In the storm-whipped night of the northern Pacific, the USS Salt Lake City turned her bow into the wind, the jet engines on her flight deck screaming from ruby red to an urgent white, the catapult officer, his head barely visible in the slightly raised Perspex-covered hatch, peeking above the flight deck, knowing he had only fifty seconds to launch each fighter, cursing the condensation building up inside his bubble despite the heating duct, his eyes having to strain to get a visual verification of takeoff weight for the F-14 Tomcat on the waist catapult so that he could set the appropriate steam pressure for the cat and crosswind. The catapult officer thought he heard “six eight zero,” indicating steam pressure on the cat for around sixty-eight thousand pounds — about right for a Tomcat, with ordnance on its four underfuselage points and the two hard points closer in under the wings. But still he couldn’t make out whether the rain-smeared digit on the “board,” a tray-sized counter held up by the yellow-jacketed member of the flight deck, was a six or a five. He had to get it right, but if he took much longer, he knew the air boss, a hundred feet up in the carrier’s island, would be onto him. The catapult officer pushed his earphones in hard, trying to hear the yellow jacket’s voice above the screaming of the twin twenty-one-thousand-pound Pratt and Whitney turbofans, but still couldn’t make out what the other man was saying. He looked again through his deck bubble at the board, saw a “six” for only a fraction of a second, but it was enough. The cat was set for sixty-two thousand pounds. He saw the last yellow jacket running from the plane, his right thumb up, indicating “all set”—the launch bar between the fighter’s nose and catapult rail connected. He pushed the button, the jet shot forward in a blur of battle gray and swirling steam that momentarily obliterated the blast deflector.
The launch had taken forty-nine seconds. There wasn’t even time to grimace at his assistant that he’d made it under fifty seconds before the next plane, an A-10 Intruder, was on the waist cat, screaming just as insistently for release. The catapult officer prayed he got every one of them right this night. “Damn!” The bubble was fogging up again.
High above the flight deck, the captain of the USS carrier Salt Lake City battle group received an urgent request from COMPAC–Commander Pacific — Pearl Harbor, that one of the carrier’s pilots, Lt. Comdr. F. Shirer, be reassigned to Washington, D.C. Knowing there were over five thousand men and women aboard and that there could easily be two with the same name, even the same rank, the director of personnel, a new man on the Salt Lake City, waited for the computer to come back on line to double-check the flier’s service number. He was pretty sure it was the Shirer of the Pyongyang raid fame who, in the midst of the North Korean army’s invasion, or rather rout, of the South Korean and American forces, had led the second wave of Tomcats through a raging monsoon over the North Korean capital. The raid of American airborne troops, led by Gen. Douglas Freeman against “Kim Il Suck,” as the general called him, deep behind the North Korean lines, had electrified the world, and in a way reminiscent of Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo in World War Two, it had given American morale at home, and particularly in the shrinking Pusan-Yosu perimeter, a much-needed boost. It had also bought precious time for the U.S. troops en route from Japan to “restock” the perimeter in time to start the counterattacks that were now driving Kim II Sung’s forces across the wide, frozen wastes of the Yalu into the mountain fastness of Manchuria.
For the men like Shirer, who’d been in on Freeman’s raid, it had given them an élan not normally found in battle-hardened men until they are much older. Even now, Shirer’s exploit in downing four Sukhois over the Aleutian Islands was overshadowed by his reputation as the cool warrior who had gone in over Pyongyang, his flight through flak- and missile-thick air giving crucial support to Freeman and his troops engaged in a fierce firelight outside Mansudae Hall. Here a young American marine, David Brentwood, had been busy winning the Silver Star, flushing out the enemy in a vicious room-to-room battle, seeking the NKA’s General Kim. Kim either escaped shortly after the defenses of the Koreans’ supposed impenetrable fortress of Pyongyang had been penetrated or, as intelligence suggested, might have been shot on the orders of Kim Il Sung. The failure to get Kim had bitterly disappointed General Freeman; the TV pictures of the successful sweep of Mansudae Hall, its windows now roaring with flame, and the felled statue of Kim Il Sung, once sixty feet of solid bronze, seconds later shattered by the American demolition teams, reasserted, however, the American determination to go on the attack even though they had been retreating in the South. The American public made heroes of young David Brentwood and the others who deserved it, and some who didn’t but who had been in the right place at the right time.
For most of the men, the reputation of having been in on the Pyongyang raid proved as much a burden as a blessing. Later, in Europe, during a night drop when Brentwood’s battalion had bailed out over the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket as part of the American airborne’s drop to relieve pressure from the trapped British Army of the Rhine, four American brigades, and a German division, David, like most in Charlie company, had been blown into enemy territory by crosswinds.
He had lain against a fetid, disemboweled corpse in a shell-pocked field under enemy artillery barrage, too paralyzed to move. At dawn, when he did go forward and found himself looking through the foresight of a Russian AK-47, he was secretly relieved. That was, until he saw the Russian SPETS commandos herding American and British prisoners, making them take off their uniforms and dog tags and issuing the shivering NATO POWs only one coarse blanket apiece.
The Russians were preparing to infiltrate the NATO lines and blow up the Allied “prepo” supply depots. Subsequently, Brentwood, after seeing a British officer and Americans murdered in cold blood on a forced march through deep snow, had been jolted out of his funk. Escaping from the column, using two of the enemy’s stick, male-female connector grenades, he’d single-handedly set a huge Soviet oil dump near Stadthagen afire, robbing Marshal Kirov’s armored columns of their critical fuel supply during the assault by over five thousand Russian T-90 and T-84 tanks against the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket.
For that, David Brentwood had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to add to the Silver Star earned at Pyongyang.
Now, recuperating in a Belgian NATO hospital outside Brussels, the exhilaration of having found his courage at Stadthagen was quelled by the burden of his memory — of those hours alone before dawn in the shell-cratered field outside the DB pocket when only he and God knew he’d been immobilized with fear. The wounds caused by flying shrapnel from the stick grenades he’d used at Stadthagen to blow up the dump were superficial but extremely painful. Yet he bore the pain without any ill will, his stoicism born of the gnawing guilt that festered out of those two hours — for him, two hours of cowardice.
To make matters worse, everyone he spoke to, from the pretty, young admitting receptionist at Lille to reporters from the Stars and Stripes, kept admiring his courage, and the more reticent he became to give yet another interview, the more he was celebrated as the modest hero, and the more the guilt of those two hours mounted.
Finally David felt literally weighed down, longing for the Dutch harbors to be cleared of the Soviet air-drop mines and Allied wrecks so that he could be shipped back to a convalescent hospital in England. There, hopefully, he could bury himself among the anonymity of the half million Allied soldiers in the vast encampments of southern England and East Anglia who, fed and resupplied by the convoys now getting through from the States, would be far too busy to worry about any one individual.
As the personnel officer aboard the USS Salt Lake City waited to get confirmation that it was Frank Shirer whom Washington was requesting, David Brentwood on the other side of the world sought solitude along the banks of one of the narrow, olive-drab canals. But the denuded winter poplars and the flat, lush green of Flanders Fields beyond only nurtured his gloomy mood. He wondered how much of his attack on the Soviet fuel dump had been due to having seen other prisoners shot at the whim of a Soviet guard and how much of his desperate run through the blizzard that night with the grenades had been motivated by nothing else than fear of meeting the other prisoners’ fate — instead of by any conscious plan to strike back at the Russians. One-half of him told him that the reason he did it wasn’t important. Who cares? as his marine buddy, Thelman, would say. “What matters, babe, is you did it.” Yet the other half of David Brentwood, his father the admiral’s side, was unmoved. For Adm. John Brentwood, the reason for doing something was almost as important as the deed itself.
A phantom breeze ruffled the canal water, its leaden surface shivering like a living thing apprehensive of the gunmetal skies gathering ominously overhead. David turned around to head back to the hospital, smelling rain in the air, wondering whether this tug-of-war within him afflicted others who, like him, had been singled out for public celebration—”Best of Show” propaganda! — at a time when Allied commanders well knew the war could easily go either way despite Freeman’s breakout from the DB pocket.
Or was his condition peculiar to himself? Was he in some way abnormal? He had tried to visualize confiding in his brothers to find the answer, but he felt too far away in years from Robert. And his older brother wasn’t given to opening up about himself. Like all submariners, cocooned in a world of secrecy, he had a natural reticence to discuss personal matters or, for that matter, anything else, outside the sub. He’d only told David of his impending marriage to Rosemary Spence a month before it took place. In any case, like their father, Robert probably wouldn’t want to discuss personal matters, perceiving such self-absorption as a sign of weakness, an inability on David’s part to handle his own problems. Perhaps it was?
David heard the high thunder of bombers, probably B-1s— the so-called Stealth B-2 a disaster, easily picked up by the enemy’s low, long-wave radar despite the Pentagon’s claims and assurances otherwise. Looking up, seeing nothing but thick overcast, David felt more depressed than ever. Someone said that coming off the painkillers helped induce depression. Or was he just feeling downright sorry for himself? — a thing neither of his two brothers or father would abide, especially not after Ray’s burn trauma.
He had thought of writing Lana — sure she’d understand his doubts and fears about having so much expected of him. Once you’d been a winner, you were supposed to go on winning, distinguishing yourself. What had old George Patton said? “Americans love to win and will not tolerate a loser.” But the problem with trying to talk about any problem in a letter, to Lana or anyone else, was the damned censor. Oh, the censor would keep it to himself, all right — wouldn’t go about blabbing a Medal of Honor winner’s doubts about himself — but the thought of anyone, especially another marine, seeing his innermost doubts revealed was too humiliating to contemplate. No — he’d just have to “bear up,” as his DI had bellowed at him and “Thelma” at Parris Island. “Flush all the shit out!” and “Go forward.” Or, as Adm. John Brentwood had said ad nauseum, “When the going gets tough…”
“Yes, I know,” David could hear his mother saying. “But we’re not all as tough as you, John.”
David smiled at the memory despite his dark mood. He longed to see his mom, remembering how, as a small child, he could go to her in the mornings and cuddle up, the warm, soft smell of her enfolding him. Safe from the world. And he thought of Melissa Lange, his last day with her, a rushed lovemaking torn by anxiety about his posting to Korea and by the memory of Rick Stacy, a political science major. Stacy, the weasel — bow tie and forced preppy charm, except he was from Oregon, having no doubt waited for David to move out so he could try a move on Melissa. The thought of her with Stacy, even though she’d said her relationship with the weasel was “strictly platonic,” was damn near unbearable.
In her most recent letter, Melissa had said Stacy was applying for an M.B.A. program scholarship, his tuition to graduate school being paid by an air force scholarship, providing he would serve four years as a crewman in one of the air force’s two-man, or was it “two-person,” missile silos. “It’s a very popular program,” Melissa had written David. Sure it was— sixty feet underground, wanking yourself off while everyone else was overseas with the crap coming from every direction. David could see Stacy now, waltzing about in his missile crewman’s blue jumpsuit, cravat and missile shoulder patch for everyone to see. The thought of Stacy with his finger on the button—
David could imagine him strutting across campus, writing A-plus papers on the “nuclear threat”—and how taking out a whole city wouldn’t worry him one little bit. Trouble was, after seeing the way the Russians had shot Americans out of hand, David knew he wouldn’t have much trouble pushing the button either if it came to that.
“Brentwood!” It was like being woken up from a sleep, the British sergeant’s bullish voice rolling down the embankment of the canal. “Brentwood?”
“Yo,” answered David.
“You’re to report to Brussels, lad.”
“There are no hospital ships in Brussels,” he told the sergeant, who was one of the military policy detachments assigned to Liege.
“Nothing about hospital ships, lad — HQ wants you. Something about prisoners. They suspect there might be a few of those bloody fancy-dress artistes.” Sometimes David didn’t know what the British were talking about. Churchill was right: the English and Americans were two races divided by a common language.
“You know!” said the sergeant, taking off his beret, bowing and slapping it hard against his thigh before putting it on again. “Artistes. Actors! Those bastards who took our blokes’ uniforms and—”
“Oh, SPETS,” said David. “What about them?”
“Brussels thinks they might have captured some of the swine. But they need positive ID, see. We’re rounding up all you blokes from the DB pocket who might have seen ‘em— least, all of you who are still around. London’s dead set on making an example of ‘em. Shoot a few of the pricks. Send a big message to Moscow, right?”
David was surprised to find himself out of breath after walking up from the canal. His old DI would’ve been disgusted, and he made a mental note right then and there that he’d better get back into shape. “I doubt it’ll make any difference,” he told the sergeant, pausing for breath. “SPETS are very professional. Won’t stop them sending more.”
“Like you marines, eh?” said the sergeant. He was a much taller man than David, an angry glint in his eye. “Well, I’m inclined to agree, mate,” continued the Brit. “Won’t stop ‘em, I reckon. But London wants to let ‘em know that it’s the high jump if they’re caught. Bump off a couple anyway. Hell — you shouldn’t worry. Free trip to Brussels, lad. See the sights. Wine, women, and song, eh? Train leaves in two hours.”
“Don’t think I could identify any of the SPETS,” said David, glancing worriedly up at the sergeant. Ahead were long, white, loamy cart tracks beside the canal. Some parts of Europe hadn’t changed in three hundred years. “Except for the guy who shot your lieutenant,” said David.
“Couple of birds among them, I hear,” said the sergeant, bending down, cracking a fallen branch from one of the poplars, stripping the bark in no time and slapping it under his left arm as if he were the regimental sergeant major on parade.
David looked up at him, puzzled. “Birds?”
“Women, lad! You know. Tits and—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” said David. He’d been thinking about Melissa, and, whenever he did, crude descriptions of the female anatomy bothered him.
“Not interested?” charged the sergeant as they walked along the path, David finding it hard to keep up. The cart track stopped and became a bicycle path by the canal. “Maybe,” said the sergeant lecherously, “you’re dipping your wick into that Admitting filly, eh? Young Lili.” He laughed so loudly, anyone could easily have heard him on the far side of the bank.
“No such luck,” answered David. The truth was, he hadn’t really tried — he guessed she mustn’t be more than seventeen.
“Well,” boomed the sergeant, “she’s got the hots for you, boy. Medal of Honor winner and all that—”
“Yeah, sure,” said David.
“I’m serious, lad. I’ve seen her giving you the once-over when you pick up your hero mail. Cat, if ever I saw it, mark my words.”
“Cat?”
The sergeant thought for a moment, slowed, then stopped. “Ah—“ he said, swiping the top off a long stem of reed grass, “pussy, I mean. Isn’t that what you call it?”
“Cat!” said David, starting to laugh.
The sergeant was exploding in laughter again. When he finally got control, he told David that several of the female POWs were supposedly “smashing!”
“You’ve seen them?” David asked, surprised.
“No — but word has it.”
“They’ll be ugly as sin,” said David. “Beards most likely.”
“Now, don’t be particular, laddie. It’s wartime.”
“No kiddin’,” David replied.
“I’m not kidding,” said the sergeant. “It’s in all the newspapers.”
“You’re nuts,” said David. He was starting to like the Limey.
“Here,” said the sergeant, thrusting his right hand out, a packet in his hand.
“What’s this?” It was a strip panel of condoms.
“If you don’t know what to do with ‘em,” ordered the sergeant, “read the instructions after you get through your fan mail.” He tapped them with his poplar stick. “See?” The condom instructions were in Dutch. “Course,” the sergeant said, “it’s all Greek to me!” and began another belly roll of laughter. But he kept laughing and wouldn’t stop, wildly swiping at more reed grass, tears rolling down his face, until the fixed glint in the Britisher’s eye told David the man was quite mad.
Despite the stinking kerosene fumes from the Avgas sucked in by the air-conditioning, there was a half-hearted cheer in Personnel two levels below the Salt Lake City’s flight deck when the computers came back on line. But they told the personnel director that Lt. Comdr. Frank Shirer was presently assigned to the Tomcat squadron at Dutch Harbor on Unalaska in the easternmost sector of the Aleutian arc. Shot down over the western Aleutians eight weeks before, following an air strike from the carrier, and picked up by a helo from one of the nine escorts in the battle group, Shirer had been taken to Unalaska. Because of the “big show” in Europe, pilots were in short supply on the Aleutian front, and Shirer had quickly found himself seconded to the air force’s Sixty-Fifth Wing stationed at Dutch Harbor.
What the computer didn’t reveal was that between sorties over the Russian-captured outposts of Adak and Shemya at the westernmost reaches of the Aleutian arc, Shirer had renewed a fleeting romance in Dutch Harbor with a Wave nurse, Lana Brentwood, whom he’d met years before in Washington. But the screen did show that Shirer was “AFR-CD — available for recall” to the carrier at the captain’s discretion.
“Very well,” the captain informed the personnel director, “check with Dutch Harbor. My hunch is they’ll be about as unhappy as I am to have one of our top guns reassigned to Washington. But if the Pentagon wants him, I’m not going to stand in their way. Any advisory on why they want him back east?”
The personnel officer’s reply was drowned by the roar of a Grumman EA-Prowler, or “Wild Weasel,” one of the ship’s electronic countermeasures aircraft, landing on the “roof.”
“Say again?” asked the captain, his eyes on a yellow jacket far below whose thumb was held high in the air as he sprinted away from the nose of the Prowler, the wash of jet engines flapping the man’s vest, the plane’s proboscislike midair refueling spout giving it the look of some giant insect anxious to be on its way.
“COMPAC gives no reason for requesting Shirer, sir.” The Prowler was off, swallowed by the darkness.
“Very well,” said the captain, slapping the personnel director on the shoulder. “Ours not to reason why, Phil. Draw up the papers. I’ll sign them end of the watch. Where’s Shirer now?”
“Dutch Harbor, sir.”
The captain nodded “okay,” but the personnel director knew the old man was still trying to figure out why the hell Washington, awash in top brass, would bother to recall one of the fleet’s top aces at a time when the damn Russians were at the back door in the Aleutians, clearly using Shemya and Adak as advance carriers to island-hop along the island chain, readying to hit America’s western and most vulnerable flank. For his part, the PD was concerned it might be a bureaucratic screwup. It had happened before — a liaison officer in San Diego ordered verbally by Washington to grab the first available flight to what was supposed to be Oakland, the guy ending up twenty-four hours later in Auckland, New Zealand.
“We have any other Shirers aboard?” asked the captain. As he waited for the answer from the PD, he never shifted his gaze from the flight deck, watching the crews working feverishly, the carrier launching a plane every forty-seven seconds. Meanwhile, other aircraft from the battle group’s constant combat patrols were coming in to land at over 150 miles an hour. One slip could take out two pilots, flight deck crew, and billion-dollar aircraft in milliseconds.
“Captain,” came the PD’s reply. “We’ve got four Shirers. One also a Frank. A purple jacket. But his number’s—”
“Never mind the number. Get a repeat from Washington, Phil. Son of a bitch, what’d I tell you? Another Pentagon snafu.”
The PD requested verification of Shirer’s service number. One wrong digit was all it would take.
The confirmation came back within the hour. It was Frank Shirer, the fighter ace at Dutch Harbor, whom Washington wanted. When he received the information, the captain sighed resignedly, telling his executive officer that neither Salt Lake City nor the Aleutian command could afford the loss of even one pilot, with more air-supported land battles shaping up in the Aleutians. “Very well,” he instructed the personnel director. “Send message to Dutch Harbor — immediate for Shirer.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But, Phil—”
“Sir?”
“I want that F-14 back here. He can be ferried back to Pearl from here and then to Washington via San Diego. He might be their fair-haired boy, but the plane’s ours! Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Washington,” put in the executive officer, “is probably going to give him another medal.”
The skipper shrugged. “Even Washington’s not that stupid. He could receive it in the field. It’s got me beat, I’m tellin’ ya. It’s ridiculous.” The executive officer agreed.
So did Shirer.