Rage of Battle wi-2

by Ian Slater

  The twin exhausts of Shirer’s F-14 turbofans wailed in zone three, having changed from red through crimson to bright orange, harsh on the deck crew’s eyes, and now moved to zone four, purplish white, and then, with the engines in the high banshee of zone five, the exhaust turned to screaming white circles edged in icy blue.

  The catapult officer saw both men had “hands off” instruments so as not to interfere with catapult launch. Shirer saw the yellow-clad catapult officer drop to the left knee, right hand extended seaward. The shooter in his “dugout” pushed the button. Shirer sucked in his breath for the “kick,” the F-14 shooting forward from zero to 180 miles per hour in three seconds. Shirer, feeling his whole body slam back into the seat, ejaculated under the G force as they were hurled aloft, then took back the controls, the white slab of the carrier tilting crazily downhill in the rear vision, flecks indicating the nine ships in the carrier’s screen coming up on the RIO’s radar.

  On the carrier, where he was one of the team of professionals handling up to forty jet aircraft in various stages of takeoff, loading, refueling, and arming on a slab of steel shorter than most commercial airport concourses, a ground crew plane captain, brown jacket sodden with spray and wind-driven rain, jumped down from checking a Tomcat’s Martin-Baker rear eject seat. He saw the left bow cat’s blast deflector up, and bent down, head low, hand on his helmet to be on the safe side. A weapons trolley, low to the deck and unloaded, lurched, smacked him on the thigh, pushing him just left of the deflector. A quick-thinking ordnance man hauled him down on the deck, but a wind gust caught him in the slip of the jet’s blast and he was gone.

  “Man overboard!” came through to the bridge. The “air boss” in the tower kept his eyes on the plane-crowded deck, the two men on the situation board moving the small magnetic plane models according to their new disposition — there were still twelve Tomcats to launch, the second wave of Shirer’s arrowhead formation. The huge, ninety-thousand-ton ship would not turn, nor would it stop. It was up to the “rescue” department to pick up the man, either with its launches or silver Sea King chopper hovering a safe distance off from the carrier, its red and green lights blinking, hardly visible, however, in the black void beyond the ship’s undulating apron of light.

  Ironically, the light from the carrier so flooded the sea immediately about her hull that the plane captain’s saltwater-activated safety light, normally quite visible in darkness, was not seen. The captain of Salt Lake City had never met him— there were six thousand men aboard.

  They called up his file from SHIPCO — ship’s personnel computer — and gave the details to the executive officer, it being his job to write the boy’s parents, farm people in Springfield, Missouri.

  * * *

  Already sixty miles from the carrier, Shirer, on strict radio silence, checked his head-up display and vectored in the present tail wind, which would be against them coming back — if they came back. Even with drop tanks carrying enough fuel for a maximum two-thousand-mile round trip, the computer was telling Shirer and his RIO that they would have only four minutes over Shemya Island. Still, last intelligence reports to the carrier relayed by the pick-up station at Adak Naval Station east of Shemya reported that everything was quiet on Shemya and that in what was a crucial game for the pennant, the New York Yankees had doubled the Boston Red Sox four to two.

  * * *

  When the phone burred, Jay told the girl to get out of bed and go and answer it. “I left it in the bathroom,” he said.

  “You should turn it off,” said the girl. She was seventeen — consenting age. Jay La Roche was very careful about that.

  “Don’t you fucking tell me what to do, you little tight-ass,” said La Roche, using his foot to push her out of the bed. He watched her walk away with an indifference bred of boredom.

  “Just a moment,” he heard her say. She brought in the phone. Jay snatched it, cupping the mouthpiece. “You can go. There’s a hundred by the lamp.”

  “We didn’t even start,” she said.

  “No, well, I want a real woman. You don’t know your ass from your tit. And put on the lock when you go out.”

  He turned back to the phone. “La Roche here,” he said, pulling a Kleenex and wiping his nose.

  “It’s me,” said the congressman, careful not to give his name.

  “That was quick. So what’s the story?”

  “Listen — I did the best I could—”

  Jay scrunched the Kleenex into a tight ball. “What are you telling me, Congressman?”

  “Jesus, don’t use my—”

  “What are you saying, damn it?” pressed La Roche, throwing off the covers and getting out of bed.

  “Look, there’s some kind of flap going on up there.”

  “Up where?”

  “The islands. COMPAC said he’d put the request through, but there’s nothing he can do right now. She and a bunch of other nurses have been sent to some naval base hospital. Adak, I think it was.”

  “You jerkin’ me off?”

  “No, hey, wait a minute. I did my best.”

  “You did fuck all. I want results. You’re the big politico. You’d better get me results, Congressman, or you’re going to lose your friggin’ reelection committee. I meant what I said. Now, you get to it. I want her, you hear me? I want her here. In Honolulu. In a fucking week. Otherwise — you’re in the morning edition. Photos and all.” La Roche slammed the phone down and looked at himself in the mirror for a few moments, admiring his lean physique and how well hung he was. He made his way to the bed, opened a drawer in the night table, and took out her photo. Like a brunette Marilyn Monroe, someone had said. She wasn’t, but her lips — yes, Jay would give her the lips and the figure, but her eyes were so different, shy yet not timid. How much had she changed? Touching the photo, he got into bed and, in a rage, started to weep.

  Suddenly he sat bolt upright. It was time to kick ass. He wanted her now — goddamn it, she could be killed up there. Snatching the phone, he got up and walked over to the globe on the plush burl coffee table, and in the soft peach light, looked to see if he could find Adak. Christ, it was just a spot in the ocean. To hell and gone. All he’d heard about was Shemya and the big early-warning radar there. What if the Russians hit this Adak as well as the base on Shemya? Had anyone thought of that?

  * * *

  Admiral Brodsky’s motorcade had passed by the Kadriorg Park as Malle was halted by the MPO guardsmen who had seen her earlier with the corporal. Distraught, so weak she’d collapsed and had to be carried out of the park, where a crowd was garnering, she was taken to MPO headquarters across the street in front of the old city hall, and charged with murder.

  Alarm spread throughout the MPO and other occupation troops. If a fifty-five-year-old woman, one of the normally passive Estonians, the “handholders,” as they’d been dubbed since 1989, when they’d helped form a human chain with the other Balts to protest Russian hegemony, could strike so wantonly and brutally against the occupying troops, the situation was getting out of hand.

  The matter was brought to Admiral Brodsky’s attention at once, though the woman’s name was not mentioned. Was she a suspected saboteur? he asked Malkov.

  “No, Admiral, but that doesn’t mean—”

  “Don’t tell me what it doesn’t mean. You’ve let these Estonian renegades run rampant. STAVKA’s still receiving reports of dud ammunition all over the place. When I initially recommended you, I thought you were tough enough to put an end to it. I was persuaded that the MPO could handle it better than the GRU. Obviously I was misinformed.”

  “With all due respect, Admiral,” replied Malkov, “we’ve shot over six hundred hostages already in an attempt—”

  “In an attempt, yes. But it obviously isn’t working, is it?”

  “I believe it is, Comrade Admiral. Informants are telling us for the first time that there is enormous internal pressure on the saboteurs to give themselves up for the sake of any further hostages. I believe it is
only a matter of days before-”

  “Captain Malkov,” Brodsky cut in, “I am officially taking over this operation.” He looked at his watch. “Sixteen forty hours. From now on it will revert to GRU jurisdiction under my command. You will be reassigned to Riga headquarters.”

  Malkov waited for more details, but Brodsky had nothing further to add.

  When Malkov stormed out to his half-track in front of city hall, his mouth was set grimly, eyes brimming in such temper that his driver could tell it was going to be a bad day, or rather, what was left of it. He hesitated to say anything at all to the captain, but a call had just come through on the radio from the docks.

  “What’s it about?” snapped Malkov.

  “I don’t know, sir. The lieutenant asked me to—”

  “All right, all right,” growled Malkov, “give me the phone.”

  “Lieutenant — Malkov here. What is it?”

  “Sir, it seems that your hostages are cracking the silence. We received an anonymous message this morning from number three shipyard. Six men are willing to talk, but only on condition that we will recognize them as members of the Estonian Liberation Front. That is, they want us to treat them as prisoners of war. And no more hostages are to be shot.”

  Malkov sat back in his seat, the driver, having overheard the conversation, equally relieved.

  “Tell them,” said Malkov, “we will agree to that on one condition. We want all saboteurs to come forward by ten hundred hours tomorrow. Otherwise we will continue to take hostages and they will have lost their chance. From then on, they would be treated as spies and shot on the spot.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Beaming, Malkov handed his driver the phone. “To barracks, Igor. It’s time for a drink.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The following morning at number three shipyard, fourteen men and five women gave themselves up, but Malkov did not get the credit for it, as the official documentation showed he had been relieved of his assignment at 1640 the day before the surrender was made, under Brodsky’s reign of authority. Furthermore, Malkov’s agreement that they would be treated as POWs had no legal standing under military law — not that he had intended to keep his word anyway.

  * * *

  Brodsky fed the prisoners well and told them he expected a full list of all saboteurs in three days, or five hundred hostages he had ordered rounded up would be shot along with the nineteen.

  The dam broke and over fifty names were presented to Brodsky. One day later, Brodsky signed an order that the saboteurs be sent to the shale oil fields around Kohtla-Järve, ninety miles east of Tallinn.

  * * *

  “I made at least twenty duds on the day I gave up,” declared an old man defiantly as they were taken on their way. “I scratched ‘MJ’ on them, too.”

  The others obviously didn’t know what he was talking about. “That women who shot that corporal bastard. Her name was Malle Jaakson — MJ, see?”

  “Huh,” grunted one of the others, his tone surly. “A lot of good it’ll do her.”

  “Or us,” added another. But soon the tensions among them and the animosities over whether or not they should have surrendered after all were lost beneath the overwhelming fact that they’d had no choice but to give in if they didn’t want to see the slaughter go on. The emotional strain had been tremendous, and to revive their spirits, some of the oldest aboard the trucks began singing the Estonian national anthem. The convoy stopped for a while in the forest outside the city of Rakvere, and the prisoners were machine-gunned.

  * * *

  As Brodsky asked to sign the death warrant for the murderer of the MPO corporal and unscrewed the cap of his gold Parker pen, he noticed the first name of the woman was Malle. When he turned the page in the file and saw her photo, his hand froze. “Has this woman been interrogated?” he asked his aide.

  “Oh, she confessed,” the aide assured him. “There’s no doubt about it, Admiral. Claims it was rape, of course. Trouble is, she was apparently having it off with the corporal for sometime.”

  “Where is she?” Brodsky asked curtly.

  The aide was confused — where else would she be but here? “Here, sir. In cells.”

  “Bring her to me.”

  “It wasn’t a forced confession, sir. The woman fully admitted to having—”

  “Bring her to me!” Brodsky repeated.

  The aide had never seen him so agitated. The admiral rose and seemed to grow angrier by the second. “Don’t you understand a simple order?” he shouted.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Immediately!”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  The aide was utterly perplexed. It was a shut-and-closed case. No matter what the circumstances, it was murder. The penalty — death.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  “Sneg!”— “Snow!” IT was the one word in Russian that gave pause to Soviet commanders all the way from the northern reaches of the Kara south to Bavaria.

  “Sneg nemozhet byt’ neytral’nym”—”Snow is not neutral”—was one of the maxims of the Frunze Military Academy. Only fools thought it an equal impediment to friend and foe alike. Snow was regarded by the Russian armies with the same passionate intensity as that with which a priest might look to the Holy See. Time and again fate had used it to preserve their destiny, to deliver them from the darkest hours of their history. It had defeated Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler at Stalingrad in 1943. If you were a Russian, you did not complain about the snow, you melded in with it, became part of it, used it, your Russian “greatcoat” enfolding you, and you kept moving, for you understood snow better than anyone on earth, save the Eskimos. You could tell better than anyone else the temperature by the white-blue aura of the northern light, how falling powder snow was the best for attack, the worst for defense, whiting out one’s vision, the great soft billows hiding you from the enemy and muffling the sound of your tanks.

  Preceded by a barrage of over a thousand guns for two hours, the Soviet divisions under Marshal Leonid Kirov led the attack on a hundred-mile front against the north-south sausage-shaped pocket. Surging ahead with their four-to-one advantage, the tanks converged in thousands, refugees and tens of thousands of farm animals scattering pathetically before them.

  With only twenty miles to go, Marshal Kirov estimated that if all went well, his forces would reach the outer defenses of the DB perimeter in the next two hours. The British and Americans, Marshal Kirov assured the Russian premier, would be dug in, in defilade positions, and with thermal imagers in addition to their laser range finders, would take a heavy toll of Soviet tanks. But dug in, the NATO armor would be loath to risk leaving their defilade positions and revetment areas in deference to the sound military axiom that defense was easier than attack — especially in such foul weather. On the other hand, the only pause his armor had to make, reported Kirov, in the sudden change in the Arctic front from heavy rain to snow, was for some of his most forward tanks to make the switch from summer thirty-weight oil to winter ten-weight.

  This was achieved with remarkable efficiency by the crack Soviet armored divisions coming down on the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket from the north and those coming from the far south, where the Tyrol was already blanketed by early snowfall.

  The very mention of snow, even to those Russian troops in the green flats of the Palatinate, was welcome because, except for the odd Canadian contingent in the pocket, it was more their element than the Americans’ and British. And it was this point that General Marchenko pressed home to his political officers in charge of morale. Oh, certainly the NATO forces had run maneuvers in the Arctic, but that was a stop-and-start affair compared to the Russian soldiers, who’d been raised to it and who, like those from Khabarovsk, knew what it was to go fishing in the ice-covered lakes, not for sport but for survival. It was this edge, Kiril Marchenko confidently assured the STAVKA, that would finally tell in the Soviets’ favor.

  Marchenko also brought them good news about the last-minute Allied airlift ou
t of Heidelberg. Here, Hungarian divisions had outflanked NATO’s Southern Command’s Wermacht divisions with such unexpected speed, it was reported that paper shredders had overheated and caught fire in the haste that verged on panic during the Allied withdrawal. That the Hungarians had achieved such a success was no surprise to Marchenko and other Soviets old enough to remember the Hungarians’ tenaciousness in battle, but it was around Heidelberg that one of the most pervasive Allied illusions was shattered. Namely, it was the belief that because Hungarians hated Russians, they would either turn against Marshal Kirov’s forces or surrender in droves to the Allies. And yet any cold, objective analysis of the prewar situation would have shown what would happen with Russia literally behind them, virtually holding Hungary as hostage. In an otherwise complex world, the answer was as simple as it was brutal: If the Warsaw Pact did not win, the Russians would raze eastern Europe in their retreat. The Russians’ strategiya vyzhzhennoy zemli— “scorched earth policy”—would turn the Hungarian plain into a slaughterhouse such as the world had never seen and which, in its utter desolation as a base from which to wage war, would as likely stop the Allies just as it had Hitler. For the Hungarians, there was no choice — better to be on the winning side. In any case, the West could not be relied upon. The martyrs had called upon Britain and America and all the other democracies to help them when they’d rebelled against the Soviets in ‘56 and then were brutally crushed by Russian tanks as the West looked on in paralyzed horror.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Up against the eccentric but brilliant American General Freeman, Marshal Kirov and his sector commanders were determined to avoid North Korea’s fate, when General Kim’s rapid advance down the peninsula outstripped his supply line, which in turn had made Freeman’s attack on Pyongyang so effective. Indeed, Kirov was convinced that it was precisely this kind of SPETS-like interdiction that had been the intent of the American airborne drops behind his lines. The shock exhibited by some of the captured American paratroopers, the marshal’s intelligence units had told him, seemed to indicate otherwise — that the American airborne had simply been blown off course.