World in Flames wi-3

by Ian Slater

  “Yes,” answered Ray, “but was it possible that the government rules and regulations had been relaxed because of the war — to make it easier to move oil more quickly?”

  “Hell, no.” was the bureaucrat’s answer. “Doesn’t take any time at all to seed the cargo. A few drops and it’s done. If you have two that aren’t matching, there must be something wrong with your terminal. If you like, I’ll authorize one of our electronic technicians out there to check it out. We’ve got a couple on the base.”

  “Yeah, I know them,” Ray Brentwood answered. “Thanks.”

  The technician took ten minutes to tell him there was nothing wrong with the terminal. Ray ran the two samples again in the technician’s presence, aware as he did so that the technician, thinking Ray couldn’t see him, was staring at Ray’s face in the kind of fascinated horror that children exhibited upon first seeing him.

  “Still no friggin’ matchup!” Ray snapped at the technician.

  “Master data bank mightn’t have all—”

  “Yes it has!” said Ray just as grumpily as before. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Well, it ain’t that terminal, man. It’s A-okay.”

  Ray took the two samples down to the privately run yard laboratories and asked the chemical lab technician there if he’d do him a favor and run them through the spectrometer. After what the navy brass had done to him in their inquiry about the Blaine, Ray was going to play it by the book, too, and nail the big brass of whatever warship had opened its bilges and caused the ruckus in La Jolla and environs.

  The lab technician told him it was his coffee break.

  “Look,” said Ray, “I’m due back at the ship. I’m in a hurry.” The technician couldn’t suppress a smile. He’d heard about “Frankenstein’s” boat. Not a bad guy, Brentwood, they said, but man, his face was a weapon — should send it into North Korea — get the bastards to surrender in no time.

  “Okay,” said the technician magnanimously. “Wouldn’t want to delay your sailing. What are you on, destroyers?”

  “Not at the moment,” said Ray quietly. “How long will this take?”

  “Whoa there. You just got here, mac. Five minutes. Can you wait that long?” He flashed a friendly grin. Ray nodded. Destroyers? Screw him.

  “It’s the sulfur content that’ll tell us whether it’s navy or civilian fuel,” said the technician. “Tell you by the smell it’s diesel.”

  “I know that,” said Ray irritably. Destroyers. Smart-ass.

  When the computer slave hooked up to the spectrometer, the printer started chattering and the technician, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of a scummy-looking, acid-holed lab coat, started rocking on his heels, announcing knowingly, “Yep! What’d I tell you? Dieseline. Let’s see.” He leaned closer. “Sulfur content coming — hmm. That’s funny.”

  “What is?” asked Ray.

  “Sulfur content,” the technician answered.

  “What about it?”

  The technician had stopped rocking and was now frowning. It brought a twisted smile to Ray’s face. So he was right after all — one of the navy’s big ships had spewed out the oil in the sample. Or both samples. He’d get his own back.

  “Holy Toledo!” the technician said, slipping in the second bottle. It, too, was from a diesel load, he told Ray.

  “All right,” said Ray. “You have a U.S. Navy master sheet here?”

  The technician was running the sample again. “I don’t need a U.S. master sheet,” he said. He turned around and looked worriedly at Ray. “Captain, that’s Baku — prime grade. We’re looking at Russian oil here.”

  “How the hell—” began Ray.

  “Submarine grade,” said the technician. “This crap is from diesel subs. Two different lots.”

  “Can’t be,” said Ray Brentwood. “They couldn’t get that close to our coast. Christ, even their nuclear jobs are noisier than ours — in their ‘silent running’ mode, you can still hear their pumps — come in like a heartbeat on the underwater hydrophones and—” Suddenly he stopped. “Listen — I’ve got to check something out, real fast. But you sit on this until I get back to you. Understand? If we’re wrong about this, we’ll get our butts kicked from here to Norfolk.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked the technician.

  “Told you. Gotta sort something out first.”

  * * *

  Ray Brentwood was walking quickly down along the docks, turning right at one of the submarine tenders toward where he’d seen five 688 Los Angeles attack-class subs tied up. Overhead in the fast-fading twilight, gulls screeched, and the only parts of the subs that were visible were the white depth numbers painted on the rudders, which served as perches for groups of brown, dimly silhouetted pelicans. Now, thought Ray, if only Robert were here instead of flitting around the Atlantic, he’d have the answer to his question. He tried to think back to the conversation he had had with Robert about the subs, but his older brother, like most submariners, had been tight-lipped about even the most mundane matters aboard a sub, and especially about where they went and what they did, the brotherhood of submariners in a nuclear age giving new meaning to the “Silent Service.”

  “Who goes there?” It was a marine guard, his M-16 looking straight at Ray Brentwood.

  “Captain Ray Brentwood.”

  “Check his ID!” It was another marine approaching from the dark shadow of the sub’s sail. Ray put his hand up to turn his ID tag, which had flipped over in the wind.

  “Don’t move!”

  Ray mumbled. A flashlight blinded him. Instinctively he turned away from it.

  “Jesus—!” the guard began. Then shifted the beam to the ID tag. “IX-44E,” he called out to the other guard.

  “Check the board!” said another voice, and now Ray was aware that it came from high up on the sub’s sail, from the bridge, the officer of the watch a black dot against the rapidly darkening sky.

  “Sir,” called out one of the guards. “IX-44E is a sludge-removal barge — propelled. His ID number checks.”

  “Very well,” said the OOD. “What do you want, Captain?”

  “I want to ask a question about subs.”

  “They’re very well guarded,” said the OOD.

  “So I see. Look — it’s not classified as far as I know, but isn’t it true that a nuclear sub’s quieter than the old diesels — or any diesel for that matter?”

  “Of course. Most of the time. Why?”

  Ray answered him with a follow-up question. “What do you mean, ‘most of the time’?”

  “Well, cooling pumps on a nuclear sub are going all the time — have to because of the reactor. On a diesel you can shut the engines right down. Go on batteries. No pumps at all. No noise. Then a diesel’s quieter than a nuclear.”

  Ray wasn’t aware of saying thank you, though he did, but as he turned back along the pier, his pace increased. Born out of his spite, he now knew the answer to the navy’s riddle of how the Russians were getting so close to the convoys, and he was now convinced they were close in off the West Coast — no doubt the East Coast as well. He was running flat out, heart thumping. The diesel boats were the key — the diesels, which in the nuclear age had been relegated to the museums. Hell, the United States no longer had any. But they could carry missiles as well as any nuclear-powered ship. And they were cheaper. He knew that much. For every SSN or Sea Wolf like the Roosevelt, you could build half a dozen diesels, equip them with snorkels. The only difference was speed and the time they could stay submerged. But if they were on battery power and shut down the engine, they could drift and you’d never hear them. If the war went nuclear in Europe and the Russians decided to launch, having subs close in to the American coast would have an enormous advantage and—

  Breathless, he arrived in the San Diego base commander’s office, sweat pouring unevenly from his mottled, burn-patch face, terrifying the Wave secretary on duty, who screamed, bringing two burly shore patrol men in from the duty room.

&
nbsp; “I’ve — got—” Ray began, but had to stop to catch his breath. “I’ve got to see the base commander. At once—”

  “Sure, buddy!” said the smaller, burlier of the two linebackers. “You just simmer down now and come with us.”

  “Look!” said Ray, jerking his arms, but they were locked in the shore patrol’s grasp.

  “Call the LT, will you, Sue?” said the smaller one. LT was the shore patrol’s lingo for “loony truck.” With the stress of this war, a lot of the guys and some of the women, too, just plain flipped their lids.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Standing back to front with him, Alexsandra felt her hair fall softly across Sergei’s chest, her hands plying behind her, cupping him, squeezing him. He felt so hard, he could penetrate steel. Then she would relax her grip, kneading his groin with her clenched fists and turning to face him, would kiss him all over as they fell on the bed. Then suddenly she would sit upright, hair swinging back, her breasts thrusting, nipples engorged like dark cherries, her hands behind her again, pulling him slowly with mounting strength and squeezing it at the same time until he groaned and mumbled nonsensically in his pleasure. Suddenly she was off the bed, getting dressed — his favorite tease.

  “Vernis!”—”Come back!”—he demanded, then pleaded.

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “No!”

  “Sandra.”

  Slowly she advanced toward him.

  “Now,” he gasped. “I can’t stand it any longer.”

  “It’s long enough already,” she giggled. She didn’t love him, but he was fun. She was sure it had been his influence that had got her released from the KGB jail. If she worked on him, maybe — if God wished — her two remaining brothers, Alexander and Myshka, might be set free. It was a vain hope, she knew, but so long as there was any possibility, she must try— do anything if it would help. It meant that she had to pretend a lot: faking an orgasm for his manly pride when she had wanted to choke him. But after pretending so long, she had begun to enjoy it, and the rougher he was with her as he approached climax, the more she liked it. It helped to rationalize what she was doing. It was God’s way, she decided, of helping her get through it.

  “Sit on me!” he ordered. “Quickly, quickly!”

  As she slid down upon him, the storm outside seemed to grow stronger, uncontrollable, the wind smacking the bare branches of the beech tree against the ancient windowpane, making a scratching noise like a cat trying to get in. His nostrils sucked in her smell as his hands and wrist muscles tensed, his body moving up and down beneath her, her breasts rising and falling faster and faster, her loins pressed hard against his sweat-slicked thighs until she, too, began moaning with pleasure.

  * * *

  Ray Brentwood asked the chief petty officer in charge of cells at the San Diego base, if he, Brentwood, wrote a note, would the petty officer deliver it to either the base commander or the base’s director of naval intelligence as soon as possible.

  The chief petty officer read it. “You sure about this, Captain?”

  “Look, Chief, I’m not nuts. Bit too excited, I guess, when your guys picked me up. That’s all. And I hope you’re not nuts either, because if you don’t get that to someone fast, they’re gonna do a Pearl Harbor on you.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I mean in forty-one there was a message in the hopper warning Pearl of an impending Japanese attack — the day before it happened. But some jerk back in Washington decided to use Western Union instead of calling it through. I’ve got evidence here that there are at least two Russian subs close inshore, and I mean close in. Closer than anyone believed possible, because all we could think of was nuclear and—” He paused as the CPO, his jaw clenched, looking like he was grinding his molars, read Brentwood’s message again. “Chief!” said Brentwood. “You deliver that now and you’re going to be part of history. A hero. You don’t deliver it and your name’ll be shit in every textbook ever written about this war. Course, if you don’t do anything about it, we’ll all be dead, so there won’t be any history for you to worry about anyway.”

  The chief looked at Brentwood, and then staggered him. “Hell, I can’t take it anywhere. I can’t leave my post. Hey — I’ll use a walkie-talkie link to patrol. Get ‘em down here to run it up for us.”

  Brentwood sat back on the hard cell mattress, letting his head roll against the cold brick. “You keep this up, Chief, and they’ll make you an admiral.”

  * * *

  The chief of naval intelligence for San Diego base was down in the cells fifteen minutes later. He listened to Brentwood and told the shore patrol to get the lab technician out of bed to verify it. “Drag him here if you have to.”

  When the patrol knocked on the technician’s door, he had just convinced his wife to give him some “relief.” He swore a lot when they barged in on him and told him he’d have to go back with them.

  “Right now?” he asked incredulously. “Damn near midnight.”

  “My God!” said his wife. “What’s he done?”

  “Can’t say, ma’am.”

  “Then you can’t take him — if there’s no charge.”

  “It’s all right, Norma. I know what it’s about.”

  “What? Tell me.”

  “Can’t tell you, hon,” said the technician, struggling to get into his pants and nearly falling. “It’s classified.”

  “What’s her name?” called Norma.

  When they got him out to the Humvee, it was ten after midnight, and Norma was sure he was mixed up with some other woman. An admiral’s wife. He was always telling her he needed “it” more than most men. Maybe she should have let him have his way more often. Lord — maybe it was drugs! She phoned her mother.

  “What’d I tell you, Norma? I told you. He’s a bum. But oh no — you knew better. He’s a bum, Norma!”

  * * *

  On the other side of the world, Frank Shirer was flying as left wingman in a finger-four formation of four F-14 Tomcats out of Kapsan Air Base, thirty miles south of the Yalu. He was regretting he had broken one of the cardinal rules for combat pilots in not having a substantial breakfast before going up on the border patrol, but the problem was he had never been a breakfast man — early mornings not his forte. But normally he would have grabbed at least a continental: juice, toast, and coffee. It wasn’t enough for a pilot who might have to go into a sustained high G-turn, and he hadn’t slept well.

  During the night he’d had dreams of the Russian fighters out of Vladivostok attacking the 747 in which he had flown Freeman to Korea. He was also a little nervous and almost regretted — heresy for a pilot — having accepted Freeman’s offer of a few days of combat patrol to keep his hand in before flying the repaired 747 back to the States tomorrow. The skills of the fighter pilot never left you, but the sudden switch from the big 747 to a Tomcat was like going from a bus to a sports car, and the morning before, he’d been a little slow as the Tomcat leader’s left wingman. He’d been only a fraction of a second late in a breakaway, but a fraction of a second could mean you were dead when you were flying over the “fence”— the Yalu. More and more MiG 29A’s had been seen in Manchurian air space — riding range on the other side. And sometimes they looked identical to U.S. planes on the radar. Two F-15 Eagles and an F-16 had been “splashed” off the coast by fellow U.S. Navy fighters because IFF — identification friend or foe — had been made on radar alone.

  As a result, the American rules of engagement now stated that all U.S. pilots could not engage before IFF had been established by “visual fix”—a radar blip insufficient to assume a Bogey, or unidentified aircraft, was in fact a “Judy”—an enemy plane. Even the normally swashbuckling Freeman, before he’d disappeared across the Yalu, had endorsed the rule, but the necessity of having to make a visual fix imposed a serious tactical disadvantage on the American pilots. It meant that the long-range missiles, such as the nine-mile-range infrared homing Sidewinder, which needed time — even
though this was measured in milliseconds — to lock on to an enemy’s exhaust or side heat patch, couldn’t be used to anywhere near their full effectiveness. At shorter ranges, the missile could be evaded by the tight-turning MiGs before the Sidewinder had time to “lock on.”

  For this reason, the Sparrow missile was preferred. Ironically it had a longer range at twenty-four miles than the Sidewinder, but did not require heat exhaust to lock on and could be fired from any angle. But at 514 pounds, it was more than twice as heavy as the Sidewinder, and this meant fewer missiles could be carried.

  “Bogeys two o’clock high!” It was the wingman — right side of the finger-four formation of Tomcats — the four blips coming out of the northwest behind and to the right as the Tomcats headed southwest over the Yalu. The blips were fourteen miles away. The Tomcats’ leader had a choice to either break left, south, away from the Yalu into the U.S.- and-South-Korean-held North Korea, or to go north for a visible fix, with the possibility of engagement if the Bogeys turned out to be Judys. The Tomcats had already consumed half their fuel.

  “Go for IFF,” announced the Tomcat leader, and the F-14s turned tightly, pulling seven Gs, Shirer already feeling the effect of his heart literally distending under the pull of the G forces, wishing now more than ever that he’d had the toast. Behind him, his radar intercept officer had gone to “warning yellow, weapons hold” status, his active radar frantically hipping and the Northrop TCS — long-range television camera set — unable to identify the blips because of heavy cumulus, which the blips were now entering.

  The four Tomcats had split into two combat pairs, Shirer still on his leader’s left and back, covering him, the Tomcats’ wings now coming in from the extended, fuel-conserving position to the tight V for greater speed at the cost of increasing fuel consumption. Shirer heard the Pratt and Whitney turbofans screaming as he and the leader went to afterburner.

  “Bandits!” It was the leader’s radar intercept officer, and now Shirer’s RIO was telling him that from the computer-enhanced radar cross-section image, the Bogeys were in fact Russian fighters. “Fulcrums,” he advised Shirer, “A’s.”