Rage of Battle

capital.

Brodsky was sitting back as if to get away from the information, snaking his head. He blamed Gorbachev, as so many other senior officers had. Glasnost and perestroika were responsible. Gorbachev had given the upstarts in the Baltic states economic independence when any fool could have told him this would soon amount to de facto political independence and give encouragement to the Baltic resistance groups, especially those in Estonia.

“Find them,” the admiral ordered, handing the captain back the papers.

The captain was pleased. Estonians had always considered themselves a cut above everyone else. It came from being too close to the capitalist nations, which exported disorder along with their technology to the USSR’s Baltic states. Time the Balts were taught a lesson.

“How many other ships are affected?” asked Brodsky.

“We don’t know yet, Admiral. At least another cruiser and a squadron of destroyers out of Tallinn and Riga.”

Brodsky looked out at the Neva; now it looked as cold as he felt.

“Bystro!”— “Quickly!” he instructed the captain. “We must root out this nest of Jews immediately.”

Whenever there was trouble, it was always “nests of Jews” with Brodsky. Of Jewish extraction himself, the admiral considered it necessary to be harder on such “rebellious elements” than any other Russian would have been.

Five minutes later, the captain handed Brodsky the order for military intelligence assist. Brodsky intended to keep the KGB out of the investigation if he could; the GRU— Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie— the main intelligence directorate of the Soviet general staff — was more like family and would give him more control. He signed the order immediately. “Get to it at once!” he told the aide again. “This could be a disaster.” He paused. “For us as well as those other ships.”

The captain knew he meant both of them.

“I’ll see to it right away, Admiral.”

“And keep me posted on that Sea Wolf.” He paused. “It has to be destroyed.”

Within the half hour a coded “for your eyes only” five-group number-for-letter transmission was being relayed to Baltic Fleet headquarters at Baltiysk, near the Lithuanian port of Kaliningrad, which was also the headquarters for the Baltic Fleet’s intelligence unit, which reported directly to the GRU.

CHAPTER SEVEN

It was 5:03 a.m. on the graveyard — midnight-to-dawn— shift in La Jolla’s Veterans’ Administration Medical Center, where two nurses on the burn ward were trying to decide whether the information phoned in from New York by Capt. Ray Brentwood’s father should be communicated to his son, who was on their ward. The older nurse, in her mid forties, busy checking the medication trays, was for withholding the news until later in the day, after the daily assessments, including that of Ray Brentwood, had been made by the doctors on their rounds. The young nurse, on the other hand, not long out of college, argued that bad news should be communicated as soon as possible to a patient. “Quicker they know, the sooner they’ll have to confront it. And overcome it,” she said confidently, but the older woman, who had worked as a nurse’s aide long before she’d become qualified as a fully trained nurse, regarded the younger woman’s approach as typical of the college-trained nurses. They were all full of confrontation, “tell it like it is,” encounter groups-mistaking forthrightness for professionalism. After many years on the job, the older nurse had come to believe that sometimes you had to keep the truth at bay, for a while anyhow — a lie if necessary. With all the daunting confidence of youth, the younger nurse stood her ground. “Sorry, I still think we should tell him. Be up-front about everything.”

“Oh?” said the older nurse. “Then why’d you tell him he looked ‘just great’ the other day?”

The younger nurse thought for a moment. “I didn’t.”

“You did, honey. I heard you say it. You told him that the last plastic surgery was a ‘terrific improvement.’ I can’t see any improvement at all.”

“Well — that’s — that’s a subjective thing, I guess.”

“Exactly.”

“I still don’t think you should keep something about his family from him. He’ll probably get official notification from the Pentagon that his kid brother’s missing anyway.”

“Not for a week or so. Believe me. Washington doesn’t move that fast.”

“All right, you tell me — what’s he going to think when he finds out we knew all along?”

“We don’t have to tell him we knew.”

“C’mon, Sue, by then he’ll have read about it in the papers.”

“About what?”

“You know — hand me that temperature chart, will you? — about how bad things are in Europe. About this Dortmund pocket or whatever they call it.”

“Honey — there’s nearly a million of our boys fighting over there. Ray Brentwood won’t know where his kid brother was — until the War Department tells him. Even then, they’re pretty vague about the area. They usually give the country, that’s all.”

The young nurse was flicking over the temperature charts, entering the readings into the computer, and wondered aloud what Brentwood’s sister would do in the circumstances.

“Honey, she’s back of beyond up there in the Aleutians. We’re here and we’re the ones making the decision.”

“Regulations say you should tell them,” said the young nurse.

“Regulations tell you you should use your discretion. Best judgment. That’s what I’m doing.”

The young nurse paused at the computer for a second. “Did I really say that? That he looked better?”

“God’s my witness.”

“Well, I don’t believe in God. I’ll have to take your word for it.” She paused. “I guess we can hold off for a while.”

“I’ll tell him,” the other one volunteered.

The younger one returned to tapping the temperatures into the computer files. “Sue — is that true about his sister? About when she was in Canada? Did she really—?”

“Gossip.”

“No — I’m not judging her. I think she was right — if that’s what she did it for.”

“Doesn’t matter what she did it for. And if you don’t want to end up back of beyond like her — don’t you ever do it. It’s easy, I know. You feel sorry for them. Nothing wrong with that, but we’re professionals.”

“I thought professionals were supposed to care.”

The other nurse said nothing.

The younger one pressed, “You do believe it, then?”

The older woman pulled over three medication trays, took a tongue depressor, and began counting off painkillers to put in the array of paper portion cups. “All I know is Lana Brentwood was Little Miss Shy Shoes. Pretty brunette, the original Miss America figure, not too tall, not too short— ‘just right,’ like they say in the nursery rhymes. Then, who knows? She married some bigwig, went to China, came back, and left her husband — or he kicked her out. Tried to hide away from the front pages, then decided to be Florence Nightingale. Next thing there’s this rumpus over the young Brit, Spencer.”

“Spence.”

“Whatever. Anyway, she was lucky she wasn’t court-martialed.”

The young nurse saw one of the call lights go on. For a moment she thought it was Ray Brentwood and was much relieved when she realized it was the patient in the next bed over. “You sure know a lot about her. Wheredo you pick up all that juicy stuff? Sounds to me like you’ve got her file.”

“Gossip — well, she was in all the papers — over the marriage breakup.”

“What papers? I never read anything in the papers about it.”