WW III

go up with the others.” Chin nodded toward the other three men.

“Sir?” asked Lee. “With great respect, sir, I would wish to be with my colleagues. We have served together in Berlin and-”

Chin shrugged easily. “Very well. I will stay here.” He looked around, seeing it would be no problem to put the sofa across the door. But in truth he expected no one. They had been very careful, they all said, leaving the embassy and all their homes in West Berlin at different times, using different routes. And Chun was now sure no one had followed him from Tempelhof.

When Chin glanced at his watch again, it was 7:30. “Go up in ten minutes,” he said quietly. “Has the roof lock been freed?”

“Yes, sir,” answered one of the men. “Everything has been prepared.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

In the wars of the early and mid twentieth century, the naval yards of Bremerton, west of Seattle, had seen many a ship launched and not return, but it was never something you got used to, most navy wives carrying it about with them until the day their husbands retired. Beth Brentwood, as had her mother-in-law and many navy wives before her, thought about it every night when she put the children to sleep and went to an empty bed. Sometimes she would take one of his shirts to bed with her.

She had prepared herself for the knock on the door, one of the things Ray’s mother had told her she must do as a service wife. It was no good trying not to think about it, Catherine Brentwood had told her — only fools told you not to think about death. We moved toward it since the day we were born. To imagine it, said her mother-in- law, and how it might come to your loved ones, could sometimes help dampen the fear. Once you’d imagined it in all its obscenity, it wouldn’t have such a hold on you. Besides, Beth knew, navy wives were expected to have the right stuff, too. And so, dutifully, Beth had imagined Ray’s death, or at least receiving the news of it. A naval officer, probably another captain, smart dark blue uniform with the pristine white cap and gold braid. A gentle knock on the door. Their eyes would meet and the first thing would be to get four-year-old Johnny, who right now could talk the leg off a chair, away from the door. Jeannie, eight next week, would realize, with her sensitivity, that something dreadful was up, and Beth knew she could appeal to her maternal instincts to look after Johnny while the naval officer, cap off, smiled down at the two children, waiting. Then when the children were out of the room… “Sorry, ma’am, but I have to tell you the USS Blaine—”

But it wasn’t like that at all. Jeannie had been bratty about cleaning up her room. “Daddy wouldn’t make me!”

“Oh yes he would.”

“No he wouldn’t.”

It had quickly degenerated into Jeannie charging, “You don’t love me!” and Beth answering, “Ungrateful brat!” and telling her, “No!” she certainly could not have Melanie home to play after school. Jeannie had obeyed, bringing home not Melanie but Judy, the daughter of one of the Blaine’s petty officers. Beth had had to make a polite but firm stand and tell Judy that she was sorry but that Jeannie hadn’t been behaving and had been told she couldn’t have any friends to play after school.

“That’s okay, Mrs. Brentwood,” Judy answered, bubbling. “ ‘Bye, Jeannie.”

There’d been another fight and Beth had sent Jeannie to her room, after which Jeannie had immediately sent young Johnny on a reconnaissance patrol. “Let Jeannie come out, Mom. Pleeeease.”

“No!” Beth screamed, frightening Johnny.

When the doorbell rang she felt like a quivering mass of guilt, anger, and sheer frustration, and on top of it all the dishwasher that was supposed to have been fixed still didn’t work.

The sight of the woman in navy uniform drained Beth of all color. She forgot to invite her in — heard Jeannie’s “Can I come out now?” and the woman saying something about “normally the Pentagon… but in light of the news reports… as soon as they have further information…” Beth finally rallied enough to ask the woman in, but she said no, asking whether there was anything else she could do.

“Mom, can I come out!” Beth’s hand was on her forehead, trying to sort it all out. She asked the Wave whether Ray’s parents had been notified.

“No, ma’am. Our policy is to first notify…”

“When will you know for sure?”

“Mom, CAN I COME OUT!!”

“Be quiet, Jeannie! Sorry—”

“We should know something more in a few hours, Mrs. Brentwood. I’ll be sure to call you.”

When Beth walked back from the door, Johnny saw something was wrong.

“That lady an officer, Mom?” he asked timidly.

“Yes.” Beth was stirring the fiercely boiling water, macaroni packet unopened.

“She talking ‘bout Daddy?”

“What?” Beth looked down at Johnny. He was holding the macaroni packet. “Can I open it, Mom? I’m strong.”

“Sure,” she said. Johnny’s cherubic face grinned, then turned red as he tried valiantly to puncture the push- open tab. “I help you when Daddy’s away, Mom.”

Beth bent down and hugged him. “Jeannie,” she said, “you can come out now.”

Jeannie came out pouting but not daring a repeat offense so soon.

“Come over here, honey,” said Beth, her voice soft, unhurried. When she pulled Jeannie to her, the three of them clung in an embrace, and it struck her how small a physical space a family actually occupied, a feeling of being infinitessimally small.

* * *

Of the Blaine’s 192-man crew, only 61 were rescued, 11 of these dying within the first two hours of pickup and 14 still in shock with third-degree burns, including Ray Brentwood, whose face was so badly disfigured that the Des Moines’s sick bay petty officer, after giving Brentwood a shot of morphine, had left him till last, assuming he was a goner, the time better spent on some of the others.

The burn victims, the worst of whom were Brentwood and the lookout who’d been on the port side when the second missile slammed into the port side railing, were ferried to the Salt Lake City. Ray Brentwood’s nose was nothing more than a skewed lump of flesh, a molten pulp now cooled, so that he was forced to breathe through his mouth, creating an alternately groaning and dry whisking sound, which, for all the compassion they had in the sick bay, several of the attendants found difficult to tolerate and so sent someone else to do the awful job of dabbing cool saline solution to wash away the globs of congealed blood from raw flesh that had once been the patient’s face. Brentwood’s eyes, having been partially protected by sunglasses but more effectively by the instinctive closing of the eyelids during the flash of the explosion, seemed not to be affected, but if he survived, this would have to be confirmed by later and more detailed tests once they got to Tokyo.

Now and then he tried to say something, but no one could understand what it was and put the garbled and repulsively snorting sounds down to pain- and narcotic-induced delirium.

* * *

In the Tokyo U.S. Army hospital, beneath the junglelike oppressiveness of an oxygen tent, Brentwood felt a searing burn, so intense he kept blacking out beneath the onslaught of pain, the merest eddy of air tearing across his raw flesh like a white-hot rake. What the voice inside was trying to ask was, what had become of his men and of his ship? But no answers came — only enormous and elusive shadows bending over the tent, the roar of his own breath like that of a doomed animal, the rushing of what he thought was his own blood unbearable but which was in fact his urine, something wrong with the catheter, filling the bed, the warm, acidic solution burning his already burned legs, his sense of smell gone. He was screaming.

With all the will he could muster, Ray Brentwood prayed for death, and now the jungle of vines, IV tubes swinging about him, went completely black, shrinking to a distant point of light, then a gentle blue, the color of the Exocet’s exhaust growing larger until it began to fade, flickering away, replaced by a long, intensely white tunnel and within him a sense of rising above the earth, his screams unheard.