“Nobody wants that,” James Callaghan murmured.
Field Marshall Sir Richard Hull shook his head.
“Prime Minister,” he prefaced respectfully. “I should be grateful to hear what terms these gentlemen have brought with them from Chelyabinsk? Before, that is, we send them on their way with a rather large flea in their ears.”
The KGB woman interpreter very nearly choked on this.
Shelepin would have reached for his gun — had he had one — and both his comrades were very nearly as offended at the First Secretary of the KGB. However, Kosygin and Sakharov were disappointed for entirely separate reasons.
Kosygin had genuinely hoped for some kind of olive branch which might even now halt the war in Iraq; despite what Chuikov and Babadzhanian claimed it was by no means a given that ‘things would turn out all right in the end’. Operation Nakazyvat had been a reckless gamble from the outset albeit one that the collective leadership felt confident it could halt, rein in or abandon if things went wrong. In the event many things had gone wrong, yet the invasion had proceeded because the enemy had been unable, unwilling or simply oblivious to the things that had ‘gone wrong’ for Army Group South. It was now clear that the British and their ‘allies’ — Kosygin shared the Red Army’s contempt for the other ‘armies’ in the region — had no intention of coming to the rescue of Iraq, or of interposing themselves into the poisonous ongoing court infighting in Isfahan. Worse, the British had formed some kind of local pact with the Iranian Army in the Abadan Sector opposite Basra, signifying that they intended to make a stand not on the plains of central Iraq but around what, by the time Babadzhanian got there, would be an isolated island citadel. Moreover, spies in England and elsewhere had reported a slow build up of troops, light equipment and tactical aircraft based in Kuwait, Damman in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Emirates and in northern Oman within striking range of Basra and Abadan. As if this was not an ominous portent of things to come, major naval forces had recently appeared in the Persian Gulf including several small aircraft carriers and at least two cruisers. Recollecting how easily a British invasion force had eradicated Red Dawn from Cyprus in less than a fortnight, and how ferociously two small Royal Navy destroyers had thwarted greatly superior Red Navy forces off Malta there was absolutely no cause to be complacent about the fighting capabilities of ‘the British’ in the Middle East.
Kosygin had come to England hoping for, if not a way out, then at least ‘options’ to take back home. While he had no doubt that Babadzhanian’s tanks would get to the Persian Gulf, or that once dug in the Red Army would be immovable from large tracts of Mesopotamia; the problem was that a plan born out of a lust for revenge was threatening to embroil the Motherland in a never ending war with an enemy ruled by an implacable mad woman!
Sakharov’s angst was of an entirely more prosaic variety. He was a scientist who prided himself on his own personal rationalism; everybody else around the table seemed to be in the grip of some kind of dreadful ‘war psychosis’. The father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb accepted that he was partly responsible for the tragedy of the Cuban Missiles War. Ever since he had been drawn into Kosygin’s inner circle he had tried to be a small voice of reason. Tragically, nobody was listening.
“For us,” Kosygin explained wearily, “this war is a matter of survival. We lost so much in the Cuban Missiles War,” he sighed, “and you so little. We too deserve our place in the sun. In the absence of a just settlement of our legitimate demands for reparations, we will win in battle new spheres of influence. You have no more ‘right’ to be in Iran or anywhere else in the Middle East that we do. You and the Americans killed a hundred million of my people; now we will take away your oil, your prestige and in time, North Africa and the Indian sub-continent will be Russian clients.”
Margaret Thatcher listened to the waspish translation.
According to Jericho the Red Army’s seizure of Basra would be the signal for Soviet agents in Egypt, the Lebanon, Syria, and throughout the Arabian Peninsula to commence campaigns of assassinations, and to foment violent civil unrest and mutinies in the armed forces. At that time the Red Air Force would launch hit and run bombing raids on shipping in the Persian Gulf, and targets along is southern shores including Kuwait City and possibly in the Damman-Dhahran area. There were also some references to of provoking civil unrest in the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal and oddly, agents in France seemed to be planning some kind of ‘action’ against ‘ports along the English Channel coast and ‘targets of opportunity’ in the Mediterranean’. Since many of the decrypts were only partial due to problems rebuilding the interception grid — there were no listening stations in Germany or Italy, for example — it was hard to know the context, or anything much in particular about the significance of the traffic directed at or emanating from south and central France. It was not that this material was unreadable simply that it was difficult to know what to prioritise. GCHQ’s Director of Cryptanalysis, Hugh Alexander, had told the Prime Minister only a day ago the ‘really interesting thing about the French traffic is that several operators in France are communicating using the codes we captured off Malta’.
Whatever was going on in France remained a bit of mystery…
The Prime Minister gathered her wits.
“What are your terms, Comrade Kosygin?”
“For peace?”
“For a peace? Or a ceasefire?”
The Russian thought about it for several seconds.
“Abadan,” he said. “Abadan and a withdrawal of all British forces from Iraq and Iran. In those countries we demand a free hand.”
Surrendering Abadan was out of the question and if the Russians had a ‘free hand’ in Iraq and Iran the United Kingdom’s position in the Persian Gulf became untenable.
“And what do you promise in return?” She asked coldly.
“The Arabian Peninsula would become a British sphere of influence.”
“And what of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and India?”
“Syria and the Lebanon will become Soviet spheres of influence sooner or later whatever we discuss here today. As to India and Egypt, that matter may be deferred for the consideration of a general peace conference once the dust has settled.”
Less than half a century ago Margaret Thatcher’s predecessor, David Lloyd George had sat down with the other victors of the Great War and carved up the Middle East and Eastern Europe in exactly this kind of cold-blooded, obscene fashion. From the abomination of the Versailles Treaty had sprung Fascism and the seeds of a yet more terrible global war. The post-Versailles Middle East had been a disaster, nothing short of an imperialistic land grab by the victors — America, Britain and France — designed to steal the region’s oilfields. Versailles had not caused the October War, that had been Cold War psychosis, but its legacy still dominated practically all of the ‘facts on the ground’ in the Middle East. Thus it was that she found herself defending the indefensible — that vile post 1918 land grab — against an enemy who made the monsters around the table at Versailles look like babes in the wood!
“No,” Margaret Thatcher said.
Jericho had told her that the Soviets had no intention of making any kind of peace with her until they had subdued the entire Middle East and choked off the West’s oil for a generation.
“No,” she repeated.
Kosygin, Sakharov and even Shelepin frowned as if they did not believe their ears.
Had she really said that?
“No,” the Angry Widow repeated. “While I live you will never get your hands on Abadan. Never!”