WW III

the world.”

“This is the world.”

“I don’t like it. Not this part anyhow.”

“Who does?” asked Sandy.

“Freeman, for one. He’s busting to go.”

“You really think Washington’ll cancel it?”

“I don’t know,” said one of the others. “We’re just the gofers around here.”

* * *

In Schonbuhel, Austria, the Danube, rarely blue, more often green with pollution, was winding its way slowly along its two-thousand-mile course through some of the most beautiful country in Europe, by castles and patchwork fields, on through Vienna to Bratislava in Czechoslovakia, beneath the ultramodern span of the bridge of the Slovak national uprising, past the great spires of Buda and Pest, over the great Hungarian plain, down through Yugoslavia to Belgrade, and on through Bulgaria to the river’s great delta in the Black Sea.

If you had to bail out, the NATO pilots said it was best along the Danube — but not on Ulm’s spire. Hundreds of pilots did bail out in the first few weeks, a third of them falling into enemy hands, but the rest, except for a dozen or so who met with misadventure, hung up in the woods or drowned before they could break free or reach shore, found their way back to their units within three or four days along the verdant plain. It wasn’t simply a matter of friendly populations, not yet overrun by the S-WP juggernaut, helping so many fliers, but the superb “rescue “ facilities of the NATO units, who, even under the severest weather conditions sweeping down from the Carpathians and the Bavarian Alps, would do everything possible to pick up a downed flier.

For the civilians in southern Germany, caught between the two sides, it was a dangerous business, for the advance units of the Soviet-Warsaw Pact attack were almost exclusively Russian, the latter holding the Czech brigade only as support, their fighting ability held in contempt by the Soviets. This meant that if a NATO flier was caught by the enemy, it would most likely be a Russian unit, which had a clear and brutal rule: anyone having helped the flier was executed along with his or her entire family, and the nearest village razed to the ground, the girls and women delivered to the Soviet troops. Despite this terror, NATO fliers still came back, aided by civilians who understood that if the cost to the Russians of advancing every mile in Germany was not maintained, the great “rollover” convoys now en route from New York, Boston, and Halifax — trying to learn from the experience of Convoy R-1—might well arrive to find nothing to reinforce.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Of all the surface ships operating in the North Atlantic, the minesweeper was now king.

Due to the experience of Convoy R-1, wood- and fiberglass-hulled vessels suddenly emerged from dull, mundane, and in many cases outright pitied, existence in the backwaters of the navy into the exalted ranks of leaders in the age of nuclear-powered missile ships. The admiral in command of the hitherto ugly duckling minesweeper fleet of forty ships that were to accompany the first three convoys was told not to gloat but merely to do the job and to do it quickly. The minesweepers did the job as quickly as conditions in the Atlantic allowed, approaching it with the zeal of newfound importance. They also gloated. Oh, how they gloated, flagging, as it was a court-martial offense to break radio silence, the warships behind them with messages such as “Follow the leader — Compliments of MS-190,” or “We’ll tell you when it’s safe.” It became an unofficial competition between British and American sweepers as to who could be the most insolent and get away with it.

“The HMAS Gordon will be happy to show you the way.”

“By God!” fumed a Royal Navy destroyer captain. “They’re cheeky bastards.”

To make it worse, the Canadian and U.S. minesweepers were among those combat ‘support ships’ allowed to have women aboard. One of the American ships, USS Twin Forks, was skippered by a woman, and on the third day out for one of the massive four-hundred ship-convoys on “rollover” to Europe, a pair of women’s lacy briefs was hoisted to the masthead, “Compliments of ‘rollover’ leader.” This moved a U.S. admiral to issue a firm rebuke by semaphore to the minesweeper, but as the message came through, the panties were gone, the minesweeper’s captain nonplussed and assured by the crew that the lookouts on the other ship must have been seeing things. It was a brief, light relief in what was otherwise a grim business.

Four hundred and seventy miles north of Newfoundland, another convoy was attacked by ten Soviet Hunter/Killer subs. All but two of the nuclear subs were destroyed, but not before there had been a “run-under” torpedo assault by all ten subs, resulting in thirty-seven Allied ships, twenty-eight of these merchantmen, sunk. When the convoy had re-formed in a defensive diamond east of the sub, it found itself unwittingly driven, or “bloody well herded,” as one British frigate captain put it, into a minefield laid about them by six Backfire bombers. Three of the Backfires were shot down on their way into “egg laying,” but their deadly cargoes landed intact.

Here, once again, the Russian numbers pointed to only one conclusion — that if the Allies could not reduce the rate of loss, whatever supplies and men did arrive in Europe would be insufficient to replace the men and materiel already lost, let alone to reinforce NATO. In this case the unrelenting Soviet-Warsaw Pact land offense would decide the issue. A further complication for NATO was the fact that with so many towns and cities in the Russians’ path, the S-WP attacks sent millions of civilians fleeing westward, tying up the vitally needed West European road and rail systems.

* * *

By now the USS SN/BN Roosevelt was going up for its second attempt at receiving a VLF burst message. This time additional aerial was extruded from the stern, like some great worm from the belly of a whale.

“Start the count!” ordered Robert Brentwood.

“Counting… five minutes…”

At the three-minute mark Brentwood knew he was not going to get a message. “Okay,” he said evenly at the five-minute mark. “Reel her in.”

“Reeling in, sir.”

“Very well. Mr. Zeldman, resume zigzag pattern for Holy Loch. ETA?”

The first officer glanced at the computer as Brentwood on the periscope island ordered, “Up search scope.”

“Up search.”

There was a quiet hum as the oil-mirrored scope slid up inside the master sheath housing several other periscopes as well.

“ETA Holy Loch,” Zeldman reported, “six hours approximate.”

“Exactly, Ex.”

“Six hours, three minutes, forty seconds, sir.”

“Very well.”

Brentwood knew that if the Wisconsin aerial “farm” was out and TACAMO aircraft had failed to overlap sufficiently to contact the Roosevelt, then the United States would have notified U.K. control to beam out a VLF signal. If not, it meant the Soviets were jamming satellite bounce-off signals between the States and Britain, or the British aerials at Holy Loch were knocked out, or Holy Loch itself was in the hands of the Soviets. Brentwood knew he had only three choices: stay where he was; head for Holy Loch and risk a trap of acoustic/pressure mines at the entrance — some keyed to Roosevelt’s specific signature; or run for cover and head back to the United States.

He reversed his cap, eye glued to the scope. He flicked on the control room monitor relay so the men on watch could see the same infrared images he saw. Nothing but gray waves stacked all about them, creased with white lines of bioluminescence.

“MOSS in tubes one and two.”

“MOSS in tubes one and two, sir.”

“Very well. ETA Holy Loch?”

“ETA five hours, fifty-seven minutes.”

“Speed?”