WW III wi-1

by Ian Slater

  The scuttlebutt had it that a convoy from England was already en route. And in the pubs around the old cobbled streets of the “Historic Properties,” where press gangs had once roamed shanghaiing “volunteers” for Her Majesty’s Navy, there was a rumor claiming empty container ships had been sent first so as not to risk any vital cargo. A “guinea pig” run for the British and Americans. The Halifax Chronicle printed the story.

  Within three hours SACLANT in Virginia and CFB — Canadian Forces Base Halifax — flatly denied the assertion, pointing out that container ships were now in the process of loading some of the millions of tons of materiel that would be needed to reinforce Europe. The Chronicle’s publisher was invited to the admiral’s house for tea. It was brief, polite, and during the conversation the admiral asked the publisher’s advice on whether or not he thought it would be worth, “in the public interest,” running a story on the Canadian War Measures Act. He reminded the publisher that the last time it had been used was in 1970— when the then Liberal prime minister, Trudeau, had deployed armed soldiers on the steps of Parliament, and during which time, the admiral noted, newspapers, along with everyone else, were forbidden under the emergency powers to discuss the FLQ — Front Liberation du Quebec — the terrorist organization that had kidnapped Labour Minister Pierre LaPorte, shot him dead, and dumped him in the trunk of a car.

  The reporter for the Chronicle who had broken the “empty cargo” story was reassigned to the obituaries.

  * * *

  To the other three nurses with her, Lana’s personality was something of an enigma, an odd mixture of shyness and assertiveness in her job, and working with the patients in an oddly detached way. She wasn’t unpleasant, but rather, distanced, as if somehow nursing for her was less a vocation than a refuge. It was several weeks before one of them discovered from an American newspaper that she had been the Mrs. J. T. La Roche and sister of the naval officer who, if he survived, looked like he was going to be court-martialed. This news only confirmed Lana’s fellow nurses in their intuitive belief that she was running away.

  “But to a hospital?” one of them had put to the others.

  “Why not? After a rotten marriage, a hospital’s as good a place as any to lose yourself for a while. Get a new perspective.”

  They were right and wrong — right in that Lana had found a place to retreat, where other people’s needs forced her to leave her troubles for a while, but wrong in thinking it gave her a new perspective. The outbreak of war to Lana was but another example of people’s inhumanity to others, something she had experienced in her marriage. And she made the depressing discovery that no amount of work, no amount of depressing news from the war in Europe and in Korea, could take herself out of herself long enough to rid her of the feeling that inside she was somehow permanently contaminated, dirty, that in succumbing to Jay’s sexual demands, she’d sullied herself more than anyone could ever know. The very thought of it would start her throat constricting as if she were being suffocated, nowhere to hide, no one to help — a heart-thumping terror of suddenly losing control. In those moments she was secretly but deeply depressed. And despite the veneer of self-assurance, she realized that not even the cataclysmic possibility of nuclear war could erase an individual’s guilt.

  * * *

  It didn’t take Lana long to fall afoul of Matron. On one of their few days off, after Lana and a black girl from Boston had discovered their U.S. dollars were worth at least fifteen percent more in the Canadian port, the four nurses had taken a cab around to see some of the sights. One of the girls wanted to go to Fairview Cemetery on the city’s west side, where 125 people who had died on the Titanic were interred and where more than 200, some of them unrecognizable after the blast, had been killed on December 6, 1917, when a French munitions ship, the Mont Blanc, on convoy to Europe, had struck a Norwegian merchantman and exploded, razing most of the buildings on the city’s northern side, killing over fifteen hundred men, women, and children and permanently injuring thousands of others. To Lana’s surprise, she found the cemetery peculiarly comforting-why, she didn’t know.

  When they returned to the nurses’ quarters, they were summoned by Matron.

  “I don’t want my nurses tearing around town waving dollar bills about like tarts!”

  The nurses were taken aback and angry, but none of them stood up to her except Lana.

  “Matron, I don’t know who could have told you that. But we were on our own time and—”

  “Own?” asked Matron malevolently. “No one has their own time in a war.”

  Lana didn’t answer that as yet they had seen nothing of the war. Intuitively she sensed Matron hated her for her good looks.

  “Well,” Matron continued, “you’ll soon be too busy for any nonsense.” She paused for a moment, was about to turn her back on them, when she cast a steely gaze on Lana. “Mrs. La Roche, you may not be aware of it, but a great deal of unnecessary resentment can be caused by people with more money flashing it about in front of others who go without. Canadian nurses earn far less in real terms than you Americans — not nearly enough to hire taxis to roam at leisure—”

  “But, Matron,” interjected one of the two Canadian nurses, “we didn’t mind spending—”

  “The point I’m making is that there’ll be enough for people to gripe about once these wards start to fill, and believe me, they will. We’ll have enough to deal with without petty squabbling breaking out between Canadian and American and British servicemen about whose girl is whose and who has the most money. Don’t tell me — I’ve seen it before in—” She decided not to reveal her age. “I merely want you to act responsibly. That’s all.”

  Elizabeth, the black girl from Boston, shook her head as they watched Matron walk away, heels clicking on the hard linoleum floor. Even the echoes of her sharp footsteps on the immaculately clean floor had the very sound of cold efficiency.

  “I’ve been told about people like that, but I never believed they actually existed. Old bitch!”

  “They exist, all right,” said one of the Canadian girls. “Can’t bear to see anyone else happy. I think she likes the war — gives purpose to her miserable existence.” Lana felt herself going red with embarrassment.

  “Yes,” said the other Canadian. “They should put her on a sub, down and out of sight. Maybe if we get lucky, she’ll get torpedoed.”

  “With what?” asked the girl from Maine. They were all laughing except Lana. Elizabeth suddenly bit her lip, turned, and consolingly put her arm about Lana. “Hey, I ‘m sorry, Lana. That was some dumb thing to say.”

  The others had to wait for Elizabeth to explain that one of Lana’s brothers was a sub captain in the Atlantic Fleet. But Lana hadn’t been bothered by the reference to either subs or torpedoes. She was far more worried about the way she had stiffened when Elizabeth had put her arm around her. Now, even the tough of another human being trying to comfort her only raised her defenses. Had Jay destroyed her that much? she wondered, in which case her days of comforting as a nurse were surely numbered.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Via the armed services radio in Japan, news had reached the LPH Saipan that in New York a drug ring had been discovered by military police overseeing the loading of NATO supplies. Among the drugs stolen were substantial quantities of Demerol and morphine destined for the U.S. forces fighting in Europe. The news item had so upset General Douglas Freeman that he had been unable to complete his meal with the usual light banter of the officers’ mess.

  The general was now looking out into the darkness from the flight deck of the Saipan, its destroyers and forward ASW helos invisible about the eighteen-thousand-ton ship.

  “Know what they ought to do with them, Al?” he asked his aide. “All those junkies?”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  The general’s voice was made sharper by the salty wind whipping it away. “Shoot them. Like the Chinks do.” He was looking up through scattered stratus at a spill of stars twinkling over th
e Sea of Japan. “By God, I don’t like that Zhou bastard, but one thing those Commies know how to do is to deal with pushers and all the other scum. I find any in this outfit with glue up their goddamned nose, I’ll throw ‘em overboard.”

  “Pity you haven’t had time to get to know them, General.”

  “I’m well aware of that deficiency, Al. They’ll get a chance to size me up when I talk with them tonight. And I’ll get to know them well enough tomorrow. If we can hold past noon-well, we’ll make history. In, bang, and out! That’s the ticket”

  Freeman was about to go down to the troop deck when Al Banks decided to get something off his chest. “Sir, I haven’t had time really to get to know you yet.”

  “You resent me having command? Don’t think I’ve earned it? Too fast a promotion. That it?”

  “No, sir, not at all. It’s casualties I’m concerned about. I know soldiers, marines — airborne or otherwise — know they might be called in to do their job anywhere at any time. And they’ve had sudden changes in command before. But the scuttlebutt aboard this ship is that casualties are going to be exceptionally heavy.”

  “They’ve seen the projected figures — or they’ve seen figures leaked by someone to discredit my plan of attack?”

  Al Banks began to object.

  “Doesn’t matter how they found out,” cut in Freeman. “Even if they hadn’t seen the figures, they’ve been studying the satellite photos and mock-ups until they know every square inch. Hell, they’d be dummies if they didn’t. What do you expect me to do about it?”

  “They’re saying the projection is higher than seventy percent, General — way above any casualties that we would normally—”

  “Normally?” Freeman seized the word. “Now listen to me, Al.” As a stiff northerly was blowing across the darkened ship’s flight deck, Al Banks was unable to hear everything the general was saying but could feel Freeman’s eyes boring into him. “This isn’t a normal time. This isn’t a normal war. Besides which, following normal rules is a recipe for disaster for any dumb son of a bitch without imagination. Normal rules won’t win the goddamned thing. Commanders are changed all the time in battle because they followed normal rules. My God—” the general paused, like an engine building up more steam, turning to go back inside the ship “—we’ve got to get this thing sewn up so we can go over and kill those Russians.”

  “I’m not sure the men share your optimism, General. Taebek Mountains look pretty formidable even on a map, and they’re wondering—”

  “All right, I’ll speak to them about that, too. By God, I tell you, Al — I smell a big Washington rat around here trying to undermine my authority.”

  “I just think they’re scared, General. None of them has been in action before except on one or two missions during the invasion of Grenada.”

  “Grenada?” The general’s face was now visible in the dim light of the ship’s interior. They were walking down toward the helo deck, lights ablaze, all solid metal portholes sealed shut as the mechanics performed last-minute checks on the big three-engined Super Stallions and Chinooks, which, carrying forty-five and thirty-three men respectively, would be carrying half the fifteen-hundred-man force into Pyongyang, the other half coming in on the Hercules, right on the airport if possible — if not, circling and making the jump. “Grenada was a shambles,” said the general. “Sustained more injuries there from our own foul-ups than from any resistance we encountered.”

  Either side of them down the cavernous hangar deck, scores of technicians and ordnance men were now “bombing up” the smaller Apache attack helos, each Apache receiving two AA Sidewinder missiles, one on the edge of each stubby wing, two pods each carrying nineteen seventy-millimeter rockets and four Hellfire antitank missiles. Loaders were also laying the belts of high-explosive thirty-millimeter for the unmanned chain gun in the chin turret, which would be slaved to the gunner’s integrated helmet and display sight system or IHADSS. The general stepped aside to let a small forklift truck pass by loaded with. 50 armor-piercing trays for the port-side chain guns of the Black Hawk Hueys, the prototypes having proved themselves in Vietnam. Here and there the sharp, angular shapes of the fifty-nine-foot Apaches and several smaller Cobras were broken by raised engine cowlings, laser sensor boxes half-out, and thermal imager sensors being tested by army and navy electronic technicians.

  Farther down they passed tightly stowed three-in-one off-the-shoulder antitank Starstreak missiles, which would be used by the Marine Air Ground Task Force units to stop any tanks that might be brought to bear if the enemy tanks got through the airdropped minefields.

  As he entered the huge area of the troop deck, one below the hangar, where rows upon rows of concertina bunks were drawn up to the ceiling while not in use, revealing an area half the size of a football field, Freeman looked out upon a sea of over a thousand faces. In less than ten hours — if the weather held— just before dawn, they would leave, and those who survived and were lifted out would probably number no more than two or three hundred. The very idea of the desperate gamble, to strike an unsuspecting blow at the enemy and to rejuvenate America’s confidence in herself, as Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo had done so many years before, filled Freeman with such pride and expectation, he felt his whole body gripped with excitement. However, he knew the men before him didn’t share in his happy anticipation. It was something a commander had to change. He would, he knew, be relying on that rare ability of his and a few others like him to convey a sense of immediacy, of intimacy with the person whom they have just met as if they had known him all their lives. He carried with him an intensity and aura of tough trust, and above all, the deep-seated fanaticism that other Americans, he knew, would not call fanaticism: the rock-solid belief that you could fix anything — that, God willing, you could put it right.

  Going up on the small rostrum made up of aircraft packing cases, the Marine Corps and Infantry flags behind him, Old Glory higher than the others, Freeman knew this was the most important speech he had ever made. In the front row sat his company commanders, five in all, and the padre assigned to the USS Saipan. He’d heard Freeman was a cowboy.

  Freeman glanced down at the padre, at the company commanders, then up at the waiting faces. He was immediately struck by their youth — most, he guessed, no more than twenty, maybe twenty-five.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  In the Mid North Atlantic the sea was turning angry, the northward flow of the Gulf Stream running up against a cold Arctic front. It was a mixed blessing for Convoy R-1, for on the one hand, it meant that enemy subs’ sonar would have a harder time separating ships’ engines from the turmoil of the air-sea interface, where hollows had become deeper, troughs more frequent. It was, however, also more difficult for the convoy escorts, or rather those that were left, to detect the noise of submarine props in the turbulence as increasingly heavy seas crashed against the ships, distorting the noise patterns even further. It wasn’t impossible for the operators to work, but it made them much more tense than usual, conscious of how false echoes, or blips wrongly interpreted, could cause the launching of a SUBROC missile from the convoy’s escorts into its own Sea King helo screen, as happened earlier.

  An equal possibility, HMS Peregrine’s captain realized, was to mistake one of your screen subs as an enemy sub, or to throw it into the suspicious “unknown” category. Accordingly, at 2200 hours he ordered mirror semaphore to signal all destroyers and frigates to be especially alert to this danger lest they prematurely launch a torpedo or depth charge attack. “The situation’s complicated, Number One,” the captain added, “because none of our sub screen will, of course, come up and radio their position to us for fear of revealing themselves to Ivan.”

  For this reason the captain reminded all those on the bridge and in the combat control room that they had to be particularly cautious if one of their own Trafalgar subs from R-1’s screen picked up an enemy sub. The Trafalgar’s skipper’s plan of attack would more likely than not mean he’d have to ta
ke the Trafalgar out of the fan-shaped sub screen and, in order not to reveal its position to the enemy, would be unable to notify the convoy. This could result in electronic misidentification of the kind that had caused a USS guided missile cruiser, Vincennes, to shoot down a commercial air bus in 1988.

  Further down the line, in HMS Peregrine’s mess, William Spence was witnessing one of the strangest sights of R-1 ‘s voyage so far, indeed one of the strangest sights in the whole British navy. Leading Seaman Carswell, with a full cup of coffee placed carefully atop a small silver salver, proceeded to carry out the first steps in the dance that had won him fame throughout the fleet as the only steward in the fleet who, leaving the galley with a full cup of coffee, could deliver it to the bridge unspilled, no matter how rough the weather. In the worst storms, with the litheness of a prima ballerina, fighting gravity against impossible angles, he was a sight to behold, as he began his trip toward the stairwells, his legs seemingly made of rubber, sometimes walking back, giving a few paces, then recovering the lost distance the next second with a short, fast run, the cup held aloft as if he himself were in a gimbals mounting. More than once, new lieutenants had lost a day’s pay by having an unofficial wager with another officer, waiting impatiently upon the news that Carswell had left the galley and was now on his way up, expecting the seaman would trip at least once on the way. But so far it had not happened, leaving Carswell with what the ship’s company called an unbroken number of “FCDs”—full cups delivered. Several crew had already written inquiring whether Carswell’s feat qualified for mention in the Guiness Book of Records. They hoped a reply would be waiting for them when they returned to their home base at Plymouth.