“Thank you for coming, Lieutenant,” said Smythe graciously.
“No problem, sir.”
“Ta ta.”
Outside the HQ, David waited impatiently for the Humvee from the transport pool to arrive.
The train had left fifteen minutes ago, and car traffic, he knew, would be slow due to the endless convoys heading east to Liege and on to the front. The driver was a British corporal, and David asked him if he thought they could get to Ezemaal in forty minutes.
“Dunno about that, Lieutenant,” said the cockney, shaking his head morosely. “Bit of a squeeze.”
“There’s a ten in it for you if you can,” David promised him.
“Marks or dollars, sir?”
“Fussy, aren’t you?”
“Begging the lieutenant’s pardon. Not fussy, sir. Practical. Dollar’s worth more right now.”
“Dollars,” said David.
“Right you are, sir,” said the driver, his mood suddenly upbeat as he rushed a yellow traffic light, an MP whistling and waving his baton to no effect. The driver was correct, thought David. You had to be practical. Look after yourself. No one else would.
“What does ‘ta ta’ mean?” David asked the corporal as the Humvee weaved its way through the Brussels traffic past the high gables of the Grand Place. “I guess it means good-bye, right?”
“Sort of,” commented the corporal, turning sharply into one of the fashionable redbrick alleys leading from the Grand Place. “Not good-bye exactly — more like till we meet again.”
“Hmm,” mused David. “I don’t think so.”
Once on the highway heading eastward toward Liege, the corporal drove dangerously. “Get out of the bloody way!” he shouted, looking in the rearview, shaking his head at Brentwood. “Women drivers!”
David wondered if Lili drove. Melissa did.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The thing that puzzled Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt at the southern tip of Vancouver Island — the listening post for the U.S. and Canadian SOSUS network — was that the undersea hydrophone should have picked up a sub that had attacked a Canadian coastal steamer, the MV Jervis. The steamer, alerted by her shipboard lookout, had actually seen the wave of the torpedo that had struck her and failed to explode — a standard Soviet 530-millimeter-long fish of the type that had decimated the NATO convoys. What worried Esquimalt was that the SOSUS hydrophones should have heard the enemy sub much earlier. No matter how silent a nuclear sub was, its reactor wasn’t noise-proof, and the reactor couldn’t be shut down because it would take hours to “cook up”—suicidal for an operational sub as it would give ASW forces ample time to reach the area and pound it with ASROCs and depth charges. Besides, without the sub’s prop going, it would not have been able to stalk the ships it attacked.
It continued to be a mystery until the CNO’s office in Washington, on advice from COMSUBAT — Commander Submarines Atlantic — in Norfolk, Virginia, informed Esquimalt and Bangor, Washington State, Trident and Sea Wolf Base eighty miles to the south of Esquimalt that the reason a Russian sub had got so close to them was that the Russian navy yards at Leningrad and elsewhere must have improved even further on quietening their props after the gigantic advantage given them by the Walker spy ring and by Toshiba’s sale in the 1980s of state-of-the-art prop technology to the Russians.
Either that, said Norfolk, or the SOSUS listening network of hydrophones on the sea floor had been cut or, more likely, “neutered” by synthesized noise “override,” producing fake yet natural-sounding sea noise that would be interpreted by the SOSUS’s monitoring teams at Esquimalt and Bangor as phytoplankton scatter, or, as the sonar operators called it, “fish fry.”
In any event, it was decided that deep-diving submersibles out of Vancouver should be used to inspect the network in the area of the attack. But if they were wrong about fish fry, Norfolk warned, it would mean that the United States had suddenly become vulnerable to close-in ICBM sub attack— America could be blindsided.
There was no malfunction in the SOSUS, however — the “sonograms” called up on the computer showed that like a seismograph picking up the slightest tremor, SOSUS had had no difficulty picking up the sound of the dud Soviet torpedo hitting the steamer, which had been well within the supposed impenetrable Anti-Submarine Warfare Zone. Something was wrong.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The moment Frank Shirer was told he wouldn’t be flying “Looking Glass” and instead was given the innocuous, flesh-colored eye patch from the outgoing pilot at Andrews, he understood his mission and was immeasurably depressed. He knew it meant his chances of seeing Lana for the next several months were zilch.
Oh, he realized full well that he was being accorded the highest honor — the “True Grit” or “Duke” eye patch the ultimate accolade a flyer could receive, its recipient being the man in whose hands the fate not only of America but of the West might reside.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked the outgoing pilot. “Look like you’ve been poleaxed.”
Shirer glanced down at the patch. “Yeah.”
“Christ, man, this is it. As good as it gets. What d’you want? You’ll have to beat pussy off with a stick. Top Gun Shogun — that’s what you are, buddy.”
Shirer looked up at him. “What if the balloon goes up?”
The other man shrugged. “That’s the downside. Comes with the territory. Hell, if I could stay on, I’d—” The man didn’t finish.
Shirer thanked him, shook hands, and walked out on the tarmac toward the cavernous hangar containing the six-story-high “Taj Mahal,” the most sophisticated command plane in history. He had mixed emotions. In a sense, coming back to the $400 million Boeing 747B was like coming home to the job of test pilot he had had before the war, as one of the elite, selected from among the top guns of the top guns — the few who were entrusted with the responsibility of flying Air Force One in the event of nuclear war. More important than Looking Glass.
The sight of the huge plane took him back before the war and to the day of the outbreak of hostilities, when, from the pool of peacetime Air Force One pilots, he’d requested active service with the F-14s. And now it had come full circle. They had recalled him. Which either meant that some member of the Taj Mahal’s “pool” had cracked or was over forty, considered too old for the quick reflexes necessary should the president find himself aloft in a “nuclear exchange.”
The conversation he’d had with the outgoing pilot had unsettled him, not only because piloting Air Force One would mean he and Lana would be separated longer than he’d thought, but because if nuclear war broke out, the Aleutians, where America herself had tested the A-bombs on Amchitka, would be a prime target for the Russians’ ICBMs on Kamchatka Peninsula. Even those Americans, like Lana, at Dutch Harbor and the other easternmost islands of the chain close to Alaska which were not directly targeted would be in the path of the radioactive clouds, carried swiftly via the millimaws, engulfing the islands in the fallout. Lana and everyone else would the of radiation poisoning — a lingering, painful death which Shirer wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy — not even La Roche.
The young communications lieutenant aboard Air Force One was eager to show him the latest wizardry, pointing proudly to a signal jammer. “Course, we’d still use basic flares against heat seekers as the first line of defense against incoming. Trouble is, Russians have reportedly got the French R-50 Air-to-Airs. They don’t go for heat but home in on the radar beam.”