The commander of the 10th Guards Tank Division had ordered his boys to laager until nightfall and driven forward to confirm what the map told him about the ground ahead. The T-62s around him were low on fuel and if they were going to dash down the road towards Miqdadiyah at sunset they needed their tanks topping off first. Miqdadiyah was only thirty kilometres north-east of Baquba. From Baquba to Baghdad was just fifty kilometres — or as little as two days fighting further down the road.
Army Group South would reconsolidate at Baghdad, transferring every available Red Air Force aircraft south to forward bases around the city. Once Puchkov’s tanks reached Baghdad, Iraq was at the Red Army’s mercy. With just four under strength divisions — most of Army Group South was still snarled up in the Alborz and Zagros Mountains — Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian had conquered half of Iraq and those useless bastards back in Chelyabinsk were still panicking like a lot of old women!
Puchkov heard booted feet approaching, crunching across the stony ground, looked down.
A sweating KGB officer brandished a wad of charred papers.
“These people,” he waved airily towards the nearest burned out M-48 Patton tank, “were Shias. That’s probably why they tried to make a stand here. There’s nothing much between here and Miqdadiyah, sir. The local Shias believe that the place was named for Miqdad ibn Aswad Al-Kindi.”
Vladimir Andreyevich Puchkov did not have much time for over-educated intelligence officers at the best of times; and even less for the KGB ones that shithead Andropov had foisted on his division, who spent more time writing down what real soldiers thought about politics than they did collecting useful combat intelligence. The scowl that creased his sunburnt, scarred face suddenly concentrated the KGB man’s thoughts.
“Miqdad ibn Aswad Al-Kindi was one of the Sahabads of the Prophet Muhammad, Comrade General,” the younger man went on hurriedly. “That is, one of the so-called Four Companions. Miqdad ibn Aswad Al-Kindi was said to be a perfect Shia…”
Puchkov shook his head.
Where did the KGB find these useless fuckers?
“Great. So everywhere we go we can expect to have a bunch of fanatics come at us in a fucking banzai charge like these comedians?” He gestured towards the scorched, smoking carcasses of the knocked out M-48s.
“Er, I don’t know, sir.”
Puchkov told the officer to fuck off and not to come back unticlass="underline" “You’ve got something useful to tell me!”
He turned to get down from the turret.
A ninety-millimetre round from one of the M-48’s had hit the cupola beneath his feet and bounced off, leaving a twenty-millimetre deep boot-long gash in the armour. An armour-piercing round from a one hundred and five-millimetre fifty-two calibre rifled British L7 gun fitted in the Centurion Mark II, would have cleaved through the steel at his feet like a red hot knife through butter. Puchkov hesitated, stared a while longer at the blackened M-48s, wondering privately how this little battle would have turned out if the Iraqis had had been riding in British Centurions or the latest American M-60 main battle tanks.
Bloodily, he suspected.
However, he did not dwell on this overlong as he jumped down and trudged towards where he had ordered his communications truck to park up in dead ground below the ridgeline. A mine clearance detail halted in mid-stride and snapped to attention as he passed.
Nobody seriously believed that the suicidal zealots who had attacked a numerically superior force equipped with bigger, longer range ordnance in broad daylight had paused to lay mines under or alongside the road ahead. But it paid to be safe. Up until the last week the main enemy had been the terrain and the occasional interventions of high altitude RAF bombers; the last few days had seen a number of sharp little actions like this afternoon’s south of Sadiyah.
Troopers from the Divisional Headquarters Company were disembarking from half-tracks and ancient requisitioned Fords and Dodge six-wheelers when he arrived at the radio truck. His boys had been forced to seize and repair whatever vehicles they found on their way south.
By the time the Division got to the Persian Gulf it was going to resemble a bloody gypsy caravan at this rate!
Chapter 42
Brigadier Mirza Hasan Mostofi al-Mamaleki was in sombre mood when Lieutenant General Sir Michael Carver arrived at his headquarters that afternoon. A week ago the Provisional Government — an ad hoc collection of middle-ranking couriers and survivors from the Shah’s regime, and elderly Army officers based in a disused Royal Palace outside Isfahan — had appointed a new Military Governor of Khuzestan Province, which covered the Khorramshahr-Abadan Sector.
It seemed that General Jafar Sharif-Zahedi — members of whose family had literally been in bed with the Pahlavi dynasty ever since it came to power in the 1920s, and had little or no actual ‘soldiering’ experience — who had based himself and his entourage in the town of Bandr Mahshahr some thirty miles to the east, was more preoccupied with recovering the ‘jewel of Abadan’ than he was securing the country’s western borders. Like the rest of the Provisional Government he viewed the war in Iraq as a sideshow; the main thing was to first, hold the Soviet invaders within the mountains of the north, and second, eventually expel them from the holy soil of Iran. Oh, and to enrich oneself and one’s family — and one’s numerous retainers — in the process.
Bizarrely, it seemed that the Provisional Government had convinced itself that the Red Army’s appetite for conquest would be wholly sated once it had consumed Iraq. The thinking went something like this: there was already a dysfunctional socialist regime in Iraq, therefore an Iraq ruled by the Soviet Union would in some way be a more stable, predictable neighbour and because it lay to the west of Abadan and the southern oilfields it was unlikely to impair Iran’s ability to continue to export that oil via the Persian Gulf to the outside World.
It was the sort of complacent logic that made re-arranging the deck chairs on the deck of the Titanic look like a rational survival strategy.
Al-Mamaleki had already made arrangements for his wife and children to travel south to stay with relations in Shiraz, hopefully beyond the reach of the idiots in Isfahan. His single meeting with General Jafar Sharif-Zahedi, a corpulent unimaginative man with no understanding of the realities of modern armoured warfare, had convinced him beyond any reasonable doubt that the inmates had seized control of the asylum. This he freely confessed to Michael Carver as they stood over the map table at his headquarters in the eastern quarter of Khorramshahr.
With the pencil in his hand he prodded the line of the Alborz Mountains stretching across his country from the Caucasus in the northwest most of the way to Afghanistan in the east.
“A couple of squadrons of my Centurions could hold the passes through those mountains forever,” he snorted derisively. “The Soviets know that. The key sector is down here opposite Basra. Abadan is the key.”
“Is there anything to be gained by my travelling to Bandr Mahshahr to pay my respects to General Jafar Sharif-Zahedi?”
Al-Mamaleki shook his head.