He made eye contact with Puchkov and then Kurochnik.
“Effective mobile strength?”
“Fifty percent,” Puchkov retorted, as if this was hardly any kind of problem.
“Forty percent, perhaps,” Kurochnik reported. He had only been in command of 3rd Siberian Mechanised Division thirty-six hours but did not for a moment contemplate falling back on this as any kind of excuse for any suggestion of vagueness in his report. “That’s forty percent that can move at a couple of hours notice, sir.”
Babadzhanian looked to the former paratrooper.
“I want you to seize Kirkuk not later than 20th May.”
Kurochnik nodded.
Babadzhanian turned to Puchkov.
“Think your boys can be in Jalawla by then?”
“Yes,” the shaven-headed commander of the 10th Guards Tank Division confirmed grimly.
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
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.