In the eighteen months since the October War the British, latterly with a garrison reinforced by troops and a handful of aircraft from Australia and New Zealand had tightened their grip on Abadan. Despite other commitments the British still kept several warships — at least two destroyers or frigates, several minesweepers and patrol craft, and probably submarines — in the Persian Gulf operating out of their base at Aden. Recently the Shah had received reports suggesting that the British had installed long-range Bloodhound anti-aircraft missiles and unloaded a consignment of modern battle tanks at Abadan; but these were the sort of reports he had learned to treat with caution. Given the difficulties the British had lately experienced in the Mediterranean the notion that they had scarce modern equipment and armour to spare to reinforce a garrison located in the heart of nominally friendly territory was faintly preposterous. This said, he did not discount the possibility that the British had become aware of the re-positioning of the bulk of his front line ground and air force units in the southern provinces of the kingdom, just in case a situation developed in which the former imperial overlords might be persuaded that it was in their best interests to depart Abadan. Besides, with the Soviet Union wrecked from end to end; what profit was there in leaving the bulk of his forever restless Army and Air Force twiddling its collective thumbs guarding the mountain passes to the Trans-Caucasus?
It was better by far to keep his generals busy in the south; recent history was replete with evidence that idleness only encouraged them to discuss new conspiracies against the Pahlavi Dynasty.
The Sa’dabad Palace was some miles north of the centre of Tehran, located in the hills overlooking the city. Between the compound and the northern limits of the capital a forest was coming into spring leaf. At dawn the view was often spectacular.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi sighed in disgust. Once awakened as he had been by his Air Force’s exercise over Tehran he knew he would be unable to get back to sleep. He contemplated summoning one of the ladies of the court; but he was too restless, not in the mood for sex.
Surely somebody on his staff would have forewarned him of a big exercise anywhere in the vicinity of the capital?
His secret police — the SAVAK — had been set up with advice, guidance and ongoing technical support from the Americans and very discreetly, by the Israelis in 1957. The October War had been a signal for a major expansion of the Sāzemān-e Ettelā'āt va Amniyat-e Keshvar, the Organization of Intelligence and National Security. In troubled times a monarch can trust no man. He had given SAVAK its head; in the kingdom of Iran enemies of the state, dissidents and troublemakers should expect no mercy.
SAVAK would surely have warned him if there was a serious threat of an imminent coup d’état?
Moreover, SAVAK would have routinely reported any planned military exercise, display or demonstration within fifty miles of the capital.
And yet many aircraft were still circling high over the city.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi marched to the nearest phone.
“Wake up the Palace Guard and put me through to the Military Governor of the Tehran Region!”
That was when the usurper’s blood running in the veins of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, suddenly began to run cold.
Even as he was in the process of slamming down the telephone handset the first sirens began to wail like distant auguries of doom in the cool spring air and he heard the first distant explosions.
Chapter 23
Colonel-General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian fought back the temptation to look again at his wristwatch. His staff had laid out the big maps of Northern Iran on two rickety trestle tables in the grubby rather squalid little hall that from the road had looked completely derelict the previous afternoon when he had arrived at the front. The border crossing into Iran was less than three hundred metres from where he now stood, gazing thoughtfully at the topography of the terrain over which he was about to launch two great armoured hammer blows. The ground over which the 3rd Caucasus Tank Army and the 2nd Siberian Mechanized Army had to advance was impossible. Manuever would be restricted to a handful of high valleys; and progress would be crucifyingly slow as soon as the forward spearheads started to climb the foothills of the Alborz Mountains on the way to Tabriz and Ardabil. If anybody in the Iranian Army or Air Force realised what was happening the narrow mountain valleys and passes would be choked with the wreckage of his armoured spearheads within hours and the Soviet Union’s great throw of the dice would be its last.
Not that he believed for a moment that anybody in Tehran would believe what was happening even if they discovered it; it was too incredible. If Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian had studied the borders of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with the specific intention of identifying the worst place on Earth to launch a massive armoured thrust — the mountains of Afghanistan excluded — he was looking at it now. This said he comforted himself with the knowledge that if the USSR had attempted to mount an attack on this scale anywhere else — say, across the Anatolian littoral of Turkey, or through Bulgaria and Romania towards the Balkans, or even across the radioactive firestorm-ravaged wasteland of central Europe — the British and the Americans would have surely discovered the preparations at an early stage and destroyed his two tank armies as they massed for the attack. A handful of Minutemen or Polaris strikes would have obliterated the Soviet Union’s last two intact armies and then, well, the Cuban Missiles War really would have been over not just for a generation but for perhaps a hundred years.
Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian was not by nature one of life’s gamblers. To the contrary the fifty-eight year old veteran tank commander born to poor Armenian farmers in the village of Chardakhlu was a man who took little on trust and believed that meticulous planning and preparation was the secret of success in war. Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian — he preferred the Armenian style to the Russian translation of his birth names, Amazasp Khachaturovich Babadzhanyan — was also the kind of soldier who thought that people who talked about knowing the ‘secret’ of success on the battlefield were either charlatans or idiots, or both.
He was a warrior who had a knack of emerging from each successive battle with an enhanced reputation and increased professional kudos from his peers. He was the sort of soldier another soldier wanted at his side in combat; a man they could trust to defend his front, his flank or his back to the death. In the Finno-Soviet Winter War of 1939-40 — which was an unmitigated disastrous for the Red Army — he had distinguished himself to such effect that he was subsequently promoted to the command of the 751st Rifle Regiment, based in the Northern Caucasus Military District. Later when the Nazis invaded the Mother Country he was sent to Smolensk to command the 395th Regiment of the 127th Rifle Division, where his unit was involved in a series of savage rearguard actions before taking part in a brief, ultimately futile counter attack. In early September 1941 the 395th Regiment had participated in another counter attack, this time against the German 4th Army south of Smolensk and was the first Soviet unit to re-enter the city of Yelnya. Sent to refit and rest his regiment in the Ukraine, Babadzhanian was soon back in the thick of the fighting again, this time heavily engaging the Wehrmacht invaders while Kursk was evacuated ahead of the seemingly all-conquering panzers. In action after desperate action throughout 1942 he showed a flair for attacking the enemy where he least expected and a talent for exploiting the merest sniff of any advantage gained, fighting always during this period against greatly superior numerical enemy forces. By September of that year he was in command of the 3rd Mechanised Brigade of the Third Mechanised Corps; in 1943 he commanded the 20th Tank brigade at the Battle of Kursk — the greatest clash of armour in history — and although wounded he had recovered to play his part in practically every major battle and campaign the Red Army fought along the long bloody road that had ended in the ruins of Berlin in April 1945. By the end of the Great Patriotic War he was an acknowledge master of tank warfare in an army full of veteran ‘tankers’. In November 1956, it had been to Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian that Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev had turned to crush to the Hungarian uprising.