face, his Kevlar jacket feeling like ice picks were hitting it. A warm sensation flooded his chest, shadows flitting by him through the smoke into the cathedral.
Garlic, so strong it made his eyes water, was the next thing David was aware of, and a burning pain as if a red-hot poker had been thrust through his abdomen down into his thigh. The SPETS medical officer, a woman, who looked as if she towed tanks to keep fit, was glowering down at him. “You are lucky.” Her garlic breath made him turn away.
“Where’s my friend?” he asked.
“The English?” she said. “He tried to be brave, too.”
David stared at her, but his focus was blurring.
“He is dead,” she said matter-of-factly. “Comrade Malek wanted him, too, but—” she shrugged “—his earlier wounds. We could not save him.”
“Malek—?”
“Comrade Malek is the new head of SPETS,” said the medical officer. “He wishes to know all about SAS.”
“I’ve never worked…” said David, gasping from his pain, “for Scandinavian Air—” He was a little deranged from the pain — and thought his answer hilariously funny. Cheek-Dawson would have liked it.
“General Malek is in no mood for jokings.”
Neither, as it turned out, was the president of the United States nor the prime minister of Great Britain — nor any of the other Allied leaders. They demanded immediate repatriation of all prisoners and said they were holding Chernko and his Politburo personally responsible for any harm that might befall
But it wasn’t the tough talk that caused the Russians to repatriate David Brentwood back to London, where he would rejoin the few SAS men, seven in all, who had made it out, but rather the enormous press coverage now being given to the Kremlin raid. Chernko badly needed a highly visible propaganda act of “humanity,” and David’s hurried repatriation became part of it, due in large measure to the simple fact that only an hour earlier, the Australian, Choir Williams, and Williams A had already been airlifted after being captured in Moscow. Infrared photos from the Japanese news satellite had embarrassed the Russians by showing the world that the final SPETS attack against the SAS holdouts in Assumption Cathedral was still in progress after President Chernko had agreed to the unconditional surrender of all Soviet forces and their allies to the joint Allied command.
It was often said to David afterward that the satellite pictures had probably saved him from being hauled off and shot as a spy and dumped in some unknown Russian grave. It didn’t seem to occur to those who told him this that the satellite pictures hadn’t saved Cheek-Dawson and that, as Aussie would have said, his fate had “simply been in the roll of the dice.”
David’s identity, like that of the other members of the raid, was protected for a time, because of the legendary SAS penchant for anonymity. But for Ray Brentwood, over ten thousand miles away, his ships in sight of San Diego’s Point Loma, where the crews could see the fireworks streaming up from Balboa Park and the fighters taking off from Miramar’s “top gun” school to form an honor overflight, anonymity was something he could not hope for. Only hours before, the shouts of recognition and streamers of adulation had been all he craved, but now the only thing that seemed in concert with the depression into which he’d been plunged by his fears for his wife and family was the sullen smog that hung above the San Ysidro Mountains, reminding him of the deadly fallout that would even now be blanketing the Pacific Northwest and all of the Great Plains states.
As he returned the salute and descended among the biggest crowd ever seen on the San Diego naval docks, Ray Brentwood suddenly became the most photographed person on earth — the man who, through brains and courage, had saved millions of American lives, and thereby thwarted an all-out nuclear holocaust, the very ugliness of his face quickly beloved by newspaper editors all over the world who saw it as an ironic and inverse measure of his heroism. Among the crowd were beautiful women trying to get close enough to touch him, others from Hollywood to ask if he had an agent — manila envelopes with “option” contracts stuffed inside thrust his way. Ray bore it as best he could — in a silence numbed by thoughts of Beth, Jeannie, and John.
“Admiral! Admiral!” It was a blonde. A military policeman was trying to block her, for SPETS, like Hollywood, had been known to employ beautiful women for their purposes, and who could be sure that some disaffected “sleeper,” many of them still at large—
But she wasn’t from Hollywood or SPETS, and the young MP, duty notwithstanding, found it decidedly pleasant to feel her pressed hard against him.
“Beth and your children—” she began.
Ray Brentwood pushed frantically toward the MP, the throng so thick, he felt like a man swimming against a riptide, the blonde’s voice all but drowned in the hysteria of congratulations about him. The woman, he noticed, was in uniform — a
“They’re all right?” Ray yelled.
“Yes, sir. They’re fine. They’re fine.”
He hugged her and flashbulbs popped, something he’d have to explain to Beth when the
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
“It is time for your confession!” announced General Kim’s interrogator, a bowl of steaming rice on the bare table beside him as he stood menacingly, a thick bamboo stick tapping his leggings. General Freeman, face hollow, eyes down, blinking nervously, his ravenous gaze fixed on the rice, nodded obediently. All he could think of was the film he had seen of Orwell’s
“Remember,” the interrogator cautioned Freeman, “you must not try any jokings. You must only say what is printed on the screen.”
“I—” began Freeman, “I do not require a—” he had difficulty remembering what it was called “—cue card. I know it.”
“Tell me!” insisted the interrogator, the bowl of rice still steaming, holding Freeman captive with its promise.
“I wish,” began Freeman, “to apologize for my part in the criminal warmongering activity of the United States against the freedoM-1oving peoples of the Democratic Republic of North Korea and the freedoM-1oving peoples of the People’s Republic of China…” The confession went on to “acknowledge” various other perfidies against freedoM-1oving peoples all over the globe. But Freeman was so weak, he could barely proceed. Despite the vitamin shots giving him some color, the effects of malnutrition were evident in his speech. But he knew that before the camera went on, he would be given the rice if he agreed and the promise of a full meal of vegetables and fish, which was a promise, whatever the brutalities the NKA inflicted on their victims, they had never reneged on. He had smelled it after others had confessed — the smell a torture and incitement in itself. No one, Freeman knew, who had not been starved could possibly understand how quickly one’s resolve broke down. As they took him up from the tunnel cells, a guard on each side helping him, he thought of Winston Smith again and of Jeremiah Denton, the senator from Alabama who had been so badly tortured by the North Vietnamese.
In the glare of the lights, he looked like an animal out of
General Kim, unsmiling, dressed in immaculately pressed NKA fatigues, his flat gold-striped and red-starred shoulder boards showing to maximum effect, waited patiently, smoking contentedly.
