World in Flames wi-3

by Ian Slater

  “Comrade Marchenko!”

  Marchenko turned to see one of the Kremlin’s guards, ruddy-faced, his breath coming out like a hot tap in the icy air, the red piping on his bluish-gray greatcoat ruby-colored like thin lines of blood, the pea-sized snow bouncing off his fur-lined cap.

  “Yes?” answered Marchenko irritably. “What is it?”

  “The STAVKA meeting, Comrade. It is about to reconvene.”

  Marchenko looked nonplussed at the guard. “But it is—” he glanced at his watch “—not yet one a.m. The adjournment was for another—” Marchenko saw that the second hand on his watch had stopped. His father, who had died in one of the gulags that were supposed to have disappeared under Gorbachev, had once told him that when a man’s watch stops, it is a warning his life is in imminent danger. Of course, Marchenko knew it was a ridiculous peasant superstition of his father’s. Nevertheless, in his present mood, it jolted him, and he resolved that, unpalatable as it was, he would have to ask — beg, if necessary, Chernko to help him deal a death blow to the NATO advance which had become embodied by one man: the American, Freeman. After all, it had been Chernko who had successfully purged the Politburo of Siberian separatists who hated Moscow as much as they hated America and who had been plotting to overthrow Suzlov. It was also Chernko who had come up with the idea of sending SPETS commandos, dressed in captured American uniforms, to infiltrate the NATO lines and sow confusion among the Allied troops in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. What Marchenko needed now was someone with the training to again pose as an American or some other NATO officer but who could penetrate right through to Freeman’s headquarters and kill the American general. Perhaps, thought Marchenko, it could be done in the same way as some of Chernko’s men already “in place” overseas had been ordered, as well as carrying out sabotage, to track down and “eliminate” the commanders of America’s weapons of last resort, the Sea Wolf nuclear subs. If Chernko would support such an audacious plan, then Marchenko would support Chernko in his bid for the presidency, if and when President Suzlov was replaced or died — whichever came first. “If you mean to get ahead in this world,” Marchenko could still hear his father say, “you must swallow your pride now and then.” Kiril Marchenko told himself it was time he did so, to ask Chernko’s help, not only for himself but for Mother Russia— for his family.

  As he headed back for the STAVKA meeting in the Council of Ministers, Marchenko saw that the guard, about his son Sergei’s age, could very well be his guard in some godforsaken prison in the Transbaikal if he, Kiril Marchenko, didn’t quickly restore his own reputation in the Politburo and STAVKA.

  “You ever been to the Far Eastern Theater?” he asked the guard. “To Khabarovsk?”

  “No, Comrade General.”

  “You’re lucky then,” replied Marchenko morosely, a sudden flurry of snow swirling about him. “It’s much colder than here. My son tells me that in Khabarovsk, the winds come all the way down from the Kara Sea — the prisoners have to dig through the ice of the Amur River so they can fish. The trouble is, the ice is jagged, you see — not at all smooth and flat as some people imagine. Chaotic — going this way and that at impossible angles.”

  The guard was feeling nervous — it was highly unusual for a general to be conversing in such a way with a mere private, especially the celebrated general who was minister of war and who had engineered the penetration of NATO’s Fulda Gap, where the masses of Russian armor had burst through before heading north to the German Plain and south to the Danube Valley, sending the NATO defenses reeling.

  “I–I don’t know anything about the Far Eastern Theater, Comrade General. I didn’t know we had taken prisoners east of—”

  “No, no, boy,” said Marchenko irritably. “Our own people — in the gulags.”

  The guard was doubly perplexed — as far as he knew, gulags had been banned ever since the time of the revisionist Gorbachev.

  * * *

  Marchenko had only a few minutes before the STAVKA meeting would be called to order, and presented his deal to Chernko quickly, succinctly.

  Chernko rejected it out of hand. “This is not possible,” Chernko said icily. “The American, Freeman, moves too fast. We never know where he is.” Chernko signaled an aide.

  “I need help, Comrade,” repeated Marchenko. “If you assist — I will support you wholeheartedly.”

  “For what?” asked Chernko, feigning ignorance.

  “For whatever you wish, Comrade.”

  Chernko replied that perhaps something could be worked out. He did have a plan to stop the Americans, but it was nothing like Marchenko’s “amateur” proposal of assassination behind enemy lines. Nevertheless, he conceded he would welcome Marchenko’s support when he presented his plan to the Politburo at tomorrow’s meeting.

  “Can you tell me what it is now?” asked Marchenko.

  “Tomorrow,” answered Chernko. “Meanwhile I will welcome your support in this meeting.” Chernko was looking directly at him.

  “Support of what?” asked Marchenko.

  “Of anything I say.”

  Marchenko felt his blood rising at Chernko’s contemptuous tone but held himself in check. President Suzlov was calling the meeting to order. As the members took their positions either side of the long, baize-covered table, with the portrait of Marx gazing down behind them, Chernko’s aide slid in beside his boss, pencil and paper in hand. “Yes, Comrade?”

  “Draw up the plan at once,” Chernko informed him. “Two teams — twenty in each — neither must have any knowledge of the other. Purpose — penetrate NATO front lines. Target — the American general, Freeman.”

  “Code name?” asked the aide.

  “Trojan,” said Chernko. “And Colonel!”

  “Sir?”

  “Book an appointment for General Marchenko — tomorrow morning. Early.”

  “Yes, Comrade Director.”

  The room was soon full of blue-gray smoke, and Chernko could see Marchenko sitting glumly, pinching the bridge of his nose.

  * * *

  Lingering for a moment before he got out of bed, Robert Brentwood watched Rosemary, her face childlike, her breasts pressing against the turquoise negligee in her contented sleep, and he had the urge to make love again. But dawn was creeping over the western sea, and though this time of day had long ceased to have any meaning for him aboard the Roosevelt on patrol in the perennial darkness four hundred meters beneath the sea, once ashore, he found that he quickly reverted to the dawn-to-dusk habits of Annapolis: up early, ready to go.

  One foot on the windowsill, looking out at the wind-lashed ocean, he began stretching his legs, preparatory to his fifteen-minute workout. He hated it, but — a believer, albeit reluctantly, in the “no gain without pain” school — he forced himself through it twice every twenty-four hours whether he was at sea or not. Out on the storm-cut swells, he could see the bobbing of a trawler, probably from Ballantrae several miles to the north, its mast momentarily spearing the cold blue sky, then disappearing in deep troughs. The constant vigilance bred at sea never left him, and he reminded himself that just over forty miles to the west, beyond the tempestuous North channel, lay Northern Ireland in the grip of continuing internecine strife between IRA terrorists and Orangemen.

  The IRA had become increasingly active against the British military, who had been stretched thin in Northern Ireland because of the heavy losses suffered over the Channel by the British Army of the Rhine in the battle for the Dortmund/ Bielefeld pocket. And Robert recalled the talk between his executive officer, Peter Zeldman, and the other officers aboard the Roosevelt about reports from CINCLANT — Commander in Chief Atlantic — to head of security for Holy Loch to be alert for IRA provisionals. Britain’s military intelligence, MI5, warned that IRA “provos” might try coming across in trawlers. If they landed farther north near the Firth of Lorn, they could fairly quickly head inland through the wilderness of the sparsely populated Argyll to Loch Lomond, men down the fifteen miles to Holy Loch.
Despite the base’s reinforced concrete pens, a well-aimed shoulder-borne antitank missile could take out the Roosevelt or any other sub.

  Not surprisingly, Robert hadn’t mentioned any of this to Rosemary, knowing how the very mention of a submarine got her worrying. Indeed, he’d gone so far as to promise her that they wouldn’t go near the base during the honeymoon but rather head inland a little, go north along Loch Lomond’s western shore, then north again along the Firth of Lorn on their way to the ancient and picturesque fishing village of Mallaig near the fabled Isle of Skye.

  Rosemary murmured in her sleep and rolled over to his side of the old-fashioned four-poster bed, her right hand moving to where he had lain, her lips in a smile that at once touched Robert with its simplicity and aroused him in its sensuousness. Below, he could hear someone stirring — the proprietor’s wife in the kitchen, he guessed — and he caught a whiff of kippers cooking, the one thing Rosemary couldn’t bring herself to eat on the honeymoon. Scottish blood ran in her veins, but the thought of smoked fish for breakfast appalled her — and no, she’d told him, it didn’t have anything to do with morning sickness, which so far she’d escaped.

  Halfway through a head-to-knee stretch, while still watching her, Robert wondered whether there’d be enough time before breakfast for what his horny crewmen ashore habitually referred to as a “dawn breaker.” He could hear the floorboards creaking outside in the upstairs hallway as early risers made their way to the bathroom and down to the dining room. He began the last stretch, right heel on the windowsill, his hands fully extended in unison to touch his toes. For a moment he glimpsed the trawler again on the pewter sea. The wind had died, but it seemed only temporary, a scud of cloud invading from the north.

  “Robert—”

  When he turned, he saw she had pulled the bedding tightly about her with one hand, the other patting the sheet on his side. “Coming back to bed?”

  “Funny you mentioned that,” Brentwood said in midstretch. “I was just thinking about it. Hadn’t decided—”

  “Yes you have,” she said, a cheeky glint in her eyes, her gaze wandering below his navel, “unless it’s an optical illusion?”

  “Rosemary!” He was genuinely and pleasantly shocked at her impishness after her fretting the night before. It was as if the worries of the night about his old girlfriends, et cetera, et cetera, had vanished with the howling of the wind. “We might be late for breakfast,” he cautioned, sliding eagerly in beside her.

  “No we won’t,” she assured him happily.

  “I’ll take the Fifth on that,” he told her.

  “What do you mean?”

  As she spoke, he detected the scent of fresh mint about her doing battle with the smell of kippers wafting up from below. “I mean,” he explained, “that I refuse to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate me.”

  The phrase sounded familiar to her — from the American films she’d seen. She popped a mint candy in his mouth. “I thought only gangsters talked like that—”

  “Well, you don’t know much about me. Maybe I run a still aboard Roosevelt.” The sub’s name was out before he could stop himself, but it didn’t matter — it was lovers’ talk, easy, without strain, and he was glad to see he could mention the sub without her getting upset again about him, the war, about what might happen. The Rosemary of the morning had put her worried self to flight — as if sometime during the sweet darkness after he’d settled her down following the latecomers’ arrival, she had decided once and for all to live in the present, that the world and all its troubles were too big for them to control, that their time together was too precious to permit armies of “what ifs” to sabotage what happiness they might find before he went back to war. He pulled her toward him. “No,” she said teasingly, giggling.

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “My God,” he said, “if you don’t let me, I’ll explode.”

  “The answer’s still no. I won’t let you.”

  His left arm curved beneath her and he raised her, kissing her nipples through the negligee. “I love you,” he said breathlessly.

  “Are you always… like this?” she asked, her hand sliding beneath the warm sheets, squeezing him.

  “When I’m with you—” he said, kissing her again, “all the time.”

  “Robert—” her tone was soft, urgent “—don’t leave me.”

  “I won’t, sweetheart. I won’t.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Though fashionably smart in a tweed jacket, tie, and flannels that Rosemary had chosen for him, Robert still wasn’t used to being out of uniform and felt more self-conscious than his bride as they entered the B and B’s dining room. They were relieved to receive a jolly greeting, without any honeymoon jokes, from Mrs. McRae, a small, dumpy, and irrepressible Scot who had been running the B and B sixty-five miles southwest of Glasgow for the past forty years, and her husband, Alfred, a partially incapacitated veteran of the Falklands War. The battle that left McRae with a gammy leg and intense pain, especially now in the depth of the Scottish winter, had been the single most important event of his life. It had also left him with a growing conviction that next to Napoleon, Montgomery of Alamein, and Robert the Bruce, he was one of the great unsung strategists of warfare. His greeting to the honeymooners and the other five guests, two couples and a single commercial traveler, consisted of a throat clearing and a stiff nod as he read the latest war news in the Edinburgh Herald.

  “What’ll it be, lass?” asked the ebullient Mrs. McRae. “Porridge to start?”

  “No, thank you,” Rosemary declined, opting instead for corn flakes — a choice that she had the distinct impression Mr. McRae didn’t approve of. Robert asked for kippers, his request receiving an appreciative nod from Mrs. McRae and one of the other two couples.

  Meanwhile Alfred McRae, head buried in the paper, let out his breath in short, audible bursts of disgust, his head shaking at something he’d just read. One of the other two couples, in their late twenties, were finishing their ersatz chicory coffee, excusing themselves from the table. Robert handed a dozen or so one-cup instant coffee packets he had brought with him from Roosevelt to Mrs. McRae.

  “Och, mon, will ye look at this, Alfred? Real coffee from America.”

  McRae grunted behind the paper while the other of the two couples, a pair in their early forties, Robert guessed, their accents distinctly upper middle class, beamed, as did the lone commercial traveler. “I say,” began the husband, sitting forward, the pale, cloud-sieved sunlight shining on his tan Dutch corduroy jacket. “Haven’t seen anything like that for months.”

  “And ye’re no likely to again,” put in Mr. McRae suddenly. “And tha’s a fact. The convoys are doomed.”

  “Oh?” said the Englishman in the corduroy jacket, who by now had introduced himself and his wife as James and Joan Price of London, a rather pinched yet tight good-humored look about him, his wife clearly deferring to him, though at the moment she was picking a pill of fluff from his jacket. Wearing a tartan shirt with nonmatching maroon necktie, he was the type of Englishman, Robert thought, who’d wear a necktie to the beach. His wife, a thin woman with mousy brown hair, wearing a beige tweed skirt, white blouse, socks, and what Rosemary’s father would have called “sensible” walking shoes, smiled pleasantly at Rosemary as she flicked the fluff away from her husband’s sleeve. Her husband looked up at the proprietor of the B and B. “Why do you say that, Mr. McRae?”

  “What’s tha’?”

  The commercial traveler, a tired, overweight, stocky man in his late fifties, was torn between listening closely to what appeared to be a developing argument and watching to see whether Mrs. McRae was going to offer him one of the packets of American coffee. “You say the convoys are doomed?” said Price.

  “Aye — we’re all doomed.”

  “Och — noo,” interjected Mrs. McRae, sliding the steaming kippers in front of Robert Brentwood. “It’s not as bad as that, surely!”

  “Then ye’ve n
o read the paper.”

  “I’ve noo had time,” she said, eyebrows raised good-naturedly.

  “They’ve attacked Sullom Voe,” McRae announced gloomily, yet somehow sounding strangely triumphant. “Just as I said they would.”

  Robert Brentwood, though he had difficulty understanding the Scotsman’s brogue, knew that Sullom Voe, one of the Shetland Islands, three hundred miles off Scotland’s northeast corner, was the site of a big oil refinery servicing the major part of the North Sea oil fields. He was interested but said nothing, finding McRae’s melodramatic air irritating.

  “Aye,” went on McRae, “biggest terminal in Europe ‘tis, Sullom Voe. Tankers line up there like buses.” With that he suddenly swung the front page of the Herald—”RUSSIANS HIT SULLOM VOE!”—for all to see, the color photograph having captured great curling plumes of dense black smoke rising over a glint of gold sea, two tankers barely discernible in the bottom right of the photograph. “Soopertankers at that,” continued McRae, to add to the horror he was clearly enjoying. “God knows how many casualties. Och—” He put the paper down disgustedly on the linen tablecloth and pushed a large, thick china mug marked “British Rail” over his place that of Burns’s poetry toward his wife for more tea. “It was daft of ‘em not to have more air cover. What did they expect? I told them, Maggie — didn’t I? But noo — the experts in London knew best. Air-to-air missile batteries would be ‘sufficient,’ they said — with some fighter cover.” He shot a glance across at Brentwood. “Drained Scotland, they did, and sent everything across the water to save the Frogs. What do they care aboot Scotland?”