“Maybe you’re right, General,” Al Banks replied. “But we’ll have to tell the men right away. Most of the choppers are on the flight deck.”
“Yes,” Freeman agreed. “Pass the word.”
As Banks left the cabin, Freeman put his arm round the ROK officer’s shoulder, looking down at the man’s name tag. Kim Dae. There were more Kims in Korea than Smiths in America.
“You’re no relation to that NKA bastard, are you?”
“No, sir,” Kim replied hastily.
“Well, Dae, let me tell you, one of the worst moments in a commander’s life is having all your men pumped up, ready to go, and then — nothing. Orders canceled. Like they’re all ready to sit their final examinations and you have to tell them it’s off.”
“Only postponed,” said Dae encouragingly.
The general sighed, his hand dropping from the Korean’s shoulder, exhaling audibly in the small cabin that he knew was but a pinpoint in the darkness.
“Temporarily postponed,” said Kim, trying again.
Freeman, hands on hips, looked up again at the map and shook his head in disbelief. “By God, to think that all those brave men in that perimeter might be sacrificial lambs — it’s unforgivable. “He paused for a few seconds. “And my speech…”
Kim was nonplussed about the speech.
“One of the best I ever made,” said Freeman, his gaze so fixed, it seemed as if he could see straight through the bulkhead. “By God, those men were ready for it.”
“I cannot believe the American president would do this,” proffered Kim.
Freeman said nothing.
“I am sure he will not abandon us, General.”
“We’ll see, Captain. We’ll see.”
The Canberra bombers were now over West Germany in high cloud that extended all the way back from the Harz. Below, sixty-three miles south of Hanover and outflanked by the Soviets’ Forty-seventh Tank and 207th Motorized Infantry divisions pressing home the attack to secure the port of Rotterdam, one of the West German AA battery commanders requested an IFF— “friend or foe”—identification code from the planes. The Canberras responded, but their radio beams were scrambled by MiGs patrolling out of Rostock 160 miles northwest of Bremen. The MiGs were jamming NATO ground control as they came round over Lübecker Bay to attack the besieged U.S. Third Corps, who, in an unexpected counterattack, had destroyed three Soviet-WP pontoon bridges over the Weser, thus delaying the fall of Bremen.
The West Germany battery commander glimpsed an aircraft’s lizard patch underside for only a fraction of a second, but it was all he needed to convince the Sturmbannführer to unleash his mobile batteries of all-weather Rolands.
Three minutes later his crews reported that fifteen of the twenty-four missiles had found their mark, three of the nine misses being due to “circuit malfunction,” a grab-all soldier’s phrase covering everything from a slight wobble of the launch sleeve to a problem with the Roland’s oxidizer. Sometimes the soft ground gave way beneath the trucks under the impact of the back-blast, and this could throw the rocket off course.
A short while later the Rolands’ crews noticed that some of the debris coming down, wing segments, bore the distinctive red, white, and blue ball of the Royal Air Force. It was not long after this that the commander realized he had destroyed fifteen of twenty-four Canberra bombers.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
The big Chinooks, making the distinctive wokka wokka sound that gave them their nickname, lived up to their reputation as one of the most reliable helicopters ever made. For William Spence, however, slipping between consciousness and blackouts from the pain, the noise of the rotors slicing their way over the heaving darkness of the Atlantic was a torture, the promise of deliverance fading by the second as he lay strapped into one of the six stretchers. How long he had been in the helicopter, minutes or hours, he did not know. At times the pain was merely a sore heaviness in his extremities, at others, so stilettolike that his body involuntarily heaved and jerked violently against the restraint straps. And always, added to the buffeting, in gusts of foul weather, there was the oppressive, stifling smell of oil. Lost in his delirium, he thought it was the smell of the Chinook’s fuel, causing his nose to feel as if it were plugged with cotton wool, sinuses so blocked that all his breathing was by mouth, his lips cracked dry by the time the chopper was approaching the tiny slice of light that was the NATO-designated hospital ship, USS Bahama Queen, four hundred miles northeast of Newfoundland. The red-cross-painted landing pad was the stern platform of the twenty-thousand-tonner — a converted cruise ship, or “Love Boat,” as they were called, which had quickly been pressed into service as a hospital relay ship by the U.S. government.
So hasty was the conversion that many of the plush luxury fittings were still aboard. And while nurses like Lana La Roche and her three colleagues had enjoyed walking on shag carpets down the passageways where private and semiprivate rooms now served as wards and a series of operating rooms, the senior surgeon had ordered all such carpets, drapes, and so forth removed in order to create a more aseptic environment. Normally it was a job that would have been done in the Halifax yards, but war and the fate of Convoy R-1 had meant making do with what was available, which, for Matron, given the perennial shortage of nurses, meant having to tolerate the “eager beavers,” as she called Lana and what she saw as Lana’s “clique.” There was no clique, but Matron was convinced, as she told a disinterested nurse’s aide, that the younger nurses congregated about the La Roche girl “no doubt because of her connections.” Lana’s and the other girls’ bravery in volunteering for sea duty was not, in Matron’s view, anything to be lauded — it was a nurse’s duty to be where she should be in times of need — and she remained convinced that “the La Roche girl” was merely grandstanding.
“She’ll be gone in six months,” Matron declared confidently to those few she had selected as her “chums” in the head nurses’ mess. “That type never stays,” she pronounced, sipping her tea from one of the Bahama Queen’s Royal Doulton cups unlike the thick, institutional mugs she was used to. “Here one minute, girls like that. Gone the next. Novelty wears off.”
“I would’ve thought,” dared one of her chums, “that she’d be much better off with her husband. I mean, all that money. Servants probably.”
Matron put her cup down, shaking her head at the other’s naïveté. “That’s just it, don’t you see. Those kind of people with too much money get bored. Simply run out of things to do. ‘Don’t you know,’ “ she said, affecting an upper-class condescension.
“I would have thought she could have chosen something a bit less dangerous,” another contested.
“Tosh!” said Matron. “Russians wouldn’t dare attack a hospital ship. Oh no,” she went on, seeing one of her chums about to interject. “I don’t think it’s because they wouldn’t like to — that they’re humane. Certainly not. People are capable of anything. I know that. But they won’t because the brouhaha internationally would be very bad publicity. Not good propaganda at all. Ms. Brentwood, as she prefers to be called, knows that very well.”