World in Flames

into the Chinese artillery positions across the Yalu.

* * *

From his tunnel position above the Yalu, General Kim, supreme commander of NKA forces, and his Chinese cohorts reported to Beijing that the Americans were using “nuclear” shells. This information, though encoded for transmission to Beijing, was picked up by Soviet satellite, and Chernko’s Sino-Soviet KGB units, already knowing the Chinese code, informed Moscow.

The information convinced Suzlov that seeing Pandora’s box had been opened, if, at the meeting that night, the Politburo and STAVKA agreed, he would order a first strike of nuclear, as well as chemical, weapons in Europe before the American-Asian policy could be adopted by NATO. And it would not only be atomic shells but missiles — for no other reason than that is what Soviet forces had most of. This, Suzlov told his aides, was a direct result of the cutback of conventional arms during Gorbachev’s disastrous tenure, for such cutbacks had meant that without enough conventional weapons to stop NATO’s advance, the use of chemical and nuclear weapons became inevitable if the Americans were to be defeated.

Cautious though he was, an apparatchik through and through, Suzlov also told his aides that if at the meeting the Politburo and STAVKA endorsed him and decided to go nuclear, he wouldn’t pussyfoot like the Americans in Vietnam, who procrastinated — and who could have won the Vietnam War in a day had they had the smelost’—”balls”—to drop an A-bomb on Hanoi.

He, Suzlov, would go all out, and with the indisputable advantage his people had with nuclear bunker defenses, he would have the decisive edge.

CHAPTER FIFTY

Ray Brentwood’s IX-44E chugged back into San Diego Harbor as the sun was sinking in a tangerine sky, the great towering silhouettes of the warships even more impressive than when Ray and his barge crew had left that morning. In the distance he could see the sleek, black lines of a fast frigate heading out to sea, her bow slicing the water like a knife, and the phosphorescence of her wake the only visible sign of her progress to war.

As they tied up, Ray took the sample bottle of the spill, as he had done more than a dozen times since his sludge-removal barge had been mopping up small spills here and there up the coast. While the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington wasn’t overly concerned with “chicken-shit” spills, as one Washington official bluntly put it, EPA had a master data bank into which all oil companies were required to register their cargo’s “fingerprints” in the form of having particular isotopes added to each cargo so that polluters could be identified. But EPA was loath to press either IMCO — the intergovernmental maritime consultative organization — or TOVALOP — the tanker owners’ voluntary agreement on liability for oil pollution — to discipline their own members when the oil being spilled by enemy subs sinking Allied tankers was astronomically larger than that of local spills. The problem was that EPA hadn’t taken into account what they later dubbed the NP, or “nagging power,” of local residents up and down California’s more affluent coastline who demanded the names of the offending companies and captains who had vented bilge oil at sea, so that they could be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

And so it was that once a week, Ray Brentwood took his sample bottles of the spills his barge had sucked up to the harbor pollution control office, where he could clip the bottle into the analyzer, flick on the switch, and wait for any matchup with the EPA’s master computer isotope list. When the matchups occurred, the terminal beeped, and like an accusing finger pointing at an overdue library book borrower, it kept up until it had stopped spitting out its printout of the matchup between sample and master list.

This day, however, two of the twelve samples would not match. Ray ran them again, with the same result. Next, he called EPA in Washington, though with the phone networks still in a mess from sabotage, it took him fifteen minutes to get through. Was it possible, he asked, that there was oil not “fingerprinted” with isotopes? The answer was a definite no— all refined oil and crude was fingerprinted by law, and supervised by government inspectors.

“Yes,” answered Ray, “but was it possible that the government rules and regulations had been relaxed because of the war — to make it easier to move oil more quickly?”

“Hell, no.” was the bureaucrat’s answer. “Doesn’t take any time at all to seed the cargo. A few drops and it’s done. If you have two that aren’t matching, there must be something wrong with your terminal. If you like, I’ll authorize one of our electronic technicians out there to check it out. We’ve got a couple on the base.”

“Yeah, I know them,” Ray Brentwood answered. “Thanks.”

The technician took ten minutes to tell him there was nothing wrong with the terminal. Ray ran the two samples again in the technician’s presence, aware as he did so that the technician, thinking Ray couldn’t see him, was staring at Ray’s face in the kind of fascinated horror that children exhibited upon first seeing him.

“Still no friggin’ matchup!” Ray snapped at the technician.

“Master data bank mightn’t have all—”

“Yes it has!” said Ray just as grumpily as before. “Something’s wrong.”

“Well, it ain’t that terminal, man. It’s A-okay.”

Ray took the two samples down to the privately run yard laboratories and asked the chemical lab technician there if he’d do him a favor and run them through the spectrometer. After what the navy brass had done to him in their inquiry about the Blaine, Ray was going to play it by the book, too, and nail the big brass of whatever warship had opened its bilges and caused the ruckus in La Jolla and environs.

The lab technician told him it was his coffee break.

“Look,” said Ray, “I’m due back at the ship. I’m in a hurry.” The technician couldn’t suppress a smile. He’d heard about “Frankenstein’s” boat. Not a bad guy, Brentwood, they said, but man, his face was a weapon — should send it into North Korea — get the bastards to surrender in no time.

“Okay,” said the technician magnanimously. “Wouldn’t want to delay your sailing. What are you on, destroyers?”

“Not at the moment,” said Ray quietly. “How long will this take?”

“Whoa there. You just got here, mac. Five minutes. Can you wait that long?” He flashed a friendly grin. Ray nodded. Destroyers? Screw him.

“It’s the sulfur content that’ll tell us whether it’s navy or civilian fuel,” said the technician. “Tell you by the smell it’s diesel.”

“I know that,” said Ray irritably. Destroyers. Smart-ass.

When the computer slave hooked up to the spectrometer, the printer started chattering and the technician, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of a scummy-looking, acid-holed lab coat, started rocking on his heels, announcing knowingly, “Yep! What’d I tell you? Dieseline. Let’s see.” He leaned closer. “Sulfur content coming — hmm. That’s funny.”

“What is?” asked Ray.

“Sulfur content,” the technician answered.

“What about it?”

The technician had stopped rocking and was now frowning. It brought a twisted smile to Ray’s face. So he was right after all — one of the navy’s big ships had spewed out the oil in the sample. Or both samples. He’d get his own back.

“Holy Toledo!” the technician said, slipping in the second bottle. It, too, was from a diesel load, he told Ray.

“All right,” said Ray. “You have a U.S. Navy master sheet here?”

The technician was running the sample again. “I don’t need a U.S. master sheet,” he said. He turned around and looked worriedly at Ray. “Captain, that’s Baku — prime grade. We’re looking at Russian oil here.”

“How the hell—” began Ray.

“Submarine grade,” said the technician. “This crap is from diesel subs. Two different lots.”

“Can’t be,” said Ray Brentwood. “They couldn’t get that close to our coast. Christ, even their nuclear jobs are noisier than ours — in their ‘silent running’ mode, you can still hear their pumps — come in like a heartbeat on the underwater hydrophones and—” Suddenly he stopped. “Listen — I’ve got to check something out, real fast. But you sit on this until I get back to you. Understand? If we’re wrong about this, we’ll get our butts kicked from here to