William Whitelaw arched an eyebrow.
“My assumption,” the First Sea Lord continued laconically, “would be that our boats would enforce an exclusion zone around the Falkland Islands and blockade Argentinean ports until such time as the regime in Buenos Aires comes to its senses.”
The Secretary of State for Defence nodded.
“And these vessels are equal to that task?”
“Yes, sir.” David Luce could see the politician’s mind clicking through the possibilities; and was also asking himself why the Navy had been holding this apparent ace up its sleeve these last few months.
“Our American allies know about these submarines?”
“Yes, sir. Since our relations with the Kennedy Administration have been normalised a disclosure of our full naval capabilities has been made to Ambassador Brenckmann. Needless to say his own principals have been less forthcoming,” the First Sea Lord added, “but then we are the ones who have been asking for American assistance, rather than vice versa. That said the United States Navy does not share the Royal Navy’s faith in the capabilities of the Oberons and the Porpoises. They worship nuclear reactors to the exclusion of good old-fashioned tried, tested and well-honed ways.” He was going to finish at that point; had a second thought. “When Dreadnought was working up in the early autumn last year she was repeatedly ‘heard’ and nominally ‘destroyed’ by two separate Oberon class boats. Dreadnought never knew she was under attack until the Oberons pinged her with active sonar to confirm the ‘exercise’ kill. Dreadnought is no noisier than any of the American nuclear boats and equally agile. In fact the reason we have dispensed with the American machinery set installed in the Dreadnought in all future nuclear-powered boats is that those ‘war games’ off the Hebrides last year confirmed exactly how disconcertingly noisy Dreadnought was in comparison with our newest conventionally powered Oberons and Porpoises.”
“Most illuminating,” William Whitelaw’s smile was saturnine. The Navy had not told his post-October War predecessor, Jim Callaghan or him any of this, other than in the most general, generic of terms. The news about the Oberons ‘sinking’ the Dreadnought — supposedly the most dangerous weapon in the Royal Navy’s arsenal — in ‘exercises’ last year was nothing short of a revelation. He decided not to make a big thing of being kept in the dark for so long. “I shall look forward to presenting your paper to Cabinet in due course, Sir David.” He sighed. “Now, Malta, gentlemen…”
Chapter 28
Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, Light of the Aryans and Head of the Warriors and a dwindling coterie of frightened and outnumbered loyal bodyguards was desperately attempting to escape from the Sa’dabad Palace. The Palace had been built during his father’s reign before the Second World War; and the only the reason Mohammad Reza was still alive was that it had been constructed on the site of an earlier building within a complex constructed by the Qajar dynasty in the 19th century. The relatively lightly armed attacking Soviet paratroopers had to clear the interlinked compounds of the palace room by room.
Somebody had found the ‘Light of the Aryans’ an anonymous battledress jacket and a bowl-shaped American style steel helmet. A Browning 9-millimetre pistol had been pressed into his trembling hands.
Stinging sweat ran into the ‘Head of the Warriors’ eyes and he struggled to catch his breath.
First there had been explosions in the heart of Tehran some miles away. Then the rattle of small arms fire had erupted nearby, and fires had begun to burn in the city. More and bigger explosions had jarred the ground like the small earthquakes most Iranians took for granted as a fact of everyday life.
The Sa’dabad Palace’s communications room had intercepted a stream of voice and military transmissions — the latter mainly broadcast in the clear — describing reports of attacks on Government offices, foreign embassies and hotels. Much of the traffic had ceased after the Tehran Central Telephone Exchange had been blown up. Everywhere the invaders went they killed and destroyed, set demolition charges, cut telephone and power lines, started fires and moved on. Large areas of Tehran had gone dark long before the dawn revealed a cityscape rapidly disappearing beneath a funereal pall of dirty grey smoke. In the south massive oil storage tanks belched a great pillar of inky black into the clean morning air funnelling down from the mountains to the north. There had been panic in the streets, with every road out of the capital clogged by terrified people attempting to reach the safety of the surrounding countryside.
Mohammad Reza flinched, involuntarily cowering into the shadows as a long, deafeningly loud burst of automatic gunfire reverberated down nearby corridors.
“Grenades!” A man near to him shouted.
Moments later the basement storeroom into which the Shah of Iran and his surviving bodyguards had been driven was filled with acrid, choking smoke and pulverised plaster and brick dust rained down.
Mohammad Reza felt himself being picked up by strong arms.
His ears rang, he was spitting dirt.
He later realised his bodyguards must have half pushed him trough the skylight window of the underground room by the time the second batch of grenades rolled into their midst.
There was sudden agonising pain in his legs.
Iron hands grabbed his arms and the collar of his battledress and dragged him across the dusty ground.
He fainted.
When he regained consciousness he had no idea how long he had lain on the dirt underneath the boughs of the large Juniper tree in the cloistered courtyard behind the main palace. A sycophantic courtier — he had had a lot of those — had once regaled him with the particular character of this tree.
Juniperus excelsa polycarpus, commonly known as the Persian juniper sometimes grew to twenty metres in height. A subspecies of the Greek juniper common through the eastern Mediterranean, Greece, Turkey, Syria, the Lebanon and the Caucasus, Juniperus excelsa polycarpus was found throughout the mountains of Iran all the way to north western Pakistan…
The sharp point of a bayonet attached to a Kalashnikov AK-47 pricked the Light of the Aryans’s throat.
An urgent interrogative was barked at the man on the ground.
Mohammad Reza’s colloquial Russian was of the colloquial Moskva kind and the question had been grunted in what sounded like a Georgian dialect shot through with bastardised half-recognisable standard Russian words.
“I don’t speak Russian,” the man on the ground muttered hoarsely in English.
Another man had joined the first.
He kicked the Shah of Iran’s left foot and spat an order.
“I am the Shah of…”
The newcomer squatted down on his haunches.
“I know who you are, you stupid bastard,” he said in clumsy Farsi, the language of the Light of the Aryans’s own people. “A real man would have stood and fought!”
“Who are you?” The Shah demanded feebly.
The other man ignored the question. He got up and walked away leaving the wounded man lying on the cold ground in the shade of the big Juniper tree.
The Shah of Iran’s lower legs had become numb and he shivered.
“Let a couple of his whores look at his legs!” Shouted the man who had previously spoken to Mohammad Reza. His Farsi was coarse, like an artisan’s. “We’re going to need to get the bastard up on his feet if we’re going to do this thing properly.”