by Ian Slater
Bering thought about it and said he would — on one condition.
“Which is?” pressed the commander anxiously.
Bering replied that as an “independent fisherman,” he didn’t have the benefits of any group medical insurance, especially as he was separated from his wife, and that now his two teenagers were in “braces,” the cost of dental treatment was keeping him broke.
“Leave it to me,” said Morin. “From here on in, you’re covered. I’ll get the paperwork done this afternoon. Don’t worry about it.” The commander’s gaze shifted to Lana, then back to Bering. “I’ll organize a platoon and transport. But I want this whole operation kept under wraps.”
“Then we should use my trawler,” put in Bering. “If there is anyone on the islands up to no good, there’s no point in advertising we’re coming.”
“But you’ll have to land somewhere. They’ll see your trawler coming whether they suspect anything or not.”
“Not if I go in fog, they won’t. And that’s the forecast for the next week.”
“All right,” said Morin, smiling appreciatively. “Sounds good to me.”
“Okay,” said Bering enthusiastically. “Would you like to come along, Miss Brentwood?”
She blushed despite herself. Was he serious? “I’ll stay here with the commander.”
“Lucky commander,” said Bering mischievously. Morin was decidedly embarrassed.
As she and Bering left the Quonset hut, the sky above them was studded with stars, but even now wisps of fog could be seen sneaking into the harbor, and for want of anything better to say, Lana noted the obvious. “Think we’ve seen the end of the good weather for a while.”
“I’ll be back,” said Bering. “I’d like to take you out when I get back. Okay with you?”
“Why — yes, I suppose—”
“Great.”
The next minute he was gone, into the night, heading back toward the docks of Dutch Harbor, his fisherman’s wet-weather coat draped over his arm — like a helpless slave, Lana thought, and she felt a stirring in her.
* * *
“Heard the scuttlebutt?” asked her roommate almost the moment she returned to barracks.
“What?” asked Lana.
“They think there’s some Commie missile base down on one of those islands. We’re probably going to see some action around here shortly.”
Lana didn’t know what shocked her most — news of the search-and-destroy mission having already leaked or that her roommate seemed so eager to see “action”—which meant broken bodies for the Waves.
“After this gig,” the girl told Lana, “in Civvy Street they’ll be begging us to work in OR.”
“If,” said Lana, “there’ll be any ORs left.”
“Ah — we’ll win, honey.”
“Like we did in Vietnam,” said Lana.
“You’re a gloom cloud all of a sudden. Morin chew your ass out?”
“No.”
“Cheer up then. Nobody’s going to push the big button. They’re not crazy, lady.”
“If they’re not crazy,” said Lana, “they wouldn’t have started a war in the first place.”
“I don’t know,” said the bubbling roommate. “Sometimes there’s no other way. Sometimes you have to fight.”
What depressed Lana more was that her fellow Wave was right. Sometimes there was no other way. Either that or you simply walked away in defeat as she had with Jay.
Her roommate, running late for her shift, grabbed her cape. “You know anything about this Bering?”
“No,” said Lana.
“Oh, come on, Lana. You were with him in Morin’s office.”
“Yes, but I mean I don’t know anything about him. Some kind of — fisherman — I don’t know.”
“Some kind of fisherman… I’d like to go fishing with him. I’d like to get him under the sheets — in between them— or on top of them — and…”
“All right,” said Lana.
* * *
Though he had just sunk the Yumashev, Robert Fernshaw’s initial rush of victory as he ditched gave way to empathy for the hundreds of Russian sailors miles away who, like him, were at the mercy of the Atlantic. Now and then he could glimpse patches of them through the crazily tilting rectangle of his life raft’s flap as the raft slid up and down the walls of ever-deepening troughs. The Exocet Fernshaw had fired had been so devastating that he knew many of the Russian crew wouldn’t have had time to make for the life rafts. Caught for a moment atop a huge, sweeping swell, he saw the dot of the Russian chopper hovering over the stricken sailors, winching a dozen or so aboard and — it looked like — ferrying others from the oil-streaked water to the few lifeboats. But how far could the chopper go? Even on a full tank, the Hormone’s range wasn’t much more than four hundred miles.
Fernshaw stopped thinking about the Russians, any sympathy he may have had for them as fellow human beings being quickly dissipated by the reality of the war. It wasn’t NATO’s divisions that had breached the Fulda Gap and started the war. Anyway, they certainly weren’t going to worry about him. He checked that his raft’s SARS — salt-activated radio-to-satellite beacon — was working and was struck by the irony that if an Allied ship was over the horizon, it would probably see, via satellite relay photos, the scores of Russian sailors in the water first, and would miss him altogether if the beacon packed it in after the first few hours of full-power transmission.
The swells that had been mere scratches on a blue slate from the air were now growing alarmingly, the high, white cumulus bruising, and the ocean no longer deep blue but a relentless and endless gray. But perhaps, he told himself, the swells that seemed to have grown more precipitous in the last five minutes were not harbingers of worsening weather but merely appeared more ominous beneath the leaden sky. Then he saw the Hormone, its coaxial rotors a black blur, and for a moment or two Fernshaw was convinced he was about to die, his heart pounding, thinking of his wife and four-year-old boy, the cloying smell of the claustrophobic rubber raft closing in on him, making him nauseated.
All his training against G forces was of no avail in the heaving chaos of the sea, where one second he felt his whole body grow lighter as the raft swept up the side of a fifteen-foot swell before plummeting, his stomach churning, into the next trough. Not a religious man, Fernshaw nevertheless said a prayer for deliverance, and it was only when he glimpsed the Russian chopper suspended above him, a buoyancy bag inflated around each of its four wheels, a rescue cable and harness still dangling from its side door, that he dared hope fate was finally lending him a hand — that the old law of the sea of enemies helping one another when they were in peril might yet prevail. One of the Russians in the Hormone, immediately behind the copilot, was dimly visible through the salt-speckled Perspex of the chopper. On impulse, Fernshaw waved. The man waved back and the chopper rose.
In the chopper several of the Yumashev’s rescued crew members made to cross the Hormone’s cabin to look out, but the pilot, alarmed by their abruptly shifting the chopper’s center of gravity, brusquely ordered them to “Sadit’sya!”— “Sit down!” A young cook, still shivering, ignored the order and remained standing, one hand on the cabin rail, the other clutching a rough woolen navy blanket about his shoulders, his wet hair and beard matted with oil sludge. As he watched the silvered barrel toppling from beneath the chopper, the bright orange raft slid bumpily down a swell’s steep incline as the chopper banked.
The sea erupted seconds later, the depth charge’s fuse set for poverknostny kontakt— “surface contact”—its shock wave visible, a huge ring shuddering and racing out from its epicenter, the tent-shaped raft miraculously still inflated but tumbling down the outside of a high, foaming column of water, as if caught in a mossy, green waterfall, the enemy pilot’s body, limp and lifeless, hitting the water before the raft.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The explosion, its range put at three miles by the Roosevelt’s sonar conversion computer, was heard aboard t
he sub as no more than a muffled cough, but it was loud enough to startle Robert Brentwood out of his light sleep, his photo of Rosemary sliding from his chest as his hand darted out to stop the Walkman from falling as he turned. Glancing up at the Control relay in his cabin, he saw the sub was maintaining the anticipated TACAMO rendezvous by crawling along at less than 3.5 knots on the emergency “bring it home” shaft against a crosscurrent. The current, surprisingly strong and not marked on the chart, was disconcertingly “mixed” in temperature and salinity.
As officer of the deck, Peter Zeldman lost no time in alerting everyone in Control to a possible inversion layer coming up. Soon every man aboard knew the sub might be approaching a “plume,” a less dense area of water caused by either fresh or hot water springs from the earth’s crust “streaming” through the colder, more dense sea around them. And everyone knew how many subs before them had suddenly plunged in a less dense column, hitting the bottom at over 130 miles an hour before tanks could be vented to regain neutral buoyancy.
The explosion, albeit muted in the distance, was at once an added strain and a possible relief for those in Control as it could mean that another Allied submarine was in the area, unknowingly taking the heat off them. On the other hand, as Zeldman pointed out to Brentwood, if it had been an enemy ASW aircraft or surface vessel searching for the Roosevelt, then the explosion some way off indicated that the sub’s pursuers were way off course and had merely been attacking blind, looking for the sub around the last reported position of the Yumashev.
But whatever was going on about him, Robert Brentwood was certain of one thing — after his sinking the cruiser, the Russians would gather their forces, and he, like the convoys, could expect more determined and pervasive attacks en route to the haven of Scotland’s Holy Loch, still over a thousand miles to the northeast. Brentwood also knew that now there was no way they could risk going up for a TACAMO rendezvous. They were on their own.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In Baltic Fleet headquarters at Baltiysk, near the Lithuanian port of Kaliningrad, a bad mood permeated the hallways, especially in the office of the Baltic Fleet’s naval intelligence unit, which reported directly to the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravienie—the GRU, main intelligence directorate of the Soviet general staff. No one among the Estonian workers was cooperating, including those of Russian background. The large minority of Russians in Estonia, as well as native Estonians, had been approached to see if they had heard anything about who was sabotaging munitions in the factories in and around Tallinn, the Estonian capital. They said they had not.
The GRU general had no doubt they were lying, their silence taken by the GRU as yet another legacy of what was contemptuously referred to as Gorbachev’s “glorious” reign. The Estonians had been permitted to pass laws forbidding Russian workers from voting unless they’d lived in Estonia for several years. The Estonian Russians had suddenly found themselves second-class citizens within the Soviet Union, and now they were in no mood to risk the wrath of the Lesnye Bortsy za Svobodu— “Forest Freedom Fighters” (the Estonian underground) — by helping military intelligence.
To make matters worse for the GRU, there had been an astonishing display of solidarity among workers of all backgrounds outside the Estonian capital as well. Not only were the shipyard and factory hands not saying anything, but Russian immigrant workers as far east as Kohtla-Järve, where most of them worked the oil shale deposits, were also proving to be uncooperative toward the GRU.
At first the GRU chief thought he could run the saboteurs to ground simply by tracing the serial numbers of the munitions that had been assigned to the Yumashev, most specifically the RBU rockets which had failed so miserably in the Yumashev’s attack upon the American submarine. But as his men fanned out amid the giant gantries of Tallinn’s shipyards and to the various munitions assembly and distribution centers along the thousand miles of Baltic coastline, from Virborg in the northern sector of the Gulf of Finland east to Leningrad, then west again to Tallinn and Riga, and as far south as Kaliningrad in Lithuania, they made a troubling discovery — that many serial numbers had been duplicated, in some cases triplicated, in different ports and the same port. This was bad enough, but as they tried to narrow the problem down to what specific shift, what factory or yard, had installed the fuses, they found themselves in a quagmire of administrative chaos, one of the clock-in cards being signed “MM Mouse,” and responsibility for the mess being passed around like a game of musical chairs.
Back in Leningrad Naval Base, it wasn’t a game Admiral Brodsky enjoyed playing. Below his office window, the Neva River looked leaden, the cloven sky morose, and in the autumn air he could smell the heavy mustiness of fallen leaves. An early winter predicted. This meant the Gulf of Finland could be iced over by Christmas, only five weeks off. Even with the few icebreakers he had available, Brodsky knew that early ice would spell disaster — resupply of the Baltic Fleet impossible. The thought of the fleet that had broken out into the Atlantic, after the joint Soviet forces’ assault on the Denmark Straits and the NATO Danish base of Bornholm Island, being left without vital food and munitions, unable to press its attack against the U.S. submarines, was anathema to Brodsky.
“I cannot believe,” Brodsky told his aide, “that in the more than fifty thousand shipyard and dockworkers we have for the Baltic Fleet, there is no one willing to talk.”
“They were ready for us, Comrade Admiral,” his aide explained. “They knew we’d discover the sabotage sooner or later. If I might make a suggestion…”
“Yes?”
“With due respect to our naval intelligence — we should hand this over from GRU to the MPO.” He meant the Morskaya Pogranichnaya Okhrama, the maritime border troops of the KGB.
“What can their frigates and gunboats do that naval intelligence can’t?”
“I wasn’t thinking of that aspect, sir. I had their shore people in mind. Undercover, antiespionage division.”
“Why would they know any more than our GRU?” asked the admiral, turning farther around in his chair.
“In 1949 British military intelligence, Department Six, were running an ‘Operation Jungle’ in the three Baltic states. KGB had it pinned from the very beginning.”
Admiral Brodsky nodded, but it was only a dim memory. He was searching for a name. “That would have been Luki—”
“Lukasevics,” put in his aide. “Yes, sir, his control was Carr. Well, Lukasevics single-handedly invented a partisan Baltic army, which MI6 was desperate to keep alive when the postwar was becoming the Cold War. Washington was just as desperate for information. Moscow center obliged. They had Lukasevics feeding Carr’s MI6 disinformation, and Carr in turn fed the CIA. Carr kept recruiting and sending agents to the Baltic. Six networks in all. And we knew — that is, the KGB knew — who they were the moment they landed.”
The admiral shifted impatiently. “Where are you taking me, Captain?”
“Just this, sir. The KGB has kept a much closer watch on the Baltic than we have. Especially in Latvia and Estonia-most of all in Tallinn.”
“But eventually the British did find out,” replied the admiral. “Their network’s blown.”
“Blown, yes, Admiral, but networks don’t simply close down. Some of those recruited by Lukasevics were genuine partisans. They didn’t know they were being run by KGB. They reformed, waited for another chance — waiting for a Gorbachev — for anything to give them a chance. But Lukasevics waited also. He still had his informers and kept them in place within the new networks. They still believed he was London’s man, you see.”
“You’re telling me,” said Brodsky, grimacing, massaging the swollen joints of his left hand, “we should turn the entire investigation over to KGB’s maritime division?”
“Either that, Admiral, or they could let us have some of their files.”
Brodsky shook his head. He wasn’t that naive about intelligence matters. “No, you were right the first time. If we must do it, Comrade, we will have to
relinquish control of the investigation. As it is, they’ll probably be surly that we left it so long. Further delay will only make matters worse. Perhaps I should put it in the form of a request? Let’s see: ‘To assist us in a case of national emergency’?” He turned to the captain. “That should break the ice. It is also true. Though how their MPO troops can identify the source of the sabotage from the same serial numbers we have is beyond me.
Sometimes Admiral Brodsky struck his aide as being bone-thick between the ears. A cautious naval tactician and ploddingly able liaison officer between the Northern and Baltic Fleets, he did not possess the subtlety of mind necessary for intelligence work — nor the necessary toughness. Though a stern disciplinarian, he was nevertheless known to exhibit bourgeois sentimentality when it came to running personnel matters to ground, particularly in cases involving three-year conscripts who went AWOL early in their shipboard assignments. His detractors said he was weak on such matters because as a young conscript in the michman—”warrant officer”—program, he had fallen in love with one of the women conscripts, who, like most women between nineteen and forty at that time, were being trained as radio officers. She was an Estonian from Tallinn. Brodsky’s parents had objected strongly, and it was said that only the urging of more sensible heads among his comrades had prevented Brodsky from going AWOL from his unit in MV Frunze, the Soviet Union’s Annapolis, where he was in training as a surface vessel line officer.
The would-be marriage never happened, and a young man’s passion became sublimated through the rigorous requirements of the Frunze academy and sea duty as a midshipman in the Baltic Fleet, where he’d learned the cold necessity of subjugating individual desires in duty to the state. In the Western navies, they called it setting your sights on your career, and women were supposed to follow, not impede.
Still, the gruff sixty-seven-year-old had never forgotten Malle Vesiland, the picture of her long, blond hair done up in a severe bun, as per regulations, making her twice as attractive to him, his youthful dreams of seeing it fall free in the flush of passion as fresh in his old man’s heart as it had been a thousand years ago when they were young. Malle’s features had blurred in the memory, and Brodsky had no doubt that she, like most women in the republics, would wear her age badly. But no matter; the unfulfilled dream he’d held as a young midshipman was as new in him now as the day he had first met her in Leningrad.