by Ian Slater
“Come on, Mel. I’m sorry.” His hands extended, palms up. “Hey, you’re more important to me than any damn war.”
“Hmm—”
He hit the “off” button and went down on his knees.
“You idiot,” she said.
“At your service, ma’am!”
“Well—”
He clapped his hands together, then opened them wide. “Without you I die.”
“Without me you’d watch TV. Lounge lizard!”
He rose and reached over the bed, taking her hand. “Love you, babe.”
“I’ve got geography at one-thirty. Have to prepare for it. Last summer school class.”
“What’s to prepare?”
“Answers. Spot quiz.”
“Ask me. Go on.”
“Hindu Kush?”
“What about it?” He pulled the sheets up about them.
“Where is it?”
“Asia.”
She punched him softly on the arm. “Big help. Where in Asia?”
He slid his hand over her buttocks, reveling in their firmness, and when it happened, he knew they’d be tighter than this, tight as a basketball.
“Where in Asia?” She pushed his hand away.
“In the mountains. India.” He was nibbling the lobe of her ear.
“I thought you poli sci majors had all the answers,” she said.
“We do. I’m giving you one now.” He slid his left hand between her thighs, pressing into her. “Means killer,” he said. “Hindu killer.”
“Are you serious?”
“Dead serious.”
“Go on.”
“All the way?” he asked.
“No—”
“Why not?”
“I promised Daddy.”
“I could have a talk with him. Make it official.”
“Not till we finish school. Remember — it was your idea. Till then, frottage. Don’t you like it?”
“Sure.” He slid his right hand behind her to unclip the bra. “But I’d like to have it all.”
“When we finish schoo—”
“Damn thing’s caught,” he said.
She arched her back, unclipped it for him, and dropped the bra to the floor.
“Oh God,” he said, seeing her breasts, closing his eyes and opening them again — as if it had all been illusion. She laughed and began stroking his hair, lowering her body slowly on his. When he came up for air, gently rolling her over to her side of the bed, his face was flushed with excitement. They kissed hard and longingly and he rolled on his back so she could sit astride him, her breasts firm yet pendulous above him. She leaned forward, gently rocking side to side, her long ash-blond hair falling down like warm rain.
“Mogul emperor—” he said, “in 1672.”
She giggled and sat up, blocking his hands with hers, their fingers intertwined, she fending him off. “What about 1672?” She kissed his hand.
“Mogul emperor — sent in forty thousand troops — through the Khyber Pass. Only five came back. That’s why they call it Hindu Kush.”
“That’s awful,” she said, sitting up, pushing her hair back.
“Yeah.”
“See? I told you. Men love war.”
“I’m just trying to help—” His mouth went dry just looking at her. “Any more questions?” he asked raspily. Her nipples were engorged and he felt hard as concrete between her legs. A frown swept over her face and she sat upright, flicking her hair back, a bobby pin in her mouth. “You don’t think there’ll be a war, do you?”
“What — oh, in Korea. There’s already a war.”
“No, I mean a world war?”
“No chance. Nuclear weapons’ll stop it.”
“Nuclear weapons could start it.”
“No, before that they would have to — hey, is this a seminar or what?” He pulled her down to him, running his fingernails gently over her back, dragging them lightly back up to her shoulders and down along her outstretched arms, her murmurs of pleasure making him happy. “Love you, babe,” he said.
“You, too,” she said, and began doing the same for him. He slipped off his watch, hearing it drop softly to the floor. Now she lay down full length on him, moaning softly as he began to move, arching his back, lifting her, all the pressure in her groin. She kissed him wetly, hard, tongue thrusting hard for his. “Don’t — don’t leave me, Davy,” she called softly, gently, lonely as a child in the night.
“I won’t,” he said.
Now he could feel her buttocks, the hard, rounded silkiness rousing him so he doubted he could hold out much longer. She stopped, perfectly still, sensing his razor-edge excitement as he calmed down. Her smell was overwhelming him, and now for a moment, a man possessed beyond his years, his vision blurred, she came back into focus, and he could feel the blood pulsing through him. She raised herself above him using her elbows and began moving rhythmically again side to side, his mouth like a fish gasping for water. She laughed and it relaxed him, his shoulders slumping back, falling on the pillow. She had to be careful — sometimes the slightest giggle could make him angry, as if he thought she was laughing at him instead of with him — for him.
“You’re going—” he stopped to get his breath “—to be late for class.”
“Yes,” she smiled.
“Sweetie — let’s get married now. Today. This afternoon.”
She placed her forefinger gently on the tip of his nose. “No. After we graduate.”
“That’ll be — hell, that’ll be the end of next term. Christmas. I can’t wait that long. I’ll go nuts.”
“No. “
“You’re a hard woman, Melissa Lange.”
“I’m old-fashioned.”
“This isn’t old-fashioned.”
“How do you know? Maybe your parents and mine did it.”
“My dad?” he said disbelievingly. “You’re joking. Mom would never have let him.”
“Oh — they didn’t have sex in the navy?”
“Shore leave,” he said.
“Oh Lord!”
“What?”
“I promised Rick I’d loan him my notes.”
“Stacy? Let him make his own.”
“He was sick last week with the flu.”
“He’ll be all right.”
“What time is it?” she said. She reached over and picked up the watch. “Oh Lord! He’ll be waiting for me at the Student Union Building.”
“Let him wait.”
“I promised, Davy,” but she could see he was getting mad. “You know how you are about promises, Davy.”
“For Stacy?”
“Oh, come on.” She shook his shoulders. “You’d go.”
“No I wouldn’t.”
“You know you would.” She hopped off the bed. “I’ll make it up to you, sweetie. Promise.”
“Why don’t you make it up with Stacy?”
“Davy.”
He slumped back in the bed, throttled a pillow, relaxed his grip, then threw it across the room.
“Listen,” she said, getting dressed as quickly as she could. “Who was the one watching the TV?”
“That was only a minute. You were watching it, too.”
“I certainly was not.”
“The hell you weren’t! You were asking me if they were people.”
“After I’d been waiting for you to come.”
“Don’t be dirty,” he said. “I don’t like it when you talk like that.”
“What? — oh, for Heaven’s sake. You’re the limit. You’re the one with the dirty—”
“All right, all right. Forget it.”
“Okay, I will. See you around. When you grow up.”
He flung the bedding aside. “Fucking Stacy. I’d give him notes. Right in the face.”
“Well, if you’re going to use that language, David…” She was tucking her shirt into her jeans.
“Oh Jesus,” he said, “Little Miss Muffet.”
“You’re so stupid,”
she shot back. “There’s nothing between Rick and me.”
“God, you’re blind. I can’t believe it. He wants your notes. You really think that’s all he wants?”
She grabbed her satchel. “Well, if you keep this up, Bub, he might just get it.”
“You—”
“Go on, say it.”
“Nevermind—”
“Say it.”
“Bitch!”
“All right, buster,” she said. “That’s it! See you around.” She stopped at the door and swung about. “And those shorts,” she said, glancing contemptuously down at the red and white striped underpants. “You look like a barbershop. Never seen anything so ridiculous.” She walked out and slammed the door.
* * *
“You hear the news?” asked Rick Stacy, a fourth-year student majoring in commerce and international relations. “What news?” asked Melissa. “The fighting in Korea.”
“Yes,” she said. “Well, now I know how wars start.”
“What do you mean?” he said as he gathered up his things from the plush but grubby Student Union sofa.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Here are my notes.”
“Oh, I already got them from Linda. Thanks anyway.”
“I could strangle you, Richard.”
“What?” he asked, alarmed. “What’d I do?”
“You started a war.”
“Uh-oh. Davy Brentwood. Right?”
“Right.”
“Hey, don’t sweat it. Really. I’ll have a talk with him. Set him straight. I am in IR.”
“What?”
“International relations. Conflict resolution. My specialty.”
“Maybe we should send you to Korea.”
“Aw, they’re just trying it on,” said Stacy.
“You see the news this morning? Looked pretty bad to me.”
“Sure it does. Right now. Surprise is with the North. Always is with the attacker. You’ll see. It’ll be over by Christmas. Not like it was back in the fifties. Caught the South napping, that’s all. President’ll mobilize the reserve maybe — that sends the message to Moscow and China real quick. End of series. They don’t want a war.”
“Neither did South Korea, but they’re getting it.”
“Stop worrying. It always takes us a little time to react, but when we do, it’s game over. Moscow’ll tell them to get their ass out of there. Russia’s got enough to worry about. Estonia, Latvia-”
“You think the president will mobilize the reserve?” asked Melissa.
“No question. Doesn’t want to seem too weak — not with old Leyland breathing down his neck in the polls. But doesn’t want to be seen as a warmonger. But he won’t send troops in. Happens all the time, Melissa. You call up the reserve or hold maneuvers—that’s another good one. Sends the right messages to Beijing, Moscow.”
“What if they call our bluff?”
“Hey! Are you serious? China’s on overtime just trying to feed itself, and Russia’s had one of the worst harvests in years.”
“Where have I heard that before?” she said, frowning, unable to pin it down exactly.
“What?” asked Stacy as they walked over past the library to the cedar-hidden geography building. Stacy thought for a minute. “Bastogne?” he proffered. “Thought we had it all wrapped up and bam! Out come the Panzers. But we beat them.”
“No,” said Melissa, “it was in Korea. MacArthur or someone said it would be over before Christmas. Then the Chinese came in.”
“History,” said Stacy.
“And history repeats itself, right?”
“Up to a point. That’s an old wives’ tale. It’s always different really.”
“Then it’ll be different now,” she said. “If the president mobilizes the reserve, maybe it won’t work.”
“Listen, Melissa — and don’t take this the wrong way — I’m no male chauvinist.” They kept walking toward the quadrangle, the smell of the cedars strong in the high humidity. “But putting an M-1—that’s a tank—”
“I knew that, Richard.”
“Well, what I’m saying is that putting our M-1s up against what the North Koreans have — hell, like a heavyweight boxer against a bantamweight. No hay compracion. No contest.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“Bet you dinner. The Steakhouse,” said Stacy.
“Okay,” she answered, knowing the moment she’d accepted, she shouldn’t have. It would only antagonize David further, but— dam it, his final words had hurt. The ingrate. Anyway, it would probably be weeks before the Korean business was over. She never did see why so many Americans had to stay there — it was up to the South Koreans to protect themselves. Well, in a few weeks everyone would have cooled off. David would have simmered down — he wanted her as much as she wanted him — they both knew that. And Richard would probably win his bet about the Korean thing being over by Christmas and impress his international relations seminar. She’d gladly pay for the steak dinner and invite David to keep the peace.
* * *
From his well-camouflaged revetment area, six miles south of Uijongbu, tank commander Lieutenant Clemens no longer felt the slightest pity for the men he was sure he was about to kill. News of the atrocities found its way into the crackle of radio traffic. One of the four who had been beheaded had been from one of the dual-based mechanized infantry support companies out of California, Clemens’s own state. On hearing the news, Clemens steeled himself for vengeance. Now he could see the first of an NKA battalion of PC-76 tanks, the “tin cans,” emerging like parts of a long, segmented green snake on the rain-polished highway. His laser range-finder told Clemens that the distance between his six American tanks and the NKA’s sixty-four was exactly 1,203.4 meters, well within the M-1’s four-thousand-meter range, the range confirmed by the additional thermal sight used in bad weather or at night.
Clemens, elbow resting on the cupola’s 12.7-millimeter machine gun, could also see NKA infantry moving up alongside the dark green PT-76s, the ceremonial red stars normally visible on the turrets painted over with slightly darker green camouflage paint. Clemens gave his orders quietly and unhurriedly to the loader and gunner, the gunner’s integrated computer display verifying the elevation of the 105-millimeter gun and compensating for crosswind and rain-caused deviations as the M-1‘s four-man crew waited patiently for the enemy’s lead PT-76 to come to a thousand meters so that the whole column would then be within killing range. Clemens’s thumb was rubbing the steel guard, ready to press the computerized fire control system that was even now compensating for the effects of wind drift, barrel bend, temperature, and humidity. Clemens had to make the decision whether, at the moment of firing, the tank would be “buttoned up” or he would do what the four men in his tank and the other two tanks of his platoon called an “Israeli,” standing up, his head and shoulders out of the turret. Despite the tank’s state-of-the-art CO2 laser range finder, driver’s thermal viewer, and the rest of it, an “Israeli” would afford him a better all-round view of the road and surrounding paddies. And so Clemens kept standing, careful not to make any move that would shake the camouflage netting around the fifty-four-ton tank, quietly telling his driver the fallback position once the tank’s initial rounds gave its present position away to the enemy column.
* * *
The USS Blaine was in condition five, its top readiness alert. On its radar the swarm of white dots within the white rectangles that had signified unknown surface ships had now become white squares, hostile ships, identified now as three 180-foot-long Nanuchka and fourteen Shershen-class fast-attack torpedo boats armed with four twenty-one-inch torpedoes and four twin thirty-millimeter machine guns. The Shershens, originally moving at thirty-eight knots, were the faster boats but now held back, knowing the U.S. frigate’s more sophisticated electronic defenses could better be penetrated by the Nanuchkas, which were now closing in the rolling fog banks.
“Missile incoming!” shouted the Blaine’s OOD, and the Pha
lanx Mark-15 close-in radar and weapons system with its twenty-millimeter gun opened up together with the seventy-six-millimeter gun aft of the multiple target radar.
“Hard right five degrees,” ordered Brentwood.
“Hard right five degrees.”
The Blaine was now bow on to the oncoming swarm, attempting to deny the NKA boats a wide broadside target in or out of the fog as she “ghosted,” projecting fake radar images of herself to decoy the attacking boats even while her six-barrel Gatling gun, with a sound like linoleum, was spitting out a hail of depleted uranium bullets at over three thousand rounds a minute. Any one of the bullets, twice as dense as the normal steel-jacketed kind, was capable of deflecting, or causing detonation of, incoming missiles.
“We’ve been locked on,” shouted the electronics warfare officer, indicating one of the Nanuchkas’ “fishbowl” radars had switched to fire control mode. Immediately the Tactical Action Office ordered “chaff” and the torpedo launcher shot out a cloud of fine aluminum chips to hash the incoming missile’s radars. Another high tone from the Blaine’s SLQ-32 radar indicated another missile had been fired at the Blaine. Seconds after Ray Brentwood ordered the four antiship Harpoon missiles fired from the launcher forward of the bridge, he felt a slight tremor from the back-blast and at the same time received confirmation that the Blaine’s two LAMPs — light airborne multipurpose helicopters — had taken off within seconds of each other from the stern pad armed with clusters of air-to-ship rockets. The next minute he heard two thumps that reverberated through the frigate as the Blaine’s two triple-tube torpedo launchers discharged four MK-48s into the swarm now closing at less than two nautical miles.
There was a bright orange flame forward of the starboard beam about three hundred yards into the fog, an enemy missile hit, and a second later the crash of a destroyed Nanuchka came rolling over the ship. At the same time the TAO reported, “Bogey missiles destroyed.” There was a cheer in the combat information center, cut short by the TAO’s command to the radar operators to compensate for clutter caused by the Blaine’s own chaff and the increasing chop caused by the wash of the remaining sixteen NKA boats. A sharp pulse of light on the radar and seconds later the sound of an explosion told them another Nanuchka had been hit, but Brentwood was worrying about the changing positions of the two remaining Nanuchkas. To maintain flank speed would mean entering the swarm sooner, but to slacken off would give him less maneuverability — the fact that the two Nanuchkas were slowing down didn’t abate his fears as they had separated to form the two tips of a bull’s-horn formation. Meanwhile the armored shell of the Blaine’s combat information center being below the bridge, Brentwood and the others were only dimly aware of the cacophony of firing outside as the Shershen attack boats coming at him broadside opened up with thirty-millimeter fire and began launching their torpedoes from staggered overlap tubes, the bull’s-horn-like formation of fast boats now becoming a rough semicircle of a half-mile radius, launching twenty torpedoes at the Blaine.
