It was a funny old World…
People told him that Margaret had changed since the death of Julian Christopher. Perhaps, only time would tell. The Battle of Malta was still just two months old and the Prime Minister was not the only one nursing very fresh, very painful scars. Nobody in the government had come out of the near fiasco in the Central Mediterranean looking very good; and but for Jericho falling unexpectedly in their laps, the dog’s breakfast that had had the gall to call itself ‘the security services’ — MI5, MI6, GCHQ and all the other tin pot little army, navy and air force ‘intelligence’ empires — would have had nowhere to hide in the last few weeks. Once things had settled down a little Margaret’s decision to bring everything under the same roof would probably bear dividends. Unfortunately, that ‘settling down’ period was not about to happen overnight and in the meantime, he was very much cast in the role of the poor chump in charge of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again just after he had fallen off that apocryphal wall!
Nevertheless, as long as they had Jericho all the other problems in the new Ministry of National Security seemed relatively insignificant, of an order of magnitude that could be filed under ‘to be sorted out when we have a spare minute’. Despite what had happened off Algiers on Tuesday evening only one theatre of operations really mattered at present; the Middle East. Yes, he would have liked to have had some sense, some feel for what the blasted French were up to; whether for example, the UAUK was dealing with some rogue element, or something more sinister, organised and ordered from and or by, the ‘Provisional Government’ in Clermont-Ferrand. But no, in the big picture they could ‘deal with the French’ later.
The main thing was what was going on in the Persian Gulf, not least because they knew exactly what the Soviets were up to right down to where the leading echelons of 3rd Caucasus Tank Army and 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army stopped each night, their declining combat strengths, wastage rates and the names of many of the senior commanders. Because of Jericho he knew that two Red Air Force general officers had been arrested and replaced with men who understood ‘the urgency of the situation’. The Red Air Force had been ordered by Leonid Brezhnev to ‘prepare the way ahead’ regardless of casualties, fast jets were being moved to forward operating bases around Baghdad and long-range bombers based in the Soviet Union were now engaged on daily ground attack and strategic bombing missions, mainly south of Baghdad, and of course, on Basra. In northern Iraq, II Corps of 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army was closing in on Mosul having already subdued Kirkuk and Erbil. In central Iraq around Baghdad, I Corps of 3rd Caucasus Tank Army had already sent out probing columns south towards Hillah and Karbala and west towards Falluja and Ramadi, testing the ground aggressively and finding relatively ‘feeble’ resistance melting away everywhere.
In Baghdad there had been a number of murderous attacks on Red Army soldiers, a litany of ongoing small isolated incidents of armed insurrection demonstrating that not every man in the defeated Iraqi National Army had thrown down his arms and gone home. There was also mounting evidence of civil disobedience and religiously inspired protests; and as yet the Russians were neither present in sufficient force nor well enough organised to crush such resistance. Nor were they likely to be for some time, if ever, because Marshal of the Soviet Union Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian — the ‘Butcher of Bucharest’ — did not have the ‘boots on the ground’ to fight his way south to the Persian Gulf, and to pacify the civilian population at the same time. Pacification was going to have to be done by the KGB’s Ministry of the Interior forces because at the moment the invaders’ manpower resources were so badly stretched that the gaps in the ranks could only be filled with drafts from penal battalions.
Airey Neave could not conceive of any circumstance in which padding out under-strength infantry units with criminals, dissidents and troublemakers was a good idea, or in any way remotely conducive to the promotion of increased fighting efficiency.
Notwithstanding that Tom Harding-Grayson constantly reminded him that ‘just because we are reading the enemy’s radio traffic it doesn’t mean we’ve already won the bloody war’, the very fact that they were ‘reading the enemy’s radio traffic’ meant that sooner or later a window of opportunity might open which might enable British and Commonwealth forces in the Middle East to seriously inconvenience the Butcher of Bucharest!
These days a wise man in England was always thankful for small mercies.
Airey Neave marched purposefully across Radcliffe Square into the main entrance to Brasenose College. Brasenose was one of the ‘younger’ Oxford Colleges, having been founded as late as 1509 by Sir Richard Sutton and William Smyth, the Bishop of Lincoln. The College had inherited its name — allegedly — from the bronze knocker that had been mounted on the door of the hall which had stood on the site in earlier times.
Rocky times were no stranger to Brasenose. It had remained a stronghold of Catholicism in the sixteenth century, a Royalist redoubt during the Civil War period and in more peaceful eras fallen behind many of the neighbouring colleges in its scholastic achievements and rigor, failings belatedly rectified in the latter nineteenth century. Nevertheless, over the centuries the college had expanded slowly, surely, adding a library and a new chapel in the mid-seventeenth century and three quadrangles, the latest and largest ‘New Quad’ being completed just before the First World War. Brasenose’s sprawling undergraduate annexe, Frewin Hall on St Michael’s Street, a recent development completed in the 1940s had been taken over by the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in recent weeks.
A courier had brought the Secretary of State for National Security the latest cables while he was still breakfasting that morning. Airey Neave insisted on that. There was nothing worse than walking into one’s office of a morning only to be greeted with a new disaster. It was better by far to have some warning of whatever debacle awaited one at the earliest possible moment.
HMS Hampshire was limping towards Gibraltar with a US Navy destroyer, the USS Berkeley — of Battle of Malta renown — keeping her company. The Berkeley was homeward bound for a refit and had been some eighty miles to the east of the Hampshire when the County class destroyer was attacked. Hearing the Hampshire’s distress signal she had raced to her aid at flank speed, catching up with the crippled ship in less than three hours.
Meanwhile, HMS Alliance had been ordered to ‘loiter’ in Corsican waters off Ajaccio. Another submarine, HMS Grampus, a more modern vessel working to full combat efficiency after an overhaul in preparation for a possible deployment to the South Atlantic, had been ordered to patrol fifty miles west of the Sardinia. Both submarines had been authorised to attack any French T-47 class destroyers they encountered ‘on sight’. A Canberra from Malta and a Shackleton from Gibraltar were currently searching the sea between Sardinia and the Balearic Islands for the ships which had attacked the Hampshire.
If at all possible, revenge would be swift and final!
The Prime Minister had already personally approved an RAF plan to bomb the French Squadron in Ajaccio if the ‘culprits were not sunk at sea first’. This had prompted a heated debate about the specifics of this prospective ‘raid’; one camp wanted to involve Tallboy-carrying Victors from Cyprus, another wanted Vulcans from Malta to drop a very large number of thousand-pound general purpose munitions to sink everything in the harbour and to reduce most of the port area to rubble.