Ian Slater - Warshot

“Shush!” said a calming voice. “You’ll wake the whole ward.” And then the voice was gone. It was dark, only the dim pinpoints of light on the IV drip monitors telling him he was still in hospital.

They had been the same nightmares that had plagued him for weeks, nightmares that he hadn’t told Lana about and which had been responsible for his sudden mood shifts— unlike him, but which, he knew, Lana had noticed with increasing anxiety. And so finally, now, with the arctic wind howling mournfully about the hospital at Dutch Harbor, he made the decision. To hell with the nightmares. There was no way he wanted to live the rest of his life, like so many, haunted by regret. He’d have to find out in the only way he knew how. He’d do a bit of a “fudge,” as Doolittle had put it. Besides, before they put him in a cockpit, he’d have to pass on ground simulators. There he wouldn’t kill anyone if his single-eye vision couldn’t cope. The worst he’d do would be to flunk the course. He’d risk a court-martial in the event that the green doctor wasn’t as green as Doolittle figured.

He got up, put the hospital robe around him, and made his way quietly through the ward and to the right, toward the TV room. He could hear that someone else was watching — an old Johnny Carson rerun — Buddy Hackett telling a joke about a guy yowling, “Wah — wah — wah,” with awful genital pain. “… So the guy goes to see doctor after doctor. Finally the only thing they could do, they said, was to remove his testicles. They didn’t have any other answer. After his operation, the guy goes to a men’s clothing store, buys a new suit, asks for a couple of ties, and asks for size thirty-four waist underpants. The clerk says he should get a size thirty-six. The guy tells the clerk he knows what he wants and it’s a size thirty-four. Clerk runs a tape measure around the guy’s waist and says, ‘No, sir. If you wore a thirty-four you’d have terrible pain in the testicles.’ Wah — wah — wah!”

Shirer roared laughing; he was feeling so good now that he’d made the decision. The man watching the show, another pilot who’d also been wounded over Ratmanov, was just sitting there, hands tremulous. “You okay?” asked Frank.

The pilot shook his head but kept looking up at Frank. For help. Shirer saw a packet of cigarettes in the man’s robe pocket, and though he didn’t smoke, he took one and lit it up for the guy and sat with him, watching the Carson show. The longer he sat there, the more he wondered if somehow he should take the guy’s condition as a warning — remembering one time how a top gun on Salt Lake City who graduated top of the class got shot down after fifteen missions. Everyone thought he was fine after, and he was, for seven more missions. Then bam! Everything came apart. Now, just hearing the sound of going on afterburner made him a head case.

When you were young you never thought you’d crack up.

It was the first time in months that General Freeman had seen his aide, Dick Norton, unshaven and in pajamas, the flannelet bottoms sticking out from underneath the greatcoat like red-and-white-striped barber poles. As he came through the door and pulled the blackout curtain aside, a flurry of snow blew in after him like an angry ghost. Despite the fact that his quarters were only ten yards from the HQ Quonset, Norton already looked half frozen. Freeman knew it must be urgent.

“Minus forty,” said Norton, handing the general the SITREP, the buff-colored situation report folder with a crimson stripe across the right-hand corner and marked “Top Secret.” It told Freeman there was marked activity all along the Siberian-Chinese border. The Chinese had been moving up the Shenyang army at night, but here and there in gaps through the cloud cover infrared satellite photos had detected them.

“Only thing we can do, Dick, is to keep a close eye on it. I want to see all SITREP reports over China, Secret and above. Hopefully, of course, everyone else is right and I’m wrong and the cease-fire’ll hold. Maybe the Chinese are just being prudent — taking precautions. As I would. But if it doesn’t hold, I don’t want to be caught with my pants down.”

“No, sir.”

“Meanwhile — long as the Chinese keep out of it, we won’t bother them.”

The door flew open. A sergeant, his voice muffled by the khaki scarf that hid his face up to his eyes, staggered in, dusted with snow. Not bothering to look up, and certainly not expecting the general to be up and about at this hour, he stamped the snow off his boots, proclaiming to the skeleton headquarters staff, “I don’t think this fuckin’ berg’ll ever thaw out!”

“Good!” answered Freeman to the startled soldier. “If we have to engage, son, I want hard ground under our tracks!”

“I must be sure,” insisted Yesov.

“I promise you, Marshal.” It was Kirov, head of the KGB’s “new and improved”—as Novosibirsk sarcastically put it — First Directorate, covering Canada and the U.S. “Once the signal arrives in—”

“Yes, yes, I know all that. But this is not enough, that your people are ready. The point is, your operation must precede my operation. That is vital. For me to begin ‘Concert,’ the American convoys must lose their ability to reinforce Freeman’s Siberian garrison.”

“Marshal, I can assure you — everything’s in order. You can start Operation Concert as you have planned. My people will already be doing their part. This I guarantee.”

“What is the code name you’re using?” inquired Yesov. He wanted no mistakes, no matter how remote the possibility of two operations being accorded the same name.

“‘Ballet,’ sir,” said Kirov, smiling.

The marshal was not known for his sense of humor, and in any case looked blankly then sternly at Kirov, who seemed very pleased with himself with the joining of his, Kirov’s, Operation Ballet with Yesov’s Concert. “This is no joking matter, Kirov. My intention is to kill every American in my sight. Gorbachev — the fool — might have liked them. I do not.”

“Nor I, comrade.”

With that, the marshal of all the armies in the United Siberian Republic abruptly left. He was ready. Despite the sudden drop to minus forty degrees reported in the American sector, the long-range forecast was for a dramatic warming within the week, and only then another plunge in temperature.

The two Black Berets were having a little fun with the Jewess on the way, one holding her tightly in the back of the police van, the other feeling her beneath the long Mongolian peasant skirt she’d worn on the escape route from Baikal through Mongolia to Harbin. Only now did Alexsandra realize why Latov, without as much urging as she had thought would be necessary, had told her about the troop buildup on the Siberian-Chinese border and the movement of troops from the southern military regions across the Yangtze at Nanking, the approach roads to other bridges over the great Yellow River effectively useless because of the early spring floods in the warmer south.

Cold, she was shivering as much from fear as from the musty, bone-eating dampness of the cell in the Gong An Ju’s — Public Security Bureau’s — so-called new jail on Zhongyang Street. The Songhua River that ran past the jail was still frozen, but water beneath the ice seeped into the cells from around the embankment and from Stalin Park. For some reason she didn’t understand, instead of immediately dwelling on her situation — indeed, as she later realized, as a way of denying the terror her capture now held for her — she found herself thinking about how ironic it was that the Chinese, who took such pride in their self-reliance, insisted on retaining and paying homage to two foreigners: parks and streets were still being named after Marx and Stalin when the rest of the world, including the new CIS and the other Soviet republics, had torn down the demagogues of Marx-Leninism.