Ian Slater - World in Flames

“I need help, Comrade,” repeated Marchenko. “If you assist — I will support you wholeheartedly.”

“For what?” asked Chernko, feigning ignorance.

“For whatever you wish, Comrade.”

Chernko replied that perhaps something could be worked out. He did have a plan to stop the Americans, but it was nothing like Marchenko’s “amateur” proposal of assassination behind enemy lines. Nevertheless, he conceded he would welcome Marchenko’s support when he presented his plan to the Politburo at tomorrow’s meeting.

“Can you tell me what it is now?” asked Marchenko.

“Tomorrow,” answered Chernko. “Meanwhile I will welcome your support in this meeting.” Chernko was looking directly at him.

“Support of what?” asked Marchenko.

“Of anything I say.”

Marchenko felt his blood rising at Chernko’s contemptuous tone but held himself in check. President Suzlov was calling the meeting to order. As the members took their positions either side of the long, baize-covered table, with the portrait of Marx gazing down behind them, Chernko’s aide slid in beside his boss, pencil and paper in hand. “Yes, Comrade?”

“Draw up the plan at once,” Chernko informed him. “Two teams — twenty in each — neither must have any knowledge of the other. Purpose — penetrate NATO front lines. Target — the American general, Freeman.”

“Code name?” asked the aide.

“Trojan,” said Chernko. “And Colonel!”

“Sir?”

“Book an appointment for General Marchenko — tomorrow morning. Early.”

“Yes, Comrade Director.”

The room was soon full of blue-gray smoke, and Chernko could see Marchenko sitting glumly, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Lingering for a moment before he got out of bed, Robert Brentwood watched Rosemary, her face childlike, her breasts pressing against the turquoise negligee in her contented sleep, and he had the urge to make love again. But dawn was creeping over the western sea, and though this time of day had long ceased to have any meaning for him aboard the Roosevelt on patrol in the perennial darkness four hundred meters beneath the sea, once ashore, he found that he quickly reverted to the dawn-to-dusk habits of Annapolis: up early, ready to go.

One foot on the windowsill, looking out at the wind-lashed ocean, he began stretching his legs, preparatory to his fifteen-minute workout. He hated it, but — a believer, albeit reluctantly, in the “no gain without pain” school — he forced himself through it twice every twenty-four hours whether he was at sea or not. Out on the storm-cut swells, he could see the bobbing of a trawler, probably from Ballantrae several miles to the north, its mast momentarily spearing the cold blue sky, then disappearing in deep troughs. The constant vigilance bred at sea never left him, and he reminded himself that just over forty miles to the west, beyond the tempestuous North channel, lay Northern Ireland in the grip of continuing internecine strife between IRA terrorists and Orangemen.

The IRA had become increasingly active against the British military, who had been stretched thin in Northern Ireland because of the heavy losses suffered over the Channel by the British Army of the Rhine in the battle for the Dortmund/ Bielefeld pocket. And Robert recalled the talk between his executive officer, Peter Zeldman, and the other officers aboard the Roosevelt about reports from CINCLANT — Commander in Chief Atlantic — to head of security for Holy Loch to be alert for IRA provisionals. Britain’s military intelligence, MI5, warned that IRA “provos” might try coming across in trawlers. If they landed farther north near the Firth of Lorn, they could fairly quickly head inland through the wilderness of the sparsely populated Argyll to Loch Lomond, men down the fifteen miles to Holy Loch. Despite the base’s reinforced concrete pens, a well-aimed shoulder-borne antitank missile could take out the Roosevelt or any other sub.

Not surprisingly, Robert hadn’t mentioned any of this to Rosemary, knowing how the very mention of a submarine got her worrying. Indeed, he’d gone so far as to promise her that they wouldn’t go near the base during the honeymoon but rather head inland a little, go north along Loch Lomond’s western shore, then north again along the Firth of Lorn on their way to the ancient and picturesque fishing village of Mallaig near the fabled Isle of Skye.

Rosemary murmured in her sleep and rolled over to his side of the old-fashioned four-poster bed, her right hand moving to where he had lain, her lips in a smile that at once touched Robert with its simplicity and aroused him in its sensuousness. Below, he could hear someone stirring — the proprietor’s wife in the kitchen, he guessed — and he caught a whiff of kippers cooking, the one thing Rosemary couldn’t bring herself to eat on the honeymoon. Scottish blood ran in her veins, but the thought of smoked fish for breakfast appalled her — and no, she’d told him, it didn’t have anything to do with morning sickness, which so far she’d escaped.

Halfway through a head-to-knee stretch, while still watching her, Robert wondered whether there’d be enough time before breakfast for what his horny crewmen ashore habitually referred to as a “dawn breaker.” He could hear the floorboards creaking outside in the upstairs hallway as early risers made their way to the bathroom and down to the dining room. He began the last stretch, right heel on the windowsill, his hands fully extended in unison to touch his toes. For a moment he glimpsed the trawler again on the pewter sea. The wind had died, but it seemed only temporary, a scud of cloud invading from the north.

“Robert—”

When he turned, he saw she had pulled the bedding tightly about her with one hand, the other patting the sheet on his side. “Coming back to bed?”

“Funny you mentioned that,” Brentwood said in midstretch. “I was just thinking about it. Hadn’t decided—”

“Yes you have,” she said, a cheeky glint in her eyes, her gaze wandering below his navel, “unless it’s an optical illusion?”

“Rosemary!” He was genuinely and pleasantly shocked at her impishness after her fretting the night before. It was as if the worries of the night about his old girlfriends, et cetera, et cetera, had vanished with the howling of the wind. “We might be late for breakfast,” he cautioned, sliding eagerly in beside her.

“No we won’t,” she assured him happily.

“I’ll take the Fifth on that,” he told her.

“What do you mean?”

As she spoke, he detected the scent of fresh mint about her doing battle with the smell of kippers wafting up from below. “I mean,” he explained, “that I refuse to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate me.”

The phrase sounded familiar to her — from the American films she’d seen. She popped a mint candy in his mouth. “I thought only gangsters talked like that—”

“Well, you don’t know much about me. Maybe I run a still aboard Roosevelt.” The sub’s name was out before he could stop himself, but it didn’t matter — it was lovers’ talk, easy, without strain, and he was glad to see he could mention the sub without her getting upset again about him, the war, about what might happen. The Rosemary of the morning had put her worried self to flight — as if sometime during the sweet darkness after he’d settled her down following the latecomers’ arrival, she had decided once and for all to live in the present, that the world and all its troubles were too big for them to control, that their time together was too precious to permit armies of “what ifs” to sabotage what happiness they might find before he went back to war. He pulled her toward him. “No,” she said teasingly, giggling.