Ian Slater: Arctic Front

By the pool, Freeman fell silent, Marjorie patting him understandingly on the arm as she placed the coffee cups atop the bubbled plastic table. Again she’d completely mistaken his mood, his staring down at the pool an attempt to turn her off for a while, but she was as unrelenting as a Soviet artillery barrage, her vigor something he would have admired in any soldier. In her case it seemed nothing more than the energy of a certified airhead.

She was a good woman, doing the right thing, but by God he wished she’d go back to Phoenix. At heart her optimism was born of the same kind of deep-seated confidence that Freeman held in the face of life’s vicissitudes, but something about her unquestioning conviction that “all is for the best” only moved him to seek the opposite view, if only for argument’s sake, a perversity alien to his usual nature.

“My,” she said, pouring the coffee in an irritating up-and-down motion that he saw no point to. “I was reading the other day about those Brentwood boys. Three heroes — all in one family. My, and the article said one of them was with you in Korea and the Dortmund-Bellfeld pocket.”

“Bielefeld,” grumped Douglas. “He wasn’t with the there. He’d been dropped outside the pocket by mistake — smack into the Russian lines.”

“ You must be very proud of him,” she continued, oblivious to the correction. “Medal of Honor winner and all.”

“Proud of all my boys who—” He was about to say “are” instead of “were in my command.” He pulled the coffee toward him. “Young David Brentwood. He’s a good man. Wounded in Russia but back on his feet in no time.”

For a moment that indicated to him that he’d been away from the front too long, Freeman almost found himself in violation of security — about to tell her that members of the Allied outfit in which Brentwood served, Britain’s Special Air Service, were blood brothers with America’s Delta Force.

“And the two other brothers,” continued Marjorie. “The one on that Roosevelt boat.”

“Submarine,” Freeman corrected her.

“But that poor other brother — Ray — the one whose face was all burned on that other boat.”

“Guided missile frigate,” said Freeman, carelessly dropping in two sugar cubes as if they were dumb bombs.

“The miracles those surgeons did on him. My oh my. If ever I saw the hand of God at work, Douglas, that was it.” A zephyr passed over the pool, wrinkling it, and he watched it like an omen before the surface was placid again. “And they have this special mask now — looks like one of those hockey goalies — to help the healing and…”

Freeman restrained himself, tempted to ask her where God’s hand had been for the men who’d drowned in the attack on the USS Blaine — the first American warship to be hit in the war. But he didn’t bother. He believed God’s plan was a lot more complicated than that, that freedom meant the freedom to… But what the hell, he thought. Airheads like Marjorie also served Him — her task, no doubt, to talk the devil to death.

“Isn’t it nice out here?” she said, taking a deep breath of the cool, salty air. “I always find the pool so calming. Don’t you?”

Freeman grunted. Where Marjorie saw a translucent pool of ultramarine beneath the clearing sky — saw nature in harmony, insects happily skimming across the water’s mirrored surface, Freeman saw an unending battle, one insect pursuing another— a fight to the finish. Which made him think again of amphibious operations. They were undoubtedly the riskiest of all military undertakings. There Murphy’s Law was king.

No matter how much planning, how many rehearsals, disaster always lurked in the ever-changing sea. If the Siberian threat turned to war, the shortest distance was across the Bering Strait, which now would be a mass of ice floes. The moment he thought of ice he recalled two things simultaneously. The first was the English lord who, in the lounge of the Titanic as it struck the iceberg, had exclaimed imperturbably, “I sent for ice but this is ridiculous!” The second thing was the curious feet, filed away in his brain along with a thousand other apparently trivial yet vital pieces of logistical information, that at latitude sixty-five degrees, thirty minutes north the ice cakes forming in the dead of winter would be more dispersed, more loosely packed than in the warmer spring months when local currents and wind changed to shift ice northward — that is, packing it tighter together in spring than in the winter. It was precisely the opposite to what one would imagine, and this would make it much tougher for icebreakers or any other ship to negotiate. Also during the winter, unlike the spring and the fall, skies tended to be clearer, often with brilliant sunshine, bad news for close-support air cover when it would be possible for observers on Ratmanov, the Soviet name for Big Diomede, to see clear across the strait.

Anyway, you sure as hell couldn’t launch a sea invasion of Siberia or Diomede if you had to contend with pack ice. There was something else about the ice that he could not recall — was it that there was no ice south of the Pribilof Islands? But hell, that was over 650 miles south of Ratmanov. No, it was something else, but it wouldn’t come to him. Perhaps it was the note he’d made in his card index file — computer discs could be wiped clean by a big bomb’s electromagnetic pulse — that unless a ship wanted to risk being locked in the ice, or forced to move so slowly it would be like a dinosaur as a target, it would have to stand off the southern, protective side of the Pribilofs to launch any cruise missiles at Ratmanov. No, that meant it was some other detail about the ice buzzing around in his head, but it wouldn’t settle amid the constant patter of Marjorie’s antiaircraft fire. He wondered if the Pentagon’s contingency planners knew as much about the area as he did. He doubted it — not immodestly but from long experience. The trouble with the Pentagon was that there were too many desk jockeys — not enough people who had actually walked around and seen the places where they might have to fight a battle one day. Douglas Freeman had.

On his own money and time, he’d used every vacation and other time to visit every major battlefield in Europe before the war and had jotted down his observations on his three-by-five cards — operational plans for what he called potential “flash points.” One such plan had been for the Kuwait-Iraqi border, another for the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. Freeman had also been to Alaska. He had trekked to see the lonely, windswept monument to Will Rogers eleven miles southwest of Barrow on the godforsaken tundra of Alaska’s North Slope and had seen more than thirty bald eagles at once, on the banks of the Chilkat River, their white throat fur above the black body and white tails giving them a nobility among the winter-stripped cottonwoods that he would never forget. He had also been to Cape Prince of Wales, where high up in the stunningly clear air at the westernmost tip of Alaska’s Seward Peninsula he had gazed out over the white strait, the cobalt blue line of Siberia on the horizon, and had seen the two specks that were the Diomede Islands. Perhaps it was there he had learned whatever it was about the ice that now he couldn’t recall. He would have to go down to his basement, go through the rotary card file. “Excuse me,” he told Marjorie. “Think I’ll take a nap.” He forced a smile. “Still not over my jet lag.”

“Yes. You poor thing, Douglas. Thank the Lord I’m not affected.”

“What — pardon?” asked Freeman as he stood up and pushed the chair back by the edge of the pool.

“Jet lag,” said Marjorie serenely. “Thank the Lord I don’t get it. I’m not affected.”