Meanwhile the commander of Little Diomede’s Patriots was primarily concerned about possible Soviet air strikes against his hydraulic-legged canisters, which for quick action against any incoming missiles bound for Alaska needed to be on the surface and ready to go. So far he could only conclude that the Soviet MiGs were not being used against Little Diomede because they were being saved to deter any possible American invasion force across the fifty-two-mile-wide strait, a force that Big Diomede’s radar would give the Siberians ample warning of.
Most depressing of all to the Patriot commander this minute was the information that he reluctantly had to convey to the general in charge of Alaskan Air Command. Although the eight SRAMs had all hit Big Diomede, sending boulder-size ice and rock fragments flying over a thousand feet into the air before they rained down on the ice floes — a few hitting Little Diomede — there was no apparent “in depth” damage done to the Siberians’ radar-guided ZSU-23s. For while the enemy cliff face, as seen through his infrared goggles, — was badly scarred — the SRAMs’ explosions had sheared off great sheets of ice that fell crashing down onto the frozen strait over sixteen hundred feet below — the impact of the SRAMs had done nothing to silence the deeply revetted missile batteries.
The enormous and foreboding cliffs of Big Diomede were impervious, it seemed, to any attack but that of an atomic bomb, a course of action that once initiated would set off a nuclear chain that would destroy both sides. For the young captain on Little Diomede in charge of the Patriot defense unit, Big Diomede had grown in menace over the preceding months. Its summit was often obscured by clouds so sharply, it was as if someone had drawn a line with a rule along its five-mile length. But this morning, as changing pressure ridges from the ice reflected the pale winter sun, and the previously downed American aircraft wreckage flickered harmlessly here and there at its base, the enemy island seemed more brooding and threatening than ever.
CHAPTER EIGHT
David Brentwood was tossing in his sleep, willing the snow to stop, but the white storm that kept up during the Moscow raid wouldn’t abate. He could smell it — the cold, fresh tang of the blizzard, shot through with the reek of burning armor. And through it all the warm, metallic whiff of blood from those SAS who lay dead in the Cathedral of the Assumption, the latter’s strangely beautiful gold baroque columns dimly visible in the creeping dawn light as the Russians closed the net in the counterattack about the blazing hulk of a T-80 which Choir Williams had stopped with a round from the “little genie,” a light and disposable French Arpac anti-tank launcher/missile pack. David felt the heavy weight of the squad automatic weapon weighing him down, every muscle aching from the fatigue of the jump and the fierce fighting in and around the cathedral across from the Council of Ministers. He knew the spell in the counterattack couldn’t last for long once the enemy grader tank that was rumbling up pushed aside the burning T-80 blocking the remainder of the Russian column. Down to the last three magazines for the SAW, David selected semiautomatic fire and waited, Choir Williams and a few remaining SAS troops having made good their escape covered by David, who had ordered them to do so. Now, with only Captain Cheek-Dawson, the leader of Troop C, whose job it had been to secure the perimeter against the Kremlin guards streaming out of the Armory, David readied for the Russians to attack again. Cheek-Dawson, having propped himself awkwardly against one of the cathedral’s columns, his leg shattered to the bone, told David to leave him with the SAW and the last of the grenades so that he could do a “spot of bowling.” The grader came, but a counterattack was halted because of Chernko’s surrender at Minsk. But as Cheek-Dawson would have said, it had been a “near-run thing,” as vivid and as immediate as…
“David!… David!” It was a soft, urgent voice. He could smell it, too — roses, yellow summer roses, but it was still snowing heavily, and he was perspiring, sitting up, mouth dry as parchment though he was lathered in sweat. Only then, as he became fully awake, the outside view not Moscow — the snowcapped church spire he could see devoid of the onion domes of the Kremlin’s inner sanctuary — did he realize that he was looking at the small church at Laugharne. And the snow that was falling was disappearing — into Carmarthen Bay, the outflow of the River Taft. And in the distance there was the open sea, indistinct, the defeated rays of the sun rising over Llanrhidian Sands smothered by sudden bad weather that had swept all the way down from the Brecon Beacons in southeastern Wales, where the SAS trained — down over West Glamorgan county, to Swansea and the mouth of the Bristol Channel.
“Poor boy, you have been in a state!”
David was catching his breath, embarrassed that Georgina should have seen him experiencing the recurring nightmare.
“Following in my brother’s footsteps,” he had happily put it when he had written home, telling his folks of visiting the Spences in Surrey during Robert’s last leave in England before Robert had been recalled from the U.S. sub base at Holy Loch in Scotland to command the USS Reagan. In Surrey he’d not only met his older brother’s new wife, the former Rosemary Spence, but her younger sister, Georgina. The “smart” money in the family, meaning that of David’s father, retired admiral John Brentwood, predicted from his eldest son’s letters home that Georgina wasn’t young David’s type. His skepticism was fueled, though he didn’t know the details, by the failure of his daughter’s marriage to Jay La Roche.
“What type’s that?” David’s mother had asked her husband. “Robert says she’s pretty, very well educated — London School of Economics and Political—”
“A lefty!” declared the admiral, who had definite views on everything from LSE graduates to the conviction that battleships were “totally obsolete,” that if the navy had any sense it would build more fast guided-missile frigates like the Blaine in which his middle son, Ray, had served, instead of spending millions refurbishing old battle wagons, like the Wisconsin and Missouri, purely “for sentimental reasons.”
“How can you say that?” asked his wife Catherine. “Build more boats like the Blaine. That boat nearly killed him.”
“It was not a boat, Catherine — it’s a ship. I regret what happened to Ray as much as anyone. It was — but all that medical ‘stuff’ is over, Catherine. He’s a distinguished skipper of—”
“It was horrible,” said Catherine. The “stuff” John Brentwood was referring to was the other side of a theory about fast, light, modern ships that, like the HMS Sheffield, were so badly gored in the Falklands. One hit and they burst into flames, the fire reaching temperatures unknown in earlier warships. With the aluminum superstructures white hot within minutes, many of the crew would the not from the intense heat of the conflagration but from the overwhelming toxic gases given off by everything from synthetic carpeting in the officers’ mess to the resins and plastics used in the high-tech electronic consoles.
When the Blaine had been hit off Korea it sent the first of what the medical establishment euphemistically referred to as “unprecedented burn cases” to San Diego’s Veterans’ Burn Center. Many had died, and it took more than a dozen sessions under general anesthesia and the most intricate plastic surgery before Ray Brentwood’s face had regained even the faintest resemblance to his former self. Admiral John Brentwood, more afraid, in fact, than Catherine of feeling the horror, had tried his best to rise above it. It sounded noble, but in the long, dark nights he suspected it was not so much an act of bravery as of escape.