Beside the Chief of the Air Staff the new First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Varyl Cargill Begg seemed slighter, less assured and very much on his guard. This was hardly surprising because in the space of a little over a week both the men above him in the professional pecking order of the Royal Navy had been killed — the one, Julian Christopher in action, the other, David Luce murdered by the IRA — hastening him into a position for which there had seemed to be no vacancy for some years to come.
Fifty-four year old Begg had been the gunnery officer of HMS Warspite at the Battle of Matapan in 1941, in which ‘sharp action’ the Mediterranean Fleet sank three Italian cruisers — two of them, the Fiume and the Zara in literally two minutes flat — in a particularly savage night time encounter. After the war he had commanded the 8th Destroyer Flotilla during the Korean conflict, been the Officer Commanding the Naval Contingent at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953, captained the aircraft carrier HMS Triumph and prior to attaining flag rank in 1957, had been Naval Aide-de-Camp to the Queen. At the time of the October War he had been slated to take over from Julian Christopher in the Far East sometime in the second half of 1963.
Margaret Thatcher quirked what she hoped was a welcoming smile to the new First Sea Lord whom she hardly knew, and the impassive, female occupant of the seat to his right.
“Before we start I would very much like to welcome our two new ‘recruits’ to this Cabinet.”
Admiral Begg half rose to his feet and nodded, returning the Prime Minister’s smile.
The woman beside him simply inclined her face a little to the right, her lips pursed in deep thought.
“The First Sea Lord and the Minister for Supply, Transportation and Distribution are most welcome,” Margaret Thatcher went on.
She had not expected fifty-two year old Alison Munro to dance a jig, or in fact, to do anything whatsoever to go out of her way to pander to any of the wearisome prejudices, and erroneous expectations of her latest set of powerful male colleagues. Many women in her place might understandably have been intimidated in this company. Not Alison Munro.
Alison Munro nee Donald had been educated at the Wynberg Girls' High School in Cape Town — where her family had emigrated in 1925 — before returning to England to attend St Paul Girls’ School and going on to St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she had graduated with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics.
Very little in Alison Munro’s her life had come easily to her. Both her parents had died in South Africa when she was a young girl. Orphaned at the age of thirteen she and her three siblings — one of whom, her brother Ian was an Obstetrician in Scotland credited with inventing the first ultrasound diagnostic machine — had, remarkably, and successfully fought not to be separated.
Margaret Thatcher had initially cavilled at her friend Airey Neave’s unqualified recommendation of Alison Munro as his replacement at ‘Supply’, compelling her to read the whole of the woman’s file.
She had married Alan Munro, an RAF officer and test pilot whom she had met at university in 1939; when her husband was killed testing a Miles Magister training aircraft she had been two months' pregnant with her son, Alan. She joined the Ministry of Aircraft Production during the Second World War, first as a typist but later as the personal assistant of the legendary Sir Robert Watson-Watt, the inventor of radar. She had worked such long hours with the great man that within the Ministry that at one time she was rumoured to be his mistress; precisely the sort of gossip that a woman of Alison Munro’s mettle was never going to dignify with a comment, let alone a denial.
The Prime Minister had been ‘hooked’ by the other woman’s story by then. In 1945 Alison Munro had passed the Direct Entry Principal Civil Servant interview (in a year when only fifty candidates were actually selected) and joined the Ministry of Civil Aviation, then in the process of considering what to do with the United Kingdom’s 600 plus — many of them wartime built — airfields. In the 1950s she was the leading figure in the negotiation of European and ultimately, world-wide air traffic regulation and rights. Margaret Thatcher had been tickled by one story from this period when dealing with the Air Ministry of the then newly reinstated Italian government. Asked by a former Fascist Air Force general, a man called Abbriata: ‘What rank did you hold in the war, Mrs Munro?’ She had retorted: ‘General, I held no rank but I was on the right side!’ Apparently, even the Americans had been in awe — and possibly despair — as she fiercely negotiated the rights for BOAC (British Overseas Airline Corporation), BEA (British European Airways) and other home-based airlines to fly to practically every corner of the world. By the end of her stint at the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the cigar-smoking, combative and tireless force of nature that was Alison Munro had risen to be Permanent Under-Secretary for International Relations in Whitehall.
In the years before the October War the idiots who ran the Home Civil Service — many but not all of whom were vaporised on the night of the October War — had transferred Alison Munro to the Railways Department of the Ministry of Transport, where a little over a year ago she had come to the Prime Minister’s attention as being one of, perhaps, the only person in the Ministry of Transport who actually seemed to be doing something constructive to ensure that the national railway system was restored to some kind of good order.
“Right,” Margaret Thatcher declared, “let’s get started!”
Chapter 7
Comrade Major General Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik commanding the 50th Guards Special Airborne Brigade — comprised of survivors from the 50th, 51st and 53rd Guards Airborne Regiments — was, for once in his rambunctious life, in something of a quandary.
He did not know where the garrison of the picturesque, peaceful city on the Shahar Chay River, had gone.
On the face of it this was hardly any kind of problem. He had, after all, seized a key communications hub — the only passable roads west of Lake Urmia from the north and the east, to the south and the west to the Turkish border passed through it — for the loss of half-a-dozen casualties of whom only two had been killed. Moreover, the whole town now seemed completely quiescent.
Perhaps, it was because this was essentially an Azerbaijani place and so many of his troopers understood and spoke, at least in a pigeon fashion, the local language?
Several priests, imams so far as he could tell because he was not religious — having never seen the point of all that mumbo jumbo — had come to his headquarters in the City Governor’s palace; they had been worried about their ‘holy houses’ and their ‘holy days’, as if he cared. None of that was any of his business; he came from a land where the state religion was agnosticism but nobody had said anything about enforcing ‘unbelief’ on ‘believers’. That was never a good idea, especially when a man only had eight hundred lightly equipped infantrymen — that was what airborne troops had to be because otherwise the aircraft that carried them would never get off the ground — to hold a city behind enemy lines along a single relief road from the east around the top of Lake Urmia, with a population of somewhere between sixty and seventy thousand, all of whom were potential ‘hostiles’.