“MY ORDERS ARE TO STAND BY YOU UNTIL OUR MUSCULAR FRIEND TAKES THE STRAIN, SIR!” The kid on the bridge of the minesweeper explained.
McGiven had been about to suggest he might care to take his ship around to his port side and start hauling bodies out of the sea. However, it seemed that the kid’s superiors had informed him that his first duty and the only rule that applied today was to ensure that whatever happened, the USS Charles F. Adams did not get dashed to pieces on the rocks of the Maltese Archipelago.
“THANK YOU, SIR!” McGiven could see the party on the Minesweeper’s stern clearing gear to stand ready to shoot a line across to the Charles F. Adams’s fo’c’sle.
“I WILL HOLD POSITION TO LEEWARD AT YOUR CONVENIENCE AND STAND READY TO PASS A TOW LINE, SIR!”
McGiven waved acknowledgement and lowered his bull horn.
“There’s a survivor demanding to speak to the Captain, sir,” a peeved yeoman reported. “Funny little guy. He’s only got one leg and there’s this Greek woman with him. They’re tied together and she won’t let anybody untie them, sir.”
McGiven handed the bull horn to the bridge speaker.
“One leg?”
“Yes, sir!”
“And he’s tied to a Greek woman?” He flicked a look at the Officer of the Deck who risked a grin. McGiven ran a tight ship but he had been in command long enough — seven months — to allow his people to know that although the old man might be a slave-driving martinet, he also had a sense of humour. “This I’ve got to see,” he chuckled.
Chapter 62
Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong. The Red Air Force had failed to make an appearance that morning and because Colonel Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik had made the unforgivably bad mistake of actually trusting the Red Air Force, he had prematurely pulled the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment back from its forward perimeter and allowed the Iranians room in which to deploy their armour!
However, the worst thing was that because Colonel Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik, having trusted the Red Air Force to airlift the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment out of its holding positions in and around Mehrabad Air Base in western Tehran, had also allowed his men to expend practically all their ammunition by the time daylight was breaking over the wide expanse of the airfield.
‘There has been a change of plan, Comrade Konstantin Yakovlevich,’ the arsehole at HQ had said over the scrambler link — as calm as you like — as if he was sitting on the veranda of his fucking dacha! ‘Your regiment will have to hold on until later this afternoon!’
It had been getting light about then.
Staying where he was on the airfield was a bad idea.
No cover, no bullets, no hope.
Colonel Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik had hastily reviewed his options; which were few and uniformly unattractive. In ten minutes it would be fully light and it was this that mandated immediate action.
‘ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK!’
The mixed force of poorly entrenched disorganised Iranian infantry and armour holding the western side of Mehrabad Air Base where the single-strand wire mess fence separated the runway from fields dotted with mud brick and the haphazardly located old stone houses either ran away or surrendered. Four hull down Centurions never fired a shot and their crews could not wait to spring their hatches and throw up their hands.
Ever a practical man Kurochnik paraded his prisoners, some two hundred unsoldierly men in front of his newly won defensive positions and ordered them to sit down on the ground.
There was nothing quite as effective as a human shield to dissuade the enemy from mortaring and shelling one’s trenches! A hurried head count revealed that he still had over three hundred effectives, four Centurions, several jeeps and a couple of trucks, and about a hundred American made carbines including a few brand new M-16 assault rifles all with plenty of ammunition. Nobody knew how to drive the tanks but they were already well dug in, hull down and his men soon figured out how to traverse the turrets and how to shoot the big guns; guns were guns so that was child’s play. The important thing was that he had gained possession of ground that he could actually defend. Although his rear was fairly flat, open country, good for tanks, he could see for miles and nobody was going to creep up on him or surprise him. There was a sparsely built up area to the north, his right, but once he had extended a picket into the nearest building he felt secure on that flank. Directly to his left, due south there was more broken ground, useless if an enemy wanted to come at him in force.
The Iranians had sent over a Colonel to talk terms around mid-morning.
The man was an idiot; typical of the westernized playboys the Shah sent abroad to Sandhurst and West Point to be taught how to be gentlemen rather than soldiers. His uniform was immaculate, his moustache freshly manicured that morning and his boots so highly polished a real soldier could use them as shaving mirrors.
Colonel Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik had been astonished when the other man addressed him in moderately coarse Moskva Russian.
‘Lay down your arms now and we won’t cut off your balls,’ he proposed, sniffing distastefully as if he had never smelled faeces and spilled entrails in the morning air of a battlefield. ‘You will be treated as prisoners of war.’
The Soviet Union had never signed up to the Geneva Convention or any of that Hague protocols so that was absolutely the best offer Kurochnik was going to get.
The commander of the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment had put on his innocently perplexed face; the one he wore when he was dealing with particularly retarded senior Red Air Force officers.
‘I don’t have enough men to take the whole garrison of Tehran prisoner,’ he had retorted in apparent bewilderment.
‘Ah, you don’t understand my Russian?’
‘I understand your Moskva bollocks just fine, Comrade!’
The exchange had been going on in full view and the hearing of dozens of Kurochnik’s men, most of whom had started laughing. Several men started taunting the Iranian.
‘SILENCE!’ The commanding officer of the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment had bellowed like a brown bear with toothache. Turning his full attention back to the Iranian parley officer he had said, soberly: ‘I am an officer of the Red Army. I surrender to no man.’
The Iranians had mounted a piecemeal frontal attack eventually but only after they had mortared and shelled and machine-gunned the 51st Guards Airborne Regiment’s positions for over an hour. By then they had exterminated the ‘human shield’ in front of the paratroopers’ lines, literally chopping and mashing their own people to bits without in the least inconveniencing Kurochnik’s men. He had given the order to wait until the onrushing enemy reached the mangled remains of their own comrades before opening fire. It had been pure murder.
The Red Air Force had finally arrived about ninety minutes ago, randomly dumping long strings of bombs across the heart of the city, one line of projectiles falling uncomfortably close to the paratroopers’ positions sending every man diving headlong for cover.
There had been too few helicopters to life the whole regiment out of Tehran; that did not matter because four out of every ten men who had been alive that morning were dead.
Such was war.
“Nobody look back!” Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik barked as he jumped down onto the ground thirty-five miles kilometres west of where the Red Air Force had lifted him and the last men of the rearguard defending the western boundary of Mehrabad Air Base.