Ian Slater: World in Flames

“I know that, but this is unsafe at any speed. There should be one of those staggered pull-offs the Scots are so fond — ah, there we are!”

Ahead, no more than fifteen feet away, Rosemary glimpsed a black rectangle of macadam or, as Robert would call it, blacktop, barely big enough for a car, bracken blurring its edge. She couldn’t imagine a more forlorn spot to stop, but Robert was right — it was riskier to go on. Besides, at most it would mean a late arrival at the bed-and-breakfast-house at Mallaig.

Pulling off, leaving the parking lights on, Robert let the motor run for a little until it was cozily warm, Rosemary lying back against the headrest, closing her eyes. “It’s ridiculous,” she said, excusing a yawn. “I feel tired and we’ve just started.”

“Make the most of it, sailor,” he said, reaching over, taking the map from her lap, and adjusting the seat into the semirecline. “You’re beautiful. I ever tell you that?”

She smiled dreamily. “All the time, kind sir.” As he began folding the map, he glimpsed a filigree of black lace against the stockinged tan of her thigh. She began to say something, but gently he placed his finger on her lips and felt the moistness of her tongue, his hand slipping beneath her skirt.

“We can’t,” she said, hushed. “What if—”

“We’d hear anyone coming a mile away.”

“Don’t be vulgar—”

“What? Oh, I wasn’t.” He laughed. “I didn’t mean to be, honest.”

“Yes you did.”

“No I didn’t—” She made sweet murmuring sounds, her thighs trapping his hand. “I want—” he began, “I want to—”

“What’s that?” she said suddenly, stiffening, pushing him away.

He stopped, listening. There was only the sound of the sleet pelting against the car. “Nothing,” he assured her, adding, “Submariners can tell, honey. If I can’t hear it, it isn’t there. We can pick out a noise short for miles and—” He didn’t finish, her embrace smothering all talk, his eyes closing with hers as his hands slid further beneath the lace to her secret warmth. She whimpered ever so slightly in a mounting joy. The very moment she touched him, gripped him, he felt his whole body stiffening with a throbbing urgency the likes of which he’d never known.

Schulz heard a high, bipping tone — a radar-homing missile locked onto him, left quarter, from Dessau thirty miles away. He hit the jammer, went to full thrust, and felt the G force “dumping” on him as the Falcon’s Pratt and Whitney F-100 afterburner screamed in the full vertical climb as he jettisoned sea urchin flares and three high-frequency “burp” box decoys, just in case — to sucker off the enemy missile.

Already, ten miles nearer American lines than the Dessau batteries, Sergei Marchenko fired his first Acrid AA missile.

Schulz saw one of the Acrids streak below in front of him, the second one passing above left, hitting a flare, disintegrating, a white cloud speckled black with debris coming down at him from the explosion. He flicked the sidestick for afterburner, but the engine was out and his tail radar warning receiver wasn’t working, so he had no idea if the Russian fighter was in the Falcon’s cone of vulnerability. Down below, he saw the snow-streaked blur of green plain start to spin, foothills moving to its periphery, mountains looming fast ahead. He pulled the Douglas eject.

Next moment he was soaking wet, the cloud he was in supersaturated, Schulz knowing only that he was alive, the ruby spot of the Falcon’s dying jet vanishing in gray stratus.

“Christ!” He was above the Harz. His greatest fear of bailing out had always been that he would be hung up in a tree on one of the steep mountain sides, unable to free himself — with a hundred-foot drop or worse beneath him and no other way out. Search and Rescue had found a colleague of his on the American side of the Harz, on the run for weeks and, of course, dead when they found him, eyes pecked out, stomach bloated enormously, and every orifice oozing with maggots.

For Marchenko, the downed American plane not only added to his score of five NATO kills — three earned over the Aleutians, including his otplata —”payback”—downing of the American, Shirer — but it added enormously to his reputation as the up-and-coming Soviet ace who might take the title from the Belorussian, Gorich, who had eleven kills. This was Marchenko’s second F-16, the first shot down over Adak in the Aleutians. And the F-16 was regarded by the Soviet pilots as one of the best all-around combination interceptor/ground attack aircraft ever built, bristling with American know-how. But if Marchenko was pleased with the kill, he showed no such emotion to his wingman. The truth was that though he was satisfied enough with the kill, he wasn’t happy that the American flier might have gotten away by having ejected. You beat the Americans not by killing their machines — their industrial capacity was enormous. You had to kill their pilots. This was the Allies’ critical vulnerability. And it irked him that the American ace, Shirer, had also survived and bailed out when Marchenko had shot him down over the Aleutians. The fact was, Sergei Marchenko was the only Soviet ace who had not killed an American ace. It rankled him, particularly when his critics charged that since the fierce dogfights over the Aleutians, he had only been up against second-stringers. Shirer became his obsession. Marchenko had a photograph of the American ace, taken from the German magazine Der Spiegel, pinned up in his home base at Khabarovsk; Shirer’s face the center of his squadron’s dart board.

Low on fuel, Marchenko and his wingman turned back toward Berlin.

In the shuddering moment of their ecstasy followed by the warm, flooding peace that enveloped them, neither Robert nor Rosemary was aware of any sound on the lonely Scottish road. It was only when he returned to the driver’s seat that Robert saw the twin yellow spots of light in the rearview mirror. Still, there was no sound, and it was another several minutes before the car, feeling its way through the fog, could be heard. In the frantic race to button her blouse and make herself “respectable,” Rosemary dropped her lipstick between the hand brake and the seat. As she and Robert reached for it, they crashed heads. “Och, we’re doomed!” said Robert, mimicking McRae of the bed-and-breakfast. Rosemary began to laugh, and the more she laughed, the more uncontrollable it became so that soon she was weeping, Robert pulling her toward him, she fending him off, slumped down out of sight beneath the window level. The lights from the car, now no more than fifty yards behind them, disappeared momentarily, and at first Robert thought the car had stopped, before he saw more thick sheets of fog sweeping in from the coast, obliterating the approaching car and roiling over the road. “Rosemary — get up.”

“I don’t want anyone to see me!”

The car was almost on them. Its horn sounded as it drew level with them, the driver a dim outline waving, Robert acknowledging it from one driver on a lonely road to another. Rosemary sighed with relief, watching the red taillights of the car and a lorry that was obviously using it as a trailblazer on the fogbound highway disappearing like two sore eyes into the mist.

“Funny,” commented Robert.

“What — me being ravaged out on the moor?”

“The car that passed us,” Robert said. “Looked like the pair we saw at McRae’s.”

“There, I found it,” Rosemary proclaimed victoriously, grimacing as she reached down behind the hand brake to retrieve her salmon-red lipstick. “Well, they did say they’d probably see us. They’re sightseeing, too, remember?”