The Great Alone

by Janet Dailey

  “Wylie.” She recognized his voice, stunned to discover that not even the snapshot had prepared her for the shocking change in his appearance.

  He scratched at his beard. “It’s me underneath all this thick fuzz.” He shrugged out of the parka and draped it on the hall tree.

  The action seemed to break the spell that had held her motionless. She quickly crossed the room to his side, but when he started to put his arm around her, Lisa drew back. Up close, he looked leaner and tougher than she remembered. She glanced over her shoulder at Steve, trying to blame her reluctance on his presence.

  “Wylie, I’d like you to meet my boss, Steve Bogardus.” She led him over to meet Steve.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, Private Cole.” Smiling warmly, Steve shook hands with him, but Lisa was conscious of the way Wylie coolly studied him.

  “I’m afraid I can’t say the same, Steve. Lisa hasn’t mentioned you at all.”

  Lisa flushed guiltily; even though she hadn’t actually gone out on a date with Steve, she enjoyed his company. “Mother invited Mr. Bogardus to dinner tonight, Wylie,” she said.

  “I wasn’t about to turn down the chance to enjoy a home-cooked meal,” Steve added.

  Lisa could have hugged him for the way he backed her up and made it sound very innocent—which it was, she reminded herself. “You haven’t eaten, have you, Wylie? Mama always cooks enough food to feed an army. I know there’ll be plenty to eat if you want to join us.”

  “Like Steve, I’m not about to turn down a home-cooked meal.”

  With seven for dinner, the Blomquists’ table was crowded. Wylie found the seating arrangement to his satisfaction, since it put Lisa on his left and her boss, Steve Bogardus, across the table from him, allowing him to observe both of them.

  He’d always known Lisa might start seeing someone else. With so many men concentrated in Anchorage and so few women, it was a foregone conclusion that she’d have ample opportunity to date. He’d almost managed to convince himself that it wouldn’t be fair to expect her to sit home alone and wait for him, that it would be all right if she dated a few guys. After all, there was a war on, and who knew what might happen to him? When he came back, that was the time to settle things between them.

  But every time he saw Bogardus glance at Lisa—even though he believed they weren’t actually dating yet—he wanted to reach across that table and mash his face to a bloody pulp. And Lisa’s mother didn’t help the situation by making her preference for Bogardus very clear by the way she manipulated the conversation to show him in a favorable light. Wylie had always known that she had never really liked him. Now with the pressure she was putting on Lisa and the natural temptation of someone like Bogardus, he knew it was only a matter of time before Lisa gave in.

  And there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. He’d virtually given her permission to see other men while he was away, so how could he object now?

  Hell, he wasn’t blind. He could see what Bogardus had going for him—he was here, on the spot, in contact with Lisa every day. And the man was probably getting rich off these government contracts. It was obvious he had her whole family wrapped around his finger by the way they all laughed at his jokes. Wylie supposed Bogardus was good-looking if a person liked the Van Johnson type. Although Lisa tried to hide it, he could tell by the way she kept looking at Bogardus then looking self-consciously away that she was attracted to him. And Wylie’s frustration mounted because he didn’t have a single damned right to condemn her for it.

  Lisa’s father and brothers practically deluged Wylie with questions about what was going on, but to most of them he had to plead ignorance even when he knew the answers. Attached, as his Scout group was, to Army Intelligence, there were a lot of things he knew—some by rumor, some from reliable sources, and some personally.

  But he couldn’t talk about the sightings of Japanese ships in Aleutian waters or that their presence and activity indicated they were seeking out landing sites. Nor could he mention that strategists in Washington wanted to launch an invasion against Japan from Nome, Siberia, and Kamchatka, an impossibility without Russian cooperation, and Russia had yet to declare war on Japan. He couldn’t discuss the secret bases that had been built at Dutch Harbor and Cold Bay on Unalaska and Umnak Islands under the guise of a fish cannery—bases General Buckner had ordered built without authorization, since they commanded the strait that provided shipping access to Siberia, Nome, the whole Upper Alaskan Peninsula, and the eastern half of the Aleutian Islands.

  Earlier that afternoon, he’d aroused his grandmother’s curiosity with his questions about their family history, especially about their ancestor Tasha, who had lived not only on Kodiak, but on Unalaska, Adak, and Attu. She’d become suspicious when he’d asked too many specific questions about the islands themselves in an effort to obtain whatever sketchy information she could give him about the terrain, natural harbors, caves, landmarks—anything that might be of use.

  Everything seemed to indicate there would soon be action somewhere in the Aleutian chain. He’d talked to a couple of the Aleuts in his outfit who had trapped on some of the islands and learned quite a bit from them. But on the whole, very little was known about the islands. No detailed mapping had ever been done. The pilots were using Rand McNally road maps, and the Navy had charts that were based on a Russian survey done back in 1864.

  There were times when Wylie doubted that the War Department realized just how big Alaska was. It had thirty-four thousand miles of coastline, more than the entire United States. On most maps, the Aleutian Islands were never shown to scale. As a result, they usually ended up resembling the Florida Keys. There was a big difference, however. They stretched some twelve hundred miles westward from the tip of the Alaska Peninsula. From Anchorage to the westernmost island of Attu, it was almost two thousand miles.

  It was a hell of a lot of territory to patrol, especially when the Army had only five combat squadrons in its air force and five thousand combat troops with twenty thousand support personnel and the Navy had only three cutters, maybe a dozen destroyers—more than half of them World War I class—five cruisers, six antique S-boat submarines, some PBY seaplanes and tenders, and a fleet of Yippee boats, mostly small fishing crafts purchased by the Navy to patrol the waters. And no one knew just where the Japanese might strike.

  Wylie had never claimed to be a brilliant military strategist, but even he could look at a map and see that Alaska was a lot closer to Japan than Hawaii was. If the Japanese took Hawaii, they’d still have to cross twenty-five hundred miles of ocean to reach targets on the West Coast. But if they took Alaska, the Bremerton Navy Yard and the Boeing bomber plant in Seattle were only three hours flying time away. All of Canada and the United States would be exposed—and Russia would be at point-blank range. As close as Japan was, a supply line could easily be established.

  But Wylie could talk about none of that. He had to act dumb and look like some stupid GI while Bogardus knowledgeably discussed how the military road from the U.S. to Alaska was to be built and how the workers, civilian and military, were to be deployed all along the route to begin construction at several points at once.

  Dinner that night was the longest meal he’d ever had to sit through. But it finally ended. Although Lisa’s mother urged Bogardus to stay a while longer, he insisted he had some plans to study. Wylie watched silently while Lisa saw him to the door.

  “I’ll pick you up Monday morning,” he heard Bogardus say.

  “I’ll be ready.”

  Wylie realized that she rode to work with him every morning—and probably home every night, too. And he wouldn’t be around to do anything about it. Spring was on its way. The winter storms that plagued the northern seas would be abating. He had a hunch that if the Japs were going to make a move against Alaska it would happen soon. If or when that happened, as a Scout he was destined for the front lines. They were a commando unit, trained to conduct raids and infiltrate enemy positions. He didn’t know when he�
�d have another chance to see Lisa again.

  After Bogardus left, Lisa’s father discreetly shooed the boys from the room to give Wylie a chance to be alone with her. She walked over to him, nervously rubbing her palms together.

  “Wylie, I’d like to explain about Mr. Bogardus—” she began.

  He cut her off. “You don’t owe me any explanations, Lisa.”

  “But—”

  “Let’s just drop it, shall we?” He was angry, and he knew it showed.

  “All right.” But she appeared confused and hurt by his attitude.

  CHAPTER LV

  Dutch Harbor, Unalaska Island

  June 3, 1942

  It was early morning, barely half past five. From the small encampment on the shoulder of Ballyhoo Mountain, Wylie surveyed the mountain-ringed bay below. There was a break in the storm that had plagued the island chain for nearly two weeks, hampering the efforts of the meager air and Navy patrols to locate the Japanese task force that, according to CINCPAC intelligence, was headed for the Aleutians. Heavy clouds lingered overhead, but the driving rain had stopped, and the powerful wind—the dreaded williwaw—no longer roared down the volcanic canyons around Dutch Harbor, flattening tents and anything else in its path, For a change, nothing obscured Wylie’s view of the harbor, its naval station, and Fort Mears.

  The rising sun made a feeble attempt to penetrate the clouds as Wylie scanned the long fingerlike body of water that was Unalaska Bay, the same bay where Captain Cook had anchored during his search for the Northwest Passage, the same bay along which his ancestor Tasha had once lived at the time of the initial uprising against the Russians. Now here he was, part of a small detachment of Scouts sent to Unalaska to gather intelligence, while others were at Kodiak, the Pribilofs, Cold Bay, and Umnak.

  A canvas flap rustled behind him. Wylie turned as Big Jim Dawson stepped out of his tent and paused to yawn and stretch, looking like some big burly bear just emerging from a winter’s hibernation. Before the war, he had been a mining engineer turned prospector from up around Circle. A thickset man of average height, he had a beard the color of dirty snow and hair black as coal. He had joined the Alaska Scouts at the same time that Wylie had. They’d gone through the arduous training together—made the long, grueling marches through the woods in the snow, endlessly sketched and made maps, and practiced day after day shooting every kind of weapon that a man could carry either over his shoulder or on his back. They’d gone through hell together and had come out hardened and tough—and good buddies, their friendship cemented by all they’d endured side by side.

  “I’m hungry.” Big Jim rubbed his stomach as he walked over to stand beside Wylie. “I sure could go for a big stack of those sourdough flapjacks of yours. It’s your turn to do the cookin’ this morning. Remember?”

  “I remember.” For the most part, all the Scouts shunned the tasteless C-rations. Instead, they carried along their own hip-pocket stove and side meat for frying grease and the precious sourdough starter. They supplemented their diet with whatever game or fish they could catch.

  “Anything going on down there?” Big Jim gazed down at the six ships anchored in the harbor.

  “It’s quiet. They’re probably all still in the sack after that air-raid drill they had just before dawn.” Then Wylie stopped and frowned, pausing to listen to the bugling alarm he heard drifting up from the bay. “Hear that? Sounds like one of those ships is sounding general quarters.”

  Before Big Jim could reply, the wail of air-raid sirens echoed across the bay, mingling with deep-throated whistles of the ships at anchor as they summoned their crews to battle stations.

  “Somehow, I don’t think this is one of their goddamned drills,” Big Jim muttered.

  Wylie lifted the binoculars he wore slung around his neck while Big Jim dived back into his tent to get his own pair. In the harbor below, all the ships were getting up steam to flee the port. At the naval station and Fort Mears, men were scrambling to man the anti-aircraft and machine-gun positions. Dutch Harbor had no airfield because of its extremely mountainous terrain. The only aircraft stationed there were a few PBY’s tied in some nearby coves.

  As he swept the points of the compass, Wylie spotted the Jap Zeros breaking out of the clouds, coming at them out of the south. Big Jim joined him, but Wylie didn’t take his glasses off the enemy planes, following them as they peeled off to attack.

  “I make it fifteen Zeros.”

  “That was my count, too,” Big Jim confirmed.

  The first bursts of flak exploded in the sky over the harbor, but the black puffs of smoke were quickly followed by more as the rest of the shore batteries joined in to lay a screen of flak over the harbor. On the bay, the lumbering mail plane was desperately attempting a takeoff run, but it was strafed by two diving Zeros before it could get airborne. On fire, the mail plane careened toward the beach.

  “They’re after the PBY’s.”

  Their initial targets did appear to be the seaplanes moored in the secluded coves. “At Pearl Harbor, nothing got in the air against them either.”

  “Well, one’s gonna make it.” Big Jim pointed to a Catalina climbing up to meet the Japanese attack.

  Spotting it, an enemy plane made a pass at the PBY. As the Zero flew over it, the waist guns opened up on its exposed belly. At the same instant, the Zero was hit by flak. It wheeled over, spewing black smoke and yellow fire, and twisted downward like a corkscrew, crashing into the bay.

  Wylie’s ears vibrated with the steady boom of the heavy guns, the spitting rattle of machine guns and tracers, and the powerful explosions of bombs—all combining to make a deafening thunder that shook the ground beneath his feet. All the endless training had taught him to observe what was going on, the enemy targets, their strategy, their objectives, but part of him couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Those Jap planes were real; so were their bombs.

  Four of the enemy bombers swung away from the harbor and headed for the Army fort. Over their targets, they dropped their thousand-pound bombs, reducing the tank farm to flames and blowing up a barracks. As the smoke cleared, the wounded started crawling out of the blackened rubble. Wylie swung his binoculars away from the site, his eyes blurring, his anger impotent.

  “Look out!” At the same instant that Big Jim shouted the warning, he slammed into Wylie’s shoulder, driving him to the ground.

  Instinctively Wylie rolled the minute he hit. Tracers from the strafing Zero chewed up the ground where he’d been standing a second ago. He felt the sweat break out across his forehead, the dryness in his throat, and the tightening in his stomach. But already the rifle he always carried was in his hands, and his nerves stayed steady enough for him to squeeze off a couple of rounds at the streaking Zero as it peeled away to look for another, more important target.

  “The sneaking bastards.” But Big Jim wisely made no attempt to get up and offer them a standing target. Neither did Wylie, choosing instead to watch the fast and furious action below from ground level.

  The enemy attack lasted a full twenty minutes. With their bomb supply exhausted, they pulled away and flew back to the south. From Ballyhoo, Dutch Harbor appeared to be practically destroyed—a smoking mass of bombed rubble and debris. But the damage wasn’t as bad as it looked. The ships in the harbor were virtually unscathed; the radio shack and its equipment were intact; and the human casualties represented only one percent of the force. Nearly all of the fifty-two casualties occurred when the bomb blew up the Army barracks at Fort Mears.

  The following afternoon the Japanese planes struck Dutch Harbor again, scoring two direct hits on an old beached ship, the Northwestern, and blowing up four large fuel storage tanks. American patrols still hadn’t located the Japanese task force operating in the Aleutian waters.

  Far to the south, at Midway Island, a large naval battle was in progress. But it didn’t seem very important to the men at Dutch Harbor. The war in the Aleutians had begun. Less than a week later, it was known that the Japanese had captu
red the island of Attu.

  CHAPTER LVI

  Anchorage

  June 20, 1942

  As the twin-engine lockheed taxied toward the hangar bearing the faded sign ace flying service, Ace Cole rubbed the taut muscles in the back of his neck. It was the end of a long day for him. Flying wasn’t as much fun as it used to be, or maybe it was just that it was getting too tame. With all the instruments and radio beams there wasn’t much excitement left.

  He taxied the plane to a halt in front of the hangar and automatically began shutting down the engines and switching off the electrical systems. When he glanced out the cockpit window, he noticed the stocky, gray-haired Billy Ray trotting toward the plane, carrying a set of wheel chocks in his hand. For a minute, Ace just stared, unable to remember the last time he’d seen Billy Ray move that fast.

  “Something must be wrong,” he murmured to himself.

  Just about that same instant, a handful of soldiers emerged from the shadows of the hangar. It felt like his heart took a sickening nosedive into his stomach. Wylie. They hadn’t heard a thing from him since the Japanese attack at Dutch Harbor and their subsequent capture and occupation of the islands of Kiska and Attu.

  “Sweet Jesus, no.” He wrenched the seat belt loose and scrambled out of the plane faster than he ever had in his life.

  But the minute his feet hit the tarmac, his legs seemed to turn to rubber. He was shaking inside, more scared than he had ever been in his life. He paused, trying to get a grip on his usually calm nerves, as the soldiers started walking toward the plane.

  Billy Ray walked over to him and pulled a greasy rag out of his dirty overalls, then wiped his hands with it. Despite his age, he was still the best mechanic Ace had ever known. There wasn’t any engine he couldn’t fix; now it just took him a little longer.