Some kind of appeal to the West; it wasn’t exactly clear what Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had had in mind because the only man he seemed to have confided in was Ceaușescu. The KGB wanted to give Ceaușescu’s wife ‘the treatment’ but neither Brezhnev nor Kosygin thought that was a good idea. If Ceaușescu ever re-surfaced he was far more likely to be reasonable if his wife and kids still looked more or less the way they did the last time he saw them. Of course, if he turned up dead then the KGB could do whatever they wanted with the little shit’s bitch wife and his whining brats.
“You know as well as I do, Comrade Colonel-General, that Phase Two cannot be launched until the Navy is ready,” Chuikov told his subordinate. “That business at Constanta completely fucked up the Navy’s plans.”
Actually, the Navy had ‘fucked up’ its own plans by needlessly shelling the dockyards and in the process, blowing up its own arsenal and setting fire to its own oil storage facilities. If the Navy had waited a couple of days minesweepers would have cleared the deep water channels and re-opened the port without a single shot having to be fired in anger. The Red Air Force was almost as bad as the Red Navy. They had bombed and strafed several forward air fields in Bulgaria and Anatolia, destroying scores of their own aircraft on the ground and killing hundreds of irreplaceable air and ground crews. The former NATO air base at Incirlik had been wrecked by a high-altitude raid by seven Tupolev Tu-95s, in which over ninety tons of high explosive and incendiaries had been scattered across the target, rendering it unusable for weeks.
It was a miracle Phase Two had only been delayed another twenty-eight days.
“All the Navy has to do is demonstrate in the southern Aegean, Comrade Marshal. A couple of cruisers and few destroyers can manage that!”
One of the reasons Marshal of the Soviet Union Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov had not wanted a face to face interview with either Babadzhanian, or his equivalent ground forces commander in the west, or his naval or air force counterparts was that after the Romanian fuck up, it was vitally important that there should be no further breaches of security. The final planning for Phase Two of Operation Nakazyvat had therefore, been rigorously compartmentalised; meaning that none of the senior commanders knew in detail what any of the other commanders were tasked to do, or necessarily, what resources had been or would be allocated to them. For example, Babadzhanian, as ground forces commander in the East had no ‘need to know’ that the mission assigned to the Black Sea Fleet and the former Turkish vessels now incorporated on its roster, had been dramatically upgraded following the degradation of the British Royal Navy’s offensive capabilities during Phase One of Operation Chastise. The Red Navy, supported by the Red Air Force was now tasked with seizing and maintaining control of the Eastern Mediterranean and destroying what survived of the British Mediterranean Fleet and any American warships that were so ill-advised to approach Cyprus. While it was understood that the USS Independence, one of the Yankees’ so-called ‘super-carriers’ was currently at Gibraltar, the British only had a couple of small aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. The Red Air Force bombers and fighters scheduled to move to forward bases in Greece and Crete ahead of the launch of Phase Two should make short work of these ‘little’ carriers. In any event, Colonel-General Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian did not need to know about the naval aspects of Operation Chastise. He had quite enough to worry about preparing his two mechanized armies for the Blitzkrieg into Persia and Iraq.
“We shall let the Navy worry about that,” Chuikov growled. “I personally selected you to command the most vital element of Operation Nakazyvat. I don’t need you worrying about shit that isn’t your responsibility, Comrade Colonel-General.”
Babadzhanian had commanded the 20th Tank Brigade at the Battle of Kursk, the greatest clash of armour in history; and spent the rest of the Great Patriotic War driving the Nazis all the way back to Berlin. In an army replete with gifted and accomplished exponents of armoured warfare, few could match Babadzhanian’s accomplishments. The trouble was that the man knew it and humility was not his strong suit. Chuikov did not care; if anybody could drive the eight armoured divisions of the two tank armies waiting like giant murderous coiled springs in the Caucasus, fifteen hundred kilometres south from the northern border of Iran across mountains, burning deserts and the floodplains of two of the planet’s greatest Rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, all the way to Abadan and Basra on the Persian Gulf that man was probably Hamazasp Khachaturi Babadzhanian.
“Don’t even think of trying to go over my head to the Politburo!” Vasily Chuikov barked with jovial menace that would have sounded hollow coming from any other man.
Chapter 27
The cold spring air of the grey morning shimmered with the heat rising above the aft stack of the battleship as the tugs hauled the eighth hundred and eighty-seven feet long forty-five thousand ton deadweight of the USS Iowa, out into the main channel for the short journey to the Fitting Out Basin. A flotilla of small boats bobbed on the murky waters of the Delaware River as the horns of the circling patrol boats discouraged the overly curious or excitable among the bystanders and the massed media people, from getting too close to the leviathan.
The USS Iowa’s nine 16-inch 50-calibre Mark 7 Naval Rifles had been raised to their maximum elevation of forty-five degrees. That was a nice touch by the Navy, thought Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Vice-President of the United States of America as he stood on the bridge of the behemoth surrounded by a crowd of TV men, jabbering press people — men and women — and a scrum of jostling photographers.
The battleship’s captain, a lean grey-haired man who had commanded one of the USS Iowa’s sisters during the Korean War ignored the interlopers.
Sixty-one year old Captain Anderson Farragut Schmidt had left the US Navy in 1957 to manage his family’s stud farm in Maryland. He had freely confessed to the Vice-President that ‘patriotism be dammed, sir’, and that nothing short of the command of ‘one of the Iowas’ would have induced him to return to active service. Schmidt was one of those old-time military types whose dignity was impermeably impenetrable; amidst the near chaos on the bridge of his ship he stood alone, aloof as if surrounded by an invisible armoured cloak.
Today was a shameless campaign publicity stunt for the Kennedy-Johnson Presidential ticket; the President would have been the star of the show — the unimaginably iconic theatricality of the Iowa being transferred from the Naval Inactive Maintenance Facility of the Philadelphia Naval Dockyard to the up-river Fitting Out Basin was something a candidate for public office could not buy for love or money — had not he and Bobby decided at the last minute that the forthcoming Mid-West Democratic Primaries and the delayed, Iowa Caucasus could not be taken for granted despite the pollsters’ predictions of a landslide. Even though there was no prospect whatsoever of a realistic Democratic opponent suddenly emerging from the back woods it did no harm to take local wannabees and malcontents seriously in the first rounds of an election campaign. The Vice-President was not about to complain about the President’s absence. He was the one who had ended up standing on the bridge of a battlewagon looking decidedly Presidential. Not so long ago the Kennedy brothers would not have let him get anywhere near a jamboree like this; it was an indicator of how relations at the top of the Administration had improved since the Battle of Washington that the President, the Attorney General and he had reorganised the schedule of the ‘top team’ for the next five days over coffees and Kentucky bourbon without a single cross word yesterday afternoon.