by James Philip
Babadzhanian had no intention of telling either man how to do his business. Time was short and any moment now he was going to have to run – or at least move hurriedly – in the direction of the nearest latrine.
He turned to another subject.
“I was informed we had taken a senior British prisoner?”
“They’ve got him outside, sir.”
“Bring him in.”
The bearded, scarecrow figure almost fell on the ground before the Army Group Commander as his burly minders pushed him into the room. The man was filthy, his uniform – which might once have resembled the battledress of a Spetsnaz trooper – was tattered and blood-stained. It was not immediately apparent if the blood belonged to the swaying, blinking forty to fifty year old man who stank of urine, faeces, gasoline and every other imaginable stench endemic in the mud and soil of the lands around Sulaymaniyah.
The prisoner made an attempt to straighten to his full height.
The effort hurt him; no matter, he was of that generation who respected the uniform and the rank of an enemy even if he despised the man inside it and everything he stood for.
“Who are you?” Babadzhanian demanded.
“Waters,” the other man croaked, paused, cleared his throat and coughed a chest-rattling cough. “Lieutenant-Colonel,” he went, translating the rank into its nearest Soviet equivalent in Russian. “Francis Harold St John Waters.”
Babadzhanian scowled.
The Prisoner went on in Russian: “Yesli vy dumayete, chto ya sobirayus' rasskazat' vam svoyu krovavuyu nomer i polka vas yest' yeshche odna krovavaya veshch' idet, tovarishch!”
If you think I am going to tell you my bloody number and regiment you've got another bloody thing coming, comrade!
The Commander of Army Group South was more impressed by the jovial manner in which the prisoner had said it than offended by the other man’s sentiments.
“Is that so?” He inquired coolly.
“Da, vot chto eto takoye. Vy mozhete popast nas yemki menya seychas, tovarishch.”
Yes, that's about the size of it. You can get on with shooting me now, comrade.
“You are a long way from home, Comrade Colonel?”
The conversation went on in Russian.
“So are you, old son!”
“Waters? Why do I know that name?”
“I tried to kill Rommel once,” the prisoner suggested, clearly trying to be helpful as if the two men were having a man to man chat to pass the time of day rather discussing pressing military matters. “Well, twice actually but that was a long time ago. You have the advantage of me, sir. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
“Babadzhanian. Marshal of the Soviet Union.”
Frank Water tried very hard to come to attention.
In his enfeebled, somewhat battered, hungry state it took him some seconds to realise that the Russians in the room were ignoring him and talking too fast for him to catch more than a few words.
Strangely, they did not seem to be discussing how to execute him.
That was a relief, although the way he felt right now it was not that much of a relief.
Presently, Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian fixed him anew in his sights.
“I have instructed my officers to clean you up, feed you and insofar as it is within our powers to attend to your injuries. You will not be shot quite yet. Unless, of course, you attempt to escape.”
“Obviously,” Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Harold St John Waters grinned, “I can’t make any promises about that. Sorry. Nothing personal. The chaps back home wouldn’t understand it if I suddenly turned over a new leaf.”
Babadzhanian almost but not quite smiled.
The other generals in the room were a little baffled by the prisoner’s idiomatic Moskva Russian; nevertheless they caught his meaning.
They exchanged old soldier’s looks; shrugged one to the other.
It was a well known fact that the English were mad.
Chapter 27
Friday 15th May 1964
Military Port, Limassol, Cyprus
Squadron Leader Guy French had watched the big grey guided missile destroyer slowly navigate the partially blocked main channel into the bay, her side manned and her flags dipping in respect as she passed close to the wreck of HMS Blake and manoeuvred to come alongside the dock.
Out in the harbour barges and small service boats still clustered around the stricken Blake, lying on her side in less than forty feet of water. The Blake had been sent to Cyprus to remove the forty or so nuclear warheads at RAF Akrotiri ahead of the feared Red Dawn invasion of the island. She had been preparing to sail for Malta at the time of the attack and over half her crew had died in the initial explosion or later from burns or radiation sickness.
During the ongoing salvage operation the cruiser’s side had been peeled open with oxyacetylene cutting torches, and in the last couple of weeks clearance divers had commenced the task of removing the nuclear weapons from submerged compartments.
Every time Guy French let his eyes wander around the ruined port he tried, and failed to imagine, what it must have been like when that ancient ferry carrying a cargo of refugees from Turkey had been vaporised by the detonation of the Hiroshima-size tactical nuclear weapon in her hold. He honestly did not know what kind of mind would put a weapon like that on a civilian ship, sail it into a port and set it off. Sometimes, the thought of it was so awful that it temporarily eased his own doubts about his part in the October War. On the night of the war, and sometimes since he had told himself he had been – in the cold jargon of these things – ‘suppressing medium range mobile ballistic missile batteries’, which might otherwise have laid waste the entire United Kingdom; but whatever he told himself the reality was that his aircraft had dropped two city-killer size thermo-nuclear bombs close to places where he knew a lot of people – tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people - had lived...
Guy French’s CO had told him that HMS Hampshire was the newest ship in the fleet and there had been no time to run the normal trials. Her crew had come onboard, her tanks had been topped off, her 4.5-inch main battery magazines half-filled, provisions for a six week cruise loaded and then she had sailed for Portsmouth to take on her ‘special’ cargo ahead of a high speed run to Cyprus.
The County Class destroyer – a few fresh rust stains on her hull plates apart – was plainly brand new. The big pendent number ‘DO2’ on her flank was blackly clean cut.
They said the big bombs stacked on the ugly cradles welded to the destroyer’s helicopter landing pad, were World War II vintage Grand Slams and Tallboys; ten ton and six ton general purpose high explosive weapons designed to penetrate several feet of reinforced concrete, or to burrow deep into the ground before exploding and undermining otherwise indestructible targets. Dropped by aircraft of No. 617 – ‘The Dambusters’ – and No. 9 Squadrons in the last year of Hitler’s war bombs like these had sunk the Tirpitz, destroyed German U-boat pens, smashed the giant V-2 launch site at Wizernes, disabled the long-range guns with which the Nazis planned to level London at the Fortress of Mimoyecques, and methodically knocked down the great railway bridges and viaducts of western Germany ahead of the advancing Allied armies.
Many of the bombs produced during that war had since been used in trials but it transpired that somebody, somewhere, had decided to hold back a cache of the mighty weapons. Just in case. After the war the United States had built its own version of the bombs, several of which had been liberated from former US Air Force bases in the last year. The US versions of the Grand Slam and the Tallboy were prosaically called T-14 and T-10. Altogether there were seven ten-ton and nineteen six-ton bombs onboard the Hampshire. If Guy French had been onboard he suspected he would have winced every time the ship hit a big wave.
The bombs were so big that only the Handley Page Victor V-Bomber had a bomb bay large enough to accommodate them internally. A Victor could carry either a single Grand S
lam or two Tallboys and the powers that be had determined that while the seven Avro Vulcans sent to the Middle East would operate from Saudi Arabian airfields or from Abadan, the six Victors sent to the Eastern Mediterranean would be based in Cyprus; three at what had been Nicosia Airport, and three from Akrotiri. Two Vulcans and a single Victor would also be based at RAF Luqa on Malta, but the deployment of the additional Victor, and a force of six additional aircraft, all Vickers Valiants had been delayed pending the completion of an extension to the existing main runway at Luqa. On completion of this deployment half the surviving operational V-Bomber Force would be based close enough to support British and Commonwealth forces in and around the Persian Gulf.
Two Victors had been sent to Iraq again last night, one with a Tallboy onboard and the other with thirty one thousand pound general purpose bombs loaded; both aircraft had returned safely at around dawn.
HMS Hampshire’s arrival, two days ahead of schedule was timely because the single Grand Slam and all four Tallboys ‘shuttled’ to Cyprus by Valiants based at Conningsby in England had been expended in the last two nights. The chaps in the Mess at Akrotiri had been of the opinion that it was high time the RAF delivered a ‘Welcome to Iraq’ greeting card to the invaders.
Honour satisfied, everybody could get on with the war now.
Before the Navy had stepped in with its generous offer to cart a whole bunker full of big bombs to Cyprus there had been much talk about ‘wearing out’ and or ‘risking’ the remaining Victor Fleet – fourteen to seventeen operational aircraft at any one time – moving the bombs to the Eastern Mediterranean. In the event, four Grand Slams and six Tallboys had been left behind in England and the Navy had offered to have the Hampshire undertake a second ‘high speed run’ to finish the job as soon as she got back to Portsmouth. But that was only after she had taken onboard all the warheads recovered from HMS Blake, and returned home via Malta and Gibraltar dropping off several ‘tactical nukes’ at each base.
With the news of HMS Hampshire’s mission everybody in the Mess now agreed that despite their initial reservations, the Navy was actually useful for something!
Guy French had spent most of the last year flying RAF turboprop transport aircraft and De Havilland Comets. Although he had been a ‘Vulcan man’ for his whole operational career there simply were not enough Vulcans to go around anymore; certainly not enough serviceable kites to keep a fellow like him in regular employment. Perversely, more pilots and miscellaneous fully trained aircrew had survived the war than either Vulcans or Valiants. He had literally jumped at the opportunity to volunteer to come to Cyprus to ‘train up’ on Victors – for which pilots were actually only slightly more numerous than operational aircraft – in the second, right-hand co-pilot’s seat.
Although being based at cold, wintry Brize Norton was not quite as miserable as it sounded – because of the proximity of Oxford - the chance to come out to sunny Cyprus and the promise of flying a V-Bomber again was almost too good to be true. Even better, everybody knew that of the three V-Bombers the Handley Page Victor was the most advanced and sophisticated of the three. Basically, it put old cart horses like the Vickers Valiant, or the American B-47 or B-52 in the shade.
The Victor was still the biggest aircraft in the world to have broken the sound limit in level flight – allegedly, some bright spark had put the nose down for a few seconds with the throttles more or less open and hey presto, his kite had registered 1.1 on the Mach meter – and in comparison with every other big bomber in the sky its design remained cutting edge over a dozen years after its maiden flight. Notwithstanding, he still missed his beloved Vulcan. Nobody believed him when he said flying a Vulcan was like flying a giant Spitfire...
“Blimey, I’ve never realised how big those bastards were up close!”
Guy French involuntarily reached to his upper lip and ran his forefinger through his moustache. Handlebars were getting a bit passé these days but he was proud of his ‘bars’ even though it did not go down so well with the girls as the clean shaven look.
Girls...
He had been engaged before the October War.
He had survived; God alone knew how.
Greta had not; nor had the tiny village outside York where she and her parents lived survived that awful night.
Even sixty or seventy feet away as the big destroyer edged towards the quayside the bombs on the helicopter pad looked very big. Guy had not realised that they were actually that big. Now if a fellow dropped one of those chaps on a half-way worthwhile target in Iraq or Russia or anywhere else, well, that really would be a thing.
Killing tens of thousands of people you had never known and never would know was murder – whichever way you cut it, it was murder, no point quibbling about words at this remove – but dropping a Grand Slam or a Tallboy ‘on the nose’, now that would be a thing indeed.
If a man could do a thing like that before he died he might die, if not happy, then at least a little more at peace with himself.
Guy French stared at the big bombs as crewmen pulled away the tarpaulins which had kept them dry on the long voyage from Southampton. He stared, and kept on staring because he knew that tonight, for the first time in eighteen months there was an even chance he might sleep awhile without descending into the dreadful miasma of his nightmares.
‘Grand Slam,” he murmured aloud.
Grand Slam!
Chapter 28
Sunday 17th May 1964
British Embassy, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Thirty-six year old Sultan bin Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman bin Faisal bin Turki bin Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Saud had been appointed Minister of Defence and Aviation only the previous October. The 12th son of King Abdulaziz had held several senior posts in the Kingdom while still a very young man and been instrumental in assisting his father to establish a system of national governance based on Sharia Law. That he had always been a highly trusted member of his father’s house was attested by the fact he had been appointed to oversee Aramco’s – the Arabian American Oil Company’s – construction of a rail link between Damman on the Persian Gulf to Riyadh in the late 1940s. Contemporaries knew him as a ‘volatile and emotional’ man with no real military experience, other than a short spell in command of the Royal Guard, who had been elevated to his present role because of his birth and his loyalty to the current regime. However, within the Kingdom these were not things to be taken lightly and neither of Prince Abdulaziz Al Saud’s guests that afternoon regarded the hard-eyed man in flowing Bedouin robes standing before them with anything other than wary respect and mild trepidation.
Until the events of recent weeks the Minister for Defence and Aviation was reputed to be a pragmatist with both feet solidly planted in the American camp. Even when the United States had reduced its military presence in Arabia to half-a-dozen companies of clerks and guards for their three strategic war stores depots; he had never conceived of a day when the Kingdom’s very existence would be called into doubt and the Americans would do...nothing.
Nothing was exactly what the United States seemed to be doing as Red Army tanks rolled into Iran and Iraq. At first he had not believed the intelligence reports, mistrusted what his people had been telling him every bit as much as what he was hearing from the British Ambassador. Like Crown Prince Faisal, he too bristled with indignation, humiliated to have to accept the presence of Royal Air Force V-Bombers on his soil because no matter how many times the US State Department offered ‘guarantees’ in respect of the ‘territorial integrity of the Arabian Peninsula’, as the war in Iraq rumbled ever closer to the borders, the airspace, and the waters of the Persian Gulf through which practically all the Kingdom’s oil was exported to the outside world, words no longer counted for very much. He and every other member of the government he felt like he had been duped by the Americans; his honour had been besmirched. He had trusted the Americans and they had, by failing to immediately send troops, aircraft and ships to ‘guarantee the territorial integrity’ of his coun
try, insulted and betrayed the entire ruling family.
Prince Abdulaziz Al Saud tried very hard to veil his anger as he studied the faces of his hosts.
It was one of those quirks of circumstance that while not a fluent Saudi speaker, the British Ambassador, fifty year old Sir Colin Tradescant Crowe found himself almost by accident, admirably qualified to be his country’s safe pair of hands in the worst of all possible times in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The son of a diplomat father he had been born in Yokohama, and educated at Stowe School and Oriel College, Oxford where he had acquired a first class degree in history before taking up a posting in the Diplomatic Service in Peking between 1936 and 1938. Thereafter, he had served in Shanghai, Washington DC and Tel Aviv before returning to China during the Korean War. In Peking in the early 1950s British diplomats were fair game for so-called Chinese ‘volunteers’; and Crowe’s brother-in-law had been arrested and executed on trumped up charges of conspiring to murder Mao Zedong in 1951.
Crowe was one of those indefatigable never say die stalwarts of the old diplomatic corps; thus it was hardly surprising when he was appointed as the prospective Chargé D'affaires in Cairo in 1957, a post he was only able to take up two years later in 1959 when diplomatic relations were resumed after the debacle of the Suez Crisis of 1956. It was largely down to Crowe that full diplomatic relations were finally restored between London and Cairo in 1961. His reward had been to be sent to New York as the United Kingdom’s deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, a position rendered redundant by the Cuban Missiles War and the host nation’s unilateral decision to withdraw from that crippled institution in February 1963. Needless to say he had not been overly surprised to be handed the poison chalice of repairing diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia – broken since 1956 – the previous year. A modest, calm, very patient man with a gentle sense of humour he could be scathingly dismissive of ‘old school’ colleagues and ‘time servers’ who still behaved as if Britain still ruled the waves and that there was actually such a thing as ‘the Empire’. Here in the Kingdom his tact and charm, and for want of a better word – his transparent ‘decency – had mended many fences and enabled him to form new working relationships. Crucially, within the upper echelons of the Saudi Royal Family Crowe was seen as a man with whom the Kingdom might do business.
