World in Flames wi-3

by Ian Slater

  Already his photo with the caption of “War Criminal” had been circulated throughout China to stiffen resistance among the masses to the increasing U.S.-ROK attacks which were now pushing the NKA and the Chinese troops back over the Yalu into Manchuria, using the low-radiation but nevertheless devastating atomic shell artillery fire.

  “General Kim is coming to see you!” announced the interrogator. “If you do not confess, you will make him very angry-”

  Freeman said nothing.

  “Do you hear me, mikuk?” he shouted again.

  “No.”

  “You — you do not be clever people with the general.” The interrogator was shaking his finger like a schoolmaster, cautioning him against disobedience. “You must confess or you will make him very angry.”

  “I wouldn’t want to do that,” said Freeman wryly.

  “Excellent. You are thinking correctly.” With that the interrogator barked several orders and two NKA guards, in full winter uniform, ear flaps down, came in, wearing white cloth face masks against the stench, which, interestingly, the interrogator either didn’t seem to mind or took pains to hide his distaste for.

  They untied him and took him away to the cold shower which meant that in half an hour he would have some thin rice soup, bread, and an injection perhaps of vitamins to help get his color up. He would be going on TV again. So far they hadn’t got a confession, but Freeman knew the power of the box. With all the will in the world to defy them, once you were shown unshaven and bleary-eyed, despite the new change of olive-drab pajamas that were supposed to pass for fresh clothes, it would be next to impossible to look anything else but defeated, which the NKA and Chinese propagandists well knew. Unless you were one of those who had extraordinary imagination and determination, it was difficult to beat the medium when it was the message. He remembered how, years before, the Chinese had so successfully covered the memory of the Beijing massacre among their people with TV confessions and “cooked” footage that in the end, many people believed a massacre had never taken place.

  * * *

  Peter Zeldman was the last man to step off the ice onto chopper number four’s ladder port aft of the sub. As he began his ascent, he saw Capt. Robert Brentwood starting to climb the rope ladder dangling from the chopper hovering uneasily amidships off the Roosevelt’s starboard side about forty or fifty feet above the ice hummocks, and Zeldman chastised himself for not having gone down to Control to press home to Brentwood the chopper crewman’s warning about just how powerful the gusts were a few feet off the ground. As the chopper hauling him up rose, Zeldman turned his head to check that Brentwood was doing okay when suddenly there was a tremendous jerk, the chopper above him buffeted sideways in a heavy gust. Zeldman’s right hand, numb with cold, tried to hang on as his left hand flew away from the rope because of the jerking motion. But he couldn’t hold and fell thirty feet onto a hummock below. Almost instantly the air force corporal, though busy in the chopper’s cabin assigning the men for the best possible distribution of weight, came quickly down the rope, not only from long practice but with the knowledge that the sub would explode in four — now three and a half — minutes. He’d seen Zeldman’s dark outline on the white ice rebound from the hummock as it hit, and while he hoped for the best, he feared the worst.

  The worst was what he found. Though Peter Zeldman had fallen only thirty feet, his head had struck the wind-carved, concrete-hard ice of a pressure ridge. The corporal felt for a pulse, but there was none, the warm back of the man’s neck lolling as if there was no bone there, the neck broken as cleanly as if it had been struck by a steel beam.

  “Two minutes — come on!” came the voice of the loud-hailer, barely audible under the frantic slap of the rotors. There was no more the corporal could do as it would take more than two minutes to heave the dead body up. Quickly he reached about Zeldman’s neck, took the dog tags, made the sign of the cross, and ran for the ladder.

  * * *

  President Mayne, without taking precious time to confer with Looking Glass, the EC-135 out of Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, or his advisers, or the seventeen “options of attack” that were laid out in the ostensibly simple but in fact very complex seventy-five pages of the football’s “black book,” ordered an MX launch against the massive Soviet oil refineries at Kuibuyshev, Ishimbay, Perm’, and Angarii. And, via satellite communication, he told Chernko, in a deadly calm tone, that the Soviet warhead that had penetrated the generally impenetrable ABM screen now thrown up along the NORAD line, and which had burst above Detroit, was the reason for the four-to-one retaliatory attack against the four refineries, and that this would constitute U.S. policy until all Soviet attacks ceased.

  * * *

  Chernko understood that Mayne wasn’t threatening him— that it was a promise, a promise backed by the undeniable demonstration of American technological superiority, still very potent despite the enormous damage it had already sustained.

  “What will happen if you do not find the two submarines?” asked Chernko, trying to sound unflappable but something in his voice betraying tightly reined panic, a panic heightened by the unhesitating willingness of the American president to have had the audacity to actually name the retaliatory targets in the Soviet Union.

  “What will happen if we don’t find your two subs,” replied Mayne, “is that if another U.S. city is struck, whether it contains a military target or not, I will take out four of your cities. You may have some difficulty reining in some of your Politburo members, Mr. Chernko, but with four of your cities gone, I think you’ll have the best of the argument to cease and desist. Wouldn’t you say so?”

  “I am doing all I can,” snapped Chernko.

  “If a U.S. city is hit,” repeated President Mayne, “I will take out four Soviet cities.”

  Trainor stood unusually silent, exhilarated, terrified by the president’s cold delivery of America’s terms. Mayne was talking unconditional surrender.

  Trainor waited several seconds before he spoke, and then, as the president sat calmly watching Kneecap’s monitors, his aide, trying to remember exactly where he had put the president’s migraine medication, asked “How’s the head, sir?”

  “Clear.”

  On Kneecap’s monitors they were now receiving the first pictures of Detroit, in real time, relayed by one of the few remaining observation satellites that were still working, the hope for Star Wars rocket-killing beam satellites the biggest single technological flop on both sides of the war, the Star Wars satellites easily taken out by supersonic aircraft firing “pebbles”—clusters of small antisatellite satellites — into orbit.

  * * *

  In Japan, because of more favorable atmospheric conditions over the northwestern Pacific, TV reception throughout the Japanese archipelago was exceptionally good, enhanced by the high-density Japanese screens that were now showing pictures of the one-megaton air burst over Detroit, eighty times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, the Japanese people horrified.

  * * *

  The Soviet warhead over Detroit was 1.2 megatons, exploding in an air burst at seven thousand feet above the city, fifteen miles in from Lake Saint Clair and approximately six miles north of the Canadian city of Windsor, which, because of a dip in the Great Lakes border, lies south of Detroit. The hydrogen bomb, detonating 1.3 miles over the intersection of Interstate 75 and Interstate 94, about 3.5 kilometers from the Windsor-Detroit tunnel, created a fireball. Different in shape from a ground-burst mushroom, the halos spreading about the shock front and fireball were extraordinarily elongated, forming elegant oval-shaped smoke rings, the fireball passing through their centers. There was no crater, as there would have been with a ground burst, but the air burst, unlike a ground-zero burst, which would have lost much of its energy going into the ground, was much more devastating. First it created an enormous vacuum over the city, then its overpressure collapsed buildings and people alike, as the firestorm-accompanied pressure rings moved from twelve p.s.i. at
the center to one p.s.i. across a twenty-six-mile-diameter killing zone. Over a half million died outright from the blast, blast-related injuries, and from the fires and thermal radiation which injured or killed another 760,000 and reduced the automobile factories to ashes.

  Not only were Japanese TV viewers horrified! — their industrialists were sick with concern. The destruction of America’s major auto factories would be a short-term gain for the Japanese auto industry, but the Americans, who could clear and rebuild faster than anyone on earth, would — unless the nuclear exchange became a total holocaust — soon have the newest, most modern and up-to-date auto production facilities in the world, and then Japan would be the country with the outmoded and obsolete equipment.

  But they knew, as did Mayne and Chernko, that everything depended on whether or not the Americans found the two Soviet subs. Should Washington and/or New York be struck, the psychological effect throughout the world would be enormous. With the U.S. political and financial capitals in ruins, her loss of prestige, that intangible yet all-important quality in the world of realpolitik, would be disastrous for America, as a ravaged Berlin had been for Germany. America might survive, but her influence in world affairs would never again be the same, and she would forfeit it in favor of Japan.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  Ray Brentwood’s discovery that the oil patches revealed the presence of the two diesel-electric Russian subs off the American West Coast had propelled him overnight into the national spotlight, but he knew spotlights could shift very quickly. If you failed, they went out altogether — you would be yesterday’s man — the man who got the scent but lost the hunt. With this in mind, he was concerned that the very size of his twenty-four-ship “armada,” as Vice Admiral Rutgers grumpily called it, while essential to cover the area, could be as much an obstruction to the hunt. If the sound of every one of the twenty-four ships was not read and understood correctly by each ship’s sonar operators, it could be mistaken for the enemy. Ray Brentwood also realized something that he hadn’t dwelt on during the officers’ call — that if any one of the Russian’s four big ballistic missiles exploded in the middle of the task force, it would, in the parlance of the military, “neutralize” them in seconds.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Neither Soviet skipper nor their crews could prove it, but, although the odds of both boats having leaked oil on the same patrol weren’t beyond possibility, given the relatively old hulls of the Golf, it was still highly unlikely. It was, they concluded, sabotage. Not of the kind that would have caused “noise shorts” which would have been quickly noticed in the first hour out of Vladivostok and which could have been corrected quickly in port. Something more subtle — a small oil leak, slow, insidious, which wouldn’t be noticeable immediately, and by the time it was, could not be so easily located or repaired: There were no dry docks on America’s continental shelf. And rather than each going its own way, they’d had to stay hidden and waited together should mutual assistance be necessary. It was the price they were paying for what they believed were “Yevreyskie sabotazhniki”—”Jewish saboteurs”—who had been known to pinprick oil feeder lines. Whether it had been done by the likes of the three Jewish brothers the KGB had arrested in Khabarovsk near the railhead for the Eastern TVD, they didn’t know, only that if they could get their hands on whoever had done it, they would drown them in oil — very slowly.

  * * *

  Ray Brentwood sent ships out over the search sea radiating from the position of the two oil spills he had collected. As well as those naval vessels assigned to his task force, Brentwood commandeered every available ship he saw — even seconding three coast guard vessels en route to San Diego for liberty. As well as the twenty-seven American ships, there were four Canadian frigates, which, though little better than target drones compared to the equipment aboard the American Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates, were, typically, crewed by seamen as brave as those on Brentwood’s ships and especially adept at making do and squeezing the best out of near obsolete equipment. It was from one of these Canadian frigates that a Sea King helicopter took off, towing its yellow MAD — magnetic anomaly detector — below its tail assembly, covering a search grid 258 miles northwest of San Diego. The Sea King thought it detected a magnetic anomaly, but the Canadian chopper, devoid of ASW torpedoes, could do nothing but radio the Americans.

  Within twenty minutes U.S. MH-53E Sea Stallions had closed with everything, as a Canadian observer described it, from dunking sonar, MADs, and MK-37 acoustic homing ASW torpedoes to Chateaubriand. The graph traces of the MADs from two of the five-man-crew Sea Stallions instantly concurred with the Canadians’ report that there was a magnetic anomaly and that most likely, “by nature of trace,” it was a metallic hull that was distorting the earth’s magnetic lines of force — in the same way as a magnet drawn beneath a sheet will redistribute the position of magnetic filings on the paper.

  But whether the anomaly was caused by a submarine hull, the traces could not tell. Sonars were dunked — so many of the champagne-magnum-size listening mikes being lowered into the sea that Brentwood’s executive officer, Cameron, said it looked like a “salmon derby.” Still, the passive sonar mikes couldn’t add any more to the active traces, unable to determine whether the hull was that of a sub. It could be a wreck — the coastal waters strewn with them. But then again, as Ray Brentwood pointed out to Cameron, the two oil patches had been found together, so that one would have expected a bigger anomaly unless it was the hull of a sub they’d found, the other hiding beneath it, the two traces merging into one magnetic anomaly.

  Brentwood was faced with a classic subhunter’s dilemma, if he dropped a torpedo and it wasn’t the subs, the explosion would immediately alert them, whether or not they were in the immediate area. And they could launch within minutes.

  Brentwood ordered sonars dunked to three hundred meters but forbade any active pulses. At three hundred meters the sonars would be very close to the crush depth of an Echo III-class diesel-electric sub. At that depth the bulkheads begin to moan. There was also the possibility that if the anomaly was a sub, it was just that—one sub. The other could very well have taken cover in the noise umbrella of the task force. Running on her batteries, the second sub would not easily be detected amid the cavitation noises of the surface vessels. Think! Ray told himself, think like a man who is hunted — like a submariner, a man closed in, as he had been in the darkness of his own trial, when he’d gone under anesthesia time and again, unsure of whether he’d ever surface again. Would you, he asked himself, simply lie down there quietly and wait for death? No, he decided. If they had come this far to their American station, they too were brave. They would fight.

  He radioed all ships to stop engines so that the deep sonar might hear the slightest sound. He could tell the officers were itching for him to go “active” with the sonar, but he wouldn’t be tempted merely to break their tension, to get it over with. If he couldn’t wait, lost his nerve, he reminded himself, a million faces — and more — would be melted and disfigured as his had been in the inferno of the Blaine. And for these, as for any victims of a nuclear blast, no surgery would save them from the radiation-bred cancers that would eat them away inside.

  The officer of the deck checked that all auxiliary machinery and air-conditioning were shut off. “Ship secured, sir.”

  “Very well. Now we’re all quiet, let’s hear what’s down there.”

  The sonar operator switched the incoming noise track to the PA. Sometimes, as now, the sound from the depths was so much like the noise of frying fish that some men claimed they could smell it and even taste…

  “Contact! Bearing two one niner.”

  “Range?” Ray Brentwood asked.

  “Estimate… contact gone.”

  Brentwood was behind the operator and saw the screen himself, the amber arm uninterrupted by any blip. “What was it, Sonar?”

  “Noise short from a hull, sir. Definitely.”

  “Sir?” It was the O
OD.

  “Yes?”

  “Sir, one of the Sea Stallions didn’t get the hook quickly enough.” It meant that as one of the helos, probably out of fuel, had come down on the white circle of the Munro’s flight deck, a “snapper”—the seaman responsible for snapping the hook onto the U-bolt beneath the chopper — wasn’t fast enough, and in the pitch and roll, the chopper had lurched forward, thwacking the bulkhead, creating the noise short.

  * * *

  “I want whoever it was,” said Brentwood, “on a charge. Immediately.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  That was another misconception Ray knew he had to deal with — the idea that because he’d had a tough run of it, ending up with “sludge-removal-propelled,” he’d somehow feel sorry for the underdog, the man who made a mistake. He also knew if he screwed up, they wouldn’t even give him sludge removal. Lieutenant Cameron as OOD couldn’t remember when he’d heard a bridge so quiet — so much so that he now heard noises, the creaking of metal fittings, which he’d never been aware of.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  The icy wind blowing the Spitzbergen howled about the choppers that were bringing in the crew of the scuttled Roosevelt. Because of the radio silence that had to be in effect while they were in the air, it wasn’t until they landed that Robert Brentwood and the men in the other four helicopters learned that Lt. Comdr. Peter Zeldman was dead.

  The Royal Navy liaison officer assigned to the Norwegian Base expressed his condolences, and while the crew were “mugging up” with cocoa and biscuits, he informed Robert Brentwood, in a decidedly Oxfordian accent, that Brentwood and the remainder of his crew had been ordered back by SACLANT “posthaste” to Holy Loch. “Balloon’s gone up, I’m afraid and—” He stopped. “Of course, you of all people know about that, sir.”