One of al-Mamaleki’s great uncles had been Prime Minister of Iran over fifty years ago, his brother, one of the Shah’s ministers had gone missing in the capital at the start of the invasion; assassinated or simply consumed in the nuclear strike which had obliterated seven-tenths of Tehran. He was of the ruling class and everything he did, and every attitude he held reflected as much.
Michael Carver understood that if the day came when his friend’s tanks stood astride the Basra to Baghdad road then nothing short of a new bloodbath was going to remove them. If their grand strategy came to fruition they would be re-drawing the map of the Middle East for a generation or more. Whether their political masters understood this was a moot point; in any event, it was hard to think of any likely consequence being remotely as bad as leaving Red Army tanks in command of the northern shores of the Persian Gulf threatening the whole of Arabia.
They could talk about ‘Cannae’, double envelopment and a crushing victory for ever and a day but nothing could actually obscure the reality of their situation. They were outnumbered ten to one and al-Mamaleki’s ‘brigade’ supported by the Commonwealth garrison of Abadan was presently the only significant ‘allied’ force between Suez and Hong Kong. The huge war stores depots in Saudi Arabia were in the wrong place and it did not matter how many infantrymen could be flown into the Middle East from the British Isles, the Mediterranean and Australasia, without another armoured force at least as large as Mirza Hasan Mostofi al-Mamaleki’s command there could be no modern day Cannae anywhere, let alone somewhere on the flood plains of the Tigris and the Euphrates between Basra and Baghdad.
“I think you’re wrong, Hasan,” Michael Carver offered cautiously. “Some of the Iraqi Army units will fight. Maybe not in the north but around Baghdad, possibly, and certainly before Najaf and Nasiriyah; moreover, above Basra in the marshlands the Soviet’s lines of advance will hit any number of pinch points. Even local insurgencies will take their toll.”
“Ah, ever the strategist, Michael!”
The older man smiled.
“For my sins. But,” he sighed, “you and I both know that the ground is the ground. Mesopotamia was the death of a British army not so many decades ago; it may well be again for another invader. The mere mention of places like Kut and Amarah and Basra still make old soldiers blanch. What has been will be again. If I had honestly believed I wouldn’t have been laughed out of court, I might have had the courage to suggest to my masters that,” he shrugged, “a solid case could be made for letting the Russians have Iraq and letting them stew in their own juices. Give it five or ten years and they’ll choke on Iraq; just like everybody else has from time immemorial!”
His Iranian friend gave him a quizzical look.
“If that happened the whole region would be on fire in the end.”
“Perhaps,” Michael Carver conceded. It was academic, anyway. There was nothing he could do to stop the Red Army swallowing the poisoned fruit of Iraq whole, except, for the time being, initiating the process of erosion. “But everything will be different, even if we win, Hasan.”
The other man guffawed and patted his shoulder.
“Different is a lot better than defeat, my friend.”
Chapter 22
The Right Honourable Airey Middleton Sheffield Neave, the Member of Parliament for Abingdon and the recently appointed Secretary of State for National Security in the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, invariably paused for thought when he came across his former protégé, Margaret Thatcher in her full war paint; especially, on those days when it was readily apparent that the lady had got out of bed that morning with a bee in her bonnet. He knew his friend the Prime Minister must still be in discomfort — sometimes excruciating pain in fact — from the back injury she had suffered at Brize Norton but nobody who did not know her well would have noticed anything amiss. She was quite simply, magnificent. Today she was positively glowing and the light of battle glistened in her steely blue eyes.
“Why Airey, this is a pleasant surprise!”
It was said with a brisk, businesslike curtness that a stranger would have interpreted as dismissive. However, Airey Neave knew the Angry Widow too well to make that mistake.
They were alone in the Cabinet Room where Margaret Thatcher was rifling through a red dispatch box, eager not to waste a single moment before her day became totally subsumed by the twice delayed celebration for the deliverance of the Battle of Malta.
Airey Neave approached and was invited to pull up a chair.
“I thought you’d like to know that the boys back in Cheltenham are beginning to ‘read’ Jericho,” he announced very, very quietly. “They’re still working on selected older intercepts, obviously,” he went on, smugly, “but we’re also reading stuff that’s less than thirty-six hours old now.”
Margaret Thatcher had looked up in the middle of a document.
She nodded, returned briefly to the page in her hands.
Presently, she smoothed the sheet on the table before her and gave her friend her full and undivided attention. GCHQ — the Government Communications Headquarters — at Cheltenham would have been ‘into’ Jericho even sooner but for two unfortunate happenstances. Firstly, MI5 had locked up four key directors of that organisation — including the legendary Chief Cryptanalyst Hugh Alexander — because they had had the temerity to attempt to communicate to her that GCHQ was, due to mismanagement, lack of prioritisation and resources, in a dangerously parlous state. And secondly, because the aircraft carrying the priceless cache of cipher books and manuals seized by HMS Alliance’s boarding party from the captured Turkish destroyer Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak, had been shot down by an Irish Republican Army terrorist using an XM41 Redeye Block I shoulder launched surface-to-air missile as it attempted to land at RAF Cheltenham on Monday 6th April.
Until the weekend before that atrocity and the heinous outrage at Brize Norton, when the aircraft bringing the Allied Supreme Commander Mediterranean (Designate), General Keith ‘Johnny’ Johnson and his staff to Europe, had also been shot down by a Redeye missile smuggled to the IRA from a supposedly ‘secure US Army facility in Virginia’, and very nearly killed herself and the Queen, Margaret Thatcher had in hindsight been almost completely in the dark about the United Kingdom’s proud history of code breaking. She had known nothing about the ‘secret’ lineage of GCHQ, or remotely comprehended the magnitude of the unspeakably bad things that happened to a country in the modern world, if it lowered or neglected its cryptographic guard for a single second.
Jericho was the only thing that gave her hope for the future.
It had been the existence of Jericho — not her incandescent rage that the IRA had been permitted to perpetrate two such atrocities on English soil and very nearly kill the Queen — which had moved her to sack the Director General of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis, and to create Airey Neave’s Ministry of National Security. It was very simple, Hollis had put several of the kingdom’s finest code breakers in prison so as to sidestep embarrassing questions about the shortcomings of the security services; therefore, he had had to go.
Jericho had almost been lost because of the failings of MI5; and even after the precious cargo of cryptographic gold dust had been recovered, because of MI5’s actions there had been a wholly unnecessary delay in ‘getting into it’.