by Ian Slater
The fuel tank didn’t blow, but its seams gave way, the high octane spewing into the sea. The captain could do little, for like most of the big Combo carriers, which relied on shore-based suction pipes for loading and unloading bulk cargo, the Nagata had derricks only midships and at the forecastle, and these were surrounded by stacked and lashed containers. Helpless to do anything about the mountain of yeast and sugar now growing like some enormous amoeba, or vast cake overspilling its pan, shifting the ship’s center of gravity dangerously, all he could do was try to vent some of the bunker C and more of the octane to compensate for the starboard list.
Twenty minutes later, at 0426, the Nagata’s master gave orders for his crew of thirty to abandon ship and, refusing to break radio silence, alerted the convoy leader by signal lamp, allowing only one repeat of his SOS, and then, opening all cocks, he scuttled his ship rather than run the risk of leaving her afloat as a half-sunken hazard to the other convoys en route to and from Fortress Europe. In obeisance to the ancient and unwritten law of the sea and the traditional precepts of the Japanese code of honor, he remained aboard, after seeing all his men safely off in the Beaufort rafts, and went down with his ship.
The loss in equipment was enormous, for while there were other spare parts for the A-10 Thunderbolts in the convoy, the Nagata had been carrying the lion’s share of A-10 replacements — engines, ammunition, bombs, and electronic “boards.” Enough to have reequipped seventy of the tank-killing Thunderbolts, which, coming in low at four hundred miles an hour, often no more than two hundred feet above the ground and loaded with six and a half tons of bombs with three-second BPSM — best possible safety margin — had proven critical in slowing the Soviet surge through the Fulda Gap.
Although they had managed to take out only two thousand Russian tanks, a third of the Soviet force, the Thunderbolts held a special place in the affections of the half million men in the British Army of the Rhine, the American Fifth, and the German Twelfth. Though the NATO soldiers had been pushed back almost a hundred miles from the prewar NATO/ Soviet line, and though they were fighting for their lives in one of the fiercest combats ever recorded in modern history, they owed what life they had to the bravery of the Thunderbolt pilots and the astonishing maneuverability of an aircraft which, swooping down with its two high-mounted rear engines, could absorb the kind of punishment that would have downed the “supersonics” on the first pass.
The loss of the Nagata was a hard lesson for everyone, from John Brentwood at the New York Port Authority to the naval planners in Norfolk, Virginia. Reams of new instructions regarding the loading of mixed cargo were issued along with an order to all NATO and “associated merchant marine” ships that ship’s masters were not required to die with their ship. Captains, like pilots, were in short supply.
The consequence of this order would be a spread of what, ironically, became known as the “Nagata defense” in courts-martial where it was charged ships could have been saved had the captain and crew remained. It was an argument the counsel for the defense planned to use in the ongoing inquiry into the sinking of the fast guided-missile frigate USS Blaine off Korea. Ray Brentwood, however, refused to consider it, arguing that this defense would require him admitting that he gave the order to abandon ship when in fact he said that, to his recollection, he had not. The defense counsel, once again, had to resume the task of trying to find a witness who would corroborate Ray Brentwood’s stand. It was thought at least six other men, including the OOD who thought he’d been given the order, were on the bridge when the North Korean missile had hit, but three of them had been killed outright, two dying later of burns to 80 percent of their bodies; the remaining sailor and ensign, Mahler, was still fighting for his life in Honolulu’s Veterans’ Hospital, having been judged too ill to be flown on to La Jolla’s Veterans’ burn unit.
Another outcome of the Nagata incident was that despite the heroic efforts of the convoys, the frontline soldiers, though representing only one-tenth of the total force, nine out of ten men required to support one soldier at the front, could no longer be guaranteed the regulation six pounds of food per man per day. And much of the bread the Western armies would be eating from now on would be flat. The loss of the Nagata also meant that the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket would shrink further without the vital resupply for the tank-killing A-10s.
The other lesson from Convoy 24 was a reminder to all NATO commanders that any man guilty of self-inflicted wounds would not only be court-martialed, but his next of kin would forfeit receipt of all military pensions. The rule, of course, was already on the books of NATO’s armies, but it was the most diplomatic way that ACLANT could think of conveying to their Japanese allies that choosing death rather than withdrawal or a surrender was not in the defensive interest of the Allied cause. The more enemy troops that the Allies could tie up with either delaying tactics or surrender, the better.
The difficulty of getting this message across, however, was compounded by the fact that, following a failed counterattack by the German Second Army and the American First against the Soviet’s southern flank ninety miles west of Prague, 321 American and West German prisoners of war had been summarily executed by the Stasi—the supposedly disbanded secret police of what was formerly East Germany, many of its members still working for Moscow.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In the darkness of the drop, all David Brentwood remembered was lining up when the green “go” light came on, the steady shuffle to the Hercules’ rear, the dark incline of the ramp-door disappearing into the vast blackness of the night. The master sergeant smacked him on the shoulder, then the jump. Tearing air so cold, he couldn’t breathe. And coming up toward them, graceful arcs of red and green tracer, crisscrossing with unhurried fluidity. The surrounding darkness was so black that though he knew his five hundred comrades must be all around him, they were invisible for the first thirty seconds.
Then he spotted several figures momentarily silhouetted in flashes of antiaircraft fire, some slumped like small toy soldiers, dead in their harness. The air was rocking violently with AA shells exploding, the acrid smell of the cordite reminding David not so much of war as of the Fourth of July. The fumes of the antiaircraft explosions, together with the pungency of burning rubber tires from several of the airborne’s Humvee trucks, threatened to overcome Brentwood as he neared the ground, his legs flailing the air in panic lest he hit stiff-limbed with his eighty-pound pack before he could take the roll.
Suddenly flares illuminated a field below, the burnt-out hulk of a barn, dead horses strewn about, the dark plum gash of a cow ripped open, its head missing, and off to the left, short, sharp stabs of bluish-white machine-gun fire. The sound of the battle increased to a crescendo at times, then fell off, small-arms fire heard in the pauses between the screams and crash of artillery and heavy 120-millimeter mortars coming in from the outer fringes of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. Here the American airborne, instead of having landed within the designated drop zone in the northeastern sector of the pocket, were caught by a sudden shift in the crosswind, which swept most of them beyond the perimeter into the very barrage of the British and German batteries that were supposed to have given them covering fire.
Though David Brentwood didn’t know it then, over 270 men had been lost in the first three minutes of landing, caught in the deadly cross fire of a Polish motorized company. The irony was too grim to bear — the drop zone having been selected because intelligence overflights had confirmed that this sector, in the northeasternmost bulge of the pocket, no more than five miles across, was up against the Polish Sixth Motorized Rifle Division. The intelligence experts pointed out that the Poles, though supposedly once loyal members of the old Warsaw Pact, were, in the main, staunchly Catholic, detested the Russians, and would either desert “en masse” or at the very worst offer only token resistance and quickly surrender to Allied forces.
Such intelligence estimates proved disastrously wrong on two counts. No matter what the Poles thought, no matter
how Catholic they were, how much they liked America and Americans, they and their cities were being pounded by the NATO bombers that had managed to penetrate the Soviet defense line, which now ran like a jagged cut bisecting Western Germany, swinging off to the southwest where the Soviet advance along the Danube and north to Munich had been the deepest. And no one had to tell David Brentwood after his stint in General Freeman’s celebrated raid on the capital of North Korea barely two months before that when you are being bombed and strafed, you make no distinction between friendly and hostile fire.
In addition to this, Western intelligence did not know that the Sixth Polish MR division, quite apart from wanting to protect its own skin from the Allied bombers’ counterattacks, had another much stronger incentive: the Soviet military police, who shot deserters or malingerers on the spot. It was a policy that the Russians had prepared years ago, during the gody prostakov— “sucker years”—of the Gorbachev revolution, which had swept the dizzy West off its feet. There was another inducement for the Poles to fight well.
This was called semeynoe pobuzhdenie—”family persuasion “—inspired in part by Beijing’s successful policy of 1989 through which people were encouraged to turn in counterrevolutionaries in their own family. The Soviet refinement was to take a family member, usually the very young or the elderly, for “antifascist war work” in eastern Poland. This way the Russians had it both ways: The relatives would work in the factories producing everything from electronic print boards for the fly-by-wire Soviet jets to biological/chemical weapons, including the manufacture of Tabun and the other VX gasses. A drop of VX paralyzed in seconds, producing involuntary defecation and vomiting. The Polish workers also served another function. If any of the Polish armed forces lost ground, relatives would be hanged. Shooting was too expensive, wasting precious rounds that could be put to better use on the front.
If the Polish and other Eastern European civilian workers — the Hungarians were the worst, in Moscow’s view-sabotaged anything, then the GRU simply reversed the policy and shot their kin who were serving in the armed forces. On the advice of Brig. Kiril Marchenko, adviser to the STAVKA, general headquarters of the VGK — the Soviet Supreme High Command — as well as to the Politburo, the next of kin in the armed forces selected to be punished were taken from administrative divisions wherever possible and not from the frontline spearheads.
It was a policy, however, that was not working well in Lithuania, Latvia, or Estonia, the three Baltic states where the populations were so small that hostages could not be sent back to Russia proper without severely weakening the already overextended civilian labor force, most of whom were forced to work in the shipyards and munitions factories of Riga and Tallinn.
But David Brentwood knew none of the politics behind the Polish motorized division and indeed had never heard of General Kiril Marchenko or his tactics. All he knew, and was grateful for, was a soft landing in what felt like a marsh, his knees and right thigh sodden as he rose.
Quickly unclicking the harness and going into the prone position, he tucked his chin in close to the V of his Kevlar flak jacket beneath the Kevlar helmet, his web harness distributing the weight about his torso, unlike his World War II forebears, who had so often found themselves weighed down below the waist by their packs of ammunition, grenades, canteen, entrenching tool, and sidearm.
Pulling the squad automatic weapon, or SAW, back along his right side, he felt for the plastic protector at the end of the barrel, and instinctively checked with his right elbow whether his sidearm was in position. It was a ritual he had followed ever since Korea, when he had seen one man’s mud-impacted weapon blow up in his face, inflicting wounds that were worse than those suffered by his brother Ray during the North Korean missile boat’s attack on the Blaine. David, a veteran after his drop and fighting withdrawal in the hit-and-run raid on Pyongyang, also carried an unofficial sidearm, a sawn-off five-cartridge pump-action shotgun in a closed, swivel-mounted canvas holster on his left side.
Waiting for the next flare, to get his bearings, he tried to listen through the crescendo of noise for the clinking sound of any of his buddies landing nearby. There was a burst of fire off somewhere to his right, sounding like the tearing of linoleum — a light machine gun. But Allied or Soviet, there was no way of telling. It was all so UFU — unbelievably fucked up. Then he heard the pop, like a champagne cork, a flare climbing unhurriedly to its apogee, its harsh, metallic glare casting a ghostly, flickering light a hundred yards across. From experience, he avoided watching the dark, serrated perimeter, where the flickering light could resemble the shapes of everything from a tank to a charging platoon to a machine-gun nest — when there wasn’t anything there. Instead, careful not to move, he froze in the prone position, watching the center of the ever-decreasing circle of light now that the flare was falling, and saw, with fright, a patch of greasy brown only six feet from him, a wriggle of barbed wire across it: a body, American or Russian — perhaps British.
The rolling thunder of approaching artillery shells told him that he was in the line of a creeping barrage. His throat was bone-dry, and he’d already urinated from fear. Now he quickly looked about for any sign of his company and friend Thelman, who had gone through Parris Island and Camp Lejeune with him. There was no sign of them — only the dark mush he’d seen seconds earlier and which he now knew had been a man’s face, the uniform that of a Russian SPETS commando, the outfit that had already been in place throughout Western Europe and had played havoc with the NATO depots the moment war had broken out. He saw what looked like the man’s finger a couple of feet away, but the hands seemed intact — all the fingers still there. Then he realized what the finger was. Jesus… Jesus…
He thought he saw something move between the man’s legs — or what was left of them — where an ooze of intestine had spread over where the man’s testicles had been. The movement Brentwood had seen was a cluster of leeches so fat, they seemed like slugs in the flare’s dying light.
“Yank?”
He swung the squad weapon around to his right, could see nothing, and then could feel the rain of hot earth coming down on him as the American 105-millimeter high-explosive barrage kept coming. He heard a man scream nearby but was too busy huddling beside the corpse, using it as protection, to know where the voice had come from, aware only that if someone didn’t quickly stop the American shelling, he’d be as dead as the maggot-infested corpse filling his nostrils with the putrefaction of death. The scream he’d heard seemed not far away, but it was impossible to tell in the barrage, and David drew himself up into the fetal position, not wishing to see anything, the next barrage so close, he could feel the earth leaping about him, and he wondered if both he and the voice he had heard would be killed — or, if they survived, who would kill whom.
The falling dirt was so thick now, it drummed down on his helmet and cascaded like hot sand over his bronze goggles, which were designed to protect him from harmful ultraviolet rays. “Like we’re going for a fucking suntan!” his buddy Thelman had said when they had been in training at Parris Island and then at jump school at Camp Lejeune. Where the hell was Thelman anyhow? David was getting mad at him — Thelman had only been two in front of him.
“Oh, Melissa…” he murmured, clutching the squad weapon, calling to his girl back home, wondering if he’d ever see her again.
Despite the rubberized earplugs, his ears were ringing so loudly from the shelling, he couldn’t tell whether it had ceased or not. But no earth was falling. Thank God someone had gotten through to the U.S. artillery unit firing the howitzers.
Then the star shells started. Flares with parachutes lit up an area a quarter mile wide, but all David could see was the pockmarked field, as desolate as the moon’s surface. He couldn’t tell from which direction the star shells had been fired — from Polish or American artillery. He thought he heard something scrabbling behind him. It slowed to a crawl. David swung quietly away from the corpse but found he’d slithered down a slight depres
sion, slippery with the dead man’s blood. There was a tremendous explosion in the air — one of the drop transports? A fighter? He didn’t know. He couldn’t stop thinking about the Russian’s pecker being blown off like that.
Now, in the star shells’ light, he could see that beyond the pockmarked field, by the edge of a wood, inert bodies, some of them still strapped to their chutes, lay strewn about, one with only one arm and one leg. The wind was shifting again, the dead man’s chute ballooning, dragging his remains across the battlefield. Behind David, about a hundred yards away, there was a shout. He knew only that it wasn’t English. The next sound was unmistakable: bayonets being clipped on. Christ! They’d told him the bayonet was used nowadays only for opening cans and for ceremonial parades. Still holding his SAW in his left hand, he felt down for the parachute knife. “Hail Mary,” he whispered, but couldn’t think of the rest of it. Thelman knew the rest of it — he was Catholic — he knew it. Where the hell was he? David heard the slushing sound of boots about sixty, maybe seventy, yards behind him, advancing. Poles… He was sure they’d be Poles. They knew the Hail Mary, too… “Thelman, you bastard,” whispered David. Whatever happened, the man who’d called out to him earlier would have to show his colors. There might be some joy in that. Sweet Jesus… it sounded like a whole company was moving.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MPO Captain Malkov had ordered a roundup of all informers, including those listed in the GRU files.
He was surprised. The informers were not helpful. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to be, but apparently they knew nothing. They could be forced to talk, of course, but then all you got was rubbish. An informer would tell you it was the bishop or his grandmother behind the munitions sabotage in order to save his own skin. Whoever was behind the nerazorvavshiesya— “dud”—rockets and shells being sent to the Yumashev—and who knew how many other ships? — had planned it very carefully, as the duplicated serial numbers attested to. Malkov also suspected that several heretofore helpful informants had gone mute, after being bitten by the bug of Baltic nationalism that had broken out ever since Baba Gorbachev—”Auntie Gorbachev”—and his stupid “liberalization” policy.
