Ian Slater - World in Flames

Then, for both sides, the fighter pilot’s nightmare happened: The first crack, then rumble, of one of several electrical storms fractured the air above the Sea of Japan with a “splitting” that began to play havoc with the sophisticated avionics of both the hunters and the hunted. The only hope was that in between electrical surges, a quick fix on the opposition might be possible.

Aboard the Boeing, commander of the aircraft, Frank Shirer, was immediately alerted to the presence of Bogeys, the battle staff correctly assuming, and he concurred, that the six Soviet fighters — too fast to be Chinese — were peeling off to engage the F-14 Tomcats farther north while three who’d been trying to hide in the scatter were the “strikers,” now climbing, fast, toward him, while the bigger American formation would have no choice but to engage the six Fulcrums.

“Damn it!” said Shirer, glancing over at his copilot, “I wish to hell I was in two oh three — my old F-14. I’d give those bastards a run for their money.”

Without any armament, the electronics of the 747 having taken up all available space, Shirer felt naked. Then it started to rain—”like a cow peeing on a flat rock,” announced Freeman.

“He’s cool,” commented the copilot as Freeman left the cabin.

“He’s not driving,” said Shirer.

In the rear of the 747, Jim Norton looked ill. He tried to hide it, but he was a white-knuckled flier at the best of times, and the storm was terrifying. “Jim,” said Freeman, “I ever tell you ‘bout the time I was in Louisiana? Bunch of us on leave, dressed in civvies, went into this greasy spoon. Bill Fryer was with us. You know Bill. Hundred and first Airborne.”

“No,” said Norton, and he didn’t care.

“Well,” said Freeman, “this white waiter ambles up, takes one look at Bill, and says, ‘We don’t serve coloreds here.’ Everyone’s struck dumb, ‘cept Johnny Morgan — my G-2 at the time. Quick as a flash Johnny looks from Bill Fryer to the waiter and says, ‘But he’s a king.”

“ ‘No shit,’ says the waiter, and toddles off. Manager comes down, and now Bill Fryer’s sitting there like he’s King Farouk and we’re all going along with it — kowtowing. ‘Your Majesty’ this. ‘Your Majesty’ that. Manager’s as obsequious as a pimp on a slow day… apologies galore… so’s the waiter by now. What can they do for us? et cetera, et cetera. So we stay and have a big meal. All the time we keep up the act, treating Bill like he’s a goddamned royal.” The 747 lurched violently. Norton closed his eyes. “Well,” continued Freeman, “just as we’re about to leave, the waiter comes down with the bill, all smiles, looks at Bill Fryer, and says, ‘We ain’t never had a king here before.’ Know what Bill Fryer says? ‘No shit!’ “

Norton shook his head.

Freeman laughed so loud, Norton felt obliged to offer a weak smile, convinced by the turbulence and the oncoming Soviet fighters that it might be the last joke he’d ever hear.

From the train, David Brentwood looked out on the rolling green hills of west England’s Herefordshire. He thought it the most beautiful country he’d ever seen. And as the train passed on through Hay-on-Wye over the English-Welsh border, winding its way between the brooding black mountains deep into Brecknockshire toward Brecon at the foot of the two windswept mountains known as the Beacons, slowly and inexorably, everything changed for David. It was as if he had been in this place before. It wasn’t only the smell of the fresh winter air, the earthy dampness that reminded him of the wet winters in the Pacific Northwest in Washington and Oregon, but the wild beauty of the place. The wind-riven hillsides of flattened grasses spoke to him, as they did to few others on that train. Though brought up by his mother in the Protestant faith, which viewed God in deeply personal ways, David could not believe as she did. The suffering of children, the death of Lili — how could there be any good in that? “We all have to die,” his mother would say. “The timing and circumstance of it, David, are only things we fret about so long as we see this life as all there is.” Was this war all there was? he wondered. If so, then winning it seemed more important than ever before, for in mourning Lili’s death, he’d realized in a way he never had before how short life really was. It had been a thing his parents and grandparents had always told him — an old person’s cliche, repeated to the young so many times, it became nothing more than a bore, because inside him there had been the secret belief of all youth that they would not die — at least not before their time, a time which in their own minds was always secure and far in the future.

For a moment he had doubts about volunteering for the SAS force. If this life was such a transitory thing — why bother? Because, he answered himself, corny as he knew it might sound to others, he believed it was right to fight evil. If you didn’t, then people like Lili, Melissa — damn her — would live in a far worse world, a world where there could be no honor, no love, only subservience to the kind of brutality he’d seen as a child the day the newscasts had shown the Communists crushing the movement for democracy with tanks in Tiananmen Square.

As the train carrying him, Thelman, and the other ninety-six volunteers who had been interviewed for the SAS training program pulled into Brecon, David looked up again at the grass-covered sandstone slopes, the sweeping line of the high hills broken now and then by woods of gnarled trees deformed by the wind, and cottages that had looked picturesque from the distance but which now appeared to be deserted and run-down. High above the three-thousand-foot Beacons, buzzards circled, ever patient, waiting, he presumed, for any of the black-faced sheep grazing on the steep slopes to fall. Still, the scene did not depress him, and inhaling the fresh mountain air, he closed his eyes, the better to impress it upon his memory as a new beginning, a place that, whatever happened, would always be close to his heart. Perhaps it was not so much the place at all but that it was a new place where he might regain the old surety of action he’d known before the nerve-shattering experience of Pyongyang and Stadthagen. A new beginning.

“You okay?” asked Thelman.

“Fine,” said David. It was the first time Thelman had seen his old buddy of Parris Island days smile since they’d left France aboard the overnight Hovercraft, the Channel still blocked by the massive explosion that had closed it in the first weeks of the war when a SPETS cell, one of them posing as a cross-channel truck driver, had set off the bomb that had collapsed the two main tunnels, concussion killing most of those in transit, the North Sea pouring in and drowning the rest.

“Nice little town,” remarked Thelman. “Somebody told me Wales was full of slag heaps.”

“Well they’re not here,” replied David. He had no inkling that within forty-eight hours he would hate the place, cursing the moment he had agreed to “try out,” as the English Captain Smythe had so casually put it. Yet the beginning of his time at SAS gave no hint of how quickly he would feel he’d made a mistake, for at first it wasn’t at all like Parris Island or Camp Lejeune. Indeed, when he first stepped out of the train, he and all the others had been struck by an angelic singing, male voices in a harmony he wouldn’t have believed possible outside of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir — voices raised, singing ancient Welsh hymns. It did sound like How Green Was My Valley.

As David looked around at the other ninety-odd volunteers, he saw unit badges from every kind of regiment, including several Dutch and German troops, sappers to engineers, even a Seabee, and at least six men from the Coldstream Guards, all brought to a standstill by a chorus they could hear somewhere beyond the station. Even Thelman, though an avid fan of what David’s father, the admiral, would have described as “moron thump,” stood on the station platform, listening in rapt attention.