‘Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep, even so I will endure… For already have I suffered full much, and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war. Let this be added to the tale of those.’
He wondered if the VIPs who were about to march into the Verdala Palace truly understood that they had just found their young Odysseus freshly returned from the Trojan Wars?
There was a commotion outside, the bawled commands of a drill sergeant and the sound of booted feet coming to attention on granite flagstones.
And then events began to blur.
Admiral Sir David Luce stood before his old friend’s son.
Salutes were exchanged and firm handshakes clasped and held.
Peter Christopher was hardly aware of the anonymous men in suits behind the professional head of the Royal Navy.
“May I have the honour of introducing you to my wife, Marija, sir?”
“It would be my honour, Sir Peter.”
The younger man hesitated. His father’s baronetcy had been hereditary. He remembered somebody telling him that in Lisbon in what seemed like another lifetime long before he had ever set eyes upon Marija. He tried to be properly formal but afterwards he could not actually remember what he said next.
Marija stepped forward to greet Sir David Luce.
The older man tried not to beam like an idiot but it was impossible.
“How do you do, Lady Marija?” He inquired, clinging onto his composure only from habit.
Chapter 64
Colonel General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s mood was such that even the arrival of Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov, the Minister of Defence in the ruling collective leadership of the Mother Country, could do little to dampen his growing elation.
“Comrade Konstantin Yakovlevich managed to get over three hundred of his men out before the Red Air Force finally got its act together at Tehran,” the younger of the two most heavily decorated surviving heroes of the Great Patriotic War — by a mere six years in age but in appearance ten to fifteen years — reported with a wolf-like smile. All real tank men needed to have the soul of a wolf, to have the steely resolve to exploit a chink in the enemy’s defences with ruthless, predatory hunger. Babadzhanian had casually come to attention when his superior had stomped into the luxurious, opulent surrounding of the mansion of the former governor of Ardabil. Now he relaxed and led the newcomer to the map table — until yesterday the Iranian Military Governor of Ardabil’s banqueting table — and waved at the high rocky plain south of the great barrier of the Alborz Mountains stretching all the way from the Caucasus to Afghanistan. “Kurochnik says the Air Force used a big bomb?”
Vasily Chuikov’s wickedly cherubic wrinkled features momentarily displayed a flash of irritation.
“The aircraft they were going to send in the morning crashed on take-off. They loaded the only available ‘fully generated’, whatever the fuck that means,” he complained like a disgruntled football coach whose star forward has just missed an open goal, “bomb onto another Tu-95. It took them all day to get the bloody thing working. They didn’t realise it was over twenty times ‘bigger’ than the plan called for until they were half way to the target! Fucking idiots!”
Colonel General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian had mandated the destruction of western Tehran and of Mehrabad Air Base; it seemed the Red Air Force had demolished the whole city. It made little or no difference to the ongoing conduct of Operation Nakazyvat whether a Hiroshima sized bomb in the range fifteen to twenty kilotons had been employed or a three hundred kiloton weapon had been deployed over Tehran. Other than in the sense that if he had known the Red Air Force was going to obliterate the city anyway, he would not have wasted the lives of several hundred of his best — and in the current situation, irreplaceable — airborne troops in a demonstration primarily designed to decapitate the Shah’s regime, and to humiliate and break the will of the Iranian people to resist. That was the trouble with the Red Air Force, the word ‘proportionality’ had never appeared in any of its manuals!
Nevertheless, Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian’s mood was optimistic. He had specified a ‘limited tactical nuclear strike’ on Tehran, hoping that such a strike might be ‘tolerated’ by the British and the Americans if and when it became advantageous to repeat the medicine on Baghdad. The use of such a large ‘city killer’ warhead on a capital city might make repetition of the gambit problematic; but that was a thing he would worry about another day.
Today, his armoured spearheads were already well down the road from the Armenian border to Tabriz and after a brief overnight consolidation, leading elements of the 3rd Guards Tank regiment would soon be pushing west from the ever-expanding ‘Ardabil Defence Zone’ towards distant Tabriz from the east. Colonel Konstantin Yakovlevich Kurochnik’s fifty percent butcher’s bill in Tehran apart, casualties had thus far been negligible.
“Still nothing from the British or the Americans?” Babadzhanian asked, looking up from his maps.
“Nothing,” Chuikov chuckled so deeply it was surprising that the window panes did not vibrate in sympathy. “The Malta demonstration still has them shitting in their pants, Comrade Hamazasp Khachaturi!”
Chapter 65
Rachel Piotrowska had been vexed to discover that she had only been asleep a little over an hour an hour when she was awakened. Within minutes she was being escorted down to the jetty in Rinella Creek for the short passage by boat beneath the low Bighi cliffs towards the silhouettes of the nearest of the two big modern American guided missile destroyers.
Beyond the USS Charles F. Adams her sister ship, the USS Berkeley was slowly backing out into the Grand Harbour, having cast off her lines from the long low bulk of the oiler beyond. She sounded her steam horn several times as she began to glide past the nearer destroyer.
It was a clear night and all around the anchorage lights twinkled.
But for the filthy flotsam and jetsam drifting in Kalkara Creek and the taint of burning everything was eerily normally.
Onboard the Charles F. Adams Rachel was taken directly to the small Captain’s day cabin on the bridge of the American destroyer.
“Commander Simon McGiven,” the dapper man with the receding hairline and firm dry handshake said introducing himself as he rose from the papers he had been shuffling on his narrow, neat desk. “Thank you for coming onboard, ma’am. My Operations Officer is processing the survivors we picked up this afternoon. They all seem to be off the Yavuz, the old Turkish dreadnought. But,” the destroyer’s commanding officer shrugged, “we’ve got one guy, well, him and his female companion, actually, who might be of interest to your people at the Joint Interrogation Centre. I say ‘might’ because frankly, we can’t make out a lot of what he’s been saying and the woman doesn’t seem to speak English or Russian or any kind of Greek that any of my people can make head or tale of. You are a linguistic specialist, I gather?”