CHAPTER TWELVE
Frank Shirer wasn’t happy about the mission. It wasn’t the danger. It was the insult — like being asked to drive the school bus after a BMW. He was a fighter pilot, born and bred. He liked living on the edge of technology and had done so in the F-14 Tomcats. There was nothing like the thrust of afterburner, the twin turbofans rocketing you to Mach 2.3, slamming you back into the Martin-Baker, and the feathery rush through your genitals. It wasn’t a thing you could explain to anyone who hadn’t done it, including Lana Brentwood, with whom he’d fallen in love while recovering from wounds at Dutch Harbor and whom he wanted to marry as soon as Jay La Roche, her husband, deigned to give her a divorce. Shirer knew more than he wanted to know about La Roche — Mr. Smooth and Successful on the outside — inside, a slimeball who rolled over people as though they were ants.
Lana had left La Roche, tired of his sexual madness, and had begun a new life for herself — gone back to school, finishing her nursing training and joining the Waves, winding up, through La Roche’s malevolent influence in Congress, being posted to the naval hospital in what was called America’s Siberia: Dutch Harbor, Alaska, off Unalaska Island in the Aleutian chain, where it could go from sunshine to full blizzard within half an hour. The foul weather was mitigated, however, by her falling in love with Shirer, and then Ratmanov happened.
When the small island, the bigger of the two Diomedes, smack in the middle of the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia, had to be taken by Freeman’s paratroopers, Shirer had flown CAS, but close air support had got him downed, his RIO — radar intercept officer — captured by Siberian Spets, one of whose interrogators had stabbed Shirer’s left eye from sheer bloody-mindedness and to make sure Shirer never flew again. But after Ratmanov was taken by Freeman’s SAS/D commandos, Frank was sent to Dutch Harbor, where, with the help of “Mr. Doolittle,” a streetwise Cockney and fellow patient, he’d learned how to do what Doolittle called an “Adolf Galland.” Galland, who was the top Luftwaffe air ace of World War II, had only one eye. He’d cheated the charts, and Shirer likewise passed the eye test. But instead of being reassigned to fighter duty, Shirer now found himself “driving” a Buff — big, ugly, fat fellow — the acronym for the well-worn B-52. Rumor had it that he might get a crack at being posted to a Harrier squadron, but it was only that — a rumor. Besides, he wasn’t that enthused — a Harrier was small stuff next to a Tomcat.
Murphy, his rear gunner, wasn’t happy about the mission either, but in Murphy’s case it was sheer unadulterated fright, though he tried not to show it. Murphy, for whom the there mention of China evoked childhood images of San Francisco’s Chinatown — mysterious smells and fearsome dragons, shot through with weird music — fervently wished the B-52s had had their turrets rigged for radar remote firing as they had been in the old days. However, with the new.50s with a higher rate of fire but not yet successfully slaved to the turret, the machine guns in the rear turret would have to be manned, albeit with radar assist whenever possible.
At Lakenheath in southeastern England, bemoaning the awful weather that swept in from the channel was de rigueur among the B-52 crews because it was the expected thing. Gunner Murphy always joined in, but secretly he couldn’t think of anything better than bad weather. So it might mean a rough ride, especially over the European Alps and the mountains of south central Asia, which included the Himalayas, but gray cloud socking them in would keep them out of visible sight, and as a rear gunner, despite all the advances in infrared, Starlite vision, and radar, Murphy retained an old-fashioned belief that lack of visibility in the enemy’s territory was your best defense. Besides, on the visual skyrange he’d brought down many more drones with line of sight than with radar assist.
Sometimes there were too many damn dials to watch instead of your sights. His big worry of course was that the bad weather wouldn’t hold. In spring the stratus could suddenly clear, revealing vistas of sky and earth that would be an antiaircraft battery’s heaven. To be on the safe side, Murphy went again to the Lakenheath PX and stocked up on the new and improved Pepto-Bismol tablets, tearing open the cardboard packages and stuffing the cellophane-wrapped pink tablets into every opening in his flying suit he could find. He explained away the Pepto-Bismol on the basis of having some vague stomach condition undiagnosed by the doctors but due, he was convinced, to the service food.
The PX quartermaster was shaking his head at the quantities of Pepto-Bismol that Murphy was concealing about his person. “Murph, you fart up there, the sky’ll turn pink.”
“Don’t be a smart ass. You got any more?”
“Christ, you’ve got the last six packs. You’ve bought enough for the whole damn flight.”
“What if we go down?”
“Christ, you’re a happy fella aren’t ya?”
“Cautious,” Murph said tersely. “I like to cover my ass. Rear gunner’s motto — right?”
“Listen, Murph, if you go down you’re gonna need a hell of a lot more than Pepto-Bismol.”
“Cheery son of a bit—” Murphy began, then suddenly stopped. “When’d you hear about the mission?”
The quartermaster shrugged. “Yesterday, I think. Scuttlebutt is your wing’s on call. Could be tomorrow. Could be next week. Right?”
“Right. ‘Cept you aren’t supposed to know. They tell you the target?”
“Nope.”
“Well that’s something,” Murphy said, and was gone.
When he got back to the NCO’s mess the buzz all over was that the mission had been scrapped. “Oh, shit!” Murphy said, as if he really meant it. “What’s up?”
“Politics,” someone said. “Some Labour congressman—”
“M.P.,” another cut in. “Member of Parliament. They don’t have congressmen.”
“Yeah, well, some Parliament joker’s heard about the request to launch a flight from here in England and threatens to raise shit unless the Labour shadow cabinet gets a chance to hash it over.”
“Aw, shoot!” Murphy said, really getting into the disappointed flier mode now. “That could mean weeks.”
“Could mean never,” another rear gunner said.
“Aw, shit!” Murphy said.
Shirer was ambivalent about the news. On the one hand, a cancellation might mean a bit of time to grab a C17 cargo flight over the pole to Alaska to spend a few days’ leave with Lana. On the other, he didn’t like just sitting around waiting. So what if the mission would mean driving a Buff? At least that was some kind of flying. Besides, the longer it took for the politicos to make a decision — to stop the Labour party from going public — the greater the danger that news of the exact target would leak out. At the moment hopefully all that would leak was a request for a U.S. Air Force overflight, the target unspecified.
But if Shirer was concerned about that, the one thing he had to feel good about was that Jay La Roche was about to go on trial in the States for “treasonable activity”—selling arms to China before the cease-fire, many of the weapons having been used in the slaughter of Freeman’s III Corps on Lake Baikal. He’d been out on bail ever since his arrest on the last night of the presidential moratorium — an Emergency Powers Act that had allowed police to arrest on due suspicion only and without having to Mirandize or to release their prisoner if a charge had not been made. Although the moratorium was over, there was speculation that it might be quickly reintroduced by the president if hostilities increased — to combat any potential internal sabotage in the United States.
In any case, La Roche had been arrested twenty minutes before midnight, midnight having been given by the president as the end of the moratorium, and La Roche had been flown from Alaska for trial in Manhattan.