Ian Slater - World in Flames

Brentwood felt his stomach tightening. Instinctively he bent his neck to look down at his own belt dosimeter. There was only a slight change — if any — that he could notice.

“It’s not all the men,” said Leach. “Not yet. But it’s only a matter of time.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“That Alfa, sir. We all heard it going down. Split wide open — their reactor squeezed flatter’n a pancake, I reckon.”

Robert Brentwood’s tone changed utterly. “Who have you noticed? I mean, which men—”

“Guys from the engine room mainly — where there was a lot of flooding — and in the torpedo room. A lot of leakage in there, I think.” He hesitated. “As well as Control.”

“You told anyone else about this?”

“No, sir.” Leach’s confidence was growing in direct proportion to Brentwood’s discomfort.

“Well, hold your horses, Leach. We’d better have a good look at everyone’s dosimeters before we rush to any conclusions. We’ll do another shield check just to make sure. If it’s here, we’ll seal it.”

“If it isn’t, sir?”

“Then you’re correct, Leach. We’re in a lot of trouble.” Brentwood made to go but stopped at Control’s curtain and looked back. “I won’t cover this up if it’s true. But I want you to keep quiet until we’re sure. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well,” said Brentwood, and with that he knew that a load had fallen from Leach’s shoulders — onto his.

When he reentered Control, the chief engineer was poring over the blueprints of the ship — for its size, it was the most complicated of any vessel ever designed, more intricate than the space shuttles. “Captain?”

“Yes, chief?”

“RRO wants to see you down in the reactor room.”

“Very well. You come up with any ideas about how we’re going to refloat this baby, Chief?”

“Not so far, Captain.”

“Any way we can get that ballast tank self-patching?”

The chief shook his head. “No hope there, Captain. Goddamned cave-in. Hole’s too big. Drive a truck through it. Damn lucky the pressure hull’s intact.”

As Brentwood walked down through Sherwood Forest, aft of the sub’s sail where the six fifty-seven-ton Trident D-5 missiles stood, a row of three towering either side of him, resting in their forty-two-foot-high, seven-foot-wide tubes, he could hear the steady wash of the forty-ton ventilator like a gentle breeze through a copse of birch. Droplets of condensation beaded the tall, chocolate-colored tubes as if they were sweating, enough deadly power in their forty-two warheads— each reentry vehicle with a six-thousand-mile range and independent navigational equipment — to take the three hundred kilotons to within a circular error of probability of plus or minus two hundred yards from a target.

And yet, trapped beneath the ice, what good were they unless Roosevelt could rise and break through? To make matters worse, the 114,000-pound D-5s were heavier than the old 68,000-pound C-5s, meaning the sub was even more firmly weighed down on the shelf than she might otherwise have been.

When he reached the anteroom of the reactor, Brentwood took off his shoes, slipping on a pair of the yellow felt-lined plastic bootees so that any odd piece of radioactive dust that he might conceivably pick up would remain in the reactor room when he changed back to his regular soft-soled deck shoes. “What have we got, Leo?” he asked Lieutenant Galardi, who, despite his white coveralls, looked more like the family dentist than a reactor room officer. He was also a man of few words.

“Captain, we’ve been rapped and it’s not coming from this baby. That goddamned Alfa we sank tore apart — including her reactor. With everything else going on, only a few boys have reported it, but soon, as we get normal lighting back, everyone’s going to notice they’ve got a dose of gamma radiation.”

“How big a dose?”

“Not exactly sure.” Galardi paused. “I’d like to call in all dosimeters, if that’s okay with you.”

“Go ahead. What are we up to now in rads?”

“We’ve passed Greenpeace recommended dosage,” said Galardi, with a rare smile that Brentwood found distinctly unsettling.

“Hell, Leo — even God’s passed Greenpeace’s recommended dosage. How bad do you think it is? I mean, if the rate you’ve seen so far doesn’t decrease, what’s the prognosis?”

“If it goes up—”

“Come on, Leo, don’t dance. You’ve always given me straight answers. Let’s keep it that way.”

“If it keeps climbing, sir, we’re all going to lose some hair.”

“When will you know for certain?” Brentwood realized he’d left himself wide open for a joke — when your hair falls out — but neither of them was in the mood.

“I’ll need a half an hour, Captain. Even then we’d have to hear what the experts in the Oxford Rad Lab say to know for sure.”

“Well, Leo, there aren’t any of them around at the moment.”

“I noticed that, Captain.”

Brentwood took off the bootees and glanced at his watch. It was 0545. By 0615 he would have a rough idea of whether Leach’s fears were fully justified. “Surely to God it isn’t that powerful that it can come straight through the hull?”

“Oh, it’s not that,” Leo assured him. “It’s in the water. The leaks. We’re swimming in the goddamned stuff.”

The jumbled ice of the Yalu proved better cover than Freeman could have reasonably hoped for, and up close, what had seemed, looking down from Outpost Delta, like chunks no more than three or four feet high were in fact enormous shards of ice over ten feet in height, the moonlight throwing the jagged landscape of the river into sharp relief.

The patrol could easily see their way across. And so, Freeman knew, could the Chinese if they were in the area. He was determined to move slowly, for though he didn’t fear land mines — the shifting ice too precarious to plant them due to the changing pressure of the ice — he was nevertheless alert to the possibility of booby traps.

On the point, Freeman would go ahead, checking the immediate area about him before waving on the patrol. High overhead the dot of an eagle crossed the moon’s face, passing through the aura of ice needles that was clearly visible as a golden ring. Finally the patrol eased its way off the frozen river toward the black humps of hills that faded into the snow-covered foothills of Manchuria.

All this time Freeman was calmly surveying escape routes should firing suddenly erupt around them, his nose as much a guide as his eyes — alert for the smell of wood smoke, which, while it mightn’t necessarily signal an NKA or Chinese position, would warn him of a village where the Chinese might be storing arms and other supplies as a forward base.

There was a sudden ice fall. Freeman flicked off the safety catch of his squad automatic weapon, its triangular box magazine pressing in firmly against his side. But soon all was quiet again, and in another little while they came upon a track, or rather series of tracks, leading up from the river, where the grass in the flood margin had been stomped down, frozen like coarse hair, prone to crack underfoot. Freeman knew he had only two options: to go on where they couldn’t help but make some noise or to head back.

It might be, Freeman realized, that there were no Chinese or NKA units anywhere in this section, but with the north-south valleys running down to the river, offering natural revetment areas for armor, the general couldn’t believe that the Chinese wouldn’t use the Manchurian side as a staging area. And if the North Koreans had successfully dug tunnels all along the DMZ — the last one being discovered in 1990—despite American ground-movement sensors, this area could be riddled with underground supply dumps, the Chinese divisions waiting for the next snowstorm that could nullify U.S. air strikes and blind the U.S. artillery’s forward observation posts. He knew that if he were the PLA commander, he’d sure as hell be using the sector.