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  World in Flames

  ( WW III - 3 )

  Ian Slater

  NATO armored divisions have broken out from near-certain defeat in the Soviet-ringed Dortmund/Bielefeld Pocket on the North German Plain. Despite being faster than the American planes, Russian MiG-25s and Sukhoi-15s are unable to maintain air superiority over the western Aleutians… On every front, the war that once seemed impossible blazes its now inevitable path of worldwide destruction. There is no way to know how it will end…

  Ian Slater

  WORLD IN FLAMES

  In the assessment of every member — not only of the United States, but of all NATO allies — of all the intelligence agencies, the strategic capability of the Soviet Union today is much, much greater than it was before Mr. Gorbachev came on the scene.

  — Senator Daniel Inouye, United States Congress. July 1990

  PROLOGUE

  The Commandant for Kremlin or “Citadel” security is always a general, and he uses falconers to send their goshawks to attack and frighten away the hundreds of crows. If the crows were left alone, they would defecate on and otherwise disturb the peace and dignity of the seat of Soviet government.

  The falcons in the Kremlin date back at least fifty years, the use of gunfire to rid pests from the Kremlin’s sixty-three acres is strictly forbidden, for in times of political unrest, as in the Gorbachev days when the Yeltsin-ites and other “anti-Soviet elements” were allowed to mass in Red Square, it was feared that even a single shot from within the Citadel might be interpreted by the masses outside as the signal of a new revolution. In wartime it becomes imperative that no shots be heard coming from within the seat of government and that therefore only falcons be used to kill pests.

  CHAPTER ONE

  As easily as he had shed his naval uniform for his civilian clothes, Robert Brentwood slipped a pillow beneath his new bride and immediately felt the difference — their bodies closer now, her fragrance rising, engulfing him as in a dream. But he knew anything could break the spell.

  Outside, the winter darkness howled along Scotland’s rugged west coast, and from the upstairs bedroom of the bed-and-breakfast, they could hear the proprietor’s dog challenging late arrivals, the spaniel’s barking rising above the crashing of the waves. Moments later they heard the slam of a car door, saw the glow of the front porch light immediately beneath their upstairs room, heard voices, then felt the tremor as the door banged shut, the old stairs groaning as the owner — his hushed voice as off-putting to Rosemary as the dog’s barking — led his guests, two of them, as far as Robert could tell, up to the other oceanfront room across the hall from Robert and Rosemary’s. It was well past midnight, unusually late for checking into a B and B, but Rosemary thought nothing of it at the time. Instead she was wondering how it was that her husband of only a few days knew to do that with the pillows. For her there had been no one else before their marriage, and when they were first engaged in Surrey, while he was on leave from his command of his sub, the USS Roosevelt, and they’d first made love, he had told her that it had been the same for him — that despite the myths about sailors, especially American ones, there’d been no one else but her.

  But now her mounting pleasure was stemmed. By itself her moment of doubt mightn’t have bothered her, but she was carrying his child, and any passing suspicion was in danger of becoming an idée fixe. “Where did you learn to do that?” she asked, trying not to sound concerned. “With the pillows. In one of your submarine manuals?”

  Everything slowed and Robert sensed there’d be “time out” before she could relax enough for them to start again, but he knew better than to show any annoyance. “Matter of fact,” he replied, “I did get it from a manual. ‘Missile Launch.’ “

  “Don’t be vulgar,” she said, smiling, but he could tell the tone was conditional. He loved her very much, but the war and his part in it as captain of the most powerful ship in history, a Sea Wolf II — dual-purpose Hunter/Killer and ballistic missile nuclear submarine — had already taken its toll on Rosemary since they had become engaged. He couldn’t deny that her worry was justified — the Sea Wolf IIs with their six 8-warhead Trident “C” missiles were the most sought-after targets of the Russian navy. But in just the few days since they had been married, on their way up to the honeymoon in Scotland, he had noticed how her worry had become tinged with obsession. She was like a student before formal exams or a job applicant before an all-important interview — a case of free-floating anxiety — in her case, about the war she could do nothing about, the anxiety searching, albeit unconsciously, for something tangible, like a dog with a bone, over which it might worry and have some measure of control.

  The only problem was that her anxiety was nondiscriminating, as likely to alight on a minor inconvenience of food rationing as it was to shift abruptly to the difficulties of teaching Shakespeare to her St. Anselm’s sixth form in Surrey, or the terror of the increasing Russian rocket attacks across the Channel. At other times she would be seized by the kind of debilitating depression that still assailed her mother following the loss of young William Spence, Rosemary’s brother, killed on one of the Atlantic convoys which Robert Brentwood and other sub skippers had been assigned to protect. Tonight her anxiety about the future manifested itself in the suspicion that she had not been Robert’s only love.

  When they’d first met, Robert had found her more confident, even fatalistic, about the war, but now it was as if their marriage, the very thing that should fill them with hope and optimism in hard times, had suddenly inundated her with concerns she’d never had before. Would the child be all right, or would the severe wartime rationing deform him or her? And what kind of a world would it be after the war — if there would be any world at all if it should suddenly go nuclear?

  She pulled the bedclothes up protectively about her against the mournful moaning of the wind. Perhaps, like the change in the weather, everything had happened too fast, she mused. Perhaps they should have waited longer — got to know one another better.

  “You told me,” Robert said quietly, “that knowing someone isn’t a matter of time — and you were right. Besides, there’s nothing—”

  “And you told me,” she said, lowering her voice, suddenly aware of how sound carried in the old house, “that I was your first and only—”

  “You were the first,” he said, his finger cupping her chin, turning her head toward his on the pillow, his right arm cradling her so close, he could feel her heart thumping. “There wasn’t anyone before you.”

  She sighed. “I wouldn’t really care if there had—”

  “Yes you would,” he told her softly.

  “I’m glad.” She snuggled into him. “Oh — I know it’s terribly old-fashioned — that it’s not supposed to matter anymore how many people you’ve slept with — or whom. But it does to me.”

  He said nothing, watching her breasts rising and falling. “I did read about the pillows in a magazine,” he said, kissing her cheek.

  “Hmm—” she teased. He pulled her closer, her breasts warm and full, her nipples hardening against him.

  “You must think me an awful old prude,” she said.

  “In the first place, thirty isn’t exactly old—I’m the one that’s old. When I hit forty-four next year, they’ll retire me from Roosevelt. That’s old. In the second place, you’re not a prude.”

  “What magazine did you get it from?” she asked. “Playboy, I expect?”

  “Actually, I think it was Cosmopolitan. Article on ‘Navy Wives’—how to home in your torpedo!”

  “Robert!” she said, her expression halfway between laughter and feigned shock. “You certainly wouldn’t have said that before we were married.”

  “No,” he admitted, h
is hands slipping beneath the covers. The faint glow from the porch light disappeared, the room plunged again into total darkness, and they heard the proprietor walking creakily along the corridor on the ground floor.

  Rosemary pulled the covers over them. “Father warned me the Scots didn’t believe in central heating. It’s freezing in here.”

  “Never mind,” said Robert, “I’ll keep you warm.”

  Rosemary, her jasmine perfume filling their cave, moved closer to him, kissing him, gently at first, then her tongue hungrily seeking his.

  When he came up for air, he asked, “Where did you learn that?”

  “Oh, I’ve had at least a dozen lovers. You wouldn’t believe—”

  His hand slipped down between her thighs and soon he entered her and slowly they began moving in harmony, then bone-hard against each other, she clutching at him tightly, wantonly, exciting him so much, he knew that unless he diverted his attention, he would climax first. Easing himself up slightly on his elbows, not breaking the rhythm but decreasing pressure, he tried to think of something completely nonsexual, something to do with his work. He seized upon the deliberately repetitious, almost mechanical, routine of Roosevelt’s missile control verification procedure for the Hunter/Killer’s six Trident C missiles, in two rows of three situated immediately aft of the sail, each of the forty-eight warheads containing more then forty times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. Should the war go nuclear, they’d be fired in “ripple” or alternate sequence, the first, number one, missile sliding out of its sheath being the first one on the port side behind the sail, the next missile to be fired not one adjacent to it but rather number six — diagonally opposite to it and farthest away on the starboard side. This would maintain the most stable buoyancy mode for the 360-foot-long sub, preventing excessive “lean,” which, if not corrected for, would cause “wobble,” which in turn would upset the launch trajectory, of the remaining missiles. It was a sequence that Robert Brentwood nightly prayed he’d never have to set in motion but was prepared to do so if it came to that. Meanwhile, the thought of a missile breaking through its protective sheath, he discovered, was no help in calming him down.

  “Robert—” Rosemary murmured, arching her back, her breathing faster, shallower. He lowered himself closer to her and could feel her nipples pressing into him. “Robert— Robert—” Then he could hear the latecomers again, in the room across the hallway, talking. Rosemary was moving faster and faster beneath him, clutching his buttocks so tightly, he could feel her nails digging in. His left hand beneath her neck lifting her, he kissed her, his other hand grasping the edge of the mattress so hard, its inner spring gave like foam rubber, his fist squeezing it to nothing.

  “Darling — darling,” she murmured, almost beyond control, and he could hear one of the latecomers padding out into the hall, heading toward the bathroom. If they flushed the toilet and put her off—

  * * *

  In Moscow, General Kiril Marchenko, once special adviser to President Suzlov and now minister for war, was strolling in the Kremlin’s snow-manteled Taynitsky Garden. It was the coldest December night in fifteen years, but Marchenko had ignored the plummeting temperatures, eagerly seeking the fresh, albeit frigid, air during the recess from the STAVKA— Supreme Headquarters — meeting, where the atmosphere had been thick with bluish-gray smoke, giving him a throbbing headache. And if Marchenko had ever needed a clear head, it was now. The NATO armor, led by the eccentric but brilliant American general Douglas Freeman, reinforced by the NATO convoys from America, had broken out from near certain defeat in the Soviet-ringed Dortmund/Bielefeld Pocket on the North German Plain.

  The American general, whose reputation had been made early in the war by a daring nighttime air cavalry raid behind enemy lines in Korea on the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, hadn’t merely breached the Russian encirclement around the hundred-mile-long Dortmund/Bielefeld pocket but was turning it into a rout of Soviet armor. And as the Soviet troops withdrew, Marchenko knew his career was also in danger. As architect of the stunning SPETS — special forces — paratroop attack against Adak, the American submarine base in the Aleutians, Marchenko was now being held responsible for having committed Russian forces to a two-front war. His comrades in the STAVKA were charging, correctly, that had Marchenko not advised President Suzlov to attack the U.S. submarine base east of Kamchatka Peninsula and west of Alaska, the thousands of supply and support, as well as combat, troops that had been funneled to the Aleutian front could have been used to plug the gap punched out by the American armor on the European front. Marchenko knew that unless he could stop, or at least slow down, the NATO breakout, led by the Americans under Freeman, he could look forward to a demotion as rapid as his previous promotion had been.

  To make matters worse, his son Sergei, a pilot attached to Far Eastern Command HQ at Khabarovsk in eastern Siberia but presently serving in the Aleutian Islands, had written home that the “millimaws”—the storm winds born in the confluence of the westward-flowing Japanese Current and the eastward-flowing Alaska Current — had been unusually severe in the past few weeks. His comments about the weather were a shorthand Sergei used in order to get his letter past the squadron censor, the millimaws an Aleut word used by Sergei and his father to mean Americans. It wasn’t the speed of the American fighting Falcons and carrier-borne Tomcats that had Sergei and the other MiG-25 Foxbat pilots worried — after all, the Russian MiG-25s and Sukhoi-15s at Mach 2.8 and 2.5 were faster than the American planes. Nor had it been the daring of the American pilots that had caused Sergei and his friends concern, for they knew about this from the North Korean pilots who had done battle with the American carrier-borne fighters providing cover for Freeman’s raid on Pyongyang at the beginning of the war. What did astonish the Soviet pilots was that even in the worst weather — in the massive fog banks that covered most of the far-flung islands in the crescent-shaped arc between the Soviet Union and America — the American pilots had an edge because of their improved radar technology. Though the MiG Foxbats’ state-of-the-art “Fox Fire” look-down 54-mile-range radar had been thought equal to anything the Americans had at the beginning of the war, the upgraded U.S. pulse-Doppler look-up, look-down radar in the American F-16 Falcons had caught up. And the F-14 Tomcats’ AN/AWG-9 weapon-control system with its 195-mile-range radar, the latter capable of simultaneously tracking twenty-four targets and attacking eight of them at different altitudes, had brought the temporary Soviet air superiority over the western Aleutians to a screaming halt. Now, instead of being able to keep sending supplies to Adak, building it up as Russia’s advance springboard for the Soviet attacks against NORAD’s Alaskan flank, taking pressure off the Soviet forces in Europe, it looked as if the Americans might try to retake Adak Island and Shemya. The capture of the huge U.S. early-warning radar station at Shemya by the Second Soviet Airborne only weeks after Adak had fallen had been Marchenko’s proudest boast.

  As for Europe, Marchenko had sought help from the Soviet Northern Fleet to increase “convoy interdiction” all along the NATO sea lanes between North America and Europe — to cut off NATO’s vital supply line from America. But following the sinking of the Yumashev, the pride of the Russian Kresta II-class guided missile cruiser, by the American submarine USS Roosevelt in the Celtic Sea off southwestern England, the battle for the Atlantic had also momentarily swung in the Americans’ favor. For the first time since the war began, more merchantmen were reaching the French and English Channel ports than were being sunk.

  On the far eastern front, the Soviet navy had assured Marchenko and the other members of the Politburo that it was working as fast as possible, including using forced-labor battalions from the hitherto upstart Baltic republics and the troublesome minority groups on the Sino-Soviet border regions near Vladivostok, readying to launch a hitherto undreamt-of and highly secret submarine offensive against the U.S. West Coast. But until the two new subs were ready — another two months — the NATO convoys to the Aleutians, the Soviet admirals co
nceded, while sustaining heavy losses, would not be stopped. Momentarily oblivious to his surroundings, Marchenko had stopped walking in the garden, the blizzard swirling about him stinging his face as he realized he was going to have to make the most humiliating decision of his life. With the Soviet army withdrawing on the European front, the air battle over Europe, like the air war over the Aleutians, in uncertain flux, and the navy’s promises not realizable for at least two, possibly four, months, the minister of war knew that only one man, Vladimir Chernko, head of the Committee for State Security, and whom Marchenko detested, could help remedy the crisis in Western Europe.

  The feud between the short, stocky Marchenko and the tall, steely-eyed Chernko, whose ambition was to become president, had begun in what the Committee for State Security, the KGB, had called its vershina, or “high summer,” of the West’s honeymoon with Gorbachev. The British, as usual, had been standoffish, the Germans willing to accept Gorbachev’s line in return for Moscow’s support of reunification, and the Americans, Chernko said, gullible and deluded, wanting everyone to be happy, believing you could fix everything that was wrong in the world with goodwill and Yankee know-how. Chernko had served under Vladimir Kryuchkov, whom Gorbachev in 1988 had ordered to launch a massive industrial and military espionage offensive against the West in order to save millions of rubles for perestroika, rubles that would otherwise have to be spent for weapons and technological catch-up with the West. It was much easier to steal or buy Western technological secrets.

  Under Chernko’s direction, the KGB had outdone Madison Avenue in its new image making, even going so far as to invite American counterparts from the CIA to “tour” the old Dzherzinsky Square headquarters and the new offices in the outer ring. In an effort to convince the world of just how reformed the KGB was, Chernko made highly publicized arrests in the Gorbachev years of certain “outlaw elements” among the Soviet elite who had “illegally profited” at the expense of the Soviet people. Chernko promised they would be severely “disciplined.” One of those so punished was Kiril Marchenko’s brother, Fyodor, accused of “profiteering” in one of the now-not-so-secret party specialty stores. As far as Kiril could find out, Fyodor had been chosen at random by Chernko. Publicly accused by Chernko, he was tried and sentenced to fifteen years, reduced to five as a humanitarian “gesture” by Gorbachev’s administration. Chernko had meanwhile been featured on the cover of Time magazine as being typical of the “new breed in the KGB”—technocrats “more interested in rooting out inefficiency at home than in spying abroad.” Fyodor Marchenko hung himself after one month in Lefortevo Prison. Kiril Marchenko remembered that Chernko had sent flowers.