Ian Slater - World in Flames

“Correct. Now, we have fifteen minutes to take out a divisional HQ. Target, this man.” He took a blowup of an Asian-looking officer and held it high, with Cheek-Dawson shining his flashlight on it. “Brigadier general,” said Cheek-Dawson. “Insignia — epaulets and shoulder tabs, yes. But the face, gentlemen. Go for the face. Remember it.” He then passed it around.

“I dunno,” said Lewis. “They all look the same to me. What do you reckon, Fritz?”

The German looked at the photo.

“No, Aussie. I think the nose is very definite. You see — and the jaw is—”

“Stone the bloody crows, Fritz,” said Lewis, winking at Thelman and Brentwood. “Just a joke. Strike a light — you Krauts take everything so seriously?” Lewis turned his head to Cheek-Dawson. “What’s after this, sir?”

“Through the house once more for final selection to the squadron.” It wasn’t so much a house but a canvas mockup of an enemy’s divisional HQ near Hereford, complete with booby traps.

“Whole squadron going, sir?”

“Can tell you that much, yes. All eighty of us — providing we get asked. Apart from that, as you know, our job is to keep fit, on standby.”

“You have any ideas, sir?” pressed Lewis.

“Sorry, Lewis, I can’t be of any assistance to your book-making prognostications, but you know the drill. SAS security’s so tight — has to be — that we’d only be told forty-eight hours in advance in any case. That’s why we have you cover the field. You’re supposed to be ready for anything. Right, Sar’Major?”

“Right, sir.”

“You will lose a lot of money if it is Korea, eh, Aussie?” teased Schwarzenegger.

“Aw — shuddup, you Kraut!”

Four of the eighty men were killed during the jump, one in a tumble, one whose emergency chute failed, and two who overshot the zone, going down in one of the lochs, drowned before they could get out of the harness with the 110-pound battle packs weighing them down in the frigid water. Cheek-Dawson took it harder than anyone but was determined not to let it show. They had lost a dozen men in accidents, either going over the Brecons or on the Hereford forced marches and in the jumps. But it had to be done if you were to be the best. Nevertheless, he was growing as impatient as the rest of them for a mission, though here again, he couldn’t let on. And so it was with a sense of both exhilaration and measured apprehension that, upon returning to the base, he received the news from Major Rye that Operation Merlin was on.

“Run-through time?” asked Cheek-Dawson.

“Twenty hours,” said Rye. “Enough?”

“If we have all the maps, paraphernalia, et cetera,” said Cheek-Dawson.

“We do.”

“Good show. First briefing early morning?” asked Cheek-Dawson, though it was already near 10:00 p.m., well after lights-out.

“Yes,” said Rye.

“Very good, sir. Good night.”

“Good night,” said Rye, but first he would have to write letters immediately to the families of the four men who had died that night. Contrary to what was generally thought, Rye did not find the task particularly onerous. It was one of the few times when he could talk quite unsentimentally about brave men. Besides, because he was constrained by SAS security requirements, he could give no hint of where they had been or where they would have been going, and this allowed parents and loved ones to gain some solace by thinking the men had already partaken in a highly secret operation and had therefore been killed on “active service”—which was technically correct.

Rosemary Spence woke up from a fitful sleep of storms and monstrous waves and of men cast upon an angry ocean that was at once majestic and terrifying in its power. But Robert was nowhere among the men she saw passing her in the dream, but could be seen on a distant pebbled shore, the shore pounded so incessantly that the moment she woke and found Georgina by her side, she still felt bound to the far-off island, the pebbles — as in Dover Beach, which she’d been discussing with the sixth form the day before — still roiling in dreadful unison as they were sucked out and flung back by the surf — every pebble in the dream a lost soul, as insignificant to the sea as a grain of sand.

“You all right?” asked Georgina, holding her sister’s hand.

“I—” Rosemary began, and fell back exhausted onto her pillow. “I’m sorry. Was I making a racket?”

“Not really,” said Georgina, “but I could hear you from my room. Sounded like a nightmare.” She paused. “Robert?”

“Yes,” answered Rosemary, still finding it difficult to tear herself away from the dark yet transparent symbolism of the dream. “Isn’t the first, I’m afraid. I worry about him all the time these days.” She looked up at Georgina. In the quiet of the room, it was as if the two were meeting in a place where they had never been before, but now, each confronted by her own fears — Rosemary for Robert and Georgina for Peter Zeldman — it was a place they both knew the other understood. Until this moment, they had carried their own fears stoically, and in silence, but in the sharing of them now, there was a mutual understanding and compassion that neither had felt for the other since their childhood.

“You dream of Peter very much?” Rosemary asked.

“All the time. But it’s all so terribly vague in my case. I think it might help if I could remember the details after, but I can’t. I try. Sometimes I don’t even realize I’ve had a dream about him until later in the day. Then something — I don’t know— something quite unrelated, it seems, will remind me of it.”

“Do you think of him being on the submarine?”

“No — at least I don’t think so. But it’s always a very confined space. I do know that. Like a cave, the entrance closing.”

Rosemary shivered. “It’s always the same island for me. And ice as far as I can see, and the closer I get, the further it recedes, the more I hear the surf crashing on a beach — a cruel, hard beach of stones.” Quite unknown to herself, Rosemary’s hands were moving protectively over her stomach as she was talking.

Georgina squeezed her hand. “I won’t be foolish and tell you you shouldn’t worry about the baby. I guess every mother does. But try not to fret too much, Rose.”

Rosemary didn’t answer. It was the first time Georgina had called her “Rose” in years.

“Oh Lord,” said Rosemary, “how can they do that — go down there for weeks at—”

“Months,” said Georgina.

“Oh, thank you,” said Rosemary in mock reproach. “You’re a great help.” It eased the tension and they began to laugh, and soon the laughter had turned to tears and they were embracing.

“What a pair of ninnies,” snuffled Rosemary. “Really— they’re probably telling obscene jokes and drinking cocoa.”

“Coffee!” corrected Georgina, wiping her eyes.

From the hallway, Richard Spence saw them, thought of going in, but instead withdrew, walking softly back to bed.

“Richard — what’s the matter?” asked Anne, her voice dopey with the sleeping pills she had found necessary since young William’s death.

“Nothing,” he said, and switched off the light, but he lay awake; the sight of his two daughters so close together filled him with a warmth he hadn’t experienced in years. Yet he felt it shot through with his own fears about his son-in-law and his doubts about the advisability of Georgina marrying young Zeldman. Anne continued to be all for it, but the war situation was so grave, and getting worse each day, that Richard wanted to spare Georgina whatever angst he could. Most people, he believed, including Anne, simply didn’t realize how bad it really was in Europe. Unable to be supplied with as much as they needed because of the Soviet sub offensive was bad enough for the NATO forces, but now it was widely reported that more and more Soviet subs, like those which continued to attack American West Coast shipping, were still getting through the SOSUS network.