by Ian Slater
“A great deal, I should imagine,” put in Price. “It’s always a problem, I suspect — how many to put where.” He, too, looked across at the Brentwoods. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes,” said Brentwood. “There’s never enough to go around.”
“Precisely,” enjoined Price.
“Ye no think the oil’s important, laddie?” said McRae, wincing in pain as he abruptly turned around in his chair, left hand vigorously massaging his left kneecap, his right hand ladling heaping teaspoons of sugar into his milky tea.
“Not at all,” answered Price, while his wife, Rosemary noticed, tugged as surreptitiously as she could on her husband’s sleeve, her eyes rolling heavenward as she caught Rosemary’s glance. Rosemary smiled sympathetically.
But Price wouldn’t be restrained. “Oil’s vital, of course,” he said, “but I suppose there was enough in storage in the first few months until the convoys—”
“Och—” said McRae, his tone one of sneering contempt, his left hand continuing to massage his knee. “There might have been reserves for a wee while, but it was obvious right from the very first shot that we’d be in a right pickle. Started rationing straight off, they did. London wasn’t prepared, laddie — and that’s all there is to it. Only thing that surprises me is that the Russians haven’t hit it sooner.”
“I daresay they could use your prescience in London,” said Price. “You should be in the Admiralty.”
There was a flash of anger in McRae’s eyes, his face clouding. “I’ve done my bit, laddie. Aye — and got this for it.” He smacked his leg, glancing at the Brentwoods for moral support. Rosemary reached for more corn flakes while Robert, diplomatically, gave all his attention to separating the second kipper from its spine.
Mrs. McRae suddenly emerged from the kitchen. “Now, who’d like some of Mr. Brentwood’s coffee?”
“I’d love a cup,” said the commercial traveler, rising eagerly, toast crumbs tumbling from his napkin.
“And,” said McRae, staring at Price, who was now looking rather sullen himself, “how old are you, laddie?”
“I’m a lecturer,” Price replied defiantly, quick to the intimation of McRae’s question. “LSE.”
Rosemary looked up. McRae’s chin jutted forward combatively. “Och, never heard of it.” He returned noisily to his mug of tea.
“London School of Economics,” said Price crisply.
“Perhaps,” put in Rosemary, half out of genuine interest, half in an effort to calm things down, “you know my sister— Georgina Spence?”
Price looked at her blankly. “I — can’t say I do. Sorry. I’m— I’m in political studies actually. Theory.”
“Oh, aye,” said McRae, “we certainly need that. A good dose of political theory. Essential war work, is it?”
“She’s in her final year,” Rosemary continued, Price trying to be polite to her while clearly furious at the Scot.
“Georgina… Spence — you said? Spence — yes — I do remember the name, I think. But can’t put a face to it, I’m afraid. It’s a big place. To tell you the truth—”
“Of course,” said Rosemary. “I know what it’s like. I’m a teacher myself and—”
“A lot of people studying politics then, are there?” cut in McRae, ignoring Rosemary and shoveling several more spoonfuls of sugar into his tea. “Special rations — along with exemptions from active duty, is it? For the important work at the university, I mean?” McRae’s gray eyes sparkled even in the dim light of the dining room.
“No,” said Price, hands clasped before him, “no, same ration as everyone else actually. Though we don’t have everything, of course. Sometimes we’ve no sugar at all.”
The door from the hallway opened and the young couple who had excused themselves earlier, as Rosemary and Robert had arrived, came into the dining room — a spot or two of confetti still on the woman’s lambswool coat. The husband, despite the civilian garb, was a young serviceman, Robert guessed as he watched the way the man pulled out and carefully counted the five-pound notes. The man, a little younger than his bride, Robert thought, had the look of a junior officer — anxious to take the lead in front of her but not quite sure of what he was doing. Turning to his wife, he whispered something, Robert detecting a distinctly New York accent as the man finally gave up trying to understand the British currency, handing his bride a clutch of ten-p notes.
By the time the couple had left, their interruption of the table conversation long enough to have cooled tempers, the Prices were completing their meal in silence and, seeing that Mrs. McRae wasn’t going to bring out any more “real” coffee packets, politely fended off further offers of tea. As he rose to leave, Price asked Robert, “You on holiday?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so. I suspect we’ll see you again. Joan and I are doing a spot of sight-seeing ourselves. Few weeks off till the new term.”
“Well,” said Robert, rising and offering his hand, “next time I hope you’ll have time for more coffee.”
“So do I,” said Joan, an edge to her voice, smiling at Rosemary. “And not so much talk!”
There was a long silence after the couple left, Robert finishing his kipper, the commercial traveler sitting quietly, hands about the cup of coffee in a warm embrace, but looking as pained as McRae, who was now avidly reading the obituaries. Finally the traveler spoke. “Excuse me. All—” He had the look of a petty criminal. “Does anyone mind if I smoke?” He glanced awkwardly at Rosemary.
“Not at all,” she lied. Next, the salesman sought Mr. McRae’s permission, the Scot shifting in his chair again, pushing his tea mug to a new position. “I’ll not mind.” Mrs. McRae was busy in the kitchen. The commercial traveler sat back, eyes closed to luxuriate in the twin pleasures of smoke and coffee. Through the dining room window they could see the young newlyweds getting into a yellow Honda Civic, the faint remnant of “Just Married” visible across the passenger door.
“That’s a silly thing to do,” observed McRae. “Cost him a packet to get that painted over.”
Mrs. McRae put a new pot of tea before him, smoothing its cozy. “Perhaps they don’t want to paint it over, McRae.”
“Aye,” conceded McRae, knowing he’d gone too far for her liking with the Prices but still grumpily eager to get in a last salvo at the world. “Well, they certainly didn’t mind who heard ‘em during the night.”
Robert saw Rosemary blush. The commercial traveler had his eyes closed in a grin of contentment as he exhaled, the long stream of smoke swirling in the air, as gray and turbulent as the storm clouds scudding in from the Irish Sea.
“You’ll be heading north, then?” said McRae.
“Yes,” answered Robert, his hand beneath the table on Rosemary’s thigh. “Yes, we’re off to Mallaig.”
“What?” said McRae, as if they’d taken leave of their senses. “That’d be nigh on two hundred miles!”
It always amazed Brentwood how the British sense of what distance it was proper or possible to travel in a day was so different from how the Americans viewed it, even accounting for the fact that the long, lonely roads over the moors and through the highlands were often one-way and certainly a far cry from any freeway — or motorway, as the British called it. “We should be there by dark,” said Robert confidently.
“You’ll be seeing Robbie’s cottage first?” It sounded more like an order from Commander in Chief Atlantic than a question.
“Yes,” said Robert.
“And Glencoe?”
It didn’t ring a bell with Robert. Rosemary came to her husband’s rescue even as she was trying to fend off his groping beneath the table. “You remember, Robert. I told you — it was the site of a great battle between the Scots and the English.”
“Who won?” asked Robert, smiling. “The Scots, I guess.”
McRae’s face was swept by squall, eyes brooding and sullen as the clouds congealing over the sea. “It wasn’t a battle,” said McRae. “It was a massacre. Maclain
Macdonald, his wife, and thirty-six of the clan. Slain by the English. And by men who had supped with them.” McRae paused. “You’ll not be calling into your Holy Loch then?”
Robert reacted quickly, trying to hide his surprise, turning the question back to McRae. “Holy Loch?”
“Aye. You’re a submariner, aren’t you?”
Robert didn’t answer.
“You’re American, aren’t you?” pressed McRae.
“Yes, but—”
“Your face, laddie,” said McRae. “Clean as a bairn’s bottom. You’ve no seen the sun or any kind of weather for a wee while, have you?”
“You’re very observant, Mr. McRae,” Robert complimented him. McRae came around the table, face grimacing, his limp favoring the stiff left leg. Then, quite unexpectedly, he offered his hand to Brentwood. “Mind how ye go.” Next, his steel-grey eyes shifted from Robert to Rosemary. “And take good care of the lassie.”
Robert nodded his head. “Thank you, sir. I will.”
* * *
After they’d packed their bags into the trunk or, as Rosemary insisted on calling it, the “boot” of the Morris and driven off, Rosemary waving back to the lone Mrs. McRae on the porch, Robert wondered aloud why, if McRae was such a determined Scot, he had bothered fighting for the British in the Falklands War.
“The Scots love to fight,” she said simply, winding up her window against the splatter of rain and taking out the map of Scotland’s west coast, looking down at the thin, solitary roads winding up past Ayre to the Highlands and beyond — to Cape Wrath.
CHAPTER THREE
From the high-resolution satellite pictures, the Politburo had clearly seen the vast North German Plain streaked with a white mange of snow, crisscrossed with Allied pontoon bridges over the tributaries to the Elbe and strewn with all the detritus of war: eviscerated, still-smoking armored columns, gutted empty gasoline dumps, and bloated bodies, all indicating how rapidly the Americans were advancing and the Russians retreating. The American general, Freeman, was obviously moving so fast that Soviet divisions hadn’t time to bury their dead.
Sergei Marchenko, one of the Soviet fighter pilots temporarily seconded from the Far Eastern TVD Aleutian section to plug the gaps opened up by the American breakout from the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket to the North German Plain, was coming in low over the white ribbon of the E-8, the 120-mile autobahn between Berlin and what, before Gorbachev, used to be the frontier of Western Germany. His Foxbat-A MiG-25, one of a combat pair, crossed the Elbe seven miles northeast of Magdeburg. He pressed the “ARM” switch for four Acrid 6 air-to-air missiles, two of them infrared-homing, the other two radar-homing. The two fighter interceptors, with no internal armament, were equipped with external pod-mounted twenty-three-millimeter cannons to be used strafing either NATO supply lines or NATO fighters covering the American advance.
Sergei Marchenko was no coward, but he, like the other pilots rushed to the western front, hoped that the SPETS units, long in place in Western Europe, would help slow the American advance by sabotaging their forward airfields, which the Americans were so good at laying down despite the slushy conditions of a temporary thaw in the freezing weather.
Besides, as much as Sergei Marchenko enjoyed being a fighter pilot after his military slog through the armored corps, to which he had originally been assigned because of his height, he would have preferred to be flying the somewhat slower but more maneuverable Sukhoi-15 Flagon. It had served him so well at his home base in the Aleutians during the attacks on the American outposts of Adak submarine base and Shemya Island. In supporting the SPETS operation against Shemya, the United States’ largest western radar warning post, the Sukhois, flying out of the Komandorskiye Islands less than two hundred miles from the Americans’ westernmost island, had performed exceptionally well. It was true that Marchenko, despite his impressive record of five unichtozhennykh—”kills”—had been shot down by an American F-14 Tomcat from the U.S. carrier Salt Lake City, reputedly flown by the American ace Shirer. Marchenko had ejected, been picked up within ten minutes, and was back at Komandorskiye base within three hours. But pilots who survived a plane shot up in a dogfight tended to grow more, not less, attached to the make, and so it was with Marchenko.
Still, he knew it was silly to become sentimental about such things, and one had to learn to adapt quickly amid the vicissitudes of a rapidly changing war. In any event, Marchenko and his wingman had been buoyed by the information given them during engine-start that intelligence reports showed Allied pilots in Europe were being forced to fly in excess of six sorties a day in order to try to deal with the swarms of Russian fighters now being funneled in from the eastern sectors of the USSR.
It was predicted that at this unheard-of — except for the Battle of Britain — sortie rate, sooner or later the unrelenting fatigue would take its toll, not only on pilots and the radar-intercept officers who flew with them, but also on the ground crews. But the Russian estimates were wide of the mark, for while there had been even more casualties than they thought, British and American pilots were not about to ease off or pause to catch their breath — not after the American army, spearheaded by Freeman’s corps, had finally breached the Soviet ring of steel. The Allied pilots were like marathon runners, worn down but suddenly invigorated by a second wind — in this case provided by Freeman’s breakout from the DB pocket and by the possibility of quickly gaining ground. To make up for air crew losses, many of the British and American aircraft normally crewed by pilot and RIOs were being flown with pilot only — doing what he could with the electronic countermeasures but going up anyway, disdaining second-by-second control over all the avionics in favor of pressing home the attack, going air-to-air, giving maximum attention to dogfight maneuvers.
* * *
Coming in from the southwest over Gottingen and the recaptured airfields of lower Saxony, a flight of two F-16A Fighting Falcons, though not yet visible against the bright whiteness of blue-patched nimbostratus, could be seen quite clearly on Marchenko’s fifty-two-mile look-down Fox Fire radar.
* * *
Unaware he was already on the Soviets’ radar, Kurt Schulz, an American from Los Angeles, now picked up one of the Russians on his Dalmo Victor AN/ALR radar-warning receiver, the computer telling him the Russian fighters were now in excess of Mach 2.3—his Falcon’s top speed, Mach 2. Lying back in full recline, sidestick mode of the F-16 to reduce the G force, Schulz pressed the zoom toggle, bringing up the DA A— designated area of attack — the blipping rectangle showing cattle grazing against sodden, snow-slushed fields either side of the highway where once the tall barbed wire had stood. The black streaks Schulz could see in the zoom shot were slicks of oil visible against the unthawed shoulder of the road where snow had remained. Then there were other streaks against the snow — these rising from the ground toward him, as SAM sites opened up from the Harz foothills to the south. Schulz immediately noted on his kneepad that the SAM sites had shifted from the day before and so were presumed to be mobile launchers. In the distance he could now see the two Russians, specks of silver, closing fast, and he was alert for an ELOK — enemy lock-on tone. Radio silence was pointless now that visual ID had been made, and he asked his wingman, “That barn down there — eleven o’clock — was it there yesterday?”
There was such a deafening noise, it made Shulz grimace. He lost the video image momentarily as the plane shifted violently left. He went to “jammer” to play havoc with the SAM radars. Coming up at him at over five hundred miles an hour from less than three hundred feet, the terrain below him now a racing white-green blur, Schulz dropped two iron bombs and let the afterburner have its head. The barn was gone; so was his wingman, a young pilot he’d met only that morning as they’d raced from the ready room in response to the scramble horn. At five thousand, Schulz banked hard, the sun glinting behind him as he turned to take another run at the broken span across the Elbe, where he’d spotted the black marks against the snow. Possibly they were tire ruts, leading down
from the highway to the water’s edge, more tracks coming up from the other side of the river through snow. “A “sunken” pontoon bridge?
The flak was thick, and he saw a burst of red tracer catching the sun, fading, climbing leisurely up toward him through the smoke of the barn, more tracer now coming from the direction of Magdeburg. He was into the smoke, turning tightly, coming in low again, the HUD lines flicking rapidly, the four green diamonds closing spastically. The smoke was gone. He saw the wreckage of the SAM site in the barn he’d destroyed littering the icy green fields, some of its debris caught in a high mesh fence either side of the autobahn. Schulz knew it was only a matter of minutes before the MiGs, rising like silver gnats in his rear vision from Stendal, would be on him. He set the “clicker”—automatic release — when the river section he’d chosen on his TV zoom was mirrored in the radar image. The Falcon rose as the bombs released. The plane yawed slightly and he headed south, climbing to clear the Harz, hoping to lose himself in cloud, black puffs of flak from the AA batteries around Stassfurt and Aschersleben smudging the air about him.
CHAPTER FOUR
Three miles south of Burns’s cottage outside Ayre, occasional spots of rain turned to sleet and Robert turned on the wipers. In the drowsy hum he and Rosemary were lost in their own thoughts — she wondering how her younger sister, Georgina, and Robert’s executive officer, Peter Zeldman, were getting along — or if they were getting along at all after having graciously performed their official roles as best man and maid of honor at Robert and Rosemary’s wedding.