Red storm rising - By Tom Clancy Page 0,275

along an idea somebody else came up with."

"Okay. You were on Nimitz when the task force got hit, right?"

"Yes, sir, I was in CIC."

"The only other guy who got out was Sonny Svenson?"

"Captain Svenson, yes, sir."

Jacobsen picked up his phone and punched three digits. "Ask Captain Spaulding to join me. Thank you. Toland, you, me, and my operations officer are going to relive that experience. I want to see if there might be something our briefing left out. They're not going to punch any holes in my carriers, son."

"Admiral, don't underestimate them," Toland warned.

"I won't underestimate them, Toland. That's why I have you here. Your group got caught too far north for the circumstances. Taking Iceland was a beautiful move on their part. It screwed our plans pretty well. We are going to fix that, Commander."

"So I gather, sir."

USS REUBEN JAMES

"Ain't she pretty!" O'Malley said. He flipped his cigarette over the side and crossed his arms, staring at the massive carrier on the horizon. She was just a dim gray shape, with aircraft landing on the flat deck.

"My story is supposed to be about the convoy," Calloway sniffed.

"Well, they're making port right about now. End of story." The pilot turned with a wide grin. "Hell, you made me famous, didn't you?"

"You bloody aviators are all the same!" the Reuters correspondent snapped angrily. "The captain won't even tell me where we're going."

"You don't know?" O'Malley asked in surprise.

"Well, where are we going?"

"North,"

LE HAVRE, FRANCE

The port had been cleared in expectation of the convoy. The merchantmen were brought past several wrecks of ships that had died from Soviet mines, some laid before the war, others dropped from aircraft. The port had also been bombed six times by long-range fighter-bombers, each time at a murderous price from French air defense forces.

The first ships in were the big Ro/Ros, the roll-on/roll-off container ships. Eight of them together carried a full armored division, and these were taken quickly to the Bassin Theophile Ducrocq. One by one, the ships lowered their curved stem ramps to the dock and the tanks began to roll off. They met a continuous taxi-rank of low-loader tractor-trailers, each of which would carry a tank or other armored fighting vehicle to the front lines. Loaded, they rolled off one by one to the assembly point at the Renault facility adjacent to the port. It would take hours to unload the division, but it had been decided nevertheless to move everything in a body to the fighting front, less than five hundred kilometers away.

After what had seemed an endless, tense voyage, arrival was a culture shock for the American troops, many of them National Guardsmen who rarely went overseas. The dock workers and traffic police were too exhausted from weeks of frantic work to show any human emotion, but ordinary people who had learned, despite heavy security, that reinforcing troops were landing came out, first in small groups, soon in small mobs, to watch the new arrivals. The American troops were not allowed to leave their company areas. After some informal negotiations, it was decided small delegations would be allowed to meet briefly with some of the troops. The security risk was minor--the telephone lines in and out of all NATO ports were under tight control--and there was an unexpected result to this exercise in simple courtesy. Like their fathers and grandfathers, the arriving troops saw that Europe was worth fighting for. The people who were often seen merely as threats to American jobs had faces and hopes and dreams, all of which were in danger. They were not fighting for a principle, or a political decision, or a treaty made of paper. They were here for these people and others not the least different from those they'd left at home.

It took two hours longer than they'd hoped. Some vehicles were broken down, but the port and police officials had organized the assembly points with skill. The division moved off in the early afternoon at a steady fifty kilometers per hour, driving down a multilane highway cleared for its path. Every few yards, someone stood to wave while the troops made final checks on their gear. The easy part of their journey was about to end.

ICELAND

It was four in the morning when they reached the top, only to find that this mountain had a number of "tops." The Russians had the highest one, three miles away. Edwards's group had a choice of two subsidiary peaks, each a few hundred feet lower than the