Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

There had been the public hue and cry for the admiral and his staff to “get off their butts,” as the New York Post put it, and to use whatever was possible for the convoys. Many of his critics pointed out that some of the thousands of big yachts, for example, could do well in excess of seventeen knots. But Brentwood stood firm, pointing out in turn that it wasn’t the yachts’ speed that worried him so much as their ability to keep in convoy pattern while heading full into a force-ten gale amid radio silence. And sailing under strict convoy orders whereby neither naval escort nor other merchantmen could alter course to assist, thus giving a marauding sub a slow target. Even so, Brentwood insisted on considering all comers, the computer telling him in cold, hard numbers that not enough of the tonnage NATO so desperately needed was getting through. “Rollover” was railing, the deadly equations tipping decidedly in the Soviets’ favor.

Six cups of coffee since lunch, his diet having held firm against the creamer until the last cup, Brentwood was surprised when he looked up and saw it was dark, the old familiar Manhattan skyline now drastically altered due to wartime fuel and energy conservation, including a blackout on all nonessential illumination. It had been suggested at first that the city go into full blackout condition, as in England and Europe, but this was ruled out on the assumption that if the Russians were going to attack New York, it would be with ICBMs or sea- and air-launched cruise missiles. They would have no need to see where the city was, the coordinates for such an attack already having been programmed into the terrain contour-matching nose radar of the ICBMs aboard their “Boomers,” as the giant Soviet Typhoon SSBNs were called. Besides, as the major pointed out, and few challenged him, if the city was blacked out, the crime rate would soar.

Even from the admiral’s commanding view on the seventieth floor, whole sections of Manhattan were missing, only the blipping of the red aircraft warning light atop the Trump Building affording the admiral a sense of his old familiarity with the city skyline. Far below, the yellow ribbons of traffic kept flowing, red taillights shimmering in the warm air of car exhausts that rose from the skyscrapers’ canyons. The admiral was so exhausted that at times he’d nod off. Upon waking, the red light on the Trump Building would cause him to start, taking him back to the other war long ago during which, his father had told him, many an exhausted American driver in the endless three-ton-truck convoys would suddenly jerk awake, momentarily panicking that he was driving on the wrong side of the road before realizing he was in England.

“More coffee, Admiral?” asked his secretary.

“No thanks, Janice. Feel like I could run a mile. We have anything back from San Diego on those three Japanese tankers?”

“I don’t think so, sir. I’ll check the fax.” As she walked away, Brentwood watched her with a mixture of affection and lust. She was half his age, in her mid thirties, a single parent with two children, yet the strains and stresses of working as well as raising children hadn’t given her the battle-worn face of many mothers her age, and her trim bottom fitted his category of “grabbable.”

The admiral had never made a pass at her, telling himself he never would, but she was divorced, and now and then, as he glanced up from the never-ending pile of files or in reaction to the weather pattern information changing on the TV monitor in front of him, he had caught her looking at him with what he believed was a mixture of admiration and warmth. But, he reminded himself, she was half his age, Lana’s age, and besides, there was no way he would cheat on his wife, Catherine. Not only would it be dishonorable, but downright cruel. She was still trying to come to terms with Ray’s condition. Already there had been ten operations — the last three purely for cosmetic reasons to try to reconstruct his face as something else than a horror mask that even Ray and Bern’s children had found difficult to deal with.

And now David was missing — God knew where — in what the Pentagon was vaguely referring to as the “northern German” sector. The admiral was tempted to pull a few strings in Washington, D.C., to try to get details of exactly where the American airborne’s rapid deployment force was. But that wouldn’t help David if he had already been killed. Besides, the admiral detested that sort of back-door, special-favor nonsense. There’d never been favoritism on his ships, and be damned if he’d start asking for it now. And how the hell he could even think of monkeying around with some gal half his age while his family was in such turmoil was beyond him, though some navy shrink, he recalled, had once told him the sex drive knew neither the proper time nor the place, that often it hit you precisely when you thought it shouldn’t: when you were exhausted, at a funeral, and certainly after combat.

Which was why the admiral had to make sure, without mentioning it to Janice, that as important as penicillin and all the other medical supplies were to the well-being of the men, condoms were an essential part of the cargo — usually cut sick bay lines by 50 percent. He told Janice, as he’d told his sons, Lana too, that more people had died in 1919 of the flu than all those killed in the bloodbath of World War I. These days it wasn’t flu but the age-old venereal diseases that stalked the battlefields of every war. To avoid public disclosure that would only increase the anxiety of the womenfolk left behind, the condoms weren’t listed as such but as sterile surgical gloves.

On the TV monitor, Admiral Brentwood saw that the red, skull-like pictures of the storm system over the Atlantic were changing again. Red patches invaded green, the storm having moved from force six to eight since midafternoon. He wondered if Robert was out there now in the middle of it. Maybe the Roosevelt was farther north, in the Irish Sea, part of the NATO force protecting England’s western approaches. Or rather trying to.

“Admiral?”

He looked up at his secretary. Janice had the lips of a Raquel Welch and a body to boot, her curves flattered by a form-clinging emerald knit dress, the air around her redolent with the perfume of roses. His favorite flower. It struck him that she might know this, but he quickly dismissed the thought as mere conceit. She handed him a fax. “Admiral, San Diego regrets…”

“But they want the oil tankers for themselves?” he interjected, taking a file of letters she had ready for his signature.

“Afraid so, Admiral.”

“I don’t blame them,” he sighed, taking off his reading glasses, sitting back, pinching the bridge of his nose. “The only oil Japan and the Sixth Fleet’s going to get is from our West Coast, at least until Iran and Iraq stop shooting at anything that moves in the Gulf.”

“We could fax Valdez,” suggested Janice. “If there’s a lineup there, we could ask Washington to intervene and release—”

“Yes,” said Brentwood, leaning forward now, hands locked together, shoulders hunched from the long hours and stress of the job. “But if we fax Valdez to release a tanker for the Atlantic ops without going through San Diego, that’ll only get San Diego’s back up — not to mention the Sixth Fleet.”

“And Tokyo,” she added.

“You’ve got it. No — we’re all running on a scarcity of ships, Janice. Everyone thinks their operational theater problem is the most important, their problems the most serious. But if anything happens to those tankers we have on—” he put his reading glasses on, peering through the dimmed light of the overhead neon at the transparent green “Ops” board “—Convoys Eighty-Three and Eighty-Four — we’re in big trouble.” Janice said nothing, and all he could hear for a moment was the soft sound of her breathing. “Look — let’s request one tanker from San Diego. They’ll look piggy if they insist on keeping all three. One’s a compromise situation, and we can start moving it as a reserve. But double-check the draft on all three tankers, Janice— before we make the request. We don’t want to do a Levins.”