Ian Slater - World in Flames

“You were wound up,” she answered.

“Yeah — well—” He was using his left sleeve to wipe condensation off the windshield, the diaphanous fog now pierced by rays of sunlight streaming down on the moss-covered crags.

“They’re gone!” she said, watching the rearview mirror. Robert adjusted it from where she’d twisted it to one side, combing her hair before they’d got out to see the Glencoe memorial. Now he could see the road farther back, but she was right — the long stretch of blacktop along the valley floor was bereft of movement. Ahead lay Loch Ballachulish, where, Rosemary informed him, they would have to catch a ferry across the loch on their way to Mallaig, the fishing village six miles farther up on the rugged west coast. In the prewar days, Mallaig had been a “repairs” port for Russian trawlers out of the Kola Peninsula, some suspected of being SIGLINT — signal intelligence — listening for NATO sub traffic around the Holy Loch sub pens eighty miles south from which, all being well, Roosevelt would set out on another war patrol as soon as Robert Brentwood returned from his honeymoon a week from now.

“I hope the ferry’s on time,” said Rosemary anxiously as they rounded the U-bend leading down to the loch.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Robert. “We can fill in the time.”

She looked quickly at him. “Oh no you don’t! Not again. I’m not—”

“No,” he said, “I didn’t mean that.”

“You didn’t?” she asked, feigning astonishment. “You’re ill!” She took in a deep breath, leaning back on the headrest, telling herself not to be a ninny — feeling better now that the car hadn’t been seen following them after all. “You’re getting tired of me,” she charged playfully.

“I’ll never get tired of you,” he said, doing a W. C. Fields: “My little cooing turtle dove.” He took her hand in his. “Never.”

“Hmm — a likely story.”

Robert could see a long, calm, cobalt-colored tongue of water coming into view, their first sight of the loch and a welcome one after the unrelieved wildness and isolation of Glencoe. Driving through the mist-shrouded valley had been cozy enough, part of the coziness coming from the safety of the warm car and its comforting dash lights, which, like those aboard a sub, created a sense of security, when in fact the line between civilization and the wild, safety and danger, was very thin.

“Where did you put the — gun?” she asked suddenly. It was no longer between them.

“In my jacket,” he said.

It was blustery outside as they pulled up to wait for the ferry, and cold, despite the sun’s attempt to break free of the low stratus.

“Think I’ll hop out and stretch my legs,” he said.

“You’ll freeze.”

“Nah — put on my old tweed coat here. No problem.”

She watched him draw up the collar of the tweed jacket as he walked away and waved back at her. She loved watching the way he walked — a purposeful yet relaxed stride that was somehow distinctly American, part and parcel of their optimism, which, no matter what the odds, refused to be dimmed. She’d noticed it the first time Robert had met her great-uncle Geoffrey. Robert, and some Australians she’d known, had no sense of class difference and so weren’t even aware they were crashing right through it with a friendly handshake and first-name familiarity. They didn’t give a fig about social status; simply rode over it, judging what a man said more than the way he said it.

She wound down the window. “Don’t go too far!” she called out over the howl of wind that was ruffling parts of the loch while other stretches of water remained surprisingly, almost alarmingly, calm. He strode back down the hill.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing — oh dear, I’m sorry, pet. Just didn’t want you to go too far. The ferry’ll be here in ten minutes or so. Besides, I don’t want you to catch a cold. You must be freezing.”

“Have to spend a shilling,” he said.

“Oh—” she began, perplexed. “Oh!” She felt herself blushing and laughing at the same time. He was walking away again.

“It’s ‘spend a penny,’ “ she said.

“Well,” he said, without turning around, “I was close.”

“You were not.”

Rosemary kept watching him and suddenly her smile and laughter vanished. Surely he could have waited until they’d reached the ferry. And wasn’t that one of those portable lavatories she’d seen parked down by the ferry ramp? “All right, Rosemary Brentwood,” she addressed herself sternly, as if bringing one of her sixth-form boys to order. “That will be quite enough of your morbidity.”

It had been the sight of the loch that had upset her — the unforgiving aspect of its gunmetal surface now that the sun was momentarily shut out again. It called up the memory of her brother William’s death on the Atlantic convoy — how one day he had sailed out, never to be seen again. So young. She took a tissue from her purse and, adjusting the rearview mirror, began making herself look presentable. “Good grief,” she told her reflection. “Will you stop worrying? Robert’ll probably outlive you.” Yes, he would undoubtedly the an old man and in bed — with her. She used just a dab of blusher, recalling Georgina’s rather high-minded counsel about how makeup was a “bourgeois conceit.” It always astonished Rosemary that here the whole world was at war, the Communist ideology so utterly discredited despite Gorbachev’s attempted reforms, and yet there were still young intellectuals like Georgina, fresh from the “thesis” and “antithesis” of university and who, filled with the outrage of people who know they will never actually have the responsibility of power, could still be drawn to the left’s unholy mysteries. She closed the lipstick holder, adjusted the mirror, and froze. Coming over the last dip before the long hill leading to the ferry was a yellow car.

Shirer saw there were fourteen minutes to go, the sea hidden from him beneath the flat gray expanse that seemed to go on forever. The edge of the front had come down from the Bering Sea over the Aleutians even before Shirer had taken off in his F-14 Tomcat, number 203, the second fighter assigned him, the first lost when he was shot down by Sergei Marchenko’s Sukhoi and had to bail out over Adak Island before being picked up and taken to Dutch Harbor.

There he and Lana Brentwood had taken up where they had left off before the war. But just when he was getting used to the idea that he’d probably be with Lana and flying out of Dutch Harbor for the foreseeable future, he was jolted back to the bleak reality of just how unforeseeable any future was when he received the terse instruction from Salt Lake City that he was to deliver his jet back to the carrier.

Shirer glanced at his vector control on “radio silence” approach toward the carrier, his plane on a passive, not active, radar to warn him of any approaching Bandits. Unless the Russians had launched midair refuelers without Aleutian radar picking them up, there shouldn’t be any danger.

By nature, he was an optimist. Lana wasn’t. She had been through the trauma of a failed marriage with Jay La Roche, the boss, or some said “don,” of La Roche Pharmaceuticals, a multinational spread over twenty-three countries, including China. Shirer remembered that China was one of the countries because Lana had told him it had been in Shanghai that the three-year marriage had ended in a violent attack on her by La Roche, who had beaten her so badly that only his money and influence with corrupt Chinese officials had prevented charges being laid. She had long ago learned to suffer the carefully chosen and medically screened stable of call girls and boys La Roche had used on his business trips abroad. But when his anal and oral fixations went beyond all bounds with her to the point at which excreta became inextricably linked in La Roche’s mind with sex, she had drawn the line and La Roche had stepped over it. He couldn’t prevent her from leaving him, from joining the navy’s “whores,” as he jeeringly referred to the Waves. But no way, he told her, would he ever allow her to divorce him, to cause him to lose face. If she tried it, La Roche warned, he’d unleash his chain of tabloids and “throw so much muck around” about her parents that the family would be ruined.