Latterly, the Light of the Aryans had greedily indulged his predilection for European women. Although he often found the company of western women irritating; their tendency towards independent thought and their irrational reluctance to invariably bend to his will or spontaneous predilections was unseemly; sexually, it made them interesting and occasionally fascinating. Of course, he was never seen in public with any women other than members of the Royal Family, and even in court circles the presence of the willowy pale skinned women who came and went from his various palaces was never officially acknowledged. The prerogatives of the Head of Warriors were his and his alone. Inevitably, there was the risk that some of the expensive European harem women he invited to reside at the Sa’dabad complex and at the other royal palaces were American or British agents but that was of little consequence. In his experiences a discreet mistress was invaluable in opening and maintaining channels of communications with friends and potential enemies alike.
Before the October War he had found one such precious woman and insofar as he harboured any real affection and respect for any ‘western whore’; sometimes he found himself thinking of her, wishing and aching, to lie with her one more time. SAVAK had told him she worked for the Americans, his contact with the Mossad had said she was a ‘British stooge’; the CIA had repeatedly warned him that she was a KGB ‘plant’.
“What will happen to us?” The woman kneeling at Mohammad Reza’s shoulder asked in a plaintive, panicky whisper in English. Another woman, standing behind her was snivelling.
“Nothing!” He grunted. “I am the Shah!” He tried to move his legs and sit up, instantly collapsing back onto the ground in agony, involuntarily biting his tongue.
Booted feet crunched heavily across the courtyard.
“We’ll have to tie the bastard to the tree trunk!”
Mohammed Reza registered the remark with the genuine disinterest of a man too deeply preoccupied with his personal world of pain to worry about what was happening around him.
“It’s too dark under the fucking tree!” Somebody objected angrily in a Moskva Russian accent that the helpless Light of the Aryans belated translated through the successive waves of pain.
“Put him over by the wall, then!”
“He’ll just fall over, sir?”
“His whores will have to hold him up!”
“What do we do with the rest of the tarts, sir?”
“Tell the boys they can do whatever they want with them!”
Mohammad Reza gasped and screamed in pain as strong hands raised him off the ground and started to drag him, much in the fashion of a sack of coal, across the courtyard.
One of the women protested.
SLAP!
She started crying.
SLAP!
It was only several minutes after he had been unceremoniously dumped in the pool of bright early morning sunshine at the base of the eastern wall of the courtyard wall that the Shah of Iran dazedly attempted to make sense of what was going on around him.
He wrinkled his nose.
I fouled myself…
Three of his whores, young western women in their twenties, who had been his guests this last week in the Sa’dabad Palace and had been due to depart after the weekend, were sitting on the dirt near him. Two were hugging each other, all three were whimpering pathetically.
In the middle of the courtyard a group of big men in camouflage battledress fatigues, each festooned with bandoliers of grenades and webbing bulging with fresh magazines for the Ak-47s or sniper rifles slung over their shoulders, were clustered around what appeared to be an unwieldy steel tripod.
He listened to women screaming in the near distance.
The Russians were raping his women…
Just like they had when they had invaded his country back in 1941; everywhere the Russians went they raped and looted. Old, young it made no difference; friend or foe an enemy’s women always became Russian whores…
Two of the soldiers were manhandling an old-fashioned movie camera onto the mounting at the top of the tripod.
And then the Shah of Iran understood what his fate was to be.
If he had not already voided his bowels he would have then…
Chapter 29
Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov stomped into the dingy command centre in the southernmost border settlement of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Astara was so far south and so close to the border with Iran that the town, the establishment of which long pre-dated the invention of the USSR, had straddled the border within living memory. Iranian Astara, just below that modern border, now lay in ruins as the leading elements of the 2nd Siberian Mechanised Army poured south through it and over it towards the Alborz Mountains. The constant rumbling roar of hundreds of engines filled the command centre.
Colonel-General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian stood to attention and saluted the Defence Minister of the Soviet Union. Vasily Chuikov’s prize fighter’s evilly cherubic gnarled face cracked into a grin that was very nearly ear to ear as he casually acknowledged the Commander of Army Group South’s salute.
He stared hard at the freshly positioned markers and arrows on the rickety plotting table in the middle of the room.
“We achieved complete surprise, Comrade Marshal,” Babadzhanian reported brusquely. “It seems that the diversionary airborne operation against Tehran was only lightly opposed and that all major objectives within the city have been taken. Amphibious operations along the Caspian coast south of the border have been unopposed and 5th Guards Tank Division is already well down the road to Talesh. Early indications are that our landing forces have established a secure beach head at Banda Anzali with negligible losses. The Navy says its gunboats have destroyed a number of small Iranian patrol craft. The advance of 5th Guards Tank Division down the coast road is being supported by several vessels carrying Katyushas.” His hand swept inland. “Airborne forces seem to have secured our lines of advance on Ardabil,” he hesitated, and added, “but there is no word yet about how successful the paratroops were securing key points around the city itself.”
Vasily Chuikov grunted like a musk ox with a stone lodged in its hoof.
Ardabil was only fifty kilometres from where the two old soldiers now stood but if the city was not taken within the next twenty-four hours Operation Nakazyvat might easily bog down in the mountains. Babadzhanian’s original operational plan was to take both Ardabil and Tabriz — the latter over four hundred circuitous kilometres by road, and the best part of three hundred across narrow, treacherous passes only negotiable by vehicles travelling in single file — by airborne force majeure. However, the ‘mopping up’ operations against Krasnaya Zarya zealots in Romania and the Balkans, and the sacrificial spoiling attack on Malta had robbed him of over thirty percent of his total available Spetsnaz and paratroopers, and just under thirty percent of his available ‘air lift’ capability. Hence, Tabriz would have to be taken after the survivors of the Ardabil and Tehran operations had been recovered, and had been given time to regroup and re-equip. At one time an alternative plan bypassing Tabriz had been seriously mooted but Babadzhanian had stood firm; he simply could not afford to leave a major enemy city — potentially the base for an Iranian counter attack — lying unsuppressed across his lines of communication.
“No serious resistance at any point along the border?” Vasily Chuikov inquired cheerfully. The other two members of the collective leadership had specifically ‘requested’ — nobody in the post-war Soviet Union was in a position to ‘order’ the Mother Country’s most decorated and most illustrious warrior to do anything he did not want to do — not to leave Soviet territory. Chastened by the experience of what had happened to him the last time he had left the holy soil of the Mother Country to visit Bucharest, Chuikov had reluctantly acquiesced. Besides, Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian would probably have him shot if he attempted to meddle directly in the affairs of Army Group South.