World in Flames

storm-cut swells, he could see the bobbing of a trawler, probably from Ballantrae several miles to the north, its mast momentarily spearing the cold blue sky, then disappearing in deep troughs. The constant vigilance bred at sea never left him, and he reminded himself that just over forty miles to the west, beyond the tempestuous North channel, lay Northern Ireland in the grip of continuing internecine strife between IRA terrorists and Orangemen.

The IRA had become increasingly active against the British military, who had been stretched thin in Northern Ireland because of the heavy losses suffered over the Channel by the British Army of the Rhine in the battle for the Dortmund/ Bielefeld pocket. And Robert recalled the talk between his executive officer, Peter Zeldman, and the other officers aboard the Roosevelt about reports from CINCLANT — Commander in Chief Atlantic — to head of security for Holy Loch to be alert for IRA provisionals. Britain’s military intelligence, MI5, warned that IRA “provos” might try coming across in trawlers. If they landed farther north near the Firth of Lorn, they could fairly quickly head inland through the wilderness of the sparsely populated Argyll to Loch Lomond, men down the fifteen miles to Holy Loch. Despite the base’s reinforced concrete pens, a well-aimed shoulder-borne antitank missile could take out the Roosevelt or any other sub.

Not surprisingly, Robert hadn’t mentioned any of this to Rosemary, knowing how the very mention of a submarine got her worrying. Indeed, he’d gone so far as to promise her that they wouldn’t go near the base during the honeymoon but rather head inland a little, go north along Loch Lomond’s western shore, then north again along the Firth of Lorn on their way to the ancient and picturesque fishing village of Mallaig near the fabled Isle of Skye.

Rosemary murmured in her sleep and rolled over to his side of the old-fashioned four-poster bed, her right hand moving to where he had lain, her lips in a smile that at once touched Robert with its simplicity and aroused him in its sensuousness. Below, he could hear someone stirring — the proprietor’s wife in the kitchen, he guessed — and he caught a whiff of kippers cooking, the one thing Rosemary couldn’t bring herself to eat on the honeymoon. Scottish blood ran in her veins, but the thought of smoked fish for breakfast appalled her — and no, she’d told him, it didn’t have anything to do with morning sickness, which so far she’d escaped.

Halfway through a head-to-knee stretch, while still watching her, Robert wondered whether there’d be enough time before breakfast for what his horny crewmen ashore habitually referred to as a “dawn breaker.” He could hear the floorboards creaking outside in the upstairs hallway as early risers made their way to the bathroom and down to the dining room. He began the last stretch, right heel on the windowsill, his hands fully extended in unison to touch his toes. For a moment he glimpsed the trawler again on the pewter sea. The wind had died, but it seemed only temporary, a scud of cloud invading from the north.

“Robert—”

When he turned, he saw she had pulled the bedding tightly about her with one hand, the other patting the sheet on his side. “Coming back to bed?”

“Funny you mentioned that,” Brentwood said in midstretch. “I was just thinking about it. Hadn’t decided —”

“Yes you have,” she said, a cheeky glint in her eyes, her gaze wandering below his navel, “unless it’s an optical illusion?”

“Rosemary!” He was genuinely and pleasantly shocked at her impishness after her fretting the night before. It was as if the worries of the night about his old girlfriends, et cetera, et cetera, had vanished with the howling of the wind. “We might be late for breakfast,” he cautioned, sliding eagerly in beside her.

“No we won’t,” she assured him happily.

“I’ll take the Fifth on that,” he told her.

“What do you mean?”

As she spoke, he detected the scent of fresh mint about her doing battle with the smell of kippers wafting up from below. “I mean,” he explained, “that I refuse to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate me.”

The phrase sounded familiar to her — from the American films she’d seen. She popped a mint candy in his mouth. “I thought only gangsters talked like that—”

“Well, you don’t know much about me. Maybe I run a still aboard Roosevelt.” The sub’s name was out before he could stop himself, but it didn’t matter — it was lovers’ talk, easy, without strain, and he was glad to see he could mention the sub without her getting upset again about him, the war, about what might happen. The Rosemary of the morning had put her worried self to flight — as if sometime during the sweet darkness after he’d settled her down following the latecomers’ arrival, she had decided once and for all to live in the present, that the world and all its troubles were too big for them to control, that their time together was too precious to permit armies of “what ifs” to sabotage what happiness they might find before he went back to war. He pulled her toward him. “No,” she said teasingly, giggling.

“Yes.”

“No.”

“My God,” he said, “if you don’t let me, I’ll explode.”

“The answer’s still no. I won’t let you.”

His left arm curved beneath her and he raised her, kissing her nipples through the negligee. “I love you,” he said breathlessly.

“Are you always… like this?” she asked, her hand sliding beneath the warm sheets, squeezing him.

“When I’m with you—” he said, kissing her again, “all the time.”

“Robert—” her tone was soft, urgent “—don’t leave me.”

“I won’t, sweetheart. I won’t.”

CHAPTER TWO

Though fashionably smart in a tweed jacket, tie, and flannels that Rosemary had chosen for him, Robert still wasn’t used to being out of uniform and felt more self-conscious than his bride as they entered the B and B’s dining room. They were relieved to receive a jolly greeting, without any honeymoon jokes, from Mrs. McRae, a small, dumpy, and irrepressible Scot who had been running the B and B sixty-five miles southwest of Glasgow for the past forty years, and her husband, Alfred, a partially incapacitated veteran of the Falklands War. The battle that left McRae with a gammy leg and intense pain, especially now in the depth of the Scottish winter, had been the single most important event of his life. It had also left him with a growing conviction that next to Napoleon, Montgomery of Alamein, and Robert the Bruce, he was one of the great unsung strategists of warfare. His greeting to the honeymooners and the other five guests, two couples and a single commercial traveler, consisted of a throat clearing and a stiff nod as he read the latest war news in the Edinburgh Herald.

“What’ll it be, lass?” asked the ebullient Mrs. McRae. “Porridge to start?”

“No, thank you,” Rosemary declined, opting instead for corn flakes — a choice that she had the distinct impression Mr. McRae didn’t approve of. Robert asked for kippers, his request receiving an appreciative nod from Mrs. McRae and one of the other two couples.

Meanwhile Alfred McRae, head buried in the paper, let out his breath in short, audible bursts of disgust, his head shaking at something he’d just read. One of the other two couples, in their late twenties, were finishing their ersatz chicory coffee, excusing themselves from the table. Robert handed a dozen or so one-cup instant coffee packets he had brought with him from Roosevelt to Mrs. McRae.

“Och, mon, will ye look at this, Alfred? Real coffee from America.”

McRae grunted behind the paper while the other of the two couples, a pair in their early forties, Robert guessed, their accents distinctly upper middle class, beamed, as did the lone commercial traveler. “I say,” began the husband, sitting forward, the pale, cloud-sieved sunlight shining on his tan Dutch corduroy jacket. “Haven’t seen anything like that for months.”

“And ye’re no likely to again,” put in Mr. McRae suddenly. “And tha’s a fact. The convoys are doomed.”

“Oh?” said the Englishman in the corduroy jacket, who by now had introduced himself and his wife as James and Joan Price of London, a rather pinched yet tight good-humored look about him, his wife clearly deferring to him, though at the moment she was picking a pill of fluff from his jacket. Wearing a tartan shirt with nonmatching