Brentwood was conscious that his reticence was often misinterpreted by the men on the Tennessee as aloofness, a kind of carefully constructed emotional shield between captain and crew so that orders were less likely to be questioned in times of crisis. With women it was different, for he discovered that most of them intuitively understood that his shyness was not a deliberately erected barrier or a lack of feeling but rather the quietude of a man confident in himself and his work, a man most of them liked, but one whose most passionate affair was with the sea. A pretty young Englishwoman in her late twenties, during one of the welcome-ashore parties arranged by the British Admiralty at Holy Loch, had once unabashedly told Robert Brentwood over her half pint of Guiness, “I’d like to go to bed with you.”
“Thank you,” he’d replied.
“It’s so, then?”
“No. Sorry.”
The woman had appeared stunned. “Why ever not?”
“Not before marriage.”
The girl, “a smashing blond bit,” as his English host had described her to Brentwood before her arrival, had spat out half her Guiness in astonished gaiety at the American’s joke. When she saw he was serious, surprise quickly gave way to anger. “You’re not a sailor.” It was delivered with all the finesse of a depth charge, meant to shake the very bulwark of his masculinity.
“I can assure you I am, ma’am.”
“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me! Are you queer?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Jesus — you’re worse than Bing Crosby,” she said, pushing a napkin at him to wipe off the chocolatey stain of Guiness.
Brentwood had taken the train to London a few days later for a bit of sight-seeing and had ordered a biography of Bing Crosby at Marriage’s bookstore.
“Back list, sir,” the manager informed him without bothering to consult Books in Print. “We could have it in five days.”
Brentwood told him he wouldn’t be able to pick it up for about three months but offered payment.
“That’s not necessary, sir,” the manager informed him. Brentwood ordered the book anyway, mad at himself for having mentioned how long he’d be away, the length of his next patrol, a breech of security for which Brentwood roundly chastised himself.
A few days later, when he returned to the ship, then in the floating dry dock, he asked Zeldman one morning, “You know anything about Bing Crosby?”
The executive officer had shrugged. “Big shot in the forties and fifties, I think. A crooner.”
“What’s that?”
“A singer.”
“What kind of singer?”
“Not sure. My Grandpa used to talk about him. Love songs, far as I can recall. Pretty slow.”
“Was he ever married?”
“Think so,” said Zeldman, who’d been pouring the coffee in the galley at the time, his voice rising above the hammering echoing through the Roosevelt as yard “birds” replaced one of the hatches on the six multiwarhead missile bays aft of the sail which the sub carried along with the eight attack torpedo tubes forward.
Standing in the sail as they’d slid slowly out of Holy Loch for another NATO Atlantic patrol, the second officer had asked Zeldman, “Ex, you ever heard of a Bing Crosby?”
“For crying out loud,” said Zeldman, “what’s with this Bing Crosby? Skipper was on about that yesterday.”
“Yeah?” said the second officer. “He was asking me this morning.”
From that point on, Captain Robert Brentwood became known as “Bing” among his crew, and the boat’s unofficial theme song was “Moon River,” crew members occasionally providing impromptu renditions during off-hours. Zeldman figured that if the skipper heard some of the associated jokes, his hair would turn completely gray overnight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Lin Kuang stood alone in the forest darkness high above Taiwan’s Taroko Gorge, the sound of the rushing river far below melding with the swishing sound of the wind in the pines, and here he pledged to Matsu, goddess of the sea, by all that was holy to him that he was ready for battle. The waiting was over, the invasion fleet ready, as it had been since his grandfather’s day, since that terrible day in 1949 when the Communists had driven the Kuomintang to the sea, when, thanks to the mercy of Matsu, the fleet of the two million Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek had arrived safely on Taiwan and made it their own.
Lin Kuang had never been “home” to the mainland, but one night, as a junior officer years before, he had been the captain of one of the Nationalist navy’s motor torpedo boats that had landed a raiding party during the intermittent fighting over Quemoy Island just off the mainland. The purpose of the raid was ostensibly to gather and update intelligence reports on the Communist ports’ defenses. But the real purpose was to keep every soldier in the KMT practiced and ready, to prevent them from ever sinking into the passive acceptance, shown by the rest of Taiwan’s eighteen million, of believing that Formosa, as Taiwan used to be called, was home. The KMT ruled Taiwan and built up enormous financial reserves to the point that it was now, after Japan, the richest Asian nation. But, with the legendary Chinese patience, the KMT had never lost the belief that the Communists in Beijing were but temporary usurpers, one day to be thrown out. Unlike so many Westerners, who accepted the legitimacy of Communist China and had now turned their back on Taiwan, Lin Kuang and his fellow officers never doubted that one day it would be their day to return. Superbly trained, equipped, through their billions of surplus dollars, with the latest in technological advances in the West, the KMT knew that the Communist hold on Mainland China was in large measure an illusion; the Chinese Communist party, constituting only 10 percent of the population, could no longer hold it together. There were hundreds of millions in the far-flung regions of China who had never been anywhere near Beijing, for whom Beijing might as well have been on the moon, as there were many millions in the far-flung republics of the Soviet Union whose loyalty to Moscow was as tenuous as a failing marriage, the parents unable to control the children who sensed the great divide and wanted to go their own way. Promise the far-flung republics their own country, said the KMT, and the center was yours.
Lin Kuang closed his eyes, breathed m the cool, damp air, happy that autumn was upon them. It was a time for change-when men would need to brace themselves for the stormy seas of winter. In his mind’s eye he was no longer inhaling the air of Taiwan but that of Hangzhou, where his father’s fathers had been born and raised, the city of which Marco Polo had once said, “In Heaven there is Paradise, on earth… Hangzhou.” There on the West Lake, serene amid a garden of gladioli, lawn, and fish ponds, was Mao’s villa. It was Lin Kuang’s dream to be the one to retake Hangzhou, to personally raze the villa to the ground.
In Washington State, Mount Ranier’s volcanic cone was visible from Seattle’s Northwest University over sixty miles away, the mountain’s peak shrouded in a rosy hue of pollution and midday sun, while fourteen miles west of the city a Trident nuclear submarine glided gracefully out of the upper reaches of Hood Canal. It passed the spidery wire webs of the onshore degaussing stations, which would wipe the sub clean of any telltale magnetic signature that might otherwise be picked up by a ship nearby, especially the Soviet trawlers that often lay listening north of the Bangor base beyond the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which ran between Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island. Sometimes, as was the case this day, a Coast Guard cutter plowed ahead of the Trident, making lots of noise and running interference against hydrophone arrays that might be trailing behind a Russian trawler as the sub headed into the vastness of the blue Pacific.