by Jerry Ahern
As the sergeant slid from under the truck, his long great coat was white with the snow. He scrambled to his feet. His knees ached with the cold. He ran in a low crouch toward the main body of his fellow soldiers. Already, as he ran, he heard sounds from the camps—shouts, rapidly barked commands, gunfire. "Fools!" the Sergeant thought. "Who are they shooting at?" He turned his head to glance back into the darkness from which the bullet that had killed Ivan Meliscovitch had come. The sergeant could see nothing.
He started to fall. As he went down he thought he had tripped on something in the snow, but when he tried to stand up, there was fire in his left ribcage. He touched his gloved right hand across his body to his coat, and his glove came back dark with blood. The sergeant pushed himself to his feet, lurched forward, two steps, then three, then fell again. A loud cry came from deep in his chest as his face pushed down against the wet snow "Natalia!" The sergeant closed his eyes.
The truck bounced hard on the rutted, snow-packed road. The sergeant looked at some of the men who were more seriously wounded than he was. He was well enough to sit instead of lying flat on his back on one of the stretchers. His side ached, his head swam a little from the morphine which the medic had given him. He leaned back, smoking a papyros. The tobacco tasted bad to him. It was too flat. His mind flashed back to some of the American soldiers he had met in Berlin, toward the end of the long war with the Nazis. He tried to remember the names of their cigarettes—they had tasted good. One had been called "Lucky" he believed. One kind that he remembered—he had liked its taste—had had a picture of a camel on the package. He had taken his grandsons to a zoological park once and shown them a camel, told them how he had smoked cigarettes with the picture of this animal on the packet.
He leaned back and drew the smoke from his papyros into his lungs and tried to imagine that it was an American cigarette instead. He looked out and saw the spot of ground where Comrade Private Ivan Meliscovitch had been shot by the Pakistani sniper—two men from the sergeant's own platoon had got the sniper an hour and three dead Russian soldiers later. As the sergeant closed his eyes, trying to forget the bumping of the truck, he wondered if Ivan Meliscovitch had ever smoked an American cigarette.
Chapter Ten
"I think it a perfectly charming idea, Mr. Ambassador," Mrs. Justin Colbert-Smythe effused. "Everyone had planned so long and hard for the charity dance—and with the Russians coming now...Well, heaven knows what the founding homes here will be forced to cope with."
"I'm so glad you approve, Madame," Ambassador Bruckner smiled. "Now, if you ladies"—and he smiled at the tight circle of aging matrons around him—"will allow me, I must confer with some of my associates in the library." He made a slight bow and started to walk away.
"About the world war that's coming—Daddy?"
Bruckner turned, seeing his nineteen-year-old daughter, Cheryl, at the edge of the group of older women, the young French intelligence attaché she had been seeing for the past six months now at her elbow, looking slightly uncomfortable.
"You're being an alarmist darling," Bruckner said, walking toward his daughter. She was the hostess for the evening. "Isn't she?" he said, turning toward her companion. "Isn't she being an alarmist, Charles?"
"As you say, Monsieur Ambassador—isn't she?" Bruckner glared at the younger man a moment, then leaned toward his daughter and touched his lips to her cheek. He did not like Charles Montand—the young man was not what Bruckner considered a good intelligence man. Talked too much, and then there was always the chance that Montand was seeing his daughter in order to spy on the American Embassy. Montand had started seeing her in earnest just after the embassy in Pakistan had become a listening post for the Soviet occupation on the neighboring Afghanistan border. A great deal of heavy U.S. intelligence was flowing in and out of the embassy. Cheryl, despite her age, and because her father was a widower, Bruckner thought bitterly, was in the same position of many ambassador's wives—she knew too much.
"I have to go, darling," Bruckner said, his tone brightening. "You see that this last dance here goes well, hmm? Remember, our plane leaves at six A.M." Then, turning to Momand, "I suppose we won't be seeing you again, Charles—at least not in the immediate future," he added, trying to mute the cheerfulness in his remark.
"Ahh, but you will, Monsieur Ambassador. I am being posted to our embassy in Washington. A promotion."
"Ohh," Bruckner said, forcing a smile.
"Oui. I knew that this would be pleasing to you. With your lovely daughter's permission, I can go right on seeing her." Montand lit a cigarette from a small silver case and Bruckner smiled again—he hated men who carried cigarette cases.
"Well," Bruckner said, edging away from his daughter and the French intelligence man, "on such good news, how can the two of you bear standing here talking with an old man like me? You should be out celebrating."
"Celebrating, Daddy?" his daughter whispered, looking down into the champagne glass she held in both hands.
Bruckner looked at the pale blonde hair, the hint of blue eyes under her long lashes, the delicate bones of her face, the tiny but determined chin. It was as if his wife had been reborn in his daughter. Bruckner's wife had died at the moment of Cheryl's birth.
"You're so much like your mother," Bruckner whispered, dismissing the young Frenchman beside his daughter from his mind. "Even to her stubbornness." Bruckner kissed her on the cheek again and walked away.
As he moved along the corridor toward the library, he glanced through one of the picture windows and across the darkened lawns and beyond to the other side of the dark bulk of wrought iron fence separating American embassy territory from Pakistan. There were vans and cars on the other side, and he could see lights for news cameras. The reporters had been there for twelve hours, ever since the United States and several of her allies had announced the intention of leaving the Pakistani capital. Official business was being left in the hands of the redoubtable Swiss. Almost bitterly. Bruckner realized he would be forced to say something to the reporters either when he left in six hours, or else at the airport.
Bruckner stopped at the double doors to the library and pulled down on his waistcoat. He hated formal wear. He placed both hands on the doors and pushed them open with a flourish.
"Gentlemen," he said briskly, then walked across the oriental rug toward his desk, nodding individually to each of the men waiting for him—the French, the British, the West German and the Swiss ambassadors. "I hope you gentlemen like the cognac," he said, whisking the tails out of his way as he sat down in the leather chair behind his desk. "Here, Reinhardt," he started, reaching for the cognac and starting to rise. The Swiss ambassador waved him back down.
"It is my doctor—and my wife. She spies on me for him. No liquor. A horrible way to live," the Swiss ambassador concluded, sucking on a dry pipe, the sound annoyingly loud to Bruckner.
Pouring a few ounces of cognac into a large crystal snifter for himself, Bruckner cleared his throat, then said, "I, ah, I imagine you all know what this is about?" Then turning back to the Swiss ambassador, he added, "I'm sorry we're leaving you with all our troubles, Reinhardt."
"That is part of being Swiss," the man said, gesturing with a casual wave of his right hand. Then he looked back to his pipe.
"I'm sure I speak for all my colleagues when I say that our governments will certainly not forget the kindness, Reinhardt. Then, on to business, hmmm?"
"Arnold?" It was the British ambassador. "What's your American CIA saying? Our chaps assess it as the Russians going full tilt. Will that mean war?"
Bruckner sat back, looked at the Englishman, then the Frenchman beside him, then at the others. "I hope not. But the Russians must be stopped. The president and our State Department are in touch with all the governments involved—the prime minister, the French president, the chancellor—I don't know, in all honesty."
"Will your president commit the
American forces, as he has so indicated?" the French ambassador whispered through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
"If the answer won't leave this room," Bruckner began, knowing that it would, "then yes. Some of our rapid deployment forces are already preparing for take-off from Egypt. All they need is the word."
"And vat ist this word," the West German said, his hands folded across his massive Bismarck-like stomach.
"There's a time deadline, actually, isn't there, Arnold," the British ambassador interjected.
"Yes—true," Bruckner said, staring into his cognac. "Less than a day, now." He transferred his gaze to his watch.
"Where did it all go wrong, mes amis," the Frenchman said, lighting another cigarette on the glowing tip of the nearly burnt out one between his fingers.
"What? Sorry, wasn't listening," Bruckner said, absently.
"I said, where did it go wrong?" The Frenchman stood and walked toward the window of Bruckner's office, parted the heavy drapes there for a moment.
"Where did what go wrong, Serge?" Bruckner asked, his voice suddenly lacking conviction.
"We are all logical men. The Russians are, too. And suddenly the end of humanity is upon us," the Frenchman whispered, his voice even and emotionless.
"I say, Serge—all this poof about the end of humanity—really," the British ambassador droned.
"He ist right," the West German said, his voice rough.
Bruckner stood up and walked around to the front of his desk, then sat on its edge. Staring down at the oriental rug, he said slowly, "You realize that it takes hundreds of hours to make a rug like this? The art is almost lost. Like engraving. No one wants to devote the effort to it anymore."
"Then I am not the only realist here," the Frenchman said, and as Bruckner looked up, their eyes met.
"I will take a glass of cognac now," Reinhardt Getsler, the Swiss ambassador said. "What? Oh, certainly Reinhardt," Bruckner said, reaching for the cognac. When he started to pour it, he noticed that his hand was shaking so badly that the cognac was spilling. The Frenchman walked over from the window and took the snifter and bottle from him.
"Serge," Bruckner said, ignoring the others in the room for a moment.
"Oui," the Frenchman answered, his hand rock steady as he poured the cognac for the Swiss ambassador, then passed the bottle around the room.
"Is your man, Montand—is he only what he claims to be with my daughter? I've got to know."
"Do you mean is he spying on you through her? No. Montand is not."
"Thank God," Bruckner said. "I'd hate it if she'd been cheated. You understand?"
"Oui. You can know she has not been cheated of that one thing." Then, putting his hand on Bruckner's shoulder he added. "I have known you since before Cheryl was born. Her mother was not cheated of that one thing either, mon ami."
Bruckner's hand stopped shaking. The cognac in the snifter he held settled into a smooth pool at the bottom. Without looking up, he whispered, "I have a few formal things that the secretary of state wants us to work out—in just a moment though." He emptied the glass.
Chapter Eleven
"All right. Let's just pretend we did a shakedown run and we'll all rest easily. The electric boat fixers here wouldn't let us down," Captain Mitch Wilmer intoned quietly into the microphone. He could hear the faint echo of his own voice coming back to him through the open doorway leading from the bridge over the intercom speaker just beyond. "We're going down now and Mr. Billings, the exec, tells me the water's fine. Anything you need to know, I'll keep you posted. Wilmer out."
Snapping the microphone back into its mounting bracket on the console dominating the central core of the U.S.S. Benjamin Franklin's bridge, Wilmer turned to the young man standing just below him by the seated corpsman, saying, "All right, Mr. Billings. You're on. Take her down, Pete."
"Aye, aye, sir," Billings snapped. Then, "Prepare for negative buoyancy. All ahead one-quarter. Check the trim on the starboard diving planes, Smith! Let's get those tanks going. Blow number two and number four. All right, blow one and three. Secure."
A smile crossing his lips, Wilmer cut in on Billings. "I'll be in my cabin for a minute, Pete." Glancing at his Rolex—just about an hour out of New London, Connecticut, now, he saw—he snatched up his baseball cap with the gold braid on the bill and left the bridge. He caught sight of the new sonar man. The man seemed pretty competent. Then he walked down the companionway and to his quarters.
Letting himself in, he snapped on the light, walked past the smaller compartment where he slept and straight toward his desk at the far end of the main cabin. He tossed the baseball cap on the small easy chair, walked around behind the desk and sat down, snatching a thumbnail full of Copenhagen snuff and slipping it into the pouch in his left cheek. He glanced at the photo of his wife and two daughters on his desk.
Fishing in his trouser pocket for his keys, he found the right one and opened the large false drawer at the bottom of the right pedestal of the desk. Bending down to see, he twirled the combination on the small safe there, opened the fireproof door, and reached inside, past his log, for the envelope he'd been given. Wilmer closed the safe, then the desk, and ripped open the manila envelope around the Top-Secret seal. Inside, was a smaller, white envelope. He opened it. On letterhead from the Chief of Naval Operations was printed a single word: "Morningstar."
"Wonderful," Wilmer muttered to himself. He put the orders down on his blotter and opened the safe again. This time he had to get out of his chair to reach all the way into the back of the safe and work the combination for access to the interior compartment. Tucked inside was a packet of bulging envelopes, each with a code word printed in the upper left-hand corner and stamped again across the closure flap—just as a precaution, he'd been told, that in haste someone didn't open the wrong orders.
"Let's see," he muttered again. "Hippodrome, Indiana, Igloo." Then, flipping through more of the envelopes, he realized that someone was ignoring alphabetical order. "Poker" was in front of "Barricade."
But then he found what he was searching for.
"Morningstar," he read aloud, then checked that the envelope was perfectly sealed and checked the code name in the upper left-hand corner and across the seal. He stood and walked to his cabin door. He locked it and threw the bolt. Orders were orders, he thought. Going back to his desk, he opened the envelope.
The co-ordinates in the first paragraph startled him. Using the old Perry route past Baffin Bay and Greenland, he'd intersect the Nautilus polar exploration route—the same route Byrd had used in part—bypassing Franz-Josef Land. Then he'd strike out across the Barents Sea toward the Kanin Peninsula. His target lay 67 degrees north, 31 degrees east, near Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula. The icepack would be above the Ben Franklin until she was halfway out of the Barents Sea.
"Wonderful," he said again. There were submarine pens near Murmansk and Archangel and those were his targets.
"Captain..." The voice on the intercom was that of Pete Billings, his exec.
"Captain here," he switched. "What is it, Pete?"
"Probably nothing much, sir, but the Russians sure got a whole hell of a lot more trawlers out here than usual."
"Figures, Pete," Captain Wilmer sighed. "Don't get into a fender-bender with the con. I'll be along in a minute or so. Keep me posted if you need to." Wilmer switched off
"Trawlers," he muttered. Why the Soviet Navy still relied so heavily on trawlers was beyond him. Soviet satellite tracking was just as good as its American counterpart—or was supposed to be—and subs could be tracked by infrared from space a lot more accurately than sonar from the ocean surface. Shrugging his shoulders Wilmer replaced the orders, noted what had transpired—including the trawlers—in his log book, then closed the interior and exterior safe doors and locked the desk.
Putting the keys back in his pocket, Wilmer reached reluctantly into the bottom drawer on the other side of the desk. His 1
917 1A1—slightly oily to the touch—was there, next to its shoulder holster. Standing up, he slipped the harness over his head and left shoulder and settled the strap across his chest, checked the .45 for a full magazine and empty chamber, lowered the hammer, and put the pistol away beside his left armpit. He snapped the strap of the holster closed over it. Wilmer had never liked guns, felt uncomfortable wearing one, and doubted that if he ever needed to use the pistol, he could hit anything with it after all these years.
He reached down to the intercom and flipped the switch to call the sub's hailing system. "Attention, all hands, this is the captain. We are now officially on alert. Section chiefs, report to your stations. All officers, meet with me on the bridge in ten minutes." He started to click off, then thought better of it and added, "We'll be going under the ice on this run, coming up near the Soviet mainland." Technically, he was disobeying the standing orders by telling this to the crew, but made the command decision that everyone would be better off knowing something. "We are not on a war footing. I repeat, not a war footing. So take it easy. Wilmer out."
He snatched his hat as he walked to the door, then passed into the companionway. He passed a seaman first class on his way toward the bridge and noticed that the man was nervously eyeing the .45 automatic he carried. Wilmer smiled at him, murmuring, "Everything's jake."
Wilmer spent a long time on the bridge, then retired again to his cabin, not bothering to eat, telling Billings, "Wake me before we're too close to the ice, Pete." Wilmer tried sleeping, couldn't, then took two sleeping pills. He disliked the way his mouth would taste afterward, but rationalized their use since he would get little rest once under the ice, and after that—he didn't know...
There was knocking on his cabin door. Wilmer sat bolt upright, then wiped his hand across his face.
Another reason he hated sleeping pills was because they always caused him to dream. And worse still, all he could ever remember of the dreams were that they were horrifying, but he could never remember why.