Ian Slater - World in Flames

“I’ll confess nothing to you scumbags,” he had told his interrogators. “It was your forces who started this business. You can dish it out, but you can’t take it — is that it?”

But that had been three days ago, an eternity in the mind of a captive, when stripped, his watch taken, nothing allowed that might assist him in the organization of his thoughts or help prevent disorientation, he had been lashed to the chair and refused all food, offered only his own urine to drink.

“Sign,” the drill sergeant had advised the marines. “We all know it’s bullshit back home.”

Yes, they would know a confession was bullshit. But underneath, in America’s heart of hearts, after the news clips were over and the outraged eyes of the American public had watched the humiliation of their fellows, and after they had voiced their disgust with the enemy tormentors, there remained, for all their understanding, a quiet, unspoken shame— that an American had shown he’d broken.

Already his photo with the caption of “War Criminal” had been circulated throughout China to stiffen resistance among the masses to the increasing U.S.-ROK attacks which were now pushing the NKA and the Chinese troops back over the Yalu into Manchuria, using the low-radiation but nevertheless devastating atomic shell artillery fire.

“General Kim is coming to see you!” announced the interrogator. “If you do not confess, you will make him very angry-”

Freeman said nothing.

“Do you hear me, mikuk?” he shouted again.

“No.”

“You — you do not be clever people with the general.” The interrogator was shaking his finger like a schoolmaster, cautioning him against disobedience. “You must confess or you will make him very angry.”

“I wouldn’t want to do that,” said Freeman wryly.

“Excellent. You are thinking correctly.” With that the interrogator barked several orders and two NKA guards, in full winter uniform, ear flaps down, came in, wearing white cloth face masks against the stench, which, interestingly, the interrogator either didn’t seem to mind or took pains to hide his distaste for.

They untied him and took him away to the cold shower which meant that in half an hour he would have some thin rice soup, bread, and an injection perhaps of vitamins to help get his color up. He would be going on TV again. So far they hadn’t got a confession, but Freeman knew the power of the box. With all the will in the world to defy them, once you were shown unshaven and bleary-eyed, despite the new change of olive-drab pajamas that were supposed to pass for fresh clothes, it would be next to impossible to look anything else but defeated, which the NKA and Chinese propagandists well knew. Unless you were one of those who had extraordinary imagination and determination, it was difficult to beat the medium when it was the message. He remembered how, years before, the Chinese had so successfully covered the memory of the Beijing massacre among their people with TV confessions and “cooked” footage that in the end, many people believed a massacre had never taken place.

Peter Zeldman was the last man to step off the ice onto chopper number four’s ladder port aft of the sub. As he began his ascent, he saw Capt. Robert Brentwood starting to climb the rope ladder dangling from the chopper hovering uneasily amidships off the Roosevelt’s starboard side about forty or fifty feet above the ice hummocks, and Zeldman chastised himself for not having gone down to Control to press home to Brentwood the chopper crewman’s warning about just how powerful the gusts were a few feet off the ground. As the chopper hauling him up rose, Zeldman turned his head to check that Brentwood was doing okay when suddenly there was a tremendous jerk, the chopper above him buffeted sideways in a heavy gust. Zeldman’s right hand, numb with cold, tried to hang on as his left hand flew away from the rope because of the jerking motion. But he couldn’t hold and fell thirty feet onto a hummock below. Almost instantly the air force corporal, though busy in the chopper’s cabin assigning the men for the best possible distribution of weight, came quickly down the rope, not only from long practice but with the knowledge that the sub would explode in four — now three and a half — minutes. He’d seen Zeldman’s dark outline on the white ice rebound from the hummock as it hit, and while he hoped for the best, he feared the worst.

The worst was what he found. Though Peter Zeldman had fallen only thirty feet, his head had struck the wind-carved, concrete-hard ice of a pressure ridge. The corporal felt for a pulse, but there was none, the warm back of the man’s neck lolling as if there was no bone there, the neck broken as cleanly as if it had been struck by a steel beam.

“Two minutes — come on!” came the voice of the loud-hailer, barely audible under the frantic slap of the rotors. There was no more the corporal could do as it would take more than two minutes to heave the dead body up. Quickly he reached about Zeldman’s neck, took the dog tags, made the sign of the cross, and ran for the ladder.

President Mayne, without taking precious time to confer with Looking Glass, the EC-135 out of Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, or his advisers, or the seventeen “options of attack” that were laid out in the ostensibly simple but in fact very complex seventy-five pages of the football’s “black book,” ordered an MX launch against the massive Soviet oil refineries at Kuibuyshev, Ishimbay, Perm’, and Angarii. And, via satellite communication, he told Chernko, in a deadly calm tone, that the Soviet warhead that had penetrated the generally impenetrable ABM screen now thrown up along the NORAD line, and which had burst above Detroit, was the reason for the four-to-one retaliatory attack against the four refineries, and that this would constitute U.S. policy until all Soviet attacks ceased.

Chernko understood that Mayne wasn’t threatening him— that it was a promise, a promise backed by the undeniable demonstration of American technological superiority, still very potent despite the enormous damage it had already sustained.

“What will happen if you do not find the two submarines?” asked Chernko, trying to sound unflappable but something in his voice betraying tightly reined panic, a panic heightened by the unhesitating willingness of the American president to have had the audacity to actually name the retaliatory targets in the Soviet Union.

“What will happen if we don’t find your two subs,” replied Mayne, “is that if another U.S. city is struck, whether it contains a military target or not, I will take out four of your cities. You may have some difficulty reining in some of your Politburo members, Mr. Chernko, but with four of your cities gone, I think you’ll have the best of the argument to cease and desist. Wouldn’t you say so?”

“I am doing all I can,” snapped Chernko.

“If a U.S. city is hit,” repeated President Mayne, “I will take out four Soviet cities.”

Trainor stood unusually silent, exhilarated, terrified by the president’s cold delivery of America’s terms. Mayne was talking unconditional surrender.

Trainor waited several seconds before he spoke, and then, as the president sat calmly watching Kneecap’s monitors, his aide, trying to remember exactly where he had put the president’s migraine medication, asked “How’s the head, sir?”

“Clear.”

On Kneecap’s monitors they were now receiving the first pictures of Detroit, in real time, relayed by one of the few remaining observation satellites that were still working, the hope for Star Wars rocket-killing beam satellites the biggest single technological flop on both sides of the war, the Star Wars satellites easily taken out by supersonic aircraft firing “pebbles”—clusters of small antisatellite satellites — into orbit.