Ian Slater - World in Flames

Breathless, he arrived in the San Diego base commander’s office, sweat pouring unevenly from his mottled, burn-patch face, terrifying the Wave secretary on duty, who screamed, bringing two burly shore patrol men in from the duty room.

“I’ve — got—” Ray began, but had to stop to catch his breath. “I’ve got to see the base commander. At once—”

“Sure, buddy!” said the smaller, burlier of the two linebackers. “You just simmer down now and come with us.”

“Look!” said Ray, jerking his arms, but they were locked in the shore patrol’s grasp.

“Call the LT, will you, Sue?” said the smaller one. LT was the shore patrol’s lingo for “loony truck.” With the stress of this war, a lot of the guys and some of the women, too, just plain flipped their lids.

Standing back to front with him, Alexsandra felt her hair fall softly across Sergei’s chest, her hands plying behind her, cupping him, squeezing him. He felt so hard, he could penetrate steel. Then she would relax her grip, kneading his groin with her clenched fists and turning to face him, would kiss him all over as they fell on the bed. Then suddenly she would sit upright, hair swinging back, her breasts thrusting, nipples engorged like dark cherries, her hands behind her again, pulling him slowly with mounting strength and squeezing it at the same time until he groaned and mumbled nonsensically in his pleasure. Suddenly she was off the bed, getting dressed — his favorite tease.

“Vernis!” —”Come back!”—he demanded, then pleaded.

“No!”

“Yes.”

“No!”

“Sandra.”

Slowly she advanced toward him.

“Now,” he gasped. “I can’t stand it any longer.”

“It’s long enough already,” she giggled. She didn’t love him, but he was fun. She was sure it had been his influence that had got her released from the KGB jail. If she worked on him, maybe — if God wished — her two remaining brothers, Alexander and Myshka, might be set free. It was a vain hope, she knew, but so long as there was any possibility, she must try— do anything if it would help. It meant that she had to pretend a lot: faking an orgasm for his manly pride when she had wanted to choke him. But after pretending so long, she had begun to enjoy it, and the rougher he was with her as he approached climax, the more she liked it. It helped to rationalize what she was doing. It was God’s way, she decided, of helping her get through it.

“Sit on me!” he ordered. “Quickly, quickly!”

As she slid down upon him, the storm outside seemed to grow stronger, uncontrollable, the wind smacking the bare branches of the beech tree against the ancient windowpane, making a scratching noise like a cat trying to get in. His nostrils sucked in her smell as his hands and wrist muscles tensed, his body moving up and down beneath her, her breasts rising and falling faster and faster, her loins pressed hard against his sweat-slicked thighs until she, too, began moaning with pleasure.

Ray Brentwood asked the chief petty officer in charge of cells at the San Diego base, if he, Brentwood, wrote a note, would the petty officer deliver it to either the base commander or the base’s director of naval intelligence as soon as possible.

The chief petty officer read it. “You sure about this, Captain?”

“Look, Chief, I’m not nuts. Bit too excited, I guess, when your guys picked me up. That’s all. And I hope you’re not nuts either, because if you don’t get that to someone fast, they’re gonna do a Pearl Harbor on you.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I mean in forty-one there was a message in the hopper warning Pearl of an impending Japanese attack — the day before it happened. But some jerk back in Washington decided to use Western Union instead of calling it through. I’ve got evidence here that there are at least two Russian subs close inshore, and I mean close in. Closer than anyone believed possible, because all we could think of was nuclear and—” He paused as the CPO, his jaw clenched, looking like he was grinding his molars, read Brentwood’s message again. “Chief!” said Brentwood. “You deliver that now and you’re going to be part of history. A hero. You don’t deliver it and your name’ll be shit in every textbook ever written about this war. Course, if you don’t do anything about it, we’ll all be dead, so there won’t be any history for you to worry about anyway.”

The chief looked at Brentwood, and then staggered him. “Hell, I can’t take it anywhere. I can’t leave my post. Hey — I’ll use a walkie-talkie link to patrol. Get ‘em down here to run it up for us.”

Brentwood sat back on the hard cell mattress, letting his head roll against the cold brick. “You keep this up, Chief, and they’ll make you an admiral.”

The chief of naval intelligence for San Diego base was down in the cells fifteen minutes later. He listened to Brentwood and told the shore patrol to get the lab technician out of bed to verify it. “Drag him here if you have to.”

When the patrol knocked on the technician’s door, he had just convinced his wife to give him some “relief.” He swore a lot when they barged in on him and told him he’d have to go back with them.

“Right now?” he asked incredulously. “Damn near midnight.”

“My God!” said his wife. “What’s he done?”

“Can’t say, ma’am.”

“Then you can’t take him — if there’s no charge.”

“It’s all right, Norma. I know what it’s about.”

“What? Tell me.”

“Can’t tell you, hon,” said the technician, struggling to get into his pants and nearly falling. “It’s classified.”

“What’s her name?” called Norma.

When they got him out to the Humvee, it was ten after midnight, and Norma was sure he was mixed up with some other woman. An admiral’s wife. He was always telling her he needed “it” more than most men. Maybe she should have let him have his way more often. Lord — maybe it was drugs! She phoned her mother.

“What’d I tell you, Norma? I told you. He’s a bum. But oh no — you knew better. He’s a bum, Norma!”

On the other side of the world, Frank Shirer was flying as left wingman in a finger-four formation of four F-14 Tomcats out of Kapsan Air Base, thirty miles south of the Yalu. He was regretting he had broken one of the cardinal rules for combat pilots in not having a substantial breakfast before going up on the border patrol, but the problem was he had never been a breakfast man — early mornings not his forte. But normally he would have grabbed at least a continental: juice, toast, and coffee. It wasn’t enough for a pilot who might have to go into a sustained high G-turn, and he hadn’t slept well.

During the night he’d had dreams of the Russian fighters out of Vladivostok attacking the 747 in which he had flown Freeman to Korea. He was also a little nervous and almost regretted — heresy for a pilot — having accepted Freeman’s offer of a few days of combat patrol to keep his hand in before flying the repaired 747 back to the States tomorrow. The skills of the fighter pilot never left you, but the sudden switch from the big 747 to a Tomcat was like going from a bus to a sports car, and the morning before, he’d been a little slow as the Tomcat leader’s left wingman. He’d been only a fraction of a second late in a breakaway, but a fraction of a second could mean you were dead when you were flying over the “fence”— the Yalu. More and more MiG 29A’s had been seen in Manchurian air space — riding range on the other side. And sometimes they looked identical to U.S. planes on the radar. Two F-15 Eagles and an F-16 had been “splashed” off the coast by fellow U.S. Navy fighters because IFF — identification friend or foe — had been made on radar alone.