Authority office on the seventieth floor. The retired admiral had resisted the move to the Trade Center as long as he could, citing, truthfully, that even the confusion of the short move from the Port Authority offices around Battery Park would cause delay in the crucial matter at hand: his office’s overseeing the loading and departure of the vital Atlantic convoys.
“No problem, Admiral,” his secretary had concluded. “Everything’s on disk. In the old days we’d need fifty trucks and a month of overtime. Now — we’ll have everything up here, three days maximum.”
“Three days we can well use here,” Brentwood had grumbled, his pen skimming over the latest cargo manifest — nearly all ammunition and aircraft parts.
They had tried flying several replacement squadrons of Thunderbolts and F-111s over the Atlantic with extra fuel in drop tanks and midair refueling. But the Russians could see them coming across the Atlantic, and though the weather was worsening over the mid-Atlantic ridge, the Russian pilots had managed to intercept. For a while the Americans and Canadians were losing more pilots at sea than over European soil. Pilots downed in Europe stood a reasonable chance of chopper pickup, providing they didn’t come down in enemy territory. But for those who were shot down over the Atlantic, the rescue rate was less than 5 percent, for even though the pilots’ radio beacons had a minuscule failure rate, the Atlantic was simply too vast to patrol for lost pilots, when every spare available aircraft was being used to help ferry materiel or conscripted for antisub patrols.
Because of the high losses of combat pilots over the Atlantic, sixty-eight in the first two months of the war, women pilots — whom the army air corps had used in peacetime to ferry the vitally needed planes to Europe — were now, albeit reluctantly, being considered as combat pilots. An editorial in
The
Now, high in his new office, Brentwood, his office’s computer notwithstanding, was confronted by hills of files, piled upon and about his desk. No matter how many computers you had to punch in all the variables, from not stowing yeast, sugar, or rice cargos together to the myriad problems about where and how to get enough ships, in the final analysis the decisions often had to be made on an old sailor’s gut instinct. The major problem was that the deficiencies of the United States’ aging mercantile marine were now starkly evident, after having been virtually ignored by every administration since Reagan, despite persistent predictions by the Pentagon that the ten thousand merchant sailors in the United States were far short of the twenty-two thousand required in war.
For Brentwood, it meant requisitioning, cajoling, recommissioning anything that would float and help bolster the old fleet, most of which had been taken out of mothballs to be used for the dangerous three-thousand-mile journey from North America to the ports of France and Britain. But while many ships were called, and many willingly lent to the government for cash equity later on, only 30 percent of these craft were approved as seaworthy, the others, to the chagrin of many a proud yachtsman or sailor, not qualifying because they could not maintain the required seventeen-knot convoy speed.
There had been the public hue and cry for the admiral and his staff to “get off their butts,” as the
Six cups of coffee since lunch, his diet having held firm against the creamer until the last cup, Brentwood was surprised when he looked up and saw it was dark, the old familiar Manhattan skyline now drastically altered due to wartime fuel and energy conservation, including a blackout on all nonessential illumination. It had been suggested at first that the city go into full blackout condition, as in England and Europe, but this was ruled out on the assumption that if the Russians were going to attack New York, it would be with ICBMs or sea- and air-launched cruise missiles. They would have no need to see where the city was, the coordinates for such an attack already having been programmed into the terrain contour-matching nose radar of the ICBMs aboard their “Boomers,” as the giant Soviet Typhoon SSBNs were called. Besides, as the major pointed out, and few challenged him, if the city was blacked out, the crime rate would soar.
Even from the admiral’s commanding view on the seventieth floor, whole sections of Manhattan were missing, only the blipping of the red aircraft warning light atop the Trump Building affording the admiral a sense of his old familiarity with the city skyline. Far below, the yellow ribbons of traffic kept flowing, red taillights shimmering in the warm air of car exhausts that rose from the skyscrapers’ canyons. The admiral was so exhausted that at times he’d nod off. Upon waking, the red light on the Trump Building would cause him to start, taking him back to the other war long ago during which, his father had told him, many an exhausted American driver in the endless three-ton-truck convoys would suddenly jerk awake, momentarily panicking that he was driving on the wrong side of the road before realizing he was in England.
“More coffee, Admiral?” asked his secretary.
“No thanks, Janice. Feel like I could run a mile. We have anything back from San Diego on those three Japanese tankers?”
“I don’t think so, sir. I’ll check the fax.” As she walked away, Brentwood watched her with a mixture of affection and lust. She was half his age, in her mid thirties, a single parent with two children, yet the strains and stresses of working as well as raising children hadn’t given her the battle-worn face of many mothers her age, and her trim bottom fitted his category of “grabbable.”
The admiral had never made a pass at her, telling himself he never would, but she was divorced, and now and then, as he glanced up from the never-ending pile of files or in reaction to the weather pattern information changing on the TV monitor in front of him, he had caught her looking at him with what he believed was a mixture of admiration and warmth. But, he reminded himself, she was half his age, Lana’s age, and besides, there was no way he would cheat on his wife, Catherine. Not only would it be dishonorable, but downright cruel. She was still trying to come to terms with Ray’s condition. Already there had been ten operations — the last three purely for cosmetic reasons to try to reconstruct his face as something else than a horror mask that even Ray and Bern’s children had found difficult to deal with.
And now David was missing — God knew where — in what the Pentagon was vaguely referring to as the “northern German” sector. The admiral was tempted to pull a few strings in Washington, D.C., to try to get details of exactly where the American airborne’s rapid deployment force was. But that wouldn’t help David if he had already been killed. Besides, the admiral detested that sort of back-door, special-favor nonsense. There’d never been favoritism on his ships, and be damned if he’d start asking for it now. And how the hell he could even think of monkeying around with some gal half his age while his family was in such turmoil was beyond him, though some navy shrink, he recalled, had once told him the sex drive knew neither the proper time nor the place, that often it hit you precisely when you thought it shouldn’t: when you were exhausted, at a funeral, and certainly after combat.
Which was why the admiral had to make sure, without mentioning it to Janice, that as important as penicillin and all the other medical supplies were to the well-being of the men, condoms were an essential part of the cargo — usually cut sick bay lines by 50 percent. He told Janice, as he’d told his sons, Lana too, that more people had died in 1919 of the flu than all those killed in the bloodbath of World War I. These days it wasn’t flu but the age-old venereal diseases that stalked the battlefields of every war. To avoid public disclosure that would only
