island in twenty-seven seconds. Most of the chaff had now dissipated, and Siberian radar picked up one of the Stealths via ultrA-10w frequency radar and fired an SA-10 but missed.
Even though the SPETS were already out and had closed the triple-armor manhole covers of the exits, the infrared video taken by the Stealths in their twenty-seven-second overflight revealed the exits, the latter’s HE, or heat emission, spots distinct against the snow — showing up on the video film like white, overexposed blurs on a negative. The moment he was awakened and given the information — ten exits, five north, five south of the island’s midpoint — Freeman ordered them CMR’d — computer map referenced. It was done in less than five minutes. While his staff was exultant with the way he had dropped weighted chutes, duping the Ratmanov commander into sending out his troops and so revealing the exit/entrance positions, Freeman was too busy to celebrate.
“Alright, Jim,” he told his air commander. “Tell your boys we’re going to give ‘em the can of Raid — make up for what those cruise missiles of yours failed to do. Get them to drop three laser-guided babies on each of those exits. Two-thousand pounders. Mightn’t do the trick, but it’s better’n dropping dumb proximity iron bombs.”
The whooping continued in the revetted mobile home that was Freeman’s Prince of Wales HQ. “You suckered ‘em, General!”
Freeman told everyone to quiet down. It was true he had tricked the Siberians — a bunch of hotshot SPETS now running across the snow shooting at dummies or whatever the air force could put on the end of a chute to simulate an airborne attack on the Russian radar. But if the laser-guided bombs didn’t blow up the exits, penetrate and spit some fire down the seams between the exit plates and rock, then he’d have to go in with the airborne after all. “Just pray those bombs do the job, gentlemen,” Freeman told them. Someone who’d lost a buddy in one of the F-111s mumbled that so far God hadn’t been listening.
CHAPTER TEN
Across the dark blue of Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island, the first big island near Alaska in the Aleutian Chain, Lana La Roche,
“I thought,” said Lana easily, “there was supposed to be a blackout in progress?”
“You know what those fishermen are like, honey,” said Elizabeth, who had done her nurse’s training with Lana on the East Coast at a joint U.S./Canadian navy hospital in Halifax and from which Lana had been officially “transferred”—in effect exiled for having given a young, dying British seaman a woman’s caring touch aboard an Allied hospital ship.
The head nurse at the hospital and on board the ship, Matron “Scud,” so-called because it was said that you never knew where she and her broomstick would land, had been outraged by Lana’s unprofessional conduct. So had Lana — for about five seconds. Then she realized she had only been guilty of being a woman who had given a dying man sexual release, something that, because of his youth and his very proper middle-class British upbringing, he’d hitherto not experienced. Besides, it wasn’t as if they’d actually been in the bed together. But it made no difference to Matron, and so Lana had been sent to “America’s Siberia”—the Aleutians. Yet, despite the fact that she didn’t like her posting in Dutch Harbor, that she always felt cold, she never regretted doing what she had done for the young Englishman. Look at what had ensued from it. His personal effects had been returned to his parents in England by Lana’s eldest brother, Robert, a submariner, when he had taken leave from Holy Loch in Scotland. Robert had met Rosemary Spence, the boy’s eldest sister, and ended up marrying her.
“Till it hits them like a williwaw they’ll keep the lights blazing,” said Elizabeth. A williwaw was the hundred- mile-an-hour wind that, along with fog and rain and sunshine, which could all occur within half an hour, made the climate of the Bering Sea one of the most unpredictable and harshest on earth. It was one of the reasons Lana was so deeply touched by Elizabeth having voluntarily transferred to Dutch Harbor to be with her.
“I hope they’re right,” responded Lana, “that it doesn’t get this far south. The fighting, I mean.”
“You heard from your sweetie pie?” asked Elizabeth as they headed for the bridge that led over to the clutter of buildings and what little night life there was in the harbor.
“No,” sighed Lana, her hands folded, sending a piece of ice skittering across the road as they made for the dirty shoulder of salt and snow to allow an army truck to pass. They were heading for “Stormy’s” restaurant, their big adventure for the week, to try some Greek chicken — one of the house specialties. Such outings from the naval base were rare now that the hospital, like so many other bases from Fort Ord to Faslane in Scotland, were reopening after only recently being closed down because of the Russian surrender at Minsk. The hospital staff found themselves short-handed. Everyone was working extra shifts, preparing for what they all hoped would never happen: massive casualties coming in from the battles on and across the Bering Sea.
She hadn’t heard from Frank for a month or so but knew it wouldn’t be long before he was mainland bound, to the naval air base at Elmendorf with two war tours in the Pacific behind him, during one of which he had shot down the MiG-29 Fulcrum state-of-the-art fighter flown by Soviet ace Sergei Marchenko as they’d mixed it up over the Yalu River in Korea. Though Shirer’s radio intercept officer in the Tomcat hadn’t seen a chute, and they’d both seen a pinhead-sized blossom that must have been the Fulcrum crashing into the frozen wastes of Manchuria, there had grown in Shirer’s mind a nagging doubt about whether the Russian had gone down with his plane. Meanwhile the twenty-seven-year-old Shirer had been celebrated, except in the La Roche papers, for having shattered the myth of the Marchenko invincibility among Allied pilots.
“Where’s he going to?” asked Elizabeth.
“Elmendorf,” said Lana. “He might already be there.”
“Uh-huh,” murmured Elizabeth. Scuttlebutt was rife around any base in any war. They’d all been told that, and how rumors were sometimes spread by the enemy just to eat away at morale. So no way Elizabeth was going to tell Lana that there was a rumor floating around that
“You know something, Elizabeth?” Lana asked, stopping.
Elizabeth kept walking, glancing back.”Honey, you’ll freeze your ass off you don’t keep on truckin’!”
“
Elizabeth stopped and turned around. “All right. I heard that no-good husband of yours—
Lana shrugged. “It wouldn’t be in the papers if he didn’t want it known. He likes to show off. Big shot. Big kid. They don’t print the rest of it.” Elizabeth was starting off again, Lana catching up, their thick-tread winter boots cracking the brittle ice, their breaths clouds of steam above their anoraks, the ice-crystalline air so clear, the moon looked like a huge communion wafer.
“You want to talk about it, honey?” said Elizabeth, ever the willing ear to her friends.
“No,” said Lana. “You wouldn’t believe it.”
“Honey. Nuthin’—I mean
No, you haven’t, thought Lana, but she said nothing, trying not to think of Jay La Roche, trying to ignore the fact he wouldn’t give her a divorce. He loved power and wouldn’t let go of anything. It wasn’t enough that he owned the huge chemical/arms La Roche multinationals, from New York to Shanghai to Paris. He had to control everyone and everything in his world. Lack of control spelled not only humiliation for Jay La Roche but the secret fear of madness. Yet the great irony, she knew, was that he was already mad — clinically certifiable — but his power was a moat around his castle keep that normal society could not cross. His tabloids would smear anyone who tried. His lawyers would do the rest.
“Hey,” said Elizabeth, “isn’t it your birthday next month?”
“You know my blood type, too?” said Lana, smiling, trying harder now to forget Jay La Roche, how one night — the last terrible night, in Shanghai, before she’d left or, more accurately, escaped — in one of his drinking bouts, he’d poured whiskey on it and pushed it into her mouth, telling her if she didn’t suck it “dry… I’ll bash your
