by Ian Slater
“Hello!” Mrs. Price called out jovially. “A bit nippy, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Rosemary. “Still, expect it won’t do us any harm.”
“Do us the world of good, I should think,” said Mrs. Price. “Fresh air. James smokes a pipe.”
They were drawing level with a yellow school bus from some girls’ school, a few giggling as Robert walked by, one of them calling out, “I say there, tall, dark, and—” There was more laughing.
Robert nodded at Mrs. Price, but kept walking toward her husband at the stern, addressing him with a questioning air. “I’ve never seen snow like that before. Have you?”
“Oh—” said Price, looking up, “the pink stuff? Yes — it’s quite common up here.” Both men were close to the rail, spray catching their face, Robert, despite his preoccupation about the Prices, automatically wondering what the fresh-to-salt-water ratio was in the loch. For a sub diving, it would be critical information, altering the density and therefore the sub’s buoyancy. If you didn’t react fast enough to a sudden change, you’d be dead.
“You’re familiar with these parts then?” he said to Price while leaning eagerly into the wind against the rail without looking at Price but remembering that at the bed-and-breakfast place, Price had said it was his first trip to Scotland.
“Ah — yes,” Price conceded, adding hastily, “well, you know — I’ve read a lot about Scotland. Before I came.”
Robert said nothing for a second or two, his gaze fixed on the fog cascading down the bank they had just left, encircling them. “I heard an interesting story the other day.”
“Oh — yes?” said Price politely.
Brentwood was still watching the shore. “Yeah. It was about this guy — kept following a sergeant and his wife. They were taking a trip through the Sierras — back in California. Wherever they went, he went. Well, after a couple of days, this sergeant pulled the guy over and told him that if he didn’t bug off, he’d get his head blown off.”
There was a long silence, and all Brentwood could hear was the ferry’s wake boiling furiously into the calm loch.
“Rather silly of the sergeant,” said Price. “I mean, to threaten people like that. I would have thought all he needed to do was call up the local constabulary. You know, the police. Register a complaint.”
Robert turned to look at Price, noticing the man’s hairline was receding — something he hadn’t been aware of at the McRaes’. There Price had looked well groomed, hair combed down over the front in a stylishly casual forelock. He wondered how much else he hadn’t noticed about Price.
“Funny you mentioned that,” said Brentwood, “about calling the police. The sergeant did look for a phone. It was high in the mountains, you see. Not many people around. When he did find one, it had been trashed. Line cut.”
Price shook his head, tut-tutting. “Vandals everywhere.”
The change in Price’s tone from his off-balance surprise in the car to his present air of confidence told Brentwood his bluff wasn’t working. He should have asked the Englishman point-blank. Instead he’d given the man time to think, regain his balance.
“Anyway,” continued Price, “what do you think the police could have done — to help the sergeant? The sergeant could have been delusional.”
“I don’t think he was,” said Brentwood, his eyes fixing Price.
“Look, old chap,” said Price. “You’re making me a bit nervous with that bulge in your jacket. I’ve made a bit of a cock-up with all this, but — well, I suppose this won’t assuage you very much, but I’m not who you think I am. Nor is Joan.”
Robert Brentwood said nothing, waiting.
“Point is,” continued Price, pushing the disobedient lock of hair back, “Special Branch didn’t see much point in unduly alarming you — certainly not on your honeymoon. And especially given what you sub chaps’ve done for us re the convoys. We’re all terribly grateful.”
Brentwood let the flattery go by him like the spray. “What Special Branch?”
“Scotland Yard. Joan and I have been tailing you ever since you left Surrey. Your wedding.”
“What the hell—”
“Peter Zeldman,” Price cut in, “your executive officer, was best man. Georgina Spence — your wife’s sister — was bridesmaid. Young William Spence was killed in the Atlantic— looked after by Lana Brentwood — your sister. It’s through her looking after him that you met Rosemary, correct? I mean, you took young Spence’s personal effects to his parents during one of your shore leaves from the Roosevelt. How am I doing?”
“Anyone could have learned all that stuff,” said Brentwood, “reading a paper down in Surrey.”
“Do be reasonable, old sport!” said Price, flashing a Special Branch card.
“You’ve got American Express, too, and you’re a blood donor. Right?” Robert challenged him. “Anyone can get cards printed up, sport! Many as they like.”
Price slipped the card away, glanced behind them, squinting in the sun-infused fog, seeing Rosemary and Joan Price ambling from the ferry’s bow back toward the cars. Another few minutes and the ferry’d be across the loch. “Look,” said Price, “I don’t want to be indelicate, old boy, but d’you know your sister Lana was transferred to the Aleutians?”
“Sure I know,” responded Robert Brentwood. “She wrote me. Her ex is a string-puller. Congressmen in his pocket. What’s indelicate about that?”
“I mean the real reason she was transferred?”
Robert Brentwood shrugged. “I told you La Roche is the original sleaze-ball. Besides, Aleutians is a combat zone.” He paused, looking hard at Price. “The Russians are trying to get through the back door. There’s a navy hospital at Dutch Harbor. So?”
“Well, I’m not saying La Roche had nothing to do with it, but he ‘lucked out,’ as you Americans put it. The navy already had a good reason to banish her up there.” He paused, still looking at the far shore. “Your sister was transferred to the Aleutian theater, old boy, because her care of young William Spence, shall we say, exceeded the requirements of duty.” He paused to let it sink in. “Not to put too fine a point on it, Captain, she performed certain — shall we say—’favors.’ “
“What the hell d’you mean?”
“I think you Americans call it a blow job.”
Rosemary heard a crack — Price’s watch smashing against the ferry’s bulkhead as Robert Brentwood felled him with one blow. “You son of a bitch!” Price stayed down, only daring to raise himself slightly on one arm, the other held up in submission.
Rosemary made to run toward them, but Joan Price grabbed her arm. “No. Stay here!”
“Get up, you son of a bitch!” yelled Robert Brentwood, his voice all but inaudible to the women, his face red, tweed jacket ballooning in the wind. “Get up or I’ll—”
“I’m not making—” began Price, fearing the blow to his chin had fractured his jaw, his voice breathless. “I’m not making a moral judgment. The Spence boy was dying. Perhaps it was an act of — look, I’m sorry, but if you don’t believe I’m from Special Branch, I had to convince—” Price paused, his face grimacing in pain. “We haven’t been following you— well, we have, but it’s the other two newlyweds that we were really shadowing. You’re in-between as it were.”
Brentwood looked blank.
“Your innocent young GI,” Price continued, easing himself back so he could rest against the bulkhead. “You know, the young couple at the B and B — confetti still in their hair. And his lovely wife. Real charmer, she is — been to bed with two of your sub captains already. Found them — should say what was left of ‘em — down by Loch Lomond. We had to change everything — including their sub’s ETD from Holy Loch — just in case our bonny pair got anything out of them. He paused, feeling his jaw, wishing he hadn’t. “We’re your minders,” he told Brentwood. “We caught up with them just before you reached the B and B. They were your late arrivals. You were bloody lucky you didn’t make it to Burns’s cottage. The sweet young thing w
as carrying a Beretta and two shrapnel grenades. Very nice.”
By now, Price felt safe enough to get up. “I’m afraid we’re on duty till we see you safely back at Holy Loch. Sorry to dampen your nuptial bliss, but we can’t afford to lose a Sea Wolf skipper. Especially now.”
Robert Brentwood gave a grunt. “Sorry — I—such a fool… didn’t realize…”
“Not to worry,” Price assured him, dusting himself down, the wind from the loch playing havoc with his hairpiece. “National Health’ll take care of the teeth. I hope.” He tried a grin, but his jaw hurt too much.
* * *
“I feel like a goddamned idiot,” said Robert, his face still red from wind chill and embarrassment. “Here they are protecting us and we think—”
“Well,” responded Rosemary, chagrined by her own embarrassment but her tone more defensive. “They should have told us.”
“No,” said Brentwood. He glanced in the rearview and gave a friendly wave. Price honked in reply. “If we’d known they were following us, it wouldn’t have been much of a honeymoon. Would’ve seemed like someone was watching us through the keyhole all the time.” Rosemary didn’t like it, but she had to agree. The thought of her and Robert trying to make love with two people staking the place out from across the hallway of the B and B would certainly have put her right off. “Oh no!” she said. “They must have heard everything.” Her face was between her fingers, looking at Robert. “Tell me, was I—”
“Screaming with joy!” he said. “All the time!”
She slid down into her seat as they drove off.
Five miles on, both cars disappearing into fog, Rosemary gasped in fright, turning to Robert. “My God — he mightn’t be from Special Branch at all. I mean, he could be just saying that to—”
“No,” Robert interjected. “He told me some stuff that only someone in the know could have a handle on. They couldn’t have found it out in Surrey.”
“Found out what? What kind of things?”
“About my family,” Robert answered, gearing down on a hill, the fog so thick, he could barely see the front of the hood. “I don’t want to talk about it. Damn it! I wish this goddamned demister would work.”
The car slowed, Robert unconsciously taking his foot off the gas pedal, not because of the fog or his preoccupation with the windshield misting, but because he realized a Russian agent could as easily have had contacts in North America and the Aleutians as in Surrey — that the information about Lana — if it was true—
“What’s assuage mean?” he asked Rosemary, a little embarrassed.
“To allay,” she explained eagerly, without a trace of surprise. “Why?” she pressed. “Did Price use it?”
“Yes, he said he hoped he’d assuaged my suspicions.”
“Has he?”
Robert pushed himself backward from the steering wheel, his back hard against the seat, arms still, as if bracing himself for a crash. It was one of the isometric exercises he often used during the long watches aboard the sub and which he would be doing in several days time when, if, he returned safely to Holy Loch. “I don’t know, hon,” he told Rosemary. “He could have got all the stuff about my family from some — I don’t know — some intelligence network in the States.”
* * *
Price’s jaw was throbbing and badly swollen on the left side. “Could you hand me one of those towelettes from the glove compartment?” he mumbled. “Or are they in the boot?”
Joan opened her purse, took out the Beretta nine-millimeter, and rummaged through the contents. “Here’s one!” she pronounced triumphantly, tearing it open and passing the towelette to him. Dabbing it gently on his chin, he relished the temporary cold that took the edge off the pain. “By God, he can pack a wallop. Hope he isn’t like that on his submarine. A man like that in charge of — how many is it — forty-eight nuclear warheads? Gives me the willies, I can tell you. Thought they were supposed to be the silent type. Not bloody rowdies.”
“You were talking about his sister. How did you know all that about her anyway?”
“Because,” he replied, “I do my homework. That’s why.”
* * *
The thing Robert Brentwood found unforgivable in himself was that, try as he might to push the image of Lana performing oral sex on young Spence from his mind, the more he fantasized about whether Rosemary would do it for him. The moment he thought he had evicted the scene from his mind as unworthy of him, the more pervasive it became until he had such an erection, he thought Rosemary would be sure to notice. At least he hoped she would. The image of her moist, red lips encasing him, her tongue darting with abandon, sucking him dry, made him doubt whether they could make Mallaig without him having to pull over. Returning again and again to what Price had said about Lana, he remembered Price also saying something about how grateful the Admiralty was for the protection afforded by the Sea Wolfs, “especially now.” But surely the subs had always been important to Admiralty. Why “especially now”? He mentioned it to Rosemary.
“Perhaps something’s happened,” she proffered, “that we haven’t heard yet on the news?”
Robert switched on the radio, but Highlands static crackled like a log fire. Anyway, it was a violation of their pledge not to listen to any newscasts while on their honeymoon, not to let anything intrude on their all-too-brief time together. But now he wondered whether their pact had been a good idea after all. He hated not knowing what was going on. He looked in the rearview again but couldn’t see Price’s car, not even the yellow eyes of fog lights. He was unsure as to whether he should pull over and wait or keep going.
CHAPTER NINE
The White House
When the army chief of staff, General Grey, arrived from the Pentagon and was ushered into the Oval Office by press aide Trainor, he wasn’t sure whether the president had heard him and so coughed politely to announce his presence.
The chief executive of the United States was reclining in the black leather chair behind the dark oak desk from HMS Resolute—given to the much earlier President Hayes by Queen Victoria in 1878, the great seal of the United States carved on its front adding to the quiet dignity of the office that General Grey found distinctly gloomy in the fading evening light. Outside, the darkening magnolia bushes and stark brambles of the rose garden added to the heavy, oppressive atmosphere that had descended about the White House since the news had come in from the big aerial arrays at Fort Meade in Maryland.
The ELINT — electronic intelligence — experts had picked up FORCOMPS — forward command post signals — between the U.S. and South Korean armies under the command of Gen. B. W. Anderson, supreme commander of all Allied forces in Southeast Asia. On top of this, Mayne was in the throes of a migraine attack — it being no consolation to him, as Trainor well knew, that other presidents, too, had been victims of disease while in office, that Ulysses S. Grant had suffered one of his worst migraine attacks the night before Lee’s surrender.
“Take a seat, General,” said Mayne, waving him in the gloom to the red-and-yellow-striped cushioned chair to the left of the president’s desk and directly in front of the presidential flag. As the general’s eyes adjusted to the dim light, he could see the president wasn’t looking directly at him but was deep in thought in the island of soft, peach-colored light casting its glow on the portrait of George Washington, in full uniform, above the mantel.
“I was told…” began the president, his voice quiet, measured. “Your intelligence boys told me Beijing couldn’t do— what they’ve now done?” Mayne’s right arm came into view indicating the map of the “big prick,” as the Pentagon called the Korean Peninsula, set up to the right of him. Already, in the first twenty-four hours of heavy fighting between the enemy and U.S.-ROK forces, there were over eleven thousand American casualties. The Chinese-North Korean breakthrough was threatening to be an even bigger rout of the U.S.-ROK forces than that suffered by them at the beginning of the war around the Pusan-Masan perimeter in the far south.
The president turned to the general. “How many Chinese have crossed already?”
Grey rose and reluctantly took up the retractable pointer, its tip sliding from southwest along the line of the Yalu to the northeastern end of the eight-hundred-mile-long river that had been the border between the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria for a thousand years. “They moved down from up here, Mr. President, in Shenyang — China’s most northeasterly province. The Thirty-ninth Army out of Anshan, the Fortieth from Shenyang City itself, and the Sixty-fourth from Fushun. Possibly they’ve moved the Twenty-fourth up from Yangshan — but that would have to be seconded from Beijing command.”
“How many troops altogether?” asked Mayne.
“Ah — a hundred and twenty thousand, thereabouts, Mr. President.” Grey paused for a second or two to collect his spittle. “Give or take a division.”
“How in Jesus’ name,” began Mayne, turning on the general, “can a one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-man army and their equipment move—” looking back at the map, he eye-balled the distance south from Shenyang to the Yalu “—a hundred and fifty miles over mountainous terrain — in the dead of winter — cross a goddamn river, and take us by surprise?”
“The river’s frozen over, sir.”
“All right then — a hundred and twenty thousand of them crossing a frozen river and taking us by surprise. And our intelligence units didn’t see any of them until I get this ELINT report — until it’s too late? Come on, General.” Mayne’s voice was rising. “Where are all those super-duper movement sensors and infrared nighttime scopes we used in Vietnam? And for which I had to fight Congress?”
The general didn’t think it appropriate to remind the president of the United States that sensors hadn’t stopped General Giap in Vietnam either. Though Grey had to concede the president had a point, he nevertheless felt obliged on behalf of the U.S. Army to explain. “The difference here, Mr. President, is that under the terms of your — our — agreement with Beijing, any overflights by us to drop those sensors on the Yalu’s northern bank would have violated Chinese air space.”
