Four thousand miles away, it was late afternoon, a stiff easterly clearing New York of its pollution haze, the twin towers of the World Trade Center reflecting the turquoise sky like two enormous slabs of green ice towering above the skyline. But the high wisps of cirrus cloud and the vibrant color of the sky went unnoticed by Adm. John Brentwood. The only reason he noticed the high winds was because of their baleful howling by his New York Port Authority office on the seventieth floor. The retired admiral had resisted the move to the Trade Center as long as he could, citing, truthfully, that even the confusion of the short move from the Port Authority offices around Battery Park would cause delay in the crucial matter at hand: his office’s overseeing the loading and departure of the vital Atlantic convoys.
“No problem, Admiral,” his secretary had concluded. “Everything’s on disk. In the old days we’d need fifty trucks and a month of overtime. Now — we’ll have everything up here, three days maximum.”
“Three days we can well use here,” Brentwood had grumbled, his pen skimming over the latest cargo manifest — nearly all ammunition and aircraft parts.
They had tried flying several replacement squadrons of Thunderbolts and F-111s over the Atlantic with extra fuel in drop tanks and midair refueling. But the Russians could see them coming across the Atlantic, and though the weather was worsening over the mid-Atlantic ridge, the Russian pilots had managed to intercept. For a while the Americans and Canadians were losing more pilots at sea than over European soil. Pilots downed in Europe stood a reasonable chance of chopper pickup, providing they didn’t come down in enemy territory. But for those who were shot down over the Atlantic, the rescue rate was less than 5 percent, for even though the pilots’ radio beacons had a minuscule failure rate, the Atlantic was simply too vast to patrol for lost pilots, when every spare available aircraft was being used to help ferry materiel or conscripted for antisub patrols.
Because of the high losses of combat pilots over the Atlantic, sixty-eight in the first two months of the war, women pilots — whom the army air corps had used in peacetime to ferry the vitally needed planes to Europe — were now, albeit reluctantly, being considered as combat pilots. An editorial in The New York Times, a usually harsh critic of Army General Freeman’s “cowboy” tactics, now brought his name back to national prominence by praising him for having had the foresight to use women chopper pilots in the daring and successful raid in and out of Pyongyang, the editorial going on to severely criticize the Pentagon’s failure to have trained women as combat pilots.
The Times also criticized the slow rate of convoy departures, so that while John Brentwood was happy that Freeman, his youngest son’s commander and someone Brentwood Senior greatly admired, was being mentioned again, sending signals to Washington that “more aggressively innovative thinking” was needed, the retired admiral bridled at the implicit criticism of the Port Authority. And it didn’t help John Brentwood or any of his colleagues when the Nagata joke had reached the “Tonight Show,” the Port Authority becoming the butt of one of Leno’s comedy routines. Leno suggested that maybe “what the New York Port Authority should do is put a congressman on every ship. With that much hot air aboard — no way it would sink!”
Now, high in his new office, Brentwood, his office’s computer notwithstanding, was confronted by hills of files, piled upon and about his desk. No matter how many computers you had to punch in all the variables, from not stowing yeast, sugar, or rice cargos together to the myriad problems about where and how to get enough ships, in the final analysis the decisions often had to be made on an old sailor’s gut instinct. The major problem was that the deficiencies of the United States’ aging mercantile marine were now starkly evident, after having been virtually ignored by every administration since Reagan, despite persistent predictions by the Pentagon that the ten thousand merchant sailors in the United States were far short of the twenty-two thousand required in war.
For Brentwood, it meant requisitioning, cajoling, recommissioning anything that would float and help bolster the old fleet, most of which had been taken out of mothballs to be used for the dangerous three-thousand-mile journey from North America to the ports of France and Britain. But while many ships were called, and many willingly lent to the government for cash equity later on, only 30 percent of these craft were approved as seaworthy, the others, to the chagrin of many a proud yachtsman or sailor, not qualifying because they could not maintain the required seventeen-knot convoy speed.
There had been the public hue and cry for the admiral and his staff to “get off their butts,” as the New York Post put it, and to use whatever was possible for the convoys. Many of his critics pointed out that some of the thousands of big yachts, for example, could do well in excess of seventeen knots. But Brentwood stood firm, pointing out in turn that it wasn’t the yachts’ speed that worried him so much as their ability to keep in convoy pattern while heading full into a force-ten gale amid radio silence. And sailing under strict convoy orders whereby neither naval escort nor other merchantmen could alter course to assist, thus giving a marauding sub a slow target. Even so, Brentwood insisted on considering all comers, the computer telling him in cold, hard numbers that not enough of the tonnage NATO so desperately needed was getting through. “Rollover” was railing, the deadly equations tipping decidedly in the Soviets’ favor.
Six cups of coffee since lunch, his diet having held firm against the creamer until the last cup, Brentwood was surprised when he looked up and saw it was dark, the old familiar Manhattan skyline now drastically altered due to wartime fuel and energy conservation, including a blackout on all nonessential illumination. It had been suggested at first that the city go into full blackout condition, as in England and Europe, but this was ruled out on the assumption that if the Russians were going to attack New York, it would be with ICBMs or sea- and air-launched cruise missiles. They would have no need to see where the city was, the coordinates for such an attack already having been programmed into the terrain contour-matching nose radar of the ICBMs aboard their “Boomers,” as the giant Soviet Typhoon SSBNs were called. Besides, as the major pointed out, and few challenged him, if the city was blacked out, the crime rate would soar.
Even from the admiral’s commanding view on the seventieth floor, whole sections of Manhattan were missing, only the blipping of the red aircraft warning light atop the Trump Building affording the admiral a sense of his old familiarity with the city skyline. Far below, the yellow ribbons of traffic kept flowing, red taillights shimmering in the warm air of car exhausts that rose from the skyscrapers’ canyons. The admiral was so exhausted that at times he’d nod off. Upon waking, the red light on the Trump Building would cause him to start, taking him back to the other war long ago during which, his father had told him, many an exhausted American driver in the endless three-ton-truck convoys would suddenly jerk awake, momentarily panicking that he was driving on the wrong side of the road before realizing he was in England.
“More coffee, Admiral?” asked his secretary.
“No thanks, Janice. Feel like I could run a mile. We have anything back from San Diego on those three Japanese tankers?”
“I don’t think so, sir. I’ll check the fax.” As she walked away, Brentwood watched her with a mixture of affection and lust. She was half his age, in her mid thirties, a single parent with two children, yet the strains and stresses of working as well as raising children hadn’t given her the battle-worn face of many mothers her age, and her trim bottom fitted his category of “grabbable.”
The admiral had never made a pass at her, telling himself he never would, but she was divorced, and now and then, as he glanced up from the never-ending pile of files or in reaction to the weather pattern information changing on the TV monitor in front of him, he had caught her looking at him with what he believed was a mixture of admiration and warmth. But, he reminded himself, she was half his age, Lana’s age, and besides, there was no way he would cheat on his wife, Catherine. Not only would it be dishonorable, but downright cruel. She was still trying to come to terms with Ray’s condition. Already there had been ten operations — the last three purely for cosmetic reasons to try to reconstruct his face as something else than a horror mask that even Ray and Bern’s children had found difficult to deal with.
And now David was missing — God knew where — in what the Pentagon was vaguely referring to as the “northern German” sector. The admiral was tempted to pull a few strings in Washington, D.C., to try to get details of exactly where the American airborne’s rapid deployment force was. But that wouldn’t help David if he had already been killed. Besides, the admiral detested that sort of back-door, special-favor nonsense. There’d never been favoritism on his ships, and be damned if he’d start asking for it now. And how the hell he could even think of monkeying around with some gal half his age while his family was in such turmoil was beyond him, though some navy shrink, he recalled, had once told him the sex drive knew neither the proper time nor the place, that often it hit you precisely when you thought it shouldn’t: when you were exhausted, at a funeral, and certainly after combat.
Which was why the admiral had to make sure, without mentioning it to Janice, that as important as penicillin and all the other medical supplies were to the well-being of the men, condoms were an essential part of the cargo — usually cut sick bay lines by 50 percent. He told Janice, as he’d told his sons, Lana too, that more people had died in 1919 of the flu than all those killed in the bloodbath of World War I. These days it wasn’t flu but the age-old venereal diseases that stalked the battlefields of every war. To avoid public disclosure that would only increase the anxiety of the womenfolk left behind, the condoms weren’t listed as such but as sterile surgical gloves.
On the TV monitor, Admiral Brentwood saw that the red, skull-like pictures of the storm system over the Atlantic were changing again. Red patches invaded green, the storm having moved from force six to eight since midafternoon. He wondered if Robert was out there now in the middle of it. Maybe the Roosevelt was farther north, in the Irish Sea, part of the NATO force protecting England’s western approaches. Or rather trying to.
“Admiral?”
He looked up at his secretary. Janice had the lips of a Raquel Welch and a body to boot, her curves flattered by a form-clinging emerald knit dress, the air around her redolent with the perfume of roses. His favorite flower. It struck him that she might know this, but he quickly dismissed the thought as mere conceit. She handed him a fax. “Admiral, San Diego regrets…”
“But they want the oil tankers for themselves?” he interjected, taking a file of letters she had ready for his signature.
“Afraid so, Admiral.”
“I don’t blame them,” he sighed, taking off his reading glasses, sitting back, pinching the bridge of his nose. “The only oil Japan and the Sixth Fleet’s going to get is from our West Coast, at least until Iran and Iraq stop shooting at anything that moves in the Gulf.”
“We could fax Valdez,” suggested Janice. “If there’s a lineup there, we could ask Washington to intervene and release—”
“Yes,” said Brentwood, leaning forward now, hands locked together, shoulders hunched from the long hours and stress of the job. “But if we fax Valdez to release a tanker for the Atlantic ops without going through San Diego, that’ll only get San Diego’s back up — not to mention the Sixth Fleet.”
“And Tokyo,” she added.
“You’ve got it. No — we’re all running on a scarcity of ships, Janice. Everyone thinks their operational theater problem is the most important, their problems the most serious. But if anything happens to those tankers we have on—” he put his reading glasses on, peering through the dimmed light of the overhead neon at the transparent green “Ops” board “—Convoys Eighty-Three and Eighty-Four — we’re in big trouble.” Janice said nothing, and all he could hear for a moment was the soft sound of her breathing. “Look — let’s request one tanker from San Diego. They’ll look piggy if they insist on keeping all three. One’s a compromise situation, and we can start moving it as a reserve. But double-check the draft on all three tankers, Janice—before we make the request. We don’t want to do a Levins.”
Janice laughed. “Yes, Admiral.” Levins was one of Brentwood’s colleagues in the New York Port Authority/Navy Logistics Liaison Office who had “demanded” a tanker from San Diego and had then become a laughingstock in the Pentagon and all up and down the West Coast after it was discovered the tanker he’d been thumping the desk for was two meters too wide for the Panama Canal. “Unless,” a tongue-in-cheek advisory had come back from San Diego, “you intend sailing it round Cape Horn?”
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navy, but that was always the weaknesses of other men. Just as his son Robert carried the responsibility of killing Seaman Evans aboard the Roosevelt, so his father labored under guilt, a guilt that to other men would have seemed disproportionate, to say the least. Though intellectually the admiral could see how it would be seen as nothing to other men, he could not shake the feeling of unworthiness, and it would become an even heavier burden as the war kept on, the admiral hoping that one day, somehow, somewhere, he could redeem himself.
Atop Hawaii’s island of Maui, it was afternoon, the azure expanse of sea now darkening with no distinguishable horizon in sight, blue upon blue upon blue, silver winking of whitecaps soon indistinguishable, swallowed by the glare of the late sun’s light. The uninterrupted aspect of the Pacific all about the Hawaiian Islands was a sight meteorologist Sam Ronson never tired of watching. As his four-wheel-drive Toyota took the last of the bending zigzag road up to the observatory, he flipped down the visor and wound down the driver’s window, relishing the cold, icy blast of air.
His union had fought vociferously against the U.S. Weather Service scheduling only one meteorological officer for the six-to-midnight watch, arguing that six hours in the high, thin, pristine air was too hard on a single observer. The truth for Sam Bronson, however, and one he was careful not to reveal to the union bosses in Honolulu, was that for his part, he wouldn’t have minded staying up at the observatory all night. He liked the solitude granted him by the astronomer, who was usually too busy to talk. For Sam, the spill of stars in the autumn sky was a sight that never ceased to awe. He wasn’t sure whether there was a God or not, but if there was, then this night sky was more evidence of a supreme being than all the holy books. Night after night he had gazed toward the heavens, transporting himself to worlds beyond. The belief that there were no other beings in the universe seemed to him as silly as the belief that there was an up and down, an idea manufactured by men merely to comfort them in the huge uncertainty of infinity.
But even if he had not enjoyed the “nocturnal star gazing,” as the astronomer on duty called it, Sam treasured this time away from his wife. She was his second and, after his first, his second biggest mistake. Sam didn’t like partying or even talking much. After two wives and four children, what he wanted was to be left alone, to monitor the anemometer for wind speed, the seismograph, and rainfall — now called “precipitation” by the TV forecasters — and to marvel at the fact that within a few thousand feet, Maui’s tropical rain forests were washed by rain that had been snow at the height of the observatory.
When he saw the stylus on the brown recorder jerk to five, registering a quake several hundred miles northwest of the outer island of Kauai, he didn’t bother putting in a call to Honolulu as the information would automatically have gone through from the observatory via the SAT/bounce feed. But when the stylus went to 6.1, he initiated a manual as well as the automatic alarm, which was just as well, for, though he didn’t know it at the time, the automatic sensors on Japan’s west coast were being “fuzzed over” by an electrical storm sweeping down from Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. It meant that Sam Ronson’s warning, via Honolulu relay and Australia’s Tidbinbilla, was the first Tokyo center had of the quake and of ensuing tsunamis, the latter so often mistakenly called tidal waves, which were heading toward Japan.
The height and frequency of the tsunamis were being excited by a hurricane, moving northwest from the Marianas with winds in excess of 120 miles an hour. When the stylus jumped from 6.1 to 7.1, every digit on the Richter scale representing a tenfold increase in force, Sam Ronson again rang through the alarm. But by now Tokyo was being hit, and though no one realized it at the time, the thesis of Tadanabu Ito, joint degree holder and Ph.D. candidate, on “Tectonics and Economics” was about to become a reality. It would make Ito famous and explain the death of over three hundred thousand Japanese as the quake, the worst in Japan for a hundred years, reduced the financial center of Tokyo, despite all the “floating base” design of its skyscrapers, to a rubble of concrete and glass shot through with enormous natural-gas-fueled fires from ruptured mains.
To rebuild meant calling in, at the very least, the interest owing on the massive loans Japan had made to the West. In particular this meant calling in loans made to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Not yet combatants themselves, these countries and others like them who were required to repay Japanese loans in terms of raw materials could not repay even if they had wanted to, which they didn’t, because of the Soviet sub packs roaming the south Atlantic and the Pacific, their prime purpose to play havoc along U.S./Australasian/ Japanese sea routes.
The horrendous implications of such a situation had been unforeseen except for the obscure graduate student, Tadanabu Ito. His doctoral thesis on the economic and social implications of a Japan suddenly depleted of a steady supply of raw materials by natural disaster had predicted that a Japan starved for raw materials after her three-month reserves of iron ore, coal, and bauxite had run out would be a Japan open to the temptations of “military adventure.” And that Tokyo, after her experiences in the thirties and forties, would not want another war with China. The only remaining source of such materials was the Soviet Far East.
At the end of November, Tokyo’s full cabinet, with the emperor’s approval, announced simultaneously to Washington and Beijing that in retaliation for increasing Soviet bombing of her western ports and the unlawful occupation of the northern islands, its defense forces would henceforth launch “surgical strikes” against Soviet bases.
This meant Vladivostok, farther inland at Ulan-Ude, and Cam Rahn Bay in Vietnam. The pilots of the Japanese “defense force,” which had more F-18s than any country except the United States, were instructed, however, that under no circumstances must they enter North Korean air space, for this might be interpreted by Beijing as the prelude to a Japanese attack across the Yalu River into China.