the passenger door.
“That’s a silly thing to do,” observed McRae. “Cost him a packet to get that painted over.”
Mrs. McRae put a new pot of tea before him, smoothing its cozy. “Perhaps they don’t want to paint it over, McRae.”
“Aye,” conceded McRae, knowing he’d gone too far for her liking with the Prices but still grumpily eager to get in a last salvo at the world. “Well, they certainly didn’t mind who heard ‘em during the night.”
Robert saw Rosemary blush. The commercial traveler had his eyes closed in a grin of contentment as he exhaled, the long stream of smoke swirling in the air, as gray and turbulent as the storm clouds scudding in from the Irish Sea.
“You’ll be heading north, then?” said McRae.
“Yes,” answered Robert, his hand beneath the table on Rosemary’s thigh. “Yes, we’re off to Mallaig.”
“What?” said McRae, as if they’d taken leave of their senses. “That’d be nigh on two hundred miles!”
It always amazed Brentwood how the British sense of what distance it was proper or possible to travel in a day was so different from how the Americans viewed it, even accounting for the fact that the long, lonely roads over the moors and through the highlands were often one-way and certainly a far cry from any freeway — or motorway, as the British called it. “We should be there by dark,” said Robert confidently.
“You’ll be seeing Robbie’s cottage first?” It sounded more like an order from Commander in Chief Atlantic than a question.
“Yes,” said Robert.
“And Glencoe?”
It didn’t ring a bell with Robert. Rosemary came to her husband’s rescue even as she was trying to fend off his groping beneath the table. “You remember, Robert. I told you — it was the site of a great battle between the Scots and the English.”
“Who won?” asked Robert, smiling. “The Scots, I guess.”
McRae’s face was swept by squall, eyes brooding and sullen as the clouds congealing over the sea. “It wasn’t a
Robert reacted quickly, trying to hide his surprise, turning the question back to McRae. “Holy Loch?”
“Aye. You’re a submariner, aren’t you?”
Robert didn’t answer.
“You’re American, aren’t you?” pressed McRae.
“Yes, but—”
“Your face, laddie,” said McRae. “Clean as a bairn’s bottom. You’ve no seen the sun or any kind of weather for a wee while, have you?”
“You’re very observant, Mr. McRae,” Robert complimented him. McRae came around the table, face grimacing, his limp favoring the stiff left leg. Then, quite unexpectedly, he offered his hand to Brentwood. “Mind how ye go.” Next, his steel-grey eyes shifted from Robert to Rosemary. “And take good care of the lassie.”
Robert nodded his head. “Thank you, sir. I will.”
After they’d packed their bags into the trunk or, as Rosemary insisted on calling it, the “boot” of the Morris and driven off, Rosemary waving back to the lone Mrs. McRae on the porch, Robert wondered aloud why, if McRae was such a determined Scot, he had bothered fighting for the British in the Falklands War.
“The Scots love to fight,” she said simply, winding up her window against the splatter of rain and taking out the map of Scotland’s west coast, looking down at the thin, solitary roads winding up past Ayre to the Highlands and beyond — to Cape Wrath.
CHAPTER THREE
From the high-resolution satellite pictures, the Politburo had clearly seen the vast North German Plain streaked with a white mange of snow, crisscrossed with Allied pontoon bridges over the tributaries to the Elbe and strewn with all the detritus of war: eviscerated, still-smoking armored columns, gutted empty gasoline dumps, and bloated bodies, all indicating how rapidly the Americans were advancing and the Russians retreating. The American general, Freeman, was obviously moving so fast that Soviet divisions hadn’t time to bury their dead.
Sergei Marchenko, one of the Soviet fighter pilots temporarily seconded from the Far Eastern TVD Aleutian section to plug the gaps opened up by the American breakout from the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket to the North German Plain, was coming in low over the white ribbon of the E-8, the 120-mile autobahn between Berlin and what, before Gorbachev, used to be the frontier of Western Germany. His Foxbat-A MiG-25, one of a combat pair, crossed the Elbe seven miles northeast of Magdeburg. He pressed the “ARM” switch for four Acrid 6 air-to-air missiles, two of them infrared-homing, the other two radar-homing. The two fighter interceptors, with no internal armament, were equipped with external pod-mounted twenty-three-millimeter cannons to be used strafing either NATO supply lines or NATO fighters covering the American advance.
Sergei Marchenko was no coward, but he, like the other pilots rushed to the western front, hoped that the SPETS units, long in place in Western Europe, would help slow the American advance by sabotaging their forward airfields, which the Americans were so good at laying down despite the slushy conditions of a temporary thaw in the freezing weather.
Besides, as much as Sergei Marchenko enjoyed being a fighter pilot after his military slog through the armored corps, to which he had originally been assigned because of his height, he would have preferred to be flying the somewhat slower but more maneuverable Sukhoi-15 Flagon. It had served him so well at his home base in the Aleutians during the attacks on the American outposts of Adak submarine base and Shemya Island. In supporting the SPETS operation against Shemya, the United States’ largest western radar warning post, the Sukhois, flying out of the Komandorskiye Islands less than two hundred miles from the Americans’ westernmost island, had performed exceptionally well. It was true that Marchenko, despite his impressive record of five
Still, he knew it was silly to become sentimental about such things, and one had to learn to adapt quickly amid the vicissitudes of a rapidly changing war. In any event, Marchenko and his wingman had been buoyed by the information given them during engine-start that intelligence reports showed Allied pilots in Europe were being forced to fly in excess of six sorties a day in order to try to deal with the swarms of Russian fighters now being funneled in from the eastern sectors of the USSR.
It was predicted that at this unheard-of — except for the Battle of Britain — sortie rate, sooner or later the unrelenting fatigue would take its toll, not only on pilots and the radar-intercept officers who flew with them, but also on the ground crews. But the Russian estimates were wide of the mark, for while there had been even more casualties than they thought, British and American pilots were not about to ease off or pause to catch their breath — not after the American army, spearheaded by Freeman’s corps, had finally breached the Soviet ring of steel. The Allied pilots were like marathon runners, worn down but suddenly invigorated by a second wind — in this case provided by Freeman’s breakout from the DB pocket and by the possibility of quickly gaining ground. To make up for air crew losses, many of the British and American aircraft normally crewed by pilot and RIOs were being flown with pilot only — doing what he could with the electronic countermeasures but going up anyway, disdaining second-by-second control over all the avionics in favor of pressing home the attack, going air-to-air, giving maximum attention to dogfight maneuvers.
Coming in from the southwest over Gottingen and the recaptured airfields of lower Saxony, a flight of two F- 16A Fighting Falcons, though not yet visible against the bright whiteness of blue-patched nimbostratus, could be
