Rage of Battle

“If they’re not crazy,” said Lana, “they wouldn’t have started a war in the first place.”

“I don’t know,” said the bubbling roommate. “Sometimes there’s no other way. Sometimes you have to fight.”

What depressed Lana more was that her fellow Wave was right. Sometimes there was no other way. Either that or you simply walked away in defeat as she had with Jay.

Her roommate, running late for her shift, grabbed her cape. “You know anything about this Bering?”

“No,” said Lana.

“Oh, come on, Lana. You were with him in Morin’s office.”

“Yes, but I mean I don’t know anything about him. Some kind of — fisherman — I don’t know.”

“Some kind of fisherman… I’d like to go fishing with him. I’d like to get him under the sheets — in between them— or on top of them — and…”

“All right,” said Lana.

* * *

Though he had just sunk the Yumashev, Robert Fernshaw’s initial rush of victory as he ditched gave way to empathy for the hundreds of Russian sailors miles away who, like him, were at the mercy of the Atlantic. Now and then he could glimpse patches of them through the crazily tilting rectangle of his life raft’s flap as the raft slid up and down the walls of ever-deepening troughs. The Exocet Fernshaw had fired had been so devastating that he knew many of the Russian crew wouldn’t have had time to make for the life rafts. Caught for a moment atop a huge, sweeping swell, he saw the dot of the Russian chopper hovering over the stricken sailors, winching a dozen or so aboard and — it looked like — ferrying others from the oil-streaked water to the few lifeboats. But how far could the chopper go? Even on a full tank, the Hormone’s range wasn’t much more than four hundred miles.

Fernshaw stopped thinking about the Russians, any sympathy he may have had for them as fellow human beings being quickly dissipated by the reality of the war. It wasn’t NATO’s divisions that had breached the Fulda Gap and started the war. Anyway, they certainly weren’t going to worry about him. He checked that his raft’s SARS — salt-activated radio-to-satellite beacon — was working and was struck by the irony that if an Allied ship was over the horizon, it would probably see, via satellite relay photos, the scores of Russian sailors in the water first, and would miss him altogether if the beacon packed it in after the first few hours of full-power transmission.

The swells that had been mere scratches on a blue slate from the air were now growing alarmingly, the high, white cumulus bruising, and the ocean no longer deep blue but a relentless and endless gray. But perhaps, he told himself, the swells that seemed to have grown more precipitous in the last five minutes were not harbingers of worsening weather but merely appeared more ominous beneath the leaden sky. Then he saw the Hormone, its coaxial rotors a black blur, and for a moment or two Fernshaw was convinced he was about to die, his heart pounding, thinking of his wife and four-year-old boy, the cloying smell of the claustrophobic rubber raft closing in on him, making him nauseated.

All his training against G forces was of no avail in the heaving chaos of the sea, where one second he felt his whole body grow lighter as the raft swept up the side of a fifteen-foot swell before plummeting, his stomach churning, into the next trough. Not a religious man, Fernshaw nevertheless said a prayer for deliverance, and it was only when he glimpsed the Russian chopper suspended above him, a buoyancy bag inflated around each of its four wheels, a rescue cable and harness still dangling from its side door, that he dared hope fate was finally lending him a hand — that the old law of the sea of enemies helping one another when they were in peril might yet prevail. One of the Russians in the Hormone, immediately behind the copilot, was dimly visible through the salt-speckled Perspex of the chopper. On impulse, Fernshaw waved. The man waved back and the chopper rose.

In the chopper several of the Yumashev’s rescued crew members made to cross the Hormone’s cabin to look out, but the pilot, alarmed by their abruptly shifting the chopper’s center of gravity, brusquely ordered them to “Sadit’sya!”— “Sit down!” A young cook, still shivering, ignored the order and remained standing, one hand on the cabin rail, the other clutching a rough woolen navy blanket about his shoulders, his wet hair and beard matted with oil sludge. As he watched the silvered barrel toppling from beneath the chopper, the bright orange raft slid bumpily down a swell’s steep incline as the chopper banked.

The sea erupted seconds later, the depth charge’s fuse set for poverknostny kontakt— “surface contact”—its shock wave visible, a huge ring shuddering and racing out from its epicenter, the tent-shaped raft miraculously still inflated but tumbling down the outside of a high, foaming column of water, as if caught in a mossy, green waterfall, the enemy pilot’s body, limp and lifeless, hitting the water before the raft.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The explosion, its range put at three miles by the Roosevelt’s sonar conversion computer, was heard aboard the sub as no more than a muffled cough, but it was loud enough to startle Robert Brentwood out of his light sleep, his photo of Rosemary sliding from his chest as his hand darted out to stop the Walkman from falling as he turned. Glancing up at the Control relay in his cabin, he saw the sub was maintaining the anticipated TACAMO rendezvous by crawling along at less than 3.5 knots on the emergency “bring it home” shaft against a crosscurrent. The current, surprisingly strong and not marked on the chart, was disconcertingly “mixed” in temperature and salinity.

As officer of the deck, Peter Zeldman lost no time in alerting everyone in Control to a possible inversion layer coming up. Soon every man aboard knew the sub might be approaching a “plume,” a less dense area of water caused by either fresh or hot water springs from the earth’s crust “streaming” through the colder, more dense sea around them. And everyone knew how many subs before them had suddenly plunged in a less dense column, hitting the bottom at over 130 miles an hour before tanks could be vented to regain neutral buoyancy.

The explosion, albeit muted in the distance, was at once an added strain and a possible relief for those in Control as it could mean that another Allied submarine was in the area, unknowingly taking the heat off them. On the other hand, as Zeldman pointed out to Brentwood, if it had been an enemy ASW aircraft or surface vessel searching for the Roosevelt, then the explosion some way off indicated that the sub’s pursuers were way off course and had merely been attacking blind, looking for the sub around the last reported position of the Yumashev.

But whatever was going on about him, Robert Brentwood was certain of one thing — after his sinking the cruiser, the Russians would gather their forces, and he, like the convoys, could expect more determined and pervasive attacks en route to the haven of Scotland’s Holy Loch, still over a thousand miles to the northeast. Brentwood also knew that now there was no way they could risk going up for a TACAMO rendezvous. They were on their own.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In Baltic Fleet headquarters at Baltiysk, near the Lithuanian port of Kaliningrad, a bad mood permeated the hallways, especially in the office of the Baltic Fleet’s naval intelligence unit, which reported directly to the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravienie—the GRU, main intelligence directorate of the Soviet general staff. No one among the Estonian workers was cooperating, including those of Russian background. The large minority of Russians in Estonia, as well as native Estonians, had been approached to see if they had heard anything about who was sabotaging munitions in the factories in and around Tallinn, the Estonian capital. They said they had not.

The GRU general had no doubt they were lying, their silence taken by the GRU as yet another legacy of what was contemptuously referred to as Gorbachev’s “glorious” reign. The Estonians had been permitted to pass laws forbidding Russian workers from voting unless they’d lived in Estonia for several years. The Estonian Russians had suddenly found themselves second-class citizens within the Soviet Union, and now they were in no mood to risk the