World in Flames

“Stand up!” shouted the sar’major. “Goggles on.”

The stick of twenty-nine men, seven groups of four, the basic SAS unit, with Cheek-Dawson leading, was about to go out for their first HALO.

For Brentwood, Lewis, Thelman, and Schwarzenegger, who were in the same four-man unit and who had stayed together through the grueling “three” and “four” phases of SAS training, the high-altitude, low-opening jump was almost a relief. Anything was a relief after phase two’s killing forty-mile, full-pack, cross-country march — each man alone, with full seventy-pound pack and weapon, having to complete the forty miles in under forty hours.

“Thought Scotland’d be covered in snow in early January,” shouted Lewis.

“Scottish people like being different, Aussie,” said the German. He pronounced “Aussie” with a slow deliberateness that belied his alertness and agility in training.

“East Africa!” said Aussie, looking down at the wild folds of Scotland. “That’s where I’ve seen hills like that before.”

“Thought we were going to Southeast Asia,” Thelman ribbed him.

“Well, somewhere in the tropics,” said Lewis. “Wanna bet?”

“No thanks.”

The sar’major felt good about the group, as he’d seldom heard them talk with such easy banter before their first HALO, even when they’d done regular para jumps before. The camaraderie came from the special cohesiveness formed among the four men who were theoretically leaderless but who had a group confidence that had grown steadily after the exhausting “sorting out” hardships of the first few weeks.

“Green light. Go!” called the NCO, tapping the first man as he went out, looking like a combination of some great bird of prey and a stuntman going for a belly flop. The difference was they were now in full battle kit and would reach 120 miles per hour in the first sixty seconds of the free fall until their chutes would open automatically — they hoped — at three thousand.

Cheek-Dawson, the first out, immediately slid off to the left to avoid the possibility of midair collision with the men in the stick coming after him. He did not expect them to keep any kind of tight formation in this early jump but was mainly concerned with seeing that they kept their starfish stability as they dropped toward the purple smoke spiraling up wispily from around the landing zone. He saw the third man in trouble almost immediately, and going into a slip roll, gaining speed, he glided laterally; reaching the man, he kept four to six feet away from him, taking his left arm, the man almost in a tumble. His Bergen pack, though tight enough, had not prevented a dangerous shift of weight on his back. Once he had got the man’s starfish under control, Cheek-Dawson gestured to him to keep his arms fully extended.

Cheek-Dawson moved on to the next man he saw wobbling, one of Brentwood’s group, he thought — the German. Twenty-six seconds had gone, and by the time he had assisted the German, it was forty-seven seconds — twelve seconds till the chutes would automatically open.

He looked over the stick of men who now looked more like a scattered flock when be saw the first man he’d helped get steady going into a tumble. The man’s left hand shot out in front of his helmet to grab air in an effort to steady himself while pulling the manual release with his other hand. Two things happened simultaneously. The man’s chute opened and he tumbled into the cords, and Cheek-Dawson immediately went into a fast lateral slide with ten seconds to go.

It was too late for Cheek-Dawson to help. Despite the express-trainlike roaring of the wind rushing past his ears, he nevertheless heard the crisp snap of his chute opening at three and a half thousand, suddenly stopping him, the other man’s chute a Roman candle, its black silk a streamer.

Second on the ground was David Brentwood. He saw Cheek-Dawson swiftly and expertly folding his chute while he, David, released the parachute harness and ran over to the fallen man. The man had struck soft moorland, but his head had burst like a coconut, a hairy mash splattered on the turf, the man’s body strangely flat — an illusion created by the fact that hitting the ground at over one hundred miles per hour, his body had penetrated six inches into the turf, every bone broken.

“Brentwood!” bawled out Cheek-Dawson.

“Sir?”

“Go and fold your chute, man. See it for bloody miles!”

The only thing David could think of was that this was only their first HALO. There would be two more “daylights,” this same day, and then a night HALO, from twenty-five thousand feet. Full kit and oxygen masks.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

As the IX-44E sludge-removal vessel—”self-propelled”— putt-putted out of San Diego harbor, the carrier USS Salt Lake City towered above the tiny vessel like a skyscraper, and even the men on the hangar deck one story below the flight deck looked toy-sized to Brentwood, while the carrier’s anchor chain alone would have sunk his barge. One of the sailors high up on the hangar deck, holding a bucket, gazed down at the small slab of wood that was the barge’s deck and at the butter-box wheelhouse. Mockingly he saluted the tiny apparition. There was a roar of laughter from the carrier, made louder by its echoing off its enormous steel sides, as Ray Brentwood and his nine men — the other two of the crew of eleven in the engine room, or rather engine cubbyhole — returned the salute. Brentwood’s face was flushed — hot with embarrassment as more and more of the carrier’s sailors and yardbirds working on the great ship lined up stem to stern to watch the joke sail by. One of the Salt Lake City crewmen, part of the one-hundred-chef contingent aboard the five- thousand-man carrier, grabbed a loud-hailer, calling out, “Don’t you go bumpin’ into us, now!”

“What is it?” hollered another man. “Smitty, you drop that garbage overboard?” It was light relief for the men on the carrier, who were in for refit after the Salt Lake City had been attacked a thousand miles north of the Hawaiian Islands en route to launch carrier-based attacks against the Russian-held Aleutian Islands. More islands had fallen to the Russians as they drew ever closer to Unalaska’s Dutch Harbor. Two Blackjack Tupolev X bombers, swooping in low on afterburner at 1.4 Mach, had released their sixteen tons of ordnance, including a cluster of air-to-surface Kingfish 6 missiles.

Two of the 10,600-pound missiles, coming in at the Salt Lake City at over 790 meters per second, had been shot out of the air by the carrier’s Phalanx radar-guided.50-millimeter-machine-gun batteries firing dense sprays of high-velocity depleted-uranium bullets. Two of the missiles were struck at three hundred meters from the ship, exploding, raining white-hot debris onto the sea; the fireball from one, streaming from a hundred-pound fragment of the missile’s midsection, kept going, hitting the carrier’s island, wiping out PRIFLY control and demolishing the backup “ops” board. Seven sailors had been killed outright, eight others badly burned.

Of the remaining two Russian missiles, one was taken out a mile from the carrier by a five-thousand-pound Sea Sparrow, though it was the men on the.20-millimeter, fifty-round-per-second Vulcan antimissile gun batteries festooning the carrier’s side who claimed credit for downing the missile.

The remaining Kingfish was a dud, but unstopped, did the most damage of all, its 10,600 pounds, traveling at seventeen hundred miles an hour, striking the carrier’s starboard side above the waterline on the starboard quarter with the impact of a heavy-haul locomotive hitting a metal garage door, the missile disintegrating, and though not exploding, tearing through ten bulkheads, the resulting shrapnel killing 117 men and injuring scores of others, leaving a gaping, jagged-toothed hole twenty feet long and fifteen feet high. The friction of the impact started several fires, one of which, its flames shooting up air-conditioning ducts, ignited three Grumman Intruder bombers. The resulting explosion killed fifteen men and destroyed over $170 million worth of airplanes and spare parts as well as scorching the forward starboard side of the hangar, the fumes from the paint downing several maintenance crews and getting into the pilots’ ready rooms sandwiched between hangar and flight deck.

It was little wonder then that the crew, now safely back in port, thought that a little levity at the expense of IX-44E— sludge removal — was in order. But for Ray Brentwood and his hapless crew, it was a humiliation that not even the gregarious and convivial Seaman Jones could forget or forgive.

Shortly, a deck officer aboard the carrier came down to the edge of one of the lower loading flight decks, ordering the jeering crew back to work, and when they had gone, in the worst humiliation of all, the officer cast a