WW III

“Yes, of course.”

“About this time of morning,” added Chernko as the battered white Volga sedan they were riding in behind the decoy Zil limousine slowed before entering the Kremlin’s sulfur-colored inner sanctum. From here Chernko could see the red star high above the bell tower of Ivan the Great. Chernko allowed himself a smile of satisfaction. “Of course, that hooligan performed a great service to the revolution.”

The major, who prided himself on a photographic memory, was having a bad day. “How is that, Comrade Director?”

“He allowed Gorbachev to fire the minister of defense and his clique, all the old bednyagi— ”farts”— in the party, the ones resistant to change.” Chernko saw that another Zil was entering the courtyard. It was Admiral Doldich. All stars and flags. A wonder there wasn’t a brass band.

“And,” Chernko continued, “the hooligan helped Comrade Gorbachev break down opposition to perestroika and opposition to detente with the United States. New openness. Gorbachev and Reagan. A breath of fresh air, you see. Just what we needed.”

The major was nodding; it had indeed been the schastlivoe vremya— “happy time”—for the KGB. “So that now,” Chernko said as the door opened, “we are ready.” He nodded to Doldich. “Morning, Admiral.”

“Comrade Director,” responded the admiral. The navy man would not have made a good agent, Chernko thought — his expectant look, his need for help, was written all over his face. As they walked to the premier’s office the admiral announced forlornly, “The fools have attacked an American frigate.”

“I know,” replied Chernko.” Satellite pictures show it is still burning. Is your fleet steaming south?”

The admiral looked up warily at Chernko. “Your agents can tell you an American frigate is afire, but they miss my whole fleet. How is that?”

Chernko started to smile but saw the admiral wasn’t in a joking mood. “Of course we did not miss it,” he explained. “But I mean have you reduced speed?”

The admiral glanced about as they continued walking toward the premier’s office. “Yes.”

“Will you stop it?”

“No. The Americans would see that as indecisiveness.”

“Quite correct,” commented Chernko. Foolhardiness was one danger — indecisiveness the other. “Yes,” he assured the admiral. “The best thing is to steer a middle course.”

The admiral frowned with concern. “This is very difficult to do. With Japan on your port side and Korea on your starboard, there’s not much room.”

“No.”

One of the premier’s aides rushed by them, a sheaf of cables in a folder.

“I’ve never seen them move so fast,” said Chernko.

“Now what’s happened?” worried the admiral aloud.

“The damned Cubans,” interjected a voice from behind. It was the air marshal. “With that loudmouth Castro gone, I thought they’d settle down. But no. I tell you, their biggest export is trouble.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

In Seoul, thirty-three thousand American soldiers, in the biggest mass surrender since Corrigedor in 1942, made the short but humiliating march across the NKA’s pontoon bridge, built in the shadow of the old Chamshil Iron Bridge, toward the shell-pocked Olympic Stadium, where they were separated according to regiment. Fifty-two senior officers were weeded out as quickly as possible, the NKA interrogators insisting, upon pain of death, that the officers sign confessions of “criminal imperialistic aggression against the Democratic Republic of Korea.”

Only three signed. Seventeen of the others, described over the loudspeakers as “recalcitrant warmongers,” were shot in the dressing rooms below the baseball stadium, their bodies dumped on the diamond from a captured U.S. Army truck that roared about the field of six thousand prisoners, the blood of the murdered men dark on the poorly lit artificial turf.

One of the bedraggled and shell-shocked soldiers, a U.S. private from the Eleventh Division, clutching a military blanket about him, watched each of the bodies fall limply onto the tread-torn diamond, wondering aloud why they had not killed all of the officers who had refused to sign.

“Why seventeen?” he asked numbly of no one in particular.

“To scare us,” answered an ROK lieutenant who had torn his intelligence corps patches off moments before he was captured. “To show the others what happens if they hold out. To show us what will happen if we resist.”

The American looked around the dimly lit stadium, few of the lights working after the artillery barrage, “There are ten times as many prisoners here as guards.”

“But they’ve got the guns,” said the ROK soldier.

One of the bodies they saw was a major, his collar stud standing out even in the poor light. He looked as if he were smiling, but it was an illusion — a death mask of pain — tortured before they shot him. The private noticed for the first time that the white U.S. stars on the truck’s doors had been smeared red. When it drove out of the stadium, there was a silence heavy with the stench of pickled cabbage and excrement. The NKA had forbidden use of any of the toilets behind the stands, and most of the wounded were now crowded into the north corner beyond the diamond, where they had to defecate into a shallow trench.

Soon the loudspeakers were ordering all intelligence officers to report to the stands.

“Fuck you!” the ROK lieutenant shouted in perfect English, and got a weak round of applause.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Heading out into the mid-Atlantic, the U.S. nuclear submarine USS Roosevelt received its digitized “burst” message via its trailing VLF aerial. The message lasted less than two- hundredths of a second — too short a time to alert an enemy sub to vector. The Roosevelt, one of the Sea Wolf class II dual-purpose (Hunter/Killer and ballistic missile) subs, normally patrolled deep at a thousand feet below the surface, but in order to be on station to receive the scheduled burst message through its very low frequency aerial, the sub’s captain, forty-three-year-old Robert Brentwood, had had to bring the Roosevelt to 150 feet. The message told Robert Brentwood and his crew two things: They were “spot on” their prearranged patrol route, and the “balloon had gone up” in Korea. This meant that they, like all NATO units, were now on the second stage of the four-step-alert ladder. But as to exactly what had happened in Korea, they did not know, nor, under the CNO’s standing orders, was it necessary for them to know what had gone on over seven thousand miles away. Besides, the coded messages, in order to keep the location of the American subs secret from the Russians, had to be kept as short as possible.

“Your brother’s out there somewhere with the Seventh Fleet, isn’t he, Captain?” asked the executive officer, Peter Zeldman.

“Last I heard,” answered Brentwood. “GM frigate.”

“Your kid brother might end up in action before you do, Skipper.”

“Hopefully, Pete, none of us’ll end up in action,” said Robert thoughtfully, adding, “My guess is it’s some border incident on the DMZ. Probably blow over in a few days.”

Zeldman wished he hadn’t said anything about the skipper’s brother — he’d merely meant it as a bit of conversation, something that was in short supply on a six-month patrol back and forth across the Atlantic in various attack and defensive patterns between Norfolk, Virginia, and Holy Loch.

The immediate question for the crew was, how long would it be before they were in Scotland? Robert Brentwood knew that, next to being home in the United States, the high point for most of them was refit and supply at the Scottish sub base. While the repairs at Holy Loch were usually minor, not requiring a stay of more than a day