WW III wi-1

by Ian Slater

  The admiral glanced about as they continued walking toward the premier’s office. “Yes.”

  “Will you stop it?”

  “No. The Americans would see that as indecisiveness.”

  “Quite correct,” commented Chernko. Foolhardiness was one danger — indecisiveness the other. “Yes,” he assured the admiral. “The best thing is to steer a middle course.”

  The admiral frowned with concern. “This is very difficult to do. With Japan on your port side and Korea on your starboard, there’s not much room.”

  “No.”

  One of the premier’s aides rushed by them, a sheaf of cables in a folder.

  “I’ve never seen them move so fast,” said Chernko.

  “Now what’s happened?” worried the admiral aloud.

  “The damned Cubans,” interjected a voice from behind. It was the air marshal. “With that loudmouth Castro gone, I thought they’d settle down. But no. I tell you, their biggest export is trouble.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  In Seoul, thirty-three thousand American soldiers, in the biggest mass surrender since Corrigedor in 1942, made the short but humiliating march across the NKA’s pontoon bridge, built in the shadow of the old Chamshil Iron Bridge, toward the shell-pocked Olympic Stadium, where they were separated according to regiment. Fifty-two senior officers were weeded out as quickly as possible, the NKA interrogators insisting, upon pain of death, that the officers sign confessions of “criminal imperialistic aggression against the Democratic Republic of Korea.”

  Only three signed. Seventeen of the others, described over the loudspeakers as “recalcitrant warmongers,” were shot in the dressing rooms below the baseball stadium, their bodies dumped on the diamond from a captured U.S. Army truck that roared about the field of six thousand prisoners, the blood of the murdered men dark on the poorly lit artificial turf.

  One of the bedraggled and shell-shocked soldiers, a U.S. private from the Eleventh Division, clutching a military blanket about him, watched each of the bodies fall limply onto the tread-torn diamond, wondering aloud why they had not killed all of the officers who had refused to sign.

  “Why seventeen?” he asked numbly of no one in particular.

  “To scare us,” answered an ROK lieutenant who had torn his intelligence corps patches off moments before he was captured. “To show the others what happens if they hold out. To show us what will happen if we resist.”

  The American looked around the dimly lit stadium, few of the lights working after the artillery barrage, “There are ten times as many prisoners here as guards.”

  “But they’ve got the guns,” said the ROK soldier.

  One of the bodies they saw was a major, his collar stud standing out even in the poor light. He looked as if he were smiling, but it was an illusion — a death mask of pain — tortured before they shot him. The private noticed for the first time that the white U.S. stars on the truck’s doors had been smeared red. When it drove out of the stadium, there was a silence heavy with the stench of pickled cabbage and excrement. The NKA had forbidden use of any of the toilets behind the stands, and most of the wounded were now crowded into the north corner beyond the diamond, where they had to defecate into a shallow trench.

  Soon the loudspeakers were ordering all intelligence officers to report to the stands.

  “Fuck you!” the ROK lieutenant shouted in perfect English, and got a weak round of applause.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Heading out into the mid-Atlantic, the U.S. nuclear submarine USS Roosevelt received its digitized “burst” message via its trailing VLF aerial. The message lasted less than two-hundredths of a second — too short a time to alert an enemy sub to vector. The Roosevelt, one of the Sea Wolf class II dual-purpose (Hunter/Killer and ballistic missile) subs, normally patrolled deep at a thousand feet below the surface, but in order to be on station to receive the scheduled burst message through its very low frequency aerial, the sub’s captain, forty-three-year-old Robert Brentwood, had had to bring the Roosevelt to 150 feet. The message told Robert Brentwood and his crew two things: They were “spot on” their prearranged patrol route, and the “balloon had gone up” in Korea. This meant that they, like all NATO units, were now on the second stage of the four-step-alert ladder. But as to exactly what had happened in Korea, they did not know, nor, under the CNO’s standing orders, was it necessary for them to know what had gone on over seven thousand miles away. Besides, the coded messages, in order to keep the location of the American subs secret from the Russians, had to be kept as short as possible.

  “Your brother’s out there somewhere with the Seventh Fleet, isn’t he, Captain?” asked the executive officer, Peter Zeldman.

  “Last I heard,” answered Brentwood. “GM frigate.”

  “Your kid brother might end up in action before you do, Skipper.”

  “Hopefully, Pete, none of us’ll end up in action,” said Robert thoughtfully, adding, “My guess is it’s some border incident on the DMZ. Probably blow over in a few days.”

  Zeldman wished he hadn’t said anything about the skipper’s brother — he’d merely meant it as a bit of conversation, something that was in short supply on a six-month patrol back and forth across the Atlantic in various attack and defensive patterns between Norfolk, Virginia, and Holy Loch.

  The immediate question for the crew was, how long would it be before they were in Scotland? Robert Brentwood knew that, next to being home in the United States, the high point for most of them was refit and supply at the Scottish sub base. While the repairs at Holy Loch were usually minor, not requiring a stay of more than a day or two, sometimes they had more shore leave than expected if he decided a new coat of anechoic, or “sponge,” paint, as the crews called it, was needed. The red paint absorbed active sonar pulses sent out by sub chasers and so denied them any return echo or at least diluted the echo so much that it was too weak to be of any use to the enemy. Painting the bottom of the 360-foot-long, 42-foot-wide sub that served both as an attack submarine and a Trident II balistic missile carrier was a job that took two weeks in the dry dock, affording the crews, alternating shifts, at least a week’s liberty, even longer if the sub’s barnacle-encrusted exterior had to be scraped down and new primer applied. However, with Roosevelt on second-stage alert, Executive Officer Zeldman had a hunch none of them would be seeing Holy Loch for a while.

  He put the question to Brentwood, who said, “We’ll see.”

  “Skipper’s not exactly bursting with information, is he?” said the third officer.

  “He’s got his reasons,” answered Zeldman, not permitting himself to be drawn into taking sides. But the lieutenant did have a point.

  Zeldman couldn’t quite figure Brentwood out either. He was one of those men, Zeldman thought, who seemed to be born old. It wasn’t that he looked old, despite slightly graying hair, but rather that he had an unflappable manner and deep-set brown eyes with a penetrating quality about them that constantly made you feel he knew what you were going to say before you said it. Luckily, however, unlike some people, who thought they knew everything, Robert Brentwood wasn’t the least bit arrogant or impatient with others, the kind of man, Zeldman concluded, a boy would be lucky to have as a father. But Zeldman doubted if the skipper would ever be one. He wasn’t married, unlike most of the crew, or even engaged.

  Zeldman had put it down to Brentwood’s obsession with his work. He was first and foremost a submariner — everything else took second place, so much so that Zeldman had become convinced that though Robert Brentwood came across as a strong, silent type, he must be driven deep down by a burning ambition to surpass his father’s achievement as admiral. Zeldman was quite wrong about this — Robert Brentwood had no intention of trying to surpass his father’s reputation. He merely loved submarines. Always had. Years before, when Lana and David had asked him how he could possibly sign on for “coffin duty” in what was essentially nine titanium-alloy spheres welded together and covered in a superstruct
ure that at times looked stronger than it really was, Robert Brentwood had no good answer. All he could tell them was that he did not share their fear of death by sudden implosion. Death was inevitable; the way you went, he told them, was beside the point. And what Zeldman had at first taken to be his quiet, all-knowing air was nothing more than shyness.

  Brentwood was conscious that his reticence was often misinterpreted by the men on the Tennessee as aloofness, a kind of carefully constructed emotional shield between captain and crew so that orders were less likely to be questioned in times of crisis. With women it was different, for he discovered that most of them intuitively understood that his shyness was not a deliberately erected barrier or a lack of feeling but rather the quietude of a man confident in himself and his work, a man most of them liked, but one whose most passionate affair was with the sea. A pretty young Englishwoman in her late twenties, during one of the welcome-ashore parties arranged by the British Admiralty at Holy Loch, had once unabashedly told Robert Brentwood over her half pint of Guiness, “I’d like to go to bed with you.”

  “Thank you,” he’d replied.

  “It’s so, then?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  The woman had appeared stunned. “Why ever not?”

  “Not before marriage.”

  The girl, “a smashing blond bit,” as his English host had described her to Brentwood before her arrival, had spat out half her Guiness in astonished gaiety at the American’s joke. When she saw he was serious, surprise quickly gave way to anger. “You’re not a sailor.” It was delivered with all the finesse of a depth charge, meant to shake the very bulwark of his masculinity.

  “I can assure you I am, ma’am.”

  “Don’t ‘ma’am’ me! Are you queer?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Jesus — you’re worse than Bing Crosby,” she said, pushing a napkin at him to wipe off the chocolatey stain of Guiness.

  Brentwood had taken the train to London a few days later for a bit of sight-seeing and had ordered a biography of Bing Crosby at Marriage’s bookstore.

  “Back list, sir,” the manager informed him without bothering to consult Books in Print. “We could have it in five days.”

  Brentwood told him he wouldn’t be able to pick it up for about three months but offered payment.

  “That’s not necessary, sir,” the manager informed him. Brentwood ordered the book anyway, mad at himself for having mentioned how long he’d be away, the length of his next patrol, a breech of security for which Brentwood roundly chastised himself.

  A few days later, when he returned to the ship, then in the floating dry dock, he asked Zeldman one morning, “You know anything about Bing Crosby?”

  The executive officer had shrugged. “Big shot in the forties and fifties, I think. A crooner.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A singer.”

  “What kind of singer?”

  “Not sure. My Grandpa used to talk about him. Love songs, far as I can recall. Pretty slow.”

  “Was he ever married?”

  “Think so,” said Zeldman, who’d been pouring the coffee in the galley at the time, his voice rising above the hammering echoing through the Roosevelt as yard “birds” replaced one of the hatches on the six multiwarhead missile bays aft of the sail which the sub carried along with the eight attack torpedo tubes forward.

  Standing in the sail as they’d slid slowly out of Holy Loch for another NATO Atlantic patrol, the second officer had asked Zeldman, “Ex, you ever heard of a Bing Crosby?”

  “For crying out loud,” said Zeldman, “what’s with this Bing Crosby? Skipper was on about that yesterday.”

  “Yeah?” said the second officer. “He was asking me this morning.”

  From that point on, Captain Robert Brentwood became known as “Bing” among his crew, and the boat’s unofficial theme song was “Moon River,” crew members occasionally providing impromptu renditions during off-hours. Zeldman figured that if the skipper heard some of the associated jokes, his hair would turn completely gray overnight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Lin Kuang stood alone in the forest darkness high above Taiwan’s Taroko Gorge, the sound of the rushing river far below melding with the swishing sound of the wind in the pines, and here he pledged to Matsu, goddess of the sea, by all that was holy to him that he was ready for battle. The waiting was over, the invasion fleet ready, as it had been since his grandfather’s day, since that terrible day in 1949 when the Communists had driven the Kuomintang to the sea, when, thanks to the mercy of Matsu, the fleet of the two million Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek had arrived safely on Taiwan and made it their own.

  Lin Kuang had never been “home” to the mainland, but one night, as a junior officer years before, he had been the captain of one of the Nationalist navy’s motor torpedo boats that had landed a raiding party during the intermittent fighting over Quemoy Island just off the mainland. The purpose of the raid was ostensibly to gather and update intelligence reports on the Communist ports’ defenses. But the real purpose was to keep every soldier in the KMT practiced and ready, to prevent them from ever sinking into the passive acceptance, shown by the rest of Taiwan’s eighteen million, of believing that Formosa, as Taiwan used to be called, was home. The KMT ruled Taiwan and built up enormous financial reserves to the point that it was now, after Japan, the richest Asian nation. But, with the legendary Chinese patience, the KMT had never lost the belief that the Communists in Beijing were but temporary usurpers, one day to be thrown out. Unlike so many Westerners, who accepted the legitimacy of Communist China and had now turned their back on Taiwan, Lin Kuang and his fellow officers never doubted that one day it would be their day to return. Superbly trained, equipped, through their billions of surplus dollars, with the latest in technological advances in the West, the KMT knew that the Communist hold on Mainland China was in large measure an illusion; the Chinese Communist party, constituting only 10 percent of the population, could no longer hold it together. There were hundreds of millions in the far-flung regions of China who had never been anywhere near Beijing, for whom Beijing might as well have been on the moon, as there were many millions in the far-flung republics of the Soviet Union whose loyalty to Moscow was as tenuous as a failing marriage, the parents unable to control the children who sensed the great divide and wanted to go their own way. Promise the far-flung republics their own country, said the KMT, and the center was yours.

  Lin Kuang closed his eyes, breathed m the cool, damp air, happy that autumn was upon them. It was a time for change-when men would need to brace themselves for the stormy seas of winter. In his mind’s eye he was no longer inhaling the air of Taiwan but that of Hangzhou, where his father’s fathers had been born and raised, the city of which Marco Polo had once said, “In Heaven there is Paradise, on earth… Hangzhou.” There on the West Lake, serene amid a garden of gladioli, lawn, and fish ponds, was Mao’s villa. It was Lin Kuang’s dream to be the one to retake Hangzhou, to personally raze the villa to the ground.

  * * *

  In Washington State, Mount Ranier’s volcanic cone was visible from Seattle’s Northwest University over sixty miles away, the mountain’s peak shrouded in a rosy hue of pollution and midday sun, while fourteen miles west of the city a Trident nuclear submarine glided gracefully out of the upper reaches of Hood Canal. It passed the spidery wire webs of the onshore degaussing stations, which would wipe the sub clean of any telltale magnetic signature that might otherwise be picked up by a ship nearby, especially the Soviet trawlers that often lay listening north of the Bangor base beyond the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which ran between Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island. Sometimes, as was the case this day, a Coast Guard cutter plowed ahead of the Trident, making lots of noise and running interference against hydrophone arrays that might be trailing behind a Russian trawler as the sub headed into the vastness of the blue Pacific.

  David Brentwood’s father had often taken him out t
o see the ships leaving the east coast, and David always found it a calming experience, which was why he’d driven out to the placid waters of the canal. The fight with Melissa was still officially on, but he’d hoped that if he could cool down by the time he got back that evening, then she would have simmered down, too. He needed her, especially now, for on the circuitous route down through Tacoma and up across to Bremerton, the “classic” rock and roll he’d been listening to on the Buick’s radio had been interrupted by a news flash that an American frigate had been attacked in the Sea of Japan, but as yet the Pentagon hadn’t given out the name. Somehow David knew in his gut that it was the Blaine. By the time he’d reached Bangor, another radio flash had cut into the program. It was the USS Blaine. No information on casualties. Then forty minutes later a Pentagon announcement saying the ship had apparently been hit twice. The National Security Council and combined Chiefs of Staff were meeting with the president.

  David felt terribly guilty. He had grown up in a naval family; his grandfather had fought at Midway. But instead of following his brothers into the navy, he had bitterly disappointed his father by joining the army reserves at Northwestern instead of the naval reserves. Now he suddenly felt somehow responsible, that somehow he should be in Ray’s place or in Robert’s place aboard the Atlantic Fleet sub, wherever it was. His father had always told him that he didn’t care what “line of work” David got into after college, “so long as you’re happy.” That at least was the official “liberal” stance of ex-Admiral John Brentwood. He had never indicated any disappointment about David joining the army reserve, yet David felt it whenever his father was talking to someone about “the boys.” Likewise David held back from talking about his father’s honor-clad career, for much as he admired his father, David always felt pressured to perform as well as his two navy brothers. One reason he felt he couldn’t, but which he had never confided to anyone, not even Melissa, for fear of them thinking him weak, was that he had a terror of the sea itself. From a distance he could admire and enjoy it as one admired people on the high trapeze, but the very idea of dying at sea, of being entombed forever in the great dark abyss, sent a cold shiver through his bowels. His father, obviously without meaning to terrify him and more as a simple point of information, had once told him when David was a young boy that the Marianas Trench in the Pacific was as deep as Everest was high. To David it became an idée fixe, a phobia that no doubt, like all phobias, would merely have sounded silly to someone else, but one that for a young man from a distinguished naval family was nothing short of cowardice. The thought of the closed-in darkness, the enormous pressures that could “crumble bones to dust”—that was another of his father’s favorites — began to haunt David, to obsess him so much, he’d gone to the library at his primary school and, with all the guilt of a pornographer, had looked up whether his father was right about the Marianas Trench. Surely nothing could be as deep as Mount Everest-was high. His hands trembled as he flicked over the Ms in the encyclopedia, heart racing, ready to shut it immediately should anyone approach him. The Marianas Trench wasn ‘t as deep as Everest was high — it was deeper, by another five thousand feet. Later David’s rational side did battle with his irrational shadows — after all, to die was to die. But logic held no ground in the battle between primeval fear of being buried in blackness and the calm logic that argued that however you died was in the end immaterial. The memory of seeing his grandmother’s body borne away on a wet and windy fall day in New York, the sounds of horns honking impatiently and uncaring from behind the hearse as, rain-polished, it pulled off into the cemetery, had stayed with him. Watching the coffin lowered, hearing the run of the ropes and the thump of the clay to close you in forever, he’d decided there and then he would be cremated when it came his time. But did the soul still rise or did it die, too, in the funeral pyre?