But Urmia was not any kind of Iranian Army training base…
His boys had not stumbled over any obvious booby traps. Yes, they had discovered a few mines hurriedly laid in culverts and by the roadside north of the city; but otherwise, nothing…
The building around him seemed to convulse.
Kurochnik found himself on the ground coughing up the gritty dust of pulverized mud brick and stone. Strong hands hauled him to his feet.
“I’m fine!” He snarled. “Fine!”
His mind was racing faster and faster.
This was only the beginning.
In an hour it would be dark and then things would get very, very bloody.
The reason his boys had had such an easy time at the air base, the reason that, a couple of amateur snipers excepted, the 51st Guards Airborne Brigade had been able to walk into Urmia unopposed was that the whole city was a trap.
Like an idiot he had voluntarily put his hand into a meat grinder.
“RUNNERS!” He bawled like a black bear with a Leopard biting his leg. “RUNNERS!”
Chapter 8
Airey Neave leaned forward and rested his elbows on the Cabinet table as he surveyed the faces of his colleagues. The Prime Minister had invited him to explain his ‘new brief’ and to describe the ‘new department’ that he had been cobbling together over the weekend. Or rather, not so much ‘cobbling together’ as spot welding those overlapping parts of the disparate, feuding organisations he had inherited wherever they abutted uneasily against another one of his collection of unwieldy ‘services’.
“The Prime Minister has instructed me to form a Ministry of National Security,” he explained briskly for a thing like this was always best done quickly.
Edward Heath had toyed with the idea of bringing the entire ‘Intelligence Community’ under a single umbrella last year but one or other of the competing Director Generals had talked him out of it every time the matter rose anywhere near to the top of the agenda. However, the fiasco of the march to near war with the Americans in November and early December last year, the whole ghastly Red Dawn imbroglio, the knowledge that but for the suicidal heroics of the Royal Navy Malta would have fallen to a Soviet invasion, the shooting down of two jetliners by IRA terrorists over England which had very nearly resulted in the assassination of both the Prime Minister and the Queen, and finally, the news that the Red Army had over run northern Iran and was now threatening to sweep all the way south to the Persian Gulf, without so much as a forewarning whimper from the code breakers in Cheltenham, or a vaguest suggestion of a problem from MI6 or MI5 had been the final straw!
Sir Roger Hollis, the MI5 man under whose watch the atrocities at Brize Norton and Cheltenham had occurred had been sacked, as had the Director of the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham, along with his deputy and the head of security at that place. Hollis and his ‘collaborators’ — the Prime Minister’s own word — had had several of GCHQ’s most senior code breakers locked up in Gloucester Prison at the time Malta was under attack, two Soviet tank armies had been parked on the northern borders of Iran and three IRA assassins had been running loose in the land. They and Hollis ‘had had to go’ and Margaret Thatcher had not just ‘sacked’ them but had them placed them under house arrest at Government House outside Cheltenham in case they were of a mood to ‘make trouble’ among their ‘old friends’.
It was now Airey Neave’s job to persuade GCHQ, the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) to work ‘nicely’ together for the good of the country. This was easier said than done; these institutions was by its nature terribly concerned with the ‘good of the country’; traditionally each had sheltered elements significantly more exercised by their own status and influence than any lightweight, ephemeral populist concept of a common understanding of patriotism.
“Bringing all the organs of the Intelligence Community under one umbrella is not a thing that can be done overnight,” the former escapee from Oflag — an abbreviation of Offizierslager; ‘Officers Camp’ — IV–C, or as the man in the street would know it ‘Colditz’ Castle explained, allowing himself a rueful smile. “However, I believe we have made a damned good start. After consultation with the Prime Minister I have appointed Sir Dick White as the first Director General of the National Security Service, of which GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 have now become the primary subordinate branches. Dick White has got his best people interrogating the Soviet military personnel taken prisoner on Malta, and, of course, the three IRA men in our custody. A raft of other initiatives are under the most urgent consideration, others have been implemented or are being implemented at this time. I regret that it would be inappropriate to discuss these in detail even in this august forum and I make no apology for this.”
The Soviet-Turkish code books and cipher equipment captured when the Turkish destroyer Mareşal Fevzi Çakmak had surrendered to HMS Alliance in the aftermath of the Battle of Malta, feared lost when the Comet airliner carrying them back to England was shot down while coming in the land at RAF Cheltenham a week ago, had been discovered late on Saturday afternoon. The code books were intact, the cipher equipment mangled beyond repair. No matter, the cryptologists at Cheltenham had pulled out all the stops and been working non-stop on ‘breaking’ previously ‘unbreakable’ intercept material for the last forty hours.
This endeavour, being conducted under the codename ‘Jericho’ was so secret that only nine people in Oxford even knew that there was a classified project called Jericho.
That morning a messenger from GCHQ had reported that the ‘experts are already into routine housekeeping traffic’ and that ‘the coding books in our hands are live for at least the next fifty-three days’, with the caveat, ‘unless, of course, the Soviets change their encryption protocols before then.’ Unfortunately this latter possibility was ‘very likely’, since no code book was routinely employed until the end of its originally scheduled ‘life span’.
Airey Neave did not care about that. If the Soviets changed their codes, so be it, there was nothing he or anybody else could do about that. The important thing was that GCHQ was reading the Soviet High Command’s chit-chat NOW…
It went without saying that he was not about to broadcast this to all and sundry; in this room the ‘Jericho approved list’ only included himself, the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, Willie Whitelaw and the three Chiefs of Staff. At this time there were just fourteen names on the ‘list’ outside the environs of GCHQ. Fortuitously, the provisions made to guard Enigma in the Second World War provided an excellent historical model on which to base the Draconian security arrangements put in place around the cryptographic gold mine that HMS Alliance had delivered to their cause.
Several of the men and women who had broken that German Enigma code over twenty years ago were now at the coal face unravelling ‘FOOL’S GOLD’.
Fool’s Gold was the coverall security ‘box’ within which Jericho lived. Or rather, the largest of the many boxes in which Jericho lived because most of the people at Cheltenham busily beavering away night and day to ‘get into’ Jericho had absolutely no idea what they were actually working on.