World in Flames

Kim cleared his throat and suddenly the bevy of technicians, producers, et cetera, fell silent, and in the surreal glare of the kleig lights, the smoke of his cigarette rising voluminously about him, filling the small studio, he spoke to the interrogator, though Freeman knew that Kim spoke quite fluent English from his days as the NKA’s chief negotiator at Panmunjom, where he was in the habit of informing the Americans that “you had better be careful or you will the like the Kennedys— shot like dogs in the street.” The interrogator turned to Freeman. “The general says to remind you that this is on videotape and that if you do not say exactly the words, then there will be great punishment. No food. More beatings.” The interrogator was snaking his finger at Freeman. “You understand?”

Freeman lifted his head and nodded.

The session began, and Freeman, the glare bothering him, asked that the lights be turned down. They refused. Still blinking like a frightened spaniel, he began, “I wish to apologize for my part in the criminal warmongering activity…” astonishing all present by getting the confession word-perfect on the first take, the interrogator pointing out to Kim how Freeman had been celebrated for his attention to detail.

When it was aired on American networks via a South American neutral country, the American public saw the general making his confession on all three networks and the public broadcasting system. So did army intelligence. They wound back the tape and went forward in freeze-frame. Freeman’s blinking was a carbon copy of what Jeremiah Denton had done in Hanoi. Well, almost a copy, as Army General Grey explained to the president. Denton had blinked “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse. Freeman had blinked “B-U-L–L-S-H-I-T.”

Freeman got the vegetables and fish hours before Beijing caught on. By then, the surrender of all Communist forces had been made, and within two weeks, Douglas Freeman was recuperating in the Walter Reid Army Hospital, regaling his wife and cat, whom she had illegally smuggled in, about those “stupid sons of bitches in Pyongyang.”

* * *

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

It was raining in Portland, but Beth didn’t care, crying uncontrollably though she knew it was very “un-navy.” Both of them explained to the children, albeit gently, that being proud of their dad was okay but not to get any swelled heads.

“Oh, Daddy,” said Jeannie, bursting with pride. The sad note in their reunion was Beth’s report that the newspapers were listing Melissa Lange — David’s old flame, Beth remembered — as one of those killed in the Russian ICBM attacks against SAC in Omaha, and that their officers’ quarters house in Seattle was presumably “gone,” like so many others. Meanwhile they would have to remain billeted in the Marriot Hotel, which the children thought was “great!” Ray’s dad was on the line from New York, though it had taken him over an hour to get through.

“Well, son,” he said, voice tight with emotion. “Well done. Well done. Well done.”

“Oh, John!” It was Ray’s mom on the extension. “Sounds like you’re ordering a steak! Let me speak to him. Ray — I’m so proud. I’m just so—”

“Now, Mother,” began John, but his wife, Catherine, took no notice, her joy unreined after hearing from the Pentagon that David, though wounded, and Robert had survived the war. The War Office had seen no point in raising the question of Robert’s radiation dosage. This was something that the navy thought would best be kept under wraps for a while, largely in an effort to dampen public concern over the number of “Chernobyls,” or downed subs, which now lay littered about the ocean’s floor and which would seriously affect the food chain for some time to come. The navy also justified its position by pointing out, correctly, that the effect of an individual’s radiation dosage could vary widely and in any case was something best left for those affected to discuss with their families as they saw fit.

* * *

When David arrived at Heathrow in the Red Cross ambulance, his stretcher wheeled into the army waiting hall, where the other seven survivors of the SAS raid were still being debriefed after exhaustive medical examination, he was conscious, but the painkilling shots he’d received on the flight had made him dopey, putting him temporarily at peace as they readied him for transfer for the operation to remove two 7.62-millimeter bullets from his thigh. As his stretcher passed by, it was the first time David had ever seen the Australian genuinely shocked. “Struth!”

“What’s up with Aussie?” David asked Choir Williams groggily.

“Oh,” explained the Welshman in his basso profundo, “‘e’s lost a bloody fortune, that fellow has. Bet a packet on you, he did — that you wouldn’t make it back. Or that Laylor chappie from Troop A. Very depressed, Aussie is.”

“Sorry to disappoint him,” said David croakily, his throat parched from the morphine.

“Oh,” said Choir philosophically, “I wouldn’t worry about ‘im, sir. ‘E’s probably taking bets from some poor sod that the surrender won’t hold or t’ sun won’t come up in the morning.”

“Almost didn’t,” said David.

Choir Williams shook his head as David’s stretcher passed on, and looked over at Williams A. “You know, Williams, that Yank’s a nice fellow. But terrible morbid sometimes.”

“Listen,” said Aussie, wandering up to Choir. “Five to one Davey boy comes through the whole operation with flying colors. Dollars! U.S.!”

“Go away,” said Choir.

“Yes,” said Williams A. “Go home, you terrible man.”

“All right, all right,” said Aussie. “Yen. How about yen?”

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

The pact between the surviving members of the USS Roosevelt was kept and none went public with the knowledge that at least a third of them were probably dying. The secret of their invisible yet deadly illness was not a difficult one to keep in a world where the visible horrors of the war were so widespread. It was a secret Robert Brentwood believed he could keep from the moment he and the others had landed in the wild and beautiful Highland dawn to the time he and Rosemary visited his brother David. They took him down from Middlesex Hospital after the operation to convalesce at the Spences’ in Oxshott, where Mrs. Spence spared no effort looking after him, doubtless seeing in David the chance to repay Lana Brentwood for her kindness to young William when he had been wounded in the Atlantic. At times Richard Spence felt his wife’s attentiveness to David Brentwood was almost too cloying, but remembering the terrible emptiness that William’s death had caused in their lives, he was loath to interfere. In any event, he was as much worried about the effect of Peter Zeldman’s death on Georgina. But she, like her mother, had rallied, and while the loss would always be with her, Richard could already see in her a sudden maturing. She was still passionate about her ideas, and at times as argumentative as ever, but much more willing now to listen. Peter Zeldman in a way had tamed her, forced her to look at her innermost self beneath all the varsity-bred and nourished pretensions, so that when she met David, there was none of the petulant, knowing air of superiority she had once held toward “soldiers,” but more understanding of what young William and others like him and Zeldman must have been through, a new respect for action as well as for intellect.

“Would you like me to do that?” she asked David one morning as he struggled valiantly but in vain with knife and fork, his right arm particularly painful.

“Yes,” he said. It was the way she did that simple thing, smiling as she sat down beside him, a wide open smile, utterly devoid of connivance or any intent to impress, that touched him.

Richard Spence, interrupting his puzzle in the Telegraph, watched her and David looking at each other and inwardly groaned for his savings account at the Midland Bank, wondering yet again what unjust and perverse origin lay beneath the pernicious custom that decreed the bride’s father always got stuck with