Brezhnev stirred like bear from hibernation, his eyes hard.
“What do you make of the reports of civil war in Iraq, Comrade Vasily Ivanovich?” He asked of Chuikov.
“I think the Iraqis are pissing their pants!” The Minister of Defence and the man who was the Red Army retorted with a grumbling chortle of satisfaction.
Babadzhanian shrugged.
“I think that was always going to happen,” he declared. “Whereas, I always assumed that if we attempted to strike south through Iran, sooner or later the British would probably stiffen the Iranian Army’s backbone.”
“What’s to stop the British or the Americans doing the same in Iraq?” The General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union persisted, unconvinced.
“That might still happen,” Babadzhanian agreed. “Or if they think they are going to lose control of the oil fields of the Persian Gulf they might just ‘bomb us back to the stone age’,” he added dryly.
Chuikov grunted but said nothing.
By the time one had one’s back against the wall it was far too late to start worrying about what happened next.
Babadzhanian frowned.
“Operation Nakazyvat”, Operation Chastise, “is not going according to plan, Comrades,” he confessed. “That said it is going better than we had dreamed possible. In approximately one week from now my forces will launch the second and most crucial stage of the operation. If ‘Action North’ succeeds it may convince the Iraqis, the British and the Americans that our real objective is not Abadan Island, and a lodgement on the northern shores of the Persian Gulf threatening future operations again Kuwait and the Arabian Peninsula; but simply the seizure of Mosul, Erbil, Kirkuk and the oilfields of northern, Kurdish Iraq. In this scenario they will assume that our seizure of Sulaymaniyah is no more than a prudent ‘straightening of our defensive line. If you recollect from my original notes on Operation Nakazyvat, I was at pains to emphasise that regardless of what forces the Iranians, the Iraqis, the British, the Yankees and their Arab lackeys managed to scrape together to block our path south, unless some or all of those forces can be drawn forward — that is, to the north — away from likely defensive positions in the marshes of the Southern Iraq or in prepared lines south of Khorramshahr and guarding Abadan Island, we might face the prospect of obtaining all our strategic objectives but be too weak to hang onto them. I can fight one, perhaps two major battles of ‘movement’; I do not have the resources or the logistics train to fight a battle of attrition all the way south and then to assault and over run pre-prepared major defence lines.”
He let this sink in.
“If the enemy swallows the lie that all we want is the oil of Kurdish Iraq they will deploy their forces to block us south of the line Sulaymaniyah-Kirkuk. Once that re-deployment commences I will destroy the enemy, drive south, invest Abadan Island and then,” he sighed, “we shall see what history has in store for us.”
Chapter 5
Lady Marija Calleja-Christopher had been — now that she had had a little while to think about it — in a state of grieving shock for most of the last week. The fact that it was the first time in her life she had been away from Malta would have been quite sufficient, of itself, to have thoroughly disorientated her; but that was not the half of it.
The United States Air Force C-130 Hercules transport rumbled noisily to a halt on the hardstand some fifty yards away. Nothing happened for about a minute and then the note of the engines altered and fell, and the rear ramp began to descend slowly to the cold tarmac.
Marija briefly reflected on her own journey to England a week ago. It had been her first ever flight, and for her in the comparative luxury of a jetliner rather than the draughty cargo bay of a propeller-driven military workhorse.
She waited for the first passenger to emerge from the cavernous hold of the newly arrived aircraft, trying very hard not to fidget and fret with anxiety in front of the others. Like Peter, her husband of a little over five weeks, she was very aware that she always on show now. Always before she could afford to be Marija Calleja, nurse, midwife and sometime unofficial leader of the Women of Malta protest movement, the dutiful daughter of her dockyard superintendent father and loving Sicilian mother; but now she was a ‘lady’, the wife of a Royal Navy Captain and the hero of the Battle of Malta, and no matter how much they would have preferred to have been an anonymous newlyweds, in public whether together or separately, alone, they were always ‘on parade’. Even their grief was a public thing.
There was a further hiatus while ground crew fussed around the cargo ramp of the US Air Force Hercules.
Marija’s thoughts replayed her — her and Peter’s — traumatic arrival in England a week ago today.
No sooner had their Comet jetliner rolled to a stop in the dark and the drizzle at Cheltenham than she and Peter had been whisked away by machine gun hefting stone-faced Royal Marines to a grand old house in the country near the airfield where they had been kept, under guard until the next morning. Neither she or her husband had slept that night; thinking about the burning wreckage on the ground near the end of the runway, the armoured cars and fire engines rushing by in the opposite direction as they and the other VIPs on their flight were ushered through the airfield buildings — the old racecourse grandstand, still with signs pointing, bizarrely to the parade ring and to the winner’s enclosure — to waiting cars. Had it not been for the comforting circle her husband’s protective arms that night she would have been utterly lost.
Iain Macleod, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Information, with whom Marija had chatted for pleasantly for well over two hours during the flight back from Malta while Peter, bless him, had slept like a baby, had hastily bade the young couple ‘adieu’ at the airport and disappeared with his minders. Nobody had really known what was going on, just that there had been a crash.
Which they could all see with their own eyes!
It was only the next day that the dreadful truth had emerged.
In fact all through that awful next day one dreadful thing after another had been ‘made known’ to the shell-shocked couple.
Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson, a kind, softly-spoken elegantly maternal lady, had arrived in Cheltenham to ‘brief’ them at around eleven o’clock last Tuesday morning.
Before she commenced her ‘briefing’ she had handed Marija a ‘Priority Cable’ from ‘The Office of the Military Governor of Malta’.
This is to confirm that Mr P. Calleja and Mrs M. Calleja of Tower Street, Sliema, are unhurt and their family home only lightly damaged. The aforementioned couple have been informed of your safe arrival and that of Mr J. Calleja, in England with your husband.
The telegram had been transmitted to Oxford over the name of Air Vice-Marshall D.B. French, DSO, DFC, Officer Commanding, Malta.
However, the confirmation of her parents’ safety had been the last good news brought to them by Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson.
Marija had not immediately registered the fact that their visitor was none other than the wife of the British Foreign Secretary, or that her somewhat drawn, tired initial appearance was on account of her friend, the Prime Minister, for whose children she acted as an unofficial governess, having spent the night in Hospital in Oxford because she had been injured in the same unspeakable ‘atrocity’ in which Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth had suffered what had initially been feared to be ‘life threatening’ injuries.