Ian Slater - World in Flames

“SAS!” It was a booming Russian voice with barely a trace of accent, coming through the smoke of battle and the mist born of the heat from the COM’s rubble blowing across the snow.

“SAS! It is useless to resist further. Surrender now and you will be treated well — as prisoners of war.”

Cheek-Dawson, his face grimacing from the pain that even the effort of speaking caused him, added wryly, “At the Ritz, no doubt.”

“Intourist,” David said, and called out, “What are your terms?”

“Clever lad!” said Cheek-Dawson, but David’s attempt to buy more time for the SAS men who had already left didn’t work, the Russian recognizing David’s ploy for what it was immediately and shouting angrily in return, “Come out now or you will die!”

Cheek-Dawson pulled his last two flash-bangs closer to him, saw David had none, slid one across to him, then, teeth clenched in pain, pushed himself up against the Pillar of the Saints. “Thanks for staying, old boy,” he said to David.

“Keep quiet,” said David, “and they might take you prisoner.”

“I will.”

David smiled at the Englishman’s transparent lie.

Glass broke somewhere, and within minutes the cathedral was filled with more smoke pouring out of two or three canisters. Suddenly David saw a way of buying a little more time for those of his men already over the wall. “Always the unexpected, son!” had been Freeman’s motto. Pulling the pin on one of the grenades, holding down its lever and dashing forward through the heavy smoke toward the cathedral’s entrance, David tossed out a grenade hard left, then dashed out to the right through smoky mist. He heard the crash of the first grenade, saw two shapes — one of them a man writhing on the ground, knocked down by the first grenade, the second shape two figures to his left. He fired a full burst. One fell, knees knocked from beneath him as if hit from behind with a club, the second man behind him still coming. David dropped to the snow, firing another burst, the heat wash hot on his face, his Kevlar jacket feeling like ice picks were hitting it. A warm sensation flooded his chest, shadows flitting by him through the smoke into the cathedral.

Garlic, so strong it made his eyes water, was the next thing David was aware of, and a burning pain as if a red-hot poker had been thrust through his abdomen down into his thigh. The SPETS medical officer, a woman, who looked as if she towed tanks to keep fit, was glowering down at him. “You are lucky.” Her garlic breath made him turn away.

“Where’s my friend?” he asked.

“The English?” she said. “He tried to be brave, too.”

David stared at her, but his focus was blurring.

“He is dead,” she said matter-of-factly. “Comrade Malek wanted him, too, but—” she shrugged “—his earlier wounds. We could not save him.”

“Malek—?”

“Comrade Malek is the new head of SPETS,” said the medical officer. “He wishes to know all about SAS.”

“I’ve never worked…” said David, gasping from his pain, “for Scandinavian Air—” He was a little deranged from the pain — and thought his answer hilariously funny. Cheek-Dawson would have liked it.

“General Malek is in no mood for jokings.”

Neither, as it turned out, was the president of the United States nor the prime minister of Great Britain — nor any of the other Allied leaders. They demanded immediate repatriation of all prisoners and said they were holding Chernko and his Politburo personally responsible for any harm that might befall any Allied prisoners in the Soviets’ possession — including those “personnel” who “have participated in the raid against the Russian capital.”

But it wasn’t the tough talk that caused the Russians to repatriate David Brentwood back to London, where he would rejoin the few SAS men, seven in all, who had made it out, but rather the enormous press coverage now being given to the Kremlin raid. Chernko badly needed a highly visible propaganda act of “humanity,” and David’s hurried repatriation became part of it, due in large measure to the simple fact that only an hour earlier, the Australian, Choir Williams, and Williams A had already been airlifted after being captured in Moscow. Infrared photos from the Japanese news satellite had embarrassed the Russians by showing the world that the final SPETS attack against the SAS holdouts in Assumption Cathedral was still in progress after President Chernko had agreed to the unconditional surrender of all Soviet forces and their allies to the joint Allied command.

It was often said to David afterward that the satellite pictures had probably saved him from being hauled off and shot as a spy and dumped in some unknown Russian grave. It didn’t seem to occur to those who told him this that the satellite pictures hadn’t saved Cheek-Dawson and that, as Aussie would have said, his fate had “simply been in the roll of the dice.”

David’s identity, like that of the other members of the raid, was protected for a time, because of the legendary SAS penchant for anonymity. But for Ray Brentwood, over ten thousand miles away, his ships in sight of San Diego’s Point Loma, where the crews could see the fireworks streaming up from Balboa Park and the fighters taking off from Miramar’s “top gun” school to form an honor overflight, anonymity was something he could not hope for. Only hours before, the shouts of recognition and streamers of adulation had been all he craved, but now the only thing that seemed in concert with the depression into which he’d been plunged by his fears for his wife and family was the sullen smog that hung above the San Ysidro Mountains, reminding him of the deadly fallout that would even now be blanketing the Pacific Northwest and all of the Great Plains states.

As he returned the salute and descended among the biggest crowd ever seen on the San Diego naval docks, Ray Brentwood suddenly became the most photographed person on earth — the man who, through brains and courage, had saved millions of American lives, and thereby thwarted an all-out nuclear holocaust, the very ugliness of his face quickly beloved by newspaper editors all over the world who saw it as an ironic and inverse measure of his heroism. Among the crowd were beautiful women trying to get close enough to touch him, others from Hollywood to ask if he had an agent — manila envelopes with “option” contracts stuffed inside thrust his way. Ray bore it as best he could — in a silence numbed by thoughts of Beth, Jeannie, and John.

“Admiral! Admiral!” It was a blonde. A military policeman was trying to block her, for SPETS, like Hollywood, had been known to employ beautiful women for their purposes, and who could be sure that some disaffected “sleeper,” many of them still at large—

But she wasn’t from Hollywood or SPETS, and the young MP, duty notwithstanding, found it decidedly pleasant to feel her pressed hard against him.

“Beth and your children—” she began.

Ray Brentwood pushed frantically toward the MP, the throng so thick, he felt like a man swimming against a riptide, the blonde’s voice all but drowned in the hysteria of congratulations about him. The woman, he noticed, was in uniform — a Wave, her hat apparently knocked off in the crush. “Sir,” she yelled, “your wife and children… in Portland. They were on their way down… soon as… heard your fleet was—”

“They’re all right?” Ray yelled.

“Yes, sir. They’re fine. They’re fine.”

He hugged her and flashbulbs popped, something he’d have to explain to Beth when the National Investigator and the other tabloids of the Jay La Roche chain printed the photo under the caption “ADMIRAL MAKING WAVES!”