by Alisa Smith
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In memory of Sheelagh
We two alone will sing like birds in the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies.
—Shakespeare, King Lear
NOVEMBER 28, 1945
CHAPTER ONE
THE NEXT WAR
I FOLLOWED THE cairns one by one to the edge of the island, grey waves crashing against black rocks, until I could forget there was ever colour anywhere. In my heavy military parka with the wolf fur snugged around my face, all I saw were swirling snow and fog muffling me inside this isolated place—four miles long and two miles wide. If it weren’t for the cairns, I wouldn’t be able to navigate in this weather, but their shapes were familiar and I knew where I needed to go.
The pistol inside my jacket wouldn’t freeze up before I needed it.
I paused where I could go no further unless I would swim. I couldn’t see it today but I knew ice rimed the shore. My breath hung in the fog and then disappeared. I took off one moosehide glove, lined with grey-white fur, to look at my own flesh, and it was grey-white too. Ghostly. I told myself: I am becoming invisible.
I screwed on the silencer and cocked the weapon, a bolt-action Welrod 9 mm. Unmarked in case captured. Best for close, quick work, because I wouldn’t have much time.
Cold seeped into my hand, the wind biting. My arm grew tired as I waited for the mists to part so that I could see my target. But my arm never shook, and the gun was comfortable in my grip. I’d done this many times before.
The noise when I fired was little more than a door slamming shut. It signalled a casual death, unnotable, the way life could be too. That was fitting.
I walked over to the target to assess how I’d done. The red was shocking in the grey world.
I smiled as I pulled the paper from the clips attached to the frame I had built. Dead centre, a perfect shot. Maybe I’d finally redeemed myself.
I wasn’t always good at this. I had been excited when, last year, I was sent for field training at Camp X. After a military transport plane left me in Prince Rupert, I rode the CN railway across British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba—three days to Ontario. From the station in Oshawa, a bumpy truck ride over dirt roads took me to the shores of Lake Ontario where there was an old farm estate, with white buildings laid out in vast fields bordered by maple forests. An old man wearing tweed rushed out of a brick house to shake my hand. “Terrence Bottomley, my dear. And you are?”
“Agent 342,” I said.
“Very good,” he said in his crisp English accent, and handed me a pistol.
I smiled at him, and thought that finally, I might be sent to Russia. Miss Maggie must want me to be ready.
My first class that afternoon was held in an old dairy barn, with eight men and one other woman. Lock picking—I did exceptionally well. Of course, they could not know I had considerable experience observing this craft in my past. From the shifty looks of the man who taught the class, who was only referred to as Agent 49, I guessed him to be a past thief himself. I had heard rumours that criminals of top ability were being released from prison in exchange for training the secret service. For the three weeks I was there, I was careful never to speak to him directly, in case he should sense the same thievery in me that I saw in him.
After that, things went downhill. I failed at target shooting. That’s why I practised out on the tundra by myself every day it was possible to see through the fog. When it was not, I sweet-talked a set of keys to the indoor range from the Sergeant. I didn’t want the men to see me do it, because the mocking and catcalls would be unbearable. I went after 9 p.m. when it was closed, and only once had to fend off the Sergeant’s advances, though tactfully enough that he would not revoke my keys.
I was also mortified to learn that I was afraid of heights. I had not known until standing near the lip of an open aeroplane door high above Camp X. I couldn’t seem to make my fingers let go of the ceiling strap until I retreated instead of leaping. I was supposed to be third, but soon everyone else had jumped, including the one other woman. When the green light went on again, I counted to three in my head and said go, and I went, feeling like I would throw up. I prayed never to have to do it again.
Wait, Miss Maggie said, wait. That was easy enough for her to say—time passes more quickly for those caught up in the power struggles of Washington. Those, I understood, occurred mostly at dinner parties. She claimed to find these tiresome. Miss Maggie was the top woman in the Office of Strategic Services, or the OSS—the innocuous name for the wartime spy agency of the United States. She had personally advised the President, but everyone still called her Miss Maggie. She was in espionage well before the war, and her old civilian moniker stuck to her. She probably liked it because it gave nothing away. What was her last name, rank, or function? No one knew, but everyone did know it was she who figured out the wiring for the Japanese Purple Machine. That was how the Allies cracked the code and defeated Japan in the Pacific. She plucked me from the Canadian navy, where she supervised me through OP-20-G, the US Navy’s intelligence operation for the Pacific defence. There were a lot of rules in OP-20-G, and paper trails were required, even if classified. So she decamped and took me with her.
Three years later, I was still on Shemya, among the westernmost of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, where the williwaw howled eternally and the airmen hurried to leave once their orders had expired. Only one skeleton air squadron, the radio operators and decryption remained. The base was being dismantled piece by piece. The soldier’s war was over, but the war I was fighting was just beginning. I could see it would be lonely, at least for a while. Miss Maggie’s predictions about the Soviet threat were not widely shared. I began spying on our allies the Russians the day I arrived, while others concerned themselves with the Germans and the Japanese. When Miss Maggie offered me this transfer, she promised a promotion to second in command of my unit. But it wasn’t long before my crew of twelve shrank to four, which was not a satisfying sphere of influence.
There was still no sign I would be assigned to Russian fieldwork, as Miss Maggie had once hinted. This was a source of bitterness, since I had the perfect cover. Before the war, I did graduate work in Canada with the prominent linguist Dr. Phipps. He believed the Tlinkit tongue of Alaska was derived from Siberia, and was applying for permission from the Soviet government to study its tribal peoples. My language research was something I enjoyed for its own sake, and if I was involved in a major discovery, even a woman could hope for a professorship. Since women got the vote when I wa
s a girl, we had made great strides in the universities. But Dr. Phipps had most likely chosen another protégé by now, amongst all the men returning from the service.
This hope for advancement was why I accepted the posting to Shemya. That and my shame at what I did to Link—as though by fleeing the location of a betrayal, my guilt could be closed up like an old house and left behind. Not so. Guilt is terribly portable, I have learned. It is not the house, but the suitcase you bring with you.
When I arrived on Shemya and buttoned up the crisp new uniform with the extra stripe, I clung to Miss Maggie’s reassurance: I was serving my country. She said Canada, as well as the US, could not afford to be blindsided by the actions of our Russian allies, and I saw the wisdom in this. After V-E Day, there were an increasing number of disturbing cables from Berlin. There may have been something improper about my assignment that required it to remain so deeply concealed. Shemya’s commander, Brigadier General Goodman, had never learned the true nature of my decryptions. On the other hand, if my work was so important that it was only meant for the highest levels of government to see, that suited me. My ambition also proved to be portable. I always wanted to make a name for myself somehow. When I was younger I admit I made some bad choices in pursuit of that aim, which put me on the wrong side of the law. Of course, Miss Maggie knew something about that also. She seemed to know most things.
I told myself to have patience, since the war had only been over for three months. I might yet get to Russia with Dr. Phipps, I thought. I could practically see it from here, and the Aleutian Islands reached toward it like a beckoning finger.
On the base there was a Quonset hut that passed for a library. The books were jammed tightly together on two jerry-rigged shelves, and I often revisited the natural history of the Aleutians. I did not need the author, Mr. McGillicuddy, to tell me about the rocky cliffs that surrounded Shemya like some Alcatraz, twenty-five feet high in the south and almost three hundred feet above sea level in the north, nor the shifting sand dunes like some misplaced corner of the Empty Quarter, nor the standing swamps of the short summer. There was not a single tree, nor hardly anything you could call a flower. From this book I learned about Shemya’s invisible character. The Aleutian chain was formed by volcanoes, still considered active, which explained the steep mountains of the other islands that I flew over when I came here. The Aleutians were born in a sudden hot rage. But Shemya, sheared flat, was unique among them. It rose from the sea, levered up by the Pacific tectonic plate. Shemya continues to rise an inch or two each year. The island is a piece of the sea floor that was hidden for millennia and surfaced in one jarring moment.
I felt a certain sympathy for the place. I hated the idea of sudden exposure.
In this posting, at least I had a window to stare out, unlike the Royal Navy bunker in Victoria. But there, when I stepped outside, the world was always fresh and green and growing. The seasons were marked by a progression of buds unfurling: delicate snowdrops, extravagant rhododendrons, decadent roses. I felt in tune with that world, perhaps in part because I looked on these things with the same eyes as everyone around me while we fought a common enemy, the Japanese. Here, when I raised my head from decoding the Russian radio messages, all I saw outside the Quonset hut were swirling snow and grey light. I felt utterly alone.
My unit commander, Colonel Topping, was a grey-haired veteran of subterfuges that must have gone awry to dump him in this exile also. Then there was another woman under me, Marguerite—of course they would not have me lead men if they could help it. The one who was left, Sergeant Hall, was bitter about his position. I was his lieutenant. He slouched at his desk, surly, waiting desperately no doubt for his own orders to leave. Marguerite said she felt lucky to be deployed still, since the Forces made great efforts to pack up the other ladies as soon as hostilities ended. The men who were demobbed in September darted a surprised glance at us when the orders were announced and did not include our names. But they seemed happy enough to leave Shemya. They must have had something to go home to.
Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night and wondered what it was like to feel. Where did happiness go, where was love, exhilaration, or even rage? In social settings I had to tell my face to smile, because it was no longer natural to me. I looked tired all the time though I went to bed at 10 p.m. each night. I often woke up in a cold sweat. I was careful not to look at the clock so that I didn’t fuss about how long I had been awake. My mind was not easy about Link.
Was he alive?
I found Link on the list of MIAs not long after I arrived in Alaska’s frozen wasteland. Corporal Link Hughes, Royal Corps of Signals, Chindits Special Force, Burma Campaign: Missing in Action.
Would an outside observer think this was my fault? I had played a role in his Burma posting, but surely a rational mind would blame Miss Maggie. She had forced me to report on my colleagues in Victoria, and I noted that Link, then a lieutenant in my decryption unit, had spoken with the Spanish Consul. I thought little of it at the time, since Spain remained neutral throughout the war. I had even met the Consul myself a year earlier at a party hosted by the Lieutenant-Governor. But I should have known nothing was innocent in war: neither what Link did, nor what Miss Maggie asked me to do. She knew that the Consul was providing intelligence to the Japanese. That made Link the traitor she’d been looking for, and she punished him with a hopeless mission behind the front lines, busted down to corporal. Less responsibility, more danger, all to serve her message: she could do as she wanted with him.
The best I could hope for was that Link was a prisoner of war. Yet that was not a thing to wish on anyone. Many Allied prisoners were being found on Pacific islands where they had been held by the Japanese. Emaciation, disease, interrogation, and torture. They were mainly broken. This the public was not told about, of course, since it would dampen our triumph at winning the war. But I knew. I saw the intelligence in its raw form. It was the only time I hated knowing more than other people.
I still kept an article I had clipped out about the USS Yorktown after the Midway battle. Our sigint, or signals intelligence, could not prevent all disasters at sea, and when the Japanese announced that they sank the ship, I broke down and left my post. It was Link that brought me the news of its survival. The Japanese planes had left the battlefield before the sinking was complete. All our men had lived. The Yorktown was my proof that resurrection was possible. The article was tacked above my bunk, as it had been on the base in Victoria, though the paper had become brittle.
There was a map of Burma above my bed also. During sleepless nights I memorized the names of rivers and towns. I circled the places where prisoners were found. But if Link was alive, I knew he could be anywhere. The Japanese shipped their prisoners throughout Asia to wherever they needed slave labour. Now that the POWs were being brought home, I watched the repatriation lists, but Link’s name was never on them.
Link was the second of my two badly chosen men. One dead, and the other exiled.
I had opened my heart to Link, something very rare for me. Miss Maggie understood that and I knew she would always doubt my loyalty. I assumed that Colonel Topping was watching me, reporting my actions, my words, maybe even my facial expressions back to Miss Maggie. After all, he had plenty of free time, since he did no decryptions himself but relied on our summaries. Sometimes my hand shook at awkward times, and I would shove it in my pocket. Except when I was decrypting, which I still got lost in, my thoughts darted everywhere, never settling. She had me secured in a petri dish and it was not possible to stray. We lived in group dormitories. Every outsider who visited Shemya had to come by ship or aeroplane, and each name was recorded on a manifest. From the time I arrived, I had only left the base for short leaves to Anchorage or Skagway, and always with others from my unit. I was never unobserved. I had been dependable for three years, doing her bidding.
But Miss Maggie’s promises turned out to be hollow.
I pushed my finger through the hole in the centre of the
target, a perfect bull’s eye. I was good at this now. I was tempted to mail my paper targets to Miss Maggie so she would know it.
I retraced my steps back to the barracks, the williwaw blowing the fog away suddenly, like it had never been, and I loosened my hood. It was not winter quite yet. It only felt like it most of the time on Shemya. The Aleutians are the frontier where the North Pacific meets the Bering Sea. Siberia didn’t scare me. I was already living it. The tundra felt bouncy under my boots. The earth shivered. I was walking over the peat bog, which was saturated with water, and the ground itself rippled away from me like waves. It was not a good feeling, but I’d passed over this spot many times without mishap.
Goddamn it, why did I care what Miss Maggie thought of me?
I could imagine her caustic words already. “A target is a bit of paper,” she would say. “It’s quite another thing to kill a man.”
CHAPTER TWO
DECEMBER 7, 1945—MORNING
I STARED OUT the porthole, cupping my hand against the glare, soaking up the golden towers and pagodas that gleamed above the trees. Bangkok was like a magical kingdom, different from anything I’d ever known. Until I met Bill Bagley, I’d never ventured from Seattle except to go to the lake with my mother when I was a boy. Bill’s Clockwork Gang took me a few hundred miles north over the Canadian border, but that was the extent of my previous travels. So I was annoyed that Shively wouldn’t even let me stand on deck. Keep a low profile, he said. What a stick in the mud. But his authority came from Bill, so I listened. I’d been forced to listen to Shively ever since he arrived out of the blue last month with Bill’s message at my saloon in Sequim, Washington. I had been both shocked and flattered to be summoned by a man I had thought dead for three years.
