“We have exchanged one unreliable ally for a whole gang of new unreliable allies?” The Defence Secretary gloomily offered to the room at large.
The Chief of the Defence Staff politely dismissed this.
“Possibly, Minister. The situation of the ground is what it is.”
The Secretary of State for Defence grunted. Normally a jovial, phlegmatic man his temper had become strained in recent weeks. He had been weakened by illness last year and looked prematurely aged, nearer sixty than fifty, even though he was still not yet forty-six.
“Forgive me, you know your business better than I, Sir Richard.”
Sir Richard Hull grimaced.
“Assuming the co-operation of significant Iranian forces and the presence, if not the whole-hearted participation of Egyptian and or Saudi armoured forces, at the very least I believe we have a fifty-fifty chance of giving the Soviets a dreadful fright. As to destroying the Soviet presence south of Baghdad,” he shrugged, “and winning any kind of total victory, the odds against that are much longer.”
Then a thought occurred to him out of the blue and the ghost of a smile quirked at his pale lips.
“Our chances of winning a new Cannae in the deserts and marshes above Basra may be very remote,” he confessed, whimsy still twinkling mischievously in his grey eyes. “But then if somebody had said to me before the Battle of Malta that but for the actions of a pair of small Royal Navy warships whose captains had been previously given leave to remove themselves from the battlefield, in charging headlong at a vastly superior enemy force, Malta would have been lost,” he guffawed softly, “frankly, I would not have believed a word of it, Prime Minister.”
Sir Richard Hull spread his arms wide.
“Who am I to throw cold water on Operation Lightfoot?”
Chapter 36
Two things had surprised Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Harold St John Water, VC, since his capture in the Zagros Mountains by KGB troopers. Firstly, apart from at the beginning shortly after his capture, nobody had tried any real rough stuff; and secondly, that after his surprise encounter with Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian, he had received rudimentary medical treatment and been given enough food and clean water to keep body and soul together while he contemplated his next move.
Notwithstanding, it was still his working assumption that he could be taken out and shot at any time. There was a war going on and when all was said and done he had been caught behind enemy lines, not only wearing a stolen uniform but with the dog tags of a dead Spetsnaz captain around his neck. Understandably, his captors had been very, very interested in how he had come by those!
‘The poor chap was already dead,’ he had explained apologetically. ‘Sorry, nothing to do with me.’ Which was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, insofar as it went. He had not personally killed the man.
The irksome thing was that he had no idea whatsoever what had happened to his boys. After the air attack on the traffic jam east of Piranshahr he had regained consciousness on the roadside being prodded by the muzzles of a couple of Kalashnikovs. The sky had been obscured with oily black and grey smoke and the atmosphere had positively reeked of seared human flesh.
The Russians had asked him about his ‘comrades’ between desultory beatings — not nice but once you curled up into a foetal ball and got into the rhythm of rolling with as many of the blows as possible, it was a bit like being at the bottom of a scrum in particularly hard fought rugby match — but Waters had got the distinct impression his boys had either made themselves scarce in the commotion or they were dead. Which was a bit of a shame; the Regiment hated it when a commanding officer walked back into Stirling Lines in Herefordshire on his own. The 22nd Special Air Service Regiment was very finicky about things like that. It was decidedly bad form losing all one’s chaps and having the gall to survive to tell the tale because that was not the stuff of the right kind of Regimental legends. That sort of thing that was regarded as very bad form in the Mess, of an order of blaggardly behaviour on a par with seducing a fellow officer’s wife, or worse, one or more of his teenage daughters. If the worst came to it, it was generally accepted — pretty much without exception — that is was de rigor for a fellow to die with his chaps, no ifs and no buts, and woe betide any man who transgressed that most scared of unwritten Regimental laws.
Basically, the way Frank Waters looked at it, the Russians would be doing him a middlingly big favour if one morning they took him outside and shot him. He had had a bloody good innings and all things considered his long-suffering wife Shirley, and eight year old son, Harry, whom he had not laid eyes on since late 1959 would probably not miss him. He knew they had survived the October War; they had been in the Welsh Marches the night the balloon went up and his brother Eric, a sickeningly honourable good egg of a man had taken them in soon afterwards. Eric had been in the Navy in the Second War, later he had gone into the Civil Service. Now young Harry and his mother lived with Eric somewhere in the hills outside Sheffield…
Yes, it would be much better for everybody concerned if he got shot, ideally attempting to escape because he had no intention of eking out a miserable declining existence in some fetid ice cold Soviet gulag.
With this in the back of his mind finding himself unceremoniously bundled onto a draughty old Soviet turboprop transport aircraft two days ago had come as something of an unwelcome shock. Likewise, the fact that ever since boarding that aircraft he had been chained by the left wrist to one or other of four tough-looking green-uniformed KGB military policemen.
The KGB men had been ordered not to talk to him and vexingly, they were self-evidently, very, very good at ‘guarding’ problematic prisoners. These boys appeared not to notice the stench when he moved his bowels, ignored his attempts to make small talk in various Moskva idioms and generally treated him like an idiot child. Equally infuriatingly, none of his KGB minders carried a personal weapon of any description so there was absolutely no chance of relieving any one of them of the same! To cap it all three of the four KGB policemen were twice his size and the fourth, a smaller species of Russian bear, was easily half as big as him again; even had he not been in a somewhat emaciated, weakened state these gorillas would have laughed themselves silly if he tried any funny stuff.
That morning he had been presented with an unbelievably badly tailored brown suit, baggy skivvies and a shirt that was so itchy it might as well have been made of hair, a pair extensively darned woollen socks and scuffed, much worn black shoes and ordered to: ‘Get dressed!’
He was unchained while he dressed.
The trousers were so roomy he had to hold them up with one hand, and the shoes painfully pinched his feet. Once he was re-attired he was re-chained to the biggest of his guards.
“No funny business!” He was told in English.
“Perish the thought, old son,” he had grinned.
His guards looked at him as if he was something malignant they had just scraped off their boots.
The walls of the bunker complex were bare, sweating concrete and the soles Frank Waters’s shoes and those of his booted escorts clumped leadenly on the damp stone floors of the corridors down which they marched.