Ian Slater: Arctic Front

“It’s brilliant,” he conceded. “Tell Novosibirsk the Third Motorized is with them.”

As Freeman walked toward his house, the wind, cold for Monterey, carried with it the invigorating tang of sea air mixed with the oppressive smell of a high-sulfur-content oil, the lower grade of crude still being rationed for civilian use, while consumer and antipollution groups pressed hard for the less sulfurous grades previously reserved for the military to be released for the domestic market now that the war was over. Freeman saw that the man spread-eagled in the sand and dune grass was dead, his T-shirt dark cherry red, a Beethoven motif faintly visible in the clinging stain of blood. Freeman heard the sound of sirens in the distance; seemed to be one coming, one going. His battle-trained hearing was acute; he did not make the mistake of confusing the echo for its origin — a mistake that had proved fatal for those troops during the war who had come up against the five-truck platoons of forty multiple-layered BM-21 Katyushas — truck-mounted rockets — for the first time.

“General Freeman?”

“Yes?”

It was a young female police officer, — short-cropped blond hair, sky-blue eyes, her khaki uniform smart, creases crisply ironed, green side piping without a wrinkle, the Smith and Wesson.38 high on her left side, he noticed. “My wife?” he said, the smile he’d had for the welcome-home crowd now gone. He could have been back at Minsk asking for SITREPS on unit deployment, his tone concerned, his control born in part from having witnessed what the Russians had called the boynya— “abattoir”—in Germany’s Fulda Gap. There the Russian armored echelons had poured through in right and left hooks before being stopped in the south by the American and Bundeswehr divisions, and in the north by the British Army of the Rhine — the choking dust literally dampened by blood as motorized infantry of both sides were torn apart in the shrapnel-filled air.

“Is she all right?” asked the general, a cheek muscle taut, his gloved right hand now a fist.

“Critical, sir, I’m afraid. She’s en route to Peninsula Hospital.”

“What happened?” A young boy, smiling, grasping a tiny stars and stripes, started beneath the ribbon toward the general. One of the MPs gently cut him off.

“We’re not exactly sure, General,” the female officer told him.”We got a 459 in progress — breaking and entering — about eighteen minutes ago. When we got here—” The officer turned, Freeman’s gaze following her outstretched hand, her notebook obscuring the man’s legs for a moment. “We found the front gate open. Back door was closed but not locked. Apparently he entered that way — round the back. We found some blood on the back pathway. It looks as if your wife fired two shots, but he made it to the sidewalk before he collapsed.” She paused. “He’s dead.”

Freeman turned back toward the army car, its khaki/black/green wave camouflage paint dulled even further by moody stratus threatening the coast as far up as Santa Cruz. His driver was pale, waiting anxiously, the situation obviously beyond her experience.

“General, sir—” said the policewoman. “I know it’s inconvenient, but could you identify the weapon your wife fired?”

“What?”

“The weapon your wife fired, sir. The man who broke in — well, he — he used a knife, General. We assume that Mrs. Freeman was the one who—”

Freeman seemed to be looking through the crowd, through the house, his right fist balling in his left. “Walther,” he said. “Nine millimeter.”

“This it, sir?” asked another police officer, holding up a Ziplock plastic bag containing a nine-millimeter automatic.

“Looks like it,” said Freeman, glancing at the gun. “Serial number’s in safety deposit.” He was looking out to sea, eyes squinting in the metallic glare that was still present though the sun was covered with cloud. “First Savings and Loan,” he told them. “Duplicate license at the base. Fort Ord.”

“Registered in your name, General?”

“Yes. Look, I’d like to get to the hospital. If there are any more questions you can—”

A flashbulb popped. He froze — first rule for any combat soldier caught in a flare. Natural instinct was to dive, but movement was what the enemy was looking for. If you could steel yourself to stand perfectly still, chances were they either wouldn’t see you or would mistake you for something else. It was only a second, but to the crowd outside his house it looked as if the general were momentarily transfixed with fright. Freeman sensed it and glowered furiously at the photographer.

Before Freeman arrived at the emergency ward at Peninsula Hospital there was a story on all the networks that the wife of General Douglas Freeman had been the victim of an attempted burglary gone wrong, was critically wounded, and that the general was — as the still photo accompanying the sound bite seemed to indicate—”visibly shaken.” The photo was also picked up by Reuters and UPI, and the implicit suggestion, made explicitly in the tabloids of the La Roche chain, was that the reason Freeman had been recalled in such haste after the Moscow surrender was due to the “hard-to-disguise fact” that the general’s nerves were already shot.

When Trainor handed the president the green file, a crimson diagonal stripe on its cover, containing the eight-by-ten blowups, he bent the gooseneck lamp down closer in the semidarkness of the working study with double steel reinforced walls in the south wing. Not far from the Oval Office, the smaller office was favored by the president not simply because it was more protected but because it had an older, comforting smell, reminiscent of his childhood — an air of old leather lounge chairs, of security, of how things used to be, of how he wished they could be again in the rapidly changing world. Also, here he could better work in the subdued light — a necessity, not a choice, when he was afflicted with the migraines that had plagued him ever since his Congressional days and which were as much a secret between Trainor, the president, and his secretary as were the codes for nuclear war in the possession of the air force officer who even now was sitting outside the study with the briefcase, or “football,” containing the daily “Go” codes. The headaches didn’t slow Mayne down; on the contrary, he held to Nietzsche’s adage that that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and believed the will required to surmount the pain served him better than those whose faculties were not tried by any such ordeal. It was a constant reminder to him of what could be done, despite the obstacles, if you set your mind to it. He examined the photographs before him more closely, but the mountain range continued to puzzle him. Nebraska and Montana were as flat as a pancake — unless these MX sites he was looking at were smack up against the Big Horn Mountains or the Rockies of the Continental Divide that rose so dramatically from the prairie.”What was the name of that old Jimmy Stewart movie?” he mused aloud to Trainor. ‘ “The Far Country?”

“That’s not the western states,” answered Trainor, moving around to look over the president’s shoulder. “It’s supposed to be Kamchatka. Yeah — it is.”

“No wonder I was—” began Mayne, feeling foolish, only now realizing what he was looking at — that the half-dozen black doughnuts, a white dot in the middle of each the size of a pin-head, were the Siberian ICBM sites set in the deep, V-shaped defiles of towering, glacier-hung granite. These were open missile silos in Kamchatka Peninsula. The next photo was of the ICBM complex at Petropavlovsk which, though difficult to get at with U.S. missiles because of the acute south-north turning angles required to hit a target in deep east-west axis defiles, could nevertheless very easily take out the U.S. Trident and Sea Wolf bases as far away as Washington State and San Diego.