World in Flames

When Kurt Schulz entered the swirling grayness of the stratus above the Harz and could no longer glimpse the reassuring green khaki parachute above him, he had the distinct sensation of going down a lot more slowly than he really was. His worst fear was not realized as he saw the tall pines glide past, his landing on open ground in the mist-shrouded outskirts of Stolberg in the Harz Mountains near a copse of poplar, and spotted by an old villager out walking his dog. As the German shepherd ran toward Schulz, the pilot, a dog lover, intuitively went down on his left knee, left hand resting on it, his right hand hanging loosely, fingers cupped, his body loose in as nonthreatening a pose as he could make, fingers snapping. “Here, boy! Good boy!” The villager stood and watched, his pipe hanging loosely from aged, stained teeth above a stomach that, despite the economic hardships of living in the GDR, had consumed its fair share of German beer. His dog’s tail began wagging. The villager whistled quietly over to the flier, looking about them anxiously, almost tripping on a patch of moss. “Hier kommen!”

It looked all right, but Shulz knew that if the Grenztruppen— “border troops”—had seen him coming down, the villager would have no alternative. Then he saw the man’s short-barreled shotgun slung across his back.

“Haben Sie amerikanisch Zigaretten?”—”Have you any American cigarettes?”— asked the villager.

“No,” Schulz told him, astonished by the question. He wished he had a bagful. A truckload.

The old man shrugged philosophically. Schulz decided to act quickly, to take no chances. He could easily overpower the old man if he was quick enough and shot the dog first. But then the dog began pawing at him, tail wagging. Intuitively, or perhaps because of his long boyhood association with pets of his own, Schulz began scratching behind the dog’s ear, the shepherd nuzzling into him the harder he scratched.

“The border,” said the old man, “is sixteen kilometers. We will have to leave now — the patrols are much heavier at night.”

Schulz trusted the dog but not the old man. He’d heard a number of tales of would-be rescuers leading fliers into a Grenztruppen trap.

They heard one patrol, but it was a long way off — the German shepherd the best early-warning radar Schulz had ever seen.

Four hours later, Schulz was across into West Germany.

Afterward, Schulz tried to dress it up a bit. With each retelling, it sounded more and more like a harrowing escape with the entire East German army pursuing him. In fact, it had been little more than a hike through one of the most beautiful wooded parts of Germany. Schulz knew that whether or not he survived the war, to his last day he would think of the old villager whenever he smelled wood smoke.

When they had parted, Schulz asked for the old man’s name so that if ever he had the chance to repay, he could. But the old man wouldn’t give it. If ever such a thing should slip out, he explained, he would be a dead man.

CHAPTER FIVE

Northeast of the Bronx, on the placid waters of Croton Reservoir, the water police helicopter was carrying out its normal patrol to ensure that no power boats were churning up the surface. If left undisturbed, the water would be aerated through the action of the sun’s ultraviolet light, and once rid of impurities, would pass through the aqueducts and tunnels, built a hundred years before, and become part of the one and a half billion gallons of water that New Yorkers consumed every day. The chopper came down as it spotted the quality-control men on the only power boat allowed in the lake lowering the seki disc — which they could see was visible down to about three and a quarter meters, much deeper than the “two-meter clarity” required by law. When the chopper had gone, a man in his late fifties, taking his usual walk by the dam, sat down by the edge of the spillway, fascinated as always at how quickly the placid surface of the lake became a cascade of white water over the elegant beveled curves of the dam. He emptied the thermos into the water.

CHAPTER SIX

In the storm-whipped night of the northern Pacific, the USS Salt Lake City turned her bow into the wind, the jet engines on her flight deck screaming from ruby red to an urgent white, the catapult officer, his head barely visible in the slightly raised Perspex-covered hatch, peeking above the flight deck, knowing he had only fifty seconds to launch each fighter, cursing the condensation building up inside his bubble despite the heating duct, his eyes having to strain to get a visual verification of takeoff weight for the F-14 Tomcat on the waist catapult so that he could set the appropriate steam pressure for the cat and crosswind. The catapult officer thought he heard “six eight zero,” indicating steam pressure on the cat for around sixty-eight thousand pounds — about right for a Tomcat, with ordnance on its four underfuselage points and the two hard points closer in under the wings. But still he couldn’t make out whether the rain-smeared digit on the “board,” a tray-sized counter held up by the yellow-jacketed member of the flight deck, was a six or a five. He had to get it right, but if he took much longer, he knew the air boss, a hundred feet up in the carrier’s island, would be onto him. The catapult officer pushed his earphones in hard, trying to hear the yellow jacket’s voice above the screaming of the twin twenty-one-thousand- pound Pratt and Whitney turbofans, but still couldn’t make out what the other man was saying. He looked again through his deck bubble at the board, saw a “six” for only a fraction of a second, but it was enough. The cat was set for sixty-two thousand pounds. He saw the last yellow jacket running from the plane, his right thumb up, indicating “all set”—the launch bar between the fighter’s nose and catapult rail connected. He pushed the button, the jet shot forward in a blur of battle gray and swirling steam that momentarily obliterated the blast deflector.

The launch had taken forty-nine seconds. There wasn’t even time to grimace at his assistant that he’d made it under fifty seconds before the next plane, an A-10 Intruder, was on the waist cat, screaming just as insistently for release. The catapult officer prayed he got every one of them right this night. “Damn!” The bubble was fogging up again.

High above the flight deck, the captain of the USS carrier Salt Lake City battle group received an urgent request from COMPAC–Commander Pacific — Pearl Harbor, that one of the carrier’s pilots, Lt. Comdr. F. Shirer, be reassigned to Washington, D.C. Knowing there were over five thousand men and women aboard and that there could easily be two with the same name, even the same rank, the director of personnel, a new man on the Salt Lake City, waited for the computer to come back on line to double- check the flier’s service number. He was pretty sure it was the Shirer of the Pyongyang raid fame who, in the midst of the North Korean army’s invasion, or rather rout, of the South Korean and American forces, had led the second wave of Tomcats through a raging monsoon over the North Korean capital. The raid of American airborne troops, led by Gen. Douglas Freeman against “Kim Il Suck,” as the general called him, deep behind the North Korean lines, had electrified the world, and in a way reminiscent of Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo in World War Two, it had given American morale at home, and particularly in the shrinking Pusan-Yosu perimeter, a much-needed boost. It had also bought precious time for the U.S. troops en route from Japan to “restock” the perimeter in time to start the counterattacks that were now driving Kim II Sung’s forces across the wide, frozen wastes of the Yalu into the mountain fastness of Manchuria.

For the men like Shirer, who’d been in on Freeman’s raid, it had given them an elan not normally found in battle-hardened men until they are much older. Even now, Shirer’s exploit in downing four Sukhois over the Aleutian Islands was overshadowed by his reputation as the cool warrior who had gone in over Pyongyang, his flight through flak- and missile-thick air giving crucial support to Freeman and his troops engaged in a fierce firelight outside Mansudae Hall. Here a young American marine, David Brentwood, had been busy winning the Silver Star, flushing out the enemy in a vicious room-to-room battle, seeking the NKA’s General Kim. Kim either escaped shortly after the defenses of the Koreans’ supposed impenetrable fortress of Pyongyang had been penetrated or, as intelligence suggested, might have been shot on the orders of Kim Il Sung. The failure to get Kim had bitterly disappointed General Freeman; the TV pictures of the successful sweep of Mansudae Hall, its windows now roaring with flame, and the felled statue of Kim Il Sung, once sixty feet of solid bronze, seconds later shattered by the American