by James Philip
Walter had pulled on a jacket over his normal fatigues and headed for the stern of the carrier where, half way beneath the massive overhang of the flight deck and the water churning under the taffrail twenty feet below, surrounded by massive mooring posts and chains, he joined perhaps a dozen other men of all ranks and trades. Some men smoked, some talked in low tones with friends, but most men came to the stern for no better reason than to stare into the darkness or the roiling water astern and to think their own thoughts.
In the light of the full Moon a North American A-5 Vigilante strike bomber was clearly visible at least two to three miles out as it lined up for its final approach. The Vigilante was a huge aircraft to be operating off a carrier, seventy-six feet long and weighing in at over twenty tons if was landing back onboard with its full ordnance load. The A-5s had been exercising night and day since Kitty Hawk cleared Bombay, which was unusual because the Vigilante’s main role was to deploy the nuclear bombs – some thirty or so – which were locked down in the ship’s Atomic Munitions Magazine.
The ‘good will’ visit to Bombay had been a colourful if rather lack lustre affair. The Kitty Hawk and two escorts had docked, the Marine Corps band had paraded on the quayside, the Fleet Commander had gone ashore to make a round of courtesy calls, one or two local dignitaries had come onboard the flagship but Indian troops had kept visitors out of the docks, and Indian Navy patrol boats had chased away inquisitive sightseers in the main anchorage. Shore leave had been strictly limited and then, as a tropical storm blew over Bombay the visit had been over, the dampest of damp squibs as driving rain swept the city in the Kitty Hawk’s wake.
Walter stared at the full Moon.
Another full Moon; another month at sea completed.
Walter had hoped that there would be a new batch of mail from home awaiting the fleet at Bombay. At sea on a deterrent cruise in a Polaris boat a man knew that there would be no mail from home, he got used to the idea and after a while it did not bother him. Life in the surface navy was different; a man expected news from home, anticipated regular contact and when there was no mail it irked him in unsettling, uneasy ways.
This was yet another thing that Walter Brenckmann’s submariner alto ego had grown accustomed to lately; although as lessons went it was nowhere near as troubling as having one’s horizons, quite literally expanded in ways he could not have predicted. His life in the undersea navy had been a cloistered affair, his view of the World limited by the proximity of the nearest bulkhead, his tactical appreciation wholly focused on the efficient running of his department, the boat and surviving the numerous perils of the deep.
Ever since he had stepped onto the Kitty Hawk he had been confronted by new realities; aware that he was involved in a bigger, infinitely more complicated drama.
The raging of the A-5 Vigilante’s engines raced ahead of the swooping bomber, gleaming like a silver eel in the loom of the all-seeing Moon.
It was as if Kitty Hawk had gone to war stations the minute she cleared the breakwater of the port of Bombay. There had been no announcement of a new mission; simply the posting of a revised, intensive program of air operations involving every element of the carrier’s eighty-one strong mixed air wing of supersonic fighters, nuclear bombers, attack aircraft, tankers, spy aircraft and helicopters.
Carrier Division Seven’s stated mission remained unchanged; to protect US tankers, maintain navigation in the Persian Gulf, to evacuate and or to assist US citizens, American diplomatic outposts and commercial interests in the Arabian Peninsula. The President had promised the American people that not one GI’s boot would be placed ‘East of Suez’, and that the US Navy was in the Arabian Sea on a ‘peacekeeping mission’.
Walter flinched involuntarily as the A-5 Vigilante fell onto the aft deck of the carrier like some screaming prehistoric raptor. Its jets raged, subsided as the restraining wires - ‘traps’ - arrested the bomber’s forward momentum with the controlled violence of a high speed car wreck.
On high the Moon saw it all.
About a thousand yards off Kitty Hawk’s port quarter the old modernized Cleveland class cruiser Providence (CLG-6) held station, her odd futuristic silhouette painted with yellowy edges in the lunar glow.
While the Providence retained one of her Second World War triple six-inch turrets forward, augmented with a twin five-inch dual purpose turret mount in place of her original main battery ‘B’ turret, her after superstructure had been replaced with towering radar towers and the unmistakable pillars of a twin-rail Mark 9 RIM-2 Terrier surface-to-air missile launcher. The US Navy had had so many ships at the end of the 1945 war that it had run out of men to man them, and finished the war owning such a plethora of redundant spare hulls rusting in mothballs that whenever possible Congress had forced the Navy to convert ‘what it had’ – rather than build fresh hulls - as the new guided weapons technologies came on stream. A rash of hybrid, odd-looking ships like the Providence had been the result; big gun ships stripped of most of their guns, compromised to mount new ‘space age’ systems as yet untested in battle.
Walter watched the silhouette of the cruiser lengthen.
Phosphorescent water bubbled under her sharp stem, and then the silhouette began to shorten as she heeled into a turn away from the flagship.
Moments later the klaxons began to sound on the Kitty Hawk.
And men were running to their battle stations.
As Walter Brenckmann ran – as if his life depended upon it because for all he knew it did – he could not stop himself thinking again about the possibility that one or more of the dozens of Soviet nuclear submarines under construction at the time of the October War had actually survived the holocaust.
Even in the bowels of the great aircraft carrier everybody felt, rather than heard, the reverberation of the big underwater explosion.
The men who had been running, now sprinted towards their duty stations.
Chapter 33
Thursday 25th June 1964
Abadan Island, Iran
Colonel Francis St John Waters, VC – he had been promoted to sweeten the pill of being summarily consigned to the Reserve List – had not yet wholly got used to the idea that he had been handed into the pastoral care of the British Broadcasting Corporation. It was odd not having a licence to kill any more; and he had entertained any number of reservations about the reception he could expect to receive on this his first assignment, when he renewed acquaintance with the daunting person of the Commander-in-Chief of all Commonwealth Forces in the Middle East.
The new Acting Director General of the British Broadcasting Corporation, upon learning of Waters’s prior acquaintance with the C-in-C, and in league with Nick Ridley, the Secretary of State for Information, had decreed that the former SAS man’s cobbled together ‘news team’ would go to the ‘north of the Gulf’, while Barry Lankester’s ‘civilian-led’ team would cover ‘the south’.
The Acting DG, thirty-six year old David Attenborough had struck Frank Waters as a good enough sort, likeable if not clubbable and clearly not overly impressed with curmudgeonly old military types like him; but a decent enough sort for all that. He was some kind of zoologist by profession by all accounts who would probably have been much happier making films about wildlife than rebuilding the BBC. To give him credit he had been crystal clear what he expected from his two ‘Persian Gulf’ teams. ‘Find out what is going on, talk to the people who matter and send reports home by the swiftest possible means at regular, ideally daily, intervals.’ To which he had added a second, entirely sensible caveat; ‘don’t worry about editing your material in the field, there are plenty of people back in England who can do that.’
It was no secret that Lieutenant-General Michael Carver and Frank Waters had crossed swords not once, but twice back in those long ago days when Rommel was making monkeys of a succession of British ‘desert generals’ in the sands of Cyrenaica. That had been over twenty years ago but the British Army could be positively elephantine when it wanted; it
might not be overly keen to apply the hard won lessons of old wars but it forgot nothing.
There was a chill in the desert air as a fluky breeze gusted off the Shatt al-Arab beneath the rising silvery Moon. In the clear, starry desert night the temperature was tumbling, the cold pinching men’s faces burned by the merciless Sun only hours before.
Parked in dead ground beneath camouflage netting, Frank Waters discovered that the C-in-C had installed himself in a command truck that would not have been out of place in the Western Desert in 1942.
Michael Carver met him under the netting outside the lorry, stepping out of the impenetrable shadows.
Hands were shaken.
Frank Waters sprang open the attached case he had brought with him from his film unit’s temporary tented base at RAF Abadan. He held out a bottle of Laphroig Malt Whiskey.
“A peace offering, General,” he smiled toothily.
Carver accepted the bottle, hefted it briefly.
He shook his head.
“Lately, I’ve been thinking about those days when XXX Corps seemed to be the only thing between the Afrika Korps and Cairo more often than I ought,” he confessed ruefully.
Frank Waters had first encountered Michael Carver when he was GSO1, the senior staff officer of the 7th Armoured Division – the ‘Desert Rats’ – in 1942. Apart from the fact that both men in their own ways thought that the top brass in charge of 8th Army was simply not up to the job, there had been absolutely no meeting of minds. Waters was the junior man, a scruffy good for nothing irregular on the payroll of the Long-Range Desert Group, the forerunner of the SAS. In those days before Bernard Montgommery showed up in the desert, Carver had bigger problems than the needs of Waters’s fighting column; like for instance, constantly having to dissuade his superiors from continually driving the Division’s tanks straight down the muzzles of the Afrika Korps’ dug in 88-millimetre tank-killing guns.
Michael Carver had never been one to tolerate fools gladly or otherwise, and to give the man credit he rarely differentiated between fools of high or low rank. Allegedly, on at least one occasion later in the war Montgommery had had to step in to save him after he had told the wrong senior officer exactly what he thought about him. Carver had won the Military Cross at Tobruk in 1941, adding two Distinguished Service Orders before the end of the war; all three decorations were for valour in the face of the enemy, as were practically all his – very numerous - mentions in despatches. Aged twenty-nine in 1944 he had been the youngest brigadier in the Army.
“Babadzhanian isn’t Rommel, sir,” Frank Waters suggested.
“Neither am I.” Michael Carver grimaced. His gaze, seemingly cool, warmed and briefly there was something akin to mischief in his eyes. “Come inside and we’ll break open your peace offering.”
Carver indicated for his visitor to perch on a low stool, he sat on a Spartan canvass cot. The two men raised their glasses.
“Old friends,” they agreed.
In the distance the sound of thunder whispered.
“The Soviets are in the northern suburbs of Basra,” Michael Carver said, as if this was of only passing interest. A few days ago he had gratuitously, positively shamelessly exaggerated the southern progress of the Red Army hoping to jerk his erstwhile Saudi allies into action; the latest intelligence reports indicated his pessimism had now been vindicated. “They lobbed artillery into the city last night about this time. Not for very long, I think they’re short of ammunition. We suspect advance elements of the Red Army have already bypassed Basra to the west and are extending south into the Faw Peninsula. Flying columns could be in Umm Qasr in forty-eight hours. Hereabouts, it will probably be a few days yet before they are in any position to shell Abadan.” He sipped his drink, seemingly the most sanguine man in the Middle East. “All in all things are developing nicely.”
Frank Waters frowned.
“We’re not beaten yet, then?”
“Not yet,” the other man, the older by five years, agreed. “The RAF lost a couple of aircraft taking out the bridges over the Euphrates at Al Qurnah two days ago. I sometimes think the Royal Air Force is afraid it is missing out on all the fun. It seems somebody in Cyprus was under the misapprehension that the enemy needed those crossing to reinforce the push towards Basra. Anyway, I’m sure the Soviets will have concluded that we are still ‘in the dark’ about their true intentions, which is all to the good.”
“Their real plans, sir?”
Michael Carver stood up and beckoned Frank Waters to join him at the big map on the left hand side of the truck.
“If you want to seize Abadan Island you have three options. One, secure the opposite, western bank of the Shatt al-Arab and mount an amphibious assault. Bad idea, the Arvand River is well over half-a-mile wide and the first waves of the assaulting force takes eighty to one hundred percent casualties. Two, using Basra as a base of operations one bridges the Arvand River at places of one’s own choice with pontoons, transferring forces to the eastern shore under cover of local air and artillery support. This is what the Iraqis did a month or two ago but they failed to achieve concentration and were routed in detail as soon as my Centurions came upon their flank. Three, you take the major river barriers out of the equation. Crossing the Tigris at Al Qurnah north of the confluence of the Tigris with the Euphrates does not meet this criteria.” He jabbed his right forefinger at the small town of Amarah on the Tigris River over a hundred miles north of Basra. “However, if you transfer your forces onto the eastern bank of the Tigris at Amarah – effectively the last place you can rely on bridging the river between Baghdad and the Persian Gulf – you can advance down that bank all the way to Khorramshahr without encountering another significant water obstacle. Moreover, you have a hundred miles of ground to advance over in which to get yourself organised to mount a proper assault on the Iranian forces holding Khorramshahr, before enveloping the low hanging fruit of Abadan Island by force majeure. By which time,” he concluded, “Red Army formations will already be in control of the western bank of the Shatt al-Arab.”
Frank Waters was so shocked by Michael Carver’s candour that he was a little lost for words.
“A whole Soviets tank army is coming down the eastern bank of the Tigris?” He blurted.
The other man nodded.
“Yes.”
Frank Waters might not be any kind of grand strategist but he had a street fighter’s nous for practical battle tactics; and the news he had just heard sent a shiver down his spine. An irresistible wave of armour was washing down the eastern bank of the Tigris River towards him and it could be here not in weeks but days.
“My word,” he chuckled thoughtfully, “the beggars really have got us by the, er, nose,” he offered lamely.
“Quite,” Michael Carver concurred. “In fact my Staff takes the general view that the blighters have got hold of us by a much more sensitive part of our anatomy, Waters,” he observed pithily. “I should imagine that’s precisely the way Comrade Babadzhanian thinks, too.”
“But you don’t, General?”
Michael Carver shook his head.
“Not entirely. No.”
He pointed to the line of the Karun River where it curved around the northern end of Abadan Island.
“If I was Babadzhanian I’d stop there,” he said. “In my own sweet time I’d ford the Karun twenty or thirty miles east of Abadan and again, in my own sweet time I’d besiege the whole island. Shell and starve us out, basically. That’s the obvious thing to do. Trying to get armour and ground troops onto Abadan Island is asking for trouble.” He sighed. “Let’s go for a walk.”
The Moon was so bright a man had to shade his eyes to see beyond the shadows. The forward headquarters was close to the southern bank of the Karun River; and the slow moving mud-laden waters glittered in the moonlight.
“We outnumbered Rommel and the Italians two or three to one at El Alamein,” Michael Carver reminded his visitor. “But we knew that in advance, just like we understood the lay of the l
and in front of us. We’re outnumbered here. That’s a given, there’s nothing we can do about it,” he explained, matter of factly, as if he was discussing dispositions at a regimental parade.
“How many tanks do you think are coming down the eastern bank of the Tigris in our direction, sir?”
“I’ve no idea. Perhaps, half of whatever Comrade Babadzhanian’s got left after his little odyssey through the Mountains of Iran a thousand miles to the Persian Gulf. Practically the whole mobile weight of 2nd Siberian mechanized Army.”
“I heard that we have some Iranian units on our side?” Frank Waters inquired cautiously.
“Yes,” the C-in-C acknowledged tersely.
“The Russians would be idiots to try and cross that river,” Frank Waters observed, staring across the hundred yard wide channel. “The channel must be ten or fifteen feet deep hereabouts?”
“Easily,” the C-in-C agreed. “Going back to El Alamein,” he went on, “if Erwin Rommel had had a water obstacle like this in front of his lines he could have held out forever.”
“So that’s the plan, sir?”
Michael Carver shrugged.
“We shall see. The trouble one always has with setting any trap,” he thought out aloud, “is persuading one’s quarry to put some significant part of his anatomy into it. In an ideal world I’d like to do Babadzhanian’s armour serious harm on the northern bank of the Karun River, and then have the blighter attempt a full scale amphibious operation to put a brigade or two of T-62s on my side of the water. Right now most of my plans revolve around isolating and destroying his spearheads around Khorramshahr; if the Russians carry on coming after that,” he chuckled mirthlessly, “well, that would be too much to hope for. Either way, if Marshal Babadzhanian thinks he’s just going to roll right over the top of us he’s going to get a very, very nasty shock.”
