Ian Slater: Arctic Front

“It’s to show, I suspect,” put in the British brigadier, Soames, “that they can reach whomever they wish. A caution perhaps against us using Freeman. May not be Chernko of course — he’s pledged his full assistance to us. It could be whoever is taking over his agents.”

“It’s Chernko’s style all right,” Trainor concurred. “He’s been known to have his sleepers — agents already in place-target our nuclear sub captains while they’re off base here as well as abroad. Two of them got it while they were on leave around Faslane in Scotland — near our Holy Lock sub pens. But the FBI doesn’t figure he’d try that now, not after the surrender. Besides, our forward units are already in Moscow. What’s in it for him?”

“Quite,” said Soames.

‘‘Problem is, gentlemen,” Mayne reminded them, “that KGB or not, General Freeman’s going to be too preoccupied with his wife’s condition. We can’t have him leading any mop-up operation after the bombardment on Big Diomede now.” Mayne saw Trainor about to speak but carried on, “I know he’s thoroughly professional, that he’d do it if we asked him, but the fact is he’ll be too preoccupied with her condition. It’s rotten luck. All other things considered he seemed the perfect man for a mop-up. But I don’t want the life of one American — not one — endangered because of some minor detail overlooked by a man too overwrought by family concerns back home. Once our naval battle group and air force take out Big Diomede I want it secured, and tightly, with no chance of them taking it back and cutting off our logistical supply between Alaska and Siberia. That’d be fatal. In any event, let’s not worry about Freeman now. Hell, if your boys do a good enough job, Admiral—” He was looking at Horton and then Air Force General Allet, “—there won’t be any garrison left to mop up.”

Mayne’s confidence was bolstered by the plans of the naval battle group Admiral Horton was assembling out of San Diego, San Francisco, and Bangor, Washington. Even now orders were being issued for extra munitions to be rushed up to Little Diomede, for while its few guns on its more exposed western side couldn’t hope to do any significant damage to the eastern cliffs of the Siberian island three miles from them, Little Diomede’s gun emplacements would, along with the infamously changeable and hostile weather of the Bering Strait, run interference for the main naval battle group attack approaching from the Aleutians to the south and led in its center by the carrier USS Salt Lake City. Big Diomede was about to be subjected to a storm of firepower. While the island might withstand it, it was almost certain to destroy the will of the Siberian garrison so that Marines could be sent in and merely take it over. But all this wouldn’t be necessary if Novosibirsk and all the space program brains of Akademgorodok failed to get the approval of the Soviet Pacific Fleet to go along with the Siberian decision. In any event, preparations were underway to reactivate an element of the joint American-British SAS — Special Air Service commandos — the Allied equivalent of the SPETS, based in Wales, whose main squadrons, of seventy-two men each, were in the process of being demobilized.

Mayne doubted they’d be used, but both he and the Joint Chiefs believed that the preparations would be another clear signal to the Siberians. If there was no Soviet naval attack in the next twenty-four hours, this would confirm quite clearly that the Soviet Navy, traditionally the most conservative of the Russian forces, were not in concert with Novosibirsk. The White House knew that if Novosibirsk lost its vital sea arm, it could not hope to prosecute any war for very long — let alone win one — and neither Freeman nor any other general would be needed.

Freeman’s sister-in-law, Marjorie Duchene, stood in silence by the general as he looked helplessly down in the intensive care unit of Monterey’s Peninsula Hospital, watching the comatose figure of his wife, the array of blinking monitors, IV drips, and translucent green color of the oxygen mask transforming Doreen’s appearance utterly. Here the general felt as useless as a conscript on his first day at boot camp — powerless to do anything but stand and take it. All he could do, as the chief resident informed him, was wait. For Freeman it might as well have been a prison sentence. The very idea of waiting, of being confronted by a problem he could not attack, do battle with, was anathema. He knew what he should be doing. He and Doreen had talked it over often enough, intending to empower each other to “pull the plug” if either of them was ever struck down by some such incontinent, paralyzed condition. But ironically the man who had been so thorough in his professional life — on more than one occasion astounding logistical officers with his attention to minor details of supply and combat support — was now faced by the fact that neither of them had actually got round to doing it — to making a “living will.”

Back at the house the silence of the rooms was all the more oppressive because of the thunderous crashing of high tide and surf which, Freeman noted in his diary, were he an enemy commander offshore, would be disastrous for any amphibious operation. Pacing the rooms, flicking on the TV, seeing protesters against any impending war with Siberia, Freeman muttered an obscenity and switched it off. He was like a caged lion, spitting out his contempt for those whose selfishness was so profound that they would not fight for the very freedom that allowed them to protest. There was only one place for conscientious objectors — front-line stretcher bearers. That put their high principle to the test.

But it wasn’t all anger with the protesters that was adding to his concern, or — dare he say it? — ”anxiety” about Doreen, but rather guilt, a civilized luxury he rarely allowed himself. It was not the usual guilt of a military life — that he hadn’t spent enough time with her; that now he had the time to give her, to make up for the long separations, she was probably not even aware that he was around. Rather it was the guilt he felt for being angry at her for being in a coma. It was bad enough he’d been put out to pasture but now, just as war threatened to reopen with the Siberian breakaway from Moscow, Washington would keep him out of it because of her. He knew it was selfish, but he knew that to command men in battle was what he had been born for, and he knew Doreen would be the first to understand. It was why he loved her. Yes, it was his duty as a husband to be with her, but if he couldn’t do anything for her, what was the point of him staying around to—

“Thank God you’re back home,” said Marjorie in her bubbly God’s-in-his-heaven-all’s-right-with-me-world voice. “I’m sure Dory knows you’re here, Douglas. It must be a comfort to her deep down. You know what they say about some stroke victims, that just knowing a loved one is nearby—”

“Yes, yes,” said Freeman irritably.

“I’m sorry, Douglas,” Marjorie said, mistaking his irritability for anxiety about Dory. “Why don’t you go out to the pool, and I’ll make some coffee and bring it out? Maybe you’d like to just sit awhile?”

Freeman gave in; it was the only damn thing you could do with relatives. Sit by the pool till she got so tired of her own goodness or the cold front locking in Monterey that she’d hightail it back to sunny Phoenix. She was one of those people who said God had planned it all. He believed the same thing in his own way, but whenever she said it she made it sound so pious and self-satisfied — leaving no room for the possibility of human intervention — that she sounded positively evangelical.