Rage of Battle wi-2

by Ian Slater

  * * *

  While a prisoner, dressed in Stasi greatcoat and helmet, with Stasi identification tags, and captured by the Coldstream Guards during the British advance on Stadthagen, was claiming he was an American called “Brentwood,” General Douglas Freeman was receiving a congratulatory call from the president of the United States.

  * * *

  Four days later, when it was confirmed by a Private Thelman and others who’d escaped when the fuel dump at Stadthagen had “blown” that the man who said he was David Brentwood was in fact David Brentwood, Freeman’s headquarters was informed.

  David, weak from pneumonia and en route on a hospital train to Lille in Belgium, oblivious to the fact that news of his exploit was now being broadcast around the world, was greeted ecstatically upon arrival in Lille by normally reserved Belgian civilians, who a week before had thought they would be under the heel of Soviet occupation. In the hospital’s admissions office, a pretty, young female clerk asked David, pronouncing every English word with painstaking exactitude, “This honor medal you will be getting — it is made of gold?”

  David, sitting down, his breathing labored, feeling so tired, he could fall asleep that instant, nevertheless managed a wink. “It had better be,” he said. Her name tag, he noticed, was Lili.

  “You will be famous, no?” she asked. “Like your General Freeman.”

  He liked the way she said “General”—sounded cute. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said, pausing for breath, “but I taught him all he knew.”

  She laughed, and he with her. It was the first time he had done so in a long while. He watched her, trying not to be too obvious, as she completed the form. No rings, he noticed. It reminded him of the last letter he’d had from Melissa telling him as gently as she could that perhaps they shouldn’t be too hasty about marriage plans. After all, she reminded him, his brother Robert hadn’t become engaged until he was much older than David. Lili was looking better all the time.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Cold as it looked, rising bleak and forbidding out of the fog, Dutch Harbor was a welcome sight to Lana and the evacuees from Adak after hours of force-six winds, more than enough seasickness to go around on the boat, and air sickness on the Hercules flight from Atka.

  When they got ashore, the news of the American-led breakout from the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket was general knowledge, but as yet, news of David’s action had not been received. In fact, the only news about her family was a letter from her mother, its postmark showing that it had been mailed a week before.

  At first, after Frank had left her to report to the base commander, Lana had looked forward to reading the letter, but before long it had made her feel thoroughly depressed. Her mother told her how excited she was about Robert’s imminent marriage to Rosemary Spence, lamenting the fact that none of the family could be there, all together again. She was naturally worried about David but reported that Ray was “coming along” and that “your father is still doing too much and has started bringing work home with him after some ‘tiff’ at the office.”

  Lana rushed through the remainder of the letter, feeling more angry than grateful. It was good to hear from home, but her mother had started using a kind of Pablum code with her ever since Lana had had what her mother called her “little problem” with Jay — as if avoidance of discussing anything unpleasant would make it go away. She had never been like that until Ray was so badly burned on the Blaine. What did her mother mean, she wondered, by Ray “coming along”? And what exactly was Father’s “tiff” at work?

  When Lana finished reading the letter, she realized that what was really eating away at her was what would happen to Frank. They had hardly stepped ashore when he was requested to report to Colonel Morin. She was afraid that he would have to report back to the carrier as soon as possible. She told him he wasn’t ready, that after what he’d been through in the last few days, he needed rest — and that she didn’t have any qualms about telling Morin that.

  But he’d gone all macho on her and said that if he had to go, he had to go, that “someone owes those marines back there.”

  And she knew he was right. But the thought of losing him, just when she’d felt her life was coming together again, filled her with such anxiety that although all she wanted to do was sleep — she couldn’t.

  When Shirer came back from Morin’s office, he told her he didn’t have to go back to the carrier — at least not immediately, not until he and the squadron of F-14s being ferried the following day to Dutch Harbor had flown an attack and reconnaissance mission over Adak.

  * * *

  As wind-driven rain swept the runway at Dutch Harbor, the red-vested ordnance man stepped out from beneath the wing of Shirer’s F-14, holding the red streamers up, showing Shirer that all safety wires had been removed — the bombs and missiles now ready. Shirer gave him the thumbs-up okay, and within a minute the afterburning thrust of the twin Pratt and Whitney turbofans had the Tomcat aloft, leading the other nine in arrowhead formation for the 450-mile mission to Adak. Climbing fast, they leveled out at ten thousand feet, keeping subsonic, wings on full spread to conserve fuel for the nine-hundred-mile return trip. This would give the planes well over an hour above and around Adak, where each plane would drop its concrete Divers to crater the runway, hopefully rendering it unusable for the Russians until a U.S. seaborne and combined-ops invasion could be mounted. Any dogfights, of course, would drastically decrease the time over target to a matter of minutes. With the afterburners kicking in, the Tomcats would consume a third of their fuel in less than four minutes at full war speed.

  As Dutch Harbor slid back on the snail-gray sea, Shirer, for the first time since his carrier sorties in the Sea of Japan, worried if he would return. Yet he was not so much afraid as impatient. No other woman had made such an impression on him — merely to be near her was exciting, an excitement only increased by anticipation. Having been unable to spend any time with her since their arrival in Dutch Harbor with the rest of the evacuees from Adak, he found it difficult now to think of anything else. Last night he’d dreamed of having her, but each time they embraced, she drew away from him— shy or afraid, he couldn’t tell. Perhaps both. He told himself not to get all hung up about it — to expect too much. If war had taught him anything, it was that. And a relationship took time, or so they said. But who had time in a war?

  At fifteen thousand feet, they were over Umnak, a hundred miles west of Dutch Harbor, and he could see the white cone of Okmok Caldera and the black patches that warned of the turmoil below the surface. The next instant they were in thick cloud, which had ballooned up under the pressure of a westward-flowing millimaw, covering the western Aleutians all the way from Atka to Amchitka Island. Even the most experienced pilot was leery of going into soup on passive radar and radio silence, but any signal emanating from the Tomcats could provide a homing beam for an enemy missile.

  Keeping on radio silence, not even talking to their RIO in the backseat until the last possible moment, Shirer and the other ten pilots began their descent toward Adak, instruments telling them they were okay but every pilot wanting to see for himself the IAP of Cape Adagdak on the northern side of Mount Adagdak, which would bring them over Clam Lagoon and Kulak Bay to the left of Andrew Lagoon, where they would pass between Mount Moffet on their right, Mount Reed to their left, exiting over Shagak Bay and Adak Strait on the western side of the island.

  Coming down through the cloud, his cockpit in a constant slipstream of moisture, Shirer saw the weather clearing and switched on the active radar, jammers, and the four cameras in the nose.

  Suddenly the cloud broke, Adak dead ahead, the sea a shining cobalt blue shot through with silver, three dots-fishing boats, most likely — far left on Kulak Bay.

  Almost immediately the sky started to smudge with AA fire, the gutted remnants of Adak Base, like some vast, scattered campfire, racing toward them at over six hundred miles an hour as their first bombs toppled and they climbed to avoid the shock waves.
He saw an orange wink from one of the fishing boats and his alarm was flashing — the trawler had fired a missile. Shirer released chaff and flares to thwart its trajectory, felt his Tomcat buffeted, the F-14 to his right gone.

  “Bogey four high, four high!” someone was yelling. He glimpsed the MiG closing, reduced speed, slid left in a defensive break, hoping the Russian would overshoot. Instead the Russian stayed with him, diving down, as Shirer went into a rolling scissors, the two fighters turning fast around each other, waiting for a shot. Suddenly Shirer found himself in the MiG’s cone of vulnerability, the three green arcs on Shirer’s HUD not yet cutting the MiG’s image, the bars widening, Shirer gaining but the MiG still outside the impact lines. The Russian wiggled left, right, high left, but Shirer was still on him, the sea a blue wall far to his left.

  “Angel Two, Angel Two…” came his radar operator’s voice, warning him he was at two thousand feet. He hauled the Tomcat into a steep climb, saw the Russian behind him, then dropped like a stone, the HUD’s circle on the MiG’s tail for a millisecond. Shirer pressed the button and felt the staccato tug of the twenty-millimeter multibarreled cannon. The tail was gone, the MiG’s cockpit flashed in the sun, the pilot ejecting, his chute ballooning now miles behind the Tomcat. By now Shirer was fifty miles out to sea, and as he headed back toward Adak, he saw the palls of smoke from the bombs of the other eight fighters. Swooping low in one last pass, coming in west of the island, he saw the trawler lost in a thick smoke, but it hadn’t been hit, the smoke camouflage of its own making. The cockpit went milky, and for a moment he thought he’d hit a seabird, but the radio officer told him it was tracer coming up from the trawler.

  Climbing, banking hard left now out beyond Sitkin Sound east of the island, he came back in, upwind of the trawler, its smoke no longer affording it as much protection, its tracer still feeling up toward him. He centered the dot and gave the trawler a one-second burst, his tracer dancing on the deck, shattering the wheelhouse, but still the trawler kept firing, Shirer recognizing it now as the boat that had evacuated them from the island.

  “That thing must be armor-plated between the bulkheads,” said Shirer’s RIO. Now everything slid into place, explaining the tracer he’d seen pouring in from the sea to Adak Base the night he was shot down.

  “Maybe he’s got a titanium hull?” the RIO half joked.

  “Not for much longer,” said Shirer. The trawler was centered, and Shirer released his FAE-fuel air explosive — the trawler engulfed in an ovoid canopy of fire.

  * * *

  As he climbed down from the cockpit, thanked the ground crew, and walked across the tarmac toward the debriefing hut, the weather was piteously cold, some of the worst he’d ever seen, but he couldn’t care less, for Lana was waiting. Though he knew that shortly he and she would be part of this new war in the Aleutians, for now at least they would be together, and just as when he was in the air, high above the earth, where time was measured not by the hour but by the second and life rushed in the vein, it was the quality of the time they would have together that was important, not its duration. Not even the fact that the camera recon showed that the Flogger he had shot down had probably been the one that had brought him down particularly interested him. There was no doubt the Flogger’s logo — a Russian name that translated as “Marchenko” above a rampant black bear crushing a bald eagle in its claws — would stay with him. And it was certain that the two air forces would clash in battles yet to come. But until then, he would spend as much good time with Lana as possible.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Her face drawn, beside herself with worry about Edouard and his parents, her sense of self-dignity and worth shattered by the humiliation of her jail cell, Malle Jaakson was lost for the first time in her life. For the past fifty-odd years she had been a model citizen of the republic of Estonia. To her, people who ended up behind bars were the ne’er-do-wells of society. Even political prisoners, automatically assumed by the West to be innocent of all wrongdoing against society, had been regarded by her as fundamentally troublemakers, the kind who would not be happy in any system. And now, here she was inside the damp, cold cell — the smell of it the odor of ageless despair. No matter how you were when they brought you here, the degradation of that moment would never leave. Forever after, a part of you would feel dirty.

  It was not the charge of murder that overwhelmed her; of this she knew she was guilty — she had seen no other way— and would pay the ultimate price. What had struck her with the most force was the indifference of her jailers. She had feared they would beat her, and they had not. At first she thought this was because she had no information to give, that they assumed she knew no saboteurs in Tallinn — which was true — but it quickly became evident to her that she did not matter to them because she was a mere thing, one of the countless thousands of Balts they had processed through these cells over the years. They had photographed her, given her a number, checked her file for previous crimes against the state — there were none; indeed, she had an honorable discharge from the Baltic Fleet’s signal school — then locked her up and left her to herself. She had found this bad enough, but what was worse was the mundane but dreadful formality of having to surrender her stockings, her bra, the belt of her coat, the laces from her low-heeled shoes, and her glasses. Having not said a word so far, she now asked them why this petty humiliation was necessary.

  “To stop you,” answered one of the guards, his voice one of tired boredom, “from trying to kill yourself.”

  Do you care? she had wanted to ask, but the cell gave her the answer. It was merely a rule they were enforcing, like that of having to use the bucket in one corner of the cell. To move it was punishable by solitary confinement. They issued her prison garb: a coarse black-and-gray-striped woolen dress, supposed to fit all sizes and which, without a belt, made everyone look pregnant. How, she wondered, did the men’s prison “pajamas” stay up? surely they were not fitted with a belt. She remembered seeing trials on TV of those charged with crimes against the state, the prisoners required to stand before the prosecutor, allowed only one hand with which to clutch the waist. Sometimes one of the more frail prisoners, who could not keep his balance, would falter, and the pajamas would drop — the packed courtroom erupting in laughter — the three judges warning the gallery they would not tolerate such outbursts.

  After she had been so suddenly taken from the world above to the world of the cells, the effect of her first few hours, an old man, a “psychiatric criminal” in the next cell, telling her what he would do with her, was devastating. She was terrified, not of what she had done but of how quickly her self-confidence had been shattered by the most banal loss of dignity.

  Malle had always believed she was made of sterner stuff, but now, with the suddenness of revelation, she understood how so many confessions had been obtained by the secret police. Most of the public, she thought, felt as she did: that apart from admissions of guilt extracted under duress, most other confessions, especially those given in the first twelve hours, when the ink was barely dry on the charge sheet, were true. Now she understood how, in those first hours, the psychological collapse could be total. You were ready to confess to anything — just to get your shoelaces back.

  During the night she had been unable to sleep, the terror of her impending death mounting in her, the madman in the cell quiet. Asleep or dead, she did not know. She called to him and there was no answer. She listened vainly for the sound of breathing, but there was none, or if there was, it was muffled by the hollow clanking of the pipes. In that moment the certainty of the firing squad made her so weak that she longed only for its finality — the end of her suffering— and, sobbing, she clung to the bars.

  “You!” She thought it was a new guard she hadn’t seen before, but without her glasses, she was unsure. She could hear the crunching of boots on the cobbled courtyard above her and the click of the rifles’ bolts.

  “Come on!” the guard hurried her. Instinctively she looked about f
or her glasses, then remembered they had been taken. Walking in front of him, she heard the crash of the volley, the clicking of rifles, and the crunch of the boots again. Barely able to stand, clinging to the banister as she was ordered to the second floor, her mind numb with fear and unable to see the edge of the steps clearly because of her shortsightedness, she was nevertheless vaguely aware of the guard changing his deportment, and brushing what appeared to be dandruff off the shoulder boards of his baggy uniform.

  Inside the room, she squinted in the brightness of the northern sun that was streaming in, its beams of light giving the room’s sparse but elegant furniture a surreal look. But there was nothing surreal or imaginary about the Russian officer, his back to her — an admiral, from his splendid uniform. He turned as the guard slid the chair behind her, told her to sit down, clicked his heels, and left the room, the echoes of his footsteps hollow and hard. She sat down.

  “Why?” asked the admiral, looking out the window, standing behind his wide, baize-covered desk, a ray of sunlight slicing the air between them, dust particles dancing crazily within. “Why did you kill the corporal?”

  “He did unspeakable things to me.”

  “He raped you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many times did this occur?”

  “Does it matter?” She marveled at her defiant tone.

  “Why did you not come to the authorities?”

  “He was the authorities,” she said. It was as if her inner voice, against all odds, demanded to be heard. “He came to my city. Like you all come and do what you want.”