Spider McCann’s eyebrows arched.
This told the younger man that he badly needed to organise his thoughts a little better.
“Ah, sorry, I should have mentioned that first really. We’re being flown back to Blighty to meet the Queen and I assume, the Prime Minister and sundry senior officers and worthies. There may not be room on the planes flying back to England for everybody but I’ve been assured by the C-in-C, Air Vice-Marshal French, that any Talaveras left behind will be offered a posting back in England in due course rather than being automatically reassigned to the Mediterranean Fleet’s manning pool.” He glanced down to the half-written letter on the edge of the rickety table at his elbow. “I’m writing to my wife to let her know what is going on. The powers that be have requested that she fly back to England with us but,” he shrugged, “that will be up to her. I’m sending Jack Griffin to Mdina to find my wife and to deliver the letter. I’ve ordered him to detail off a couple of our people to go with him.” Forcing a smile he continued: “Can I leave it to you to round up Mr Hannay, to select the men to accompany us back home, and to let the other chaps know what is going on, Master?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Mr Reilly will be accompanying me back to HQ at Marsa Creek. Hopefully, he’ll remember more about the twists and turns we put Talavera through after we cleared the Grand Harbour than I do!”
Spider McCann grinned.
Peter returned his grin.
“When we were charging towards those big ships yesterday everything seemed so simple. Now,” he shrugged, “well, that was then I suppose, and this is now.”
“That’s the Navy for you, sir. If it isn’t one thing it’s another!”
Peter Christopher nodded.
“Thank you, Master.” He picked up his pen. “If you could tell PO Griffin to hang around for another ten minutes please. This letter will be ready for him to take to Mdina by then.”
Chapter 41
In the mind of Colonel General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian, the commander of Army Group South, the early investment and capture — hopefully largely intact — of the city of Ardabil was the first and most important litmus test of the viability of Operation Nakazyvat. If Ardabil, some seventy kilometres from the Caspian Sea and less than half that from the border with Azerbaijan could not be taken swiftly, it augured nothing but ill for the rest of the campaign in the mountains of Northern Iran.
Babadzhanian had no pretensions to be a great strategist. He was a fighting soldier, a tank man with a profound understanding of, and a virtually unparalleled experience of armoured warfare who believed in fighting battles step by step, constantly reappraising successes and failures and ruthlessly exploiting the weaknesses exposed by each probe or counter punch. He had planned for most conceivable possibilities; he had even planned for a scenario in which the Iranian units stationed on the border were capable of not just mounting a robust, in depth defence but also of retaining a limited capacity to launch narrow front counter attacks against the exposed flanks of his armoured columns tens of kilometres inside Iran. The only thing Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian had not factored into his plans was that the Iranian army — British and American trained and equipped, albeit with older surplus kit, some of it of World War II vintage — would surrender en masse as soon as the initial bombardment lifted, and then melt away before the T-62 led spearheads of 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army. Less still had he dared to imagine that the relatively small airborne force dropped to seize the small Iranian Air Force base north of the city of Ardabil would take the airfield intact with the loss of less than ten casualties, and that the fleeing defenders would panic the whole of Ardabil into surrender while the first T-62s of the 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army were still snarled up along the narrow roads fifteen kilometres north west of the city.
None of his tanks had yet reached the city as Colonel General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s Mil Mi6 Red Air Force helicopter bumped down onto the verdant lawn of the elegant compound just outside the old city of Ardabil.
Paratroopers rushed forward to form a circling, protective honour guard for the Army Group Commander. Salutes were exchanged.
“I respectfully recommend we get under cover, Comrade Colonel General,” shouted a lean, hook-nosed major over the thrumming of the rotors directly over his head, “there are still several enemy snipers active in the city.”
Babadzhanian nodded his curt acknowledgement of the warning but marched unhurriedly towards the mansion of the former military governor of Ardabil. Inside it was cool, almost cold and nobody had started to clear up the mess the previous occupants had left in their headlong rush to escape. The conqueror had little time to waste admiring the intricate and colourful tessellation of the mosaic floors under his feet, or the hand-painted Farsi sayings on the wall and ceiling tiles at each doorway. It was all Babadzhanian could do to contain his elation at such a bloodless victory. In a matter of hours his deepest fears had proved to be groundless, and each and every one of his theories about the intrinsic dissonance and incoherence of an Iranian state — founded upon a throne stolen by a usurper dynasty which but for the meddling of the British and the Americans could have fallen at any time in the last decade — made up of religious and ethnically diverse and incompatible communities, had been vindicated. Ardabil was a case in point; its population was mainly Azeri, not Iranian. Most families in Ardabil traced their origins not to Iran, but to Azerbaijan where in times within living memory many had been forced to flee because of religious persecution or economic necessity, or had simply been driven south in one of the minor tribal and border wars that had afflicted the region from time immemorial. Many of the Azeris in Ardabil and the surrounding country felt themselves to be at least half-Russian Azerbaijani; to some, possibly a sizable minority, the Red Army tanks and Red Air Force jets rumbling through their villages and thundering across their skies were liberators.
Big maps were spread across a table roughly dragged into the centre of what must have been some kind of banqueting hall the day before. Technicians wearing the tabs of the Fourth Guards Tank Regiment on their uniforms snapped upright as the Army Group Commander entered the room.
“Carry on!” Babadzhanian barked.
The technicians were from his Headquarters Company, sent forward the moment the commander of the under-strength airborne company which had secured the nearby air base had, on his own initiative, pushed on into the northern suburbs of the city. During the great Patriotic War Babadzhanian had been slow to fully appreciate the marvels of modern communications technologies; but his experience putting down the counter revolutionary uprising in Budapest in 1956 had taught him exactly what went wrong if unit and army level command communications nets lost contact one with the other. In Hungary he had ended up with tanks and infantry in the wrong places at the wrong times; the ‘Budapest Action’ would have been a dirty, bloody business whatever he had done but if he was asked to repeat the affair he would have done his business faster, with co-ordinated crushing brutality. Back in 1956 his armour had moved in according to an overly rigid plan and then everything had gone to Hell. It had not mattered in the end, the uprising had been put down and his masters in the Kremlin did not care how it had been done. However, he had known what had gone wrong and he had learned valuable lessons from the experience, every one of which he had rigorously applied to every facet of the planning for Operation Nakazyvat.