Rosemary made to run toward them, but Joan Price grabbed her arm. “No. Stay here!”
“Get up, you son of a bitch!” yelled Robert Brentwood, his voice all but inaudible to the women, his face red, tweed jacket ballooning in the wind. “Get up or I’ll—”
“I’m not making—” began Price, fearing the blow to his chin had fractured his jaw, his voice breathless. “I’m not making a moral judgment. The Spence boy was dying. Perhaps it was an act of — look, I’m sorry, but if you don’t believe I’m from Special Branch, I had to convince—” Price paused, his face grimacing in pain. “We haven’t been following you— well, we have, but it’s the other two newlyweds that we were really shadowing. You’re in- between as it were.”
Brentwood looked blank.
“Your innocent young GI,” Price continued, easing himself back so he could rest against the bulkhead. “You know, the young couple at the B and B — confetti still in their hair. And his lovely wife. Real charmer, she is — been to bed with two of your sub captains already. Found them — should say what was left of ‘em — down by Loch Lomond. We had to change everything — including their sub’s ETD from Holy Loch — just in case our bonny pair got anything out of them. He paused, feeling his jaw, wishing he hadn’t. “We’re your minders,” he told Brentwood. “We caught up with them just before you reached the B and B. They were your late arrivals. You were bloody lucky you didn’t make it to Burns’s cottage. The sweet young thing was carrying a Beretta and two shrapnel grenades. Very nice.”
By now, Price felt safe enough to get up. “I’m afraid we’re on duty till we see you safely back at Holy Loch. Sorry to dampen your nuptial bliss, but we can’t afford to lose a Sea Wolf skipper. Especially now.”
Robert Brentwood gave a grunt. “Sorry — I—such a fool… didn’t realize…”
“Not to worry,” Price assured him, dusting himself down, the wind from the loch playing havoc with his hairpiece. “National Health’ll take care of the teeth. I hope.” He tried a grin, but his jaw hurt too much.
“I feel like a goddamned idiot,” said Robert, his face still red from wind chill and embarrassment. “Here they are protecting us and we think—”
“Well,” responded Rosemary, chagrined by her own embarrassment but her tone more defensive. “They should have told us.”
“No,” said Brentwood. He glanced in the rearview and gave a friendly wave. Price honked in reply. “If we’d known they were following us, it wouldn’t have been much of a honeymoon. Would’ve seemed like someone was watching us through the keyhole all the time.” Rosemary didn’t like it, but she had to agree. The thought of her and Robert trying to make love with two people staking the place out from across the hallway of the B and B would certainly have put her right off. “Oh no!” she said. “They must have heard everything.” Her face was between her fingers, looking at Robert. “Tell me, was I—”
“Screaming with joy!” he said. “All the time!”
She slid down into her seat as they drove off.
Five miles on, both cars disappearing into fog, Rosemary gasped in fright, turning to Robert. “My God — he mightn’t be from Special Branch at all. I mean, he could be just saying that to—”
“No,” Robert interjected. “He told me some stuff that only someone in the know could have a handle on. They couldn’t have found it out in Surrey.”
“Found out what? What kind of things?”
“About my family,” Robert answered, gearing down on a hill, the fog so thick, he could barely see the front of the hood. “I don’t want to talk about it. Damn it! I wish this goddamned demister would work.”
The car slowed, Robert unconsciously taking his foot off the gas pedal, not because of the fog or his preoccupation with the windshield misting, but because he realized a Russian agent could as easily have had contacts in North America and the Aleutians as in Surrey — that the information about Lana — if it was true—
“What’s
“To allay,” she explained eagerly, without a trace of surprise. “Why?” she pressed. “Did Price use it?”
“Yes, he said he hoped he’d assuaged my suspicions.”
“Has he?”
Robert pushed himself backward from the steering wheel, his back hard against the seat, arms still, as if bracing himself for a crash. It was one of the isometric exercises he often used during the long watches aboard the sub and which he would be doing in several days time when,
Price’s jaw was throbbing and badly swollen on the left side. “Could you hand me one of those towelettes from the glove compartment?” he mumbled. “Or are they in the boot?”
Joan opened her purse, took out the Beretta nine-millimeter, and rummaged through the contents. “Here’s one!” she pronounced triumphantly, tearing it open and passing the towelette to him. Dabbing it gently on his chin, he relished the temporary cold that took the edge off the pain. “By God, he can pack a wallop. Hope he isn’t like that on his submarine. A man like that in charge of — how many is it — forty-eight nuclear warheads? Gives me the willies, I can tell you. Thought they were supposed to be the silent type. Not bloody rowdies.”
“You
“Because,” he replied, “I do my homework. That’s why.”
The thing Robert Brentwood found unforgivable in himself was that, try as he might to push the image of Lana performing oral sex on young Spence from his mind, the more he fantasized about whether Rosemary would do it for him. The moment he thought he had evicted the scene from his mind as unworthy of him, the more pervasive it became until he had such an erection, he thought Rosemary would be sure to notice. At least he hoped she would. The image of her moist, red lips encasing him, her tongue darting with abandon, sucking him dry, made him doubt whether they could make Mallaig without him having to pull over. Returning again and again to what Price had said about Lana, he remembered Price also saying something about how grateful the Admiralty was for the protection afforded by the Sea Wolfs, “especially now.” But surely the subs had always been important to Admiralty. Why
“Perhaps something’s happened,” she proffered, “that we haven’t heard yet on the news?”
Robert switched on the radio, but Highlands static crackled like a log fire. Anyway, it was a violation of their pledge not to listen to any newscasts while on their honeymoon, not to let anything intrude on their all-too-brief time together. But now he wondered whether their pact had been a good idea after all. He hated not knowing what was going on. He looked in the rearview again but couldn’t see Price’s car, not even the yellow eyes of fog lights. He was unsure as to whether he should pull over and wait or keep going.
CHAPTER NINE
When the army chief of staff, General Grey, arrived from the Pentagon and was ushered into the Oval Office by press aide Trainor, he wasn’t sure whether the president had heard him and so coughed politely to announce his presence.
The chief executive of the United States was reclining in the black leather chair behind the dark oak desk from HMS
The ELINT — electronic intelligence — experts had picked up FORCOMPS — forward command post signals — between the U.S. and South Korean armies under the command of Gen. B. W. Anderson, supreme commander of all Allied forces in Southeast Asia. On top of this, Mayne was in the throes of a migraine attack — it being no
