by Ian Slater
“I’ll never get tired of you,” he said, doing a W. C. Fields: “My little cooing turtle dove.” He took her hand in his. “Never.”
“Hmm — a likely story.”
Robert could see a long, calm, cobalt-colored tongue of water coming into view, their first sight of the loch and a welcome one after the unrelieved wildness and isolation of Glencoe. Driving through the mist-shrouded valley had been cozy enough, part of the coziness coming from the safety of the warm car and its comforting dash lights, which, like those aboard a sub, created a sense of security, when in fact the line between civilization and the wild, safety and danger, was very thin.
“Where did you put the — gun?” she asked suddenly. It was no longer between them.
“In my jacket,” he said.
It was blustery outside as they pulled up to wait for the ferry, and cold, despite the sun’s attempt to break free of the low stratus.
“Think I’ll hop out and stretch my legs,” he said.
“You’ll freeze.”
“Nah — put on my old tweed coat here. No problem.”
She watched him draw up the collar of the tweed jacket as he walked away and waved back at her. She loved watching the way he walked — a purposeful yet relaxed stride that was somehow distinctly American, part and parcel of their optimism, which, no matter what the odds, refused to be dimmed. She’d noticed it the first time Robert had met her great-uncle Geoffrey. Robert, and some Australians she’d known, had no sense of class difference and so weren’t even aware they were crashing right through it with a friendly handshake and first-name familiarity. They didn’t give a fig about social status; simply rode over it, judging what a man said more than the way he said it.
She wound down the window. “Don’t go too far!” she called out over the howl of wind that was ruffling parts of the loch while other stretches of water remained surprisingly, almost alarmingly, calm. He strode back down the hill.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing — oh dear, I’m sorry, pet. Just didn’t want you to go too far. The ferry’ll be here in ten minutes or so. Besides, I don’t want you to catch a cold. You must be freezing.”
“Have to spend a shilling,” he said.
“Oh—” she began, perplexed. “Oh!” She felt herself blushing and laughing at the same time. He was walking away again.
“It’s ‘spend a penny,’ “ she said.
“Well,” he said, without turning around, “I was close.”
“You were not.”
Rosemary kept watching him and suddenly her smile and laughter vanished. Surely he could have waited until they’d reached the ferry. And wasn’t that one of those portable lavatories she’d seen parked down by the ferry ramp? “All right, Rosemary Brentwood,” she addressed herself sternly, as if bringing one of her sixth-form boys to order. “That will be quite enough of your morbidity.”
It had been the sight of the loch that had upset her — the unforgiving aspect of its gunmetal surface now that the sun was momentarily shut out again. It called up the memory of her brother William’s death on the Atlantic convoy — how one day he had sailed out, never to be seen again. So young. She took a tissue from her purse and, adjusting the rearview mirror, began making herself look presentable. “Good grief,” she told her reflection. “Will you stop worrying? Robert’ll probably outlive you.” Yes, he would undoubtedly the an old man and in bed — with her. She used just a dab of blusher, recalling Georgina’s rather high-minded counsel about how makeup was a “bourgeois conceit.” It always astonished Rosemary that here the whole world was at war, the Communist ideology so utterly discredited despite Gorbachev’s attempted reforms, and yet there were still young intellectuals like Georgina, fresh from the “thesis” and “antithesis” of university and who, filled with the outrage of people who know they will never actually have the responsibility of power, could still be drawn to the left’s unholy mysteries. She closed the lipstick holder, adjusted the mirror, and froze. Coming over the last dip before the long hill leading to the ferry was a yellow car.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Shirer saw there were fourteen minutes to go, the sea hidden from him beneath the flat gray expanse that seemed to go on forever. The edge of the front had come down from the Bering Sea over the Aleutians even before Shirer had taken off in his F-14 Tomcat, number 203, the second fighter assigned him, the first lost when he was shot down by Sergei Marchenko’s Sukhoi and had to bail out over Adak Island before being picked up and taken to Dutch Harbor.
There he and Lana Brentwood had taken up where they had left off before the war. But just when he was getting used to the idea that he’d probably be with Lana and flying out of Dutch Harbor for the foreseeable future, he was jolted back to the bleak reality of just how unforeseeable any future was when he received the terse instruction from Salt Lake City that he was to deliver his jet back to the carrier.
Shirer glanced at his vector control on “radio silence” approach toward the carrier, his plane on a passive, not active, radar to warn him of any approaching Bandits. Unless the Russians had launched midair refuelers without Aleutian radar picking them up, there shouldn’t be any danger.
By nature, he was an optimist. Lana wasn’t. She had been through the trauma of a failed marriage with Jay La Roche, the boss, or some said “don,” of La Roche Pharmaceuticals, a multinational spread over twenty-three countries, including China. Shirer remembered that China was one of the countries because Lana had told him it had been in Shanghai that the three-year marriage had ended in a violent attack on her by La Roche, who had beaten her so badly that only his money and influence with corrupt Chinese officials had prevented charges being laid. She had long ago learned to suffer the carefully chosen and medically screened stable of call girls and boys La Roche had used on his business trips abroad. But when his anal and oral fixations went beyond all bounds with her to the point at which excreta became inextricably linked in La Roche’s mind with sex, she had drawn the line and La Roche had stepped over it. He couldn’t prevent her from leaving him, from joining the navy’s “whores,” as he jeeringly referred to the Waves. But no way, he told her, would he ever allow her to divorce him, to cause him to lose face. If she tried it, La Roche warned, he’d unleash his chain of tabloids and “throw so much muck around” about her parents that the family would be ruined.
“There’s no muck to throw around,” she’d challenged him bravely. She remembered his sneering, cold reply. “You’re so fucking naive, Lana, I don’t believe it. Doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. Once it hits the street on page one, it’s game over for the Brentwoods, sweetheart.”
It was little wonder, Shirer realized as they had parted in Dutch Harbor, that she’d learned to roll with life’s punches— their Washington-enforced separation not upsetting her as much as he had expected, or secretly hoped, it might. And yet he knew she loved him. Still, her greatest fear wasn’t of separation but of him simply vanishing somewhere over the vastness of the Pacific, more terrifying to her than anything Jay La Roche might have done.
“I won’t get shot down, honey,” he’d tried to assure her, recognizing the hollowness of it as soon as he spoke.
“You have been already.”
“Then it’s over. Finished. One time is all you’re allowed. If you get out of that — you’re home and—”
A luminescent green dot, the size of a pinhead, was blipping on his radar screen. The carrier.
He had done it hundreds of times before, but during the approach, his stomach still knotted, his G suit warmer as the perspiration increased, his heartbeat, like most pilots’, faster now than when in a dogfight. He still couldn’t see the ship through the gray candy floss cloud flitting below him like a black river. With air brakes full on, he was coming in at over 150 miles an hour. He remembered that during Freeman’s raid on Pyongyang, Salt Lake City had lost more planes on landing than in combat — the slightest thing going wrong could mean curtains. But it hadn’t happe
ned to him yet and — hell, he told himself cavalierly, it wasn’t going to happen now, even if Salt Lake City’s air boss was always claiming a fighter pilot’s worst enemy wasn’t the Russians but a woman who took your mind off “one joystick onto another.”
No way, Shirer told himself, feeling the slight vibration of his oxygen mask, convinced that the thought of making sweet, unhurried love with Lana was the best guarantee in the world that he wouldn’t foul up. His vector was dead on — five minutes to the carrier, the possibility of enemy fighters suddenly appearing and pouncing remoter than ever.
* * *
In Salt Lake City’s air traffic control with the CIC — combat information center — and in PRIFLY — primary flight control, above flight deck control — computers and status boards showed Tomcat 203 approaching the carrier with fifty-seven thousand pounds gross weight — information conveyed instantaneously to the LSO — landing signal officer — in the flight deck’s trench. The LSO, his Day-Glo orange vest only dimly visible above the deck’s skirting, kept one eye on the video recording 203’s approach, and the SPIN, or speed indicator, that showed the Tomcat’s approach speed. This speed, together with that of the crosswind and carrier, aided the LSO in deciding the correct tension for the four arrestor wires. Too little would fail to stop the fighter within the three hundred feet — too much could snap the cable, with the same result.
“Tomcat two zero three, five seven zero,” came the confirmation from the arresting gear room, whose crew of four set the dials for fifty-seven-thousand pounds. Shirer was looking for the orange ball of light in the big convex mirror mounted on the carrier’s starboard side. If centered, the orange blob of light would be a second visual confirmation of the glide path projected by his computer. There were so many variables: state of sea, humidity, cloud cover, wind sheer…
He saw the orange ball between two horizontal green lights, but it was above the mirror’s midline. He was too high. Quickly he realigned degrees of flap, saw the orange orb go dead center, and called, “Meatball,” which told the LSO he was “on the ball”—locked into the correct glide path, the relief in his voice palpable despite his long experience.
The LSO’s voice blasted Shirer’s earpiece and suddenly, either side of the meatball, he saw two vertical red lines appear. A wave off. “Damn!”
“Try again,” instructed the LSO, Shirer hitting the button for full afterburner, the Tomcat veering hard left, engines screaming in a banshee howl as it climbed, leaving the carrier’s island leaning hard right and slipping downhill. Then the carrier was gone, below cloud.
“Try again two oh three,” repeated the LSO. “Nose wheel not lowered.”
In flight deck control, a man on the “Ouija” board moved the plastic model of 203 to the side while another crewman took up his grease pencil, a backup in case of power failure, and marked 203’s position on the transparent plastic screen, asking, “He a nugget?”
“No,” replied Comdr. Phil Harris, the officer in charge of FDC — flight deck control—”nothing green about him. Been on this tub longer than you have.”
“Two oh three?” said the crewman disbelievingly. “I haven’t heard of a Tomcat of ours with that number.”
“It’s been in Dutch Harbor. Watch him — he’s turning.”
“Got him,” replied the seaman cockily, skidding the plastic model around. Two oh three was already on infrared video, its ghostly outline like an underdeveloped negative, a heat blur around the twin twenty-one-thousand pound Pratt and Whitney exhausts, heat streamers trailing from the fuselage’s shimmering edge.
Shirer pressed the nose wheel release button again, unable to hear whether or not it was coming out of its well because of the noise of the fighter’s engines, the indicator nevertheless showing the wheel was down, his G suit feeling like a sauna as he took another run over the carrier, alert for other incoming aircraft. He was on a vector that would take him fifty feet above the flight deck, giving the LSO and other deck crew plus everyone in PRIFLY a chance to see whether the wheel was in fact down.
“There it is!” said one of the red-jacketed ordnance crew.
“No,” responded a green jacket from electronics maintenance, his arm following the line of the plane, “it’s only half-extended.”
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
The LSO saw it swooping directly overhead through the mist. “LSO to two oh three. Your nose wheel is only half-extended. Do you read me?”
“Affirmative. Nose wheel half-extended,” came Shirer’s voice, crackling through static.
“LSO to two oh three. Go to five thousand. Repeat, five thousand. Minimum radius ten miles. Repeat ten miles and hold pattern. I say again, hold pattern.”
“Going to five thousand,” confirmed Shirer, silently cursing the nose wheel. “Will hold pattern.” The carrier couldn’t waste any more time on him at the moment. He would have to hold pattern until Salt Lake City got all its other planes, which included combat patrols approaching “Bingo”—fuel exhausted — status, and only then, when his Tomcat’s fuel was all but gone, reducing the risk of fire, could they try to bring him in.
His eyes refocused on his helmet display, which remained steady, despite the motion of the fighter. Shirer could see he had fifty-seven minutes of fuel remaining. Meantime he’d try the wheel again. He thought he felt it give a little — hoped that it might only be a bird jamming the lower gear. A bird’s body, most likely a gull, would compress on retraction — unless it was one of the big wandering albatross with a wingspan up to seven feet, but he’d felt no impact.
He tried the release again and it seemed to give, but only a fraction. Trouble was, it was so damn hard to be certain, given all the noise. Simultaneously the indicator panel’s constant flickering demanded close attention if he was to avoid midair collision.
* * *
With the ferry almost at the dock and the yellow Honda rolling slowly up behind theirs, Rosemary looked about anxiously for Robert. She saw him walk out from the bracken behind the Prices, coming up to them on the driver’s side, rapping on the window. Rosemary saw Price start, winding down the window, looking flustered.
“Going to Mallaig?” Robert asked Price, his tone convivial.
“Ah, yes—” Price turned to his wife. “Joan said we’d probably meet up with you.”
“Small world,” said Robert, still smiling. “Rosemary’ll be glad to see you.” He indicated the ferry at the dock. “Better be getting back to the car. See you on board.”
“Ah, yes.”
By the time Robert reached the car, the ferry attendant was waiting for him to drive on down the ramp. There obviously wasn’t any hurry about it — not until the Christmas rush in a few days time would the lonely road see a line of cars and trucks backed impatiently waiting to cross the loch.
“Well?” asked Rosemary. “What did they say?”
“Not much,” answered Robert. “Seemed surprised.” He pulled his seat belt strap across, looking at Rosemary. “Better buckle up. More accidents happen leaving port.”
“Except we’re not on your submarine,” she replied affably, “and we’re not leaving port exactly.”
“Buckle up. Accidents happen when you least expect them.”
As they approached the ferry and he was watching the Prices in the rearview, Rosemary saw that on the other side of the loch, mist had crept right down to the bank, and she pointed out patches of old snow discolored by pink algae visible among the heather. In a few more seconds the mist was replaced by heavy fog, tongues of it tumbling like dry ice over the embankment, spreading quickly, turning what had been the cobalt blue of the loch into a monotonous gray sheet. “I don’t fancy being ahead of them in that,” she said, indicating the fog on the far side of the loch.
“Neither do I.”
“How can we avoid it?” said Rosemary, almost as if she were asking him to turn back, her suspicion of the Prices now complete. “Not like the big ferry, is it? I mean, we’ll be
first on and first off.” They went over the bump of the ramp, the metal drop plate reverberating under them, followed by a quieter sound as the tires “burred” on the grooved steel decking.
“It’ll be all right,” Robert told her.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll think of something.”
“What did she say — Mrs. Price?”
“Nothing. All smiles. Didn’t seem surprised at all. Very cool.”
“Perhaps she doesn’t know?”
Robert looked across at Rosemary. It was the kind of glance she used to give a student when he didn’t know what came after Hamlet’s “To be or…”
“All right then,” she conceded. “So she would have to know — if she’s with him all the time. I mean if she is his wife? Was she wearing a ring?”
“What — oh, I don’t know. Never noticed.”
“Men never do.”
“Ring wouldn’t prove anything. Not these days-” He saw the hood of the Prices’ Honda dip toward the deck as it pulled up behind them. “Keep the doors locked,” he told Rosemary. “I won’t be—”
“Stay here? Locked in?” she said, adopting a cockney accent to convey the apprehension an upper-middle-class upbringing wanted to subdue. “Not ruddy likely. I’m coming with you.” As Robert walked around to the left side of the car and opened her door, the wind buffeting his tweed jacket, he felt the bulk of the gun against his chest. If there was any comfort in it, it was also a reminder that he hadn’t practiced with the service-issued sidearm for at least three years — at Norfolk, Virginia, when he’d first taken command of Roosevelt. Opening her door, he gave her his hand and flashed a honeymoon smile. “Get Mrs. Price — if that’s who she is— off to one side. Get her talking. I want to jaw with her old man.”
“Yes,” Rosemary said hesitantly. “All right. You know—”
“He was very defensive about not having joined up. When old McRae, remember, challenged him about being a lecturer at LSE.”