Ian Slater - World in Flames

The military sergeant identified himself.

“Yes, Sergeant?”

“He’s passed with flying colors, sir. I’ve done everything to goad him. Insulted his piece of skirt. No go. Bit annoyed, mind — but held himself in check. Lots of self-discipline.”

The sergeant could hear the captain exhale. “Pity he declined then, Sergeant. Just the kind of man we need.”

“You going to have another crack at him, sir?” asked the sergeant.

“Yes. But I doubt he’ll change his mind. Still — I appreciate what you’ve done, Sergeant. Let’s know if you have any other chaps you think could do the job.”

“Will do. Sorry he didn’t turn out, sir. Thought he was made of sterner stuff. Maybe we could take another run at him in a month or so?”

“I doubt it, Sergeant. Especially given young Miss Malmédy. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, sir.” It took the sergeant a second to remember “Malmédy” was Lili’s last name. No flies on the SAS.

Captain Smythe’s prognosis was borne out by David Brentwood. Upon arriving at HQ, Brentwood was clearly anxious to rejoin Lili after telling Smythe, albeit reluctantly, that in his opinion, the sergeant who had accompanied him to the SAS interview was a serious security risk, having blabbed something on the way out about an SAS attack against the Arabs.

Smythe thanked him and asked, “I don’t suppose you’ve changed your mind — about joining the team?”

“No, sir. I haven’t.”

Typical Brits, thought David. Always making it sound like they were merely asking you to join a cricket club. One British officer he remembered insisted on referring to the whole war as the “unpleasantness.”

“Very good, Brentwood,” Smythe reacted heartily. “Don’t mean to press you.”

Like hell, thought David, who, before he left, turned to Smythe. “Sir — I’ve heard quite a few rumors about some kind of action in the Middle East — against the Arabs. No specific targets — until the sergeant, that is.”

Smythe took his pipe out of his pocket, turning it upside-down, smacking it hard against the heel of his boot, then blowing through it, little pieces of charcoal flying out into the wastepaper basket. “Well, of course, it’s hardly news — I mean, the possibility of us going into the Gulf, with Iraq threatening to go to war again with Iran. If that happened, it’s possible, of course, we’d have to put pay to that chappie in Baghdad. We simply cannot tolerate disruption of oil supplies.”

Smythe seemed to Brentwood far too unconcerned about the voluble sergeant mouthing off about an Allied attack against the Arabs. The British captain put his arm around David’s shoulder as he escorted him toward the door. Momentarily it made David wince, but the Englishman’s gesture was purely that of a comrade — or was it? he wondered. Or was he worrying about nothing? Again he realized how badly his whole sense of his own self — the confidence of his own masculinity and of the world around him — had been shattered by the nerve-pounding experiences of Pyongyang and Stadthagen. It was something he couldn’t explain to anyone who hadn’t been through it. War, he had once thought, was supposed to clarify conflicts — the enemy was there, you were here. But war had only made his life, at least his inner life, extraordinarily more complex. He felt at war with himself- —his psyche a battlefront, never clearly defined and as changeable as any free-floating anxiety, constantly shifting in its attempt to escape a flak of uncertainty.

“Truth is,” Smythe assured him, “we’ve been feeding the sergeant a lot of ‘cockamamy’ plans. He’s known as ‘Flapper Lips’ around here, you know. Anyway, point is, everyone expects NATO to hit if the Iraqis and Iranians become difficult. So we might as well plant a few fake rumors about the actual targets to give us cover.”

Cover for what? David wondered, but knew better than to ask. If he wasn’t willing to volunteer for the “team,” he had no right to know. Besides, he understood the general strategy well enough. The allies were simply going to have to punch out the Iraqis a la Desert Storm if they threatened to stop the oil. You’d have to go in and kill them to go on killing elsewhere. It was necessary and mad — like the sergeant.

“Thank you for coming, Lieutenant,” said Smythe graciously.

“No problem, sir.”

“Ta ta.”

Outside the HQ, David waited impatiently for the Humvee from the transport pool to arrive.

The train had left fifteen minutes ago, and car traffic, he knew, would be slow due to the endless convoys heading east to Liege and on to the front. The driver was a British corporal, and David asked him if he thought they could get to Ezemaal in forty minutes.

“Dunno about that, Lieutenant,” said the cockney, shaking his head morosely. “Bit of a squeeze.”

“There’s a ten in it for you if you can,” David promised him.

“Marks or dollars, sir?”

“Fussy, aren’t you?”

“Begging the lieutenant’s pardon. Not fussy, sir. Practical. Dollar’s worth more right now.”

“Dollars,” said David.

“Right you are, sir,” said the driver, his mood suddenly upbeat as he rushed a yellow traffic light, an MP whistling and waving his baton to no effect. The driver was correct, thought David. You had to be practical. Look after yourself. No one else would.

“What does ‘ta ta’ mean?” David asked the corporal as the Humvee weaved its way through the Brussels traffic past the high gables of the Grand Place. “I guess it means good-bye, right?”

“Sort of,” commented the corporal, turning sharply into one of the fashionable redbrick alleys leading from the Grand Place. “Not good-bye exactly — more like till we meet again.”

“Hmm,” mused David. “I don’t think so.”

Once on the highway heading eastward toward Liege, the corporal drove dangerously. “Get out of the bloody way!” he shouted, looking in the rearview, shaking his head at Brentwood. “Women drivers!”

David wondered if Lili drove. Melissa did.

The thing that puzzled Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt at the southern tip of Vancouver Island — the listening post for the U.S. and Canadian SOSUS network — was that the undersea hydrophone should have picked up a sub that had attacked a Canadian coastal steamer, the MV Jervis. The steamer, alerted by her shipboard lookout, had actually seen the wave of the torpedo that had struck her and failed to explode — a standard Soviet 530-millimeter-long fish of the type that had decimated the NATO convoys. What worried Esquimalt was that the SOSUS hydrophones should have heard the enemy sub much earlier. No matter how silent a nuclear sub was, its reactor wasn’t noise-proof, and the reactor couldn’t be shut down because it would take hours to “cook up”—suicidal for an operational sub as it would give ASW forces ample time to reach the area and pound it with ASROCs and depth charges. Besides, without the sub’s prop going, it would not have been able to stalk the ships it attacked.

It continued to be a mystery until the CNO’s office in Washington, on advice from COMSUBAT — Commander Submarines Atlantic — in Norfolk, Virginia, informed Esquimalt and Bangor, Washington State, Trident and Sea Wolf Base eighty miles to the south of Esquimalt that the reason a Russian sub had got so close to them was that the Russian navy yards at Leningrad and elsewhere must have improved even further on quietening their props after the gigantic advantage given them by the Walker spy ring and by Toshiba’s sale in the 1980s of state-of-the-art prop technology to the Russians.

Either that, said Norfolk, or the SOSUS listening network of hydrophones on the sea floor had been cut or, more likely, “neutered” by synthesized noise “override,” producing fake yet natural-sounding sea noise that would be interpreted by the SOSUS’s monitoring teams at Esquimalt and Bangor as phytoplankton scatter, or, as the sonar operators called it, “fish fry.”