Ian Slater - WW III

“Man,” said another navigator. “She could sit on my face anytime. Anywhere.”

“Look at the board,” said Shirer, nodding toward the TV monitors. Visibility had been cut to near zero about the carrier, one of the things that really spooked the pilots, though they would never admit it. The carrier was no bigger than a postage stamp when you were coming in to hook the wire at several hundred miles an hour. It was nerve-racking enough when you could see.

“You’d better get your minds out of your shorts,” advised Shirer. “And think about Charlie. Now he’s got two things going for him — distance and heavy cloud cover.” He turned to another pilot. “Fisher, that drop tank of yours. Got the release fixed?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

The briefing officer came in. They stood up and he immediately waved for them to sit down.

“It’s still on for tomorrow morning. We’ll be riding shotgun for the choppers and Prowlers and the Hercules. Drop tanks to give us extra time for strafing and rocket attacks.”

The RIO called Fisher leaned over to his Tomcat’s navigator. “How the hell did One-Eyed Jack know we’d be using drop tanks?”

The navigator shrugged. It meant that they were going in deep. A long way inland.

“Target, sir?”

“You’ll be told later, Fisher. Meanwhile I suggest you get some rest.”

“With this noise?” someone asked.

As the ready room emptied, Fisher turned to Major Shirer. “Sir? How’d you know about the drop tanks?”

Shirer looked around so as none of the others could hear. “I have the knowledge, Fisher,” he said, tapping his head. “Know what I mean?”

In Western France, autumn cast a russet spell over the countryside, and poplars were turning half-golden in the breeze, the only sign of war being increased traffic on the road to Coquettes as apprehensive Frenchmen began lining up for hours, waiting their turn in the creeping traffic line heading for England. They were not going by roll-on, roll-off ferries, as these had been stopped two days ago when an East German fighter, out of control over Holland, had plummeted into the channel midway between Dover and Calais. There were no injuries, the pilot picked up by the Calais-to-Dover hovercraft. He was not popular, however, and was roundly booed in several tongues as, dripping wet, he was fished out of the frigid water and taken to the bridge for safety’s sake. Sitting wrapped in British Sea Link blankets, he was a forlorn figure, torn between gratitude for the British having picked him up and anxiety about what would happen to him later on.

The London tabloids gave prominence to the fighter “attack.” Overnight the ferry traffic from France dropped away to a trickle. Now the twin twenty-five-foot-diameter undersea tunnels of the “Chunnel” through which rail-borne cars, passengers, and freight trucks moved under the channel from Coquelles outside Calais to Cheriton outside Folkestone, a distance of thirty miles, became the preferred way of crossing.

It was shortly after 10:00 a.m. the following day at Cheriton when a lorry driver, having to leave his truck on the rail wagon because of a false fire alarm, arrived in a foul mood at the Cheriton terminal. Agitated and mumbling to himself after having to walk three hundred meters from inside the Chunnel, he complained bitterly to the British Eurotunnel public relations officer on duty. This was the third time, the lorry driver told the official, that there’d been a false fire alarm. In addition, he protested that when he tried to call London on one of the emergency phones inside the Chunnel, to tell his employer that he’d be late, “the bloody thing wouldn’t work.” He’d been jinxed, he told them, by inefficiency. At the beginning of his journey in France his truck had broken down and he’d been cursed “to Kingdom Come” by damned Frogs who were backed up behind him. And when he’d tried to get help, there was no one available at the French terminal. If Eurotunnel couldn’t keep the phones working, he charged, and provide assistance when needed, then they shouldn’t have built the bloody Chunnel in the first place.

The British public relations officer did not handle the criticism well, insinuating that perhaps the truck shouldn’t have been on the road in the first place if it was “mechanically unsound.” This infuriated the driver, and the official didn’t improve matters by grudgingly telling the driver he could use the office phone but would have to pay for any “trunk”—long distance — call to London. The driver stormed off, saying that he wouldn’t use Eurotunnel’s damn phone, and was last seen hailing a taxi.

Five and a half minutes later, one of the cross-service tunnels connecting the two main traffic tunnels under the channel began to shake as in an earthquake. Light fixtures popped, cement debris began falling, and there was an enormous rumbling. Seven seconds later a huge, vomiting stream of rolling fire like a napalm bomb roared out of the Chunnel at the Cheriton end. Cars and trucks came spewing out like so many toys as Centrex explosive, together with the NATO-placed wartime contingency explosives, collapsed not only the cross-service and ventilation tunnel but the two main rail tunnels as well, millions of tons of rock and water cascading in.

Over eight hundred people were killed. The newspapers reported that they had been drowned, but Department of Defense coroners ascertained later that most victims had in fact died from the concussion of the explosion even before the tunnel had collapsed.

For days after, bodies were still washing up on the beaches between Folkestone and Dover, many children and pets among them. The minister of transport resigned, and had it not been for the war conditions in Europe, the whole government might have fallen following the informal yet traditional rule of ministerial responsibility. But with the country at war, it was considered essential for national security that the war cabinet stay intact.

In one blow England’s and America’s strategic land link with Europe had been severed.

In Moscow, in STAVKA — the Soviet Supreme High Command — former Colonel, now Brigadier, Kiril Marchenko, at fifty-five, one of the youngest high-ranking officers, was again receiving congratulations, for it had been his plan for SPETS units to sabotage the Chunnel using the “lorry” attack. After Marchenko’s successful suggestion of putting the Far East Fleet to sea in order to stabilize the Sino-Soviet situation around Vladivostok and to dissuade the Taiwanese navy from “adventurism,” Marchenko had risen even higher in the Premier Suzlov’s estimation.

The destruction of the Chunnel would prevent U.S. troops and supplies from disembarking in England and being shuttled to Europe now that Northern Europe’s ports were being closed by the advancing Soviet-Warsaw Pact shock troops, which included Marchenko’s son Sergei at Fulda Gap. But much more important than cutting off the undersea link between Britain and the Continent, the destruction of the Chunnel meant that the vital British oil supplies, particularly Avgas, following refinement of crude from the North Sea, would be cut. The idea had first occurred to Kiril Marchenko when his son Sergei, who was still pressing for a chance to enter the air force’s fighter academy, had pointed out that the American M-1s “proglotal”— “guzzled,” as he put it — two gallons of gasoline per mile; the F-16s, eight gallons a second; and the B-1 bombers burned off twenty-nine gallons every sixty seconds.

The U.S. tanks and those of its NATO allies would soon deplete their one-month reserve stockpiles throughout western Europe. Kiril Marchenko passed Sergei’s figures, though he knew his son was quite wrong about the B-1—it used more than 34.7 gallons a minute — to a colleague in the Soviet Air Force Academy. There was no overt pressure, Marchenko simply mentioning in a conversational tone to the Air Force Academy’s general that his son Sergei was particularly keen on the air force as a career. The general said he’d make a note of it and had Sergei’s initial application pulled from central data bank. Sergei Marchenko, it seemed, had passed all entrance requirements with flying colors except one — the vision in his left eye was slightly deficient and not quite up to the standard for fighter pilots.