Peter could not take issue with any of that no matter how hard he tried.
“I’m awfully flattered and all that, but…”
“I envisage the West Coast Consulate to be, in effect, the West Coast Embassy second in precedence among our diplomatic missions in America only to the Embassy in Philadelphia.” Lord Franks took pity on Peter. “Whatever happens in the Middle East in the next few days and weeks we need to make friends wherever we can, and to build bridges. Besides, once you get out to California it will be like having your own independent command again. Isn’t that what you really want?”
Chapter 50
Lieutenant-General Michael Carver had driven up from his headquarters on Abadan Island that morning to establish if, and or what assistance the British and Commonwealth garrison could offer his Iranian allies. Now and then a speculative long-range artillery shell smashed down into the desert to the east and in the distance columns of black smoke merged into a shimmering mirage-like haze in the blazing afternoon heat.
He had found Brigadier Mirza Hasan Mostofi al-Mamaleki covered in dust, having only recently returned from a flying visit to his forward units. His friend’s dark eyes glowed with angry violence.
“That bastard Zahedi ordered me to report to him in Bandr Mahshahr this morning at about the time he began shelling my Divisional perimeter!” He reported disgustedly. “Then half-an-hour later the fucking idiot sent a couple of regiments of armour and mechanised infantry to probe my lines. My anti-tank gunners and a couple of hull down Centurions turned the attacks back inside ten minutes. My boys probably brewed up a dozen M-48s and as many APCs; you’d have thought that would have been enough for that fat-headed imbecile! But, no! On the stroke of mid-day there was a general assault all long my north-eastern sector, M-48s and a few Mark I Centurions driving straight onto my guns!”
Michael Carver absorbed this, his emotions significantly less sanguine than his stern, stoical outer mask.
“I have two Hunters loitering at thirty thousand feet over Bandr Mahshahr,” he informed the dusty Iranian officer, “and four other fighters and two Canberras on QRA. Before I left my HQ I alerted 2nd Royal Tanks to fire up their Centurions, and 3 Para and two troops of twenty-five pounders to get ready to move at one hour’s notice.”
Al-Mamaleki nodded, his breath slowing.
2nd Royal Tank Regiment’s eighteen Centurion Mark IIs, the six hundred men of the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, and the guns of the Royal Artillery constituted a substantial part of the ‘mobile reserve’ of the British and Commonwealth garrison of Abadan Island.
“That is good to know, my friend.”
Although the two men had instructed their respective staffs to plan for the worst some days ago, neither man had actually expected the Provisional Government in Isfahan to move so precipitously against either al-Mamaleki’s 3rd Imperial Armoured Division, or to directly threaten the defences of Abadan this early, or without at least some kind of warning preamble in the form of threats or demands for ‘talks’.
It seemed that the Military Governor of Khuzestan Province, General Jafar Sharif-Zahedi — an unimaginative, corpulent man who owed his rank to the unseated Pahlavi dynasty rather than any military credentials — was as stupid as he was greedy.
Michael Carver had feared the early morning attacks on al-Mamaleki’s rearward-facing defences was the prelude, a diversion, presaging a major assault on Abadan across the desert south of the Shedegan Lake and the marshes which blocked any landward approach to the north eastern end of the Island. However, when no reports had come in from the SAS patrols operating on the eastern bank of the Bahmanshir River he had begun to suspect that whatever else he was up against, General Sharif-Zahedi was no second Napoleon. Any man who was so ill-advised as to sent armour against prepared defences manned by men equipped with 120-millimetre recoilless ant-tank guns and the 105-millimetre precision rifles of hull-down Centurions, across country previously ‘zeroed in’ by al-Mamaleki’s Divisional artillery was not so much incompetent, he was criminally negligent.
The columns of smoke rising on the eastern horizon graphically illustrated the width of the killing ground now littered with the wrecks of burning tanks, shattered APCs and miscellaneous thin-skinned, unarmoured vehicles. Zahedi had obviously thrown a significant proportion of his entire mobile combat strength at al-Mamaleki’s force; after expending assets on such a profligate scale, it greatly reduced the fool’s options when it came to mounting a similar attack on the formidable defences — augmented by the not inconsiderable eastern river barrier of the Bahmanshir — of Abadan Island.
What troubled the British general was not the ineptitude of the attack but that such an operation could be contemplated in the first place, let alone carried out. It was madness, sheer unadulterated madness! The Red Army occupied the mountains of Iran, there was little to stop its tanks motoring south from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf; within weeks there might be a Soviet tank army immediately to the west of Abadan Island, or coiled ready to surge across the Arvand River through the Khorramshahr gap into southern Iran. Yet it seemed General Jafar Sharif-Zahedi, the Military Governor of a large part of south western Iran, was preoccupied with waging war on a formation of his own Iranian Army that would not bow to his personal will.
It all rather smacked of fiddling while Rome burned.
Al-Mamaleki was rightly disgusted and appalled by what had happened. Under the regime of the Shah career military officers got used to the idea that occasionally, one was liable to be ordered to shoot at fellow Iranians. That was the way of things, the natural order of affairs. However, slaughtering fellow soldiers for no better reason than that they had the misfortune to be commanded by an imbecile was another thing, dirty, and dishonourable.
He was about to vent a little more of his disgust when both men felt the ground twitching beneath their feet and a few moments later, the very distant, drum roll of thunder from the west. It was like somebody was hitting the crust of the earth with a giant hammer many, many miles away. As one man they hurried into a nearby building and went up to the flat roof.
There was nothing to be seen.
Basra was over forty miles away as a crow would fly and the haze was too impenetrable. Nevertheless, both men guessed what was happening; the Russians were bombing the city. Not a hit and run raid. This was a sustained pounding by strategic bombers dropping hundreds of big bombs.
If anybody had doubted the enemy’s intentions before there could be no doubt now.
The Russians were coming.
Chapter 51
A balmy Mediterranean afternoon had darkened into a warm summer night as HMS Hampshire cruised west at eighteen knots. She was returning from her second ‘fast run’ to Cyprus carrying an additional consignment of huge World War II vintage Grand Slam and Tallboy bombs to the military port at Limassol, and her officers and men were basking in the satisfaction of a job well done. On the previous ‘trip’ the big guided missile destroyer had taken onboard all thirty-eight nuclear warheads recovered from the wreck of HMS Blake and successfully conveyed them home, stopping off briefly at Malta and Gibraltar to deliver respectively four and six devices. Back in Portsmouth a tanker had come alongside to refill her empty fuel bunkers and within an hour of unloading the last of the remaining ‘warheads’ she had been towed across the harbour to the ammunition wharf to take on a second load of monstrous conventional bombs. A month ago the Hampshire had been a brand new ship with a green crew, that evening she was a fighting ship which had earned her first laurels, and her complement of over five hundred men was justifiably proud in the knowledge that their new ship had won her spurs.