WW III wi-1

by Ian Slater

  “Up!” ordered Rhee, and Tae, using one of the table’s legs for support, struggled unsteadily to his feet.

  “Untie him,” ordered Rhee, and the guard used his bayonet to cut the knot. The major held out the pencil to Tae. “Print!” he ordered. “And you! “he shouted at Mi-Ja, who was now cowering back in the far comer of the tent like a whipped dog, trying to cover her shame. “Be quiet or you will be sorry!”

  Tae heard his daughter’s terrified sobbing and wrote down the names.

  Rhee was under no illusion that Tae had given all the names to him, but it was good enough. Once you had one or two names, you could start breaking down the various organizational “cells” in each city, and then, usually more quickly than you anticipated, everything would start to unravel, some of them surrendering even, lured on in part by terror of what would happen if they didn’t and in part by public promises of forgiveness and “reeducation.” Rhee looked down at the list — nine names for three cities. About right. He pulled out his revolver to shoot Tae. Mi-Ja screamed and ran to her father. She was checked by the guard and fell back as if bouncing from a solid wall, the bottom of her dress now covered in mud.

  “Tie him to the chair!” ordered Rhee, letting his revolver slip back into the holster. Walking over to the table, he kicked two of the folding legs from under it so that the table was now inclined like a child’s slide. He ordered the guard to hurry up and tie Tae securely to the chair, and when he finished to tie the girl to the table. “If you resist,” he said, flicking a hair away from her face, “I will shoot him as we did your boyfriend. You are all lackeys of the Americans.”

  Mi-Ja closed her eyes and began reciting a Christian prayer. This infuriated the major, who slapped her hard. Unbuttoning his fly, Rhee smiled hatefully at her and, behind him, the defeated ROK major lashed to the chair. “You are all whores of the Americans.” She began to fight, trying vainly to get away from the table, her muscles tightening, but was unable to loosen any of the bonds.

  “I will kill him,” Rhee warned her, and she stopped — still and staring at the mold-spotted roof of the tent that seemed to be breathing as he mounted her, grunting his pleasure, her father screaming at him, the blood from Tae’s mouth running over his mud-spattered chin.

  “Gag him! Tape him!” ordered Rhee. The guard stuffed an oily rag into Tae’s mouth and taped his eyelids back so that he was forced to watch. Mi-Ja kept looking up at the tent breathing over her.

  After — staggering back like a drunkard from the table, almost falling against the side of the wind-bulged tent — Rhee, out of breath, told Tae hoarsely, “Now the men can have her.” Tae said nothing but looked over at his daughter with all the love he could muster, Mi-Ja’s wail of despair no louder than the squeak of a small animal in pain.

  “I was mistaken,” Major Rhee said, smiling at the guard. “She wasn’t a whore.” The guard’s eyes were bright again with expectation. He asked the major what he should do with her. The major put on his cloth camouflage cap. “Whatever you wish,” he said. “Give her to the men.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  On their way down to the White House situation room, Mayne asked his press secretary, Trainor, whether Senator Leyland had accepted the president’s offer to join the White House war advisory committee.

  “No answer as of an hour ago.”

  “But you did make the offer public?”

  “Yes, sir. This morning’s press conference. Some of the southern papers were a bit smart-ass about it, but The Times took the high road.” He showed Mayne the leader about NATO units falling back in southern Germany. “Quite frankly, Mr. President, I don’t see how he can say no. If he declines, he looks like he doesn’t want to help the country when it needs him. If he accepts, he’s on our side.”

  “There aren’t more than two sides in this country, Bill,” said Mayne. “Not in this war. You see the people in the streets? Everywhere I go you can feel the momentum. They don’t want war — they know I didn’t want war. But this isn’t any hazy Gulf of Tonkin a million miles away. This is out-and-out aggression. This is the Communists stepping over the line, and the American people know it.” He paused for a moment. “How many listeners did you say Voice of America has? Seventeen million?”

  “Thereabouts, Mr. President. With all due respect, Mr. President, I don’t think any fireside chats are going to sway the Russians.”

  “I’m not an idiot,” said Mayne sharply. “Point is, our intelligence reports from different sources can seldom agree on anything, but they’re all saying the same thing on this one. There’s a lot of restlessness out there among the republics. We too often think of it as just one big bloc. I guess it was always a weaker federation of states than we thought, but when Gorbachev got in, started promising them perestroika, glasnost, and all the rest of it, he gave them hope. That’s a pretty potent force, Bill. This country was built on that in our Revolution.”

  “Maybe, sir, but hope can go either way. Doesn’t necessarily mean the Ukrainians, the Azerbaijanians, and all the rest of the republics will side with us to overthrow the Russians. Ukrainians hated Stalin’s guts and he slaughtered eighty percent of his officers in the purges, but when the Nazis hit him, what did he fall back on? No call for the revolution to be defended — no, sir. It was all Mother Russia.”

  “He was lucky,” countered Mayne. “When the Wermacht drove into the Ukraine, the peasants hailed them as conquering heros.”

  “That didn’t last for long, though, Mr. President.”

  “No, and you know why? Sent in the SS after the army, and they started their usual horseshit — worse than the Russians — so the Ukrainians went back to Uncle Joe. Missed opportunity, Bill. Could have changed everything — which is why I want Voice of America telling those people the truth — that with all our warts, our side’s the right side and we’ll help them get their independence if they throw in their lot with us.”

  “Problem there, Mr. President,” said Trainor as they passed the situation room’s marine guards, “is anyone with a radio or TV set on the wrong channel is going to end up in a salt mine in Siberia.”

  “They don’t have salt mines in Siberia, Bill. Old wives’ tale.” Mayne paused, glanced at a White House secretary, and nodded at the chiefs and aides. But his mind was still on the Voice of America possibility and the whole range of propaganda that might help him. What they needed in Europe — hell, what they needed everywhere — was time. If they could get the Hungarians and Poles to do something — not actually fight the Russians, which would cause massive reprisals, but perhaps get them to use go-slow tactics — that would help. Solidarity should know how to arrange “accidental” breakdowns in the war industries.

  Problem was, the puppet states had tried it a few times already — Hungary in ‘56, Czechoslovakia in ‘68—and only got their faces kicked in. And with the Soviet-WP pushing NATO back… which brought him to the first question of the meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. NATO’s communications as well as VOA and Radio Free Europe were in a shambles from Austria to Belgium. Why was it, Mayne asked, that the only hard intelligence the Pentagon was getting the last few hours was coming from the French?

  “That’s because,” said Army General Gray, “Suzlov, or whoever’s in charge over there, is playing footsie with France. The Russians want France left out of it — that way they can concentrate all their forces—” Gray turned toward the map stand.

  “I can read a map, General,” interjected Mayne. “What I’m asking is, haven’t we got underground units in Eastern Europe that should be doing the same thing with Soviet communications?”

  There was a pronounced silence.

  “Well, don’t all speak at once,” said Mayne, looking about, his gaze shifting from General Gray to Admiral Horton, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations and NATO’s SACLANT. “Well?” pressed Mayne. “Why aren’t the bridges in eastern Germany and up there on the Northern Plain cut? Why haven’t they been taken out?”

  “Most of them
have been, Mr. President,” said General Gray — after all, he was the army authority—”but the one thing Ruskies are very good at is quick pontooning. They can get four tank regiments across in less than an hour. They open the valves, sinking the pontoons a few inches, and we can’t see them from the air.”

  “Can anyone tell me if we’re holding ground anywhere?”

  “West Germans and some of our forces are holding the Thurian Alps, sir.”

  “Well, why wouldn’t they be? Why in hell would the Russians try climbing over mountains when they’ve already got us on the run? Are we holding our own in the air?”

  “Yes, sir,” answered Air Force General Allet. “For now.”

  Next the president turned around to the Marine Corps commandant, General Barry. “I hear your boys are giving a hundred and ten percent at Fulda, General.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are we holding them?”

  “I don’t honestly know, Mr. President. It’s an hour-by-hour situation — their tanks are breaking down faster than ours, but we’re getting hurt, too. At Fulda we need a six-to-one kill ratio just to stay even.”

  The use of the phrase “kill ratio” got the attention of the secretaries present. Up until then, things had been so frantic, the war meetings were much like any other major White House crisis — hostage taking, attacks on embassies — but “kill ratios” was not the usual pre-press-conference banter.

  In all, the meeting was short and gloomy, each service giving its report. The central front was sagging but holding here and there. The question was, for how long. But Korea was all bad, ROK and U.S. units still in what reports were pleased to call “retreats in force.”

  “Which means,” the president responded, “we’re getting our ass kicked.” He turned to Admiral Horton. “Can you give us what we need, Admiral?”

  “We’ve been practicing this one for a long time, as you know, Mr. President.”

  “And what were your casualties during practice, Admiral?”

  “High, sir. Considerably higher than we anticipated.”

  “Well, fill me in. Is anything moving out there?”

  “There’s a convoy under way this minute, sir. Out of Southampton. NATO escorts, which we will take over from halfway, northeast of Newfoundland.”

  “Our sub fleet?”

  “Already at sea.”

  “Very well.” The president stood up and left the room. One thing he had learned in politics was that it was essential you husband your time. Right now, this night, there were vast armies of men locked in mortal combat, and until the situation changed sufficiently to warrant his intervention, there was only one sensible thing to do.

  “I’m going to bed, Bill. Wake me if it’s Code One.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  William Spence was a cook’s helper aboard HMS Peregrine— not yet a chef, but determined to become one. Cooking was the thing he loved to do best because he’d seldom seen people happier than when they were enjoying a good meal. His parents, Richard Spence, an industrial chemist for a large heavy industrial adhesive company in London, and Anne Spence, a retired grammar school teacher, lived in one of the upper-middle-class green belt housing estates near Oxshott in the south of England — forty minutes by train from Waterloo. Young William had never intended to join the navy — certainly it had not been his father’s intention for him. But with the middle class increasingly distrustful of the secular state schools, demand and fees for private schools had gone up dramatically. Richard and Anne Spence had scraped and saved early in their marriage so that their two eldest children could go to private school. For Rosemary, now thirty, it had been the school best equipped to get her into teacher’s training college, and for Georgina, now twenty-five, the school best suited to win her entry, via scholarship, to the markedly secular but reasonably prestigious LSE, the London School of Economics and Political Science.

  William, on the other hand, had not been “planned,” and when Anne in her early forties had found she was pregnant, there had been a frightful row between her and Richard, but one conducted in the absence of the two girls. Anne finally decided not to abort, but now Richard, on the verge of his sixties, when both he and Anne had anticipated early retirement, was faced with paying the bills for William to be at a private school. It meant delayed retirement for Richard for at least another five years. Resentment of his predicament, however, had long ago given way to a love for his son that he had not thought possible, and certainly the kind he had achingly missed with his father.

  Then one day shortly after his eighteenth birthday, William announced he didn’t want to go to university — he wanted to be a cook.

  “A chef!” corrected Richard in astonishment. Even then William could see his father was at once disappointed and relieved. Relieved because, erroneously, Richard Spence expected it would cost less money to train his son in the culinary arts, and disappointed because the Spences had always been of professional stock — solicitors, doctors, even the odd barrister. No criminal briefs, of course, mainly mercantile law. It was one of these relatives who, before the war broke out, had advised Richard of a “solicitous compromise” which he believed would satisfy both Richard’s desire to see his son in a respectable profession, rather than merely a trade, and William’s choice. Richard demurred, however, on the subject of a child of his being in, well — manual work.

  “Being a chef’s not like being in a trade these days, Richard,” William’s great-uncle had advised in High Church tone. “More of a guild, I should think. Point is, if you want both, he’ll have to don uniform. Have to pass the entry exam, of course, but he’ll get his O levels.”

  “Shortly,” Richard assured him. “What do you mean by uniform?”

  “Not a bad arrangement at all,” the uncle had continued.

  “And they’re desperate these days. No offense, Richard. But they do want volunteers if they can get them. William seems bright enough. I see no reason why after a while he couldn’t apply for officer training school. Rather rushing them through these days, I should think, with all this talk of trouble brewing in Europe.” The uncle had looked satisfiedly into his dry sherry. “Yes, I should think it would suit him admirably. End up with a commission and—” he sipped the sherry “—I shouldn’t be surprised if he was running a large hotel in years to come. Could do worse.”

  “I suppose,” began Richard, “if he wanted—”

  “Richard, old boy, once he gets his one stripe, he’s way ahead of other applicants for any hostelry business. Officer, cordon bleu, and all that. Doesn’t do any harm, Richard. I do think that given his rather limited aspirations, it would be best for him.”

  Richard was coming around, slowly. “Any of the services will do, I expect?” asked Richard.

  The uncle came as near as he ever had to swallowing sherry without savoring it first. “Certainly not. I strongly suggest the senior service.”

  “The air force,” said Richard.

  “Don’t be fey, Richard. The navy, of course.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be fey.”

  “Then your ignorance on these matters is lamentable.”

  “But I’ve never thought of William as a sailor. Anne won’t go for it,” Richard had said. “I can tell you that now. All this business about the possibility of war breaking out…”

  “War? Richard, old man, you’ve been watching too many of those dreadful ‘Insight’ programs. Either that or reading the Mirror.” The uncle took his brolly and hat from the front stand, using the unfurled umbrella as a pointer. “You send him to the navy, mark my words.”

  Richard was right — Anne didn’t like it — but he told her it was most likely that, unless the unthinkable happened, William would be posted to a shore establishment. In any case, if there was a flare-up, with modern weapons it would be like the Falklands so many years ago — over very quickly.

  * * *

  Eleven months to the day, William Spence was Leading Seama
n Spence, cook’s helper, aboard the destroyer escort HMS Peregrine. After a very rushed, rather peremptory training drill ashore, he now found himself aboard one of the latest DD escorts, his job one of the least glamorous, most important jobs in war: to prepare food for convoy under attack, to guarantee, no matter what the conditions, that everyone in the ship’s company got his NATO-required three thousand calories a day.

  For all the destroyer’s modern technology, hot meals were, as the cook quickly explained, ill-advised at most and “sheer bloody impossible” in the maelstrom of an engagement: hot stoves, soup tubs spilling despite their gimbals mountings, steaming coffee and tea that would burn, and ovens that unattended could cause a fire — as lethal as any missile. Yet if morale was to be kept up, food was fundamental, providing the high-sugar, high-adrenaline level necessary for any kind of sustained battle.

  William Spence had heard but seen little of R-1’s action against the trawlers. Apart from the bridge-wing lookouts, no one was permitted on ship’s decks, the 115-millimeter gun and the Australian IKARA SUBROCS going off along with the Limbo depth-charge mortar unloading its deadly ordnance off the stern of the seven-thousand-ton ship. The Bristol-class destroyer, her twin funnels astern behind the rotary bar radar her telltale markings, had fired her 115-millimeter at two of the trawlers, but her angle in the close pack of the convoy prevented her from launching torpedoes. After the sinking of the Russian-manned trawlers, the men who did not have their stations overlooking the well deck and so had not see the carnage of broken bodies adrift in the icy waters of the Atlantic were the only ones who were hungry. But the cook, a chief petty officer, assured William Spence that later that night, when the others’ shock of seeing their first “dead men” wore off, they would be ravenous— especially if the big fish came.