Ian Slater - World in Flames

Robert Brentwood said nothing, waiting.

“Point is,” continued Price, pushing the disobedient lock of hair back, “Special Branch didn’t see much point in unduly alarming you — certainly not on your honeymoon. And especially given what you sub chaps’ve done for us re the convoys. We’re all terribly grateful.”

Brentwood let the flattery go by him like the spray. “What Special Branch?”

“Scotland Yard. Joan and I have been tailing you ever since you left Surrey. Your wedding.”

“What the hell—”

“Peter Zeldman,” Price cut in, “your executive officer, was best man. Georgina Spence — your wife’s sister — was bridesmaid. Young William Spence was killed in the Atlantic— looked after by Lana Brentwood — your sister. It’s through her looking after him that you met Rosemary, correct? I mean, you took young Spence’s personal effects to his parents during one of your shore leaves from the Roosevelt. How am I doing?”

“Anyone could have learned all that stuff,” said Brentwood, “reading a paper down in Surrey.”

“Do be reasonable, old sport!” said Price, flashing a Special Branch card.

“You’ve got American Express, too, and you’re a blood donor. Right?” Robert challenged him. “Anyone can get cards printed up, sport! Many as they like.”

Price slipped the card away, glanced behind them, squinting in the sun-infused fog, seeing Rosemary and Joan Price ambling from the ferry’s bow back toward the cars. Another few minutes and the ferry’d be across the loch. “Look,” said Price, “I don’t want to be indelicate, old boy, but d’you know your sister Lana was transferred to the Aleutians?”

“Sure I know,” responded Robert Brentwood. “She wrote me. Her ex is a string-puller. Congressmen in his pocket. What’s indelicate about that?”

“I mean the real reason she was transferred?”

Robert Brentwood shrugged. “I told you La Roche is the original sleaze-ball. Besides, Aleutians is a combat zone.” He paused, looking hard at Price. “The Russians are trying to get through the back door. There’s a navy hospital at Dutch Harbor. So?”

“Well, I’m not saying La Roche had nothing to do with it, but he ‘lucked out,’ as you Americans put it. The navy already had a good reason to banish her up there.” He paused, still looking at the far shore. “Your sister was transferred to the Aleutian theater, old boy, because her care of young William Spence, shall we say, exceeded the requirements of duty.” He paused to let it sink in. “Not to put too fine a point on it, Captain, she performed certain — shall we say—’favors.’ “

“What the hell d’you mean?”

“I think you Americans call it a blow job.”

Rosemary heard a crack — Price’s watch smashing against the ferry’s bulkhead as Robert Brentwood felled him with one blow. “You son of a bitch!” Price stayed down, only daring to raise himself slightly on one arm, the other held up in submission.

Rosemary made to run toward them, but Joan Price grabbed her arm. “No. Stay here!”

“Get up, you son of a bitch!” yelled Robert Brentwood, his voice all but inaudible to the women, his face red, tweed jacket ballooning in the wind. “Get up or I’ll—”

“I’m not making—” began Price, fearing the blow to his chin had fractured his jaw, his voice breathless. “I’m not making a moral judgment. The Spence boy was dying. Perhaps it was an act of — look, I’m sorry, but if you don’t believe I’m from Special Branch, I had to convince—” Price paused, his face grimacing in pain. “We haven’t been following you— well, we have, but it’s the other two newlyweds that we were really shadowing. You’re in-between as it were.”

Brentwood looked blank.

“Your innocent young GI,” Price continued, easing himself back so he could rest against the bulkhead. “You know, the young couple at the B and B — confetti still in their hair. And his lovely wife. Real charmer, she is — been to bed with two of your sub captains already. Found them — should say what was left of ‘em — down by Loch Lomond. We had to change everything — including their sub’s ETD from Holy Loch — just in case our bonny pair got anything out of them. He paused, feeling his jaw, wishing he hadn’t. “We’re your minders,” he told Brentwood. “We caught up with them just before you reached the B and B. They were your late arrivals. You were bloody lucky you didn’t make it to Burns’s cottage. The sweet young thing was carrying a Beretta and two shrapnel grenades. Very nice.”

By now, Price felt safe enough to get up. “I’m afraid we’re on duty till we see you safely back at Holy Loch. Sorry to dampen your nuptial bliss, but we can’t afford to lose a Sea Wolf skipper. Especially now.”

Robert Brentwood gave a grunt. “Sorry — I—such a fool… didn’t realize…”

“Not to worry,” Price assured him, dusting himself down, the wind from the loch playing havoc with his hairpiece. “National Health’ll take care of the teeth. I hope.” He tried a grin, but his jaw hurt too much.

“I feel like a goddamned idiot,” said Robert, his face still red from wind chill and embarrassment. “Here they are protecting us and we think—”

“Well,” responded Rosemary, chagrined by her own embarrassment but her tone more defensive. “They should have told us.”

“No,” said Brentwood. He glanced in the rearview and gave a friendly wave. Price honked in reply. “If we’d known they were following us, it wouldn’t have been much of a honeymoon. Would’ve seemed like someone was watching us through the keyhole all the time.” Rosemary didn’t like it, but she had to agree. The thought of her and Robert trying to make love with two people staking the place out from across the hallway of the B and B would certainly have put her right off. “Oh no!” she said. “They must have heard everything.” Her face was between her fingers, looking at Robert. “Tell me, was I—”

“Screaming with joy!” he said. “All the time!”

She slid down into her seat as they drove off.

Five miles on, both cars disappearing into fog, Rosemary gasped in fright, turning to Robert. “My God — he mightn’t be from Special Branch at all. I mean, he could be just saying that to—”

“No,” Robert interjected. “He told me some stuff that only someone in the know could have a handle on. They couldn’t have found it out in Surrey.”

“Found out what? What kind of things?”

“About my family,” Robert answered, gearing down on a hill, the fog so thick, he could barely see the front of the hood. “I don’t want to talk about it. Damn it! I wish this goddamned demister would work.”

The car slowed, Robert unconsciously taking his foot off the gas pedal, not because of the fog or his preoccupation with the windshield misting, but because he realized a Russian agent could as easily have had contacts in North America and the Aleutians as in Surrey — that the information about Lana — if it was true—

“What’s assuage mean?” he asked Rosemary, a little embarrassed.

“To allay,” she explained eagerly, without a trace of surprise. “Why?” she pressed. “Did Price use it?”

“Yes, he said he hoped he’d assuaged my suspicions.”

“Has he?”

Robert pushed himself backward from the steering wheel, his back hard against the seat, arms still, as if bracing himself for a crash. It was one of the isometric exercises he often used during the long watches aboard the sub and which he would be doing in several days time when, if, he returned safely to Holy Loch. “I don’t know, hon,” he told Rosemary. “He could have got all the stuff about my family from some — I don’t know — some intelligence network in the States.”