WW III wi-1

by Ian Slater

  At Börfink the tape-connected oscilloscope hiccuped twice. There was a jolting sound, one of the Falcons hit, a scratch of static on the tape, pilot and RIO ejecting. And then in low stratus, above the invisible spread of Germany’s southern Palatinate, the thunder of another two explosions, two of the Sukhois disintegrating at fifteen hundred feet.

  * * *

  East Germany said nothing. Further arms reduction talks were under way in Geneva. In the West, newspapers picked up the story released from NATO’s headquarters in Brussels: two more F-16s had gone down during low-level practice runs over southern Germany. The F-16, one story reported, was fast taking over the Starfighter in Germany as the “widow maker.” There were more complaints from both the Green Party and even some conservative Christian Democrats that the noise level of the low-flying jets was intolerable. From the villages and towns along the border, a petition was presented to NATO headquarters in Brussels and to the Tenth U.S. Tactical Fighter Squadron, complaining that the noise of the jets was in excess of 123 decibels, “like a train roaring through your bedroom,” one farmer said angrily, and never mind the effects on the children and the farm animals. The latter were so jittery that farmers had long claimed it was adversely affecting the output of milch cows and increasingly devaluating already depressed real estate values along the border. Both claims were true.

  NATO HQ said it would seriously consider the protests and reevaluate the low-level attack program, but did neither. Since 1980 NATO had lost 97 fighters, 61 of them two-crew F-16s. In all, 103 dead. Few pilots and radar intercept officers managed to bail out at such low altitudes. But NATO kept up the dangerous low-level flights. The reason was brutally simple. Along the five-hundred-kilometer border of NATO’s central front there were 2,781 NATO aircraft against over 3,050 Warsaw Pact aircraft and a further 4,000 Russian fighters and fighter/bombers between Moscow and the German border. In the event of war, NATO’s only hope against a Soviet “surge” would be to have better planes, but even then they could be overwhelmed, the problem of lost pilots, as in the Battle of Britain, becoming the crucial factor. NATO’s hope resided in developing better pilot and ground crews than the other side’s. In the event of war the NATO/Soviet-Warsaw Pact sortie rate had to be two to one against the Soviet-Warsaw Pact air forces if the West was to stand a chance. In low-level combat, in the battle of razor-sharp wits and split-second radar blips, in dogfights with G-forces so great that they literally drained you of four to seven pounds of fluid a sortie, the concentration needed was enormous.

  That afternoon Colonel Delcorte was instructing a new batch of pilots from the States, cautioning them that at such low altitudes the slightest mistake on the touch-sensitive joystick, the slightest reverie, with speeds approaching Mach 1 under two thousand feet, would bring the ground slamming up to kill them. “Any questions?” Delcorte had asked.

  A hand shot up.

  “Yes?” said Delcorte.

  “You said five hundred feet, sir.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, when’s the next flight home?”

  It was a joke, of course. Despite such “probing” incidents as the one this morning, deep down no one in the air force, nor anyone else for that matter, least of all Lana La Roche, expected a war. Since Gorbachev, everything had been looking good.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Among her friends Lana Brentwood had always been described as a perfectionist, with energy to burn, a good student who always went the extra distance for the straight A’s and to please. And a good listener, often seeing things in others that they thought were hidden and yet having the ability to convey to whomever she was speaking to a sense that for that moment she wanted to hear only from that person. It helped to fend off, or hold at bay, her secret and enormous dread of failure. It made no difference that she had done well at school, won a scholarship to Harvard’s medical school. She wanted to do everything at once, and everything wouldn’t have it, and one day it all tumbled in on her in one exam, an avalanche triggered by one question in her prerequisite arts course: “Man was born free, yet everywhere he is in chains. Comment.” It wasn’t that she felt she couldn’t answer it, but here were so many reasons Rousseau was right, so many that he was wrong. Like a shopper who, feeling suddenly overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices, in the end walks out and buys nothing, Lana broke out in the perspiration of quiet terror, made some panicky notes with which to start the answer, erased them, wrote them down again. Finally she began to tremble and asked if she could go to the washroom. Worse than her fear that everybody was looking at her was her realization that no one was — all too busy, heads bent, answering the question.

  She never went back to the room, and following a six-month stint as a student nurse, from which she again dropped out, the rush of failure after came like a series of storm waves battering down an exhausted swimmer as she tried desperately for the safety of the shore, never making it. Her father, John Brentwood, a sixty-five-year-old ex-naval captain, once retired with high honors from the navy and now on the brink of retirement from his post-naval New York Port Authority job, was a man who had led what he called a “no-nonsense” life, one of duty, discipline, and duty. He was for Lana, however, extraordinarily kind when he sat down with her, putting his arm about her, comforting her, telling her that there was more to life than exams and that perhaps she should think about something else where the pressure wasn’t so great.

  “Thank you, Daddy, but that isn’t what you told Ray or Robert when they had troubles. You said when the going gets tough—”

  “Yes, yes,” he answered. “But with men, Lanny, it’s different. They’re expected—”

  “Oh, Daddy!” she said angrily, storming from the room. He made to follow after her but couldn’t get up from her bed as quickly as he used to. “Now, I didn’t mean you’re not equal, honey,” he called out.

  “Yes you do,” she said from the kitchen, snatching a tissue, hating herself because for her it was different than for the boys. They hadn’t broken down. Besides, these days women were supposed to be as tough.

  “All I’m saying, Lanny,” continued her father, “is that you don’t have to beat your brains out. You can… well, do something else for a while.”

  Lana, now that the floodgates were open, that her uptight, high school “girl most likely to succeed” image had been shattered, steered the discussion self-destructively back to her exam failure, indulging in a whining catechism of other petty and/or imagined failures, about how she really hadn’t done anything with her life, about how she was finished before she’d even started. She’d never even had time for boyfriends, no “serious,” lasting relationship. John Brentwood looked over at his wife, Catherine. In an age when condoms were as easy to get as gum and an aging Geraldo Rivera was wrestling on TV with near naked women in mudpits, they were thankful there had been no serious relationships. But they understood well enough what it was she was telling them — that she wasn’t even experienced as a woman. Still, John Brentwood turned it over to his wife to deal with, to tell Lana there would come a time when she was more settled, when she knew better what she wanted, that there’d be plenty of time for men and “that kind of thing.”

  “Take a year off,” her father said in his wife’s silence. It was announced with the surprise of a captain with a wounded frigate suddenly recognizing the virtue of a retreat. “Return to port,” he said half-jokingly. “Get your surface vessel out of range of the sub, eh, Lanny?”

  “Oh, John,” said Catherine Brentwood. “We’re not in the Persian Gulf. Last thing she needs is to ‘return to port,’ as you put it.”

  “Catherine, I was only trying to—”

  “I know, sweetie. But what Lana needs is something to do, something concrete. Take herself out of herself. That’s what you used to tell the boys. You still tell David the same thing. Not that he takes any notice.”

  “Well,” John Brentwood began, but stopped himself. Lana was flushed, in that difficult mood, for self-pity and ve
ngeance and for asking where was God anyway?

  “There you go again,” Lana told her mother, her eyes liquid-bright. “The boys again. The boys are different. The boys are special!”

  “We don’t mean that,” said the ex-rear admiral lamely. Sons were so much easier to deal with. “I never meant that.”

  “You don’t think I can handle it alone,” snapped Lana. “Well—” She hesitated, lips quivering. “I can. You’ll see.”

  * * *

  What they saw was Lana dropping out of college altogether, going back to her old love of horseback riding, spending hours at the stables.

  “I hope,” said John Brentwood, despairing of his daughter’s future while leafing through the evening newspaper — reading of more trouble in Yugoslavia, Serbs against Croats—“that Lanny doesn’t turn into one of those ‘horsey women.’ “

  “And what,” asked Catherine, her hand steady with crochet needle, “is a ‘horsey woman’?”

  “You know,” replied John, turning on the remote control TV. “Look at that. Montreux Convention distinctly guarantees us right of passage through the Dardanelles and Bosporus.” There was an inset map behind the TV announcer showing the narrow straits at Istanbul that lead into the Black Sea and the coast of Bulgaria and the USSR. A Bulgarian destroyer had “bumped,” the announcer said, a U.S. destroyer off Odessa on the boundary line of the twelve-mile territorial zone.

  “Those Bulgarian bastards,” said John Brentwood, peering over his bifocals. “Ivan snaps his fingers and they play the monkey. Ah—” He waved his hand disgustedly at the TV. “We won’t do anything. Diplomatic notes. Now, if that had happened in Reagan’s day—”

  “It might just have been an accident,” his wife commented.

  “Catherine,” began John Brentwood exasperatedly. “A naval vessel doesn’t accidentally ‘bump’ another naval ship, for Chrissake!”

  “You did once.”

  “Damn it, woman!” He tore the newspaper away from his lap. “I did not! How many times have I told you that that son-of-a-bitch sub was snooping on us — trying to get a good noise signature for their goddamned mines — and I surprised him. Cut engines and the bastard couldn’t turn quick enough. He bumped me, goddamn it!”

  “Don’t swear. Well, whatever. All they said was it was a Bulgarian ship. We’re getting on fine with the Russians now.”

  “Now, yes. I wouldn’t trust those sons of—”

  “What were you saying about Lana?”

  “What — oh, yes. Well, I just don’t want her turning into one of those horsey women. That’s all.”

  “I know lots of men who like horses. And they—”

  “Don’t bait me, Catherine. You know perfectly well what I mean. One of those women who won’t go anywhere near anything unless it farts and eats hay.”

  “Jay La Roche doesn’t do either. Far as I know.”

  “Jay who? That perfume guy?”

  “Yes. You remember. You met him at the equestrian ball. The night you were so grumpy. You and that admiral busy jawing about the president’s cuts in defense. I think he’s rather glamorous. And he’s well connected.”

  “She’s been seeing him? I mean — seeing him a lot?”

  “Quite a lot.”

  Brentwood grunted. He was glamorous in a way. Do his little girl good to get out and around away from those damned horses. On the other hand, there was something about La Roche he didn’t like. Haughty — that was it. Millionaires’ club haughtiness. Or was it because the cosmetics magnate didn’t like career service officers? He certainly gave that impression despite the ultrapoliteness. Lot of those people around. Thought being in the service meant you wanted to kill everybody. Young David at college in Washington State had noted the same thing. Some liberal artsy-fartsy types baiting him about “mucho macho.” And with the new palsy-walsy public relations between Moscow and Washington and the defense cuts, it made it even more fashionable to put down those in uniform. Christ, they were still on about Vietnam, and that was an age ago.

  “Lanny say anything to you about him?” he asked Catherine.

  “No. But I can tell. She spends a lot of time getting dressed.”

  “Good God, that’s no criterion. Half the women I know take most of the day getting dressed.”

  “Oh, and how many have you known?” she teased. “Quite a few, I expect.”

  He ignored it, watching the TV, shaking his head disgustedly. “You see, that’s the sort of thing I mean. This Supreme Court business — women in future being ready for combat. Take ‘em half an hour to get their war paint on.”

  Catherine was hooking the crochet needle in an end stitch. “You’re a dinosaur,” she said simply. “But I love you all the same.”

  “What happened to that pilot she was going out with from Andrews? Nice young fella.”

  “Shirer. I thought you warned her off servicemen — if I remember correctly. Too many billets. Strain on the marriage?”

  “Maybe. But I prefer a pilot to a perfume maker.”

  “Now, John,” said Catherine, putting down her crocheting. “That’s unfair and you know it. What if I told you La Roche Industries makes a lot of munitions for defense?”

  “They do?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “By God, you can be irritating. Wouldn’t make a skerrick of difference anyway. Even if he was making rockets. I don’t like his snooty manner.”

  “He’s well-bred.”

  “Officers from Annapolis are well-bred, too, but they don’t act like that.”

  “You leave him alone. Lana needs all the self-confidence and affection she can get right now. Said so yourself.”

  “I won’t interfere, I won’t interfere,” he said, holding up his hands. “All I want is for my little girl to be happy.”

  “Good. But she isn’t so little, and sometimes you just have to let go. Let them make up their own minds. Remember what you always said about children — they’re on loan to us. They’re not ours. Best we can do is point them in the right direction and pray.”

  “All right, but what happened to that pilot?”

  “A fling, I think. It wasn’t long after her breakdown.”

  “Wasn’t a breakdown, it was just—”

  “Whatever you want to call it. He was someone she liked at the time, that’s all.”

  John Brentwood lowered the sound on the TV. “You don’t think she—” There was a long pause. “You know. Do you? With him?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t intend to pry.”

  On the TV the announcer was reporting more trouble in El Salvador, or was it Nicaragua, more killing during elections — shots of blood-splattered hostages murdered in Beirut in the crazy war that Brentwood had never understood and was plain weary of hearing about. There was also growing support for the president, predictions of more defense cuts about to be announced — even more popular than pollsters had previously thought — and a lot of combat training money being diverted to less expensive electronic “closed-helmet” simulators. And reporters were predicting a major reduction in the number of stealth bombers, from two hundred to one hundred, possibly fewer.

  Brentwood was shaking his head — a snappy young female Annapolis graduate was telling a reporter how she thought that the possibility that someday the Supreme Court would go all the way and allow women in front line combat role was just “terrific.”

  “Sure,” said Brentwood. “And what happens when you get pregnant? ‘Excuse me, sir, could I please leave the war for six months?’ “ He turned to Catherine. “Honestly, I don’t know what the world’s coming to.”

  There was a brief mention that there was a shooting somewhere on the Korean DMZ. “Should’ve let MacArthur over the Yalu,” said Brentwood, getting up from his recliner. Snapping the TV off, he saw under the streetlights a long car — a limousine — pulling up outside his house. He stared at it in disbelief through the blinds; then he saw the chauffeur opening the rear door and Lana getting out, her dark, sh
iny hair in sharp contrast with the long, white gown and white wrap, imitation fur — she wouldn’t have real fur. “Look at this,” he said, but when he turned around he saw Catherine had left, and heard her getting ready for bed. When he entered their bedroom, newspaper clutched in one hand, the other whipping off his bifocals, Catherine was changing into her nightdress.

  “It’s pink!” he announced in horror.

  “What is?” said Catherine, taking the comb out of her hair. “Oh, you mean the limousine? Cute, isn’t it?”

  “Cute! Like a New Orleans whorehouse!”

  “Oh, don’t be such an old stodge. It’s cute. Just a gimmick for his cosmetic company. Shocking pink.”

  Brentwood stood there looking at her. “Sometimes, Catherine.. I just don’t understand you.” She wouldn’t be baited and kept brushing her hair.

  “Now there’s this thing in Korea.”

  “What thing?”

  “Another row.”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  “Ray’s out there somewhere with the Seventh Fleet, remember.”

  “There’s trouble everywhere, John,” she said. “I worry about it, too, at times. But we can’t do anything about it, so that’s that.” She slid off her slippers and drew up the covers, patting the bed invitingly beside her. “Come on now, stop fretting. I swear you worry more out of the navy than in it. Besides—” she reached for the lamp’s dimmer switch “—the experts say that despite all the little wars that always seem to be going on, there’s now a greater chance of peace between the superpowers than ever before.”

  “Experts,” said Brentwood dismissively. “Experts told us nuclear arms would put a stop to war forever. Everyone would be too scared to let one off. They’re right — so far. Only trouble is, now everybody’s so scared to push the button, we need more conventional arms than ever. So what does the president do? Talk about cuts. I don’t know. It’s crazy.”