World in Flames wi-3

by Ian Slater

  “Oh, stop fretting. It’s like chalk and cheese with those two. He’s interested, I think, but not Georgina. I’m afraid she considers him ‘unsuitable.’ “

  “She’s probably right. Don’t mind putting the chap up. Nice enough, and it’s our duty really, as the government says. If it wasn’t for the American submariners, we’d be starving. Everyone knows that. No, I don’t mind billeting the chap at all. Pleasant enough. But we’re not obliged to open a marriage bureau. In any case, Georgina’s far too young.”

  “She’s twenty-five, Richard.”

  “Yes, and he’s what?”

  “Late twenties, that’s all.”

  “I’m not talking number of years,” Richard replied. “It’s a matter of maturity. She’s not ready—”

  “Oh, stop fretting so. I told you, she has no interest in him whatsoever. Tell you the truth, she’s been rather rude to him. Goes about the house as if he’s not there.”

  “Well, she’s studying. Her Michaelmas term paper—”

  “Oh, you know what I mean. Or perhaps you don’t. Every time I see you, you’ve got your head stuck in the paper.”

  “Leave off, old girl.” It was said politely but firmly— the danger signal that they were close to reliving the terrible time when they’d heard young William had been killed, Richard retreating for days at a time, saying nothing, reading, burying his grief in his own silence, and the two of them quite apart at the very time they both knew they should have been closest.

  They were approaching the parish hall. “A big crowd to hear Professor Knowlton. Now, don’t worry, Richard. He’s not Georgina’s type. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “My God!” said Richard. “Look at Knowlton. Old fool. Looks like a recycled coat he’s wearing.”

  “Richard! Behave yourself.”

  “Yes, yes.” He glanced up at the brooding sky. Clouds were curdling ominously about one another but not yet a solid sheet of gray.

  * * *

  When the phone rang, Georgina jumped, her nerves on edge because of the expected Soviet missile raid, but as she rose to answer it, she pretended to Zeldman her fright was due to her having been absorbed in one of her textbooks.

  “It’s for you,” she said, surprised.

  As he took the phone from her, their fingers touched. He watched her walk away. The phone call was from Faslane, the village near Holy Loch, informing him the post office was holding a “familygram” for him — a fifteen-word message each submariner was allowed over a month. Did he want it forwarded to Surrey? The question about whether he wanted it “sent on” meant, however, that it wasn’t from home. Instead, it was a message to him that he must report back to the Sea Wolf within seventy-two hours. He had counted on having several more days at the Spences’—at least till Christmas — if things worked out with Georgina, but now his time with her had suddenly been cut in half.

  “Have to leave tomorrow,” he said after putting the phone down.

  Georgina said nothing.

  At 9:17 p.m. the first Russian salvos could be heard several miles away, their distinctive shuffling noise sounding as if they were chopping the air instead of coming at supersonic speed toward their targets. Peter picked up the TV’s remote control and turned the television off, for, as well as the increasing Russian salvos, an electrical storm was coming in from the Channel. “Better not use the phone either,” he said. “Charge could throw you across the room.”

  She barely acknowledged his comment, continuing to read in the soft glow of an Edwardian lamp, its light trapped by heavy blackout drapes. Finally the din of missiles exploding came several miles closer. Suddenly the power was out.

  “Okay if I open the drapes?” asked Zeldman. She didn’t answer.

  Looking outside at the garden pond, neglected through the winter, he could see, reflected in its icy surface, the stalks of searchlights starting to cluster and intertwine high in the sky to the east. Beyond the garden, yellow slits of headlights came to a standstill — everything stopping during the raid except for a blacked-out commuter train rumbling through the nearby culvert, making its run for the nearest tunnel.

  “Right,” said Peter. “I’m off for the shelter. Coming?”

  “No, thank you.” She said it as if the missile raid were a mere impertinence and that in any event, it was “too bourgeois” by half to go scuttling into the nearest shelter.

  “Suit yourself,” said Zeldman, walking out through the wild shrubs of the English garden toward the shelter Richard Spence had dug not far from an old sun house.

  In the momentary lighting of the Nike Hercules air defense batteries around Leatherhead, Georgina saw the ugly, leafless vines of morning glory which had strangled the best of the garden, its wild aspect the result of her mother’s neglect following William’s death. Suddenly, oppressively, the red and bluish flashes of the AA missile batteries nearby, the tang of ozone in the air, the decaying garden, seemed to leap at her in a series of strobe-lit pictures of primeval forces victorious not only in having run riot over the garden, the very semblance of civilization, but over civilization itself.

  The Russian rockets were crashing closer and closer, and a rain of red-tailed missiles could be seen plummeting down over Leatherhead and nearby in Oxshott, devastating what had been heavily camouflaged army staging areas.

  A salvo of Zhukov J rockets, their long crimson exhausts plainly, if only momentarily, visible, their harsh metallic retching sound rending the air, crashed into the nearby culvert, the explosion blowing out most of the Spences’s windows, the living room’s heavy blackout drapes sucked frighteningly inward, swirling about her but stopping most of the flying glass.

  Zeldman, in the shelter, heard the implosion — glass shattering. Within seconds, drawing the Nansen slide bolt and wrenching the heavy door open, he was racing up the short flight of sunken brick steps as Georgina, her nerve breaking as more salvos rained about the culvert, fled the house toward the shelter.

  In another flash of a Nike Hercules battery and the glow of fuel dump fires, the two of them all but crashed into one another in the garden. It would have been funny but for Georgina’s frantic panic.

  Leading her back to the shelter, Peter Zeldman said little apart from a few quietly given instructions, and sat holding her, stroking her hair, trying to calm her down. For a long time her body remained rigid, tense with fear, but then slowly she yielded — all her pretenses shattered by the closeness of death, their mutual longing unreined by the dull thumps of the rockets’ explosions bringing danger ever closer, her fingers tearing into him as he lifted her high against the shelter’s damp wall, penetrating her with equally wild abandon, the fullness of her release sweeping over her time and again, the air raid reaching its crescendo, their joy a reverie.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In Montana, coyotes howled in the foothills of Bear Paw Mountain while in the hardened shelters of Strategic Air Command on the snow-covered Great Plains, an air force instructor was telling Rick Stacy and the other eleven silo cadets not to hesitate. “If your partner goes berserk under pressure, you not only have the right but the duty to shoot him or her.” He paused. None of them showed any surprise — which was good. “Now, the air force has taken great pains to select the best possible people for this job. But none of us knows for sure how we’ll perform if things start coming apart — that is, if it comes to a nuclear exchange — if other silos in your sector were to be hit. You all passed A-okay on the simulators, but tomorrow you’ll be in silo on solo ride.”

  Stacy smiled across at Melissa Lange. The instructor saw it, gave no sign of disapproval, but made a mental note that these two were to be kept apart in the two-member team drills. You couldn’t stop fraternization. In fact, it could be a stabilizing factor off duty, but you kept them well apart in training and in the silo. Despite the advancement of women in the forces, the no-mixed-sex rule remained inviolate at “Ground Zero.”

  “There’s something else I want to mention,” the instruc
tor continued, neat and tan in knife-edged ironed pale blue uniform and tie. “In any crew, you’ll find there’s a tendency for one partner to become leader by default. Know what I mean, Lieutenant Stacy?”

  “Yes, sir. One team member relies too heavily on the other.” Stacy looked pleased with himself.

  “Not really,” replied the instructor. “You’re all taught to rely on one another, Lieutenant. The problem, however, is when one member habitually relies on the other so that in the event of a slipup by the one who’s been leading, we are likely to risk either aborting launch or executing an inappropriate release at the critical moment. It is not,” the instructor emphasized, “a pilot-copilot situation down there. In the silo there are two of you with equal responsibility. You’re a team. No one of you can launch. And forget all that BS you’ve read about a ‘string and second key’ game where one of you supposedly goes bonkers, shoots the other, and then catapults us into a nuclear exchange by using a connecting string to turn both keys at once. You can’t. We fixed it. You need a two-key insert to initiate your launch procedure.” The instructor paused. “You got that, Corporal Lange?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay. Let’s recap before you all head off to get drunk.” There was a polite ripple of laughter. None of them were heavy drinkers. The air force had carefully checked that out in the psychiatric profile on each recruit. Besides, everyone knew that if they so much as took an aspirin, it had to be reported. If anyone climbed aboard the pickup van and had taken so much as an antihistamine, they’d have to immediately declare themselves DNIA — duty not involving alert. Not to do so carried the same penalty meted out to a fighter pilot who hadn’t reported himself DNIF — a verbal reprimand, a fine, and confined to barracks. With launch crews of necessity required to live in and around the silos, being CB meant staying in the plusher SAC living quarters. But in the middle of the snow-covered prairie with all calls automatically monitored, the only recreation was to watch TV, get laid — difficult, given the long duty hours — eat, get overweight, and risk a WRC — weight reduction course.

  For some reason Melissa couldn’t understand, the U.S. Air Force did not want their missile shooters fat. Rick Stacy, a fitness fiend, postulated that “excessive poundage,” in his words, made people slower on the controls. Melissa said she knew a cab dispatcher who was fat, enormous, and the most competent dispatcher around.

  “We’re not dispatching cabs, Lissa,” Stacy told her. “We’re into kilotons on the front line.”

  Melissa didn’t bother pursuing the fact that the front line was five thousand miles away in Europe, and nine thousand in Korea. In a way, she knew Rick was right, but his egocentric habit of automatically assuming the “front line” wherever he was annoyed her. Still, he was kind to her, considerate, and in this world where the casualties in Europe and Korea meant that there were about four women for every man back home, Richard was a better catch than most. And he’d given her good advice. While some of her friends at college had put their professional goals on permanent hold to have a good time, “while the world lasts,” as they’d put it, Melissa had signed up for the silo program, which would help pay for her degree. After the war, her degree and experience in such a highly skilled job would stand her in good stead.

  In any case, she and Rick, by planning on getting married in the spring, were going to try both for the “good time” and, in Rick’s words, improve their “marketable skills.”

  The only thing she regretted was that Rick was as organized and efficient in bed as he was in class. It was all very purposeful and unerringly “on target,” as he so romantically put it. And it was all over in ten minutes. She was reminded of some vulgar engineering student in Portland talking about “slam, bam, thank you, ma’am.” Part of the problem was that Rick detested sweat.

  Now and then she found herself conscious of the stares of a local contractor, a man the air force used for base and silo support building repairs. He was a big man, very hairy, known to some of the unmarried women team members — and, it was said, some of the married women — as “KITS — Killerton in the SAC.” Melissa hadn’t been listening to the instructor, idly wondering whether “KITS” referred to his weight on top of you or to his actual performance in bed.

  The instructor was rambling on about how “weather bias,” such as differences in air density, could cause possible “skipping” of a reentry warhead vehicle and how one way around this was for the kiloton or megaton warhead to effect reentry at a steeper angle than usual, which would make it more accurate, but that this in turn would generate more heat.

  “So be alert,” said the instructor, “when we’re going through PALFIR — which is?” He was pointing at Melissa. Rick Stacy was watching her.

  “Prearming,” she replied. “Arming, launching, firing, releasing,” she added smartly.

  “Very good! Okay, that wraps it up for today. Remember, tomorrow you’re on solo, which may or may not include a problem with the blast valve. Three ways to clear?” He looked about the room, using a stick of chalk as a pointer. “Johnson?”

  “Ah—”

  The instructor laughed. “Unfair question. Tomorrow, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Zipping up his parka before going out in the thirty-below “icy hell,” as Rick Stacy called it with what he thought was a fine piece of irony, he complimented Melissa on her PALFIR answer. “Right on the button, Lissa. Very impressive!”

  “Don’t call me that,” she snapped.

  “What?”

  “Lissa.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “What’s right with it? My name’s Melissa.”

  “Sorreeeee.”

  In the pickup van, there was a lot of loud talk as the class members unwound. No one spoke of estimating warhead yield, launch reliability factors, or reentry penetration. Only when it was suggested that the PX might have run out of Coors did one of the silo cadets, a tall youth from Louisiana, drawl that if the PX manager hadn’t ordered in enough beer, the manager’s TKP — terminal kill probability — would be 1.0—absolutely certain.

  Melissa ignored the small talk, thinking instead about the bungalow she and another woman trainee shared. The bungalow had developed a leak in the roof. It would be all right for the time being, but once there was any melting, it’d be like a waterfall. “Be spring,” Rick said sulkily, “before there’s any melting around here.”

  “You might be right,” she said, “but I thought you didn’t like my place looking unkempt — the ceiling’s stained.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well then?”

  “Melissa, I have better things to do right now than to mend roofs. We go solo tomorrow, remember?”

  “I remember,” she said tartly.

  “What’s gotten into you?” he asked brusquely.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, if you want it fixed that badly, call Base Repairs. They’ll send someone over.”

  “I thought you liked doing that kind of stuff.”

  “I would if I had the time. Okay?”

  “Okay. I’ll get Base Repairs.”

  “Right.”

  The van suddenly slid on black ice. There was a chorus of “whoa”s as it slithered further, then righted itself. It was all very funny, but for a second Melissa felt they were going to go right off the road and smash into the ice-hardened ditch. Life was too short — full of hazard.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  As David Brentwood left Brussels headquarters, stepping out onto the wet, black pavement, his mood was one of brooding self-condemnation — about Melissa’s letter, the interview board — everything. His dejection wasn’t helped any by the ceiling of overcast, drizzling gray clouds so low, they obscured the ornate spires of the Grand Place, or by the British military police sergeant waiting for him under a dark canvas awning. The last thing he needed was the Brit’s nonstop patter, full of empty homilies and pubic jokes.

  “What ho! Here comes our hero!”
the sergeant said. Until then, David hadn’t seen Lili with him. The rosy-faced girl smiled with such transparent pleasure at seeing David that momentarily his attention shifted from thoughts of Melissa, whose letter lay like a poison against his chest. So powerful was the effect of the letter that for a moment during the interview, he had petulantly thought of agreeing to join the joint British/American commandos out of pure pique. He’d show her — the bitch. But then the fear of sudden death had prevailed — and now he was glad. Lili’s smile beneath the Flemish bonnet was so radiant and open that despite himself, he was smiling, too.

  “You have forgotten,” she said.

  He looked blank.

  “Well — are you ready?” she added, full of enthusiasm.

  “Oh-oh — that’s a leading question,” guffawed the sergeant. David wished the MP would evaporate. Lili ignored the Englishman.

  “You do not remember,” she said, but it was uttered without rancor, almost alluringly. “I promised I would be your, ah—” She couldn’t think of the English word, her hands gesticulating impatiently, but even this was done with an infectious eagerness, full of life, of the kind of spirit that David felt had deserted him, what the French call joie de vivre.

  “My guide?” he proffered.

  “Oui—yes. My guide.”

  “Lucky you!” said the sergeant. “Can I come along, too?”

  “No.” Lili said it with such unequivocal authority, given her age, that David found himself laughing. The sergeant, unamused, mumbled something ending with “bitch,” adding officiously, “We’re leaving Brussels at sixteen hundred hours. By rights I should accompany you — you being a big hero and all. You’re my charge, you might say.”

  David wasn’t listening. He was still watching Lili.

  “Hey!” bellowed the sergeant.

  “I’m a big boy, Sarge,” said David. “You’ve done your duty directing me to HQ. I can find my way back to the station, thanks.”