Ian Slater - Warshot

Finding that his eyes got tired after only a small time at the computer screens, Freeman had the reports run out on hard copy and was now going over them for any signs of an earlier than normal thaw, at the same time trying to put himself in Yesov’s shoes should the Siberian commander decide to attack across the westernmost defensive line of the cease-fire, namely Lake Baikal. Freeman marked off possible Siberian jump-off points on the west bank of the four-hundred-mile lake, especially those down around the small port of Baikal at the southern end, which now lay in American hands under the terms of the cease-fire. If Yesov attacked, Freeman decided he would send in Stealth bombers to try to take out the line along the cliffs that formed the southern arm of the Trans-Siberian as it curved about the lake before dipping south into Mongolia. Even with Smart bombs, however, a rail line was notoriously difficult to take out, as ties and rails could by replaced in a matter of hours.

He poured another black coffee and looked at his watch. It was 0400, with only the cease-fire skeleton staff on duty. Even Dick Norton, who tried to keep pace with the general, had gone to bed. At times Freeman felt guilty for not having the time to think more about the welfare of his staff. He hadn’t even thought much about Doreen, his wife, who had died only a short time before and for whose funeral he couldn’t return — the battle for Ratmanov Island raging at the time. But he knew his first responsibility was to Second Army as a whole, knowing that a surprise attack, which neither Washington nor London nor any of the other Allies expected, could presage a disaster. Doreen, he was sure, would have been the first to understand. She had been the ideal serviceman’s wife — uncomplaining, ready to follow at a moment’s notice, and, if the truth be known, the source of much of his earlier strength when, as a young officer, he was trying to make his mark in a field crowded with other veterans of the Iraqi war. He had experienced both hosannas and hoots, the former when he’d led the raid on Pyongyang and reached Baikal, the latter when he’d used fuel air explosives over Ratmanov. La Roche’s tabloids in particular had alternated between making him a saint and a “warmonger.” Presently they were saying that he was a man “obsessed” by war, unable to see that “there could be an end to it.”

They were right, he was a warrior — saw the world with a warrior’s eye — but there was nothing he could do about that. It was the way he was made. When they walked on the spring grass, people marveled at the beauty of swallows sweeping low, so close to yet never quite touching the grass, their darting blue-metal sheen a thing of joy to watch. Freeman enjoyed watching them, too, but he knew that it was the feet of the people visiting the park that scared up insects which the swallows then swooped low to kill, and that this was every bit as much a part of the scene as was the beauty. Even the most tranquil scene he could remember— the tidal pools he and Doreen had seen around Monterey— were in fact miniature seas populated by creatures for whom battle was never ending. You fought or you died.

Dutch Harbor was in darkness. If the aurora borealis was “kicking up its ‘eels,” Doolittle said, “some ruddy great clouds are in the way, mate.” But his fellow patient, Frank Shirer, wasn’t listening. The flier, his convalescence rapidly coming to an end, was engrossed in the Wall Street Journal that Doolittle had given him. It wasn’t a paper Frank normally perused. Neither did Doolittle, investment to the cockney constituting an eternal mystery. “Stocks” in his family were things Robin Hood was put in if the Sheriff of Nottingham ever caught him. Doolittle dragged heavily on his cigarette, glancing down at the Xeroxed page he’d inserted into the newspaper so that no passersby, including the MD he called “Joe Friday”—”Just the facts, soldier”—could see Frank studying it. “Bit of a fudge,” Doolittle conceded.

“Fudge?” replied Frank. “It’s downright cheating!”

“Well, mate, this is the first time I’ve ever ‘eard that a man who wants to get ‘imself killed is cheatin.’ That’s a new one, that is. Personally, I wouldn’t do it — I’ve already done my bit, squire. For me it’s out on the old compo— disabled soldiers’ pension to you — and a deck chair on Brighton Beach, lookin’ at the birds strolling’ up an’ down. An’ I don’t mean bloody sea gulls. Yep — that’ll do me nicely, that will. Me, the deck chair, wiv a jar o’ Flower’s bitter.” He exhaled, cigarette smoke appearing to come from every orifice in his head behind the bandages that covered the horrible burns he’d suffered during the taking of Ratmanov Island. “And that’s what I’d do if I were you, mate,” he advised Frank Shirer. “Crikey, you’ve already done your bit for king and country. Besides, you got a good-lookin’ bird. That Lana’s a real corker, she is. All you need, mate, is the ruddy beach. Instead, what you want to do? Go up in one of them bloody death traps again.”

Doolittle took another heavy drag on the Player’s, leaned back and shook his head, hands together, head smoking again like a double boiler about to blow. He leaned over and, tapping the Xerox of the Snellen eye chart, told Frank conspiratorially, “Best day’s Monday, see? When old Joe Friday ‘sn’t around. The new doc’s a bit unsure of ‘imself, so ‘e’s followin’ the same bloody routine day after day. Same chart, same sequence. Ail you have to know is which letter’s where. Right? He puts ‘is black patch stick over your good eye and asks you what you see. You can make out the blur wiv your bad eye can’t you?”

“Yes — just.”

“There you are, then. ‘E points to the third blur in the fourth row and you’ve got it. ‘Cause you memorized the chart. Right? Piece o’ cake!”

The smoke came pouring down from the cockney’s nostrils like a dragon, and Frank drew back out of range.

“They’re so many guys ‘e’s got to do, see?” explained Doolittle. “Even if he changes the routine from one blur to another, you memorize the chart, you’ve got it. Besides, you got one big thing going for you, old cock.”

“Yeah,” said Frank wryly. “I could be court-martialed.”

The cockney laughed; which was appropriate, Frank thought. Doolittle wouldn’t be the one on a charge.

“Nah, mate. Listen — what you forget is, none of these guys wants to pass the test. What they want — what you’d want, if you weren’t so bloody daft — is to get home fast as they can, start usin’ the old joystick in bed, not up in the blue fucking yonder.”

For Doolittle, his “plan to put one over” on the authorities — in this case, a greenhorn MD fresh from medical school and not yet wise to the ways of the army — was a bit of a lark. But to Frank it meant a restless night of old dreams, of Adolf Galland, the one-eyed German Luftwaffe ace, of the British ace Douglas Bader and the Canadian Rosin, who, after a seven-year court battle with the army, had won the right to be a paratrooper, despite having only one eye. Visions of Lana invaded the dreams as she fought her way through the crowd of pilots, not saying a word; and through it all there was the crackle of fighter pilots mixing it up in a furball, a Soviet MiG-29 going into the radar-defying stall slide, Sergei Marchenko, the Mikoyan Works emblem on the Fulcrum’s fuselage, coming at the Tomcat at Mach 1.2 in a steep dive, the MiG’s thirty-millimeter cannon winking, followed by two white puffs as two Aphid air-to-air missiles streaked toward Shirer, his copilot yelling, “I’ve been hit”—and all because of information overload on the one good eye, misreading the Heads-Up display. He pulled the Tomcat hard out of the “Finger Four” formation, going into the scissors so as to get Marchenko to overfly him, get the Tomcat into the MiG’s cone. But then it was the Tomcat, his radar intercept officer screaming, Marchenko’s Fulcrum now in the Tomcat’s cone of vulnerability. There was a bang, the Cat shuddering violently and Frank screaming at his RIO to get out. The next second he pulled the strip, heard the explosive bolts go, felt the wind tearing at his face, like rushing through some vast refrigerator, and heard the snap of his chute opening, the RIO’s on fire, going down like a Roman candle.