seen quite clearly on Marchenko’s fifty-two-mile look-down Fox Fire radar.
Unaware he was already on the Soviets’ radar, Kurt Schulz, an American from Los Angeles, now picked up one of the Russians on his Dalmo Victor AN/ALR radar-warning receiver, the computer telling him the Russian fighters were now in excess of Mach 2.3—his Falcon’s top speed, Mach 2. Lying back in full recline, sidestick mode of the F-16 to reduce the G force, Schulz pressed the zoom toggle, bringing up the DA A— designated area of attack — the blipping rectangle showing cattle grazing against sodden, snow-slushed fields either side of the highway where once the tall barbed wire had stood. The black streaks Schulz could see in the zoom shot were slicks of oil visible against the unthawed shoulder of the road where snow had remained. Then there were other streaks against the snow — these rising from the ground toward him, as SAM sites opened up from the Harz foothills to the south. Schulz immediately noted on his kneepad that the SAM sites had shifted from the day before and so were presumed to be mobile launchers. In the distance he could now see the two Russians, specks of silver, closing fast, and he was alert for an ELOK — enemy lock-on tone. Radio silence was pointless now that visual ID had been made, and he asked his wingman, “That barn down there — eleven o’clock — was it there yesterday?”
There was such a deafening noise, it made Shulz grimace. He lost the video image momentarily as the plane shifted violently left. He went to “jammer” to play havoc with the SAM radars. Coming up at him at over five hundred miles an hour from less than three hundred feet, the terrain below him now a racing white-green blur, Schulz dropped two iron bombs and let the afterburner have its head. The barn was gone; so was his wingman, a young pilot he’d met only that morning as they’d raced from the ready room in response to the scramble horn. At five thousand, Schulz banked hard, the sun glinting behind him as he turned to take another run at the broken span across the Elbe, where he’d spotted the black marks against the snow. Possibly they were tire ruts, leading down from the highway to the water’s edge, more tracks coming up from the other side of the river through snow. “A “sunken” pontoon bridge?
The flak was thick, and he saw a burst of red tracer catching the sun, fading, climbing leisurely up toward him through the smoke of the barn, more tracer now coming from the direction of Magdeburg. He was into the smoke, turning tightly, coming in low again, the HUD lines flicking rapidly, the four green diamonds closing spastically. The smoke was gone. He saw the wreckage of the SAM site in the barn he’d destroyed littering the icy green fields, some of its debris caught in a high mesh fence either side of the autobahn. Schulz knew it was only a matter of minutes before the MiGs, rising like silver gnats in his rear vision from Stendal, would be on him. He set the “clicker”—automatic release — when the river section he’d chosen on his TV zoom was mirrored in the radar image. The Falcon rose as the bombs released. The plane yawed slightly and he headed south, climbing to clear the Harz, hoping to lose himself in cloud, black puffs of flak from the AA batteries around Stassfurt and Aschersleben smudging the air about him.
CHAPTER FOUR
Three miles south of Burns’s cottage outside Ayre, occasional spots of rain turned to sleet and Robert turned on the wipers. In the drowsy hum he and Rosemary were lost in their own thoughts — she wondering how her younger sister, Georgina, and Robert’s executive officer, Peter Zeldman, were getting along — or if they were getting along at all after having graciously performed their official roles as best man and maid of honor at Robert and Rosemary’s wedding.
Georgina’s beauty was matched by her pride and a strong streak of leftist feminism that Rosemary surmised might not “go down” or, as Robert would say, “sit well” with the plainspoken, somewhat taciturn Zeldman. On the other hand, Rosemary, after the years of teaching all types of students in her Shakespeare class, was aware that sometimes opposites attract in the most unpredictable way. She hoped so, suspecting that, deep down, Georgina, though too proud to admit it, wanted a relationship that would give her a measure of certainty and stability in the world of “avant-garde” politics at the LSE and in a world made daily more uncertain by war.
She thought of her brother William’s death in the convoy and of how terrified he must have been, his ship torpedoed in the middle of the Atlantic. She thought, too, of Robert’s sister, Lana, who, as William’s nurse, had written them about William, and without whom Rosemary would never have met Robert, who’d so kindly brought the letter down to Surrey on his first leave. Lana Brentwood, it seemed, had been with William in the final days of his life on the Halifax-bound hospital ship where he died. Rosemary thought, too, of Robert’s youngest brother, David, twenty-four, who, though now safe in Liege in Belgium, had been listed as an MIA for several weeks after he and others, in the big drop by the American airborne over the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, had been swept off course by cross winds into enemy territory. She wondered what he was like. There was still so much she didn’t know about Robert’s family. “Does your brother David have a girlfriend?” she asked.
Robert shrugged. “Sort of, I guess.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure. Had a girl he liked back in the States—” He paused. “High school sweetheart — far as I can recall. But that was before the war. Don’t know if it’s still on between them.”
“Do you know her name?”
“Mmm—” Robert pondered the question while using another tissue to clear the semicircle of mist above the dash. “Now there,” he said, “you’ve got me.”
“Oh, Robert — you
“Mel…Mel… Melanie, I think.” It bugged him that he couldn’t remember, a nuclear sub skipper who, like Zeldman and others in the service, was expected to have a photographic memory of enemy maneuvers and myriad descriptions of ships and armaments. But he was having trouble even trying to visualize the girl’s face.
“Melanie who?” pressed Rosemary. “He must have spoken about her?”
“Not David,” said Robert. “Very closemouthed about dating. We all were. All I remember is that he and a guy called Rick Stacy were in competition for her.”
“Sounds serious.”
“I guess. She was a nice kid — well, a kid
“So you’ve met her?”
“Once. On leave. She was a coed.”
“A first-year student?”
“What — oh, yes,” replied Robert. “First year at Oregon State. She was a bright — hold on!”
Rosemary was thrown forward, the car’s rear end skewing hard right, skidding to a stop on the rain-slicked road. “You okay, honey?” he asked her quickly.
Off to her left, Rosemary caught the auburn blur of a deer slipping through the mist. “I’m all right,” she said. “For a second—” she sat back against the headrest and turned to him, hand over her heart “—I thought it was another car.”
“Figured the honeymoon was over, eh?” he said, swinging the Morris back onto the left-hand side of the road.
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
He put a hand on her knee. “Sorry, sweetie.”
“It’s all right — not your fault.” The fog was so thick, it made day seem like night, and for a moment Robert realized again how close the line was between survival and death — if it
Ray, once nicknamed “Cruise” because of his resemblance to the onetime Hollywood idol, had been wounded in the flash fire following the attack of a swarm of fast, small North Korean attack boats, one of whose missiles had exploded on the
