gloom. “Signal Galatea and Stirling to do likewise, if you please.” There were still a couple of fires burning in the city, further degrading visibility as the winter’s day drew in. “Close up all searchlight crews.”

  It had crossed Dermot O’Reilly’s mind that not everybody in Toulon was going to be ecstatic about the Royal Navy steaming in to ‘liberate’ the port.

  The harbour might easily be mined…

  No, nothing I can do about that…

  Although guns from the shore batteries defending Toulon back in the 1940s had been scavenged by the Nazis, and many of those that survived the liberation in 1944, subsequently removed or neglected long before the October War, he was painfully cognisant that a handful of relatively small anti-tank guns on the surrounding hills and promontories, might take a horrible toll upon his thin-skinned flotilla at point blank range…

  Photographic reconnaissance sorties by the RAF, and earlier that afternoon, by one of the Victorious’s Gannets reported that apart from the helicopter carrier La Resolue, sunk at her moorings, a couple of old destroyers being used as accommodation ships, and a flotilla of minesweepers, the great port was practically empty.

  O’Reilly thought he saw the shortened silhouettes of other small warships, a couple of Le Normand class frigates and nearby them, a tanker and several merchantmen.

  “Two surfaced submarines bearing three-three-zero one thousand yards!”

  Several sets of glasses turned in unison.

  Both low, indistinct, black forms were flying white flags.

  One of the submarines appeared to have a bulbous rounded ‘nose’ at its bow; that was probably the Arethuse class boat that Rene Leguay had mentioned.

  All around the widening bay as Cam
pbeltown cautiously nosed north at little more than steerage speed, walking pace on land, was darkness.

  Not for the first time in recent years the commanding officer of Her Majesty’s Ship Campbeltown asked himself; exactly who had bombed who back into the Stone Age that night back in late October 1962?

  Chapter 63

  Thursday 16th February 1967

  Philip Burton Federal Building, San Francisco

  The old man had been picked up by the San Francisco PD on Tuesday night down near Fisherman’s Wharf. They had assumed he was a hobo, vagrant, he was drunk, incoherent and had pushed an officer into the bay; this latter probably being the thing which had attracted the attention of the local plain clothes inspector.

  When the man sobered up the next morning, he claimed to be Tobias A. Little of Irvington, Portland, Oregon revisiting the Bay Area, where he had served in the Navy in the Second War. He said he was ill and that he must have taken the ‘wrong pills’ the previous day. He seemed contrite, embarrassed, and a little ashamed of himself.

  As indeed, would any self-respecting veteran who had disgraced himself re-visiting the scene of his military service in time of war nearly a quarter-of-a-century later.

  ‘Even back when I was in the Navy, I never had no trouble with the Shore Patrol!’ The old man insisted, sheepishly.

  He said he was dying of lung cancer.

  ‘Probably because of all the hot stuff that’s in the air these days!’

  By then the guys at the local station were starting to feel guilty about putting the old guy through the wringer, just because he had pushed one of them into the bay. No real harm had been done an nobody liked screwing around with a veteran who had fallen on hard times.

  However, because he had been held two nights – the first sobering up without being interviewed - and nobody had actually ruled out the possibility of preferring charges against him for assaulting a police officer, he was still in custody the morning after his second night in after his arrest. There had been a delay finding a doctor to give the old man the once over; the boys at the station were worried about him and they did not want to be wrongly accused, at some time in the future, of not doing their best for the old guy.