helicopters at a distance could easily be mistaken for an American Apache, and some of these had reportedly been hit by mistake. Above the smoke and crash of the ground battle, over sixteen hundred NATO and Soviet-Warsaw Pact aircraft, from high-performance jets to subsonic ground-support aircraft, were engaged in a fierce battle, the NATO air force’s biggest problem being that, although they could launch over three sorties per plane in the first ten hours compared to the Russians’ two, their heat-seeking missiles had in fact taken out over thirty of their own aircraft in the high-tech confusion over Fulda Gap, where Murphy’s Law operated with even more devastating effect than in peacetime, when laser beams fixing on the wrong target simply resulted in an embarrassed pilot. In the skies over Fulda it meant the death of a pilot, and while the West could replace fighters at a faster rate than the Soviet-Warsaw Pact alliance, the Russians’ reserve of pilots had been carefully built up to a three-to-one superiority over NATO.
As Marchenko looked above him, glimpsing dogfights through the wafting smoke cover, he wondered who was getting the best of it. He wasn’t even sure what was happening in
Marchenko’s troop of five tanks had stopped for refueling when they got the message “German armor ahead.” Marchenko felt his stomach tighten — half fear, half excitement. If you beat the Germans, you’d done something. The Americans were tough, but this was German home soil. “What are they?” Marchenko asked. “M-1s or Pattons?”
“Leopards.”
“Ones or twos?”
His wingman signaled that they had finished refueling.
“What’s the difference?” asked the sergeant over the radio from the starboard tank. “A Leopard’s a Leopard.”
“Oh,” said Sergei with mocking nonchalance. “No difference. You clod. The Mark Two’s reach is an extra thousand meters. A slight advantage over the One, wouldn’t you agree?”
That was the major trouble, thought Sergei — never quite knowing what you were up against. His was only a small piece in a great puzzle of war. Now, if you were a fighter pilot — then at least you’d have more freedom of movement than in one of the nine hundred tanks now wheeling en masse to engage the West Germans, the biggest problem for the next few miles being a collision in the damn smoke.
Then news came that another lightning strike had been unleashed by Major General Agursky, this time a left hook around the Czechoslovakian-Austrian corner near the Bohemian Forest’ across the river in Inn — fanning out on the ancient Danube plain and streaming into Bavaria.
“Who told you that?” shouted Sergei.
“American armed forces network.”
Sergei smiled, despite the dust-thick air that was making it almost impossible to breathe. Why did the Americans tell everybody? He couldn’t understand it. They had to tell everyone everything. They were telling the world NATO was on the run, reeling two hundred miles to the north, the S-WP forces smashing through the Dutch 415th Armored and now two hundred miles south through the Austrian border, splitting the NATO defenses into three sectors. Clearly Agursky was set on the right course, seeking to divide the NATO pockets, then pulverize them into submission before America’s enormous production potential to resupply could come into play. And the farther the S-WP penetrated into West Germany, the less likely it became that the Americans could even consider the nuclear alternative. The radio crackled, informing Marchenko that the Leopard tanks were Mark Ones.
“God is good,” Sergei said, and got a belly laugh from the driver, who was so wound up that the thought of his T-90 having a thousand-meter advantage over the Leopard One seemed to him nothing less than a gift.
“I’d still rather be up north,” put in the driver, “if the American radio is right.”
“Why?” asked Sergei.
“I’d rather be fighting those Dutch hippies,” said the driver. “The Krauts are a different matter, Comrade.”
“Ah,” said Sergei, dismissing the odds, “we’ll shit all over—” The tank swerved violently to the left to avoid a forty-five-degree antitank slab. There was a tremendous
In the south on the Donau, or Danube, plain, the weather over the Bohemian Forest was closing in, hampering NATO’s Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force, so that to its Luftwaffe commander, General Heiss, it seemed that even God was against NATO.
Before Congress had even heard of and ratified the president’s declaration of war, the British convoy, under British naval escort, was already under way, the U.S. Navy to take up escort duty twelve hundred miles north of Newfoundland, and in Manhattan, Lana La Roche, nee Brentwood, had carefully aligned the arrows on the child- proof safety top of her vial of sleeping pills and poured them down the toilet.
Earlier that day she had left her apartment on the Upper East Side and walked down to the Plaza — for some reason, which at first she couldn’t explain, she found Central Park to be a kind of magnet in her depression. She had scrupulously avoided watching television or reading a newspaper, for her own bad news about her marriage — Jay would still not agree to a divorce — was enough to cope with. And it was a long time before she realized why she had been going to Central Park, often at night. It was dangerous, a punishment for her failure in her marriage, at college, at living. Then, whether she liked it or not, the world came crashing in on her.
She had been standing by the park wall, across from the Plaza’s north entrance, barely noticing the traffic sliding by — a young man showing off, coming out of the hotel, crossing over to the horse-drawn cabriolets, bowing deeply before a bejeweled blonde, twice his years. Soon she would grow old and he’d still be young.
The whip struck the horse’s flank and it began the lover’s walk through the park. Raucous rock was booming from the band shell, and roller skaters with ghetto blasters weaved by. Why didn’t they get Walkmans or earphones or something and just blow off their own ears? she wondered. Then she saw someone nearby reading
David Brentwood hadn’t had the freedom that his sister, for all her troubles, had, and as one of the six-month reservists, his was a stark choice. Deferment, then go where the army sent you, or volunteer now for the marines. Stacy and Melissa, who had come over to the ROTC office, were watching him.
“Marines,” he said. The look on Stacy’s face was worth it— or so David thought until David got to Parris Island and quickly came to the conclusion that it had been the dumbest decision he’d ever made. He’d said “marines” to impress Melissa. That bastard Stacy had conned him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“A baker’s bar?” asked Lana.
“No, a baker bar,” explained the surgeon at San Diego’s War Vets Hospital. His Swiss-German accent was clear, his manner polite, coat as white as the gleaming walls of the intensive burn wing. “It is named after its inventor.” After all night on the red-eye flight from New York, Lana still wasn’t getting an answer to her question of why she was unable to see Ray. God, if she’d known this — hadn’t been so impulsive in the first place-she could have stayed in New York. But then, she didn’t want to be in New York. That was the whole idea — to get out, away
