Ian Slater - WW III

“Who told you that?” shouted Sergei.

“American armed forces network.”

Sergei smiled, despite the dust-thick air that was making it almost impossible to breathe. Why did the Americans tell everybody? He couldn’t understand it. They had to tell everyone everything. They were telling the world NATO was on the run, reeling two hundred miles to the north, the S-WP forces smashing through the Dutch 415th Armored and now two hundred miles south through the Austrian border, splitting the NATO defenses into three sectors. Clearly Agursky was set on the right course, seeking to divide the NATO pockets, then pulverize them into submission before America’s enormous production potential to resupply could come into play. And the farther the S-WP penetrated into West Germany, the less likely it became that the Americans could even consider the nuclear alternative. The radio crackled, informing Marchenko that the Leopard tanks were Mark Ones.

“God is good,” Sergei said, and got a belly laugh from the driver, who was so wound up that the thought of his T-90 having a thousand-meter advantage over the Leopard One seemed to him nothing less than a gift.

“I’d still rather be up north,” put in the driver, “if the American radio is right.”

“Why?” asked Sergei.

“I’d rather be fighting those Dutch hippies,” said the driver. “The Krauts are a different matter, Comrade.”

“Ah,” said Sergei, dismissing the odds, “we’ll shit all over—” The tank swerved violently to the left to avoid a forty-five-degree antitank slab. There was a tremendous thwack and Sergei saw a fine red mist, then his gunner’s head rolling by his feet, the man’s torso bubbling with blood.

In the south on the Donau, or Danube, plain, the weather over the Bohemian Forest was closing in, hampering NATO’s Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force, so that to its Luftwaffe commander, General Heiss, it seemed that even God was against NATO.

Before Congress had even heard of and ratified the president’s declaration of war, the British convoy, under British naval escort, was already under way, the U.S. Navy to take up escort duty twelve hundred miles north of Newfoundland, and in Manhattan, Lana La Roche, nee Brentwood, had carefully aligned the arrows on the child-proof safety top of her vial of sleeping pills and poured them down the toilet.

Earlier that day she had left her apartment on the Upper East Side and walked down to the Plaza — for some reason, which at first she couldn’t explain, she found Central Park to be a kind of magnet in her depression. She had scrupulously avoided watching television or reading a newspaper, for her own bad news about her marriage — Jay would still not agree to a divorce — was enough to cope with. And it was a long time before she realized why she had been going to Central Park, often at night. It was dangerous, a punishment for her failure in her marriage, at college, at living. Then, whether she liked it or not, the world came crashing in on her.

She had been standing by the park wall, across from the Plaza’s north entrance, barely noticing the traffic sliding by — a young man showing off, coming out of the hotel, crossing over to the horse-drawn cabriolets, bowing deeply before a bejeweled blonde, twice his years. Soon she would grow old and he’d still be young.

The whip struck the horse’s flank and it began the lover’s walk through the park. Raucous rock was booming from the band shell, and roller skaters with ghetto blasters weaved by. Why didn’t they get Walkmans or earphones or something and just blow off their own ears? she wondered. Then she saw someone nearby reading The Times, its banner headline telling the world that an American warship, the USS Blaine, had been hit in the East China Sea. She had felt her heart racing with the shock, yet simultaneously she felt a surge of exhilaration for the overwhelming fact was that for the first time in over a year of utter defeat, she knew exactly what to do. A few days in New York to get things set up and then to California.

David Brentwood hadn’t had the freedom that his sister, for all her troubles, had, and as one of the six-month reservists, his was a stark choice. Deferment, then go where the army sent you, or volunteer now for the marines. Stacy and Melissa, who had come over to the ROTC office, were watching him.

“Marines,” he said. The look on Stacy’s face was worth it— or so David thought until David got to Parris Island and quickly came to the conclusion that it had been the dumbest decision he’d ever made. He’d said “marines” to impress Melissa. That bastard Stacy had conned him.

“A baker’s bar?” asked Lana.

“No, a baker bar,” explained the surgeon at San Diego’s War Vets Hospital. His Swiss-German accent was clear, his manner polite, coat as white as the gleaming walls of the intensive burn wing. “It is named after its inventor.” After all night on the red-eye flight from New York, Lana still wasn’t getting an answer to her question of why she was unable to see Ray. God, if she’d known this — hadn’t been so impulsive in the first place-she could have stayed in New York. But then, she didn’t want to be in New York. That was the whole idea — to get out, away from the pills, the corrosive self-pity. To be with her brother. The plan was to comfort him, to think of someone else for a change. Their parents.

Beth and the two children had come down again from Bremerton. It was supposed to be what a family did in crisis, but here was Dr. Franz Lehman, maxillofacial specialist, seemingly still unmoved by their pleas to see him.

In fact, he understood their concerns very well. It was for that reason he was so insistent on them not seeing Ray so soon after the first of the long series of operations that would be necessary to reconstruct something that resembled a face. Skin grafts from the arm and hip seemed promising, but in any event, it would be a long time.

The “baker bar,” Dr. Lehman explained, would be only a small part of it, a curved four-inch gold rod cemented to the top jaw, replacing bone that had been smashed by shrapnel. After building the bar, anchoring it either side in the remaining bone, a partial denture of five teeth could be attached to the bar by two small inverted U-shaped clips inside the denture, the gum line being a meld of plastic and gold to reduce expansion and contraction coefficients. A millimeter difference could cause maxillofacial strain on the mandibular joint, and the telltale click, in most people merely the sound of the joint functioning, would in Ray Brentwood’s case cause massive malfunction, the precursor of severe headaches that would involve the whole head and radiate deep into the neck, shoulders, and lower back.

“Couldn’t we see him for just a second?” Lana pleaded, though she knew well enough from her premed days that it was useless to push. But she felt somehow that if she could see him, it would help — just say a few words to him.

But in the doctor’s experience, it didn’t help at all. It was doubtful whether, under the pain medication, which was only partially effective in burn cases anyway, the patient was fully cognizant of what was going on, and often the confusion only added to the burden of inner anxiety being suffered.

It was better to wait awhile, not because the patient didn’t need support or, like so many Vietnam vets, was refusing to see anyone out of a sense of bitterness, of having been rejected by his country. But the ugliness of the tight, polished skin where the fire aboard the Blaine had burned him made Ray Brentwood want to withdraw into a deep cave of cool silence, where the pain from the searing fire that made every breath an agony might finally abate. In that cave, Dr. Lehman knew, the greatest fear of all could be hidden for a while, to prepare him for the shock in the mirror of the visitor’s eyes, the eyes that could never lie despite the visitor’s determination not to betray shock or any other kind of surprise. In Ray Brentwood’s case there was an added torture to the constant searing pain of his disfigurement: As captain of the Blaine, he was solely to blame not only for his own condition but for all those, one hundred forty-three men, who had died in the attack on the Blaine. Like the parent of a lost child, he constantly replayed the attack. If only he’d given an order for left-hand rudder, perhaps the missile might have missed them altogether. If only he had picked up the skimmer on radar — or was it fired by a ship? In which case he couldn’t be blamed. Could he?