Ian Slater - WW III

The moment he saw the brilliant light, David, his training overcoming instinct, froze as another militiaman fifty feet away fired a second flare inside the building. David knew what they were looking for would be movement, not shapes, as he pressed himself hard against the pedestal of a peasant woman at harvest.

Brooklyn forgot his training, swung out between the columns with his SAW, and crashed to the ground as a dozen militia cut him down. The flare now fizzing in the far corner, Brentwood snapped into the prone position and swept the floor with a full magazine, hitting four of the militia, sending the others racing back behind the columns toward the door, the general getting one man silhouetted in the penumbra of the flare’s light.

“Brentwood!” he yelled. “Go for the balustrade. Back of it there’s the auditorium. Give ‘em a burst and head back!”

As the general fired the covering burst up the stairs, David ran between the columns, heading beyond the foyer toward the faint outline of the auditorium door, plate glass collapsing from the windows either side of the assembly hall from ricochets. When he reached the auditorium he turned hard right inside, sweeping the SAW in front of him — astonished to see the emergency lights down by the stage were on, casting a soft glow over the two thousand seats that smelled like a new car’s upholstery.

The door burst open and the general came in, almost taking Brentwood with him, the hot barrel of the gun striking David’s flak vest, the general swearing, his SAW’s sling having got caught in the breech, jamming the gun. He yanked hard at it, but it wouldn’t budge. His PRC surged to life, Freeman still uttering oaths, cursing himself now for having left the volume switch up. “Forty-dollar fine,” he said to Brentwood, who tried to smile but couldn’t. It was all he could do to get enough saliva to swallow. Freeman turned the volume down and heard Banks. “General, this is square one.”

“Reading you,” said the general. He was disappointed it wasn’t his mortar crew outside.

“General,” Banks went on in an excited voice, “one of our ROK interpreters has plugged into Charlie traffic — seems—” Banks’s voice rose and fell in waves of interference, and Freeman could hear the gunfire around the square. “Seems, General… the runt’s in Mansudae Hall.”

“For Christ’s sake!” hissed the general. “Why the fuck you think we’re here? Intelligence confirmed he’s been holed up here since…” There was more static, but this time it seemed like the tearing sound of a machine gun in the background.

“That all?” said the general.

“Yes, sir. Mortar crew should be there soon.”

The general turned the volume switch off. It had suddenly become very quiet. They heard the patter of sandaled feet. He yanked at the SAW strap again, but it wouldn’t come free. As David drew his bayonet from its scabbard, handing it to the general to cut the strap loose, Freeman saw the boy’s hands were shaking uncontrollably.

“Don’t you worry about it, son,” the general said, in a barely audible voice, his breathing slowing for the first time since they’d entered the great hall. “You’re doing just fine. We’ll get the son of a bitch.” Brentwood began to speak, but Freeman held up his hand, motioning above with his thumb. “Some of the monkeys are going up the stairs. Good.”

David guessed there’d been about half a dozen or so, and when they didn’t find any Americans upstairs, they’d be coming back down. His apprehensive gaze upward conveyed his fear to the general. “Don’t worry,” said Freeman, smiling. “We’ll be all right.” He nodded his head down toward the stage. “You like the front seats or the mezzanine?”

David couldn’t think straight, let alone respond to a joke. All he knew for certain was that he was down to his second to last clip and that whenever anyone told him everything was going to be all right — it never was.

At latitude fifty-six degrees north and longitude seven degrees ten minutes west, a hundred feet below the sea’s hard blue, USS Roosevelt was eighty miles west of Scotland and thirty miles north of Ireland.

“Any upwelling here?” the captain asked.

“No, sir. Salinity, temperature look fine.”

“Look or are?”

“They’re normal, sir.”

“Very well. Ahead five knots, roll out VLF to two thousand.”

“VLF rolling, sir.”

At the Sorbonne in Paris, over five thousand leftist students, some of them anarchists, were rioting, fighting police, protesting France’s decision to “defend the borders.”

In Whitehall, the new minister of war was on the scrambler to 10 Downing Street.

“Agreed, Prime Minister, it’s not a declaration of war per se. But I should have thought that a ‘defense of one’s borders’ means…” The minister grimaced. “No, Prime Minister. Yes, it is possible. Very well. Yes. Right away, Prime Minister.”

When the minister of war put down the phone, his hand went to his forehead in an effort to remember what he’d been saying to Under Secretary Hoskins. But his mind was still on the prime minister’s unsettling reservation about the French action. “PM’s office can’t seem to understand,” began the minister, “that while the French response means we can’t use their rapid deployment force in NATO as yet, we will be able to the moment any foreign troops violate French soil. And—” he looked across at his secretary “—that has to happen — otherwise what’s the bloody point of the Russians fighting the bloody war? If we have the French ports for resupply, we still stand a chance. We don’t have the Chunnel, and if we don’t have the ports and the Bolshies continue to hold Holland, Hamburg, and Bremen, and take Rotterdam, then I should think we’re in very deep. Wouldn’t you agree, Hoskins?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I mean to say—” the minister’s right hand reached out for an elusive word as if he were answering an opposition question in the House “—the bloody French have to come in.” He paused for a moment, thinking, hands behind his back, moving toward the now armor-plated window. “I mean, all that lovely wine. It’s unthinkable.”

“Yes, Minister.”

But the reports from JIB — Joint Intelligence Bureau — indicated that the Russian surge had lost much of its wallop. There had been early snow, and the war of mobility was grinding down. It didn’t go nuclear, as all the experts had told the minister it would, and “Pray God it won’t,” said the minister, adding, “But I think, Hoskins, contrary to what we all thought — I should say, what all the experts thought — that we’re in for a long war.”

“No VLF signal,” Zeldman reported to the captain.

Captain Robert Brentwood nodded and gave orders to the executive officer of the USS Roosevelt to map a course for the next twenty-four hours that would place them in the deepest part of the Norwegian Sea — within comfortable launching range of targets on the Kola Peninsula and beyond, guaranteeing the Roosevelt’s missiles the minimum possible CEP — circular error of probability — when striking all twenty-four of the sub’s designated targets.

In “Sherwood Forest,” aft of the sub’s sail, where the six missiles in two rows of three stood ready in their gleaming forty-foot-high, seven-foot-wide tubes, Raymond Wilson, one of the off-duty RCOs, or reactor control operators, was jogging, the steady hum of the forty-ton ventilators washing comfortably overhead like the pleasantly reassuring noise of a summer breeze in high timber. Wilson, the man whom Captain Brentwood and the cook had been joking about earlier, was in his workaday blue cotton and polyester jumpsuit and quiet matching canvas-sole shoes, the blue in stark contrast to the smooth, creamy white color of the missile tubes. He sat on one of the narrow flip-down benches near the bulkhead, taking his pulse, his breathing slowing, whole body relaxed, yet his senses acute, missing nothing, the odor of the sub like that of a sparkling clean showroom — a world away from what he’d been told were the stink-holes of the old World War II diesels. He felt good-fit, confident he’d live to be a hundred.