He was disconcerted by how directly the Englishman had confronted him with the reality of their situation.
At his shoulder Yamani coughed politely.
“Our forces are equipped with M-48, so-called ‘Patton’ tanks, General Carver,” he said in English. Thomas Barger effortlessly stepped in and translated, in low confidential terms in flowing Arabic for Yamani’s colleague, the Minister for Defence and Aviation. “These machines are no match for the modern Red Army tanks. Likewise, we have few modern jet fighter aircraft.”
Carver thought about this.
He looked to the senior minister, Prince Abdulaziz.
“Well handled the M-48’s ninety-millimetre gun is capable of doing great harm to the Soviet T-62. I am confident that your tanks, well-handled,” he emphasised, “fighting alongside my Centurions are perfectly capable of greatly inconveniencing our foes.”
Michael Carver was not a man who liked to deal in unequivocal predictions. On this occasion he saw no profit in hedging around his thinking with superfluous caveats and clauses. He had the forces to hand to allow him to blunt and possible stall the Soviets at the Kuwaiti border and if absolutely unavoidable, with which to embroil the Red Army in an attritional bloodbath on Abadan Island; but those forces alone even with the ANZAC reinforcements presently coming ashore at Damman were too weak to attempt to repel the enemy. To go onto the offensive he needed ‘mass’, more of everything and even then there were no certainties to be had. Somehow the Egyptians or the Saudis, hopefully the Syrians, and Iranian Army units fast evaporating through desertions and lack of leadership had to be drawn together into some kind of united fighting force to resist the invaders. There was no point worrying about all the things that could go wrong. It was the worst kept secret in the Middle East that the Israelis had been planning their next war against their neighbours ever since the Suez Fiasco; likewise, that Nasser wanted a finger in every political pie and had been actively seeking to undermine practically every other regime in the region. Saudi isolationism, the Shah’s ego-centric rule in Iran, the constant threat of civil war in Iraq, and to a lesser degree, in Syria and the escalating tensions created by the huge reserves of oil recently discovered in the Emirates along the southern shore of the Persian Gulf made for an explosively volatile mix. Ongoing low-level civil wars in Yemen and Oman, and finally, the withdrawal of the permanent presence of American troops, aircraft and warships from bases in Saudi Arabia had turned the Middle East into a powder keg in which the continuing British footholds at Abadan, Aden, Kuwait and a dozen other under strength garrisons had merely complicated, rather than simplified the ungodly, horribly messy strategic picture.
Until that was, the Red Army had intervened.
Now there was a short window of opportunity; a heaven sent common enemy against whom it was in everybody’s interest to unite.
“Frankly, Your Highness,” Michael Carver said, addressing the Defence Minister in the tone of a weary cleric confronting some esoteric or arcane doctrinal matter. “While it might not be wholly in your interests to fight the Soviets with us; it is certainly not in your interests to fight the Soviets alone, or to shrink back from fighting at all. I am a Christian and I like to think I come from a country which is still essentially Christian. In this region Islam lights the way of its peoples. You and I, Your Highness, are ‘people of the book’, bound to respect each other’s beliefs and cultures.” He half-turned and pointed to the north. “Driving down from the mountains of Iran and Iraq is a godless horde that respects neither Islam nor Christianity and is set upon condemning us all to the spiritual darkness of the atheistic Marxist-Leninism creed.”
There was a delay as Thomas Barger translated every time Michael Carver halted. Both Saudi ministers listened respectfully.
“We shall fight,” the Englishman said. “Alone if necessary but we shall fight. Together, we the ‘people of the book’ may, with God’s grace, turn back the Soviet monster from the Persian Gulf and some greater part of the lands to our north.”
It was Yamani who spoke first.
“You speak well, General Carver. But what becomes of us after the battle?”
Michael Carver allowed himself a deathly smile.
“Ah. Surely that is a thing that is in God’s hands.”
Chapter 39
Captain Sir Peter Christopher, VC, ignored the pack of photographers and the long lenses of the television cameras. Having exited the United States Navy Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King ahead of ‘the girls’, as he and his friend Alan Hannay referred to their Maltese wives, he turned and reached up to grab Marija before she tried to be brave and negotiate the steps down to the grassy landing field unassisted. It had been a long day and she had been on her feet constantly until they had boarded the helicopter for the one hundred and twenty mile, ninety minute ‘hop’ from Philadelphia to the Catoctin Mountains. Marija was weary, her bones were aching and she was — albeit as yet lightly — with child; so Peter gently seized his wife under her arms and lifted down to terra firma.
“I’m not ill,” she muttered, her face still turned to his chest and therefore out of sight of the watchers. “I’m just…”
“Pregnant,” he whispered, smiling.
“Yes, husband,” she retorted, mildly accusative for the briefest of instants as behind the couple Alan Hannay helped Rosa out into the late afternoon sunshine.
Both wives were wearing new ‘party frocks’ ordered from Bloomingdales in New York — items from a trousseau specially procured by the agency of, and at the expense of Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson — for the ‘at home’ with the President and the First Lady. The husbands were in ceremonial uniforms, minus the customary swords, which was an immense relief to Peter Christopher because every time he had been out in public lately with that clanking, infernally awkward weapon hanging off his waistband he had been terrified he was going to trip over it, drop it, step on it, inadvertently stab somebody or otherwise disgrace himself with it at any moment.
For Peter Christopher this was to be his third encounter with the President of the United States of America; a month ago there had been that fraught meeting at the White House when the Prime Minister had torn the poor fellow off a frightful strip in front of his whole entourage, and another, less angst-ridden formal introduction at a somewhat ill-starred ‘diner’ hosted by the House of Representatives the following evening.
President Kennedy looked old before his time but tanned, altogether healthier than a month ago as he stepped forward to greet his guests. The First Lady looked, well, like a movie star. The Marine Corps honour guard in their old-fashioned uniforms snapped impressively to attention, presenting arms immaculately. Behind them the band which had struck up ‘Hail to the Chief’ fell silent. At the edge of the landing field, a level square of grass trimmed like the green baize of a billiard table, surrounded by trees which concealed the chalets, barracks and bunkers glimpsed through the windows of the helicopter as it had swooped down to land, more soldiers and military policemen kept watch from the shadows.
Camp David was a heavily armed military camp. Such, it seemed, was the price of maintaining the sanctity of this Shangri La in the Catoctin Mountains, and keeping the First Family’s guests safe in the modern age.
Lady Marija Christopher smiled and looked around at her surroundings, unconsciously smoothing down the folds of her expensive calf-length dress. She still felt a little uncomfortable accepting Pat Harding-Grayson’s ‘charity’. This even though her friend, and since the moment she arrived in England, her mentor, had assured her that ‘I made a ridiculously large amount of money from my books in America before the war and if I tried to bring all those dollars home they would be horribly taxed, and besides, you and Rosa are the very best of causes!’ Marija and her sister had been measured up almost as soon as they arrived in Philadelphia; but the frocks and blouses and stockings and lingerie had been delivered the day after ‘the shooting’, and what with one thing and another neither woman had been in any mood to properly investigate their bounty until yesterday. Ever since ‘the shooting’ they had been far too busy trying to stop their respective husbands braining every American who crossed his path!