by Ian Slater
Georgina’s beauty was matched by her pride and a strong streak of leftist feminism that Rosemary surmised might not “go down” or, as Robert would say, “sit well” with the plainspoken, somewhat taciturn Zeldman. On the other hand, Rosemary, after the years of teaching all types of students in her Shakespeare class, was aware that sometimes opposites attract in the most unpredictable way. She hoped so, suspecting that, deep down, Georgina, though too proud to admit it, wanted a relationship that would give her a measure of certainty and stability in the world of “avant-garde” politics at the LSE and in a world made daily more uncertain by war.
She thought of her brother William’s death in the convoy and of how terrified he must have been, his ship torpedoed in the middle of the Atlantic. She thought, too, of Robert’s sister, Lana, who, as William’s nurse, had written them about William, and without whom Rosemary would never have met Robert, who’d so kindly brought the letter down to Surrey on his first leave. Lana Brentwood, it seemed, had been with William in the final days of his life on the Halifax-bound hospital ship where he died. Rosemary thought, too, of Robert’s youngest brother, David, twenty-four, who, though now safe in Liege in Belgium, had been listed as an MIA for several weeks after he and others, in the big drop by the American airborne over the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, had been swept off course by cross winds into enemy territory. She wondered what he was like. There was still so much she didn’t know about Robert’s family. “Does your brother David have a girlfriend?” she asked.
Robert shrugged. “Sort of, I guess.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure. Had a girl he liked back in the States—” He paused. “High school sweetheart — far as I can recall. But that was before the war. Don’t know if it’s still on between them.”
“Do you know her name?”
“Mmm—” Robert pondered the question while using another tissue to clear the semicircle of mist above the dash. “Now there,” he said, “you’ve got me.”
“Oh, Robert — you must know!”
“Mel…Mel… Melanie, I think.” It bugged him that he couldn’t remember, a nuclear sub skipper who, like Zeldman and others in the service, was expected to have a photographic memory of enemy maneuvers and myriad descriptions of ships and armaments. But he was having trouble even trying to visualize the girl’s face.
“Melanie who?” pressed Rosemary. “He must have spoken about her?”
“Not David,” said Robert. “Very closemouthed about dating. We all were. All I remember is that he and a guy called Rick Stacy were in competition for her.”
“Sounds serious.”
“I guess. She was a nice kid — well, a kid then.”
“So you’ve met her?”
“Once. On leave. She was a coed.”
“A first-year student?”
“What — oh, yes,” replied Robert. “First year at Oregon State. She was a bright — hold on!”
Rosemary was thrown forward, the car’s rear end skewing hard right, skidding to a stop on the rain-slicked road. “You okay, honey?” he asked her quickly.
Off to her left, Rosemary caught the auburn blur of a deer slipping through the mist. “I’m all right,” she said. “For a second—” she sat back against the headrest and turned to him, hand over her heart “—I thought it was another car.”
“Figured the honeymoon was over, eh?” he said, swinging the Morris back onto the left-hand side of the road.
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
He put a hand on her knee. “Sorry, sweetie.”
“It’s all right — not your fault.” The fog was so thick, it made day seem like night, and for a moment Robert realized again how close the line was between survival and death — if it had been another car — a head-on collision on the lonely, narrow road across the moor. The irony of him and Rosemary dying on their honeymoon while David, having weathered the vicissitudes of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, was now safe in Liege, awaiting transport back to England, struck with full force. Even hitting the deer could have been disastrous for them, and in a second he found himself envisaging Rosemary’s face slashed bloody with broken glass and saw his other brother, Ray, the thirty-seven-year-old ex-captain of a missile frigate, the USS Blaine.
Ray, once nicknamed “Cruise” because of his resemblance to the onetime Hollywood idol, had been wounded in the flash fire following the attack of a swarm of fast, small North Korean attack boats, one of whose missiles had exploded on the Blaine’s bridge. Ray’s face was now a horror mask of tight, polished skin, and he was still convalescing after a long, painful, and still unfinished series of plastic surgery operations. Robert had been revolted when he’d first seen the pictures of Ray and then felt guilty. He had never been close to either Ray or David. Perhaps, he thought, it wasn’t so much a matter of different personalities as the gap in ages between him and his two younger brothers. It was like the age of “Bing” Crosby, as Robert was called by his crew, meeting Springsteen. After a certain age, your tastes just didn’t change much, “nor your tactics,” as one of the submarine instructors had told them, which is why anyone heading into his “deep” forties was considered too old for submarines. The temptation to let old habits ride, never to change them, from music to tactics, he knew could be fatal aboard the most complex fighting machine in history.
“Burns’s cottage,” said Rosemary, looking down at the map, “should be about five miles further on.” Robert was feeling unusually drowsy, a temporary reaction, he knew from his war patrols on the sub, to the rush of adrenaline caused by a near miss — in this case a deer standing in for a Russian depth charge.
“Robert — I don’t want to be a backseat driver, but you’re going awfully fast.” He glanced at the speedometer — seventy kilometers per hour.
“Just a tad over forty,” he said, and almost added that Roosevelt went faster than this when she was submerged — but he stopped himself.
“You’re angry?” she said, turning to him.
“Nope.”
“Yes you are.”
“No, seriously. I was — Melissa! That’s it.”
“What—?”
“David’s girlfriend. Melissa Lange.”
“Have you been thinking of her all this time?” Rosemary pressed mischievously. “I supposed that’s why we almost hit that poor deer.”
“No,” he said, smiling across at her. “That had nothing to do with it. You were right. I was going too fast for fog like this.”
“ ‘Och, och—’ as Mr. McRae would say, ‘ye’re noo tellin’ me the truth, Robert Brentwood. You were going fast because you were thinking of her. This Melissa creature. ‘Turns you on,’ I suppose, as you Americans say.”
“Aye,” he joked, in an atrocious imitation of a Scottish accent. The car slowed to twenty kilometers, the fog so thick, visibility was near zero. Now the car was at a crawl, Robert sitting well forward in the seat. He flicked on the left turn signal.
“What are you doing?” asked Rosemary, alarmed. “We’re not there—”
“I know that, but this is unsafe at any speed. There should be one of those staggered pull-offs the Scots are so fond — ah, there we are!”
Ahead, no more than fifteen feet away, Rosemary glimpsed a black rectangle of macadam or, as Robert would call it, blacktop, barely big enough for a car, bracken blurring its edge. She couldn’t imagine a more forlorn spot to stop, but Robert was right — it was riskier to go on. Besides, at most it would mean a late arrival at the bed-and-breakfast-house at Mallaig.
Pulling off, leaving the parking lights on, Robert let the motor run for a little until it was cozily warm, Rosemary lying back against the headrest, closing her eyes. “It’s ridiculous,” she said, excusing a yawn. “I feel tired and we’ve just started.”
“Make the most of it, sailor,” he said, reaching over, taking the map from her lap, and adjusting the seat into the semirecline. “You’re beautiful. I ever tell you that?”
She smiled dreamily. “All the time, kind sir.” As he began folding the map, he glimpsed a filigree of black lace against the stockinged tan of her thigh. She began to say something, but gently he placed his finger on her lips and felt the moistness of her tongue, his hand slipping beneath her skirt.
“We can’t,” she said, hushed. “What if—”
“We’d hear anyone coming a mile away.”
“Don’t be vulgar—”
“What? Oh, I wasn’t.” He laughed. “I didn’t mean to be, honest.”
“Yes you did.”
“No I didn’t—” She made sweet murmuring sounds, her thighs trapping his hand. “I want—” he began, “I want to—”
“What’s that?” she said suddenly, stiffening, pushing him away.
He stopped, listening. There was only the sound of the sleet pelting against the car. “Nothing,” he assured her, adding, “Submariners can tell, honey. If I can’t hear it, it isn’t there. We can pick out a noise short for miles and—” He didn’t finish, her embrace smothering all talk, his eyes closing with hers as his hands slid further beneath the lace to her secret warmth. She whimpered ever so slightly in a mounting joy. The very moment she touched him, gripped him, he felt his whole body stiffening with a throbbing urgency the likes of which he’d never known.
* * *
Schulz heard a high, bipping tone — a radar-homing missile locked onto him, left quarter, from Dessau thirty miles away. He hit the jammer, went to full thrust, and felt the G force “dumping” on him as the Falcon’s Pratt and Whitney F-100 afterburner screamed in the full vertical climb as he jettisoned sea urchin flares and three high-frequency “burp” box decoys, just in case — to sucker off the enemy missile.
Already, ten miles nearer American lines than the Dessau batteries, Sergei Marchenko fired his first Acrid AA missile.
Schulz saw one of the Acrids streak below in front of him, the second one passing above left, hitting a flare, disintegrating, a white cloud speckled black with debris coming down at him from the explosion. He flicked the sidestick for afterburner, but the engine was out and his tail radar warning receiver wasn’t working, so he had no idea if the Russian fighter was in the Falcon’s cone of vulnerability. Down below, he saw the snow-streaked blur of green plain start to spin, foothills moving to its periphery, mountains looming fast ahead. He pulled the Douglas eject.
Next moment he was soaking wet, the cloud he was in supersaturated, Schulz knowing only that he was alive, the ruby spot of the Falcon’s dying jet vanishing in gray stratus.
“Christ!” He was above the Harz. His greatest fear of bailing out had always been that he would be hung up in a tree on one of the steep mountain sides, unable to free himself — with a hundred-foot drop or worse beneath him and no other way out. Search and Rescue had found a colleague of his on the American side of the Harz, on the run for weeks and, of course, dead when they found him, eyes pecked out, stomach bloated enormously, and every orifice oozing with maggots.
* * *
For Marchenko, the downed American plane not only added to his score of five NATO kills — three earned over the Aleutians, including his otplata—”payback”—downing of the American, Shirer — but it added enormously to his reputation as the up-and-coming Soviet ace who might take the title from the Belorussian, Gorich, who had eleven kills. This was Marchenko’s second F-16, the first shot down over Adak in the Aleutians. And the F-16 was regarded by the Soviet pilots as one of the best all-around combination interceptor/ground attack aircraft ever built, bristling with American know-how. But if Marchenko was pleased with the kill, he showed no such emotion to his wingman. The truth was that though he was satisfied enough with the kill, he wasn’t happy that the American flier might have gotten away by having ejected. You beat the Americans not by killing their machines — their industrial capacity was enormous. You had to kill their pilots. This was the Allies’ critical vulnerability. And it irked him that the American ace, Shirer, had also survived and bailed out when Marchenko had shot him down over the Aleutians. The fact was, Sergei Marchenko was the only Soviet ace who had not killed an American ace. It rankled him, particularly when his critics charged that since the fierce dogfights over the Aleutians, he had only been up against second-stringers. Shirer became his obsession. Marchenko had a photograph of the American ace, taken from the German magazine Der Spiegel, pinned up in his home base at Khabarovsk; Shirer’s face the center of his squadron’s dart board.
Low on fuel, Marchenko and his wingman turned back toward Berlin.
* * *
In the shuddering moment of their ecstasy followed by the warm, flooding peace that enveloped them, neither Robert nor Rosemary was aware of any sound on the lonely Scottish road. It was only when he returned to the driver’s seat that Robert saw the twin yellow spots of light in the rearview mirror. Still, there was no sound, and it was another several minutes before the car, feeling its way through the fog, could be heard. In the frantic race to button her blouse and make herself “respectable,” Rosemary dropped her lipstick between the hand brake and the seat. As she and Robert reached for it, they crashed heads. “Och, we’re doomed!” said Robert, mimicking McRae of the bed-and-breakfast. Rosemary began to laugh, and the more she laughed, the more uncontrollable it became so that soon she was weeping, Robert pulling her toward him, she fending him off, slumped down out of sight beneath the window level. The lights from the car, now no more than fifty yards behind them, disappeared momentarily, and at first Robert thought the car had stopped, before he saw more thick sheets of fog sweeping in from the coast, obliterating the approaching car and roiling over the road. “Rosemary — get up.”
“I don’t want anyone to see me!”
The car was almost on them. Its horn sounded as it drew level with them, the driver a dim outline waving, Robert acknowledging it from one driver on a lonely road to another. Rosemary sighed with relief, watching the red taillights of the car and a lorry that was obviously using it as a trailblazer on the fogbound highway disappearing like two sore eyes into the mist.
“Funny,” commented Robert.
“What — me being ravaged out on the moor?”
“The car that passed us,” Robert said. “Looked like the pair we saw at McRae’s.”
“There, I found it,” Rosemary proclaimed victoriously, grimacing as she reached down behind the hand brake to retrieve her salmon-red lipstick. “Well, they did say they’d probably see us. They’re sightseeing, too, remember?”
“No—” Robert replied, “not the Prices — that other couple. The soldier and the girl. Confetti still on them. Remember?”
“Soldier?”
“Well, he was wearing civvies, but he looked to me like a junior officer — NCO maybe.”
“I don’t understand,” Rosemary said, winding her passenger window down a tad in an effort to thwart any more misting up on the inside of the windshield. “What’s so funny about them being on the same road? There’s no other highway to speak of. I should think it’s likely we’ll see them again.”
Robert shrugged. He tried to remember whether the yellow Honda Civic that had passed them had had “Just Married” sprayed on the side, but he hadn’t noticed. It was sprinkling rain again, and he turned on the wipers. “It’s just that they started out long before we did.”
“Maybe they stopped somewhere for the fog to clear, too.” He nodded in acquiescence. For several seconds they drove on in silence. Soon they saw the taillights again, at first thinking they were the lorry’s but then realizing the two red lights weren’t far enough apart for a truck, the lorry having apparently overtaken the car on one of the pass-bys. “Any other points of interest along this road — before Ayre?” he asked Rosemary casually. “Before we get to Burns’s cottage?”
“I don’t—” she began, stifling a yawn, “—know. Why?”
“Just wondered. Wouldn’t want to miss anything. McRae’d send a lynch party.”
“You want me to look up the map?�
� she offered unenthusiastically.
“Nope,” he said. “Doesn’t matter.”
“I do hope this fog clears,” said Rosemary, peering ahead at the dim gray strip of bitumen a few feet in front of them. “If not, we will be doomed up at Glencoe. Daddy told me the Highland mists are always much worse. Won’t see a thing. Perhaps we should stop at Glasgow for a bite. Give the weather a chance to improve?”
“Aye, lass,” he said.
“You have a terrible Scottish accent. Did you know that?”
“I’m working on it. You want to eat in Glasgow then?”
“Do you?” For a moment Robert Brentwood was back in his family’s home in New York. It was his mother’s habit to ask his father five or six times whether he was sure he wanted to do something after he’d said that’s what he wanted to do. Drove him nuts. Her repetition, his father had written Robert, had been particularly bad after Ray had been wounded, her nerves shot to pieces — the trying repetition of every “goddamn question” clearly a symptom of her anxiety. Robert knew in Rosemary’s case the repetition was thoughtfulness on her part, not wanting him to feel obligated to do anything he didn’t really care to do, particularly given the short time he had ashore. But Rosemary, too, had changed between the engagement and the wedding, her nerves and her sense of self trembling like so many in Britain who’d experienced the sudden dangers of modern war. For the submariner, it might be the fear of ASROCs coming down at you out of nowhere — for civilians, like Rosemary and her family, it was the terrifying cacophony of massed Soviet rocket attacks.
“Fine,” he said. “We’ll eat in Glasgow.”
“You sure? It might clear up. You never know in the Highlands apparently. Daddy told me you can have rain, sun, and sleet all in one morning.”
“You’re as cheerful as old McRae.”
“I’m trying not to plan things too far in advance, that’s all. On your honeymoon you’re supposed to be carefree. Anyway, as your best man would say, I guess it’s ‘no use frettin’.’ “