Tom Harding-Grayson paused to let this grim thought sink in.
“However, that was not actually the doomsday scenario that so infuriated my elders and betters at the Foreign Office in the period before the October War that they unanimously condemned me to indefinite internal exile. Prior to the October War both Iraq and Iran were no less unstable and unreliable than they are now; whereas post-war our resources and more importantly, those of the United States which might readily have been deployed to counter or at least ameliorate the worst effects of the case I have just outlined, were immeasurably greater.” He half-smiled a very bleak smile. “Albeit probably not equal to meeting and defeating a major, concerted Soviet attack on either or both of the two countries under discussion.”
Margaret Thatcher glanced to Sir David Luce.
The First Sea Lord pursed his lips, shrugged.
“Scenarios in which massive Soviet forces attack Iran, and or negotiate free passage of its forces through Iraq to the northern shores of the Persian Gulf were frequently considered by planners before the October War, Prime Minister. It was a common war game scenario played out at staff colleges on both sides of the Atlantic. I think the general consensus in the 1950s was that Soviets probably realised such actions would risk a nuclear response.”
Airey Neave had sat back in his chair, made a pyramid of his fingers before him.
“Correct me if I am wrong, Tom,” he invited the Foreign Secretary, ‘but wasn’t it the dream of the Tsars to conquer the Near East so as to open up a corridor to a warm water port in the Indian Ocean?”
The other man nodded.
“In the nineteenth century our concerns centred around a Russian invasion south through what is now Pakistan. Or possibly via northern Afghanistan. That was one of the reasons — almost lost among the plethora of stupid reasons — why we kept on fighting and losing all those dreadful Afghan Wars.”
“The Soviets can’t possibly have any massive armies left?” Barbara Castle objected.
“That,” Tom Harding-Grayson sighed, ‘is the thing, Mrs Castle. Given the state of Iran and Iraq at this time and our own thinly spread ‘defences’ in the region, a relatively modest invasion force might easily drive across Northern Iran down onto the floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates and thrust, virtually unopposed all the way to the Persian Gulf.”
Chapter 39
Samuel Calleja attempted to turn his head away from the blinding white light as his captors tore the black sack off his head. He was desperately thirsty, hungry, enfeebled and terrified and his broken left hand hurt abominably. He had vomited into the sack twice on the journey but nobody was about to clean him up. His captors forced him to sit on a metal chair; he was too weak to resist as they manacled his wrists behind his back.
“We meet at last,” Major Denzil Williams said glumly, his words were slurred because his shattered lower jaw was still slowly knitting back together after his encounter with Samuel Calleja’s KGB puppet master in January. He would carry the scars and feel the deep pains of that day to his grave, and as he looked at the frightened Red Dawn terrorist in the chair he ached to be able to inflict harm and disfigurement on him before he killed him. Greatly to his infuriated consternation his superiors had explicitly forbidden him to ‘mistreat Samuel Calleja’.
It would not do for the little princess’s big brother to get roughed up!
“You don’t know me,” the newly re-instated MI6 head of Station in Malta went on, his stare boring into the prisoner’s face. “But if you don’t tell me everything I want to know, well,” he grinned a crookedly unfunny grin, “you won’t like what happens next.” He could not stop himself adding: “Particularly the part where my friends,” he glanced to the big men ringing the man chained to the chair in the middle of the dungeon squirming in the dazzling arc lamp’s beam, “get out the hammers and the drills.”
If Samuel Calleja had not already voided his bowels he would have then.
Down in the caverns beneath the old Victorian fort which — boasting a single huge 100-hundred ton muzzle loading Vickers Armstrong gun — had covered the south eastern approaches to the Grand Harbour until around 1905, and had been the home of a anti-aircraft battery during and just after the 1945 war, the air was always cool. During the Second World War these old cells and caves had been filled from floor to ceiling with ammunition. Now in the dank air condensation dripped coldly onto the floor.
“Cut off his clothes,” Denzil Williams decided matter of factly. “I’ll be back down later after I’ve had a cup of tea.” He had already given orders that nobody was to speak to the prisoner except him. A couple of hours sitting naked in the cold with big ugly Redcaps giving him the silent treatment ought to ensure the traitor was in a more talkative mood. In the meantime the senior Secret Intelligence Service Officer on the Maltese Archipelago wanted to know why that bitch Clara Pullman had not yet arrived at Fort Rinella.
After Arkady Pavlovich Rykov had very nearly beaten him to death at Mdina he had been sent back to Gibraltar to recuperate and basically, left twiddling his thumbs waiting to discover if he had a future in the Service. He had been a little surprised when nobody came out from England to debrief him. Actually, after a few weeks he had begun to wonder if the Service had forgotten he existed.
Each morning he had gone for a walk out to Europa Point, where on a clear day he could stare at the faint outline of the North African coast some sixteen miles away across the Straits of Gibraltar. In his darker moods he would wonder what was happening in the former French and Spanish colonies across the water; what dark threats lurked beyond the hazy horizon. With France half bomb-ravaged with rumours of regional provisional governments vying for power in Normandy, Gascony and Marseilles sporadically skirmishing around the frayed edges of their self-proclaimed territories, with Corsica in the hands of a military junta and members of former French administrations holed up in the Caribbean with disaffected surviving admirals and generals plotting a return to the old country, what price renewal, reconstruction and rebirth? It was all so sad.
Denzil Williams had learned his trade in the intelligence game working with the Special Operations Executive in occupied France in 1944. His first wife had been a Parisienne émigré who had dumped him for an insurance salesman in 1953; and his second wife the widow of a French diplomat assassinated in Algeria. Juliette had loved living in London much more than she had ever loved him; their cramped little penthouse flat in Mayfair had become her nest and they would have remained happily married for ever and a day if the fucking World had not gone mad at the end of October 1962. On the night of the war he had been in Lebanon talking to the sort of people the bigwigs back in London tried not to have any dealings with lest they got their hands dirty. He had been in Beirut and Juliette had been, most likely, sleeping in her bed in Mayfair when the bombs went off over London. Like hundreds of thousands, ultimately millions of other Britons she had, he hoped, died without ever knowing a thing.