Kurochnik had been warned to expect tanks and artillery; if he could not achieve a secure lodgement within the city he had been ordered to harass and tie down the garrison and block the road south to Mahabad.
Somebody had told him Rezaiyeh — his maps called it ‘Urmia’ but apparently the Shah, rest his blighted soul, or his father, no probably his father, had renamed the place back in 1924 — was the ‘Paris of Iran’. Kurochnik had never been to Paris, never would now. However, Rezaiyeh or Urmia, or whatever it was called these days, was a not unattractive place for his veterans to rest up and feel the sun on their faces. From his position on the flat roof on top of the City Governor’s residence he could see most of the built up area, and the oasis green of the scrubby, forested area between the east of the city and the hazy blue grey of the waters of Lake Urmia. Beyond the lake a volcano-like mountain reared up. North and south-west of Rezaiyeh there were ribbons alternating with broad swathes of undergrowth, and trees filled the river valleys. After the arid mountains around Ardabil and Tabriz, this place was like that mythical land the Yankees and the British talked about…
What was it called?
Kurochnik lowered his binoculars, searched his memory.
“Shangri-La,” he muttered to himself. “That’s the place! Shangri-La…”
“Sorry, sir,” one of his runners asked apologetically.
Kurochnik belched a guffaw of laughter.
“Nothing, kid,” he grunted. His boys — he still thought of the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment as ‘his boys’ even though he now commanded a combined force comprising his two hundred and fifty ‘boys’ and the nearly six hundred strong remnants of the 50th and 53rd Guards Airborne — had had to leave most of their communications equipment behind in Tehran and the ‘Urmia Action’ had been mounted at such short notice there had been no chance to replace the lost kit. Life was like that sometimes; so he kept a coterie of about half-a-dozen ‘runners’, fit young guys close to him wherever he went just so he knew that whatever happened, he would still be able to talk to ‘his boys’.
The High Command was worried about the northern flank of the force it planned to start feeding into Northern Iraq from Mahabad via the border crossings at Piranshahr and opposite Sardasht to the south. Anything that stopped columns moving through Mahabad would be bad news. Here on the Urmia Plain the going was not so bad but to the west the mountains effectively barred vehicular progress other than on treacherous winding roads which, in places, were effectively single-track highways that had not been repaired since being buried for several weeks by last winter’s snows. It was all very well for planners to claim that aerial reconnaissance confirmed all the roads were still open; Kurochnik was too old a soldier to take a thing like that for granted and he hoped that the Army Group Commander’s staff had not taken anybody’s word for the it either.
If he was the Army Group Commander he would have had Spetsnaz crawling on their hands and knees all over those roads through the Zagros Mountains for the last month.
Just thinking about those narrow, switchback passes gave him a bad feeling.
Raising his glasses to his face he tried and failed to make out the squat control tower at the city’s only air strip, ‘a neglected, pot-holed disgrace’, as it had been described to him by one briefing officer. Actually, the strip was not that neglected or pot-holed, although the runway was only partly concreted. The main problem was that the ‘safe landing area’ was only about two thousand metres long and that was bad news for the bigger transports in Army Group South’s already dwindling air fleet.
The Urmia Action had exposed just how badly the aircraft lost on the Malta Operation were now beginning to be missed. Once the airfield, situated six or seven kilometres north from the centre of Rezaiyeh, roughly halfway to the tiny hamlet of Chonqeraluy-e Pol, had been secured it had taken two further trips for the planes assigned to the ‘Urmia Action’ to transport the remaining six hundred troopers from Tabriz.
Kurochnik heard the distance scream of jet engines.
The fighters, four MiG-21s, were flying at some three thousand metres above the plain. Altitude was an ambiguous word in these localities since Rezaiyeh was some one thousand three hundred metres above sea level. The fighters roared south and returned a few minutes later, this time much lower and rocketed across the city less than two hundred feet above the rooftops before pointing their noses to the heavens and with their afterburners glowing red, blasting straight up into high clouds scudding across the mountains.
There was absolutely nothing quite like a show of strength!
It was a pity the concrete part of the runway of the only airstrip this side of Tabriz was too short to allow any kind of serious jet fighter or bomber to operate out of it!
More prosaically, Kurochnik regretted that while the Red Air Force possessed enough advanced supersonic aircraft available for a ‘show of strength’, it did not seem to have any old fashioned, slow unspectacular propeller driven spotter planes to spare for doing boring, mundane little things like discovering what exactly lay beyond the trees, mountains and the valleys to the south and the west. There could have been a whole armoured division hidden out there and the first he would know about it was when the opening salvo of an artillery barrage fell on his perimeter!
What did he know?
He was a mere Colonel; correction, Major General, he had been informed of his promotion to Major General as he boarded the transport to lead the assault on the so-called Urmia Air Base.
It was nice knowing he was a General at last; not so good to still be commanding only a ‘regimental’ sized ‘brigade’.
He sighed, turned on his heel and strode towards the steps down to the street. He had requested urgent airborne resupply; loads of ammunition for his mortars, as many 7.92-mm rounds as possible, and respectfully observed to his superiors that a few of the new, very scarce, shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles would be good, too. Headquarters had told him to make do with what he had. Stores earmarked for the 51st Guards Airborne Brigade had already been reallocated to other units ‘more likely to face serious enemy resistance’.
It was as Kurochnik was walking into his first floor ‘operations room’ that he felt the shock of the distant explosion through the soles of his boots. The ground flinched another two times before the sound of the first big explosion rumbled into the room like the roiling commotion of great waves breaking on a distant shore.
In a moment he was running back to the steps to the roof.
“It’s the air base, sir!”
Even as Kurochnik was attempting to focus his binoculars on the rising mushroom clouds of the huge explosions enveloping Urmia Air Base more detonations crashed out. These blasts were much louder, closer, in the south of the city.
Kurochnik’s mind was churning with possibilities.
The bridges over the river had been rigged for demolition!
The Iranians sent their people to the west to be trained; not the conscript foot soldiers but all their officer class and most of their technical specialists.
In the past the Iranian armed forces had had British and American personnel embedded in their ranks, advising and supervising, trying to stop the locals breaking all the expensive kit they had acquired from the West in recent years.