“He would probably have you arrested, my friend.” The Iranian officer sighed. “People like Zahedi care about nothing beyond their own little satrapy,” he went on derisively. “He thinks that because he is the ‘master’ of Khuzestan Province that Abadan and the oilfields are his own personal possessions, to enjoy and to dispose of at his whim.”
Michael Carver was silent for several seconds.
“What of your situation, Hasan?”
“My uncle is Governor in Shiraz. My family will be safe there.” The Iranian shrugged, his lips formed into a grimly thin line on his still handsome now darkly bearded face. “My officers understand that this is the key front. This,” he added resignedly, “is where the Russians will strike next when they have digested the easy meat of the Basra garrison.”
The Englishman became aware that his friend’s stare was suddenly hard, unrelenting.
“The fools in Isfahan and many of their servants, men like Zahedi in Bandr Mahshahr, imagined that you will meekly surrender Abadan to me. They don’t believe me when I tell them that you would fight to the last tank and wreck the place from end to end to stop it falling into the hands of the Russians.” He smiled roguishly. “Or us.”
Michael Carver made no attempt to contradict the other man.
“This I know,” al-Mamaleki guffawed. “Because you and I, we are soldiers. But those imbeciles in Isfahan? Even after what the Russians did to Tehran and the Shah,” his momentary good humour died, “they still don’t understand that unless we fight, those bastards will enslave us for generations to come.”
Not for the first time Michael Carver found himself admiring the poet that invariably emerged in troubled times from somewhere deep within the Persian soul.
“What of your officers, my friend?”
“Those who are still with me will fight when the time comes.”
Al-Mamaleki’s brigade had grown into an over-sized division boasting as many as two hundred armoured fighting vehicles of which over sixty were Centurions — a mixture of Mark Is and up-gunned Mark IIs — and over seventy American M-48 Pattons. Notwithstanding that the original ‘brigade’ had been re-designated a ‘division’, no battlefield or brevet promotion had been bestowed on its commanding officer; a thing which spoke volumes for the suspicion in which al-Mamaleki was obviously held by his new master in Bandr Mahshahr.
Before driving up to Khorramshahr from his headquarters in Abadan — a journey of around seven miles — Michael Carver had summoned his staff to brief him on events in and around Abadan during his absence in Saudi Arabia.
His own smaller ‘Abadan Garrison’ force of some thirty tanks, several batteries of seventeen and twenty-five millimetre anti-tank artillery, a total of six battalions of partially mechanised infantry, and around a thousand lines of communication troops supported by two squadrons of RAF Hawker Hunter interceptors, half-a-dozen helicopters of various descriptions and a flight of four Canberra jet bombers represented a formidable fighting unit but if the Red Army was to be struck a telling blow it would be by al-Mamaleki’s massed armour, not by the British and Commonwealth forces defending Abadan Island. In a perfect world Carver would have explored ways of extending Abadan’s air defence umbrella — two batteries of long-range surface-to-air Bristol Bloodhound missiles — to cover the Iranian 3rd Imperial Armoured Division’s over-extended northern front opposite Basra. The Bloodhounds already covered the airspace over Khorramshahr, and two troops of Centurions were already imbedded with al-Mamaleki’s garrison within the town. Sometime within the next ten days it was planned to bring HMAS Sydney up the Shat-al-Arab to offload several Centurions, a squadron of Australian Navy Westland Wessex helicopters and to deliver an addition ANZAC rifle battalion to Abadan.
“I reported to Bandr Mahshahr that I ‘demanded’ fuel and lubricants from ‘the British’,” al-Mamaleki confessed, ruefully. “The idiots had no idea that the only thing which had been keeping the 3rd Division in the field was your supply organisation.”
Michael Carver saw the funny side of this, smiled.
Last night he had dined with the Foreign Secretary, Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson, a most erudite and perspicacious man with an apparently encyclopaedic knowledge of the history, religions and customs of the Middle East, and a profound understanding of the mindsets of principal members of each of the major governmental, religious and ethnic leaders. Sir Thomas was deeply distrustful of Nasser even though he personally admired the man; ‘fascinating, remarkable fellow’ he had said ruminatively, ‘but he will let us down in the end’. As for the Saudis ‘they would blow up Abadan themselves if they could but without the Americans they feel vulnerable, as much to an internal revolt as they do to external aggression’.
The Emir of Kuwait was pleading for his small country to be packed full of British and Commonwealth troops but shuddered at the idea of Egyptian tanks rumbling across his sands. Likewise, in the emirates along the southern shores of the Persian Gulf the local potentates, sheiks and despots felt both reassured and fearful watching the big grey allied warships out at sea, listening to the silvery jets noisily overflying their barren lands and by the ongoing ‘pull out’ of the American conglomerates prospecting for black gold in their fiefdoms.
The whole Middle East was ready to explode.
‘Nasser won’t send us more than a token brigade or maybe a couple of under-strength regiments from his 1st and 3rd Armoured Divisions,’ the Foreign Secretary had explained. It was not said cynically, he was simply stating facts. ‘Oh, he’ll dress it up as a massive military commitment, a huge investment in pan-Arabism, or some such. But that’s not the thing. The thing is that Egypt will be putting down a marker that the Soviets will not be able to ignore in years to come. It is pointless expending unlimited blood and treasure stopping the Red Army in its tracks if, when the shooting is over everybody looks to us to guarantee the peace because that is certainly not a burden we can carry alone.’
Michael Carver had quizzed the Foreign Secretary over the as yet unpublicised Anglo-Egyptian Mutual Defence Treaty.
‘Will we actually go to war with Israel if the Israelis attack Egypt after this is over? Assuming we don’t get thrown out of the Gulf, that is? Say, if there’s a war between Egypt and Israel next year?’
‘Probably not,’ Sir Thomas had conceded. ‘But Nasser knows that. In the long run he also knows that it will be in our interests to be his arms manufacturer and in the foreseeable future, his naval bulwark in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Israelis won’t know what we and Nasser have cooked up; they’ll have to assume, for a year or two at least, that if they make a wrong move that either the Ark Royal or the Eagle will come steaming into the Eastern Mediterranean. That wouldn’t be good for anybody. In the meantime Nasser knows he’s got a free hand in Libya to secure his western borders against a possible insurgency and to start building his pan-Arab empire along the North African coast, safe in the knowledge the Royal Navy is guarding his seaward right flank. Diplomacy is like politics, and most things in life I suppose, it is the art of the possible. We have made a number of distasteful compromises and accommodations because at the end of the day we need a reliable constant supply of crude oil from this region.’
Hasan al-Mamaleki was watching Michael Carver with thoughtful eyes that threatened to read his friend’s mind.
“General Zahedi doesn’t understand,” he said stepping back from the map table. “None of the people in Isfahan understand. If you and I were playing a staff college exercise, a war game, nine times out of ten the result would be the same. Whether we stand and fight or whether we run and hide the result would be the same.” He nodded towards the map. “Abadan will be lost.”