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  WW III

  ( WW III - 1 )

  Ian Slater

  In the Pacific — Off Koreans east cost, 185 miles south of the DMZ, six Russian-made TU-22M backfires come in low, carrying two seven-hundred-pound cluster bombs, three one-thousand-pound “iron” bombs, ten one-thousand-pound concrete-piercing bombs, and fifty-two-hundred-pound FAEs.

  In Europe — Twenty Soviet Warsaw Pact infantry divisions and four thousand tanks begin to move. They are preceded by hundreds of strike aircraft. All are pointed toward the Fulda Gap. And World War III begins…

  Ian Slater

  WW III

  That [Russian] withdrawal began last week, when thirty-one Soviet tanks were loaded onto flatbed cars in Hungary. Among those watching the pullout was Ilona Staller, a member of the Italian Parliament and a porno-movie star. Staller kept her clothes on when she posed with Soviet officers, and released a white dove of peace. Ominously, perhaps, the bird was crushed in the treads of a Soviet tank.

  Time, May 1989

  PROLOGUE

  The man with the eye patch was the president’s pilot. Once, while making love to a beautiful young woman, he had left the patch on, kidding around, pretending to be a pirate of old. But after, in the hush following the storm, she had asked him to take it off. The patch frightened her, she told him, an augury of the perpetual hush that would follow a nuclear explosion, the bomb’s airburst, “brighter than a million suns,” blinding all aboard the “Doomsday” plane except the man with the protected eye-killing all below. Leaving the president in charge of what? Seeing her distress, the pilot had quickly removed it. Trembling with fear, she asked him to hold her and he did. It would be more than a year before he would see her again.

  Before he had met her, he had never heard of her two brothers — or anyone else in the Brentwood family for that matter-but then, people all over the world had never heard of the family, and there was no reason they should have, that is until, like the Brentwoods in America and Major Tae in South Korea, everybody suddenly found themselves swept into the maelstrom when, whether anyone liked it or not, ordinary human beings would be called upon to do extraordinary things.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Korea — August 14

  High above Seoul’s Yonsei campus, the moon was white — the color of mourning. Mi-ja Tae felt her heart race from the fear of parting, the moon fleeing a cloven sky, one moment its light turning the ginkgo leaves silver, the next swallowing them in darkness. As it was the evening before the annual Independence Day celebrations, fireworks could be seen now and then bursting above the old ‘88 Olympic Stadium south across the river. And tonight, the television news had told them, there was an added reason for celebration. In Europe the Americans and Russians had announced further arms and troop reductions. The prospects for peace, commentators proclaimed, had never been better.

  Turning away from her lover, though still in his embrace, Mi-ja told him, “We cannot meet again.”

  He was stunned. “What are you saying? Why—”

  “If my father knew what you are doing,” she said, “you know he would forbid me seeing you.”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “It’s his job to know these things. Sooner or later he will find out.”

  “How?” asked Jung-hyun. “He’s at Panmunjom. We’re here.”

  “Each time he comes home on leave, it is more difficult.”

  “What is more difficult?”

  “To deceive him,” said Mi-ja sadly. “I love him very much. If he knew—”

  “That’s unreasonable!” said Jung-hyun.

  “Not to him,” answered Mi-ja. “He fears the North. For him, you would be a traitor.”

  “Then you’re not coming on the march?” It was more accusation than question.

  “I didn’t say that. But can’t you see how he—”

  “But you,” Jung-hyun pressed, pushing her away, looking down at her beauty, the nape of her neck revealed in fleeting moonlight. “You see, don’t you, that North and South should be united? That we should be together?”

  “He wants that, too,” she said.

  “Ah—” Jung-hyun said, turning from her, “he is a chin-mipa—pro- American.”

  “He doesn’t hate the Americans,” she said, looking up at him. “If that’s what you mean. He says if it wasn’t for them, we would all be slaves.”

  “And you believe that?” Jung-hyun said dismissively.

  “I’m—” She shook her head and came closer to him, her arms around his waist. He could smell her perfume, feel her softly weeping against him. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice trembling. “I don’t know what to think. Father says the North is looking to make war before the South becomes too strong. He says that is why it’s so dangerous now.”

  “Rubbish!” snapped Jung-hyun. “The North will never attack us. They only want peace.” He pushed her roughly away now, his hands in fists of frustration. “You think I’d be in the movement for reunification if I thought the North wanted war?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, “there you are.”

  The moon was lost in cloud. Slowly he drew her back to him. He could feel her heart beating. Stroking the sensuous curve of her neck, he pulled her still closer. She could feel his arousal. “I love you,” he said softly. “You must not worry so. Your father is wrong. There’ll be no war.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “What’s that?” asked the elderly woman in one of Northwest’s Boeing 767’s starboard window seats. The flight attendant, on her first trip from Seattle to Shanghai, lowered her head to look out into the “wild blue yonder,” as she banally called it. The man from Texas sitting next to the elderly woman didn’t care what the attendant called it so long as she kept bending over him for a better view. He was married, but his wife said she didn’t mind where he got his appetite so long as he did his eating at home.

  “A seabird probably,” said the attendant, fresh out of training school in Atlanta.

  “At thirty thousand feet?” said the elderly woman. “I don’t think so, dear. It would need an oxygen mask.”

  “Oh,” the attendant replied, “then it’s probably another plane.”

  “Same altitude as us?” the elderly woman rejoined.

  The attendant peered out again, the man from Texas loving it. If only the plane were empty and they were alone.

  “I think you’d better find out,” said the woman, a trifle schoolmarmish in her tone. “Would you mind?”

  “I’ll ask the senior flight attendant. He’ll probably—”

  “You ask the pilot, dear.” As the attendant forced an accommodating smile and stood up, the Texan studiously watched her walk away. She had to squeeze past the drink trolley. The elderly woman was anxiously looking out the window. The Texan, James Delcorte, smiled at her. “I wouldn’t worry about it, ma’am. Probably just a jet fighter.”

  She turned, looking sharply at him. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Well, there’s no need,” he said reassuringly. “We’re in the Corridor. If it’s a jet, it’s a South Korean. Or American. We’re on our side of the lane. Besides, there’s a radio beacon plum in the middle to guide civil aircraft.”

  “It could go out.”

  “Hardly think that’s—”

  “Well, it did. During the eighty-eight Olympics. ‘Course,” she continued, “that’d be before your time.”

  “I’m not that old,” he replied good-naturedly. He was looking out the window now. “You see? It’s gone.”

  “Behind a cloud,” she said. “Remember double oh seven?”

  The man was nonplussed. “James Bond?”

  “James nothing,” the woman said irritably. “Korean Airlines double oh seven. Shot down by the
Russians in eighty-three. You can’t trust any of ‘em. Especially Pyongyang.”

  The Texan moved uncomfortably in his seat. Pyon — it sounded familiar to him. Some Communist leader.

  “North Korea,” she explained.

  “Oh.”

  “You a businessman?”

  He was glad of the change of subject. “Yes. And you — on vacation?”

  “Of sorts. Daughter-in-law lives in Shanghai. Works for La Roche Chemicals. Husband owns it.”

  “La Roche?” The Texan sat up in his seat. If it was the La Roche the old lady could be as irritable as she wanted. La Roche was one of the world’s biggest chemical/cosmetic conglomerates—Fortune’s, top ten. “J. T. La Roche?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said the woman. “He’s a fool.”

  “Oh-?”

  “All think they’ll make a fortune in China. A billion people. A billion customers, that’s the way Jay looks at it.” She shook her head. “Won’t get anywhere in China. I told him — they’ll have to get their distribution system organized first. Lord — you ever fly China Air?”

  “No,” answered the Texan.

  “Well, don’t,” said Mrs. La Roche. “Love ‘em, but Lord, are they disorganized. That’s their problem, y’see.”

  “Sounds like you know a lot about them.”

  She turned toward him. “Henry — my late husband — and I lived in Hong Kong before the Communists took it over. Moved back to the States when the British left. That’s where Jay met the Brentwood girl. She’d been doing some courses in college— to be a nurse. Gave that up and went back to China with Jay. She has a brother out here in the navy — another one in the Atlantic. Don’t think it’ll work.”

  The Texan wasn’t sure what wouldn’t work: the navy for the Brentwood brothers or her son’s marriage to the Brentwood girl.

  “Lovely girl,” continued Mrs. La Roche, “but oh my. Can’t sit still. Neurotic as all get out. Low self-esteem.” She was glancing out at the clouds again. “Course, Jay loves that. Ego.” She turned to the Texan. “You remember that Donald Trump?”

  “Sure.”

  “Compared to Jay’s ego, Trump’s Mother Teresa. Good boy, Jay, but too big for his britches. Don’t know where he got it from. Too much money. Wants to own the world, Jay does.”

  “Well,” smiled the Texan, holding his hand up for another double, “he’s well on the way.”

  “You got family?”

  “Yes, ma’m. My son, Walter. With the air force.”

  “Uh-huh. Where’s he stationed?”

  “Germany. You been there?”

  Mrs. La Roche didn’t answer, still peering suspiciously at the cumulus towering thousands of feet above them, its ice white turning creamy in the fading light. “No use fretting, I suppose,” she said. “It’s a dangerous world wherever you go.” She paused and sat back. “I’d worry if I had young ‘uns though.” She turned to the Texan. “Especially now. Everyone’s getting jittery. Lana’s folks — that’s my daughter-in-law — want her and Jay to go back to the States. Nice people. Navy man, too.”

  “Uh-huh,” said the Texan uninterestedly. Why was it that people told you things on planes they’d never dare bore you with anywhere else? A captive audience, or maybe they thought they’d never see you again. Which was true. He was getting impatient for the double Scotch.

  “I told them,” she kept on. “Use your brains. It was Gorbachev this, Gorbachev that. Lord — worst thing could’ve happened.”

  “Why’s that?” queried the Texan, the trolley edging closer.

  “Raises expectations,” said Mrs. La Roche. “Biggest bully in Europe for sixty years suddenly smiles and we go ape. And everyone in the Eastern bloc starts agitating for independence. You just knew there was going to be trouble. Think about it, I told Henry — think about it. You really want the Poles and Hungarians to start trouble? Drag us into it? Yugoslavs are just as bad. Coming apart at the seams, that country is. Gorbachev encouraged them, too — everybody’ll have more freedom. Pretty soon someone’s going to try taking a bit more than they’re allowed. Ukranians, Georgians, Armenians, Tuvans, Buryats. You name it. Least with those bullies, Andropov, Brezhnev, we knew where we stood. East was East and West was West. Stay off the grass.” She glanced up at the trolley attendant. “I’ll have a brandy, dear.” As she took the drink neat and sat back, the Texan saw a glint of silver coming out from the boiling mass of cumulonimbus.

  As they came in over the East China Sea, the serpentine curve of the Huangpu was a river of burning gold.

  * * *

  The Texan held back to let the rush of eager tourists go before him. As he passed the young attendant whom Mrs. La Roche had first spoken to, he thanked her for the flight and asked whether she’d found out anything about the other plane.

  “Yes,” she said. “The captain saw it.”

  “Whose was it?”

  “South Korean,” the chief steward put in hurriedly.

  “Hmm. They fly that close.” It was said more as a comment than a question, but the steward got right onto it. “Actually, they’re always much further away than you think. Air distances are very deceptive.”

  The Texan saw Mrs. La Roche walking down the concourse past the glass display cases of China dolls, foreign cigarettes, and battery-operated panda bears that moved if you clapped.

  In the waiting crowd beyond customs, the Texan could also see a beautiful brunette in a black and white silk dress, a sloppy-looking chauffeur in gray beside her. She was looking eagerly around, as a bored member of the People’s Liberation Army stared at her from the customs exit. When she saw Mrs. La Roche she waved excitedly and pointed her out to the chauffeur, and the Texan knew it must be Lana La Roche.

  Damn, he thought, wishing he’d gone out with the old lady after all and wrangled an introduction. You never knew where these things could lead. He tried to hurry — nothing to declare at customs — but by the time he passed through, the swarming mass of people engulfed him, bodies so close together that all he could think of was escape. Surrounded, wall to wall, by Chinese, he found the push of bodies frightening, the noise deafening, and he began to panic. He was so far from home, the crowd so huge, so oppressive, unstoppable — like a world going mad — and for a terrifying moment he feared he might never get out, might never see his son or America again.

  * * *

  At 0400, the moon behind them, coming from the east toward the Rhineland’s Eifel Mountains and picked up on one of the NADGE — Nato Air Defense Ground Environment — radars, the four East German fighters, Russian-made Sukhoi-15 Flagons, came straight for the American patrol of four F-16B Falcons out of Hahn, each Falcon’s Avgas receptacle open, ready for the refueling exercise with a KC-135 tanker. USAF Col. Walter Delcorte, leader of the patrol from the Tenth U.S. Tactical Fighter Squadron at Hahn, ordered the wing to close refueling vents and drop to five thousand, breaking off west, well away from the “trace,” the ten-meter-wide border strip that, despite what had happened to the Wall, still ran for five hundred kilometers between the two Germanys along NATO’s Central Front. The Falcons broke as ordered, the moon-bathed quilt of German farms sliding away beneath them at over nine hundred miles an hour as they sought to avoid any confrontation from the Warsaw Pact fighters. Four minutes later the Sukhoi-15s came in again. Nose to nose.

  “Break west again,” Delcorte instructed the other three Falcons. They did so.

  “Bogeys have jinked again,” reported Delcorte’s wing man, seeing that the four Sukhoi-15s, armed with an under-fuselage cannon pack of twenty-three-millimeter weapons and air-to-air “Anab” missiles, were coming in to try it on again.

  “Okay, that’s enough,” said Delcorte, reporting to Hahn base. “Flagons have jinked again for second time. Coming for us now seventeen miles. Closing Mach 1.1.” Even though the twenty-one-meteR-1ong Sukhoi-15s were capable of sixteen hundred miles an hour at over ten thousand feet, their present subsonic speed was still very fast for such a low altitude, and all
the pilots knew that with the seventeen-ton F-16s able to match them, life or death could be a matter of milliseconds.

  “Get under them!” ordered Delcorte. “Four thousand.”

  With this the F-16s slid into radar advantage, their electronic look-up of the Sukhoi-15s uncluttered by ground fuzz which would, however, interfere with the Sukhois’ radar look-down images of the American Falcons.

  Ten seconds later all four American RIOs (radar intercept officers) armed their air-to-air Sidewinder and Sparrow missiles. Hahn ground control, NADGE, and a NATO rotodome early warning Hawkeye aircraft out of Geilenkirchen all had tracks of the Sukhoi-15s as well as intercepts of East Germany’s Dresden control ordering the Sukhois to confront the F-16s again. CO-MAAFCE — Commander Allied Air Forces Central Europe — at Börfink, in NATO’s command bunker HQ, ordered two more evasive actions.

  “Bogeys jinking again,” came Delcorte’s voice. “Twenty-three miles.”

  “Bogey jinked on me,” reported another plane. “Noses on at twenty-two miles. Angels four.” This meant the American F-16s were still at four thousand feet. Again Börfink ordered evasive action and again the F-16 Falcons reported the Sukhois had jinked again. At 0411 Börfink gave Delcorte weapons-free— independent decision — authority.

  “Master arm on!” Delcorte ordered, his voice, but not the faint growl of the activated missile, on tape at Börfink.

  “Master arm on,” came his RIO’s confirmation. “Am centering the T. Bogeys jinked fourteen miles. Centering dot. Fox One. Fox One.” The twelve-foot-long Sparrow missile was off, streaking at over two thousand miles per hour, seen on the early warning Hawkeye’s radar.

  “Ten miles,” came in another American pilot. “Fox One. Fox One.”

  Another pilot’s voice cut in, “Tally Three. Tally Three. Afterburners,” indicating he could now actually see the crimson eyes of three Sukhoi SU-15s’ afterburners. “Six miles. Select Fox Two. Five miles… four miles… lock ‘im up… lock ‘im up… shoot Fox Two. Fox Two.” Now the shoosh of the shorter, lighter air-to-air Sidewinder missile could be heard on the tape together with the burst of one of the F-16’s twenty-millimeter port side cannons, adding to the general confusion of sound, overriding voices. “Good kill! Good kill!”