Ian Slater - WW III

Lin Kuang had never been “home” to the mainland, but one night, as a junior officer years before, he had been the captain of one of the Nationalist navy’s motor torpedo boats that had landed a raiding party during the intermittent fighting over Quemoy Island just off the mainland. The purpose of the raid was ostensibly to gather and update intelligence reports on the Communist ports’ defenses. But the real purpose was to keep every soldier in the KMT practiced and ready, to prevent them from ever sinking into the passive acceptance, shown by the rest of Taiwan’s eighteen million, of believing that Formosa, as Taiwan used to be called, was home. The KMT ruled Taiwan and built up enormous financial reserves to the point that it was now, after Japan, the richest Asian nation. But, with the legendary Chinese patience, the KMT had never lost the belief that the Communists in Beijing were but temporary usurpers, one day to be thrown out. Unlike so many Westerners, who accepted the legitimacy of Communist China and had now turned their back on Taiwan, Lin Kuang and his fellow officers never doubted that one day it would be their day to return. Superbly trained, equipped, through their billions of surplus dollars, with the latest in technological advances in the West, the KMT knew that the Communist hold on Mainland China was in large measure an illusion; the Chinese Communist party, constituting only 10 percent of the population, could no longer hold it together. There were hundreds of millions in the far-flung regions of China who had never been anywhere near Beijing, for whom Beijing might as well have been on the moon, as there were many millions in the far-flung republics of the Soviet Union whose loyalty to Moscow was as tenuous as a failing marriage, the parents unable to control the children who sensed the great divide and wanted to go their own way. Promise the far-flung republics their own country, said the KMT, and the center was yours.

Lin Kuang closed his eyes, breathed m the cool, damp air, happy that autumn was upon them. It was a time for change-when men would need to brace themselves for the stormy seas of winter. In his mind’s eye he was no longer inhaling the air of Taiwan but that of Hangzhou, where his father’s fathers had been born and raised, the city of which Marco Polo had once said, “In Heaven there is Paradise, on earth… Hangzhou.” There on the West Lake, serene amid a garden of gladioli, lawn, and fish ponds, was Mao’s villa. It was Lin Kuang’s dream to be the one to retake Hangzhou, to personally raze the villa to the ground.

In Washington State, Mount Ranier’s volcanic cone was visible from Seattle’s Northwest University over sixty miles away, the mountain’s peak shrouded in a rosy hue of pollution and midday sun, while fourteen miles west of the city a Trident nuclear submarine glided gracefully out of the upper reaches of Hood Canal. It passed the spidery wire webs of the onshore degaussing stations, which would wipe the sub clean of any telltale magnetic signature that might otherwise be picked up by a ship nearby, especially the Soviet trawlers that often lay listening north of the Bangor base beyond the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which ran between Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island. Sometimes, as was the case this day, a Coast Guard cutter plowed ahead of the Trident, making lots of noise and running interference against hydrophone arrays that might be trailing behind a Russian trawler as the sub headed into the vastness of the blue Pacific.

David Brentwood’s father had often taken him out to see the ships leaving the east coast, and David always found it a calming experience, which was why he’d driven out to the placid waters of the canal. The fight with Melissa was still officially on, but he’d hoped that if he could cool down by the time he got back that evening, then she would have simmered down, too. He needed her, especially now, for on the circuitous route down through Tacoma and up across to Bremerton, the “classic” rock and roll he’d been listening to on the Buick’s radio had been interrupted by a news flash that an American frigate had been attacked in the Sea of Japan, but as yet the Pentagon hadn’t given out the name. Somehow David knew in his gut that it was the Blaine. By the time he’d reached Bangor, another radio flash had cut into the program. It was the USS Blaine. No information on casualties. Then forty minutes later a Pentagon announcement saying the ship had apparently been hit twice. The National Security Council and combined Chiefs of Staff were meeting with the president.

David felt terribly guilty. He had grown up in a naval family; his grandfather had fought at Midway. But instead of following his brothers into the navy, he had bitterly disappointed his father by joining the army reserves at Northwestern instead of the naval reserves. Now he suddenly felt somehow responsible, that somehow he should be in Ray’s place or in Robert’s place aboard the Atlantic Fleet sub, wherever it was. His father had always told him that he didn’t care what “line of work” David got into after college, “so long as you’re happy.” That at least was the official “liberal” stance of ex-Admiral John Brentwood. He had never indicated any disappointment about David joining the army reserve, yet David felt it whenever his father was talking to someone about “the boys.” Likewise David held back from talking about his father’s honor-clad career, for much as he admired his father, David always felt pressured to perform as well as his two navy brothers. One reason he felt he couldn’t, but which he had never confided to anyone, not even Melissa, for fear of them thinking him weak, was that he had a terror of the sea itself. From a distance he could admire and enjoy it as one admired people on the high trapeze, but the very idea of dying at sea, of being entombed forever in the great dark abyss, sent a cold shiver through his bowels. His father, obviously without meaning to terrify him and more as a simple point of information, had once told him when David was a young boy that the Marianas Trench in the Pacific was as deep as Everest was high. To David it became an idée fixe, a phobia that no doubt, like all phobias, would merely have sounded silly to someone else, but one that for a young man from a distinguished naval family was nothing short of cowardice. The thought of the closed-in darkness, the enormous pressures that could “crumble bones to dust”—that was another of his father’s favorites — began to haunt David, to obsess him so much, he’d gone to the library at his primary school and, with all the guilt of a pornographer, had looked up whether his father was right about the Marianas Trench. Surely nothing could be as deep as Mount Everest-was high. His hands trembled as he flicked over the Ms in the encyclopedia, heart racing, ready to shut it immediately should anyone approach him. The Marianas Trench wasn ‘t as deep as Everest was high — it was deeper, by another five thousand feet. Later David’s rational side did battle with his irrational shadows — after all, to die was to die. But logic held no ground in the battle between primeval fear of being buried in blackness and the calm logic that argued that however you died was in the end immaterial. The memory of seeing his grandmother’s body borne away on a wet and windy fall day in New York, the sounds of horns honking impatiently and uncaring from behind the hearse as, rain-polished, it pulled off into the cemetery, had stayed with him. Watching the coffin lowered, hearing the run of the ropes and the thump of the clay to close you in forever, he’d decided there and then he would be cremated when it came his time. But did the soul still rise or did it die, too, in the funeral pyre?