Ian Slater: World in Flames

“Where’s Brentwood?” Aussie whispered to Choir Williams as they headed away from the Kremlin, eagerly seeking the cover afforded by both blizzard and blackout.

In the pitch-black cathedral, its air choked with the smell of cordite, gasoline fumes, and the sweet stench of burning flesh from out by the tanks, Brentwood, taking out his own last shot of morphine, had dragged Cheek-Dawson up by the altar, having had to hold the frozen ampule in his mouth to warm it before injecting it. He loosened the Englishman’s tourniquet for a few moments but then tightened it again and clipped the last magazine of nine-millimeter shorts into the MAC’s grip housing. Then deftly, considering the unnerving shooshing sound of boots in the snow as SPETS closed in toward the cathedral, David snuffed out a tiny candle flame left burning by one of the men who now lay dead beneath it by one of the frescoed columns.

He heard Russian voices coming from somewhere outside by the cathedral’s marbeled entrance, and racked by fatigue, he was momentarily back in the vast, marbled hall of Mansudae, where he, Freeman, and another marine had stormed the stairwell leading up to General Kim’s office. But the NKA general had fled.

The cathedral was so huge that Brentwood thought he and Cheek-Dawson might luck out — that if they kept quiet enough, the SPETS might pass right by them through the doorway into the sanctuary. It was the fatigue that was doing it, that was making him entertain such fantastic notions of escape — as if, after the SPETS passed through, there would be no one to discover him and Cheek-Dawson in the morning light.

The morphine had given Cheek-Dawson new life, and with it, the clarity that David had often seen in the wounded following a shot. Though unable to walk by himself, the cold stiffening his immobile leg even further, the Englishman was fully cognizant of what was going on. Gently he nudged David and whispered, “Get going — damn fool.”

David ignored him.

Suddenly there was a horrific bang, not of munitions but of the huge entrance doors being thrown back at the far end, a sharp order given — the SPETS clearly gathering, readying to charge in force.

“Here we go,” whispered Cheek-Dawson. “Think things are going to get a bit sticky, old boy. They’re—” Cheek-Dawson winced from pain, despite the morphine, as he tried to sit up into a better firing position. “They’re going to light this up like a Christmas tree.”

“Well, hell,” said David. “At least we’ll see what we’re doing.”

“I’d take that overlay off if I were you, old boy,” said Cheek-Dawson, grimacing.

“Why?”

“They capture you in that — you’re technically a spy. They don’t like spies very much.”

“You sound like they’re going to ask me to surrender.”

“And if they do?”

“You’re dreaming, Dawson. Morphine’s gone to your fucking head.”

“Then if you’re going to leave it on, old boy,” Cheek-Dawson whispered, tugging the overlay, “I suggest you make a run for it. No point in you staying around and—”

“Shut up,” said David. They heard a loud hissing noise, then a bump, the pillars with the saints on them flickering brilliantly, then disappearing, the flare having presumably hit the edge of the main door, bouncing back off into the snow.

“Lousy bowlers,” Cheek-Dawson said.

“Pitchers,” David corrected him. “They’ll get better.” They could hear loudspeakers and a lot of shouting.

Cheek-Dawson dragged himself over behind one of the sainted pillars, David now behind the pillar to his right. “Don’t know what they’re carrying on about,” said the Englishman. “They can all have a turn.”

The sonarman aboard Ray Brentwood’s guided missile frigate had frozen a pie-slice segment of his screen— restricting the arm’s sweep between 200 and 350 degrees— where the noise short from the hard helo landing had been picked up by the Munro’s passive sonar. Brentwood, however, quickly had him put it back on continuous sweep from zero to 360 degrees in order to prevent the ship from being surprised by an attack from any other segment — his insurance against the assumption, now held by most of his ships, that the metallic anomaly a mile ahead of them was caused by the two subs they were looking for.

The Munro was so quiet as Brentwood and the others listened to the steady stir-fry of incoming passive, they could hear the slopping of water against the ship’s starboard flank. Ray Brentwood knew they might be losing valuable time, but the dunking helos were insistent that the anomaly was “within the significant” range — that it could be a sub. The trouble, as Brentwood well knew through his careful attention to the minutiae of the charts, was that while they were on the continental shelf, they were very close to where it started to plunge down to form the continental slope. The “significant” anomaly could well be an outcrop of metal-rich rock or even mud slowly shifted by the turbidity currents. The other possibility was that it might be one of the many wrecks that littered the coast, some of them not marked on the charts. Was he being too cautious? — the legacy of any captain who had lost a ship.

“Inform the helos to fire torpedoes,” he ordered.

“Yes, sir.”

Ten sleek blue Mark-37s dropped from the hard points of the five Sea Stallions, the “wrapped” control wire unraveling behind them like tightly bundled spaghetti.

Almost immediately the cobalt sea boiled with air bubbles— a classic sub antisonar tactic, the effusion of bubbles normally blanking any acoustic homing torpedoes. But as the Mark-37s were being guided toward magnetic anomaly, the noise of the bubbles could not deter them.

For a moment it seemed as if the whole sea had swollen into an enormous green carbuncle, then it turned white, bursting in an air-shattering explosion, permanently deafening a sonar operator aboard one of the dunking helos who’d forgotten to turn down his volume control. There was a series of other explosions, the sea’s foaming surface littered with the torn and shattered detritus, human and material alike.

“Quiet on the bridge!” shouted Ray Brentwood, determined not to let either ship or helo crews get carried away with the kill, lest the second one had escaped, though he seriously doubted it. OOD Cameron, summoned by one of the lookouts, saw flashes of silver amid the debris, indicating that some of the Sea Stallions’ torpedoes might have been chaff-activated— set off by metal balloons full of fine metal foil excreted by a sub in order to detonate the metal-homing warheads prematurely.

Two miles away from the explosion whose noise smothered all target indicators in Ray Brentwood’s ships and helos, the sea’s surface was broken by what looked like two porpoise-nosed shapes, seeming to leap from the sea, whitish-green water running down their flanks.

“Bearing!” yelled Ray Brentwood. “Zero two two! Fire harpoon! Fire ASROC!”

The OOD immediately relayed the order to all ships while, in less than eighty seconds, the Soviet Golf 5 had launched its two SS-N-8 missiles from its fin tubes.

Two of Brentwood’s ships fired Harpoons within two seconds of hearing his order, the American missiles having less than twenty-seven seconds to reach the sea-launched ICBMs after the Soviet missiles had cleared their fin housing, popping through the water like rubber balls suddenly released beneath the surface, their engines already ignited in boost phase.

One was hit, everyone surprised by the lack of flame, its debris smacking loudly into the sea, other pieces of it spinning away in cartwheels, the two halves of its midsection split and dangling like a broken white cigar crashing harmlessly into the sea. But in drawing the fire of the Americans, this missile allowed the other missile from the Golf to escape, passing quickly from subsonic to supersonic trajectory, evading a phalanx of American antiballistic missile defense batteries — their radars confused by the sheer volume of information coming in from the task force’s firing — the Russian missile further aided by the usual winter storms above the mountainous coastal ranges in Oregon and Washington State interfering with advanced radar warning stations. Minutes later, it hit Seattle in air burst.