Robert finally had to sleep. But it wasn’t for long, and waking from his turn on the “plank,” one of the GST’s fold-down bunks, he felt sick from the suffocating smell of diesel. He was in a hellish red light, Johnson informing him triumphantly that he’d found the “rigged for red” switch while he, Brentwood, was asleep. In the event that they might have to go topside, through thin ice into the pitch-black Arctic night, the ruby glow would be easier on their eyes, allowing them to adjust to the darkness. “Do we still have them—” Brentwood almost passed out with the pain, a persistent hammer blow radiating from his shoulder through his neck and head muscles down into his lower back and buttocks. “Do we still have them in the northern quadrant? “
“Yes, sir,” answered Johnson. “One of ‘em moved a few hundred yards or so but not far. They’ve come up close to the surface — just fired off another salvo. Means they’re still pretty close to the ice hole — only about a hundred feet below. Guess they’re going to pop off another few. I figure they must be near some upwelling — thin crust — so why move? Probably don’t even have to use any ‘charge-pick’ through the thinner ice now they’ve fired.”
Robert Brentwood didn’t respond, for as he sat up he felt his head was literally going to fall off, consciousness having torn him brutally from a dream. He’d been with Rosemary and his little boy — would it be a boy or would it be a girl? — in a sylvan glade in Oxshott, the embracing, cool calm of a huge oak tree above them as they’d picnicked — chicken — with one of those wicker baskets so beloved by the English with everything in its right place, and his child smiling at him, eyes wide with wonder, and then David and Lana were there with her pilot boyfriend, the one she wanted to have as a fiancé if La Roche ever condescended to agree to a divorce, and the pilot’s head, which had somehow become Robert, was bandaged, sore, eyes covered as Lana had described in a letter.
“We’re going to fire our missiles,” he told Johnson and Lopez, easing himself off the bunk. “Convince ‘em we’re still one of them.” He paused then pointed at the ONC E-8 chart, the position of the two subs, from which they hadn’t moved, marked with red crosses. “They’ll think we’re hitting Second Army.” He tried to smile at his own brilliance, but even the effort emitted a fiery pain deep inside his skull.
“All right!” said Johnson, his enthusiasm echoing throughout the tiny sub, pummeling Brentwood’s head some more. Such enthusiasm was something that Robert Brentwood himself hadn’t been able to regain, however much he wished, after the shock of the knife wound. At forty-three he was still a relatively young man, but he was growing old for submarines.
“Way to go, Skipper!” echoed Lopez.
“You okay?” Brentwood asked, squinting in the redded-out light. “You look like hell.”
“A bit whacked, sir.”
“After we shoot off the missiles, you hit that bunk.”
“Sir, I’ll be all-”
“Do as I say.”
“Yes, sir.”
To Lopez’s utter amazement Robert Brentwood chewed two aspirin without water as he punched in the coordinate vectors for the attack arcs, double-checking the distances and remembering the forty-mile-an-hour winds expected in the blizzard they’d seen racing south down the lake as they’d egressed Port Baikal. In any event Brentwood knew that with the two enemy subs’ exact “quadrant 85” position known and the two subs being close to the surface, a direct hit wouldn’t be necessary. A half mile either way, even across the 85 line into nearby 65 or 56 quadrants, would do the job. “I’d say that after that last salvo at Second Army they’re either into quadrant six five or just moving into five six. Here, southeast of—” He couldn’t pronounce it and spelled it, “S-B-E-G-A. Kow’d you say that, Johnson?”
“Asshole country, sir.”
Then Lopez had a suggestion. “Sir?”
“Yes?”
“Sir, could we pop one on Irkutsk?”
“Pop one?” In the fatigue that gives rise to silly laughter, even in the most introverted souls, during moments of high tension, Johnson and Robert Brentwood, a world apart in rank, broke up in common cause, Brentwood shaking his head, Johnson, tears in his eyes, looking across at Lopez. “Pop one! You dork!”
“Well, I’m telling you, Lopez,” said Robert Brentwood, right hand holding his head as if it were a basket of eggs, “I’m not gunning for civilians — nor is Freeman — but I like your idea. Matter of fact, I like it so much, if we get out of this I’m gonna see you get promoted.”
“Hell no, sir.”
“Only let’s spread the good news around a little, Lopez,” said Brentwood. “On behalf of Second Army and—” A stab of needlelike pain forced Brentwood to sit down abruptly on the bunk.
“You okay, sir?” asked Johnson anxiously.
“No. Son of a—” The pain passed but left him nauseated and dizzy for a few minutes. Johnson was trying not to look worried, but he was scared. As a Sea Wolf captain Brentwood had all the Soviet firing procedures down pat. Without him, Johnson doubted he could handle it—knew he couldn’t handle it.
Brentwood had Lopez strap his left arm against his chest, moved to the computer, triple-checked the coordinates, then stopped. Without looking around he announced, “Lopez, I’m gonna promote you whether you damn well like it or not.” He looked around at Lopez, on steerage, then forward a few feet to Johnson. “We are going to spread it around, boys. Johnson, how many cruise missiles on that raft?
“Eight, sir.”
“Right! With the four we already have that makes twelve. We’ll clobber the Stalingrad Division from behind with six. Won’t know what the hell hit them. Confusion’ll be worth as much to us as the casualties we inflict. And, gentlemen, let’s not be mean about this. We’ll split the other six with two for the KMK factory at Novokuznetsk, which we’ll fire first, and two we’ll donate to Akademgorodok, near Novosibirsk. The KMK factory,” he explained to Lopez, who hadn’t picked up on the name, “is where they make their tanks as well as these GSTs. And that leaves two for our two friends up north. Seeing they stole our technology, let’s demonstrate its accuracy, gentlemen. All right?”
“All right.”
“Okay. Let’s have a sonar ping,” ordered Brentwood, and the easy tone of a second ago was now replaced by his professional demeanor. “Come on, hurry it up.”
“Yes, sir.” Now they were on active sonar, Brentwood explaining, “Might as well be brazen about it. What’s that old man Freeman always says? L’audace, I’audace, toujours I’audace!”
“He stole it from Patton,” said Johnson.
“Who stole it from Frederick the Great,” said Brentwood. “Well, it’s ours now.”
The active’s “pings” were now bouncing, or “bonging,” back, telling them that they had a relatively thin ice roof no more than half a mile three degrees starboard.
“No problem, sir,” Johnson pronounced. “Looks as thin as a virgin’s—”
“Yes, yes, all right,” said Robert Brentwood, notoriously prudish about such matters, even in front of his sister Lana who, is a nurse had seen it all and had “done time,” as young David put it, with “Scumbag” La Roche.
Reaching the area of the thin ice, Brentwood ordered Johnson to take the sub to a depth of two thousand feet, approaching the sub’s crush depth, and at an off angle to the targeted ice patch. He then pulled the lever to release float charge. Two minutes later there was a gut-wrenching thud, and Brentwood immediately ordered the GST to fifty feet.
“Fifty feet, aye, sir,” came Johnson’s confirmation. At fifty feet he levelled the sub out, still surprised at how quickly the tiny GST, a seal compared to a whale in size, responded. The problem was not to let it get ahead of you and slam into the ice.
“Half speed,” Brentwood instructed Lopez, then to Johnson, “Twenty-five feet.”
“Twenty-five feet, sir… Levelling at twenty-five.”
“Very well. Man battle stations missile. Set condition one!”
“Condition one, aye, sir,” responded Johnson.
“Departments ready?” asked Brentwood. There were only two departments, Lopez’s and Johnson’s, but Brentwood knew that this was a time for tried and true procedures to steady their nerves.
“Steerage ready, sir,” reported Lopez, followed by Johnson’s, “Sonar ready.”
“Very well,” acknowledged Brentwood. “Neutral trim.”
Johnson made a slight adjustment to starboard.”Neutral trim, sir.”
“Stand by to flood tubes one and two,” ordered Brentwood, it being standard procedure on any missile submarine to be ready to fire torpedoes in defense of the ship should an enemy vessel try to interfere with the missile launch. “Completing spin up,” Brentwood advised them as he entered the final salinity and current corrections that would affect the missiles’ trajectories. “Spin up complete. Prepare for ripple fire.”
“Prepare for ripple fire,” responded Johnson.
“Fire one,” ordered Brentwood.
“Fire one. One fired.” There was a hiss of compressed air and a rasping noise, the sub rolling ten degrees port before regaining neutral trim.
“Fire two.”
“Fire two. Two fired.”
In less than three and half minutes all four cruise missiles had passed through their nose cones’ protective membranes, exited the ice-free hole, booster rockets engaged, and were en route to their targets. Lopez and Johnson exited the sub for the reloads, while Brentwood made copious notes on the GST’s performance as he prepared a course to take the sub toward thinner ice at the eastern shore after all salvos had been fired.
“In the spring, General,” said Professor Leonid Grigorenko, looking out on the frozen Ob Sea that was Akademgorodok’s private lake, “I hope you’ll find time to come out sailing with me and lrena.”
The gruff, heavy-browed Yesov shook his head. “Nyet, thank you all the same, Professor. I am no sailor. Besides, there will still be ice in the spring.”
“Oh, come now, Comrade. It adds to the adventure, yes?”
“Nyet.” Yesov looked about so that none of his aides at the professor’s cocktail party, to celebrate the success of the GST offensive, heard that he was leery of anything to do with water-including bathing, some had said. “I get sick in the Jacuzzi, Professor.”
“Ah, Marshal!” said Chernko, his familiarity claiming Yesov, marshal of all Siberian forces, as if he were a long-lost friend. “How goes the Thirty-first?”
“Well,” said Yesov curtly — he didn’t like Chernko, even if he was hailed in Novosibirsk for his GST plan. Yesov was willing to accept the general’s help, but to Yesov it had been too conditional altogether — Chernko telling them, insisting on what pleasures and luxuries, including dachas, he would get in return. Yesov despised him. Here was the Russian, a former KGB chief, now sucking up to the Western alliance in Moscow while slipping Novosibirsk vital information via his spies, information chat Yesov had to grudgingly admit had served them well in stopping the Allies at the Urals, pummeling the Allies in fact. Still, he disliked the man’s opportunism. As far as he was concerned Chernko was little more than the old bourgeois “Communist”—as ideologically unsound and, at root, as uncommitted to the military as Gorbachev had been.
“I’m well satisfied,” said Chernko. “If the Thirty-first does as well in the east against this Freeman as we have in the west, eh. it’ll be over soon. A cease-fire, and then we go for American aid. The Americans are suckers. Once the Thirty-first mauls Freeman’s soft Second Ar—”
The apartment building shook, everyone thinking it was an earthquake, broken glass, whole windows popping out and whizzing through the air, expensive dresses of the elite slashed, many of the generals’ wives screaming from the minor cuts and abrasions created by the first shock wave. Yesov had moved under the mahogany dining table with all the finesse of a charging T-80, sending two colonels’ wives splaying on the plush Persian carpet. As people were getting up off the floor, his beeper was set off by the pressure of his folding gut.
“Machina!”—”Stop that thing!” one of the women screamed hysterically.
“Tishe!”— “Be quiet!” Yesov replied, red-faced, lumbering up with the help of an aide, whom he quickly shook off like an offending mullet. The marshal was in the throes of regaining his ruffled dignity. It was seven minutes, the phone lines being down, before he heard that the KMK works in Novokuznetsk had been badly hit, as well as the Institute of Defense Science in Akademgorodok.
The damage — over 192 killed, several hundred wounded, was not of particular concern to the marshal even though it abruptly ended the cocktail party. Whatever his faults might be, Yesov had been the first in that room, or in Novosibirsk’s Central Committee, to realize that the Americans had suddenly and dramatically demonstrated that they had the ability to reach deep into Sibir. It could only mean that the Americans must now have established forward air bases, despite the Thirty-first’s advance, from which to fire off their air-launch cruise missiles which, skimming at tree level across the taiga and steppe, had hit both the political heart and a vital industrial organ of Siberia. It was clearly a warning of the terrible danger that the vital Siberian oil fields at Mirnyy, in the very center of Siberia and without which she could not continue the war, were at immediate risk. The same would then be true of Siberia’s vital defense industries all the way from Mirnyy, believed to be invulnerable to all U.S. tactical missiles, to the oil field, barely two hundred miles north of Novosibirsk, at Belyy Yar. Everything was now within Freeman’s reach.
“You know what this means?” Professor Grigorenko demanded, rather than informing Yesov. But the marshal already knew. He might be slow afoot, but his brain was in excellent condition. Still the professor, shakily pouring himself a large vodka and ignoring the general’s glass, went on, “It’s brutally simple, Marshal. If they want to they can turn this into another Kuwait. On fire!”
“Do you really believe they’d do that?” asked an aide.
“Are you senile?” growled Yesov. “They’re not playing baseball, Comrade!”
“No, sir.”
In fact, Sonarman First Class Johnson aboard the GST was thinking in precisely those terms. They had stolen first base (the KMK works at Novokuznetsk), the second (Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk), and the third — he looked at his watch. Right about now.
Five hundred miles east of them the six one-thousand-pound cruise warheads came “shuffling” through the air over train tracks and a pipeline only yards apart in quadrant 56 just west of Sbega. When he heard them coming in, a praporschika — a warrant officer — in the Siberian Thirty-first knew as well as anyone else in the Stalingrad division that if the explosions of the incoming subsonic missiles — loaded with armor-piercing bomblets — blew out the pipe or rail tracks, 90 percent of the Thirty-first’s supplies would be cut off, only 10 percent able to make it on the poor road system. They simply did not have the kind of airlift capacity of the Americans.
The first missile took out a copse of snow-laden birch trees and did no harm to speak of. The second missile, however, tore up more than thirty feet of track; the remaining four missiles tore up even more, and their rain of armor-piercing bomblets sliced through the Thirty-first Stalingrad Division trucks in showers of white-hot steel, hitting over fifty fully loaded troop trucks in the 2,300-vehicle convoy, most of the casualties — over nine hundred — caused not only from the detonation but from the hornetlike swarms of flechettes.
Far more serious was the severing of the pipeline by the thousands of bomblets from missiles four and five. The oil line running adjacent to the road erupted in flame, the fire speeding along the ruptured pipe like a quick fuse.
The oil, already under pressure, jetted out like water from a long, punctured hose along a snaking, forty-mile section that, like the rest of the line, ran close to the road. The long, spurting tongues of fire set trucks, armor, troops, and self-propelled 120-millimeter howitzer haulers ablaze, and consumed another hundred vehicles, including BMDs — armored personnel carriers — in the most devastating single loss — over four thousand killed or injured — suffered by Russian arms in the past year.
The fire alone attracted American fighters in the overcast. Although they paid heavily, losing over twenty-three to the Fulcrums, they had such overwhelming numerical and instrument-flying superiority, they delivered what the Thirty-first commanders and those few still alive in the column were calling a “Kuwaiti highway” massacre. A-10 Thunderbolts were coming in, their seven-barrelled, thirty-millimeter Avenger cannons blazing, picking off the Siberians’ T-80 tanks at will.
Streams of tracer poured down so fast that they created the illusion that the tanks were actually sucking the fire from the planes, the tanks exploding, providing more target identification for the American air force. They created such a massive traffic jam on the second-rate road, hemmed in by the taiga and snow banks, that Freeman, seeing his chance, issued orders that the carnage continue unabated and that he would personally court-martial anyone who let up attacking in the next twenty-four hours for any other reason than to refuel and rearm.
The Thirty-first Stalingrad was taking a terrible pummelling, its morale as savaged by the belief that it was now surrounded as by the actual punishment it was taking. So savage was the American counterattack that, despite the thick white overlay of cumulonimbus, the battle became visible as a pulsating, red vein to satellite reconnaissance.
As suddenly as it had seemed an overwhelming threat, the Thirty-first was now in full retreat. Freeman, the Baikal threat against him now removed, ordered his armored divisions into the “fishhook” configuration he’d been waiting for. One column of over a thousand tanks with close air support arced left, southward, heading for Irkutsk on any side roads and rivers they could find. Some roads had been literally bombed and napalmed out of the taiga by U.S. engineers. The right curve of the fishhook turned northward, heading for Yakutsk. Freeman’s Shermanlike breakout around the flanks of the smashed-Thirty-first became a rout, the Siberian division finally pocketed, unable to move, its GST backup, as Freeman announced in a message to the president, “no longer in service.” The greatest strain on the American supply line was surrendering Siberians, most of them wounded. U.S. Medevac facilities were stretched to the limit.
For the crews aboard the two GSTs in quadrant 65 there was no warning, no gradual foreboding of ice growl or increase in subsurface turbidity. There was only the world coming to an end, the explosions of the two cruise missiles hitting them, so cataclysmic as to shock each man’s nervous system into instant, irreparable crisis, as surely as the subs’ hatches were buckled, preventing escape. The two GSTs, squashed like molten bottles, plummeted to over five thousand feet below into the primeval silt of the boreal forest.
“What can we do?” asked civilian members of the Novosibirsk Central Committee in panic. Yesov looked at each one of them in turn, then at all of them contemptuously. “Arrange a cease-fire, you fools!” He was a soldier first, he told them, but also a realist.
The American public, led by La Roche’s tabloids, were overwhelmingly in favor.
Freeman was appalled, Dick Norton handing him a faxed copy of the New York Times editorial which, like the La Roche papers, joined in heartily for an immediate cease-fire as offered by the Siberians, warning only that a cease-fire should not “extract unreasonable demands and sacrifices” from the Siberian people, “as did the Treaty of Versailles of the German nation, thereby assuring continued bitterness in the rebuilding that would have to be done.”
Outside his victorious forward headquarters at Sbega, west of the Chinese/Siberian hump, Freeman strode up a snow-dazzling embankment, the sky the bluest he’d ever seen. Smacking the New York Times headline, he thrust the newspaper back at Norton. “By God, this is, this is treachery, Norton.”
Norton looked stunned.
“They talk about the Treaty of Versailles,” thundered Freeman, frightening a bird from a nearby perch, the bird startling Norton, who reached for his sidearm. “Remember what Churchill said about the Treaty of Versailles?” said Freeman. “It was an armistice, he said, for twenty years. It’s the same here, goddamn it! Dick, if we don’t run with the bit while we have it between our teeth, we’ll have to fight these jokers again. Didn’t we learn anything from that bastard Hussein?” Freeman was beside himself, right glove smashing into his left. “Why don’t they let the do it, Dick? What the hell’s the matter with them back there at the White House?”
“President’s under an awful lot of pressure, General, for this cease-fire. Nobody wants any more fighting.”
“Neither do I, damn it! But can’t you see? Can’t anybody see that if we don’t finish it now, we’ll have to finish it somewhere else — forced into a rematch at a time and place of their choosing?”
Norton, quite frankly, didn’t have the courage to show the general the copies of the other newspapers’ headlines. “BRING OUR BOYS HOME!” the La Roche papers cried. “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!”
“They’re praising you a lot, General. Saying if it hadn’t been for your brilliance, your planning—”
Freeman wasn’t listening. “They must be made to understand, Dick. I want you to send a message to the president. Immediate. ‘Strongly suggest we finish the job. Do not trust Siberian offer, which I see as merely an opportunity to regroup — especially given their strong position on the western front. Please let my views be known to the Joint Chiefs. Sincerely, General Douglas Freeman.’ “
It was of no avail. President Mayne agreed with the American public: it was time to bring the boys home.
“YOU ARE ORDERED,” President Mayne’s reply message read, “TO CEASE ALL MILITARY OPERATIONS AT A MUTUALLY AGREED-UPON TIME WITHIN THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. REPEAT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS. THE NATION IS GRATEFUL FOR YOUR BRILLIANT LEADERSHIP. NOW IS THE TIME TO LEAD THE PEACE.”
Norton received the response from the White House and immediately went out to give it to the general. Freeman read it, crumpled it, and thrust it deep into his greatcoat pocket. He looked down the snow bank on the gaggle of press types trying to negotiate the slope in their frantic eagerness to interview “Dogged Doug,” a sobriquet he abhorred as much as he disliked the unwillingness of the press pool to go back to Khabarovsk now and interview some of the individuals — everyone from supply officers to grunts — who had made it possible. No, now they all wanted to be up at the front, now that it was all quiet.
“Look at ‘em!” Freeman told Norton. “By God, I’d like to bulldoze all of them into Baikal! You see, Dick? That’s how short a step it is from hosanna to hoot.”
“General, if you don’t feel up to it, perhaps we can arrange another— “
“Don’t fret, Dick. I won’t disgrace Second Army. Let the bastards come up and take their pretty pictures. Look good against the skyline, don’t I?”
“Yes, sir. It’s terrific.”
“All right then. Send ‘em up.”
The first of the press corps to make it was a woman reporter from Detroit who, barely able to get her breath, asked the general, “It’s said, General, you wanted to drive on once you’d turned the battle. Is that true?”
“I did.”
Norton looked skyward in exasperation.
“However,” continued Freeman, looking as happy as a father who’s been told his daughter has just become engaged to a parolee, “the U.S. Second Army is an instrument of national policy. I do what I am told. That is all.”
“But General—” Freeman walked through the rapturous acclaim back into his headquarters, urgent messages already coming through from the Joint Chiefs that he was, as soon as it could be arranged after the cease-fire, to make himself “available” to return to Washington for consultation.
“Ah,” he told Norton disgustedly.”Clear as the nose on my face. Far as the White House is concerned, the war is over. By God, they think it’s finished, Dick.”
At the signing of the cease-fire at Irkutsk, a dour Freeman shook hands with a dour Yesov, both flashing a smile for the cameras, Norton careful to keep Freeman out of mike range, which was just as well. “I tell you, Norton, there’s not one of them,” he said, smiling icily across the table at the Siberians, “you can stand near. Breath stinks like a goddamn—”
“General.”
Yesov was smiling again, this time for the French press.
“I don’t trust those Frogs either,” said Freeman. “They let us down when we wanted to overfly France — get that son of a bitch Khaddafy.”
“They helped us in the Iraqi war, General,” Norton whispered.
“At the last goddamn minute. Not like the Brits.”
“It’s over, General. In a few days we’ll be flying back to Khabarovsk and—” He was interrupted by applause as Yesov was acclaimed by the Siberian press — the marshal’s grin at the camera so transparently insincere, Norton thought, that it would need drastic touching up if the Siberian propaganda ministry was going to use it.
“It’s over,” Lana told Frank Shirer.
“I know,” he said, holding her, trying to feel good again. “You know that young cockney guy — all the facial burns and-”
“Yes,” she said, trying to hold her impatience, wanting to put any talk of wounds and hospitals — her work — behind her. It was time to celebrate.
“He says,” continued Shirer, stroking her hair but his mind clearly elsewhere, “that I should try for a transplant.”
She knew he could. One grisly fact about the war and the abilities of the Americans to get their wounded back more quickly than anyone else was that organ donor banks — and most servicemen were donors — were full of spare parts.
“Well, tell him you don’t want to — not now. Your fighting days are over, mister. Everyone’s fighting days are over, thank God,” she said, her hand holding his, guiding it to where she wanted it. It was the only magic that could overcome his depression at the prospect of no longer being a pilot.
“God, I love you,” he said.
“You, too.”
“Problem is, not everyone’s compatible.” For an instant she thought he was talking about them, but then realized his preoccupation about losing the eye — and a transplant — was still with him.
“All depends,” she said, “on whether you’re a candidate in the first place. Priorities.” She hesitated, then thought she might as well say it. “Some people can’t even see, honey.” But for all Shirer’s maturity, it was about as effective as telling a child to eat his broccoli because thousands were starving in Ethiopia. But for the moment, with the help of her professional knowledge of anatomy, the admonition was working, and soon she felt the hardness growing. “Nothing wrong with this,” she said, looking up, giving him the sweet, full smile that had first attracted him to her.
“No,” he said. “It’s ready for takeoff.”
“Looking for somewhere to land?” she asked, snuggling in closer.
“Have to do some maneuvering first,” he answered with a grin, and she knew that for the time being the horror of what they had done to him would abate.
“God, I love you,” he told her.
“You, too. Oh now, sweetie, we can have time for each other instead of this damn war.”
“Yes,” he said. It was almost disappointment.
“Hold me,” she said. He took her in his arms.