WW III

“Roast lamb and mint sauce, sir.”

“Gravy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Trying to make me fat?”

“No, sir.”

“I’ll have to start training like Wilson.”

The cook grinned, hoping the skipper wouldn’t notice he wasn’t wearing his chef’s hat.

“Wilson’s down there now, sir.” He nodded back toward the missile bays. “Doing his laps.”

“Hope he’s wearing sneakers,” Brentwood said, half in jest, half seriously — the “on station” behavior code forbidding anything that would make a noise loud enough to be picked up by an enemy’s towed array.

“Good,” said Brentwood, about to move on. “And Cook?”

“Sir?”

“Get that hat on.”

“Yes, sir.”

Stepping into control, the sub still rigged for red, Brentwood could feel the tension.

“Depth?” he asked Zeldman.

“Five hundred, sir.”

“Very well. Take her to one hundred.”

“To one hundred,” confirmed the diving officer, standing behind the plane and trim operators, their half-wheel steering columns moving gently with hydraulic grace.

“Four fifty… three hundred… three fifty…”

Brentwood pressed the intercom for all sections, from torpedo room up forward through “Sherwood Forest,” the missile bays, to the reactor, to call in for status reports.

“Three hundred… one fifty… one hundred, sir.”

“Very well. Roll out VLF.”

“Roll VLF.”

The sub shifted slightly.

“Upwelling, sir,” commented the diving officer, noting the sudden change in salinity and water temperature.

“Stop VLF,” commanded Brentwood.

“Stop VLF.”

Brentwood watched the depth gauge, its needle moving slightly, up again, then down. The sub shifted a little more. Last thing he needed was an inversion layer, a sudden change in water density that could suck the sub down before enough ballast could be blown to regain neutral boyancy, driving the boat down, hitting the bottom at 150 miles per hour. The needle moved down again and back.

“Retract VLF.”

“Retracting, sir.”

Brentwood was now receiving status reports from all the sections. Everything A1. “Pete, let’s take her on a mile or so. Get her away from this upwelling nonsense.”

“Yes, sir.”

Robert Brentwood looked at the steering computer’s clock— at an easy twenty-five knots they should reach a new position in plus or minus four minutes, depending on local sea current/ salinity/temperature variations. It would mean running out the VLF a little faster and risking a little more noise for Roosevelt to hopefully clear the upwelling and still have time for a ten-minute wait — but this should be no problem.

* * *

In itself, the fact that the old Cold War rule of Soviet-Warsaw Pact armies forbade anyone under the rank of lieutenant to possess military maps did not seem particularly significant. While it was something that had astonished the Americans and British in the long-gone days when NATO had invited Soviet-Warsaw Pact officers to observe NATO maneuvers, it had not occurred to anyone that the antiquated rule, buried in the bureaucracy of the Soviet army, would have much significance. After all, even platoon officers didn’t require maps, their particular tasks, such as taking a farmhouse, a ditch, or a hill, “microrated,” in the jargon of the strategists and tactical warfare experts, a small piece in the vast jigsaw of war. Most combat troops, only 25 percent of any army doing the actual fighting, rarely knew or cared about the wider battles. All that mattered was for them to survive, to take the particular objective on any given day with minimum casualties, not knowing till it was over, sometimes for months, even years, what part they might have played in the overall scheme of things, whether they had won or lost or had merely come to a bloody draw.

But on this October day, while the USS SN/BN Roosevelt approached message station, and another Brentwood, half a world away, was running up the stairs of the granite and marble Mansudae Assembly Hall, now quickly having been reinforced by North Korean regulars and the “black-pajamaed” militia of Pyongyang, something decisive was about to happen on NATO’s central front.

In the southwestern corner of West Germany, a weary Margaret Ford, the young lieutenant of twenty-six, and her crew of three were about to launch another Lance missile with conventional warhead. Ford’s crew was one of twelve out of the original twenty-three that had been located for” shoot and scoot” counterbattery fire in the German Black Forest. A light shower had fallen, but now the sun was trying to come out as the rain clouds passed over the forest into France, and Margaret Ford, though she did not know it, was about to change the course of history.

An advance Soviet mobile observation post, a camouflage-painted, fourteen-ton Russian BMP — armored personnel carrier — traveling at thirty miles per hour, carrying ten troops and armed with the standard 7.62- millimeter machine gun and antitank missiles, stopped on a side road, twenty miles from the Black Forest, now a blue smudge through the hazy autumn mist. The greenish-yellow poplars were turning and flickering in the midafternoon sun, and the sudden warmth made the fields steam for miles around.

The men aboard the BMP had been on hard rations for forty-eight hours, with little sleep, nerves jangled by a brief but spirited American counterattack which had taken place behind them on the big bend in the Danube as it curved south from Regensburg. And when they had lost their officer, whom they all liked, during the fierce American 155-millimeter barrage of high explosives and armor-piercing shells, the Russian crew’s morale had taken a bad body blow. Had it not been for the sergeant’s initiative in keeping the men going, they would probably have called for a break earlier on, but now the sergeant didn’t have a choice as one of the men ema stalo plokho— “was feeling carsick “—in the personnel carrier, not surprising in the suffocating heat from the engine and the sun combining in the coffinlike interior. The jolting, jarring, and lack of any sense of direction for the men inside was guaranteed to leave even the toughest reeling after three or four hours in battle conditions. The sergeant had yelled for the driver to stop earlier, but the BMP was so noisy, he couldn’t be heard. But with the smell of the man’s vomit filling the already dirty and stale air inside, the driver finally got the message.

As the sick man rested with a few comrades, the sergeant and four others took the BMP over to a green hill nearby from which they could see a farm about two or three kilometers away and had a good view of the retreating American 155s, their flashers, like pieces of a shattered orange mirror, visible at the edge of the dense forest. The sergeant and his comrades could also see that the shells from their own guns roaring away five miles behind them were falling short of the West German and American batteries.

Suddenly a Lance missile could be seen streaking from the blur of the woods twenty miles away, but the elevation of the Russian guns was still obviously too acute and the sergeant was reporting on his radio, “Too short! Too short!” until the Soviet battery commander, in an effort to save valuable rounds at the end of the already overextended supply lines from Czechoslovakia and Poland and Russia, ordered the fifty big G-6s to “down.” New salvos came screaming lower, over the crew of the BMP, the G-6s’ twenty-five-mile range six miles longer than the American 155s’. The Russian shells not only tore into the American and West German positions in the Black Forest, but over four hundred of the HE shells crashed into the forest on the French side.

Several of the Allied TV, print, and radio reporters covering the war from the Rhineland — on the supposedly “safe” French side — were hit. Two of them, both French, were killed, another, British, from ITN, badly wounded.

A shell or two amiss was to be expected, inevitable perhaps, but not salvo after salvo — and all because the Russian sergeant, not knowing precisely where he was, only in front of American and West German guns, had