“Yes. You poor thing, Douglas. Thank the Lord I’m not affected.”
“What — pardon?” asked Freeman as he stood up and pushed the chair back by the edge of the pool.
“Jet lag,” said Marjorie serenely. “Thank the Lord I don’t get it. I’m not affected.”
“You wouldn’t be,” said Freeman under his breath.
“Pardon?”
“You’re unaffected,” said the general.
“Yes. To tell you the truth, Douglas, I think it’s all in your head. If God had intended—”
Freeman wasn’t listening, his attention drawn momentarily to the wind-ruffled pool, and knew instantly what it was about the winter ice floes in the strait. Not only were they looser than summer ice, but they were wind sculptured to heights of twenty-five feet above the frozen surface of the sea. He remembered them now — the purest white, glistening like mirrors in the sunny, clear air and then, as night came, turning to extraordinary hues of blue, a forest of jumbled sharp ice that would spell the death knell of any marine or army hovercraft invasion against Ratmanov, the ice too jagged to permit the necessary air cushion for the troop-carrying hovercrafts. They’d be torn to pieces.
Immediately he rang General Grey at the Pentagon, using his personal scrambler code to get a secure line.
“May I ask who’s calling please?” said the secretary.
“General Douglas Freeman.”
“Hold on please, General.” Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” assaulted him at full volume before the receptionist’s voice came back on the line.
“Ah, Douglas,” came General Grey’s voice. “How’s your wife?”
“The same, thank you. Look, Jimmy, with this Siberian thing looming I thought you could do with some advice from an old soldier out here.” Freeman was waiting for a positive response but got none. He told Grey about the ice.
“Thanks, Douglas. Appreciate your interest. Really do. But to tell you the truth, we think this Novosibirsk thing is pretty much a bluff — to squeeze concessions out of us after the Moscow surrender. It’ll blow over.”
“What if it blows over Ratmanov?” asked Freeman.
“What?”
“Ratmanov. Big Diomede?”
“Oh — well, Douglas. CIA agrees with us that if we stand our ground, Novosibirsk’ll back off. Besides, air force figures it can handle Big Diomede if it comes to that. And the navy, of course. But look — it’s great to hear from you. You keep in touch, you hear? And Douglas — give my regards to your wife.”
“Yes, sir.”
Freeman put down the phone and cussed. He might be the commanding officer of Fort Ord, but he was effectively unemployed, out to pasture. The “No Help Wanted” sign up in Washington.
“Yoohoo! Douglas? Are you awake?”
“No,” said Freeman, as he walked over and spun the globe, arresting the spin, turning it to him like the end of a football so he could see the Arctic Circle. Goddamn Diomedes were so small they weren’t even marked. Like him, they were off the map. Get a goddamn grip on yourself, he muttered. Goddamn pity is for goddamn sissies. You a sniveller, Freeman? No. Then stop your goddamn whining.
“Yoohoo? Douglas?”
The general inhaled deeply, slowly, teeth gritted. Damn woman knew he was in his basement den. Why in hell did she have to—
“Yes? What is it?”
“It’s visiting time. The hospital. You coming along?”
“Yes,” said Freeman morosely. Then his conscience berated him, not only with what should have been concern for Doreen but because he’d caught himself at the shoreline of another sulk, the one thing he couldn’t stand in anyone, least of all himself. “Yes,” he said clearly, straightening up, grabbing his cap, “I’m coming.” Surely the man who had handled the raid on Pyongyang and broken out of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket and pierced the famed Minsk-Moscow defenses could handle the barrage of inanities and clichés launched by his mobile sister-in-law.
“You see, Douglas?” she said as they walked out to the general’s car.
“See what?” he asked as pleasantly as he could.
“How things work out for the best? I mean you coming home just when Dory needed you the most.”
“Goddamn it, Marjorie — she’s comatose!” said Douglas. “I can’t do a thing to help her.”
“But you’re nearby. And just think — if you’d still been on active duty you might have got caught up in all this terrible Siberian business.”
“Yes,” said Douglas. “I probably would have, Marjorie.”
“There, you see?” said Marjorie, slipping her arm through his and patting him. “It was meant to be.”
Off Canada’s west coast Captain Valery’s Saratov, one of the Soviet Union’s Pacific Fleet subs, out of radio contact with its home base of Vladivostok, was on silent running, listening on passive, rather than active, sonar. An active pulse, having to originate from the sub, would be too dangerous to use as the Saratov penetrated deeper into Allied ASW “microphoned” waters north of Vancouver Island. Sound from the ships it had been tracking for the last forty-eight hours was faint, yet discernible, the sound travelling at four times the speed it would in air, racing through the saline molecules of the sound layers.
Whether the contact was now fading because the ships his sub was shadowing had moved closer in to the coastline during the storm, further away from the Saratov, or whether they had in fact reduced speed, giving off less signature noise, Captain Valery couldn’t tell, but with his sub at the end of its OSP— operational safety perimeter — he’d soon have to decide. “Take her up,” he instructed the first officer. “Thirty meters.”
“Up to thirty meters,” confirmed the officer and planesman. “Rising… angle ten… steady at thirty meters, sir.”
“Up search scope.”
Valery flipped the beak of his cap about, his eyes glued to the column, and draped his arms on the scored grips, moving around with the scope as if he were one with it. Now hopefully he would see the actual shape of the ships his sub had been tracking so far only by noise. What he saw through the infrared-penetrated darkness puzzled him. In the grayish white circle of wave action, obscured now and then in the night’s dark curtain of spray, the Canadian coastline, rather than being visible as a low blur before the mountains, appeared to be missing. Only the sharp geometry of the snow-capped coastal range beyond was visible, as if the range rose straight out of the sea. He turned the scope another five degrees but still no trace of the coast. It was as if the diameter of the periscope’s gray infrared circle had been painted black. Then he realized what he was looking at, why turning the five degrees hadn’t made any difference: two great slabs, the two ships, had overlapped, obliterating the coastline. “Gospodi!”— “My God!” he called. “Ya ikh vizhu! Pryamo peredo mnoy!”— “I have them dead ahead. Bearing?”
“Zero eight two,” came the reply.
“Down scope!” ordered Valery. “Attack scope up.”
“Down search scope. Up attack,” confirmed the first officer. Above the wheeze of the scope’s column the tone signal of action stations gonged urgently, though softly, in Control, the pulsating red of the battle station’s alarm bleeding pink into the red of Control.