“I’ve ordered the Air Force to burn you several hundred metres of clear ground to the north and the south of the city,” he informed his hard-pressed airborne commander.
“That should stop the bastards creeping up on my boys tonight, sir!” The other man had chortled, seemingly without a care in the world. “We found a depot with brand new Yankee radios. The locals had never unpacked the bloody things! I reckon they had at least eight tanks based here, sir. Yankee M-48s judging by the spares inventory of the workshops on the outskirts of the town. They pulled out so fast they didn’t have time to wipe out the maintenance schedules posted on the walls of the garages!”
“You had a tough night again last night?”
“This thing doesn’t feel right, sir. My boys reckon there were hostiles infiltrating the central areas of the city around midnight. If it wasn’t for the sniping I’d get on with a systematic house to house search.”
“Do you still think you have hostiles in the city?”
“I’d put money on it, sir. I reckon we’ve got two, maybe three shit hot snipers operating in the city. My boys can’t even get close to them. They’re acting like a team, covering each other’s backs. The sort of thing our Spetsnaz boys are trained to do. From what I’ve seen of the Iranian Army,” he went on, the words dripping with contempt, “I wouldn’t have thought they were capable of playing these games with my boys.”
Babadzhanian digested this. Unable to form a settled opinion he ended the conversation. Kurochnik did not need him to tell him his business any more than Puchkov.
Having come down to Mahabad to stand at the cutting edge of the great sword the collective leadership had place in his hands, to symbolically lead from the front, Babadzhanian badly needed to step back and think.
Back in Tabriz his headquarters staff — like all staffs in the Red Army — looked to him to do its thinking for it. Down here the minutiae of divisional movement, deployment and logistics was Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov’s problem. Here in Mahabad Babadzhanian could stand to one side and ask himself if things were really going as well as they seemed to be going.
He was confident that Kurochnik would hold out, block the road south and therefore protect his vulnerable right flank should Iraqi or renegade Turkish Army units decide to get involved, which was unlikely. He had gambled that the Yankees and the British would initially be too shocked to react; and not recover in time to mount a sustained aerial attack on his forces while they were at their most vulnerable, stretched out in convoy along hundreds of kilometres of mountain roads.
Thus far, his gamble had paid off.
However, it would all be for nought if the enemy attacked his armoured spearheads in the two high passes to the west at Piranshahr and Sardasht.
Chapter 12
The Secretary of State anticipated that the forthcoming summit would be a bloody affair but he was confident he held all the cards that mattered. Not least among these was the unassailable fact that nobody in the Administration had ever given the British any kind of undertaking, or guarantee that American armed forces would participate in any military adventure ‘east of Suez’. The British might have implied the existence of such implicit unwritten promises in the tone of the soon to be defunct US-UK Mutual defense Treaty; but that however, was their problem.
The President had only agreed to the ‘Philadelphia Summit’ for domestic political consumption. How better to explicitly proclaim one’s ‘America First’ credentials than by spurning a fresh British demand to get involved in yet another one of their interminable post-colonial wars?
The recent firestorm over the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom’s alleged attempt to appoint a British Supreme Commander of All Allied Forces in the Mediterranean had satisfactorily poisoned the well, and now the rebirth of the Soviet Menace in the Middle East had serendipitously created a ‘magic moment’; one of those once in a generation ‘moments’ when the public imagination and the national consciousness might be seized by a re-born charismatic leader. And that was exactly what John Fitzgerald Kennedy planned to do at the Philadelphia Summit.
America First!
It was no coincidence that the morning papers were carrying more ‘leaks’ purporting to prove ‘beyond doubt’ that the USS Scorpion had been sunk last year — not in error by US Navy Grumman S-2 Tracker anti-submarine aircraft flying off the USS Enterprise — but in a ‘cowardly pre-planned attack’ by an unnamed Royal Navy ‘super silent advanced diesel electric submarine’ operating as HMS Dreadnought’s ‘backup’.
Fulbright blanched somewhat at the heavy-handedness of the rumour mill; he wondered at how newspaper editors and TV producers could look themselves in the eyes of a morning. Newsweek apart everybody else seemed only too happy to accept every unsubstantiated piece of nonsense that spewed out of the House of Representatives, or from anybody who had ever been associated with the Administration.
Ben Bradlee, Bureau Chief of the newly relocated Newsweek Office in Philadelphia had been trying to get Fulbright to give him an interview for weeks but the Secretary of State knew better than to humour Bradlee. Jack and Bobby Kennedy had tried to tempt him back into the fold in February but Bradlee had not bought the ‘party line’. Presently, the media was playing the Administrations tune with just enough discordant notes to make it look as if it was not entirely in the President’s pocket; but the last thing anybody in the Philadelphia White House wanted was a former Kennedy family insider like Ben Bradlee getting his hooks into what was actually going on.
In the last forty-eight hours more inflammatory stories had emerged from ‘sources within the Sixth Fleet’ detailing how ‘inept and incompetent’ the British forces in the Mediterranean had been to quote, allow an ‘obsolete big-gun Soviet invasion fleet to creep up on Malta undetected’. Fulbright was painfully cognisant that these ‘reports’ neglected to mention that the powerful US Navy squadron assigned to provide long-range radar coverage for the Maltese Archipelago, and its primary seaborne defence against airborne and seaborne attack had gone missing during the critical hours. It was telling that nobody in the Navy Department had lifted a finger to contradict the latest ‘Scorpion lies’ or the new rash of misinformation coming out of the Mediterranean. As for the Administration; three brass monkeys could not have been any more publicly ‘neutral’ about the undermining of the alliance supposedly set in stone by the US-UK Defense Treaty signed in January.
Fulbright took little or no pleasure in his part in the campaign; but politics were politics and nobody got any prizes for coming second in a Presidential race. More to the point, while stabilising the situation in the Mediterranean was entirely defensible as a being in the immediate vital national security interests of the United States, right now a major war in Iraq and Iran was not.
If America actually needed Middle Eastern oil right now it would have been different but it did not, nor would it need Arab oil, or have to contemplate any of the compromises and accommodations that came with ensuring its smooth uninterrupted supply, it in the foreseeable future. Given the lack of competition for what, pre-October War had been relatively scarce reserves of well head crude, American domestic requirements could presently be easily satisfied from internal US production, Central and South American, even Indonesian oilfields and according to recent geological surveys, eventually from Alaskan fields. In the absence of competition from other modern industrialised competitors, the abundance of Middle Eastern oil was in the short to medium-term — five to ten years according to which economist one spoke to — superfluous to American needs.