Rage of Battle wi-2

by Ian Slater

  Brodsky was sitting back as if to get away from the information, snaking his head. He blamed Gorbachev, as so many other senior officers had. Glasnost and perestroika were responsible. Gorbachev had given the upstarts in the Baltic states economic independence when any fool could have told him this would soon amount to de facto political independence and give encouragement to the Baltic resistance groups, especially those in Estonia.

  “Find them,” the admiral ordered, handing the captain back the papers.

  The captain was pleased. Estonians had always considered themselves a cut above everyone else. It came from being too close to the capitalist nations, which exported disorder along with their technology to the USSR’s Baltic states. Time the Balts were taught a lesson.

  “How many other ships are affected?” asked Brodsky.

  “We don’t know yet, Admiral. At least another cruiser and a squadron of destroyers out of Tallinn and Riga.”

  Brodsky looked out at the Neva; now it looked as cold as he felt.

  “Bystro!”— “Quickly!” he instructed the captain. “We must root out this nest of Jews immediately.”

  Whenever there was trouble, it was always “nests of Jews” with Brodsky. Of Jewish extraction himself, the admiral considered it necessary to be harder on such “rebellious elements” than any other Russian would have been.

  Five minutes later, the captain handed Brodsky the order for military intelligence assist. Brodsky intended to keep the KGB out of the investigation if he could; the GRU— Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie—the main intelligence directorate of the Soviet general staff — was more like family and would give him more control. He signed the order immediately. “Get to it at once!” he told the aide again. “This could be a disaster.” He paused. “For us as well as those other ships.”

  The captain knew he meant both of them.

  “I’ll see to it right away, Admiral.”

  “And keep me posted on that Sea Wolf.” He paused. “It has to be destroyed.”

  Within the half hour a coded “for your eyes only” five-group number-for-letter transmission was being relayed to Baltic Fleet headquarters at Baltiysk, near the Lithuanian port of Kaliningrad, which was also the headquarters for the Baltic Fleet’s intelligence unit, which reported directly to the GRU.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was 5:03 a.m. on the graveyard — midnight-to-dawn— shift in La Jolla’s Veterans’ Administration Medical Center, where two nurses on the burn ward were trying to decide whether the information phoned in from New York by Capt. Ray Brentwood’s father should be communicated to his son, who was on their ward. The older nurse, in her mid forties, busy checking the medication trays, was for withholding the news until later in the day, after the daily assessments, including that of Ray Brentwood, had been made by the doctors on their rounds. The young nurse, on the other hand, not long out of college, argued that bad news should be communicated as soon as possible to a patient. “Quicker they know, the sooner they’ll have to confront it. And overcome it,” she said confidently, but the older woman, who had worked as a nurse’s aide long before she’d become qualified as a fully trained nurse, regarded the younger woman’s approach as typical of the college-trained nurses. They were all full of confrontation, “tell it like it is,” encounter groups-mistaking forthrightness for professionalism. After many years on the job, the older nurse had come to believe that sometimes you had to keep the truth at bay, for a while anyhow — a lie if necessary. With all the daunting confidence of youth, the younger nurse stood her ground. “Sorry, I still think we should tell him. Be up-front about everything.”

  “Oh?” said the older nurse. “Then why’d you tell him he looked ‘just great’ the other day?”

  The younger nurse thought for a moment. “I didn’t.”

  “You did, honey. I heard you say it. You told him that the last plastic surgery was a ‘terrific improvement.’ I can’t see any improvement at all.”

  “Well — that’s — that’s a subjective thing, I guess.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I still don’t think you should keep something about his family from him. He’ll probably get official notification from the Pentagon that his kid brother’s missing anyway.”

  “Not for a week or so. Believe me. Washington doesn’t move that fast.”

  “All right, you tell me — what’s he going to think when he finds out we knew all along?”

  “We don’t have to tell him we knew.”

  “C’mon, Sue, by then he’ll have read about it in the papers.”

  “About what?”

  “You know — hand me that temperature chart, will you? — about how bad things are in Europe. About this Dortmund pocket or whatever they call it.”

  “Honey — there’s nearly a million of our boys fighting over there. Ray Brentwood won’t know where his kid brother was — until the War Department tells him. Even then, they’re pretty vague about the area. They usually give the country, that’s all.”

  The young nurse was flicking over the temperature charts, entering the readings into the computer, and wondered aloud what Brentwood’s sister would do in the circumstances.

  “Honey, she’s back of beyond up there in the Aleutians. We’re here and we’re the ones making the decision.”

  “Regulations say you should tell them,” said the young nurse.

  “Regulations tell you you should use your discretion. Best judgment. That’s what I’m doing.”

  The young nurse paused at the computer for a second. “Did I really say that? That he looked better?”

  “God’s my witness.”

  “Well, I don’t believe in God. I’ll have to take your word for it.” She paused. “I guess we can hold off for a while.”

  “I’ll tell him,” the other one volunteered.

  The younger one returned to tapping the temperatures into the computer files. “Sue — is that true about his sister? About when she was in Canada? Did she really—?”

  “Gossip.”

  “No — I’m not judging her. I think she was right — if that’s what she did it for.”

  “Doesn’t matter what she did it for. And if you don’t want to end up back of beyond like her — don’t you ever do it. It’s easy, I know. You feel sorry for them. Nothing wrong with that, but we’re professionals.”

  “I thought professionals were supposed to care.”

  The other nurse said nothing.

  The younger one pressed, “You do believe it, then?”

  The older woman pulled over three medication trays, took a tongue depressor, and began counting off painkillers to put in the array of paper portion cups. “All I know is Lana Brentwood was Little Miss Shy Shoes. Pretty brunette, the original Miss America figure, not too tall, not too short— ‘just right,’ like they say in the nursery rhymes. Then, who knows? She married some bigwig, went to China, came back, and left her husband — or he kicked her out. Tried to hide away from the front pages, then decided to be Florence Nightingale. Next thing there’s this rumpus over the young Brit, Spencer.”

  “Spence.”

  “Whatever. Anyway, she was lucky she wasn’t court-martialed.”

  The young nurse saw one of the call lights go on. For a moment she thought it was Ray Brentwood and was much relieved when she realized it was the patient in the next bed over. “You sure know a lot about her. Wheredo you pick up all that juicy stuff? Sounds to me like you’ve got her file.”

  “Gossip — well, she was in all the papers — over the marriage breakup.”

  “What papers? I never read anything in the papers about it.”

  The older nurse was blushing. “I don’t know. Maybe the National Enquirer or something. Look — you’d better hop on down and see what Jensen—” They heard a torrent of abuse erupting from five rooms down on the west wing.

  When she entered the room, the young nurse saw Ray Brentwood was awake, reading. He looked hideous — the night-light reflecting off the tig
ht skin, stretched like pink plastic, blotchy here and there with dead spots. The eyes, having escaped the burn, appeared strange, fixed and protruding like those of a fish, but she realized it wasn’t that anything was wrong with the eyes so much as the rest of his face, especially the nose — so horribly disfigured, off center, and pushed to one side — so that the eyes looked grotesque in their normalcy. She avoided their stare as she checked the frame that had been built over Jensen’s bed, Jensen’s burns being on the lower part of his body and, like Brentwood’s, caused by the extraordinarily high temperatures from a ship’s aluminum superstructure. While the light weight gave the modern ships more speed, the aluminum alloys were unable to sustain high temperatures. In the case of Brentwood’s ship, the guided missile frigate USS Blaine, the white-hot superstructure, collapsing under the stress, tumbled into the fire of other explosions below, taking men down with it into the inferno of the ship’s twisted entrails.

  Brentwood was making a terrible piglike snorting noise as he breathed in. The young nurse pitied his wife and wondered how a woman, even with the best will in the world, could ever make love to a man after something like that.

  “For Christ’s sake!” Jensen cried. “Gimme a shot!”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Jensen. It isn’t time.”

  Jensen was sobbing, and she wanted to tell him to stop it. It couldn’t be that bad, she told herself.

  “You’ll be fine,” she told him, and knew she was lying. He would be lucky to survive, and if he did, it would be a torture. He no longer had any genitals, and had to be constantly catheterized.

  Brentwood’s breathing was getting heavier. She hated it, asking herself why on earth she’d become a nurse in the first place. It had been a terrible mistake. But then, when she had been writing her finals only months before, the world had been at peace, and nursing a guarantee of a job. Now everything had changed. It was another world, one in which death and suffering on such a scale had been unimaginable to the young. The types of wounds she was seeing in this hospital simply hadn’t been covered. Even automobile accidents paled by comparison. She remembered some professor in college assuring them that nuclear weapons had made world war “obsolete.” She wished the fool could have been on the ward with her now, hearing, smelling, the death that hung about the night wards, giving her the creeps, like some obscene voyeur whose presence, though invisible, was palpable in the dark corners of the room.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The sharp black peaks and volcanic sores of the windswept islands that stretched in a scythelike arc for over three thousand miles between Alaska and Russia first appeared to the astronauts like the emerald spine of some enormous exotic sea creature. There was nothing exotic about them for Lana Brentwood. From the moment she landed at Dutch Harbor on the northeastern end of tomahawk-shaped Unalaska Island, she thought there must be no lonelier place on earth. No wonder they called it America’s Siberia.

  Beneath the enormous steel-gray clouds of cumulonimbus that constantly rolled in over Makushin Volcano toward the narrow neck of the harbor, Lana saw a white dot bursting out from the fibrous sky that was mixed with steam coming off the sulfurous fumaroles of Mount Vsevidof on Umnak Island to the west. With unerring grace, the dot swooped down over the polished black clumps of kelp that washed in from the cold Bering Sea immediately to the north and from the Pacific to the south. She pulled the string of her parka hood tight against the bone-aching chill of late October and, stepping to the side of the road that skirted the forlorn haven of Dutch Harbor, fixed her binoculars on the bird. It was a glaucous-winged gull.

  Two months before, the woman whose beauty had once gained her offers to model in New York and delivered her to a disastrous marriage with the tall, lean, and eminently successful Jay La Roche couldn’t have told the difference between a glaucous-winged gull and any other of the hundreds of species of birds. But two months ago she had been a nurse, quietly nursing her psyche back to health after the trauma of her having left Jay. He was one of the high-flying conglomerate stars and chairman of the La Roche pharmaceutical and cosmetic empire, and his job had necessitated frequent business trips abroad. At first she’d been allowed to accompany him on his globe-trotting hops, from New York to London, Shanghai to Paris, and London to Melbourne, and at first she had enjoyed them. But then it soon became clear to her that Jay was combining business with a seemingly endless string of one-night stands.

  Lana looked back now with a mixture of incredulity and self-loathing at how hard she’d tried to “accommodate” him — as he urbanely put it to her, in tones that made her feel nothing less than a country hick in the fast social world where the mores of an admiral’s daughter seemed quaintly, even ludicrously, out of place.

  At first she’d blamed herself, for her naïveté, for what Jay repeatedly reminded her was her “lack of experience.” And she had blamed her parents for not having prepared her. It had taken her more than a year to realize that no one but a masochist could have prepared her for Jay La Roche, for whom a menage-a-trois, which Lana would not participate in, was viewed as the least kinky of sexual preferences. Then one night in his apartment in Shanghai, just after his mother, whom Lana liked, had flown home from staying with them, and the servants were on their night off, she was trapped. She had seen how his mother’s visit had put enormous pressure on him. Instead of being able to spend his days and nights whoring — he was always very careful to have the boys as well as the girls examined by his bevy of highly paid physicians — he’d been forced to show himself at home in the evenings, his stable of sexual partners quarantined in the luxurious surroundings of the Jinjiang Hotel. He told Lana he wanted her. She asked him why he didn’t go to the Jinjiang. “No,” he’d replied. “First, I want you. “Twisting her hand till she was on her knees, he told her, smiling, his gray eyes glistening, “You don’t understand, do you?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.” When she wouldn’t let him urinate on her, as part of his latest complex ritual, he tried what he screamed at her was the “slut stuff,” beating her so badly, it had nearly killed her. She vowed it would never happen again, thinking that now there was more than infidelity as a reason for leaving him, she was finally free. That no court in the land would refuse a divorce. But Jay’s money and influence, she discovered, could fix that, too. He told her he’d contest any divorce.

  “Why?” she had cried, or rather mumbled, through her swollen lips, sobbing, “You hate me. I hate you.”

  “No you don’t,” he told her arrogantly. “No matter how much you think you hate me, I was the first, baby. That counts for something. Forever.”

  She managed a contemptuous smile, not normally part of her repartee, the taste of blood metallic in her mouth. “You’re not the first.”

  “You lying bitch!” He had her by the throat, screaming that he’d kill her, but now she didn’t care. It was too indescribably awful to go on.

  “Who was it?” he demanded, shaking her, throwing her to the floor.

  “I’m not telling you,” she gasped.

  “Was it that fucking pilot?” he shouted, shaking her so violently, her head felt like a rag doll’s.

  It was the bravest thing she’d ever said to him, and she believed later that the only reason he hadn’t killed her was that he was making so much noise about it, screaming and smashing everything in sight, that one of the wealthier Chinese playing at mah-jongg and losing badly in one of the other penthouse suites complained to the police.

  By the time the Chinese police arrived — two men in a motorcycle and sidecar — Jay had the minister for trade on the line, and the two policeman left with a dozen cans of Coca-Cola each — eight days wages. Lana still had enough courage to be scornful. “You think you can buy off a divorce with Coke?”

  “With Coke,” he said, turning the pun back at her, “I could buy Jesus Christ!”

  “You’re sick.”

  He unzipped his fly and, pouring Scotch on it, walked toward her. “Listen, you little daddy’s who
re, I could buy your chicken-shit daddy, the admiral, if I wanted. Don’t you push me. I could have a dozen Chinks up here in a flash-all testifying you’d sucked them off in Tiananmen Square. I can buy anything in this country, and don’t you forget it.” His voice rose as he kept coming toward her, waving the Scotch for effect. “I can buy anything in any fucking country. Cunt-tree. Get it?”

  Lana had sat cowering from him, but now she merely looked away in her revulsion. He was mad. And she knew if she looked at him now, he would kill her. He pushed it into her face, slapping her with it. “You try to divorce me, pussy willow, and I’ll drag so much shit in the papers that your mommy and daddy won’t show their faces outside their little fucking house. Understand?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Understand?” he bellowed. “And your fucking brothers’ll be the fucking joke from here to Peoria. Got it?”

  She was terrified.

  “I can’t hear you,” he taunted in a singsong voice.

  “Yes,” she said very quietly.

  “All right, you bitch. Now open your mouth.” She wouldn’t.

  “You want Daddy and Mommy in trouble? And how about you? You want to end up a friggin’ monster like that brother of yours?”

  Her gut turned. She knew he was right. He could buy anything. It was childish to imagine anything else. He had bought half of Shanghai, and party officials from the Bund to Beijing. They were all in his pocket.

  “Hey!” He grabbed her hair, shaking her violently. “I own half the tabloids, sweetheart. And I can buy the rest just like that—” He tried to snap his fingers but failed. Against all caution, in spite of her terror, or perhaps because of it, she laughed.

  He had his hands around her throat again, pushing the thumbs hard up into her. As she gasped for air, he jammed it into her mouth, thumping her head against the wall, screaming again how he could ruin her, her family, how he could do anything he wanted. She thought of Frank Shirer, the pilot who had taken her out in Washington before she’d ever met Jay La Roche. They’d made love, but it hadn’t been good — her first time and painful beyond belief — but Shirer had been kind the moment he realized he was hurting her. She could see him now, the pale blue eyes, quick yet serene, the eyes of one of the navy’s top guns, of a man who wouldn’t blink at danger, she’d thought, but a man who was warm and loving. And funny. He’d put on the “nuclear” eye patch that he’d kept since his stint as one of the pilots of Air Force One. It had frightened her at the time, but now she clung to the memory of it, so different it was from the horror of Jay in her mouth. Frank Shirer, wherever he was, was as different from Jay La Roche’s type as you could imagine.