by Ian Slater
“And so will their southern arm,” said Freeman. “S-Three. They’ll try to pincer us, box us in, with their triple play — their armor coming at us through the taiga west of the lake, down from the north on the ice, and up from the south on the ice.” Freeman was smiling at Norton. “The marshal is going to get a big surprise, Dick. Son of a bitch waited until the warming started, figuring I couldn’t move armor east fast enough through the thaw — least not as far as Lake Baikal’s west shore — to stop him. Well — he’s right. But that cocky bastard is in for an earlier springtime than he anticipated, gentlemen.”
Freeman was positively beaming. Striding to the huge wall map, he took the Day-Glo marker pen and drew a crimson slash line from the Siberian mid, or S-Two, position, east across the lake, drawing another line parallel to it east across the lake from the S-Three position farther south. “Those tramtracks are our corridor, gentlemen. Fifty miles wide south to north on our front, twenty miles deep west to east from Port Baikal to the lake’s eastern shore. Now Dick, I want volunteers to lay the flare lines for the corridor a mile or so out from the western edge of the lake. Then once that’s done, tell the TACAIR boys to hit anything outside the corridor.”
Now the duty officer was starting to see it. The flares would mark the outer limits of the American defense — any Siberian tanks north or south that ventured out onto the ice, attempting to encircle and cut off the Americans from the far eastern shore in a pincer movement, would have to forego the formidable protection of the dense taiga. Even in heavy fog their infrared signatures would be more easily picked up on the completely uncluttered background of the ice. It would be a killing ground for the A-10 Thunderbolts’ thirty-millimeter guns, a killing ground that would be as devastating for the Siberians as the Basra road had been for die fleeing Iraqi armor. Just as the Republican Guards’ tanks had broken out from their underground shelters to do battle, only to be slaughtered in the open, the Siberian tanks would be doomed the moment they emerged from the thick cover of shoreline taiga.
Convinced he was approaching the crowning moment of his career, Freeman tried but simply could not contain his excitement, knowing that snatching victory from such an apparently massive defeat would astonish the world and forever place him in the annals of warfare.
Meanwhile, as the babushka and her husband were driven west of the lake toward Podkamennaya township, General Minsky’s regiment sat still, including the BMPs which, though stationary, were still churning out thick, white smoke into the already thick whiteness of the blizzard. Waiting.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Aleutian Islands, Alaska
As if the lineup outside the doctor’s office at the Dutch Harbor hospital wasn’t creating enough pressure on the new young ophthalmologist, no one could find the pointer he’d brought with him to use for the Snellen eye chart. It was a small detail, but it flustered him, as more and more it seemed he was losing control of the situation just when he wanted to be most impressive in the wounded veterans’ sight. And to top it off, an obstreperous patient — a limey by his accent — was loudly complaining outside the doctor’s office. “ ‘Ere, what’s the bloody ‘oldup, then? ‘Aven’t got all bloody week ‘ave we?”
“You know the army,” commented another patient. “Hurry up and wait!”
“Well,” said Doolittle, “we ain’t in the bloody army, are we? This is the senior bloody service.”
“Would you behave yourself!” It was “Mother Attila,” the head nurse, Doolittle’s fellow Britisher assigned to the Allied naval hospital. She was big and heavy, her trajectory so unpredictable they had begun to call her “Scud.” “I’ll put you on report,” she threatened the cockney.
“Oh dear!” retorted Doolittle insolently. “Terrified I am, that’s wot. Bloody terrified!”
She was taking out her pen when the ophthalmologist, red-faced and harassed, appeared at the door. “Nurse, you haven’t seen my pointer, have you?”
“In your trousers, mate!” said the cockney.
There was a roar of laughter from the queue, the doctor’s head withdrawing quickly to his examination room, and Doolittle now definitely on the Scud’s report.
Even more flustered now, the young ophthalmologist smiled apologetically at Shirer, who, during Doolittle’s diversionary play, had been sitting patiently in the hard-seated examination chair. “Can’t seem to find my occluder — sight blocker. Well, just place your hand over one eye.”
“Fine,” said Frank. “Which line?”
“Wha — uh, any line.”
“Read it all?” said Frank, feigning surprise, and was reciting it by heart when he had a moment of inspiration, hesitated, then said, “Last letter, fourth line — bit blurry— an E or an F.”
The doctor glanced up at him, convinced that this pilot — he looked back at the file — Shirer knew very well it was an F and, like so many others, was probably trying to fudge it in an attempt to eke out a little more rest and recreation if at all possible. It was known he was keen on a young nurse, Lana La Roche. Well, the young ophthalmologist thought, I might be green, but not that green. He wasn’t about to underwrite malingerers, and he told Shirer straight, “I guess you don’t want to hear it, Major, but you’re fit for flying duty again.”
Frank mumbled an obscenity, taking the RTD — return to duty — slip with feigned reluctance. The head nurse and Doolittle were still arguing outside. It was getting on the doctor’s nerves. He knew he shouldn’t have wasted so much time looking for the damn pointer, but he’d had it since medical school and it had become like a charm to him. He rose, opened the door and called out briskly, “Next!” It was Doolittle, only his eyes and nose visible, the remainder of his head still bandaged.
“Right!” said the doctor, sitting on the stool in front of the examination chair. “What letters can you make out?”
“Where?”
“On the chart.”
“What fucking chart?”
* * *
That afternoon, Frank Shirer was officially posted back on the active duty list, but the day was to end in disappointment. It hadn’t occurred to him that once he got back on the active list he would be assigned anything else but fighters. However, with not enough fighters to go around, and his earlier experience of flying 727s coming up on the Pentagon’s screen, he was assigned to Far East Bomber Command, Nayoro, Japan. B-52s. For Shirer it was like being told you’d been assigned to driving a Mack truck after having been at the wheel of Alfa-Romeos.
* * *
Lana was delighted. With Japan so close to Siberia, only F-111s and one or two of the precious few Stealth B-2 bombers were being used, as far as she knew — the long distance B-52s merely on reserve standby.
“Too bad,” she lied. “But it’ll help you to have a new challenge.”
“Challenge! I can fly a B-52 blindfolded.”
“Is it that easy?”
“Well, no, but hell, after flying Tomcats. They don’t call B-52s ‘BUFFs’—big ugly fat fellows — for nothing. Anyway, they’re not using B-52s over there — least not where it counts.”
“Oh?” Lana said, sounding disappointed. “Too bad, hon.”
He turned to her. “You serious?”
“Of course.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll grow old in B-52s,” he said morosely.
“When will you be shipping out?”
He handed her the fax. “Tomorrow. They don’t waste any time once you’re fit, do they?”
“Well, it’s what you wanted. I mean at least you’ll be flying and—”
“Yeah, sure.”
* * *
It was a bright clear day over Roosevelt Island, with Manhattan towering against a background of a hard blue winter sky. Johnny Ferrago bent down to hoist his six-year-old daughter Linda onto his shoulders so she could see over the crowd gathering for the opening of the third water tunnel. Johnny was what was known in the excavating business as a “sandhog,” one of
the “unsung thousands,” as The New York Times editorial put it, who, risking deafness, silicosis, and a range of other subterranean maladies, not to mention cave-ins, had labored for the past ten years to keep not only Manhattan, but the whole of New York alive. Blasting and drilling over seven hundred feet below ground, the sandhogs had carved out a sixty-mile-long, twenty-foot diameter third tunnel. This would boost the 1.5-billion-ton capacity of New York’s water supply to 2.25 billion — the third tunnel taking the strain off one and two, which, fed by the underground aqueducts coming down from the Hillsview Reservoir, passed under the Bronx, exiting on West Thirty-fourth.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, hon?”
“Won’t all the water be dirty?”
Ferrago’s wife, Lenore, smiled as he pulled young Linda forward over his head and, looking up, ostrichlike, said, “Hey, what you think your daddy’s been doin’ all this time? That water’s clean as you can get.”
Ferrago’s twelve-year-old son, Danny, his face all but covered by the collar of his parka and earmuffs, grumbled, “Can’t be clean as snow water.”
“What the hell you talking about?” said Johnny.
“You shouldn’t say that, Daddy,” came Linda’s voice from above.
“Sorry, little girl. But that water’s passed the sniffer test, Danny. Better than half the bottled water you can buy.”
“What’s a sniffer test?” asked Danny sullenly, wanting to know, but his pride at odds with his curiosity.
They could hear a murmur in the crowd of several thousand strong, someone saying the governor, with police escort, was approaching. He wasn’t — it was traffic control cops on bikes keeping everyone behind the tape. “Sniffer test,” Johnny Ferrago explained to Danny, “is done by a lady who sniffs the water. Right? Like a wine tester.”
“They don’t drink it, Daddy.”
“Sure they do, Lindy—”
“No, Daddy. I saw it on ‘Mister Rogers.’ They spit it out.”
“She means wine tasting,” put in Lenore, his wife.
“Oh,” said Johnny, looking up at his daughter. “That’s right, honey. They don’t drink the wine. Maybe the lady doesn’t drink the water, but it’s the best test they have.” He looked down again at Danny, to include him in the conversation. “Some people can smell bacteria better than a machine. How about that, eh, Danny?”
“Yeah,” said Danny. “I can’t see anything.”
“Well, you ‘scuse yourself,” Johnny told him, “and move up front. Your mom can’t hold you up. You’re too big.”
“Don’t want to go up front.”
“All right then, stop squawkin’.”
“I’m not squawkin’.”
“All right, you two,” said Lenore. “Cool it. We’re supposed to be having fun. Remember?”
“How do they clean the water, Daddy?” asked his daughter, her head bending down over his.
“Don’t have to, honey. Sunshine kills a lot of the bugs, and all the other bad stuff settles down in a big dam.”
“What’s a dam?”
“Well, place where you collect water. Lots of it. Keep it still so all the bad stuff can settle out. Then they put a seki disk — sort of like a black and white lid — down into the water. They have to be able to see it for at least two meters — that’s just higher than Daddy. If they can still see the disk, then the water’s safe.”
“How come we drink bottled water, then?” pressed Danny.
“Don’t be a smartass, Danny,” said Ferrago sharply. “Because I don’t like all that chlorine they put in tap water, that’s why.”
“Miss Lawson at school says they put fluoride in it. It’s good for your teeth.”
“Yeah, well,” said Johnny, “far as I’m concerned, the jury’s still out on that one.”
“What’s a jury, Daddy?” asked Linda.
“Never mind,” said Johnny crabbily. “You keep your eyes on all the people going up there on the dais — the stand. You see the mayor’s limo yet?”
“No.”
“Can you see ‘em?” Ferrago asked his wife irritably.
“No. Just a few motorcycle cops.” She nudged Johnny, lowering her voice. “Don’t let Danny get on your nerves. He’s just pushing your buttons.”
“Yeah, well, he’s doin’ a damn good job.”
Linda started jumping up and down on his shoulders as the band began to warm up.
“What’s the big deal anyway?” said Danny. “It’s boring.”
Lenore Ferrago reached in front of Johnny, grabbed the shoulder of Danny’s jacket and gave it a good shake. “The big deal, Danny, is that your father has spent the last ten years digging that tunnel, and without it all those flashy Manhattan offices up there would be empty. A lot of men got killed in that tunnel, and a lot of others got silicosis, and—”
“What’s sili—” began Danny, unrepentant.
“Lungs fill up with dust,” said Johnny matter-of-factly.
The dignitaries were collecting now on the flag-draped dais decorated in front of the “head frame” that had taken Johnny and hundreds of others down countless times beneath the East River, where they’d had to continue blasting through bedrock. Apart from increasing the city’s water supply, a third tunnel would allow the old aqueducts, many of whose huge valves had all but rusted away, to be maintained. Without the new tunnel, what now were maintenance crises for New York would soon become a colossal disaster.
For Johnny and the hundreds of other sandhogs who had spent so much of their lives in the subterranean tunnel and complex of risers, or overflow shafts, and who knew every inch of it, there was a shared feeling that it wasn’t so much New York’s tunnel as theirs. Despite all the problems, its on-and-off-again financial history, the biggest job of its kind in the history of the world had not only provided the sandhogs with work at some of the highest blue collar wages around, but had given them a deep sense of purpose, the kind that for a tradesman sometimes comes only once in a lifetime. They knew that without water, everything in New York — from flushing a toilet and mixing martinis to life-saving hospitals — would come to an abrupt halt. And a disease-ridden halt at that.
While Lenore was trying to convey something of what it had meant to their son, Johnny recalled the time he had been pinned for hours by a fall in one of the riser tunnels that led up to the street and the manhole covers that millions of New Yorkers walked over daily without a thought of the unseen world that kept their seeing world going. He wondered, too, about his future. The question of how many of the workers would be kept on hadn’t been settled — or rather, that’s what the union had been told. Ferrago and his friends, however, believed that the city officials already knew who’d be kept on, but not wanting to precipitate any “job action” that might mar the opening celebration, hadn’t yet released the information. What they did know was that because of the war there’d been a lot of talk about cutting the completion ceremonies to a bare minimum: the mayor, a few local politicians, the police band, and that’d be it. But the mayor had overridden any such cutbacks, arguing, with unexpected support from the Post and the Times, that it was precisely because of the war that a very public celebration of America’s industrial know-how and determination, evidenced in the world’s largest tunnel, should be held. It would demonstrate once again, especially to the Siberians, that this was a “can-do” nation whose role as the “arsenal and foundry” of democracy could surmount industrial and logistical problems that would have confounded most others.
“There must be fifty people up there,” commented Lenore, indicating the dais through the thicket of heads in front of her. “There’s even an admiral. What’s he in charge of — they sail boats in the tunnel?”
“Matter of fact, they do,” Johnny answered. “Little prop-driven TV robot jobs. Push through all the crap and take pictures of any fractures ‘fore they get a chance to get any bigger and blow. Those gases build up and that baby explodes, those brokers in Wall Street are gonna get more than their
ankles wet, I can tell you. Stock exchange’d be goddamned swamped.”
“Daddy, you shouldn’t say that—”
“Yeah, sorry, Lindy.”
“So what’s the admiral—” began Lenore, her voice drowned out by the throaty roar of a V formation of Harley-Davidsons, the mayor’s limo drawing to a halt in front of the dais, the serious men with the shades, despite the pale winter light, on either side of him looking hard beyond the line of uniformed policemen at the tape.
“How come you’re not up there, Daddy?” Linda called out.
“They’re VDs, stupid,” said Danny. A Sousa march crashed into the air.
“What?” said Johnny, straining down to hear Danny, and seeing Lenore laughing so hard she looked like she’d fall down.
“He means VIPs!” she explained.
“Jesus,” said Johnny. “I hope so.”
“Don’t call me stupid!” said Linda, bending toward Danny so that Johnny had to take a quick, jerking step forward to keep his balance.
Johnny saw Lenore standing on her toes, waving, calling out to someone. “Johnny — it’s Mike Ricardo. Thought they weren’t going to come… Over here, Mike!” Ricardo, a small, wiry man, made his way through the crowd, his New York Yankees cap lost from view now and then as the crowd moved forward, someone saying something about a movie star. Johnny and Lenore had got to know Mike and Betty Ricardo when both men had been working on the Bronx section of number three.
“Hiya, Johnny!” called Ricardo.
“Hey, Mike. What’s the story — thought you and the missus were gonna watch Notre Dame?”
“Nah. Betty says I got square eyes already. So what the hell? Figured I’d give her a day out.”
“Big deal,” said Lenore.
Ricardo grinned. “She’s havin’ a ball. Stuffing herself with candy floss.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the dais. “I think she’s got a thing for the mayor.”