Arctic Front wi-4

by Ian Slater

  Lana shrugged. “It wouldn’t be in the papers if he didn’t want it known. He likes to show off. Big shot. Big kid. They don’t print the rest of it.” Elizabeth was starting off again, Lana catching up, their thick-tread winter boots cracking the brittle ice, their breaths clouds of steam above their anoraks, the ice-crystalline air so clear, the moon looked like a huge communion wafer.

  “You want to talk about it, honey?” said Elizabeth, ever the willing ear to her friends.

  “No,” said Lana. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Honey. Nuthin’—I mean nuthin ‘—fazes ‘Lizabeth Ryan. I’ve seen them all.”

  No, you haven’t, thought Lana, but she said nothing, trying not to think of Jay La Roche, trying to ignore the fact he wouldn’t give her a divorce. He loved power and wouldn’t let go of anything. It wasn’t enough that he owned the huge chemical/arms La Roche multinationals, from New York to Shanghai to Paris. He had to control everyone and everything in his world. Lack of control spelled not only humiliation for Jay La Roche but the secret fear of madness. Yet the great irony, she knew, was that he was already mad — clinically certifiable — but his power was a moat around his castle keep that normal society could not cross. His tabloids would smear anyone who tried. His lawyers would do the rest.

  “Hey,” said Elizabeth, “isn’t it your birthday next month?”

  “You know my blood type, too?” said Lana, smiling, trying harder now to forget Jay La Roche, how one night — the last terrible night, in Shanghai, before she’d left or, more accurately, escaped — in one of his drinking bouts, he’d poured whiskey on it and pushed it into her mouth, telling her if she didn’t suck it “dry… I’ll bash your fucking head in!” And if she threatened to take him to court, he’d use his tabloids, not on her but to smear “shit all over your lovey-dovey Ma and Pa — the big fucking admiral and Mrs. Fucking Admiral!” And then later, in the gray of the China dawn, he’d come in to her like a whipped spaniel, stale, boozy breath, telling her he was sorry, that he loved her. And the most awful part of it was her knowing he meant it — that he couldn’t control his other self, the one beneath the public persona, beneath the lean, suave, rich-industrialist smile, the one that turned every act of love into a depraved ritual, obsessive and obscene.

  “He’s a survivor,” said Elizabeth, and for a moment Lana thought she meant Jay.

  “He’s probably got his feet up in Elmendorf,” said Elizabeth heartily, “chewing the fat with some other hotshot pilot. Probably writing you a letter this minute. Oh Lordy, will you look at that now!” It was a Marine sergeant, stepping out of a Humvee, the driver making a U-turn so the vehicle was facing back toward the town as the sergeant driver approached the two nurses.

  “My,” said Elizabeth huskily. “I’d sure like to mother him.”

  “Elizabeth!” said Lana as the sergeant kept walking toward them.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Elizabeth continued, unabashed. “He could ‘spect my plumbin’ any day. Mind you, he’d have to say, ‘Please, ma’am — pretty please.’ “

  “Hussy!” said Lana.

  “That’s me — Boston Boobs. You lookin’ for me, Sergeant?”

  “Ah — ah yes, ma’am. You Lieutenant Brentwood?”

  “I am,” said Lana.

  “Ma’am,” said the sergeant, snapping a salute. “They said you were heading over to Stormy’s.”

  “Yes.”

  There was an awkward silence, and all Lana could hear was the spitting of the Humvee’s exhaust, its long, bluish white curl trailing up behind the truck then suddenly disappearing in the pristine night air.

  “Ma’am…” The sergeant saluted again and gave her the brown-widow envelope. It was stiff with cold. She couldn’t open it with her mittens, and Elizabeth did it for her but didn’t read it. Despite her almost legendary self-control Lana was crying, the tears freezing her cheeks.

  “Can we give you a lift, ma’am?”

  Lana looked at Elizabeth. She needed help. Elizabeth told the sergeant to forget Stormy’s, to return them to the base. Then halfway back she thought perhaps they should have gone to Stormy’s after all. Do something. Anything. She didn’t know. They returned to the base.

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” said Elizabeth, noting the man’s name patch: Dukowski. Ah.

  Inside the Quonset hut, Lana was collecting herself, surprised at how poorly she’d handled it. “Good grief,” she sobbed to Elizabeth, “I deal with this every week on the wards. I mean I used to—”

  Elizabeth handed her a mug of coffee that Lana held between her knees for warmth. She began rocking gently back and forth like an old woman, and it bothered Elizabeth more than when Lana had first read the fax. “Hell, honey,” Elizabeth tried to assure her, “never the same till it hits you.”

  “No,” said Lana. “No, it isn’t.”

  “Now you listen to me, Lana. That dumb old fax says ‘MIA.’ That doesn’t mean… Well, if he’s MIA, he could be on the ice pack up there. Better’n in the drink.” Elizabeth looked up at the curved ceiling of the Quonset hut. No matter that it wasn’t a ward — everything smelled of antiseptic. “Man, I never thought I’d be thanking God it was winter.”

  “I — don’t understand,” said Lana.

  “Well, summertime they’d be in the water. Freezin’ water. They stand a better chance out there on the ice.”

  “They?” Lana was confused.

  “Two guys in a Tomcat, Lana.”

  “Oh.”

  “I know all about Tomcats, honey,” said Elizabeth smiling. “I like ’em!”

  Lana tried to be cheerful in kind but everything about her, the darkness about the Quonset hut, the smells of the hospital, of fresh coffee brewing, oppressed her — the very air suddenly too heavy and the forlorn howl of the Arctic wind soul-crushing. Other nurses — nurses who had lost loved ones — said it was the not knowing that was the worst, not knowing for sure whether they were alive or dead, but Lana felt no such yearning for a definite answer. So long as they weren’t certain definite knowns there was hope that Frank had been rescued — or, as Elizabeth had said, was on the ice waiting to be rescued.

  What frightened her most was that now, when she wanted desperately to remember every detail of her and Frank’s intimacy, of his strength and gentleness when they made love, she couldn’t see him clearly in her mind’s eye. It had happened before, at moments when it seemed that she had wanted him too much. Jay La Roche’s face, on the other hand, was so clear, his jealousy and hate so palpable, it was as if he were a presence in the room, with his contemptuous smile of victory, his eyes coke-sniffing bright and alive.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Not one of the two thousand men in the two ANGES— Alaska National Guard Eskimo Scouts — believed that the four-foot-diameter, eight-hundred-mile-long pipeline that snaked its way from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope through the majestic Brooks Mountains, over the Yukon River and down to Valdez on Alaska’s south coast, could be adequately protected. Neither did Joe Mell.

  Joe wasn’t in the Eskimo Scouts, and Mell wasn’t his real name, but white men could never get Athabascan names right, so he called himself “Mell.” “Fucking Eskimo,” was what one of the whites had called him. Joe never forgot it, along with all the other insults. “All right,” he said, taking another suck of Southern Comfort, looking down morosely at his snow-shoes — he’d made them the traditional way, from birch, and used caribou rawhide for the lacing — so the pink noses thought he was a dumb Eskimo. All they saw was a native with no teeth left and a rubbery smile.

  He took another drag at the Southern Comfort. What did they know? Pink nose big shots from the oil companies down south, coming up with their prefabricated houses to give to all the natives. “No problem, pops!” they’d said. “You just stick ‘em together.” Yeah — well the pink noses didn’t think he knew about Bethel town, far to the southwest, where the Kuskokwim River flows into the Bering Sea. The big shots had guys put all the prefabricated huts up
in the summer, but come the winter they all started to crack and buckle. Joe took another belt of the Southern Comfort, swallowed, and grinned. Sod houses were still the best — had a soul. They knew the Arctic winds and ice. Sod houses didn’t fight the weather like the white man. Sod houses let their earth give a little here and there, and the wind understood. No crazy stiff doors either — only sealskin storm entrances that started way back from the house in the earth and angled up to keep out the snow. All white men weren’t bad, though. Or stupid. One, from the other side of the ice bridge— the other big country — had paid him in the Cold War. A lot of money and booze, with a promise of much more if the Hot War broke out. Joe was to break the long silver snake. It wasn’t a big pipe. All you had to do was wait for the next blizzard so there’d be no tracks found after and wrap a belt of hide about the four-foot-diameter pipe with the white package attached to the belt. You pushed the white button and you had five minutes — plenty of time to get away, even in deep snow, the man said. Then the rest of the money — U.S. dollars — would come. And whose country was it anyway? When some pink noses bought Alaska, the rest of the pink noses booed them, said it wasn’t worth anything. So how come the pink noses had come up in the thousands? It sure didn’t belong to the native people anymore. The pink noses from across the strait weren’t much better. They stopped the Eskimo people from walking across the ice to meet their cousins and took everybody off the big island because some big pink nose secret had been going on there. One of the pink noses from across the strait said one of their sailors, called “Bering,” discovered Alaska. Joe had known it was there all the time. Another thing he knew: the pipeline didn’t belong here. It was like a scar on the land, as if a beautiful chukchee woman had taken her k/k — blubber knife — and slashed it across her face. It was a desecration. But if you put the strap on the silver snake, would the fire despoil the land?

  “No,” the Russian pink nose had told him. “Not at all. The fire will only burn the oil.” Then Joe knew the white men sucking the oil from the North Slope would have to stop. Those who had insulted his Athabascan forebears with filthy talk about Eskimos wouldn’t try to scar the land again — they’d know what could happen.

  Joe heard the wounded cry of the land in the Arctic storm and knew it would not end until he had placated its soul, healed its hurt. Unhurriedly he put on his kamleika, the gut raincoat that once belonged to his father, and taking the hide strap and its package he crawled out through the sealskin storm trap and called the dogs, now like white lumps of sugar in the swirling snow. From his sod house through the village to the stretch of pipeline that bent in a long, gentle curve in the frozen valley of the Dietrich River on to the southern side of the mighty Brooks Range — the pink noses even gave their names to the sacred places — would take only half an hour. The silver snake would now be caked in an icy sheet, running alongside the wide gravel trail from Fairbanks in the center of Alaska to Prudhoe Bay on the Beaufort Sea. The pink noses called it the Dalton Highway. He took another swig from the bottle. Worst of all, some of his people had been traitors, had gone into the pink nose courts and palavered for money to allow the silver snake to despoil the land.

  Joe looked intently at the dogs. Only the lead husky had turned and paid him any mind. They were tired and he was tired and he took another suck at the bottle then murmured to the dogs in the dialect of his parents, who had come from Galena far to the west. But the dogs didn’t know his parents’ dialect, as he only used it when he was drunk. Throwing the empty bottle away, he reverted to the dialect again, shouting into the wind, the words meaning “To hell with it. I’ll use the Ski-Doo!”

  Unsteadily he pulled the starter cord at least a dozen times and fell over once before the Ski-Doo gave forth its crackling roar. It backfired several times before settling into its high-pitched whine. He told himself the Greenpeace noses would be as happy as he was, because they were the only pink noses who understood about desecrating mother nature. The Ski-Doo plowed into heavy drift, but Joe gave the throttle sleeve more twist, and the steering skis went straight through it. Dogs were scattering in the village as he whooped at them — an old man shouting at Joe, telling him that he must show more respect for the dogs. But Joe was already through the hamlet, snow-curtained birch slipping by him on either side of the trail he knew like the back of his hand. The irony of the whole situation was that Joe Mell was considered by the Siberian Military Intelligence “canvasser” as one of the least reliable of the half-dozen natives they had suborned and the least likely to succeed in the mission.

  * * *

  On Ratmanov Island more than two hundred SPETS commandos streaming out of the exits fired at the descending shapes as they became visible only a few meters from the ground. Had they been paratroopers coming down it would have been a massacre; the SPETS’ marksmanship with the AK-74s was highly accurate. They hit everything that had been used to weigh the chutes down. It took the white-uniformed SPETS, all but invisible against the snow, only two or three minutes to realize they’d been obmanuty—”had”—and, fearing an air attack, they quickly retreated to the exit/entrances like ants being vacuumed back into their deep hive, leaving the dozens of American chutes buffeted by wind and rain mixed with snow in the swirling blizzard now blanketing the island.

  “Make sure the engineers have double-checked the exit/entrance seals,” ordered Dracheev.

  “They’re already doing it, Comrade General.”

  “Good! The Americans are obviously going to use their Smart bombs. They have deceived us into betraying our exit points. The chaff must have covered the approach of a reconnaissance aircraft.”

  “Their Smart bombs cannot take out the Saddam entrances,” said his aide, but his voice betrayed more hope than conviction. The general asked his radar chief if there were any signs of another American air attack on its way. There were none. His aides crowded around him, the smell of sweat mixing with the oily odor of the tunnel complexes’ gun emplacements on rails behind sealed doors at the cliff face. General Dracheev was biting his bottom lip as he bent over the table’s map trace, computer consoles giving immediate zoom blowups on the screen whenever he touched any part of the island map. He was worried. The whole point of having made Ratmanov self-contained, self-sufficient, was so that it could survive without Novosibirsk having to risk vitally needed aircraft over the narrow strait. But now the American Freeman would know where the exits were, and he was bound to send in air strikes, though the heavy snowfall would work in Dracheev’s favor, effectively cutting the American flyers’ laser beams. Even so, the only exits Dracheev could now use with any reliability were the two emergency exits — R1, a quarter mile from complex one, at the midpoint of the northern half of the island, and R2, above complex two on the southern end of the island, the same distance from Dracheev’s control bunker. Two exits for up to two thousand SPETS.

  It had the makings of a disaster. Dracheev knew that if he failed to hold the Americans until Novosibirsk HQ had time to reinforce the Siberian coastal defenses, it would be best if he stayed on the island rather than make a run for it aboard his chopper to the mainland, for he would almost certainly be shot for his failure. But then he had what he called his osenivshaya ideya— “brain wave”—born of the fear of what would happen if he didn’t hold the island — and from the deep anger he had experienced at being duped by the American Freeman’s fake paratroopers, a humiliation made worse for Dracheev by the fact that in addition to his regular troops manning the island’s underground AA network, he was answerable for the effective use of the SPETS, Siberia’s elite force.

  “We don’t have much time,” he quickly told his aides in Ratmanov control. “We’ll use two emergency exits. Exit one for complex one, exit two for complex two.”

  “Eto originalno”— “That’s original,” murmured one of the SPETS, but Dracheev did not demand an apology. He had made a serious mistake sending out the SPETS before he had visual confirmation that they were really Allied paratroopers desce
nding and not dummies, and the SPETS had every right to expect him to correct it. “I ‘m confident,” he told them, “that the Smart bombs, while they may take out one or two of the exits the Americans have discovered, will not—”

  “Samolyoty vraga priblizhayutsya!”—”Hostile aircraft approaching! Rising from Seward Peninsula.”

  “All second-level plates are to be sealed!” Dracheev ordered. He meant each exit’s number two hatch, slotted in at the sixty-foot level in every one-hundred-foot spiral stair exit, had to be sealed like the hatches of a diving submarine, just in case any of the Smart bombs’ high-explosive charges were, despite the lack of laser beam accuracy, lucky enough to blow out the top Saddam seal.

  Within minutes the bombs started to fall. The lights in Control flickered momentarily as circuits were broken and auxiliary generators kicked in. General Dracheev, his legs shaking involuntarily from the Smart weapons’ bombardment, turned anxiously and angrily to his aide. “The American flyer we captured. Do you think he knows what Freeman’s strategy is?”

  “He hasn’t talked yet, General. He’s a tough customer. We’ve tried to…”

  “Then try again!” snapped Dracheev. The aide nodded to one of the two SPETS nearby. “Anyone can be made to talk!”

  “With pleasure,” said the SPETS who, on his way down the corridor, announced matter-of-factly to his colleague, “The general’s right. Everyone has their breaking point.”

  “Even you?” asked the other SPETS challengingly.

  “Yes. Of course. I couldn’t withstand what I’m about to do to that American bastard. You’ll see.”

  Electronic monitors were telling General Dracheev that four of the manhole covers had been breached and that the other six should not have their secondary hatches opened, even after the air raid had ended, for fear of red-hot debris raining down the shaft.