Richard Shirreff - War with Russia

All it had taken was the merest of hints to the editor of the Sun and selected others that, while Little had an excellent relationship with the American president, the other leading candidate to take over as PM “carried no weight in Washington.” Unsurprisingly, given the current crisis, the country needed a prime minister with clout inside the Washington beltway. Therefore, it was Little who had seen the Queen that morning to confirm his appointment as her new Prime Minister and head of Her Majesty’s Government. He now sat at his desk; square-shouldered, gruff-voiced and pugnacious, glaring at a clearly unhappy Everage, still Defense Secretary.

“What the hell do you mean there’s nothing that we can do to respond?” The Prime Minister was clearly furious; his jaw stuck out obstinately, as his eyes bore into the wilting Defense Secretary. “Do you mean to tell me that your recommendation to me after the Russians have sunk Queen Elizabeth , with the loss of nearly nine hundred sailors and commandos, is that we sit back and do nothing? You cannot be serious!”

“Well, Prime Minister…” Everage said ingratiatingly in his Estuary accent. Walker was reminded of Dickens’s David Copperfield and Uriah Heep, as Everage, hair flopping over his gaunt undertaker’s face, wrung his hands together and tried to avoid eye contact with the irate Prime Minister.

There was a knock on the door and Walker went over and half-opened it, irritation at the interruption turning to approval when he saw who it was.

“Sorry to interrupt, Prime Minister,” said Walker, noting the relief on Everage’s face at being let off the hook. “It’s the new Chief of the Defense Staff. The police refused to let him in without an escort. He insists on seeing you.”

“Show him in,” the Prime Minister ordered.

Walker fully opened and then stepped away from the door to allow General Jock Kydd—despite accepting a knighthood from the Queen, he had made it known that he was never to be referred to as “Sir”—to enter.

A sudden surge of physical energy, like an electric current, filled the room as Kydd stepped forward and looked around, as if checking where any potential threat could come from. Broad-shouldered, slightly hunched, he rocked gently from foot to foot, fists clenched at his sides, like a boxer sizing up his opponent.

Looking at him, Walker couldn’t help thinking that the new CDS looked more like a bodyguard in a movie about the Kray brothers than the new, professional head of Britain’s Armed Forces. He took in the shaven head, ill-fitting, black off-the-peg suit, white shirt with chest hair poking up above the fastened collar, stringy blue tie, and black, steel-toecapped, “executive super safety” shoes, bought from the Bodyguard Workwear online shop.

On taking over as Prime Minister, Little had immediately appointed Kydd, whom he had first come across in Afghanistan where he had set up a program to bring former Taliban into the political process, as his new CDS. Despite his eccentric manner, Little recognized Kydd’s qualities and the importance of his evident credibility with the Americans. A phone call to Kydd had brought him out of very recent retirement.

Little dispensed with pleasantries. “CDS, I am told by the Defense Secretary that there’s nothing we can do.”

Kydd was in no mood for pleasantries either. “Fucking bollocks, Prime Minister,” he growled. “The shagging war’s not over till the general says it is and this fucking general is not saying that. No fucking way.” He looked contemptuously at Everage, who squirmed and writhed like a demented octopus.

Walker rolled his eyes at the Prime Minister and muttered theatrically in Kydd’s ear. “Go easy on the effing and blinding, mate. We’ve got the point.”

Kydd continued, “Sorry about the language, boss… Where was I? Oh yeah, the Russians may be in the Baltic states, but that doesn’t mean we leave them be. There’s no point in trying to push them out directly. Much better to whip up the insurgency to make them feel the heat, force them to move as many people and as much stuff in there as possible to try to contain it, and then punch for the jugular; somewhere they least expect it and where it’ll hurt the most. Kaliningrad looks good to me… and my mate Dave McKinlay, the Deputy SACEUR in NATO, tells me that they’ve already war-gamed it.”

Walker had never heard of the place, so was glad when the CDS elaborated. “That’s the former East Prussia—Königsberg. It’s a small chunk of Russia between Lithuania and Poland, surrounded by NATO territory; Poland to the south and Lithuania to its north. With Lithuania in flames and the Russians fully occupied trying to control the insurrection, that makes it much harder to defend and much more vulnerable to a surprise attack from Poland, the sea or through Lithuania.”

The Prime Minister leaned forward. “This is more like it. Go on.”

Kydd outlined a possible course of action. The insurgency across the Baltic states was rapidly getting out of control with thousands of men and women now in the forests resisting the Russians, who were discovering they had bitten off very much more than they could easily chew. Britain should support the American lead by providing the support, equipment and training the Baltics needed to enmesh the Russians ever more tightly there. As it was, GCHQ was picking up indications from Russian soldiers on social media and other sources that they were thinning out their garrison in Kaliningrad, in order to reinforce their overstretched troops in Lithuania.

Britain just happened to have a small party of infantrymen working with the Forest Brothers in Latvia, so it might be possible to get eyes on the ground in Kaliningrad. Meanwhile, it was entirely possible for Britain, America and its NATO allies to assemble a force by land, sea and in the air to hit the Russians where it would cause the most trouble for the President with his own people: Russian-owned Kaliningrad.

“Lose Kaliningrad and he’ll be seen as a failure and, in Russia, that makes him a dead man walking.”

“How long do you reckon it’ll take to assemble the forces and what do we need?” asked the Prime Minister.

“It’ll take a good month plus, Prime Minister,” replied Kydd. “And we’re talking about a one-corps, possibly two-corps operation. With three or four divisions on land. Say sixty thousand to eighty thousand personnel, plus a major amphibious effort to put it ashore. I reckon we could pull together a division with the French. The Germans and Poles may be able to combine. If that happened, we’d put it all under the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps. And the Americans have also got 82nd Airborne at immediate notice to move, plus a Marine Expeditionary Force already on its way across the Atlantic. So that’s another corps-sized force. We’ll need to regain command of the Baltic, but the Americans have got 6th Fleet inbound as well as a substantial air effort.”

Walker could see that the Prime Minister liked what he heard. Little questioned Kydd further. “It’s really important that we have a substantial British effort. After all, we’ve taken the biggest hit… Apart from the Baltics that is—”

“OK, Prime Minister. I get that. But the bottom line is that the Armed Forces are still reeling from the cuts made by the last government.”

“What are you implying?” Everage snarled.

Kydd looked down at him. “Since you ask, you’re more on the hook than anyone,” he said bluntly. Then, eyes boring into the hapless Defense Secretary and entirely forgetting Walker’s plea to moderate his language, he added, “And whichever stupid fucker thought they could cut the regular Army by a third and replace it with reserves needs their fucking head examining.”