World in Flames wi-3

by Ian Slater

  Brentwood nodded, but he was still thinking about Zeldman and Georgina.

  “Point is, sir, SACLANT’s canceled all leave. And, ah…” The lieutenant, for all the Firsts he’d earned at Oxford, was suddenly tongue-tied, realizing that, if the world survived, the man he was looking at would go down in history as the unflinching American who, upon seeing the Russian ICBMs streaking up from Kola Peninsula toward his country, had immediately launched the West’s counterattack.

  None of the Roosevelt’s crew spoke much as they filed into the Hercules transport that, escorted by six heavily armed Harriers, would take them back to Holy Loch. The next worst thing to having lost your ship was being split up. Half of them, on the orders from SACLANT, were to replace only those crewmen killed aboard another Sea Wolf II which now lay waiting for them in Holy Loch, a titanium patch on her hull where a Soviet ASROC had grazed her hull aft of the sail.

  It made sense to split up the Roosevelt crew and they knew it, but for men who had lived and worked so closely together, knew one another’s joys and failures and shared them, it was still a gut-wrenching business on top of having to send your own ship to her grave. And while they were glad to have survived the ordeal, their first view of Scotland’s Cape Wrath was greeted with mixed feelings. There was, too, in the Hercules an unspoken fear as heavy about them as the steady roar of the great Hercules engines: the cold, scientific fact that no matter how they felt now, some of them were going to the within the next few months, others having no more than two, possibly three, years to live — if they weren’t killed in action. No one had spoken about it on the way in to Spitzbergen, the dosimeters still on their belts but hidden beneath their Arctic parkas, but it was far from a case of out of sight, out of mind.

  The Hercules pilot said something over the PA which no one understood, and Robert Brentwood went forward to find out what it was. Below he could see a wrinkled, gray sea barely visible in the dawn’s early light — Cape Wrath. Just as quickly, it was swallowed by cloud.

  “Holy Loch!” the pilot told him. “Half an hour. Bet you’re pleased to be back?”

  “Yes,” said Robert. He wondered how much time he would have with Rosemary. It might be better if he had none, he thought, and immediately felt ashamed, disgusted by his own despair. Holding on to the strap webbing for support as the plane hit a patch of turbulence, he made his way carefully back from the cockpit. He told the chiefs of the boat to instruct each man in their department to take off the dosimeter, and when they’d collected them all, to give them to him. Each man’s name was on each dosimeter, and he told them they would address the problem of radiation through the base medical officer and the radiation lab in Oxford. Meanwhile he didn’t want any family or friends — if any had been alerted that Roosevelt’s crew were due back at Holy Loch — to see the dosimeters and start worrying. There’d be enough time for that later when they had the lab’s reports. Several of the men — those who, like Brentwood, had sustained more than permissible levels of radiation — felt greatly relieved, and in his concern for them, the bond they felt with old “Bing” was cemented even further.

  * * *

  The SPETS had completely surrounded the Cathedral of the Assumption. Five 135-millimeter rounds had been fired from the third T-90 in the column before the first two battle tanks had been destroyed by the direct hit from Choir Williams on the first tank, which men spewed burning fuel on the SPETS immediately around it. As Williams, following David Brentwood’s orders, made his way quickly out of the cathedral into the Hall of Facets, the glorious colors of the priceless fifteenth-century frescoes, lit up by parachute flares, didn’t warrant even a glance from him as he hastened to join Aussie and the other SAS men, only fourteen in all, not counting David Brentwood and Cheek-Dawson. Another two men were cut down as the fourteen SAS burst out from Annunciation Cathedral at the Kremlin’s southern end, across the snow-covered quad and into the pristine snow of Taynitsky Park. Another man died, beheaded by the sustained burst of heavy machine-gun fire, for despite his SPETS overlay, he was spotted in the floodlit park opposite Annunciation Cathedral because part of his SPETS overlay had been torn. In the next seven seconds, however, three floodlights and the SPETS manning them were shattered into perpetual darkness by at least five bursts of SAS submachine-gun fire as the remaining eleven SAS, including Williams A and Choir Williams, made for the wall. There was more firing, a hundred yards or so west of them, near the high water tower that marked the southernmost tip of the Kremlin’s stronghold, where SPETS, mistaking one another for SAS troops, were unintentionally creating a diversionary tactic that the eleven SAS men couldn’t have planned better themselves. It was the one flash of luck most of them would remember as, going over the darkened wall, the small band of commandos fell into the soft snow amid the trees that faced the Kremlin Quay, and beyond, in the darkness, the frozen Moscow River. In the air raid blackout of the city, the Kremlin now looked like an island of fire.

  “Where’s Brentwood?” Aussie whispered to Choir Williams as they headed away from the Kremlin, eagerly seeking the cover afforded by both blizzard and blackout.

  * * *

  In the pitch-black cathedral, its air choked with the smell of cordite, gasoline fumes, and the sweet stench of burning flesh from out by the tanks, Brentwood, taking out his own last shot of morphine, had dragged Cheek-Dawson up by the altar, having had to hold the frozen ampule in his mouth to warm it before injecting it. He loosened the Englishman’s tourniquet for a few moments but then tightened it again and clipped the last magazine of nine-millimeter shorts into the MAC’s grip housing. Then deftly, considering the unnerving shooshing sound of boots in the snow as SPETS closed in toward the cathedral, David snuffed out a tiny candle flame left burning by one of the men who now lay dead beneath it by one of the frescoed columns.

  He heard Russian voices coming from somewhere outside by the cathedral’s marbeled entrance, and racked by fatigue, he was momentarily back in the vast, marbled hall of Mansudae, where he, Freeman, and another marine had stormed the stairwell leading up to General Kim’s office. But the NKA general had fled.

  The cathedral was so huge that Brentwood thought he and Cheek-Dawson might luck out — that if they kept quiet enough, the SPETS might pass right by them through the doorway into the sanctuary. It was the fatigue that was doing it, that was making him entertain such fantastic notions of escape — as if, after the SPETS passed through, there would be no one to discover him and Cheek-Dawson in the morning light.

  * * *

  The morphine had given Cheek-Dawson new life, and with it, the clarity that David had often seen in the wounded following a shot. Though unable to walk by himself, the cold stiffening his immobile leg even further, the Englishman was fully cognizant of what was going on. Gently he nudged David and whispered, “Get going — damn fool.”

  David ignored him.

  Suddenly there was a horrific bang, not of munitions but of the huge entrance doors being thrown back at the far end, a sharp order given — the SPETS clearly gathering, readying to charge in force.

  “Here we go,” whispered Cheek-Dawson. “Think things are going to get a bit sticky, old boy. They’re—” Cheek-Dawson winced from pain, despite the morphine, as he tried to sit up into a better firing position. “They’re going to light this up like a Christmas tree.”

  “Well, hell,” said David. “At least we’ll see what we’re doing.”

  “I’d take that overlay off if I were you, old boy,” said Cheek-Dawson, grimacing.

  “Why?”

  “They capture you in that — you’re technically a spy. They don’t like spies very much.”

  “You sound like they’re going to ask me to surrender.”

  “And if they do?”

  “You’re dreaming, Dawson. Morphine’s gone to your fucking head.”

  “Then if you’re going to leave it on, old boy,” Cheek-Dawson whispered, tugging the overlay, “I suggest you make a run for it. No point in you staying around
and—”

  “Shut up,” said David. They heard a loud hissing noise, then a bump, the pillars with the saints on them flickering brilliantly, then disappearing, the flare having presumably hit the edge of the main door, bouncing back off into the snow.

  “Lousy bowlers,” Cheek-Dawson said.

  “Pitchers,” David corrected him. “They’ll get better.” They could hear loudspeakers and a lot of shouting.

  Cheek-Dawson dragged himself over behind one of the sainted pillars, David now behind the pillar to his right. “Don’t know what they’re carrying on about,” said the Englishman. “They can all have a turn.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  The sonarman aboard Ray Brentwood’s guided missile frigate had frozen a pie-slice segment of his screen— restricting the arm’s sweep between 200 and 350 degrees— where the noise short from the hard helo landing had been picked up by the Munro’s passive sonar. Brentwood, however, quickly had him put it back on continuous sweep from zero to 360 degrees in order to prevent the ship from being surprised by an attack from any other segment — his insurance against the assumption, now held by most of his ships, that the metallic anomaly a mile ahead of them was caused by the two subs they were looking for.

  The Munro was so quiet as Brentwood and the others listened to the steady stir-fry of incoming passive, they could hear the slopping of water against the ship’s starboard flank. Ray Brentwood knew they might be losing valuable time, but the dunking helos were insistent that the anomaly was “within the significant” range — that it could be a sub. The trouble, as Brentwood well knew through his careful attention to the minutiae of the charts, was that while they were on the continental shelf, they were very close to where it started to plunge down to form the continental slope. The “significant” anomaly could well be an outcrop of metal-rich rock or even mud slowly shifted by the turbidity currents. The other possibility was that it might be one of the many wrecks that littered the coast, some of them not marked on the charts. Was he being too cautious? — the legacy of any captain who had lost a ship.

  “Inform the helos to fire torpedoes,” he ordered.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ten sleek blue Mark-37s dropped from the hard points of the five Sea Stallions, the “wrapped” control wire unraveling behind them like tightly bundled spaghetti.

  Almost immediately the cobalt sea boiled with air bubbles— a classic sub antisonar tactic, the effusion of bubbles normally blanking any acoustic homing torpedoes. But as the Mark-37s were being guided toward magnetic anomaly, the noise of the bubbles could not deter them.

  For a moment it seemed as if the whole sea had swollen into an enormous green carbuncle, then it turned white, bursting in an air-shattering explosion, permanently deafening a sonar operator aboard one of the dunking helos who’d forgotten to turn down his volume control. There was a series of other explosions, the sea’s foaming surface littered with the torn and shattered detritus, human and material alike.

  “Quiet on the bridge!” shouted Ray Brentwood, determined not to let either ship or helo crews get carried away with the kill, lest the second one had escaped, though he seriously doubted it. OOD Cameron, summoned by one of the lookouts, saw flashes of silver amid the debris, indicating that some of the Sea Stallions’ torpedoes might have been chaff-activated— set off by metal balloons full of fine metal foil excreted by a sub in order to detonate the metal-homing warheads prematurely.

  Two miles away from the explosion whose noise smothered all target indicators in Ray Brentwood’s ships and helos, the sea’s surface was broken by what looked like two porpoise-nosed shapes, seeming to leap from the sea, whitish-green water running down their flanks.

  “Bearing!” yelled Ray Brentwood. “Zero two two! Fire harpoon! Fire ASROC!”

  The OOD immediately relayed the order to all ships while, in less than eighty seconds, the Soviet Golf 5 had launched its two SS-N-8 missiles from its fin tubes.

  Two of Brentwood’s ships fired Harpoons within two seconds of hearing his order, the American missiles having less than twenty-seven seconds to reach the sea-launched ICBMs after the Soviet missiles had cleared their fin housing, popping through the water like rubber balls suddenly released beneath the surface, their engines already ignited in boost phase.

  One was hit, everyone surprised by the lack of flame, its debris smacking loudly into the sea, other pieces of it spinning away in cartwheels, the two halves of its midsection split and dangling like a broken white cigar crashing harmlessly into the sea. But in drawing the fire of the Americans, this missile allowed the other missile from the Golf to escape, passing quickly from subsonic to supersonic trajectory, evading a phalanx of American antiballistic missile defense batteries — their radars confused by the sheer volume of information coming in from the task force’s firing — the Russian missile further aided by the usual winter storms above the mountainous coastal ranges in Oregon and Washington State interfering with advanced radar warning stations. Minutes later, it hit Seattle in air burst.

  * * *

  In President Mayne’s mind, the Russians had no doubt chosen Seattle as a “technically correct” counterforce, or military, target, as his adviser Schuman had told him, because of the massive Boeing works. It was a lawyer’s point, Mayne’s advisers aboard both Kneecap and Looking Glass telling him that though Seattle was the most populous northwestern city in the continguous United States, this could not be used as a “countervalue” argument against the Soviets, who would no doubt, correctly, claim that because of Boeing, Seattle was a bona fide “counterforce” military target. Mayne, though in no mood for lawyers’ points, nevertheless had to confront the cold logic of their reasoning in a nuclear world. But cold logic also told him the Russians, who had started the nuclear “exchange,” might well be lying through their teeth in claiming they could not contact their subs. Was it Chernko’s test of U.S. will? It was only a second in his mind’s eye, but in that second, the long memory of what America had forfeited because of Russian lies and subterfuge at the end of World War II lay heavily upon him. And what were the Russians planning? Were they moving their SLBM fleet closer, to attack should America weaken?

  He decided that for the sake of everyone, and not just the United States, there must be absolutely no question — no doubt left in the Russians’ minds. He would not order the four retaliatory strikes, and as they had not taken out Washington, he would leave Moscow standing, but ordered Leningrad taken out as payment in kind for the millions who he now knew had died in Seattle and would the in the weeks to come.

  * * *

  As the MX warheads came down over Leningrad, the overpressure caused the Neva to burst its banks, flooding Nevsky Prospekt. The rubble that moments before had been a golden glory of imperial architecture housing the general staff headquarters in Palace Square mixed in a sludge with the ashes of what had been the burnished gold of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, its vaporized frescoes infusing the sludge with speckles of gold. The entire Hermitage was razed to the ground, Rembrandt’s Flora and millions of other exhibits vaporized. The docks, where only minutes before, battle cruisers and missile-carrying destroyers were setting out to sea, were now infernos, the huge dockside cranes tumbling into the Neva, boiling it with their heat. The fires from the air burst cremated over a million — and there would have been many more were it not for the extensive underground shelters in the outlying suburbs.

  Now even Chernko knew the war was over — that America could no longer be resisted. In the crude measure of body counts, no doubt America had suffered millions more dead than the Soviet Union because of her lack of nuclear shelters and evacuation schemes, but her technology and, now it was clear, her will, were indomitable.

  * * *

  For his part in detecting the presence of the two Russian ballistic missile subs, which, had it not been for his prescience, would have surely increased America’s dreadful losses of over six million dead into more than forty and would have turned the radioactive-dead zones
of several midwestern states and north Washington State into an entire country of dead zones, poisoned for decades, Ray Brentwood had become an overnight hero — celebrated not only in every state of the union but all over the Allied world.

  But even at this moment, when Chernko, “on behalf of the Politburo and STAVKA,” delivered Russia — despite the threat of the Siberian Republic to secede — into “unconditional surrender to the United States of America,” it would take hours in some places — days in others — before the word was out, and in those places men would continue to the as if there had been no surrender. And despite the euphoria embracing the return of Ray Brentwood’s “fleet,” he stood alone at the ship’s stern, disturbingly hypnotized by the ship’s wake. At one moment it was a sea alive, its effervescence catching the morning sun like an ice cream cloud in summer, yet at the same time it seemed to him a massive and ever-moving grave, its vastness taking him into itself, making him feel insignificant and lost.

  “What the hell’s gotten into him?” asked a jubilant third officer. “Christ, he’s won the—”

  “Quiet now,” said Cameron, who was still officer of the deck. “His wife and children live — lived in Seattle.”

  As in all modern wars, it was one in which the civilian casualties far outnumbered those of the combatants.

  * * *

  In Khabarovsk, Alexsandra was hysterical. Her three brothers had come home, released by Nefski, who had apologized, saying that there had been a “grievous error” committed by his second in command, that the three brothers’ arrest had been nothing more and nothing less than a case of “mistaken identity.” He very much hoped the family would understand, and as a sign of his sincerity, he would be “most honored” if they would be his guests at The Bear Restaurant—kosher, of course. What he meant, as they well knew, was that the Allies would go easier on him, given his apology and his subsequent treatment of the family. But Alexsandra didn’t hear a word of what he said, still crying hysterically at the sight of Ivan, her oldest brother, whom she had seen shot in the courtyard of the KGB prison. She kept hugging him, pushing him away to see that it was really him, pulling at his beard like a small child, hugging him again and crying and laughing and weeping as she hadn’t done in years. Ivan had been told, Alexander explained, to fall in the snow when he heard shots — blanks or, more likely, said Alexander, live ammunition but aimed at the wall, away from Ivan, Nefski not wanting to shoot a source of information before he had to, hoping to terrify the girl enough before he moved to more drastic measures.