Ian Slater: World in Flames

Rosemary pulled the covers over them. “Father warned me the Scots didn’t believe in central heating. It’s freezing in here.”

“Never mind,” said Robert, “I’ll keep you warm.”

Rosemary, her jasmine perfume filling their cave, moved closer to him, kissing him, gently at first, then her tongue hungrily seeking his.

When he came up for air, he asked, “Where did you learn that?”

“Oh, I’ve had at least a dozen lovers. You wouldn’t believe—”

His hand slipped down between her thighs and soon he entered her and slowly they began moving in harmony, then bone-hard against each other, she clutching at him tightly, wantonly, exciting him so much, he knew that unless he diverted his attention, he would climax first. Easing himself up slightly on his elbows, not breaking the rhythm but decreasing pressure, he tried to think of something completely nonsexual, something to do with his work. He seized upon the deliberately repetitious, almost mechanical, routine of Roosevelt’s missile control verification procedure for the Hunter/Killer’s six Trident C missiles, in two rows of three situated immediately aft of the sail, each of the forty-eight warheads containing more then forty times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. Should the war go nuclear, they’d be fired in “ripple” or alternate sequence, the first, number one, missile sliding out of its sheath being the first one on the port side behind the sail, the next missile to be fired not one adjacent to it but rather number six — diagonally opposite to it and farthest away on the starboard side. This would maintain the most stable buoyancy mode for the 360-foot-long sub, preventing excessive “lean,” which, if not corrected for, would cause “wobble,” which in turn would upset the launch trajectory, of the remaining missiles. It was a sequence that Robert Brentwood nightly prayed he’d never have to set in motion but was prepared to do so if it came to that. Meanwhile, the thought of a missile breaking through its protective sheath, he discovered, was no help in calming him down.

“Robert—” Rosemary murmured, arching her back, her breathing faster, shallower. He lowered himself closer to her and could feel her nipples pressing into him. “Robert— Robert—” Then he could hear the latecomers again, in the room across the hallway, talking. Rosemary was moving faster and faster beneath him, clutching his buttocks so tightly, he could feel her nails digging in. His left hand beneath her neck lifting her, he kissed her, his other hand grasping the edge of the mattress so hard, its inner spring gave like foam rubber, his fist squeezing it to nothing.

“Darling — darling,” she murmured, almost beyond control, and he could hear one of the latecomers padding out into the hall, heading toward the bathroom. If they flushed the toilet and put her off—

In Moscow, General Kiril Marchenko, once special adviser to President Suzlov and now minister for war, was strolling in the Kremlin’s snow-manteled Taynitsky Garden. It was the coldest December night in fifteen years, but Marchenko had ignored the plummeting temperatures, eagerly seeking the fresh, albeit frigid, air during the recess from the STAVKA— Supreme Headquarters — meeting, where the atmosphere had been thick with bluish-gray smoke, giving him a throbbing headache. And if Marchenko had ever needed a clear head, it was now. The NATO armor, led by the eccentric but brilliant American general Douglas Freeman, reinforced by the NATO convoys from America, had broken out from near certain defeat in the Soviet-ringed Dortmund/Bielefeld Pocket on the North German Plain.

The American general, whose reputation had been made early in the war by a daring nighttime air cavalry raid behind enemy lines in Korea on the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, hadn’t merely breached the Russian encirclement around the hundred-mile-long Dortmund/Bielefeld pocket but was turning it into a rout of Soviet armor. And as the Soviet troops withdrew, Marchenko knew his career was also in danger. As architect of the stunning SPETS — special forces — paratroop attack against Adak, the American submarine base in the Aleutians, Marchenko was now being held responsible for having committed Russian forces to a two-front war. His comrades in the STAVKA were charging, correctly, that had Marchenko not advised President Suzlov to attack the U.S. submarine base east of Kamchatka Peninsula and west of Alaska, the thousands of supply and support, as well as combat, troops that had been funneled to the Aleutian front could have been used to plug the gap punched out by the American armor on the European front. Marchenko knew that unless he could stop, or at least slow down, the NATO breakout, led by the Americans under Freeman, he could look forward to a demotion as rapid as his previous promotion had been.

To make matters worse, his son Sergei, a pilot attached to Far Eastern Command HQ at Khabarovsk in eastern Siberia but presently serving in the Aleutian Islands, had written home that the “millimaws”—the storm winds born in the confluence of the westward-flowing Japanese Current and the eastward-flowing Alaska Current — had been unusually severe in the past few weeks. His comments about the weather were a shorthand Sergei used in order to get his letter past the squadron censor, the millimaws an Aleut word used by Sergei and his father to mean Americans. It wasn’t the speed of the American fighting Falcons and carrier-borne Tomcats that had Sergei and the other MiG-25 Foxbat pilots worried — after all, the Russian MiG-25s and Sukhoi-15s at Mach 2.8 and 2.5 were faster than the American planes. Nor had it been the daring of the American pilots that had caused Sergei and his friends concern, for they knew about this from the North Korean pilots who had done battle with the American carrier-borne fighters providing cover for Freeman’s raid on Pyongyang at the beginning of the war. What did astonish the Soviet pilots was that even in the worst weather — in the massive fog banks that covered most of the far-flung islands in the crescent-shaped arc between the Soviet Union and America — the American pilots had an edge because of their improved radar technology. Though the MiG Foxbats’ state-of-the-art “Fox Fire” look-down 54-mile-range radar had been thought equal to anything the Americans had at the beginning of the war, the upgraded U.S. pulse-Doppler look-up, look-down radar in the American F-16 Falcons had caught up. And the F-14 Tomcats’ AN/AWG-9 weapon-control system with its 195-mile-range radar, the latter capable of simultaneously tracking twenty-four targets and attacking eight of them at different altitudes, had brought the temporary Soviet air superiority over the western Aleutians to a screaming halt. Now, instead of being able to keep sending supplies to Adak, building it up as Russia’s advance springboard for the Soviet attacks against NORAD’s Alaskan flank, taking pressure off the Soviet forces in Europe, it looked as if the Americans might try to retake Adak Island and Shemya. The capture of the huge U.S. early-warning radar station at Shemya by the Second Soviet Airborne only weeks after Adak had fallen had been Marchenko’s proudest boast.

As for Europe, Marchenko had sought help from the Soviet Northern Fleet to increase “convoy interdiction” all along the NATO sea lanes between North America and Europe — to cut off NATO’s vital supply line from America. But following the sinking of the Yumashev, the pride of the Russian Kresta II-class guided missile cruiser, by the American submarine USS Roosevelt in the Celtic Sea off southwestern England, the battle for the Atlantic had also momentarily swung in the Americans’ favor. For the first time since the war began, more merchantmen were reaching the French and English Channel ports than were being sunk.