“Slit trench,” explained the gauze mask.”Filled wif all kinds o’ muck: sheep shit, dead rats. You name it, sport, it’s there. Hard to lie in it wivout movin’ for up to twelve hours. No fuckin’ tea party, I can tell you mat.”
“Guess not,” said Shirer disinterestedly.
“Still, I’d rawer a sheep dip than this lot!” He jerked a nicotine-stained thumb toward his mask. “Fuckin’ Phantom of the Opera! Least you got your fuckin’ face, ‘aven’t you?”
Frank knew that JFK had been right: Life was unfair, and in a world where thousands starved while you had the glorious privilege of flying, you had no cause to moan. But the limey didn’t help — at least not then — with his wisecracking camouflaging his own terror beneath the British mask of self-deprecation. Yet this wounded English soldier was to have a profound effect on what would happen to Shirer.
“You a sky jockey?” asked the cockney.
“Was, “said Frank.
“Ah, never say the, mate. Never say the.”
The Brit reminded Frank of Eliza Doolittle’s father: “Get the to the church on time!” He thought about Lana, about whether they’d ever be able to get married, whether the slimeball Jay La Roche would ever release her. Thinking of Lana, he felt himself having what the nurses called a “tent,” the erection pressing against the sheet. He wanted to tell the limey to buzz off; yet he knew what the limey had said was right. You should never say the. But the prospects right then were as bleak as the Aleutians in the winter chill and, like all who are very ill, no matter for how short or long a time, he found it impossible at that moment to imagine he could ever be well again, and that fear was his real terror.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Quantity has a quality of its own,” said Freeman in his address to the task force commanders gathered aboard the Marines’ LHD amphibious assault ship the USS Winston Davis. “It’s a Leninist dictum the Russians have embraced ever since the Bolshevik Revolution. Their reasoning is simple: throw enough at the enemy, overwhelm him with numbers of tanks, ships, planes, and men, and some are bound to get through, enough to breach our defenses. Your job, gentlemen, now, and my job when we go ashore, is to stop them. Stop them so effectively that even if a few can get through it won’t be enough to impede us. The attendant danger for us, however, is not the Siberians; it is that in stopping them we will adopt an overly defensive mode. That would be a crucial mistake. Our job is to attack, to take Irkutsk just west of Lake Baikal. Irkutsk is the key, gentlemen! If we take Irkutsk our air force will be able to radiate out into the industrial heart of Siberia. Without Irkutsk our bombers’ fighter escorts would have to have in-air refueling — distances are too great. So our job is to attack the Siberian shield to get far enough in so that our fighters don’t have to refuel in air and become sitting ducks.”
He paused, eyes taking in the collective brass in the ship’s rigged-for-red situation room. “There’s another old adage, gentlemen, as true now as it was for Sherman: Offense is the best defense.” His fist clenched. “Go forward to meet them. Engage at every possible point. The entire Soviet military philosophy rests upon the necessity of the quick victory before their administrative deficiencies — their overcentralization — constipates their lines of supply. In this their navy and air force are no different from their army. They’ll throw everything — everything they’ve got at us, but if you can hold and advance you’ll turn the tide. Attack, gentlemen! Attack! That’s the strategy here.”
Freeman’s message to the noncommissioned officers and men throughout the Seventh Fleet’s task force was much more succinct. “Nothing in history compares with this battle. Siberia, the only country now capable of imposing its will on the rest of the world, is testing our will. Novosibirsk had a chance for peace and chose war instead. Well, we’re going to give it to him — in spades. Now, you navy boys, it’s your job to get us there. And I know you will, and when you do, I promise you we’ll kick ass from Kamchatka to Kiev. God bless you all.”
There was a complaint from one of the female quartermasters in the task force about the exclusion of women in his address. Freeman was taken aback when Norton so advised him.
“What the hell does she mean?” he asked Norton, the latter’s grimace the first sign of seasickness as the two men made their way up from the mess deck to the open air of the 41,000-ton amphibious assault ship Winston Davis. It was one of scores of ships in the task force carrying supplies for Second Army, including the amphibious assault vehicles, attack and transport choppers, and AV-8 Harrier ground support fighters needed for the eighteen hundred marines aboard each ship.
“She noted, General,” explained Norton, “that you didn’t mention women once in your address, whereas you used the expression ‘navy boys’ several times.”
“Oh, for Chrissake, Dick! Navy gals were the ones who flew the lead choppers into Pyongyang.”
“Yes, General, I know, but in the interest of morale… We’ve got over five hundred women in the twenty-thousand-man — I mean ‘person’—assault force.”
“Yes, yes, all right. What’s her name?”
“Quartermaster Sarah Lee.”
“Goddamn cheesecake, isn’t it?”
Norton could taste the bacon he’d had for breakfast. It was threatening to come straight up, and the quicker he got out to the fresh air of the flight deck, away from the combined stink of diesel oil and recycled air, the better.
“All right, relax, Dick. Won’t say anything to offend the—” He paused, “—lady. I suppose if I call them ‘lathes’ I’ll be on a discrimination charge.”
“Will I put a call through, General?”
“Later — when we go below. But Dick?”
“Sir?”
They were passing through the “light lock,” in whose chamber all illumination went out as soon as they began to spin the wheel to open the outer door leading to the deck. Although Norton could not see the general, the latter’s tone had changed to one of dead seriousness. “Aren’t any females in the tank divisions, are there? I told the Pentagon about that. I don’t want any tank crewmen killed trying to figure out how some dame is going to piss in her helmet while everybody looks the other way. Last I heard Siberia’s armored don’t give the enemy time off for rest stops and I—”
“No women in the armored units, General, far as I know. Support, perhaps, but not in the tanks themselves.”
Norton had lied. It had been an ongoing fight between Freeman and the Pentagon since the beginning of the war. There were several women, Norton knew, qualified as gunners, but he wasn’t having the commander of Operation Arctic Front suffer a coronary before any of the first three landings they were going to make on the Kuril Islands, the opening stage of the air-land battle. Freeman was silent for a few minutes as they stood on the flight deck, cold Arctic air whistling about them, the salty tang at once invigorating and freezing, stars showing through intermittent clouds but the sky on their westward heading thickening. The sea was moderate so far, but the latest meteorological report showed the state of sea deteriorating the further westward the task force steamed.
“First few hours’ll be critical, Dick. As it always is, of course, in an operation of this kind, but particularly here. We need the Kurils for air bases as well as those in Japan if we’re going to make the landing on eastern Siberia proper.”
Two of the three landings, unknown to anyone but battalion-level commanders, were feints, “Persian Gulfs,” so-called because of the Marine feint made off the beaches of Kuwait during the Iraqi war while the Twenty-fourth made their end run around the Republican Guards. Only in this case the marine feints would be to sucker Siberian navy and air-arm elements away from the main landing. Meanwhile Freeman, as supreme commander, had designated the Petropavlovsk sub base on Kamchatka a top-priority air target, the attacks on the sub pens to be launched from Attu Island at the western end of America’s Aleutian chain, which curved like a scythe toward Kamchatka, Siberia’s sparsely populated protective arm.