“Never mind. We shall just have to settle for the head of the ‘Light of the Aryans’, I suppose!”
Babadzhanian’s normally impassive face dissolved into a short-lived half-smile. The Tehran ‘demonstration’ had been taken over and reworked so often by the Combine Red Army Security Directorate that it was unrecognisable as that initially envisaged in his initial draft proposals for Operation Nakazyvat. He had had in mind a small scale airborne raid designed to terrorise the populous, assassinate key military and civilian administrators and to disrupt Iranian radio and television broadcasting stations. His modest concept had been transformed into a no holds barred attempt to ‘decapitate the Iranian state and to undermine its cohesion and fighting spirit to such an extent that it was incapable of mounting ongoing organised resistance against the Soviet forces operating in its northern provinces’.
Colonel-General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian would probably — in most if not all cases — have baulked at the extremity of the terroristic actions which both sides now countenanced as standard operating practice. Before the October War he might have been more receptive to esoteric notions of ‘the rules of war’. But ‘before the October War’ was a different time, that World no longer existed and in the Mother Country, the well of pity had run dry.
Chapter 30
The city had awakened to an overcast and coldly rainy day. The rain pattered persistently against the windows, periodically thrummed hard on rooftops, overflowed blocked drains and formed puddles on roads and pavements unmaintained and unrepaired since the October War. It was so gloomy that every office and house with a functioning connection to the electricity network had lights turned on and heaters plugged in and the unusual spring load on the overstressed grid caused light bulbs to flicker constantly and now and again, whole sections of the city to go dark as transformers or generators shorted out. Inside the cloistered corridors and halls of Corpus Christi College, the new home of the Cabinet Office of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom there was a pervasive smell of dampness and the chill lingered in the fabric of the ancient buildings.
Walter Brenckmann, the Ambassador of the Unites States of America to the court of Blenheim Palace had listened to Margaret Thatcher’s harangue for several minutes before his patience began to fray at the edges. Eventually, he decided that the point had been reached when the only diplomatic option left to him was to make his excuses and to leave the room.
If that was he could get a word in edgewise!
In any event he had come to the conclusion that diplomatic manoeuvring was unlikely to cut much ice with the British Prime Minister. He did not actually disagree with her central thesis that the Maltese Archipelago should not, under any circumstances, have been left undefended. Where he disagreed with the lady was over her preoccupation with rehashing, over and over again from every possible angle, where the underlying culpability for the disaster lay.
He held up a hand and waited.
“Yes, what is it, Ambassador?” Margaret Thatcher demanded. The Angry Widow was at her angriest. Notwithstanding she had not slept for over thirty hours she was breathing fire, flushed with the glow of battle and she was looking for a dragon to slay.
Walter Brenckmann had not thought it was a very good idea for him to sit in on a meeting of the Angry Widow’s War Cabinet. However, Margaret Thatcher had insisted and now he was seated between Airey Neave and Iain Macleod, directly opposite James Callaghan who was sitting in the chair next to the Prime Minister’s empty chair while she paced and well, ranted…
Sir Henry Tomlinson, the greying Cabinet Secretary and Head of what now constituted the rump of the pre-war Home Civil Service sat at the left hand of his Prime Minister. Or rather, he would have if she had not keep jumping up and walking away. Next to him and figuratively slightly apart from everybody else in the room, obviously a little despondent, the Foreign Secretary had thus far sat out the ‘meeting’ in unbroken silence. At times he had he hardly seemed to be paying attention to his surroundings, let alone interacting with his colleagues. The final member of the hastily convened emergency ‘cabinet’ was the Chief of the Defence Staff, the First Sea Lord. Normally the most urbane and courteous of men, Admiral Sir David Luce’s blood pressure was visibly building towards a violent eruption.
“We are fighting a war, Prime Minister,” Walter Brenckmann said coolly. “Many of us around the table have seen a great deal of action and therefore, understand and accept that in combat things sometimes go wrong…”
“Oh, for goodness sake. I’m not interested in old soldier’s homilies!”
“Prime Minister,” the First Sea Lord said, grinding the words out via tightly clenched teeth.
Margaret Thatcher swung on him but although she opened her mouth to issue an angry rebuke she said nothing. There was one man — perhaps, also one woman — in England without whose loyalty and support no Prime Minister could govern in this much altered post-cataclysm far from United Kingdom. The man was Sir David Luce; and the woman was Queen Elizabeth II.
“Julian Christopher was my oldest friend in the Service,” the First Sea Lord continued. “That he found himself in the position he found himself in was not a failure of military judgement; it was a failure of political imagination and co-ordination. Yes, it is perfectly true to assert that had the operations of United States Navy units in the Central Mediterranean been effectively dovetailed with our own activities yesterday’s disaster might not have happened, or at least it might have been substantially mitigated. However, it is not true to assert that the United States Navy is solely responsible for our misfortunes. Frankly, madam,” Sir David Luce concluded, “what transpired yesterday at Malta will happen again somewhere else sooner or later unless your Government starts to listen to the professional military advice of the Chiefs of Staff.”
Walter Brenckmann suspected for a moment, but only a moment, that he had just witnessed the first step in a particularly British coup d’état. However, the First Sea Lord was swift to disabuse him of his mistake.
“Admiral Detweiller was undoubtedly ill-advised in removing his powerful modern flotilla from Maltese waters, coincidentally, unknown to him at exactly the worst possible moment. That said his actions were entirely explicable. He wished to exercise his ships in preparation for joining the United States Sixth Fleet. The fact that Admiral Christopher acquiesced without protest for fear of prompting an Anglo-American diplomatic furore was equally explicable in a situation in which each man sat in a separate and independent chain of command. There was a reason why Churchill and Roosevelt appointed a man like Dwight Eisenhower as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces first in the Mediterranean and then in overall command of the D-Day Landings, and other Supreme Commanders in every other major theatre of the 1945 war, and post-war that NATO adopted exactly the same practice. The reason was that broadly speaking, that system of command worked. Even as we speak there is still no Supreme Commander of all allied forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of operations.” He sighed, and shook his head. “Or anywhere else despite the nonsense one is hearing coming out of Philadelphia on the subject!”
The Prime Minister glared at the head of the Royal Navy.