Ian Slater - World in Flames

Trainor read the message handed him by the TV producer. Ahead of the Pentagon, the wire services were reporting ten massive forest fires, apparently deliberately set and now raging on the north-south spine of the Sierra Nevada, causing the evacuation of over thirty communities and producing a thick pall of smoke and ash over ten thousand square miles in the western United States. As Trainor walked quietly back to the White House press room, he glanced at the monitor, ever conscious of the president’s appearance as well as what he was saying. But in this crisis, Trainor knew that it hardly mattered what the president looked like so long as he projected calm— and did not come across as being as stressed out as he was.

Hearing the president’s speech en route to Washington, D.C., on Eastern Airlines flight 147 out of San Diego, Frank Shirer, who had been dreaming of Lana, now had a fairly good idea of why he, as one of the top five American aces, had been recalled. What bothered him, however, was that if SAC had recalled him to pilot one of the two “Looking Glass” twenty-four-hour command planes, each E-48 with fifty battle staff and communications experts, a week before the president’s speech, then things must be much worse now. Or perhaps he hadn’t been recalled to fly Looking Glass at all.

Perhaps, Shirer flattered himself, the president, like the country’s chief executives before him, wanted a firsthand account of exactly what the precarious Aleutians campaign was like.

Within a few minutes of touching down at Dulles International in Washington, D.C, Shirer would learn he was wrong on both counts.

The sixteen SPETS who carried out the sabotage in New York were among the first citizens to support the president, and joined crowds in burning effigies of Premier Suzlov outside the now boarded-up though still guarded Soviet Embassy. In the next twenty-four hours, more than three thousand reports of sabotage poured in, the most hysterical callers screaming about the vulnerability of the country’s nuclear power plants, which had already been placed under heavy protection by National Guard units.

In Detroit it was reported that large concentrations of deadly PCBs, once used in old electric power station generators, had been dumped into Detroit’s, and on the Canadian side, Windsor’s, water supply. A bottler of “mountain-fresh water” in Cleveland, Ohio, was arrested when tests showed he’d been bottling water that had been contaminated by highly toxic PCBs.

David Brentwood’s first shock upon reaching the outskirts of Brussels was to see just how badly damaged the city was. Like so many other soldiers who’d seen action at the front and the terrible punishment meted out by the Russian rocket artillery attacks, he knew that civilian centers behind the front were being hit, but he hadn’t imagined it would be as bad as this. Piles of red and yellow brick rubble were everywhere as the train slowly crept in from the southern outskirts, the rockets clearly having made no distinction between residential areas and military targets — not that David could blame Russians for that any more than he could the Allies’ artillery for the havoc their short-range rockets were now wreaking on the ancient capitals of eastern Europe, church spires and stained glass mixed in with the rubble of thousands of homes as well as the officially designated targets. There was very little wood around, he noticed, most of it already scavenged for fuel, the Atlantic convoys having been hit again by Soviet sub packs.

His second shock in Brussels was that he had not been summoned to identify any of the SPETS he’d seen in U.S. and British uniform around Stadthagen and who had murdered British and American POWs.

Instead David found himself being escorted by the MP sergeant, then by an American captain, to a rather nondescript, musty-smelling basement room in the pockmarked Brussels HQ. A U.S. Marine major sat at a long plywood table supported by sawhorses in front of a crumbling plaster wall, the major flanked by another American, a captain, on his left, and a British captain to the major’s right. It was a recruiting committee for the elite, and now joint, British and American SAS, or Special Air Service, of which little was known by regular units except that elements of the joint SAS regiment sometimes made tactical strikes deep behind enemy lines. They were the British and American equivalent of the SPETS Kommandos, some of whom were believed to be operating in civilian garb behind NATO lines.

David’s orders that he was to ID captured SPETS were, as the American army captain from the three-man interviewing board had put it before taking him inside, merely a “cover.” “Limeys are very careful about recruitment,” the captain explained. “Special Air Service personnel are never identified— not even in their own regiments. It’s always put down as a transfer. Anyway, there are no SPETS for you to identify, Brentwood. We haven’t caught any.” The captain had paused, looking David over carefully before entering the room. “You in the picture?”

“Yes, sir,” David answered unenthusiastically. He didn’t like it. He’d had enough.

Inside the windowless interview room, he could hear the faint hum of the furnace heat recirculating the cloying dust particles from the bomb rubble above.

“Quite an honor, Lieutenant,” the marine major sitting in the center told him.

“Yes, sir.” David wasn’t sure whether the major was talking about the honor of him having been selected for interview or whether it was meant as a compliment to David’s decorations.

There was an awkward silence, the U.S. Army captain glancing up at Brentwood’s regulation somber straight-headed gaze, then at the marine major and British SAS liaison captain.

The marine major cleared his throat. “Course, it’s purely voluntary, but a man with your experience, Brentwood, would—” He looked at the British officer, who was showing no sign of embarrassment over Brentwood’s obvious hesitation. “I think,” continued the major, “your experience in Pyongyang and—” he glanced down at a file “—Stadthagen would prove invaluable to SAS.”

So that’s it, thought David. The major was now pointing out that in keeping with NATO policy, Washington and Whitehall were “actively encouraging” joint Allied participation in both SAS in Europe and further afield in the Pacific, with U.S. Special Forces. It was either Korea, concluded David, or the Russian front.

Then the major threw him the curveball. “General Freeman recommended you — personally.”

The British captain, a bent-stem pipe in his right hand, was scooping dark Erinmore Flake from its pouch and palming it into a stringy consistency before stuffing the bowl. “Please don’t feel pressed, old man,” he told Brentwood. The U.S. Marine major was looking down hard at the pencil he held captive between his burly hands.

“Purely voluntary,” the Englishman continued, “as your chaps have already told you. And Heaven knows — Medal of Honor, Silver Star… I should say you’ve done your bit and more. Just thought you might like a crack at it, that’s all. Heard so much about you.” He smiled, and what made it worse for David, the Englishman’s smile seemed genuine, without the trace of irony he’d come to expect of some of the other British officers he’d met. The Englishman was now tamping the tobacco into the pipe’s bowl, blowing through it before waving a lighted match back and forth over it. “Just thought you might be a beggar for punishment,” he told David congenially. “Getting a bit bored—” he paused to suck in hard on the pipe “—with all those Flemish girls and couques. Given your record, thought you might be craving a little action again.” The very thought of action produced in David the chilled-bowel feeling he’d experienced before final exams at college, his throat dry, face feeling strangely hot yet cold at the same time, his heart racing, thumping so loudly, he was afraid they might hear it. “Thanks, sir,” he said in a parched voice, “but — all — I don’t think I’m fit enough for your SAS or any other—”