Ian Slater - World in Flames

Brentwood ordered sonars dunked to three hundred meters but forbade any active pulses. At three hundred meters the sonars would be very close to the crush depth of an Echo III-class diesel-electric sub. At that depth the bulkheads begin to moan. There was also the possibility that if the anomaly was a sub, it was just that— one sub. The other could very well have taken cover in the noise umbrella of the task force. Running on her batteries, the second sub would not easily be detected amid the cavitation noises of the surface vessels. Think! Ray told himself, think like a man who is hunted — like a submariner, a man closed in, as he had been in the darkness of his own trial, when he’d gone under anesthesia time and again, unsure of whether he’d ever surface again. Would you, he asked himself, simply lie down there quietly and wait for death? No, he decided. If they had come this far to their American station, they too were brave. They would fight.

He radioed all ships to stop engines so that the deep sonar might hear the slightest sound. He could tell the officers were itching for him to go “active” with the sonar, but he wouldn’t be tempted merely to break their tension, to get it over with. If he couldn’t wait, lost his nerve, he reminded himself, a million faces — and more — would be melted and disfigured as his had been in the inferno of the Blaine. And for these, as for any victims of a nuclear blast, no surgery would save them from the radiation-bred cancers that would eat them away inside.

The officer of the deck checked that all auxiliary machinery and air-conditioning were shut off. “Ship secured, sir.”

“Very well. Now we’re all quiet, let’s hear what’s down there.”

The sonar operator switched the incoming noise track to the PA. Sometimes, as now, the sound from the depths was so much like the noise of frying fish that some men claimed they could smell it and even taste…

“Contact! Bearing two one niner.”

“Range?” Ray Brentwood asked.

“Estimate… contact gone.”

Brentwood was behind the operator and saw the screen himself, the amber arm uninterrupted by any blip. “What was it, Sonar?”

“Noise short from a hull, sir. Definitely.”

“Sir?” It was the OOD.

“Yes?”

“Sir, one of the Sea Stallions didn’t get the hook quickly enough.” It meant that as one of the helos, probably out of fuel, had come down on the white circle of the Munro’s flight deck, a “snapper”—the seaman responsible for snapping the hook onto the U-bolt beneath the chopper — wasn’t fast enough, and in the pitch and roll, the chopper had lurched forward, thwacking the bulkhead, creating the noise short.

“I want whoever it was,” said Brentwood, “on a charge. Immediately.”

“Yes, sir.”

That was another misconception Ray knew he had to deal with — the idea that because he’d had a tough run of it, ending up with “sludge-removal-propelled,” he’d somehow feel sorry for the underdog, the man who made a mistake. He also knew if he screwed up, they wouldn’t even give him sludge removal. Lieutenant Cameron as OOD couldn’t remember when he’d heard a bridge so quiet — so much so that he now heard noises, the creaking of metal fittings, which he’d never been aware of.

The icy wind blowing the Spitzbergen howled about the choppers that were bringing in the crew of the scuttled Roosevelt. Because of the radio silence that had to be in effect while they were in the air, it wasn’t until they landed that Robert Brentwood and the men in the other four helicopters learned that Lt. Comdr. Peter Zeldman was dead.

The Royal Navy liaison officer assigned to the Norwegian Base expressed his condolences, and while the crew were “mugging up” with cocoa and biscuits, he informed Robert Brentwood, in a decidedly Oxfordian accent, that Brentwood and the remainder of his crew had been ordered back by SACLANT “posthaste” to Holy Loch. “Balloon’s gone up, I’m afraid and—” He stopped. “Of course, you of all people know about that, sir.”

Brentwood nodded, but he was still thinking about Zeldman and Georgina.

“Point is, sir, SACLANT’s canceled all leave. And, ah…” The lieutenant, for all the Firsts he’d earned at Oxford, was suddenly tongue-tied, realizing that, if the world survived, the man he was looking at would go down in history as the unflinching American who, upon seeing the Russian ICBMs streaking up from Kola Peninsula toward his country, had immediately launched the West’s counterattack.

None of the Roosevelt’s crew spoke much as they filed into the Hercules transport that, escorted by six heavily armed Harriers, would take them back to Holy Loch. The next worst thing to having lost your ship was being split up. Half of them, on the orders from SACLANT, were to replace only those crewmen killed aboard another Sea Wolf II which now lay waiting for them in Holy Loch, a titanium patch on her hull where a Soviet ASROC had grazed her hull aft of the sail.

It made sense to split up the Roosevelt crew and they knew it, but for men who had lived and worked so closely together, knew one another’s joys and failures and shared them, it was still a gut-wrenching business on top of having to send your own ship to her grave. And while they were glad to have survived the ordeal, their first view of Scotland’s Cape Wrath was greeted with mixed feelings. There was, too, in the Hercules an unspoken fear as heavy about them as the steady roar of the great Hercules engines: the cold, scientific fact that no matter how they felt now, some of them were going to the within the next few months, others having no more than two, possibly three, years to live — if they weren’t killed in action. No one had spoken about it on the way in to Spitzbergen, the dosimeters still on their belts but hidden beneath their Arctic parkas, but it was far from a case of out of sight, out of mind.

The Hercules pilot said something over the PA which no one understood, and Robert Brentwood went forward to find out what it was. Below he could see a wrinkled, gray sea barely visible in the dawn’s early light — Cape Wrath. Just as quickly, it was swallowed by cloud.

“Holy Loch!” the pilot told him. “Half an hour. Bet you’re pleased to be back?”

“Yes,” said Robert. He wondered how much time he would have with Rosemary. It might be better if he had none, he thought, and immediately felt ashamed, disgusted by his own despair. Holding on to the strap webbing for support as the plane hit a patch of turbulence, he made his way carefully back from the cockpit. He told the chiefs of the boat to instruct each man in their department to take off the dosimeter, and when they’d collected them all, to give them to him. Each man’s name was on each dosimeter, and he told them they would address the problem of radiation through the base medical officer and the radiation lab in Oxford. Meanwhile he didn’t want any family or friends — if any had been alerted that Roosevelt’s crew were due back at Holy Loch — to see the dosimeters and start worrying. There’d be enough time for that later when they had the lab’s reports. Several of the men — those who, like Brentwood, had sustained more than permissible levels of radiation — felt greatly relieved, and in his concern for them, the bond they felt with old “Bing” was cemented even further.

The SPETS had completely surrounded the Cathedral of the Assumption. Five 135-millimeter rounds had been fired from the third T-90 in the column before the first two battle tanks had been destroyed by the direct hit from Choir Williams on the first tank, which men spewed burning fuel on the SPETS immediately around it. As Williams, following David Brentwood’s orders, made his way quickly out of the cathedral into the Hall of Facets, the glorious colors of the priceless fifteenth-century frescoes, lit up by parachute flares, didn’t warrant even a glance from him as he hastened to join Aussie and the other SAS men, only fourteen in all, not counting David Brentwood and Cheek-Dawson. Another two men were cut down as the fourteen SAS burst out from Annunciation Cathedral at the Kremlin’s southern end, across the snow-covered quad and into the pristine snow of Taynitsky Park. Another man died, beheaded by the sustained burst of heavy machine-gun fire, for despite his SPETS overlay, he was spotted in the floodlit park opposite Annunciation Cathedral because part of his SPETS overlay had been torn. In the next seven seconds, however, three floodlights and the SPETS manning them were shattered into perpetual darkness by at least five bursts of SAS submachine-gun fire as the remaining eleven SAS, including Williams A and Choir Williams, made for the wall. There was more firing, a hundred yards or so west of them, near the high water tower that marked the southernmost tip of the Kremlin’s stronghold, where SPETS, mistaking one another for SAS troops, were unintentionally creating a diversionary tactic that the eleven SAS men couldn’t have planned better themselves. It was the one flash of luck most of them would remember as, going over the darkened wall, the small band of commandos fell into the soft snow amid the trees that faced the Kremlin Quay, and beyond, in the darkness, the frozen Moscow River. In the air raid blackout of the city, the Kremlin now looked like an island of fire.