World in Flames wi-3

by Ian Slater

  They were getting closer to the car.

  “You know your southern accent is terrible?” he said.

  “Yes, I know. So?”

  “We’ll stop for chow in Glasgow, and what happens, happens.”

  “Yes.”

  “They have any places to pull off up in the Highlands?”

  “Oh, lots of them,” Rosemary said encouragingly. “Or so Father says. Road’s so narrow in places, you have to go off just to let another car pass.”

  “So who has right of way?”

  “No one,” she said. “First in, first served.”

  “Sounds like a Texas whorehouse.”

  “Robert—really! And what, pray, do you know about Texas whorehouses?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Absolutely nothing. Shipboard talk, that’s all. Tell me more about these Highlands.”

  “They’re supposed to be wildly beautiful,” she said. “Forlorn but beautiful.”

  “And there are lots of places to pull off?” he said, leering.

  “My Lord, is that all you can think about? I would have thought you’d had enough for one day.” She adopted her stern, schoolmarmish pose. “Anyway, you’ll just have to wait till we get to Mallaig.”

  “How far’s that?”

  “About a hundred and sixty miles.”

  “Don’t know if I’ll make it,” he said, reaching out for her.

  She pushed his hand away. “You stay alert, Captain, otherwise neither of us’ll make it. You’ll have us in the bracken, and tha’s a fact.”

  For a moment he glimpsed red taillights again, but then the rain came down in sheets and they had to slow to a crawl. “Damn,” he said, above the whine of the wipers, “this is tougher than driving a sub.”

  * * *

  In the heavy rain, they missed Burns’s cottage. Rosemary was disappointed but didn’t press to go back. They’d only a week left of his leave before he’d once again set out on war patrol.

  “Sorry, sweetie,” he apologized. “I was so busy looking at the damn road—”

  “Oh, never mind,” she said gaily. “We’ll see it another time.”

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s a promise.” Both of them fell silent, the rain coming down so hard on the roof, it made a steady drumming sound and was splashing up from the narrow road, but they didn’t mind. It gave them a cozy feeling together inside the car, like being in a cave, safe from the raging forces outside their control.

  “We’ll stop at Glasgow,” he said, “if we find it.”

  * * *

  When Kurt Schulz entered the swirling grayness of the stratus above the Harz and could no longer glimpse the reassuring green khaki parachute above him, he had the distinct sensation of going down a lot more slowly than he really was. His worst fear was not realized as he saw the tall pines glide past, his landing on open ground in the mist-shrouded outskirts of Stolberg in the Harz Mountains near a copse of poplar, and spotted by an old villager out walking his dog. As the German shepherd ran toward Schulz, the pilot, a dog lover, intuitively went down on his left knee, left hand resting on it, his right hand hanging loosely, fingers cupped, his body loose in as nonthreatening a pose as he could make, fingers snapping. “Here, boy! Good boy!” The villager stood and watched, his pipe hanging loosely from aged, stained teeth above a stomach that, despite the economic hardships of living in the GDR, had consumed its fair share of German beer. His dog’s tail began wagging. The villager whistled quietly over to the flier, looking about them anxiously, almost tripping on a patch of moss. “Hier kommen!”

  It looked all right, but Shulz knew that if the Grenztruppen— “border troops”—had seen him coming down, the villager would have no alternative. Then he saw the man’s short-barreled shotgun slung across his back.

  “Haben Sie amerikanisch Zigaretten?”—”Have you any American cigarettes?”—asked the villager.

  “No,” Schulz told him, astonished by the question. He wished he had a bagful. A truckload.

  The old man shrugged philosophically. Schulz decided to act quickly, to take no chances. He could easily overpower the old man if he was quick enough and shot the dog first. But then the dog began pawing at him, tail wagging. Intuitively, or perhaps because of his long boyhood association with pets of his own, Schulz began scratching behind the dog’s ear, the shepherd nuzzling into him the harder he scratched.

  “The border,” said the old man, “is sixteen kilometers. We will have to leave now — the patrols are much heavier at night.”

  Schulz trusted the dog but not the old man. He’d heard a number of tales of would-be rescuers leading fliers into a Grenztruppen trap.

  They heard one patrol, but it was a long way off — the German shepherd the best early-warning radar Schulz had ever seen.

  Four hours later, Schulz was across into West Germany.

  Afterward, Schulz tried to dress it up a bit. With each retelling, it sounded more and more like a harrowing escape with the entire East German army pursuing him. In fact, it had been little more than a hike through one of the most beautiful wooded parts of Germany. Schulz knew that whether or not he survived the war, to his last day he would think of the old villager whenever he smelled wood smoke.

  When they had parted, Schulz asked for the old man’s name so that if ever he had the chance to repay, he could. But the old man wouldn’t give it. If ever such a thing should slip out, he explained, he would be a dead man.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Northeast of the Bronx, on the placid waters of Croton Reservoir, the water police helicopter was carrying out its normal patrol to ensure that no power boats were churning up the surface. If left undisturbed, the water would be aerated through the action of the sun’s ultraviolet light, and once rid of impurities, would pass through the aqueducts and tunnels, built a hundred years before, and become part of the one and a half billion gallons of water that New Yorkers consumed every day. The chopper came down as it spotted the quality-control men on the only power boat allowed in the lake lowering the seki disc — which they could see was visible down to about three and a quarter meters, much deeper than the “two-meter clarity” required by law. When the chopper had gone, a man in his late fifties, taking his usual walk by the dam, sat down by the edge of the spillway, fascinated as always at how quickly the placid surface of the lake became a cascade of white water over the elegant beveled curves of the dam. He emptied the thermos into the water.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In the storm-whipped night of the northern Pacific, the USS Salt Lake City turned her bow into the wind, the jet engines on her flight deck screaming from ruby red to an urgent white, the catapult officer, his head barely visible in the slightly raised Perspex-covered hatch, peeking above the flight deck, knowing he had only fifty seconds to launch each fighter, cursing the condensation building up inside his bubble despite the heating duct, his eyes having to strain to get a visual verification of takeoff weight for the F-14 Tomcat on the waist catapult so that he could set the appropriate steam pressure for the cat and crosswind. The catapult officer thought he heard “six eight zero,” indicating steam pressure on the cat for around sixty-eight thousand pounds — about right for a Tomcat, with ordnance on its four underfuselage points and the two hard points closer in under the wings. But still he couldn’t make out whether the rain-smeared digit on the “board,” a tray-sized counter held up by the yellow-jacketed member of the flight deck, was a six or a five. He had to get it right, but if he took much longer, he knew the air boss, a hundred feet up in the carrier’s island, would be onto him. The catapult officer pushed his earphones in hard, trying to hear the yellow jacket’s voice above the screaming of the twin twenty-one-thousand-pound Pratt and Whitney turbofans, but still couldn’t make out what the other man was saying. He looked again through his deck bubble at the board, saw a “six” for only a fraction of a second, but it was enough. The cat was set for sixty-two thousand pounds. He saw the last yellow jacket running from the plane, his right thumb up, indicati
ng “all set”—the launch bar between the fighter’s nose and catapult rail connected. He pushed the button, the jet shot forward in a blur of battle gray and swirling steam that momentarily obliterated the blast deflector.

  The launch had taken forty-nine seconds. There wasn’t even time to grimace at his assistant that he’d made it under fifty seconds before the next plane, an A-10 Intruder, was on the waist cat, screaming just as insistently for release. The catapult officer prayed he got every one of them right this night. “Damn!” The bubble was fogging up again.

  High above the flight deck, the captain of the USS carrier Salt Lake City battle group received an urgent request from COMPAC–Commander Pacific — Pearl Harbor, that one of the carrier’s pilots, Lt. Comdr. F. Shirer, be reassigned to Washington, D.C. Knowing there were over five thousand men and women aboard and that there could easily be two with the same name, even the same rank, the director of personnel, a new man on the Salt Lake City, waited for the computer to come back on line to double-check the flier’s service number. He was pretty sure it was the Shirer of the Pyongyang raid fame who, in the midst of the North Korean army’s invasion, or rather rout, of the South Korean and American forces, had led the second wave of Tomcats through a raging monsoon over the North Korean capital. The raid of American airborne troops, led by Gen. Douglas Freeman against “Kim Il Suck,” as the general called him, deep behind the North Korean lines, had electrified the world, and in a way reminiscent of Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo in World War Two, it had given American morale at home, and particularly in the shrinking Pusan-Yosu perimeter, a much-needed boost. It had also bought precious time for the U.S. troops en route from Japan to “restock” the perimeter in time to start the counterattacks that were now driving Kim II Sung’s forces across the wide, frozen wastes of the Yalu into the mountain fastness of Manchuria.

  For the men like Shirer, who’d been in on Freeman’s raid, it had given them an élan not normally found in battle-hardened men until they are much older. Even now, Shirer’s exploit in downing four Sukhois over the Aleutian Islands was overshadowed by his reputation as the cool warrior who had gone in over Pyongyang, his flight through flak- and missile-thick air giving crucial support to Freeman and his troops engaged in a fierce firelight outside Mansudae Hall. Here a young American marine, David Brentwood, had been busy winning the Silver Star, flushing out the enemy in a vicious room-to-room battle, seeking the NKA’s General Kim. Kim either escaped shortly after the defenses of the Koreans’ supposed impenetrable fortress of Pyongyang had been penetrated or, as intelligence suggested, might have been shot on the orders of Kim Il Sung. The failure to get Kim had bitterly disappointed General Freeman; the TV pictures of the successful sweep of Mansudae Hall, its windows now roaring with flame, and the felled statue of Kim Il Sung, once sixty feet of solid bronze, seconds later shattered by the American demolition teams, reasserted, however, the American determination to go on the attack even though they had been retreating in the South. The American public made heroes of young David Brentwood and the others who deserved it, and some who didn’t but who had been in the right place at the right time.

  For most of the men, the reputation of having been in on the Pyongyang raid proved as much a burden as a blessing. Later, in Europe, during a night drop when Brentwood’s battalion had bailed out over the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket as part of the American airborne’s drop to relieve pressure from the trapped British Army of the Rhine, four American brigades, and a German division, David, like most in Charlie company, had been blown into enemy territory by crosswinds.

  He had lain against a fetid, disemboweled corpse in a shell-pocked field under enemy artillery barrage, too paralyzed to move. At dawn, when he did go forward and found himself looking through the foresight of a Russian AK-47, he was secretly relieved. That was, until he saw the Russian SPETS commandos herding American and British prisoners, making them take off their uniforms and dog tags and issuing the shivering NATO POWs only one coarse blanket apiece.

  The Russians were preparing to infiltrate the NATO lines and blow up the Allied “prepo” supply depots. Subsequently, Brentwood, after seeing a British officer and Americans murdered in cold blood on a forced march through deep snow, had been jolted out of his funk. Escaping from the column, using two of the enemy’s stick, male-female connector grenades, he’d single-handedly set a huge Soviet oil dump near Stadthagen afire, robbing Marshal Kirov’s armored columns of their critical fuel supply during the assault by over five thousand Russian T-90 and T-84 tanks against the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket.

  For that, David Brentwood had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to add to the Silver Star earned at Pyongyang.

  Now, recuperating in a Belgian NATO hospital outside Brussels, the exhilaration of having found his courage at Stadthagen was quelled by the burden of his memory — of those hours alone before dawn in the shell-cratered field outside the DB pocket when only he and God knew he’d been immobilized with fear. The wounds caused by flying shrapnel from the stick grenades he’d used at Stadthagen to blow up the dump were superficial but extremely painful. Yet he bore the pain without any ill will, his stoicism born of the gnawing guilt that festered out of those two hours — for him, two hours of cowardice.

  To make matters worse, everyone he spoke to, from the pretty, young admitting receptionist at Lille to reporters from the Stars and Stripes, kept admiring his courage, and the more reticent he became to give yet another interview, the more he was celebrated as the modest hero, and the more the guilt of those two hours mounted.

  Finally David felt literally weighed down, longing for the Dutch harbors to be cleared of the Soviet air-drop mines and Allied wrecks so that he could be shipped back to a convalescent hospital in England. There, hopefully, he could bury himself among the anonymity of the half million Allied soldiers in the vast encampments of southern England and East Anglia who, fed and resupplied by the convoys now getting through from the States, would be far too busy to worry about any one individual.

  As the personnel officer aboard the USS Salt Lake City waited to get confirmation that it was Frank Shirer whom Washington was requesting, David Brentwood on the other side of the world sought solitude along the banks of one of the narrow, olive-drab canals. But the denuded winter poplars and the flat, lush green of Flanders Fields beyond only nurtured his gloomy mood. He wondered how much of his attack on the Soviet fuel dump had been due to having seen other prisoners shot at the whim of a Soviet guard and how much of his desperate run through the blizzard that night with the grenades had been motivated by nothing else than fear of meeting the other prisoners’ fate — instead of by any conscious plan to strike back at the Russians. One-half of him told him that the reason he did it wasn’t important. Who cares? as his marine buddy, Thelman, would say. “What matters, babe, is you did it.” Yet the other half of David Brentwood, his father the admiral’s side, was unmoved. For Adm. John Brentwood, the reason for doing something was almost as important as the deed itself.

  A phantom breeze ruffled the canal water, its leaden surface shivering like a living thing apprehensive of the gunmetal skies gathering ominously overhead. David turned around to head back to the hospital, smelling rain in the air, wondering whether this tug-of-war within him afflicted others who, like him, had been singled out for public celebration—”Best of Show” propaganda! — at a time when Allied commanders well knew the war could easily go either way despite Freeman’s breakout from the DB pocket.

  Or was his condition peculiar to himself? Was he in some way abnormal? He had tried to visualize confiding in his brothers to find the answer, but he felt too far away in years from Robert. And his older brother wasn’t given to opening up about himself. Like all submariners, cocooned in a world of secrecy, he had a natural reticence to discuss personal matters or, for that matter, anything else, outside the sub. He’d only told David of his impending marriage to Rosemary Spence a month before it took place. In any case, like their father, Robert probabl
y wouldn’t want to discuss personal matters, perceiving such self-absorption as a sign of weakness, an inability on David’s part to handle his own problems. Perhaps it was?

  David heard the high thunder of bombers, probably B-1s— the so-called Stealth B-2 a disaster, easily picked up by the enemy’s low, long-wave radar despite the Pentagon’s claims and assurances otherwise. Looking up, seeing nothing but thick overcast, David felt more depressed than ever. Someone said that coming off the painkillers helped induce depression. Or was he just feeling downright sorry for himself? — a thing neither of his two brothers or father would abide, especially not after Ray’s burn trauma.

  He had thought of writing Lana — sure she’d understand his doubts and fears about having so much expected of him. Once you’d been a winner, you were supposed to go on winning, distinguishing yourself. What had old George Patton said? “Americans love to win and will not tolerate a loser.” But the problem with trying to talk about any problem in a letter, to Lana or anyone else, was the damned censor. Oh, the censor would keep it to himself, all right — wouldn’t go about blabbing a Medal of Honor winner’s doubts about himself — but the thought of anyone, especially another marine, seeing his innermost doubts revealed was too humiliating to contemplate. No — he’d just have to “bear up,” as his DI had bellowed at him and “Thelma” at Parris Island. “Flush all the shit out!” and “Go forward.” Or, as Adm. John Brentwood had said ad nauseum, “When the going gets tough…”

  “Yes, I know,” David could hear his mother saying. “But we’re not all as tough as you, John.”

  David smiled at the memory despite his dark mood. He longed to see his mom, remembering how, as a small child, he could go to her in the mornings and cuddle up, the warm, soft smell of her enfolding him. Safe from the world. And he thought of Melissa Lange, his last day with her, a rushed lovemaking torn by anxiety about his posting to Korea and by the memory of Rick Stacy, a political science major. Stacy, the weasel — bow tie and forced preppy charm, except he was from Oregon, having no doubt waited for David to move out so he could try a move on Melissa. The thought of her with Stacy, even though she’d said her relationship with the weasel was “strictly platonic,” was damn near unbearable.