Ian Slater - World in Flames

“He is the nuts!” said Lili, wide-eyed, her bonnet shaking side to side.

David slipped his arm further about her. She told him first she would take him to the Grand Place to show him the four-hundred-year-old gilded Flemish gables surrounding the square; then they would go to the Museum of Art and she would present the “immortal” Rubens. “Do you like the little people?” she asked.

“Little people? Pygmies — in Brussels?”

“No, no, silly. The puppets.”

He didn’t answer, preoccupied with crossing the rain-spattered street in what was now heavy military traffic and still thinking about the sergeant’s blatant breach of security. David hated the idea of fingering anyone but knew he had no option. Too bad the sergeant had cracked, and the Englishman couldn’t know how much David sympathized, but Brentwood knew if he didn’t report what the sergeant had shouted about, a lot of American and British lives might be lost. What, for example, would have happened if Lili Malmédy had been a spy? “What’s that?” David snapped at her.”I mean pardon?”

“The puppets. Do you like them?”

“Yes,” he said. “Sure — I like puppets. I’ll have to make a call, too, okay?”

“Okay.” She said it with delight. “It is all right, we have time. After, we will go to the Toone.”

“Toone?”

“A puppet theater for — how do you say? — adults?”

“I guess.” It made him think of the British Special Air Service captain at the interview saying something about enjoying Flemish girls and what sounded like “Cokes.” He pressed Lili for an explanation.

“The same as in your country,” she answered. “Fizzy drinks.”

“No,” said David. “Way I heard it, I think it must be a Belgian word.”

“Oh — you must mean a Walloonian, not Flemish.”

“Okay,” he said. “A Walloonian word.”

“Then it must be C-O-U-Q-U-E-S. It is a—” she thought for a moment “—A vast cookie.”

“A cookie?”

“Yes. Very large. As big as—” She withdrew her arm from his, holding her hands about two feet apart.

“A cake!” he said.

“No, no,” she answered, “a cookie,” her face suffused with such enthusiasm that momentarily David felt much older. “It is a cookie,” she insisted. “You do not believe me?”

He took her hand and looked at her. “Yes,” he said, “I do,” and her smile told him unequivocally that she loved him.

Rosemary stood on the dockside at Holy Loch watching the USS Roosevelt slip her moorings from the sub pen inside the huge, floating dock and pass her tender, the USS Topeka, as she made her way through the oily calm of the loch past the crushed-stone houses that lined the shore and the magnificent snow-mantled hills of Scotland’s western approaches, heading out toward the rougher water south in the Firth of Clyde.

She knew she might never see Robert again, and yet rather than the overwhelming sadness of saying good-bye numbing her as it had the first time, the clean, wintry smell of the loch, the snow-dusted blue of the hills, and the screech of gulls all came to her aid — their wild beauty enough to make the very idea of war seem momentarily unreal. Besides, the strain of these last few hours together before they’d reached the safety of Mallaig had worn her down so that she felt too tired to weep. In any case, with Robert on the Roosevelt’s bridge, the last thing she wanted him or any other of the crew aboard to see was a woman bawling her eyes out.

It was time to be strong, to return to Surrey, spend Christmas with her parents, and get on with her teaching again at St. Anselm’s in the new term. And to keep herself and “Junior”— Robert still insisted it would be a boy — well nourished, no small feat with rationing becoming more severe, the Allied convoys under constant attack from the Russian subs.

Taking off a tartan scarf Robert had bought her in Mallaig, she waved once more, his captain’s cap no more than a blip on the bridge atop the Roosevelt’s tall, tapered sail.

Robert had her framed in the circle of his binoculars. She was standing alone on the dock, dwarfed by the hills, and he was afraid for her. The “charmers” aside, who the police had told him had never bothered any of the wives, it was still possible in this war that a Soviet rocket attack from as far away as the Russians’ Baltic bases could kill her as easily as a depth bomb could implode his sub, killing every man aboard in seconds.

Now fully provisional and reloaded with the latest D-5 Trident missiles, the Sea Wolf was passing through the aerial arrays of the degaussing station.

Beyond the few small surface craft of the Royal Navy that would run noise interference for him until he reached the more open water of the Firth of Clyde, the best way to avoid detection from either spy trawlers or satellites, which might pick up either the Roosevelt’s thermal patch, from even the minute heat exchange of the sub’s exhaust systems, or its surface bulge, not visible to the naked eye, was to go deep. As well as the Sea Wolf’s speed being greater beneath the water, because of the absence of roiling, depth was the best defense against aircraft with magnetic anomaly detectors looking for the sub and its lethal load of six missiles, each D-5 with a range of six-thousand-plus nautical miles and with fourteen MIRVs, independently targeted reentry vehicles, of 150 kilotons each.

Normally the crew’s scuttlebutt would have been alive with rumor of where they were going based on a word here and there around the dry dock. But this trip, it was different. Britain’s MI6—its secret services counterespionage branch — had discovered that a spy, a disc jockey on a Glasgow radio station, had, by using letter-for-letter code in his selection of record titles, been broadcasting departure times as well as the names of submarines egressing Holy Loch.

As a result, security at the base had been so tight that the base commander wouldn’t even risk verbal instructions to his captains for fear of parabolic directional mikes being beamed in from the hills around the loch. The result was that it was only now that Robert Brentwood, his sub’s food supplies the only factor limiting the normal war patrol of seventy-five days submerged, was going down below to Control, forward of the sail. As soon as he was clear of the firth, heading into the Irish Sea, he would dive, and only then would he open up the magnetic-tape-sealed heavy-gauge white plastic envelope to find out where he was going and what his mission was.

“Officer of the deck — last man down. Hatch secured.”

Zeldman took up his position as officer of the deck. “Last man down. Hatch secured, aye. Captain, the ship is rigged for dive, current depth one three two fathoms. Checks with the chart. Request permission to submerge the ship.”

“Very well, officer of the deck,” said Brentwood. “Submerge the ship.”

“Submerge the ship, aye, sir.” Zeldman turned to the diving console. “Diving officer, submerge the ship.”

“Submerge the ship, aye, sir. Dive — two blasts on the dive alarm. Dive, dive.”

The wheezing sound of the alarm followed, loud enough for the crew in Control to hear but not powerful enough to resonate through the hull. A seaman shut all the main ballast tanks. “All vents are shut.”

“Vents shut, aye.”

A seaman was reading off the depth. “Fifty… fifty-two… fifty-four…”

One of the chiefs of the boat was watching the angle of the dive, trim, and speed. “Officer of the deck, conditions normal on the dive.”

“Very well, diving officer,” confirmed Zeldman, turning to Brentwood. “Captain, at one-thirty feet, trim satisfactory.”