“I’ll never get tired of you,” he said, doing a W. C. Fields: “My little cooing turtle dove.” He took her hand in his. “Never.”
“Hmm — a likely story.”
Robert could see a long, calm, cobalt-colored tongue of water coming into view, their first sight of the loch and a welcome one after the unrelieved wildness and isolation of Glencoe. Driving through the mist-shrouded valley had been cozy enough, part of the coziness coming from the safety of the warm car and its comforting dash lights, which, like those aboard a sub, created a sense of security, when in fact the line between civilization and the wild, safety and danger, was very thin.
“Where did you put the — gun?” she asked suddenly. It was no longer between them.
“In my jacket,” he said.
It was blustery outside as they pulled up to wait for the ferry, and cold, despite the sun’s attempt to break free of the low stratus.
“Think I’ll hop out and stretch my legs,” he said.
“You’ll freeze.”
“Nah — put on my old tweed coat here. No problem.”
She watched him draw up the collar of the tweed jacket as he walked away and waved back at her. She loved watching the way he walked — a purposeful yet relaxed stride that was somehow distinctly American, part and parcel of their optimism, which, no matter what the odds, refused to be dimmed. She’d noticed it the first time Robert had met her great-uncle Geoffrey. Robert, and some Australians she’d known, had no sense of class difference and so weren’t even aware they were crashing right through it with a friendly handshake and first-name familiarity. They didn’t give a fig about social status; simply rode over it, judging what a man said more than the way he said it.
She wound down the window. “Don’t go too far!” she called out over the howl of wind that was ruffling parts of the loch while other stretches of water remained surprisingly, almost alarmingly, calm. He strode back down the hill.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing — oh dear, I’m sorry, pet. Just didn’t want you to go too far. The ferry’ll be here in ten minutes or so. Besides, I don’t want you to catch a cold. You must be freezing.”
“Have to spend a shilling,” he said.
“Oh—” she began, perplexed.
“It’s ‘spend a penny,’ “ she said.
“Well,” he said, without turning around, “I was close.”
“You were not.”
Rosemary kept watching him and suddenly her smile and laughter vanished. Surely he could have waited until they’d reached the ferry. And wasn’t that one of those portable lavatories she’d seen parked down by the ferry ramp? “All right, Rosemary Brentwood,” she addressed herself sternly, as if bringing one of her sixth-form boys to order. “That will be quite enough of your morbidity.”
It had been the sight of the loch that had upset her — the unforgiving aspect of its gunmetal surface now that the sun was momentarily shut out again. It called up the memory of her brother William’s death on the Atlantic convoy — how one day he had sailed out, never to be seen again. So young. She took a tissue from her purse and, adjusting the rearview mirror, began making herself look presentable. “Good grief,” she told her reflection. “Will you stop worrying? Robert’ll probably outlive you.” Yes, he would undoubtedly the an old man and in bed — with her. She used just a dab of blusher, recalling Georgina’s rather high-minded counsel about how makeup was a “bourgeois conceit.” It always astonished Rosemary that here the whole world was at war, the Communist ideology so utterly discredited despite Gorbachev’s attempted reforms, and yet there were still young intellectuals like Georgina, fresh from the “thesis” and “antithesis” of university and who, filled with the outrage of people who know they will never actually have the responsibility of power, could still be drawn to the left’s unholy mysteries. She closed the lipstick holder, adjusted the mirror, and froze. Coming over the last dip before the long hill leading to the ferry was a yellow car.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Shirer saw there were fourteen minutes to go, the sea hidden from him beneath the flat gray expanse that seemed to go on forever. The edge of the front had come down from the Bering Sea over the Aleutians even before Shirer had taken off in his F-14 Tomcat, number 203, the second fighter assigned him, the first lost when he was shot down by Sergei Marchenko’s Sukhoi and had to bail out over Adak Island before being picked up and taken to Dutch Harbor.
There he and Lana Brentwood had taken up where they had left off before the war. But just when he was getting used to the idea that he’d probably be with Lana and flying out of Dutch Harbor for the foreseeable future, he was jolted back to the bleak reality of just how unforeseeable any future was when he received the terse instruction from
Shirer glanced at his vector control on “radio silence” approach toward the carrier, his plane on a passive, not active, radar to warn him of any approaching Bandits. Unless the Russians had launched midair refuelers without Aleutian radar picking them up, there shouldn’t be any danger.
By nature, he was an optimist. Lana wasn’t. She had been through the trauma of a failed marriage with Jay La Roche, the boss, or some said “don,” of La Roche Pharmaceuticals, a multinational spread over twenty-three countries, including China. Shirer remembered that China was one of the countries because Lana had told him it had been in Shanghai that the three-year marriage had ended in a violent attack on her by La Roche, who had beaten her so badly that only his money and influence with corrupt Chinese officials had prevented charges being laid. She had long ago learned to suffer the carefully chosen and medically screened stable of call girls and boys La Roche had used on his business trips abroad. But when his anal and oral fixations went beyond all bounds with her to the point at which excreta became inextricably linked in La Roche’s mind with sex, she had drawn the line and La Roche had stepped over it. He couldn’t prevent her from leaving him, from joining the navy’s “whores,” as he jeeringly referred to the Waves. But no way, he told her, would he ever allow her to divorce him, to cause him to lose face. If she tried it, La Roche warned, he’d unleash his chain of tabloids and “throw so much muck around” about her parents that the family would be ruined.
“There’s no muck to throw around,” she’d challenged him bravely. She remembered his sneering, cold reply. “You’re so fucking naive, Lana, I don’t believe it. Doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. Once it hits the street on page one, it’s game over for the Brentwoods, sweetheart.”
It was little wonder, Shirer realized as they had parted in Dutch Harbor, that she’d learned to roll with life’s punches— their Washington-enforced separation not upsetting her as much as he had expected, or secretly hoped, it might. And yet he knew she loved him. Still, her greatest fear wasn’t of separation but of him simply vanishing somewhere over the vastness of the Pacific, more terrifying to her than anything Jay La Roche might have done.
“I won’t get shot down, honey,” he’d tried to assure her, recognizing the hollowness of it as soon as he spoke.
“You have been already.”
“Then it’s over. Finished. One time is all you’re allowed. If you get out of that — you’re home and—”
A luminescent green dot, the size of a pinhead, was blipping on his radar screen. The carrier.
He had done it hundreds of times before, but during the approach, his stomach still knotted, his G suit warmer as the perspiration increased, his heartbeat, like most pilots’, faster now than when in a dogfight. He still couldn’t see the ship through the gray candy floss cloud flitting below him like a black river. With air brakes full on, he was coming in at over 150 miles an hour. He remembered that during Freeman’s raid on Pyongyang,
