World in Flames wi-3

by Ian Slater

  The rest of it was crossed out by the censor’s pen.

  Just like Stacy, thought David. They put him in a hole somewhere in the Midwest in some friggin’ wheat field and he thinks he’s an authority on how to run the war. “Very scary in Canada,” Melissa went on.

  Six big grain silos — huge things like round skyscrapers — no windows and full of wheat, waiting for rail transport to the Great Lakes. They were blown up. ABC Late Night showed shots of one of them — terrific explosion. Apparently they build up a lot of electricity from the dry grain dust and it makes for a very explosive atmosphere, but of course, sabotage is suspected. There’s a big row about how come ABC got an exclusive — live coverage of one of the silos blowing its top. They said they got an anonymous tip, which is probably right — I mean whoever blew it up probably wanted us to see it. Just to show how vulnerable we are. Now everyone’s saying our big mistake was to have let so many so-called “refugees’ into the States during the Gorbachev years — turns out apparently that the head of the KGB was stuffing in as many agents as possible. Nobody figured what would happen after Gorbachev, I guess.

  Must run now. I am sorry, Davey, but I wanted to tell you right away. Please write. I’d love to hear from you.

  Love, Lissa.

  There were hugs and kisses.

  “Hey!” came a British voice from outside. “Don’t make a meal of it, Yank.”

  “Hero’s probably wanking himself off,” said another voice. It sounded like the sergeant, so that when David came out, he was ready for him. But it wasn’t. Instinctively the British soldiers stepped back, one pinned up against the water fountain, his sleeve getting wet. Brentwood’s face was white with anger. As he passed them, the men waiting for the toilet fell silent, and for a moment it was as if the noise of the train drowned all else, even the sergeant’s snoring, while David, mumbling, “Excuse me,” made his way back to his seat by the window, the letter now a crumpled, tight ball in his fist.

  One of the soldiers waiting outside the toilet, a corporal, lit a cigarette and noted quietly, “A Dear John letter. You think?”

  “I’ll put a fiver on it,” said an Australian gunner, arm in a sling.

  “Dear John in the John,” a cockney quipped.

  “Not funny, mate,” said the corporal. “Knock the piss out of you, that will. Rotten bitch.”

  “He should chuck it. Throw it away,” said the corporal’s mate.

  “Nah,” said the cockney. “Our ‘ero’s a bloody brooder, I reckon. ‘E’ll covet that, ‘e will. Read it over an’ over. Torture ‘imself proper. Drop ‘is bundle, ‘e will. No more gongs for him, mate.”

  “Ah, I dunno,” said the Australian reflectively, drawing thoughtfully on the cigarette. “Might take it out on the Russkis and win another friggin’ gong.”

  “A Purple ‘Eart’s only medal ‘e’ll get,” rejoined the cockney. “A loser.”

  “Dunno,” opined the Australian, lighting a cigarette from the corporal. “Hears his bird’s getting screwed by the milkman. First he’s mad, full ‘o piss and vinegar, know what I mean? Then he goes really crazy — runs at a fucking machine gun. He’ll get his gong.” The Australian blew out a cloud of smoke and looked down at the cockney. “But it’ll be posthumous.”

  “Well,” answered the cockney, “ ‘e won’t get it in bloody Brussels. All ‘e’ll get there is the clap.”

  “No way,” concluded the Australian definitively. “Right now he hates all women, I reckon.”

  “Who are you?” asked the cockney derisively. “Dr. Freud?”

  “Listen, mate, I know about those blokes. Overachievers. Type A. Go, go, go, and then suddenly they look around and mere’s no one there. Then they can go either way. He’s on a high wire, mate, make no mistake.”

  * * *

  When Lili came through the carriage again, clutching a sheaf of papers in her hands, checking each patient had the right chart to avoid the kinds of bureaucratic foul-ups that so often bedeviled administrators trying to keep track of wounded as they moved from train to buses to ships, she saw David and could tell instantly something dreadful had happened to him. He was staring out the carriage window like an old man, the coloration in his face splotchy, teeth clenched like those patients she’d seen who ground their teeth at night and wondered why they woke up with a pounding headache — a look of such unrelieved bitterness in his eyes that it seemed to distort the very contours of his face.

  Lili could only wonder what might have caused it. Her heart wanted to go out to him not only because she had found him attractive when she’d first seen him but because he was an American. In her father’s house the word “American” had always been uttered in reverential tones. When she was a child, her father had taken her to the South, deep into French-speaking Wallonia, to Bastogne, where the Nazis had made their deep armored thrust through Belgium in December of 1944. Lili had stood in awe of the huge monument outside the town with the Latin inscription, which her father translated: “To the American liberators. The Belgian people remember.” He had told her of how his great-grandfather and his wife and two children, like so many other Belgians, owed their lives to the Americans who, though surrounded by a ring of German steel in that bitter Christmas, wouldn’t surrender. At school, Lili had heard the story of how the American general, given the surrender terms by the German commander, had replied, “Nuts,” though her father—”in the interest of truth,” as he gravely told her — felt compelled to explain to her in order to save her any “embarrassment” as she grew older that what the American general, McAuliffe, after whom the town square in Bastogne was named, had actually said was not “Nuts” but an English synonym to do with, as Lili’s father put it, a part of the male anatomy.

  Because of the fearlessness of her youth and because she had always assumed Americans were heroes, Lili felt that no matter how off-putting David’s mood or appearance was now, she must try to help him. He was, after all, far away from his home, and to have fought with such courage must have exacted a terrible cost. She was so used to seeing soldiers whose wounds were external, she had to remind herself that some of the most terrible wounds, as her father had so often told her, were unseen, inside the heart. Perhaps, she thought, he was worried about the coming ordeal of identifying the captive SPETS. It was not a thing, she imagined, that a soldier liked doing, even to his most bitter enemy, even though she knew such people must be punished. Perhaps after he had been to the NATO HQ, she could help him forget the ordeal by showing him around Brussels. She must be brave, she resolved, brace herself and risk his anger. The Belgians’ debt of honor to the Americans, her father had said, was eternal, and every generation must do its best to repay.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Five hundred miles to the east, on the snowy vastness of the alluvial Polish plain, the thunder of artillery was intense. Along the C-shaped front that took in Gdansk in the north to Poznan, 250 miles to the southwest, and Krakow, 250 miles to the southeast, the crashing of the artillery was so constant that it was said newborn babies were accepting the noise as normal. Since December 21, over a thousand Russian self-propelled 152-millimeter gun-howitzers, refueled by urgently rushed oil supplies from the Estonian shale fields, were mobile again and, together with the 2,037 lighter 122-millimeter guns still in action on the front, were laying down a wall of steel that had already destroyed advanced elements of the Dutch Forty-first and German Third Armored. And with blizzards moving in from the Baltic, advance Allied air cover was soon reduced to almost nil except for the all-weather ground-hugging Tornadoes whose British and German pilots were flying often no more than a hundred feet above ground level, denying Russian antiaircraft radar stations any telltale “bounce-back.”

  The situation was made even worse for the Allies when the American helicopters, which had performed so magnificently at Fulda Gap when the Russian armored surges had first breached the NATO defenses, now found themselves hampered by lack of refueling depots. The helos, including the redoubtable Black Ha
wk UH-60—three-man-crewed air cavalry choppers, capable of carrying up to eleven fully equipped troops, antitank and antihelo missiles, plus M-52 mine disposal baskets — were fuel-limited to a hundred minutes in the air. Drop tanks could be fitted, but then the fuel weight/weapons equation shifted dramatically, making the missions doubly dangerous for the pilot. In short, as General Freeman was first to recognize in his forward HQ bunker less than forty miles from Poznan, his armies were the victims of their own success.

  “Like small businesses,” he had told his aides. “All the business we want, fellas, and too little inventory.” After he’d broken out of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, the speed of his advance from NATO’s central front had been such that urgently needed fuel, ammunition, and food supplies had either been slowed or stopped altogether in the truck convoys’ attempt to keep up with the troops in the blizzards sweeping down from the Baltic and the North Sea. In such weather, artillery notwithstanding, the opinion of most Allied commanders was that neither side could mount major offensives, particularly fighter sorties — NATO air forces, as much as the Soviets, thankful for the respite of the snowstorms so they could attend to the high levels of maintenance demanded by state-of-the-art aircraft. In any case, the pilots of the “super” birds like the F-15 Eagles and MiG Foxbats were presently as worn out as their fighters’ engines. Furthermore, apart from the Luftwaffe and RAF risking their Tornadoes in zero visibility, subjecting other billion-dollar airplanes and pilots to dogfights in blizzard conditions was a losing proposition. For the Allied chiefs, it was viewed as a good time to pause and consolidate. In this they were in concert with Washington.

  Not so for Douglas Freeman. He wanted to press on.

  “Give me a fuel dump, Lord,” Freeman declared, studying the headquarters map of the curving Polish front beyond Poznan, “and I’ll be in Warsaw in two weeks! In another week I’ll be over the River Bug into Russia.”

  Without turning from the map, Freeman addressed his aide, Colonel Norton. “Jim, I’ve gotta have gas. By God, we’ll fly fuel in here by the pallet if we have to. Like we did it inside the DB pocket. Meanwhile I don’t want anybody digging in for Christmas. Get as much as we can as far forward as we can. We can’t stop. Attack! Attack! Attack! — that’s the strategy. That’s the only strategy. You start letting troops dig in, they start thinking it’s R and R. Start putting up pictures of the girl back home and their dog. Next thing you know, you have to stick a bayonet up their ass to get ‘em moving again. No, sir, now we’ve got the bastards on the ropes — finish them off. That’s the plan.”

  “I needn’t tell you it’s a risk, General,” cautioned Norton anyway. “You could lose everything you’ve gained.”

  “I know — I know. It’s against every military credo. But all we need is the gas, goddamn it! If we can get the gas up here, we can kick ass from here to Moscow.” Freeman paused, arms akimbo, looking up at the huge operations map, shaking his head. “We made one hell of a mistake, Jim — and I’ll be the first to admit it—” He paused. “Though I wouldn’t want that to get around.”

  “What’s that, General?”

  “That we — meaning everybody from the president down— screwed up royally when we thought that once we hit the Russian regulars, all their frappin’ republics would take advantage of it. Try like Siberia to break free of Moscow. Even help us. But—” the general sighed, his right-hand glove sweeping over the map beyond the Urals and the Caucasus. “—we should have known. Mother Russia isn’t politics. It’s an emotion. Republics’ll hang together to beat us, no matter they hate one another’s guts.” Freeman lifted a mug of coffee, holding it thoughtfully between his hands, still studying the map. “But I do believe the Baltics will be different. They’ll help us. Oh, not much — only a handful of troops compared to the Russians. But — look what Finland did in forty-one, Jim.” He put his coffee down, making short, skirting movements about the Russian Baltic seaports. “If they can harass the Russians, a week, ten days — long enough for us to drive a wedge here, into Lithuania, and out — we can do it, Jim. We can do it.”

  “I hope so, General.”

  “So do I.” It was such a shocking, unpredictable thing for the general to say — to concede even the slightest doubt — that it had the effect of jolting Norton.

  “General.”

  “No, no.” Freeman shook his head. “I have no doubt about my troops. About the ground war. What I’m alluding to, Colonel, is a matter of time. What I’m concerned about is that if we don’t hit hard, and fast enough…”He paused and took a sip of coffee.

  “What, General?”

  “That some bastard’ll push the button.”

  Knowing the general as well as he did, what disturbed Norton most was that if the general had seemingly envisaged the possibility of the Russians going nuclear — then Freeman had probably thought of doing it himself.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In Atlanta CDC–Center for Disease Control — another skull-and-crossbones pin, this one for the state of New York, was stuck into the map of the United States. There were now twenty-three pins clustered along the eastern seaboard, near Chicago and the Midwest, the others sprinkled throughout California, the major clusters of “stings,” meaning five or more acts of sabotage, in Silicone Valley, the site of some of the country’s leading electronic defense system manufacturers.

  What was first thought to be only a New York problem because of the sabotage of Croton, Hillsview, and the other main reservoirs for New York, affecting eleven million people, was now a national crisis, affecting seventy-two million. Over a thousand cases of “arson” had been reported — many of the fires impossible to extinguish by water from city reservoirs because the water, once evaporated, left lethal residues of airborne poison. All but two of the twenty-three cities, Salt Lake City and Portland, declared martial law and curfews in an effort to contain growing crowds clamoring for water supplies. In Norfolk, Virginia, and in Puget Sound, north of Seattle, at the Bangor Sub Base, several nuclear submarines in for maintenance were ordered to stay in port, their salt/freshwater converters providing emergency drinking water for households with a ration of two gallons of water per day for a family of four.

  National Guard units throughout the country on “shoot-to-kill” orders surrounded distilleries and bottled water depots, and in Colorado, more Guard units were deployed to turn back ad hoc convoys of armed civilians heading for Aspen and other winter resorts where fresh snow had not yet melted down into the contaminated water tables. Atlanta CDC issued a national alert — so urgent that it could not wait for the chiefs of staff’s normal clearance and so was disseminated under President Mayne’s “Executive Order” signature. The CDC alert was a warning that because of the poisoning that by now had been conveyed via myriad underground aquifers into the major U.S. water tables, “no water other than rainwater directly trapped by uncontaminated vessels would be safe” for at least three months. When President Mayne realized the enormity of the problem, he knew he was confronted by a danger whose implications posed a greater threat to the public than that posed to Lincoln during the threat of disunion. Already looting and attendant crime were the worst they had ever been.

  As the president moved from his White House work study around to the Oval Office to address the nation, the kleig lights seemed to stun him momentarily and he used his notes, with Xeroxes of the Atlanta CDC crisis map, to shield himself from the glare.

  “How long have we got?” he asked Trainor, who was grumpily telling the CBS mobile crew to clear the hallway.

  “Six minutes, Mr. President,” Trainor replied.

  * * *

  As he raised his cup of coffee seconds before going on national TV to try to calm the nation, Mayne looked at the black liquid and put the cup down.

  “It’s been tested, Mr. President,” an aide informed him. “Washington’s supply hasn’t been affected — so far.”

  “Why not?” he asked. “Surely the capital would be the prime target?”
>
  “We think,” suggested Trainor, “it’s a message. U.S. leadership can survive if it comes to terms.”

  “With what? Chemical warfare?” snapped Mayne.

  “With their terms,” responded Trainor.

  One of the TV crew stepped forward beneath the kleig lights and put a glass of water on the president’s desk. There were ten seconds to go. “Take it away,” said Mayne, indicating the glass. “Can’t show that on television. Cause a goddamn revolution!”

  “Get it away!” hissed the TV producer. The red light turned green.

  Unbeknownst to President Mayne as he began his speech, red lights all across the frozen tundra of northern Canada and Alaska came on in every one of NORAD’s — North American Air Defense — early-warning stations reporting “Bogeys, fifty plus.”

  It was the third time that week that NORAD jets, engines constantly warmed in the hardened snow-white hangars, scrambled to meet the Soviet bombers who, with all Canadian and American F-18s airborne, turned back before they reached the BI — Baffin Island — circle. Duty officers were watching the operators as much as the big screens. This game of cat and mouse, constantly testing each other’s state of readiness, did much more than tell the other side whether you were ready or not, forcing the NORAD fighters to gulp thousands of gallons of precious fuel during each scramble. It also wore down the nerves of potential attackers and defenders alike, especially those of radar operators on the NORAD line, any one of whose “yea” or “nay” could inadvertently start the chain of events catapulting both sides into all-out nuclear war.

  Trainor read the message handed him by the TV producer. Ahead of the Pentagon, the wire services were reporting ten massive forest fires, apparently deliberately set and now raging on the north-south spine of the Sierra Nevada, causing the evacuation of over thirty communities and producing a thick pall of smoke and ash over ten thousand square miles in the western United States. As Trainor walked quietly back to the White House press room, he glanced at the monitor, ever conscious of the president’s appearance as well as what he was saying. But in this crisis, Trainor knew that it hardly mattered what the president looked like so long as he projected calm— and did not come across as being as stressed out as he was.