by Ian Slater
CHAPTER TEN
Half a world away in Unalaska’s Dutch Harbor, the woman in the jeep coming out of the mist toward the howl of Lieutenant Alen’s Hercules was not the Wave Alen was expecting.
“Where’s Lana?” he asked the Wave sergeant.
“Lieutenant Brentwood can’t make it, sir.”
“She sick?”
“No, sir. She’s sorry, but Voice of America is doing a special report on the NATO front. She’s hoping to pick up some more news about where her brother’s division might be.”
“Oh—” said Alen, trying not to show his disappointment. “Well — thanks for coming out and telling me.” The Wave appeared not to hear him, or was she asking another question, one hand holding down her cap, the other cupped about her mouth against the howl of the Hercules’ four props.
“So?” yelled the copilot to Alen. “What d’you say?” Alen was looking blankly at him. In his disappointment he hadn’t been paying much attention to the Wave sergeant, and there was an awkward moment before he realized that she was asking if she could take the flight to Adak. Unconsciously Alen was letting his eye rove over her body. The Wave outfit was just about the sexiest uniform he’d seen on a woman — the snappy navy cap and the tunic that, whether or not the designer had intended it, had easily sailed through the sea changes of fashion, emphasizing the bust by trying to camouflage it.
“Sure,” said Alen. “O’Sullivan, isn’t it?”
“Reilley,” she corrected him. “Sergeant Mary Reilley.”
“It’s Irish anyhow.” Alen grinned. “Welcome aboard.”
The tall, gangly engineer in his midtwenties from Texas whom they called “the Turk” for a reason no one could figure out was asked to make sure that Sergeant Reilley was strapped in tight. The two-hourly weather adjustment was for millimaws and more of the fog that one minute would obliterate the brutal majesty of the far-flung volcanic islands and the next be blown asunder by a millimaw, replaced by driving rain, snow, and hail all at once.
As the Hercules took off — all by instruments because of the fog — Alen banked quickly, taking the C-130 E, with twenty-one tons of food and electronic supplies for Adak, well away from the hidden and towering mass of Makushin Volcano. The sixty-seven-hundred-foot-high mountain rising immediately west of Dutch Harbor on the northern end of Unalaska was now visible only on his radar. Mary Reilly was asking the engineer on her helmet’s flip mike whether or not it would be possible for them to “hop across” from Adak to Attu Island. She had been told a “horror story,” she said, of how in World War II over fifteen thousand poorly equipped American soldiers, trained for desert warfare, had been sent in against a smaller but much better-trained and dug-in garrison of three thousand Japanese troops. Turk said he didn’t know much about that war. “All I know, ma’am, is that the Japanese are our allies in this one.”
Reilley, voice straining against the background noise of the Hercules, was asking him another question, but she kept forgetting to depress the talk button. She couldn’t believe how much noise military planes made compared to civil aircraft. The Turk was just sitting there watching her lips move, which would have suited him nicely, but he didn’t want to be rude and pointed again to the talk button.
“Oh, yes, sorry,” said Reilley. “I heard they — I mean we — thought the Japanese would use the Aleutians as kind of — you know — stepping stones to the United States.”
“They did,” cut in Alen. “They attacked Dutch Harbor, middle of forty-two. Wanted to sucker our Pacific Fleet up here — what was left of it after Pearl Harbor. Course, they thought we ‘d use Attu and the other islands as stepping stones to them. You’re in a very strategic area, Sergeant—”
“Call me Mary.”
“Okeydoke, Mary.”
“I’m surprised that the Russians haven’t tried something up here,” she said.
“They will,” Alen answered. “When they’re ready. Those sons of—” He paused.
“Bitches,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. Well, they’ve got their hands full right now.”
“I dunno,” countered the copilot. “What I hear is, they’re doin’ pretty good in Europe.”
“Maybe so,” said Alen, “but Ivan’s tricky, man. They could still decide to go for it up here — try our back door. Sure as hell take the NATO heat off their western front.”
“Russkies don’t like two fronts,” said the copilot. “That’s what I heard.”
“That’s it,” said Alen derisively. “Fight the last friggin’ war. Sure way to lose this one.”
“That where Lana’s kid brother is?” asked Turk.
Christ, thought Alen, glancing over at the copilot. The Turk could always be depended on to open his mouth and screw everything up. Just when they were impressing big-chested Mary, Turk had to shift the conversation to another woman.
“Yeah,” said Alen quickly, “he’s somewhere over there.”
“He’s trapped in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket,” said Mary.
“You sure know a lot about this war,” said Turk ingratiatingly. Alen didn’t mind — at least they were back talking about her.
“Not really,” said Mary.
“Shit!” It was the copilot, his exclamation followed by a dull thump on the fuselage. Instinctively Mary pulled her head back. There was another. “Fuck — sorry, miss. Damn seabirds.” Their dark blood and gizzards, splattered on the Hercules’ windscreen, went into long, spidery, scarlet webs under the pressure of the head wind, the Hercules’ air speed now at four hundred miles per hour. Despite the increasing turbulence, driving the birds into the aircraft, the big transport with its twenty-one tons of cargo and a maximum fuel load of thirty tons, loaded at Dutch Harbor to save refueling from Adak’s precious store, was heavy enough to minimize the rough ride. Even so, the impact of the birds had given the Wave a bad fright, and Alen quickly and adroitly steered the conversation back to her knowledge of the war in Europe. Nothing like praise to calm the nerves.
“Heck,” said Reilley bashfully. “I don’t know that much about it. It’s just that Lana and I work the same shift and— well, when she talks about her brothers, she keeps me up-to-date, I guess—”
“How old is he?” asked Turk.
Oh, Christ! thought Alen. There he goes again.
“Oh,” said the Wave, “David’s in his early twenties, I think. He’s been around, though. He was in Korea first— with Freeman.”
Turk let out a low, respectful whistle.
“Well,” interjected Alen impatiently, “if he’s fought with Freeman, he’s a survivor. I wouldn’t worry about him.”
Mary Reilley was nonplussed by Alen’s remark, a tone of condescension in it, but for whom — David Brentwood? Because he, Alen, hadn’t yet seen combat? Or was it disdain for Freeman? Freeman was one of Mary Reilley’s heroes in a world where it was no longer fashionable to have heroes, especially not military ones. To his troops, the general was known as George C. Scott, for, like Patton, Freeman had proved himself daring and, to many, insufferably brave. Convinced of his mission — to “drive back the Mongols,” as he put it, by which, his critics charged, the general meant anyone not born in either “the old British Empire” or “the new American one”—Freeman had given America its first, and so far only, good news in the war. As now, aboard the Hercules, whenever his name was mentioned, it evoked powerful emotions and left no middle ground. The media especially was divided into those who hated to say anything good about him and those who loved saying anything bad about him. But on one point, as Mary Reilley pointed out, there was unanimity: he had turned things around in Korea.
“Yeah,” agreed Turk. “We were damned near in the drink over there.”
Alen interjected that it was kind of “strange” for a nurse to like a combat general, adding, “I heard Freeman was the first general on our side to use women in combat. That right?”
Mary said nothing. The lieutenant was starting to get on her nerves, his comments les
s questions than taunts against what he obviously thought were her “butch” sensibilities. Hell, thought Mary, it wasn’t her fault Lana couldn’t make it.
“That right?” pressed Alen. “Chopper One in the Pyongyang raid was flown by a ‘skirt’?”
“You want to be in combat, miss?” asked Turk, looking puzzled.
“I don’t want to be in combat, but heck, if you can do the job, what difference does it make whether you’re—”
The next two thuds on the fuselage interrupted her. “But I mean if we’re outnumbered by the Russians, and we are, then—”
The next instant she was flattened out, arms pinned hard back against the fuselage, her mouth gasping like a stunned fish. Turk was gone — out of the flapping, gaping hole where his monitor console had been — and there was a long, bluish light in front of her, fluttering like a silk scarf — a tongue of high-octane flame — and above it a roaring, then all about crashing sounds as the crated cargo shifted and came adrift, crashing through its webbing straps, the Hercules now in a spin, the suction tearing at her, ripping open her tunic, the icy blasts so powerful, she felt as if her nostrils were burning. Alen slumped in his seat, the copilot shouting, “Mayday!… Mayday!…”
* * *
Wreckage from the Hercules was found sliding up and down the swells about fifteen miles north of the smoking Okmok Caldera, a volcanic cone on the eastern end of Umnak Island 130 miles west of Dutch Harbor. In a feat of oceanographic skill unmatched since the Howard Hughes-CIA “Glomar Challenger” retrieval of a sunken Soviet Golf-class submarine in the 1960s, a U.S. Navy two-man submersible, flown in from Valdez over nine hundred miles away, located the black box from the Hercules.
As well as the hard disk recording of the chitchat between cockpit and the unauthorized Wave passenger, the USAF investigators flown in from Anchorage were able to agree that the transport had been operating under normal procedure. The radar, the black box showed, had been on, but the investigators noted that in the heavy fog, no doubt exacerbated by wind shear conditions from the approaching millimaw, an error could have been made by either Lieutenant Alen or his copilot in interpreting the blips occurring on the radar. Most of the blips recorded on the radar strip were confirmed by thumps faintly discernible on the sound disk; thus it appeared that whatever it was that had struck the Hercules, passing through the engineer’s position, could have been mistaken for yet another seabird approaching — possibly a royal albatross. These big birds had a seven-foot wingspan and were easily capable of giving a very distinct blip on the plane’s high-definition radar.
This explanation by the USAF investigators was accepted by the Dutch Harbor board of inquiry, particularly as meteorological reports from the small settlement of Nikolski on the western end of Umnak Island confirmed that quake tremors, registering 4.6 on the Richter scale, and intermittent volcanic activity from the seven-thousand-foot-high Mount Vsevidof on the western end of the island had been recorded. Volcanic activity in and about the Okmok Caldera, at the eastern end of the island, was suspected as boulder-sized rocks thrown up, even at subsonic speed, by either volcano could have easily doomed the aircraft. An act of God.
Even so, the commanding officer of Dutch Harbor was severely reprimanded for having allowed the unauthorized flight of Sgt. Mary Eileen Reilley, and the officer commanding the Wave detachment, Maj. Brenda Sharp, was named in the issuances of an upcoming naval inquiry as an “interested party.” In navy parlance this meant that because Major Sharp had not signed a piece of paper, her career was effectively finished. For this, as well as for Sergeant Reilley’s death, the major in her turn held Lana Brentwood directly responsible. The scuttlebutt — and now the gossip was much cruder and harsher than before — was that Brentwood had jerked off some Limey back East, had been sent to Siberia, and had now screwed up the Wave CO, and done in an NCO while she was at it. The advice given every new arrival to Dutch Harbor was “Stay away from Lana.” She was unlucky.
* * *
The bodies from the Hercules were never found, no surprise to the fishermen who worked nets from Dutch Harbor to Amchitka or anywhere else around the seven-thousand-foot-deep Aleutian Trench. The Bering Sea was a protein soup, from the tiny plankton whose diurnal migrations cluttered your sonar to the big killer whales. If you were dead or couldn’t move, you were feed — and quickly. In any event, Unalaska Coast Guard requested that any fishermen working the waters off the steaming black sands of Okmok Caldera should immediately report any debris they found. The coast guard was upbraided by SOWAC, the local Status of Women Action Committee, for using the word “fishermen,” and it issued the request for “fisherpersons” to assist.
As it turned out, one fisherman, Pete Bering — who was erroneously claimed by the locals to be a direct descendant of explorer Vitus Bering — and his crew were working the waters off Umnak but had been well off the southwestern tip of the island the day of the crash. As it might be a week before Bering had his boat’s hold full of pollack and he could head back toward Dutch Harbor a hundred miles east of him, Bering radioed the coast guard to say that while he and his crew of three had heard a plane overhead, they’d been in heavy fog and so hadn’t seen it go down.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When the brooding gray mountains of cumulus shifted above Unalaska, there were moments of stunning wild beauty — the United States’ wind-riven bases in the Aleutians changing suddenly from fog-shrouded bleakness to a cold but clear sky, an expanse of Arctic turquoise that in a moment seemed to clear the mind of island fever. At nightfall the lights of Dutch Harbor would take on a sparkling quality in the pristine Arctic air, reminding Lana Brentwood of the summer nights as a child in the Sierra Nevada, of the days before the war when the whole family would go camping. The days had been hot and dry, the nights getting colder, just before Labor Day and the start of the new school year.
Those nights came back to her now as she went for her evening stroll on the road leading from the bluish cold of Dutch Harbor. She could smell the coming of winter in the air and instinctively pulled her Wave’s parka about her, the Quallofil lining sighing as it collapsed, a sound that brought back memories of a favorite red down jacket her father had given her. Things had been so predictable then, the sad end of summer, the anxiety-veined anticipation of the new school year, and a new jacket from her parents. Most kids took jackets as standard fare, but her father wasn’t an admiral then, and on a captain’s pay, with the three boys and her to put through school, a new jacket was something to celebrate. Later, when she married Jay La Roche, a think coat was no big deal, but now at least she didn’t have to fear Jay anymore. The world might be at war, but she wasn’t — at least not with him — and save for her brief encounter with the horror of battle wounds she had seen when caring for young William Spence aboard the hospital ship on the East Coast, the war was a long way away from Unalaska.
She knew that with the western tip of the Aleutian chain pointing toward Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, her feeling of isolation from the war was in fact very much an illusion. The big Soviet missiles on Kamchatka pointing toward the United States were countered by the United States’ missiles on Shemya, which, despite its small size, was the most heavily armed place on earth. Its missiles were only minutes from the Russian mainland. Lana offered up a silent prayer to any power that might exist that so long as the war remained CONHTTECH— in the jargon of the strategist, conventional high-tech war — a war in where there might still be a chance that all would not disintegrate, killing millions, suffocating the earth, reason might yet prevail in the madness. She pulled the jacket more tightly about her, the very chill of the thought of nuclear holocaust adding to the chill of the Arctic front.
If the war did go nuclear, then pray she’d go in the fireball and not suffer the horrible, lingering death of radiation. The thought of her hair falling out in clumps was more terrifying to Lana than all the other horrible possibilities, like those that had afflicted Ray, the burn on his face making him a walking ni
ghtmare so that even his children could not find it in them yet to look straight at him. According to the last letter her mom had sent her, Ray’s appearance was changed again. Whether it was the eighth of ninth operation, Lana no longer knew. And despite their mom’s assertion that Ray was looking “better and better,” Lana saw no change in the photograph, an awful, polished plastic sheen instead of a face of real skin that made it look like a tight mask, its stretched-skinlike quality not diminished by the prints, which were not glossy but matte-finished. Lana’s use of mattes instead of glossies was a deliberate attempt to delude herself of the reality: that with all the magic of laser and plastic surgery — and it was magic in what it could sometimes do — Ray would never look normal again. She was surprised that Beth and Ray were still together, with him a virtual prisoner in La Jolla’s Veterans’ burn unit outside San Diego, and Beth up in Seattle with the two children. For a moment Lana was jealous — at least they were together in the way it mattered. An old line from her favorite movie came to her, and she could see Katharine Hepburn alone and lonely in Venice and counseling a beautiful blonde who was complaining about her husband, “Don’t knock it, cookie. Two’s the most beautiful number in the world.” Well, it was if the other one wasn’t Jay La Roche.
