WW III

the Des Moines. Already there’d been strict orders that upon return to port, there was to be no comment made to anyone until Admiral Horton, chief of naval operations, had directed otherwise.

Most of the men picked up were already dead, drowned, despite their life jackets, by the oil breathed in, some asphyxiated by the lack of oxygen in the oil slick fires that were still burning around the smoking ship.

“Sonar contact. Range three thousand yards.”

“Bearing?” asked the skipper.

“Zero fiveniner.”

“Hard right rudder,” instructed the skipper. He flicked onto the CIC channel, pushing the “squelch” button, drowning out the rescue craft traffic.

“What have we got, Tom?”

From the CIC below the bridge there was a pause, the computer racing through engine signature matchup.

“No match.” Which meant it might be hostile but was definitely not friendly. The young skipper was thinking fast; the signal was increasing, its echo louder. “It should be closing,” said the skipper to the electronics warfare officer down in the CIC. “How about passive mode? Any noise from it?”

“Negative.”

“Very well. Torpedoes ready?”

“Ready.”

“Standby to fire.”

“Stand by to fire.”

“Lookouts sharp!”

The starboard lookout shouted an alarm, but it turned out to be one of the white igloo-shaped Beauforts, bobbing up and down.

“Contact fading,” reported the radar operator. It was an awful decision — the damned thing was thirty fathoms below the surface. A new sub with no known signature waiting? The computers weren’t sure, absorbing a lot of clutter from the dozen or so small rescue boats and clutter from the sewn-in metal reflectors on the Beauforts.

“Size?” asked the skipper.

“Can’t say,” reported the EWO. “Echo returns, but it’s fuzzy.”

The skipper decided he couldn’t take a chance.

“Range?”

“Twelve hundred yards.”

“Bearing?”

“Zero six three.”

“Stand by to fire one and four.”

“Ready to fire one and four.”

“Bearing?”

“Zero six three. Holding steady.”

“Range?”

“Eleven hundred yards and closing.”

“Fire one and four.”

Two MK-48s, the most sophisticated torpedoes yet made, were running through the chop in excess of sixty feet a second, diving, homing in on the target.

“Contact fading.”

“He’s hightailing,” came a voice in the background, but the target wasn’t running; it was the angle of the ship turning that only made it seem that way.

Two miles ahead, the sea rose out of itself, shattered white and brown-speckled, the whoomp of the second torpedo quickly following the first — the sound of both reaching the frigate seconds later. The brown spots in the white mushroom were Beaufort life rafts, tumbling down into the vortex of the collapsing column, its bubbling base dirty with oil, bodies, and pieces of metal, possibly from the Blaine as well as from the target blown skyward, several of the Blaine’s crew spilling out of the falling Beauforts, disappearing along with the glints of metal.

The contact vanished from the screen, the skipper not knowing whether he’d sunk an NKA diesel sub, though this surely would have made more noise, or whether what he had torpedoed was a hunk of metal having sunk and been suspended in the heavier salinity layers and for which he had killed over forty more of the Blaine’s already shipwrecked crew, those close to the explosions of the torpedoes having their spines and necks snapped by the concussion.

It was his prerogative and his conscience. No board of inquiry would fault him. Parents would write and say they understood, which would be the most terrible burden of all.

* * *

As the Lufthansa began its descent into West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, Chin felt the thickening pressure growing above his eyes. He had already taken an Ornade capsule but didn’t want to use any more. He wouldn’t be driving, which the label warned against, but he would need a lot of concentration. Nothing less than the fate of his country hung in the balance. In the seat pocket in front of him he saw a copy of Paris Match, a headline about the Communists for Peace volunteer force. Chin was sure the force wouldn’t be composed of merely anyone who wanted to fight “U.S. imperialist aggression.” It would be the cream of the crop, special forces from the SPETSNAZ air/ marine commandos most probably, including the pith-helmeted Vietnamese, the latter particularly courted by Moscow as the outstanding brothers in the fraternity of socialist states — the ones who had “humiliated the Americans in Vietnam.” Even so, it wouldn’t be the numbers, initially only a few thousand or so, from different Communist Bloc countries that would leave East Berlin that would prove to be strategically important in the eyes of the world, but rather their entry in the war on the side of the NKA.

Even now, as affluent young West Germans cruised down West Berlin’s neon-sparkling Kurfurstendamm less than two miles from the eastern sector which, though it had ostensibly been socially and commercially integrated with the West, retained its own political demarcation proscenium, radio and television were reporting that there were already mass rallies in East Berlin’s Alexander Platz. The vast square was jam-packed with everyone from athletes marching in from the Sportforum in the suburb of Weissensee to workers from as far away as Karl Marx Stadt in Dresden over a hundred miles south, bussed-in crowds spilling out onto the Unter den Linden and down past the reinstated statue of Frederick the Great. While bands played the national anthems of each country, from Cuba to the dozen or so African nations, hardly any of which the East Germans knew much about, the crowds kept growing and surging amid calls for socialist solidarity in the face of American aggression. The East Germans were clearly taking the idea of the Communist volunteer force much more seriously than Moscow.

Then the “Internationale” was struck up by the band of the Bereitschafts Polizei, the blue-uniformed civil police, and enormous splotches of yellow, red, and black, the long-time colors of the GDR, and the red flags of the revolution struck a vivid contrast to the white uniforms of the athletes and the hazy blue sky.

The East Berlin parades could be seen by hundreds of West German residents, mainly Turkish Gastarbeiters, or “guest workers,” looking through the holes made by souvenir hunters and down over the remnants of the Wall from apartment balconies in Kreuzberg, the suburb an island of foreigners within the island of West Berlin. It was here Chin now headed within twenty minutes of landing at Tempelhof. The cab driver, like the older Insulaners, “islanders,” of West Berlin, had heard all the noise before, whenever the Communists wanted to whip up an anti-West rally.

Kreuzberg was a suburb which had always been avoided by most West Germans, not because of its proximity to the old Wall but because for most West Germans, Kreuzberg belonged to the Turks who had come in their thousands after the Wall had gone up in ‘61 and who, though they liked deutsch marks, did not like what they saw as West German decadence. The Turks were not so much unfriendly as separate. It suited them and it suited the KCIA, for in the netherworld of the only West German city exempted from the drafts, in order to attract businessmen and young workers, Kreuzberg had also become a haven for dropouts and squatters. It was good cover.