In the Arctic grayness around the ice-locked Roosevelt, the Sea Harrier, though having left East Spitzbergen, two hundred miles to the north, well before the five Sea King helicopters, was having difficulty finding a suitable spot to land.
The Harrier’s forward-looking infrared radar showed such an uneven chaos of jagged ice that even for the versatile vertical-takeoff-and-landing fighter, putting down on the ice would have been a risky venture, so that the pilot couldn’t justify risking the multimillion-dollar plane. In any case, his very presence circling the sub, riding shotgun for the approaching helicopters, was message enough, in the radio silence, for Capt. Robert Brentwood and his crew that they were about to be rescued.
As the five choppers neared, two fore and aft of the Roosevelt, the fifth helicopter starboard midships, all five about fifty feet away from the sub’s hull, they began lowering their rope ladders, while Zeldman and the five chief petty officers, their voices battling the steady roar of the rotor slap, began dividing the crew into their various departments and then into groups of twenty, for each of the Sea Kings.
Robert Brentwood went back aboard Roosevelt to Control, and set the scuttling charges, double-checking that all code books and deciphering coils were destroyed. After he pushed the timer, he would have five minutes to clear the sail and get on the last chopper.
While the chopper pilots fought to keep hover position in the unpredictable gusts and sudden shears that were caused by the wind blowing over the jagged serrations of the ice pressure ridges, Zeldman and several others struggled to steady a stretcher containing one of the men who was too badly wounded to either climb or be winched up in harness. The chopper, rising suddenly in a gust, shifted only two feet or so, but in doing so, tore the stretcher from the grasp of the ground party, who, as they stood helplessly by, saw the man would have been lost had it not been for the restraining straps. After the chopper steadied enough to allow them to snap on the backup safety ring and began to haul the injured man up, Zeldman walked down the line, his fur-lined parka stiff with ice particles, the rising wind and the sway of the choppers combining to create a wind-chill factor of minus sixty degrees as he shouted above the noise of the rotors, making sure every man understood that if a chopper should suddenly rise in a gust or drop in a wind shear, they must stop climbing immediately and hang on until it steadied itself. Otherwise, as the Royal Air Force corporal who had climbed down to assist told Zeldman, a man who continued to move on the rope ladder could start a swinging motion in concert with the chopper, resulting in a sudden lurch. This could cause a man to either lose his grip or, in the extreme case, as the chopper tried to right itself, create a pendulum effect that could throw him into the rotors. Soon after Zeldman had returned to the head of the line to help the chiefs, whose hands, like his, were frozen despite their gloves, one of the petty officers slipped on a rope rung and lost his grip. Fortunately he fell only a few feet onto the hard ice, his worst injury appearing to be a bruised ego from the severe ribbing he got from the waiting crewmen, who from then on would forever call him “Ice Man.”
In Taipingshao, thirty miles north of the Yalu, the North Korean Army’s General Kim’s personal interrogator made his way down through the deep subterranean tunnel HQ into the dank interrogation room — or rather, the six-foot-square mud pit with a three-foot boardwalk and bare table.
“Mikuk chapnomtul”—”American bastard!”—he yelled. “You kill our people with gangster weapons.” His breath was steaming in the frigid tunnel air, his short, lean frame in the drab olive green of the baggy NKA uniform barely visible in the light of the lantern which he placed on the bare table. “If you do not confess, it will make the general very angry.”
The prisoner, who had been kept sitting naked for hours, lashed to a rough bamboo chair, didn’t answer. He couldn’t sleep, for then they would wake him with a bayonet. He was forbidden to use anything, not even a bucket for a toilet so that he was forced to sit, chained as he was, in his own urine and excrement.
Three of Kim’s earlier interrogators had been women, and throughout the questioning and persistent demands for a confession of war crimes, they would make derisive remarks about the prisoner’s genitals, warning him that where he was going, he would have no need of his member even if he knew how to use it, which, they taunted, was doubtful. It was this kind of adolescent brutality that was easiest for Freeman to withstand. What was far more deadly was the lack of sleep.
Other things were bearable. Sitting in your own shit wasn’t as bad as the gooks thought it was — besides, no one was as repulsed by the smell of his own ordure as were other people. In fact, as a young soldier at Camp Lejeune, he had been told by the drill instructor that people secretly liked it. In any event, this was the kind of humiliation most men could bear — at least for the first few days or so. Lack of sleep was the killer, physically and spiritually. That and their damned stinking “facecloth” torture — during which a large piece of sodden calico was slapped over his face so that every breath he took sucked it tighter against his face. Then they’d jerk the chair back to the point of tipping, and on the already supersaturated cloth they would drip water from a gourd, its rope cradle attached to a hook jammed hard into the semifrozen earth above him. The feeling of panic, of being unable to breathe, the single drops of water creating the sensation — indeed, the reality — of drowning, was almost too much for him, and the hero of Pyongyang wondered how much longer he could last without publicly — on TV for all the world to see — abjectly confessing his part in “the conspiracy of U.S. warmongers to wage chemical warfare on the peaceful, loving peoples of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
“I’ll confess nothing to you scumbags,” he had told his interrogators. “It was your forces who started this business. You can dish it out, but you can’t take it — is that it?”
But that had been three days ago, an eternity in the mind of a captive, when stripped, his watch taken, nothing allowed that might assist him in the organization of his thoughts or help prevent disorientation, he had been lashed to the chair and refused all food, offered only his own urine to drink.
“Sign,” the drill sergeant had advised the marines. “We all know it’s bullshit back home.”
Yes, they would know a confession was bullshit. But underneath, in America’s heart of hearts, after the news clips were over and the outraged eyes of the American public had watched the humiliation of their fellows, and after they had voiced their disgust with the enemy tormentors, there remained, for all their understanding, a quiet, unspoken shame— that an American had shown he’d broken.
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.