“Good morning, gentlemen,” Carver drawled, returning his visitors’ salutes with a cursory motion of his right hand. He left his uninvited ‘guests’ standing at attention. “You catch me at a busy time. I’d be obliged if you would state your business directly please.”
The abruptness of this clearly unnerved both the Iraqis.
By reputation the Military Governor of Basra, General Abd al-Rahman al-Bazzaz was, as political soldiers can sometimes be, actually a middlingly competent officer. The appearance of al-Bakr and Arif at his Headquarters now told Michael Carver that al-Bazzaz had finally seen the writing on the wall. Having had his curiosity whetted, he was interested to hear what the two visitors had to say for themselves.
“General al-Bazzaz offers an alliance with your forces, General Carver,” Brigadier al-Bakr asserted, hardly believing his master had had the bare-faced cheek to put the words in his mouth.
“An alliance?” The Englishman tried not to laugh.
“Yes, sir. Together we will halt the Russians north of Basra.”
Michael Carver thought this was a particularly fatuous statement. Nevertheless, he was an innately courteous man and he had no intention of heaping gratuitous humiliation on the two officers before him.
“What is the current order of battle of General al-Bazzaz’s forces?”
“In addition to the Basra garrison elements of the 2nd, 4th and 9th Armoured Divisions of the Iraqi National Army, in total roughly equivalent to four brigades of armour in the British Army, sir.”
Carver did not believe for a moment that al-Bazzaz could field over three hundred tanks, let alone actually ‘command’ them to do anything except hunker down. Moreover, the one and only time he had seen Iraqi armour on the battlefield six of his Centurions had chased off a force of over fifty Iraqi tanks and enabled his friend, Hassan al-Mamaleki’s then under-strength brigade to chase numerically much superior invaders all the way back across the Arvand River west of Khorramshahr.
Carver sighed.
“With such a force at his disposal General al-Bazzaz should be able to dig in north of Basra and hold back any number of T-62s,” he observed mildly, neutrally. Wild horses would not drag him into the quagmire of Iraq’s feuding ethnic and religious factions. One could not fight a war — especially one against a more powerful enemy — if one had to spend all one’s time looking over one’s shoulder, and that was exactly what campaigning in Iraq, would be like. Sooner or later, if they had not discovered it already, the Russians would understand that they had jumped barefoot into a horribly well-populated snake pit. Even with its great oilfields no western government had actually wanted to be in Iraq before the October War. The British situation on Abadan had been increasingly marginal and sooner or later, war or no war, the Iranians would have taken it back; that after all was the logic of not basing his current war plans on attempting to hold Abadan Island. The position was untenable, indefensible, like that of the mutinous, splintered garrison of Basra. The officers and men of the 2nd, 4th and 9th Armoured Divisions of the Iraqi National Army would much rather be fighting each other than the Russians, or even the Iranians or even the loathed former imperial overlords, the British. Truth be told they would much rather not be fighting anybody at all; fighting interfered with the politicking and gave the general populous, upon which they were accustomed to prey, the courage to stand up to the sad excuse for a fighting force that was supposed, when all was said and done, to be protecting them.
When the Red Army drove into Basra it would be a close run thing whether men like Brigadier Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and Major Abdul Salam Arif were captured by the Russians, shot in the back by their own men, or lynched by a vengeful civilian mob.
“Or if not an alliance,” al-Bakr went on, “then some mutually satisfactory arrangement under which senior officers, officials and their families might be allowed to pass through your lines and granted sanctuary, as it were?”
So many rats leaving a sinking ship.
“General al-Bazzaz is a very wealthy man. The treasury of the city of Basra and many ancient artefacts and…”
“Let me understand you correctly, Brigadier al-Bakr,” Michael Carver retorted, his face stiff with disgust. The bloody fools were trying to bribe him! “You want me to risk my men fighting to defend a city that General al-Bazzaz is not prepared to defend himself?”
Answer came there none.
“Or is it simply that you want to buy sanctuary for traitors?”
All the Red Army had to do was motor south from Baghdad and the whole rotten country would fall into its hands like a nightmarishly poised low-hanging fruit!
“Frankly, gentlemen, I’d rather sell my daughters into white slavery than get into bed with you.” Michael Carver shook his head. “Not only do you not have the gumption or the wherewithal to mount any kind of coordinated defence against the invader; you expect me to take any number of useless mouths into my lines because you don’t have the guts to fight.”
The two Iraqi officers were shamefaced in an angry, blood feud sort of way as if it was Carver’s fault that were members of an army beaten before it had fired a single shot in anger against the invaders.
“Take this message back to General al-Bazzaz,” Carver decided, brusquely. “I will not permit a single Iraqi civilian or soldier into my lines. If necessary, I will fire on any such person who approaches my lines.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Good day to you, our business is concluded.”
Chapter 56
Airey Neave had awakened that morning before dawn with an odd feeling of unease, as if he was sickening for something or had gone to bed the previous evening with pressing questions unanswered. His wife Diana had remarked upon his apparent mal de mere over breakfast but he had shrugged it off.
‘I just need a breath of fresh air. The walk to my office will do me the world of good, my dear,’ he had assured her.
His wife knew better than to press him further. For all that he had been the Member of Parliament for Abingdon — a seat he had won in a by-election — since 1953 he had never cut his personal Gordian knot with the security services. A part of his life was forever closed to her and to most of his closest friends. Some men needed their secrets and Diana had never begrudge her husband his; nor, in a strange way his attachment to the extraordinary force of nature that was Margaret Hilda Thatcher, the woman he had skilfully mentored and guided to the premiership.
Airey Neave found himself briefly pondering the conundrum of his wife’s true feelings about his friendship with Margaret, as he walked from the lodgings at Magdalene College along the High Street. He had grown so accustomed to the presence of his two armed plain clothed bodyguards that he sometimes forgot they were with him; in the past this had led to inadvertent collisions when he stopped to wave to an acquaintance, or to look in a bookshop window without warning. In another age, time, and place he would have been able to confess that he loved Margaret. He did actually love her in some ways; but it was the strictly platonic fascination of an artist for a work he has been partly responsible for bringing to public attention, not a physical or visceral thing. It was the protective love of a brother for a sister or teacher for a particularly gifted student; except now the apprentice had outgrown and outdone them all. It must have been hard for Diana, he recognised, albeit in retrospect. Although she and Margaret were firm friends he did not know if that had helped, or made things harder.