World in Flames wi-3

by Ian Slater

  They did not accept his invitation to the Bear, for apart from it never having entered their heads that they would do so, it would only confirm the suspicions of others in the Oblast that what Nefski had said about them being turncoats and opportunists was true.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  In the pale light of Moscow’s dawn, the sun’s rays grew brighter by the second, and despite the air being filled with dust from the rubble of the COM, the colors within Assumption Cathedral grew richer, David hearing the SPETS moving outside, their boots crunching the tightly packed snow, their commanding officer obviously having decided to wait for more light to aid him in rooting out the last of the SAS holdouts. Cheek-Dawson was in great pain again, his left foot so swollen that the boot looked like it was about to split. From his position behind the pillar to the left of the altar and from David’s position behind the pillar to the right, they had the entrance well covered, but both knew they could not realistically hold out for any more than a few minutes once the final rush came, both of them having donned their masks for what they were sure would be a tear gas attack.

  Then they heard the tolling of the bell tower in St. Nicholas, and the very beauty of the sound, muted by the snow-laden roofs, was hardly over when the attack began, not with tear gas canisters — which would have obliged the attackers to have the encumbrances of gas masks as well — but a cluster of smoke grenades, which rolled into the cathedral, their thick, spuming white smoke churning sunbeams and obscuring the cathedral’s chandeliers.

  Neither Cheek-Dawson nor Brentwood fell for the trap of firing to give away their positions but instead quickly rolled four “flash-bangs” into the smoke, immediately cupping their ears and pressing their helmets hard up against the pillars. There was a purple flash, a splintering of glass, the sound of someone running, off to David’s left. David wheeled about the pillar, saw denser white on white — the SPETS’s overlay in the smoke — and fired a quick, three-round burst. The SPETS’s feet shot from under him as if he’d slipped on ice, and he was dead the moment he struck the floor. There was a series of shouted orders and now they all came in, Cheek-Dawson throwing two more grenades and David three in quick succession. The cathedral erupted in machine-gun fire, orange tongues darting in the thick smoke, a man screaming somewhere down by the entrance, David knowing he had only four or five good bursts left.

  “SAS!” It was a booming Russian voice with barely a trace of accent, coming through the smoke of battle and the mist born of the heat from the COM’s rubble blowing across the snow.

  “SAS! It is useless to resist further. Surrender now and you will be treated well — as prisoners of war.”

  Cheek-Dawson, his face grimacing from the pain that even the effort of speaking caused him, added wryly, “At the Ritz, no doubt.”

  “Intourist,” David said, and called out, “What are your terms?”

  “Clever lad!” said Cheek-Dawson, but David’s attempt to buy more time for the SAS men who had already left didn’t work, the Russian recognizing David’s ploy for what it was immediately and shouting angrily in return, “Come out now or you will die!”

  Cheek-Dawson pulled his last two flash-bangs closer to him, saw David had none, slid one across to him, then, teeth clenched in pain, pushed himself up against the Pillar of the Saints. “Thanks for staying, old boy,” he said to David.

  “Keep quiet,” said David, “and they might take you prisoner.”

  “I will.”

  David smiled at the Englishman’s transparent lie.

  Glass broke somewhere, and within minutes the cathedral was filled with more smoke pouring out of two or three canisters. Suddenly David saw a way of buying a little more time for those of his men already over the wall. “Always the unexpected, son!” had been Freeman’s motto. Pulling the pin on one of the grenades, holding down its lever and dashing forward through the heavy smoke toward the cathedral’s entrance, David tossed out a grenade hard left, then dashed out to the right through smoky mist. He heard the crash of the first grenade, saw two shapes — one of them a man writhing on the ground, knocked down by the first grenade, the second shape two figures to his left. He fired a full burst. One fell, knees knocked from beneath him as if hit from behind with a club, the second man behind him still coming. David dropped to the snow, firing another burst, the heat wash hot on his face, his Kevlar jacket feeling like ice picks were hitting it. A warm sensation flooded his chest, shadows flitting by him through the smoke into the cathedral.

  * * *

  Garlic, so strong it made his eyes water, was the next thing David was aware of, and a burning pain as if a red-hot poker had been thrust through his abdomen down into his thigh. The SPETS medical officer, a woman, who looked as if she towed tanks to keep fit, was glowering down at him. “You are lucky.” Her garlic breath made him turn away.

  “Where’s my friend?” he asked.

  “The English?” she said. “He tried to be brave, too.”

  David stared at her, but his focus was blurring.

  “He is dead,” she said matter-of-factly. “Comrade Malek wanted him, too, but—” she shrugged “—his earlier wounds. We could not save him.”

  “Malek—?”

  “Comrade Malek is the new head of SPETS,” said the medical officer. “He wishes to know all about SAS.”

  “I’ve never worked…” said David, gasping from his pain, “for Scandinavian Air—” He was a little deranged from the pain — and thought his answer hilariously funny. Cheek-Dawson would have liked it.

  “General Malek is in no mood for jokings.”

  Neither, as it turned out, was the president of the United States nor the prime minister of Great Britain — nor any of the other Allied leaders. They demanded immediate repatriation of all prisoners and said they were holding Chernko and his Politburo personally responsible for any harm that might befall any Allied prisoners in the Soviets’ possession — including those “personnel” who “have participated in the raid against the Russian capital.”

  But it wasn’t the tough talk that caused the Russians to repatriate David Brentwood back to London, where he would rejoin the few SAS men, seven in all, who had made it out, but rather the enormous press coverage now being given to the Kremlin raid. Chernko badly needed a highly visible propaganda act of “humanity,” and David’s hurried repatriation became part of it, due in large measure to the simple fact that only an hour earlier, the Australian, Choir Williams, and Williams A had already been airlifted after being captured in Moscow. Infrared photos from the Japanese news satellite had embarrassed the Russians by showing the world that the final SPETS attack against the SAS holdouts in Assumption Cathedral was still in progress after President Chernko had agreed to the unconditional surrender of all Soviet forces and their allies to the joint Allied command.

  It was often said to David afterward that the satellite pictures had probably saved him from being hauled off and shot as a spy and dumped in some unknown Russian grave. It didn’t seem to occur to those who told him this that the satellite pictures hadn’t saved Cheek-Dawson and that, as Aussie would have said, his fate had “simply been in the roll of the dice.”

  * * *

  David’s identity, like that of the other members of the raid, was protected for a time, because of the legendary SAS penchant for anonymity. But for Ray Brentwood, over ten thousand miles away, his ships in sight of San Diego’s Point Loma, where the crews could see the fireworks streaming up from Balboa Park and the fighters taking off from Miramar’s “top gun” school to form an honor overflight, anonymity was something he could not hope for. Only hours before, the shouts of recognition and streamers of adulation had been all he craved, but now the only thing that seemed in concert with the depression into which he’d been plunged by his fears for his wife and family was the sullen smog that hung above the San Ysidro Mountains, reminding him of the deadly fallout that would even now be blanketing the Pacific Northwest and all of the Great Plains states.

  As
he returned the salute and descended among the biggest crowd ever seen on the San Diego naval docks, Ray Brentwood suddenly became the most photographed person on earth — the man who, through brains and courage, had saved millions of American lives, and thereby thwarted an all-out nuclear holocaust, the very ugliness of his face quickly beloved by newspaper editors all over the world who saw it as an ironic and inverse measure of his heroism. Among the crowd were beautiful women trying to get close enough to touch him, others from Hollywood to ask if he had an agent — manila envelopes with “option” contracts stuffed inside thrust his way. Ray bore it as best he could — in a silence numbed by thoughts of Beth, Jeannie, and John.

  “Admiral! Admiral!” It was a blonde. A military policeman was trying to block her, for SPETS, like Hollywood, had been known to employ beautiful women for their purposes, and who could be sure that some disaffected “sleeper,” many of them still at large—

  But she wasn’t from Hollywood or SPETS, and the young MP, duty notwithstanding, found it decidedly pleasant to feel her pressed hard against him.

  “Beth and your children—” she began.

  Ray Brentwood pushed frantically toward the MP, the throng so thick, he felt like a man swimming against a riptide, the blonde’s voice all but drowned in the hysteria of congratulations about him. The woman, he noticed, was in uniform — a Wave, her hat apparently knocked off in the crush. “Sir,” she yelled, “your wife and children… in Portland. They were on their way down… soon as… heard your fleet was—”

  “They’re all right?” Ray yelled.

  “Yes, sir. They’re fine. They’re fine.”

  He hugged her and flashbulbs popped, something he’d have to explain to Beth when the National Investigator and the other tabloids of the Jay La Roche chain printed the photo under the caption “ADMIRAL MAKING WAVES!”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  “It is time for your confession!” announced General Kim’s interrogator, a bowl of steaming rice on the bare table beside him as he stood menacingly, a thick bamboo stick tapping his leggings. General Freeman, face hollow, eyes down, blinking nervously, his ravenous gaze fixed on the rice, nodded obediently. All he could think of was the film he had seen of Orwell’s 1984 when, in the end, Winston Smith — he of the famous first name and common surname — the embodiment of all mens’ strengths and weaknesses — had bowed his head in obedience to his interrogator, conceding tearfully and irrevocably that two plus two were five.

  “Remember,” the interrogator cautioned Freeman, “you must not try any jokings. You must only say what is printed on the screen.”

  “I—” began Freeman, “I do not require a—” he had difficulty remembering what it was called “—cue card. I know it.”

  “Tell me!” insisted the interrogator, the bowl of rice still steaming, holding Freeman captive with its promise.

  “I wish,” began Freeman, “to apologize for my part in the criminal warmongering activity of the United States against the freedoM-1oving peoples of the Democratic Republic of North Korea and the freedoM-1oving peoples of the People’s Republic of China…” The confession went on to “acknowledge” various other perfidies against freedoM-1oving peoples all over the globe. But Freeman was so weak, he could barely proceed. Despite the vitamin shots giving him some color, the effects of malnutrition were evident in his speech. But he knew that before the camera went on, he would be given the rice if he agreed and the promise of a full meal of vegetables and fish, which was a promise, whatever the brutalities the NKA inflicted on their victims, they had never reneged on. He had smelled it after others had confessed — the smell a torture and incitement in itself. No one, Freeman knew, who had not been starved could possibly understand how quickly one’s resolve broke down. As they took him up from the tunnel cells, a guard on each side helping him, he thought of Winston Smith again and of Jeremiah Denton, the senator from Alabama who had been so badly tortured by the North Vietnamese.

  In the glare of the lights, he looked like an animal out of its tunnel, blinking almost continuously.

  General Kim, unsmiling, dressed in immaculately pressed NKA fatigues, his flat gold-striped and red-starred shoulder boards showing to maximum effect, waited patiently, smoking contentedly.

  Kim cleared his throat and suddenly the bevy of technicians, producers, et cetera, fell silent, and in the surreal glare of the kleig lights, the smoke of his cigarette rising voluminously about him, filling the small studio, he spoke to the interrogator, though Freeman knew that Kim spoke quite fluent English from his days as the NKA’s chief negotiator at Panmunjom, where he was in the habit of informing the Americans that “you had better be careful or you will the like the Kennedys— shot like dogs in the street.” The interrogator turned to Freeman. “The general says to remind you that this is on videotape and that if you do not say exactly the words, then there will be great punishment. No food. More beatings.” The interrogator was snaking his finger at Freeman. “You understand?”

  Freeman lifted his head and nodded.

  The session began, and Freeman, the glare bothering him, asked that the lights be turned down. They refused. Still blinking like a frightened spaniel, he began, “I wish to apologize for my part in the criminal warmongering activity…” astonishing all present by getting the confession word-perfect on the first take, the interrogator pointing out to Kim how Freeman had been celebrated for his attention to detail.

  When it was aired on American networks via a South American neutral country, the American public saw the general making his confession on all three networks and the public broadcasting system. So did army intelligence. They wound back the tape and went forward in freeze-frame. Freeman’s blinking was a carbon copy of what Jeremiah Denton had done in Hanoi. Well, almost a copy, as Army General Grey explained to the president. Denton had blinked “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse. Freeman had blinked “B-U-L–L-S-H-I-T.”

  Freeman got the vegetables and fish hours before Beijing caught on. By then, the surrender of all Communist forces had been made, and within two weeks, Douglas Freeman was recuperating in the Walter Reid Army Hospital, regaling his wife and cat, whom she had illegally smuggled in, about those “stupid sons of bitches in Pyongyang.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  It was raining in Portland, but Beth didn’t care, crying uncontrollably though she knew it was very “un-navy.” Both of them explained to the children, albeit gently, that being proud of their dad was okay but not to get any swelled heads.

  “Oh, Daddy,” said Jeannie, bursting with pride. The sad note in their reunion was Beth’s report that the newspapers were listing Melissa Lange — David’s old flame, Beth remembered — as one of those killed in the Russian ICBM attacks against SAC in Omaha, and that their officers’ quarters house in Seattle was presumably “gone,” like so many others. Meanwhile they would have to remain billeted in the Marriot Hotel, which the children thought was “great!” Ray’s dad was on the line from New York, though it had taken him over an hour to get through.

  “Well, son,” he said, voice tight with emotion. “Well done. Well done. Well done.”

  “Oh, John!” It was Ray’s mom on the extension. “Sounds like you’re ordering a steak! Let me speak to him. Ray — I’m so proud. I’m just so—”

  “Now, Mother,” began John, but his wife, Catherine, took no notice, her joy unreined after hearing from the Pentagon that David, though wounded, and Robert had survived the war. The War Office had seen no point in raising the question of Robert’s radiation dosage. This was something that the navy thought would best be kept under wraps for a while, largely in an effort to dampen public concern over the number of “Chernobyls,” or downed subs, which now lay littered about the ocean’s floor and which would seriously affect the food chain for some time to come. The navy also justified its position by pointing out, correctly, that the effect of an individual’s radiation dosage could vary widely and in any case was something best left for those affec
ted to discuss with their families as they saw fit.

  * * *

  When David arrived at Heathrow in the Red Cross ambulance, his stretcher wheeled into the army waiting hall, where the other seven survivors of the SAS raid were still being debriefed after exhaustive medical examination, he was conscious, but the painkilling shots he’d received on the flight had made him dopey, putting him temporarily at peace as they readied him for transfer for the operation to remove two 7.62-millimeter bullets from his thigh. As his stretcher passed by, it was the first time David had ever seen the Australian genuinely shocked. “Struth!”

  “What’s up with Aussie?” David asked Choir Williams groggily.

  “Oh,” explained the Welshman in his basso profundo, “‘e’s lost a bloody fortune, that fellow has. Bet a packet on you, he did — that you wouldn’t make it back. Or that Laylor chappie from Troop A. Very depressed, Aussie is.”

  “Sorry to disappoint him,” said David croakily, his throat parched from the morphine.

  “Oh,” said Choir philosophically, “I wouldn’t worry about ‘im, sir. ‘E’s probably taking bets from some poor sod that the surrender won’t hold or t’ sun won’t come up in the morning.”