World in Flames

“Sir,” one of Freeman’s aides cut in, “we’ve got reports here from General Waverley, Two Brigade commander in Creigh’s outfit. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but you can read between the lines. Waverley’s saying Creigh’s stressed out!”

“Stressed out!” bellowed Freeman. “Goddamn it! I’ll give him stress.” He stood up from his seat in the plane’s forward command booth. “Riley!”

The radio operator came running down through the “canyon” between the two rows of consoles.

“Yes, General?”

“ ‘Top secret,’ priority rush to General Creigh, Second Infantry Division, Korean Northern Command. If you can’t pinpoint his position and beam it down, funnel it through Seoul, but get it there.”

“Yes, sir,” said Riley, flipping out his notepad.

“Message reads,” began Freeman, glowering as if Creigh, a popular commander by all accounts, was standing before him, Freeman starting to pace up and down the aisle just beyond the radio control like a caged bear. “Second Division is to cease retreat immediately. If you are incapable of command, you should transfer all authority at once. Repeat ‘at once.’ Shoot any man refusing to fight. I accept full responsibility. Freeman, C in C Korea. Message ends.”

“By God,” said Freeman, turning to address the two lanes of operators. “Stressed! That’s just a fancy word for funk. Word gets out about Creigh shitting in his pants, we’ll have desertion on that road.” His voice was rising. “We’ll leave more than blood on that road, gentlemen. We’ll leave American honor.” He paused — Norton taking the opportunity to follow the radio operator down through the canyon. “Now,” continued Freeman, “I want everyone here to remember that. I don’t ever want to hear ‘stressed out’ in this command— goddamn pansy excuse for not working hard. Not doing your job. Do I make myself clear?”

There was murmured assent.

“Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir!” came a chorus.

* * *

Down by the radio console, Norton stood behind the operator and spoke in a quiet, even tone, to Riley, who was feeding the message into code pretransmission. “Change the first part of the message, Riley,” Norton told him. “Replace ‘if you are incapable’ with ‘if you are incapacitated.’ “

Riley looked up worriedly at the colonel.

“Just do it, son,” said Norton. “If it hits the fan, I’ll take the flak.”

“Yes, sir.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

In the halls of the Admiralty in London’s Whitehall and in Brussels HQ, a crisis of another kind was building, one of whose consequences, if nothing was done about it, would be infinitely more terrible than those facing the Americans in Korea. The operations board told the story in cold, unemotional figures — the rate of Soviet submarines sunk in the Atlantic had fallen off drastically, and the Allied convoys from the United States and Canada devoted to maintaining the rollover necessary to resupply Allied Europe were being sunk at a rate greater than that which had occurred in the early months of the war. For NATO’s C in Cs, the danger, suspected earlier, was now being confirmed with yet another convoy of fifty ships having suffered over sixty percent losses barely a hundred miles north of the Azores. How the Russians submarines were doing it, neither Admiralty in Whitehall nor Norfolk, Virginia, knew, but the mathematical equations gave them the stark warning: If rollover faltered any further, then not only would Europe face the possibility of being starved into submission through lack of conventional munitions as well as food from America, but this lack would force the Allies to the weapons of last resort, which might be the last of everything.

But if in Whitehall the growing fear of the Allies was evident in the cold statistics on the computer screens and by the tiny models representing the growing number of convoy ships sunk, then for the Allied submarine commanders like Robert Brentwood, a thousand feet or more beneath the surface of the Atlantic, the danger took on an infinitely more palpable, if invisible, reality.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The Hawaiian Islands

The Fijian trawler MV Vanuatu was manned by East Indian Fijians with long memories of Colonel Kabuka’s coup d’etat of 1987 when the Fijian-run military overthrew Her Majesty’s duly elected government in the South Seas island. Indian journalists were imprisoned, and the ever-present hostility of the native Fijian population against their fellow East Indian citizens was as palpable in the balmy air as the humidity that hung so oppressively over Suva Bay. Paradise had lost its innocence forever after the coup, and into the void created by the condemnation issued from Her Majesty’s government, the Russians had come, bearing aid. In return, the Russians received not only fish treaties but also the right to visit and use Fijian port facilities for repairs to the huge Soviet trawler fleet whenever “necessary.”

At one stroke the Soviets in the eighties had extended the KGB’s and MVD’s intelligence-gathering facilities halfway around the world to the South Seas — hitherto the American navy’s domain.

And so it was that the MV Vanuatu, ostensibly a Fijian trawler but in reality under subcontract to the Russian merchant marine, operating between the Ellis Islands group and Hawaii, was in Honolulu when Freeman’s 747 landed. Still, the Indian operatives aboard the trawler wouldn’t have learned of his presence but for one of the civilian ground crew from Honolulu’s airport grouching in the Reef Bar about missing the first round of poker because he’d had to work overtime “juicing up” some bigwig’s “flying lanai.”

“Some politician’s freebie,” suggested one of the players, another mechanic, making like a high roller, ordering mai-tais all round.

“Nah,” said the airport mechanic. “Wasn’t politicians. They hit the tarmac soon as they land. Suck in their gut, leis all around them, and big smiles for the Advertizer. These guys wouldn’t even leave the plane when we were pumping ‘er full of Avgas.”

It wasn’t much to go on for one of the Vanuatu’s crew sitting at the bar, knocking back his fourth Bud, but it was enough for Vanuatu’s skipper to pass it along via “fish talk.” This innocuous plain-language transmission, full of information about sea conditions, movements and depth of schools of fish, was relayed from one trawler to another as far as the South Korean and Japanese trawler fleets plying the Tsushima Straits off Japan’s southern island of Honshu. By the time Freeman’s plane reached Tokyo’s Narita Airport — Osaka ruled out because of fog — a South Korean trawler, manned by North Korean illegals, all with bona fide ROK papers, had sent a fake SOS of predetermined coordinates. The rescue hovercraft of the Japanese defense forces, taking the message as a genuine distress call, ended up on a wild-goose chase and assumed the boat had sunk when they reached the area and found no sign of the vessel.

The coordinates, a number-for-letter code, alerted Soviet operatives from Japan to Vladivostok and Khabarovsk that the Americans’ VIP plane was at Narita.

In order that there would be no possibility of either Soviet or Chinese radar-guided, surface-to-air missile batteries along the Yalu and Tamur firing at the Soviet mission’s aircraft as they headed south, a secret message in “four group, number-for-number” code went out from STAVKA Moscow HQ to Far Eastern TVD HQ Khabarovsk — for repeat to the Soviet Embassy in Beijing. The message, mainly for the benefit of the Chinese, was to inform all AA batteries that in the next twenty-four hours, Soviet fighters would be in Manchurian air space and were not to be fired upon.

The message was intercepted by U.S. intelligence satellite K-14 in geosynchronous orbit over the South China Sea, but as the STAVKA’s code had not been broken, the number series transcript of it was filed — to add to the voluminous piles of other intercepts, which included everything from military traffic to civilian traffic between the United States, Canada, and Asia. Even if the code had been cracked by U.S. intelligence, the chances of it being