Warshot wi-5

by Ian Slater

  “Are you sure you—” she began.

  He screamed at her, “Until I tell you to stop! Understand?”

  Before she could answer, he lay facedown, spread-eagled on the bed, his body much thinner than she had imagined— the robe probably had padded shoulders.

  Only then in the dim peach glow of the lamp did she notice another photo of his wife Lana. He’d placed it so that he could see it as Francine began giving him the strap. He told her to do it harder and harder, and soon he was calling out his wife’s name and Francine thought that that’s all there’d be to it.

  * * *

  If Jay La Roche was thinking of his wife, she wasn’t thinking of him. Still busy looking after the wounded that had come in prior to the cease-fire — the worst cases from ferocious tank battles along the Never-Skovorodino road north of the hump formed by the Amur River — Lieutenant Lana La Roche — nee Brentwood — was far too occupied to think of anyone but her patients. And even if she’d had the time, she would have tried to avoid thinking of Jay — his kinky sex so vulgarly aggressive, to the minutest detail, that even the memory of their short and, for her, terrible marriage made her stomach churn. In her work she’d found a way of at least temporarily escaping the awful humiliations he had subjected her to in the bedroom while appearing to the outside world as a meticulously groomed and successful businessman, owner as well as chief executive officer of one of the world’s largest industrial conglomerates.

  Work also helped Lana forget his petty vindictiveness— his refusal to grant her a divorce on any grounds, unless she wanted to see her family — in particular, her father, a retired U.S. admiral, and her three brothers — smeared in his tabloids. At first she thought he was bluffing. Besides, with her youngest brother, David, who had served with distinction in the Allied Special Air Service/Delta Force commando raid against the submarine pens on Lake Baikal; her brother Ray’s equally distinguished service as captain of a fast guided-missile frigate; and her eldest brother, Robert, serving as the captain of a Sea Wolf II Hunter/Killer; she quite frankly didn’t see how La Roche could do anything against her family.

  “You want to bet, baby?” Jay had sneered at her through coke-bright eyes. “I don’t need your whole fucking family. Daddy’ll do fine.”

  “What do you mean?” she’d asked him, flabbergasted.

  La Roche had poured himself a half glass of scotch, downed it, then used a napkin to pat his sneering lips dry, staring into the distance, affecting the pose of someone in deep thought. “How about this for a headline? ‘Admiral Brentwood Denies He Is Homosexual.’ “

  “But — But—” she’d said, flustered, angry, yet feeling utterly helpless before him. “He’s not! Even if he was, so what—”

  “You naive little bitch,” retorted La Roche. “Don’t you know anything? You sure as hell don’t know how to fuck. Doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. Hollywood wouldn’t care — or would say they didn’t care. Liz Taylor would probably donate another of her pearl chokers to the Fight AIDS Committee. But believe me, babe, in the rest of the country — in the navy, for Chrissakes—’Admiral Denies He’s Gay.’ Put that in a headline,” he shrugged, “and not even Clarence Darrow could sue me. We — and by we, sweetheart, I mean every goddamn paper I own, a hundred and twenty-three to be exact — would only be reporting the admiral’s denial.” His smile was pure evil. “Freedom of the press, right?” It was the first time she’d ever hit him, or at least tried to. The blow he delivered in return sent her reeling across the plush-carpeted bedroom of their Shanghai penthouse.

  “That makes two black eyes you’ve got. You’d better quit while you still have your teeth.”

  That night, looking down on the Bund, watching Shanghai’s waterfront lights smeared by the drizzling rain that was falling over the Huangpu and farther north at the mouth of the Yangtze, Lana felt as lonely and as homesick as she thought anyone could be. All she had wanted to do then was to go down and get aboard a ship, a junk, anything that would float and take her away from Shanghai and Jay. But realizing now die threat against her family was real, she had no option but to stay. The war and her volunteering as a Wave had allowed her the only possible escape. But even her volunteering made La Roche look even better — the successful businessman and patriot, unselfishly allowing his wife to go and help the “boys and gals,” as he was fond of putting it, at the front. Now and then he even sent La Roche-sponsored concerts to entertain the troops. But Lana knew that if she ever sued for divorce, his tabloids would unleash a muckraking, albeit invented, offensive that would totally bewilder as well as destroy her parents — if not her brothers’ careers.

  But for Lana this night thousands of miles away from Jay was one of the better ones in “America’s Siberia,” the name given to the remote naval hospital at Dutch Harbor, which for many servicemen on rotation from duty in Siberia was the first piece of America they had seen for months. The weather was bad, as usual, wind, fog, and then eighty-mile-per-hour arctic winds — all within the space of an hour. But she didn’t mind — she was on her way to see the man who had helped her mend. Frank Shirer was an American air ace she’d met briefly years before in Washington and who was now the man she wanted to marry — if that were ever possible. Shirer had been shot down during Freeman’s attack on Ratmanov Island in the Bering Strait when the U.S. carrier Salt Lake City, from which Frank had led the second wave of Tomcats, launched its fighter bomber attack on the rock.

  Both he and his radar intercept officer had baled out but were captured by the Siberian SPETSNAZ — the equivalent of allied Special Forces — and, with a cruelty that Lana could still not fathom, one of the SPETS commandos, trying to get Frank to reveal the exact location of the American carrier, had driven a ballpoint into Frank’s left eye, leaving it hanging by the optic nerve. After the fall of Ratmanov, surgeons at Dutch Harbor had put back the eye, but the 20/20 vision demanded of a fighter pilot was gone. Yet as traumatic as it was for Frank Shirer — the man who had once shot down his coequal in the Siberian air force, Sergei Marchenko, after having been downed once by Marchenko himself — to contemplate the end of a brilliant career, it was made worse by the knowledge that Marchenko, whom he had thought he had downed for good over North Korea, had apparently survived. Marchenko’s Fulcrum MiG-29 with its telltale Ubiytsa yanki—”Yankee Killer”—motif, had been sighted by Americans flying patrol over the Lake Baikal cease-fire line.

  For Lana, however, the prospect of Frank being out of the war was something for which she was grateful.

  For a moment, when she walked into Ward 5 and saw he was gone, all her professional cool left her and she panicked. Sometimes, for no known cause, an infection could develop in a patient overnight and—

  She heard a whistle. “ ‘E’s over ‘ere!” It was a cockney voice that always reminded her and Frank of Eliza Doolittie’s father in My Fair Lady. The voice belonged to an irreverent but well-meaning cockney whom they’d appropriately nicknamed “Doolittle” and who was convalescing from burns suffered when General Freeman, in one of the most controversial decisions of the war, had ordered in FAEs — fuel air explosive bombs — over the seven-square-mile Ratmanov Island in the Bering Strait. Freeman had used the overpressure of the air-detonated FAEs — a chemical mist of jellied ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, and polystyrene soap — to detonate mines that the SPETS had laid in anticipation of Freeman’s airborne invasion. Unfortunately, on the small, rocky island the explosion of the FAEs had also caused some “collateral damage,” as the Pentagon had put it, amongst the joint British SAS/U.S. Delta Force commando detachment that had spearheaded the attack on Ratmanov.

  “Fought ‘e’d done a midnight flit on yer, did yer, Lieutenant?” asked Doolittle, his bandaged head nodding toward Frank’s empty bed.

  Lana smiled with relief, the cockney quickly dousing a cigarette in his tea mug before the ward sister—”Mother Attila,” he called her — spotted him. “Me and Frank nipped out to the lounge for a bit of TV. ‘Masterp
iece Theatre.’ Shakespeare.” He nodded cheekily toward Frank, who was returning from the washroom. “Fought it about time ‘e got a bit of bloody culture.” The cockney winked at Lana. “But all ‘e wants to do is ogle the nurses, ‘e does — and read dirty mags. Glad you turned up. Gettin’ right out of control ‘e was. Right, mate?” he asked Shirer, who had shoved the reading glasses prescribed for him into the pocket of his hospital-issue robe.

  “Yeah,” continued Doolittle. “ ‘Ere I was tryin’ to educate ‘im, an’ he’s pervin’ at centerfolds. Just as well ‘e got his transfer.”

  “Transfer?” said Lana, completely taken aback.

  “Washington,” said Shirer, adding disgustedly, “Some damn desk job. Have to be there in a week.”

  “I’ll see you two later,” said the cockney. “Tat-ta.”

  * * *

  Neither of them speaking, Frank and Lana walked out together to the TV lounge. They could hear the “Masterpiece Theatre” theme trumpeting, and saw the blue flickering of the screen. “Lousy reception,” Frank said. “Atmospherics up here are really weird. Met guys say that if it wasn’t for all the cold fronts socking us in, we’d see the aurora borealis. Least that’d be something.”

  They walked hand in hand through the lounge and got a disapproving look for it from one of the head nurses coming from the coffee room where they were headed.

  “I don’t want you to,” Lana began, “but if you really had your heart set on it, why couldn’t you go back to the carrier in some, you know, administrative—”

  “God damn it—” he began, then checked himself. “Sorry. But lookit — if I can’t fly, I don’t want to be on the carrier. Seeing other guys suiting up — couldn’t stand it.”

  “I know. Sorry — it was stupid of me—”

  “No, no. You’re right. I’ll just — hell, I’ll just have to settle into whatever they give me.” He paused, both hands in his robe. “Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “Nothing.” There was an awkward moment’s silence, and without him saying a word, she knew what it was. Doolittle — the cockney — had been pumping him up again with stories about Adolf Galland, Germany’s top air ace, commander of the Luftwaffe in World War Two, having flown and fought with only one eye, the other one glass. Every fighter pilot who had ever had an eye injury had heard about Galland. It was even said that Siberian ace Marchenko, who had reputedly suffered from a slight astigmatism, had trotted out the Galland story to get into flying school, before he’d submitted to a simple laser recontour of the cornea to correct the problem.

  “That was in World War Two,” said Lana sharply. “They never flew jets.”

  “Yes they did,” replied Frank hastily. “Galland flew the Messerschmidt 263. If they’d produced enough of—”

  “I don’t want to hear about Galland,” Lana said impatiently. “All I hear about is Galland and his damned glass eye.”

  “How about Bader?” Frank shot back. “British ace. Didn’t have any legs. Can you imagine? Flew without legs. Everyone said it was impossible — thought it was going to be a big handicap. Guess what? It helped him out in a dive. Blood flow — didn’t have so far to go. Could come out of a blackout quicker than anyone else. How about that?”

  “That’s great. I’m very happy for him. But I wish Doolittle would clam up for a while. He means well, I know, Frank, but look, hon, the sooner you face it — I mean really face it — me better. No one’s going to let you take up multimillion-dollar aircraft with one eye. Not these days. Don’t you think I’ve asked around?”

  It took Shirer by surprise.

  “Well, I have. If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t see you near another plane, but I know how much it means — well anyway, the answer’s the same. No deal. Besides, it—” She stopped herself.

  “Go on.”

  “No, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Go on.”

  They were no longer holding hands. “All right, I’ll say it. Frank, you’ve got to think of other people as well as yourself. I know how much flying means to you. It’s been your whole life — all you’ve ever cared about. But it’s not just you. It’s—”

  “You’re saying I’d be a danger to others?”

  She looked straight at him. “Yes.”

  “Standard answer,” he said dismissively, plugging in the kettle again for coffee, although it had just been on a raging boil.

  “Because it’s the standard truth,” she said. “Anyway, you’d never pass the eye examination without your glasses.”

  “Thanks a million.”

  “Oh, don’t be so childish. All I’m trying to do is help you. Frank—”

  “All right, let’s not talk about it anymore,” he said. “You want sugar?”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “You, too,” he said, kissing her quickly on the cheek.

  It bothered her — oh, not that they’d had another row about his inability to accept the end of his flying career. They’d had any number of “discussions” on that subject. It was him asking her if she wanted any sugar. He knew she never took it — her determination to keep on her diet had been reinforced by the sweet things he told her about her body during their most intimate moments — his “Venus de Milo,” he had called her. Frank Shirer knew darn well that she never took sugar. He slipped his arm about her, pulling her closely to him, kissing her again on the cheek. Their fights had never ended like that — at least not so quickly. There’d always been a mini cold war before the thaw. He was up to something.

  “Whatcha, mate?” asked Doolittle. It was the cockney’s way of inquiring how you were doing.

  “Fine,” said Frank as they passed him on the way back to the ward. “Just fine.”

  Lana felt increasingly anxious. Something wasn’t right. Suddenly she felt herself plunging into outright depression, brought on in part by the shock of realizing they’d be separated within the week. She’d never seen a transfer come through that fast. A week. The thought of being without him filled her with an ache of such longing she felt as empty as she had that night looking down on the Bund in Shanghai without any hope of escaping the pain. Her only consolation was that at least the war was over — the cease-fire intact.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Marshal Yesov had tired of the endless Mongolian vista of snow-covered pasturelands, unbroken except for the odd camel he could see from the train, and clumps of yurts—the circular, willow-framework-covered homes of the Mongols. An occasional curl of cow-dung smoke spiraled lazily up from the yurts’ toonos, or chimneys, whose flaps opened a little more as the sun rose higher over the cloudless Gobi, where night temperatures were still often minus twenty-five and below.

  Yesov also had had enough of the bowls of yellowish, glutinous goats’ ears swimming in fat, delivered to him proudly by the Mongolians. As the train approached the Chinese border, Yesov noticed that patches of snow had already melted, revealing the yellow, caked earth which, blown up by the hot winds of summer, would form the great dust storms of the Gobi, which would sweep south over the Great Wall and on to Beijing, less than four hundred miles to the south. He would be glad to get his business done, and, though he wouldn’t admit it to the Chinese who met him at Erhlien, glad to be on Chinese soil, away from the inedible muck the Mongolians served up, and glad, too, to get away from smiling in fraternal friendship with the Mongolian comrades while having to drink their vile traditional cup of sour camel milk mixed with salt tea.

  * * *

  “Na zdorovye”—To your health! — said Marshal Yesov, gratefully raising his cup of Chinese tea. Unlike the Troe durokov—”Three Stooges,” the drunks who had bungled the attempted putsch against Gorbachev back in ‘91— Yesov preferred tea to alcohol, which he rarely consumed, though he had a great reputation for doing so. What he never told anyone was that whoever was attending bar at official functions in Novosibirsk was always warned by one of his aides, on pain of losing their job, that after the first vodka toast, his glass was to
be filled with water. This enabled a sober Yesov to hear many things he would not have otherwise, and to be one step ahead of his competitors.

  In response to his “Na zdorovye,” Yesov expected to hear, “Gan bei!”—Bottoms up! — the Chinese equivalent of the toast he’d just made to the fraternal friendship between Siberia and China. Instead General Cheng, still standing, not yet having removed either cap or coat, responded with a long-winded toast to the health and fraternal friendship of Marxist-Leninist principles.

  Yesov grunted and drank the tea. The Chinese were paranoid about what had happened in the Soviet Union, particularly with the breakaway Siberian union, and were determined to prevent any such dissolution in China. Accordingly, Marshal Yesov couched his introductory remarks in terms of “consolidation,” as in the case of the Siberian union having annexed—”with Ulan Bator’s invitation”—Outer Mongolia. This could hardly be seen, Yesov pointed out with the first smile that had crossed his face in two weeks, as aggression on the part of the Siberian union. Far from a splitting up of constituent parts, it was, as he said, a consolidation of two historical cousins into “one.”

  Cheng sat expressionless. Beijing had already protested the annexation of Outer Mongolia. He waited. There was a long, pained silence, Yesov finally offering cigars, “Cuban,” giving Cheng the chance to comment either way on his view of the annexation.

  Cheng declined the cigar.

  Seeing his opposite number clearly had no intention of exchanging pleasantries, Yesov now came directly to the point. “The Americans are up to no good. This cease-fire is in reality a time of frantic resupply for their imperialist forces.” Yesov leaned forward across the bare wooden table. “It is the American-Japanese alliance. We both know Japan covets your Manchuria. The Japanese have always done so. And now with the oil wells set aflame in the Middle East by the Muslim fundamentalists, Japan is frantic, comrade. Frantic! She imports ninety percent of her oil from the Middle East. Without that oil she is nothing. But your vast coal reserves in Manchuria—”