by Bill Mesce
Zagottis produced a torch, which he handed over to Kneece. Kneece began poking his way forward, tripping over the tangle of blackened debris scattered through the ships body, the ray from the torch sweeping this way and that. The litter on the floor was comprised of the burnt wood of packing crates heavily dappled with sparkling crystals of broken glass.
Zagottis sneezed. “Damn…” He pulled his hood clear of his face to spit out a wad of phlegm: snap! “My family is fishermen, we have a boat we run out of San Francisco, all the way back to my grandpa. I’m on that boat since I’m a kid: rain, cold, wind, that bitch-evil San Francisco fog that goes right in your bones. All that time I don’t get a sniffle, all my life. Your pal Grassi shows up —”
“I wouldn’t call him my —”
“ — and bang, I’m sick as a dog. It’s not enough the guy’s a pain in the ass, he’s a germ carrier to boot. Typhoid Mary.” Zagottis sneezed gustily.
“Somehow it doesn’t surprise me.” Perhaps it was because they were inside the ship, out of the elements, that Harry’d stopped shivering. Finally getting used to the cold, he decided. Harry (and this he said to himself with an uncharacteristic touch of jaunty bravado), you are becoming an arctic veteran.
“How about the crew?” It was Kneece crunching his way back to them from the cockpit.
“Mr. Hotshot McKesson, he didn’t make it out. You saw that cockpit? Took us three hours to cut his body outta there. In the dummy seat a shavetail named Coster. I don’t know how he got outta here — he doesn’t know — but he must be in good with God somehow. ’Cept for some bumps and bruises, Coster come out OK. Two E-6’s back here. Marquez on the radio; he doesn’t make it. Bell, the flight mechanic, the crash crew gets him out but he’s in bad shape: busted bones, cracked skull, burned up bad. Third degree all over here.” Zagottis waved his mittened hand round his torso and face. He shivered, though Harry didn’t think it was because of the cold. “A guy in that kinda shape goin’ home, sometimes you think he’s better off he doesn’t make it.”
“All Army,” Harry noted of the crew.
“Yeah. I pulled their serial numbers from their dog tags if you need ’em. This wasn’t an ATC flight. Diplomatic.”
“What does that mean? Diplomatic?”
“You know, like they’re sendin’ a pouch to some embassy in the ETO, or a courier, like FDR wants Harry Hopkins to go shake Churchill’s hand, let ’em know he’s still a pal. Most times, somebody like that goes by Navy ship, unless it’s a red ball, then you throw’em on a C-87 and send’em transatlantic direct. Unless it is Harry Hopkins, then he gets to go by Pan Am clipper, first class, him and the Rockefellers.”
“But some of it does go through you,” Kneece said.
“Some. No Rockefellers.”
“Grassi’s CO says you reported the crew might’ve been drinking.”
“That’s what we thought, ’cause we get in here, the place smells like a distillery. Coster, McKesson, it’s like they’re swimmin’ in the stuff. But we goofed.” Zagottis shrugged apologetically. He beckoned for the torch, led them farther aft, and knelt. Kneeling by the Navy man, Harry caught a sweet scent hovering above the floor, something more welcoming than the deathly smell permeating the rest of the gutted ship. Zagottis flashed the light about the jumble between the arched fuselage ribs, flipped burnt bits of packing crate out of the way. Something glittered under the light on the floor between them: a hard mass several inches across.
“Ice?” asked Kneece.
“Glass,” Zagottis said. “Melted in the fire, then hardened again.”
“My God, how hot did it get in here?” Harry asked.
“Hot,” Zagottis said.
“A lot of glass,” Kneece observed.
“A lot,” Zagottis agreed. He crab-walked a few feet, reached down into the debris, and picked up a fire-blackened piece of paper a few inches square. One side of the paper glittered with crystals of broken glass. “This look about the size of a bottle label to you? You can’t read it, the fire took care of that, but take a sniff. On the adhesive side.”
Kneece took the label from Zagottis, held it to his face and sniffed. He turned to Harry and smiled, handing him the label. Harry sniffed. That sweet smell again, stronger.
“Liquor?” Harry guessed.
“Whisky,” Kneece declared.
“I’m figurin’ a coupla dozen bottles,” Zagottis said. “That’s why everythin’ smelled like booze.”
“And everybody” Kneece said.
“By the time we know better, Grassi is already on his way here. There’s somethin’ else.” Zagottis stumbled his way farther aft, the light flashing round at his feet. “Where the hell…? Ahh, here we go.” His beam rested on another glossy mass nearly eighteen inches across, this more a pile than a pool, rising to a thickened middle. At first Harry thought it was more melted glass, but this had a milkier color. Zagottis pulled off a mitten with his teeth, reached into his parka with his gloved hand, drew out a penknife. He scraped at the substance, then shook the powder onto the palm of Harry’s mitten. “Taste.”
Tentatively, Harry flicked his tongue at the white powder. “Sugar!”
“Sugar.” Zagottis swept his light round the debris. “Also melted in the fire. Pounds of it. That stuff over there looks like dirt? Coffee. More pounds. See those?” He shone the light on a pile of what looked like smoked, deflated cricket balls spilling from the remains of a smashed packing crate. “Like your grapefruit barbecued? Eat up. Poke through all this crap you’re gonna find maple syrup, butter, canned hams, fresh fruit… A whole restaurant in here.” Zagottis scowled at the incinerated delectables. “My name’s not Eisenhower, I’m not a priority, so I gotta jump through hoops to get stuff I need. Aviation gas, vacuum tubes for radios. I got planes out here so overdue for engine overhauls it’s not funny, but I can’t get parts. Not even spark plugs. Antifreeze, shovels, chow for my guys don’t come out of a can smellin’ like dog food. Blankets, electric flyin’ suits, long johns, socks, snowshoes, snow packs, gloves, cigarettes, knives, forks, pens, pencils, paper clips, every other goddamn thing. I gotta fill out requisitions in triplicate to get toilet paper —”
“Quintuplicate,” Harry said.
“— but we’re always down to wipin’ our asses with old copies of Stars & Stripes before we get it.” Zagottis kicked at a piece of packing crate. The crack of splintering wood was sharp inside the hull of the Dakota. “My guys eat powdered eggs, wash it down with powdered milk, wipe their asses with newspapers, fly on bad plugs. But some son of a bitch somewheres is gettin’ fresh grapefruit with his breakfast.”
“Where was this load headed?” Kneece asked.
Zagottis sneezed and swept his sleeve at his nose. “Dunno.”
“Where was it flying in from?”
Zagottis shrugged.
“I’m all in suspense about how you logged the flight.”
“No log. I told you, I wasn’t even suppose’ to put down about me warnin’ Mr. Hotshot to stand down. That’s how it is with a night train.”
“A what?”
Zagottis smiled at the consternation on Kneece s face. “That’s what we call ’em — an off-log diplomatic flight. I don’t know about you, Captain, but I’m freezin’ my ass off. If you’re done lookin’, we can conversate in my office where it’s eighty degrees warmer. That poor bastard in the track’s probably froze to his seat by now.”
The air station was squeezed on a narrow plain between the interior highlands and the jagged, ice-blocked coast of Kap Farvel. It was the biggest and most elaborate aerodrome Harry had seen since he and Kneece had left Newark, 2800 miles away. Near the half-mile-long runway were fuel storage tanks, munitions stores, a machine shop, the wide bulk of a repair hangar. As the half-track clanked along the runway, Harry saw, in the sweep of the headlamps, like troops lined up at parade dress, a mixed squadron of blocky four-engined B-24 Liberators alongside ungainly PBY Catalina flying boats. The open faces of each ship’s engines were shi
elded from the weather by tightly wrapped tarpaulins.
“You called this flight a ‘night train,’” Harry heard Kneece say to Zagottis. “Something about ‘off-log’ —”
“We call ’em night trains ’cause that’s how they are — they slip in, slip out, you hardly know they’re there. They show up with orders sayin’ we’re not supposed to log ’em. I figure — well, what I used to figure before the bar car from the Super Chief cracked up here — was they wanted these runs off-log ’cause it was some kind of secret mission or somethin’. That’s why they were goin’ this route, out of the way. Now?” Zagottis shrugged. “I figure they just didn’t want to share the goodies.”
“How long’s this been going on? These night-train flights?”
“Well, I’m here eight months. Some hands I got go back a year or better, they remember them comin’ even back then. Sometimes we get a couple a month, then maybe you go a month or more with none.”
“They just come in from nowhere, go out to nowhere? Seems like a hell of a way to run a railroad.”
Zagottis laughed. “You gotta understand how it works here. I get flights comin’ in here all the time I don’t know who they are. Army, Navy, sometimes Canucks, sometimes even limeys. Come outta the east, west. Communications as bad as they are — especially this time of year — half the time I don’t know a plane’s comin’ in’til it touches down on my runway. These are military transport planes, Captain, not your papa’s Ford. You don’t just pick up the keys, say I’m goin’ for a spin, and wind up here. I figure you don’t get here unless you’re supposed to be here. And where you wind up is for your dispatcher and the guy at the other end to worry about. I gas ’em up, I give ’em hot chow, a bunk if they need sack time, but my job’s to get’em outta my way fast as I can.” Zagottis pointed at the phalanx of aircraft parked near the runway. ‘Those are my priority. Anytime I got half a sky, my planes’re up nursemaidin’ convoys in and out the Denmark Strait. No convoy? They’re still up there, huntin’. They go huntin’ U-boats, Captain, and when they find ’em they kill ’em. Anythin’ else is just a distractin’ pain in my ass.”
Harry knew all this was important, but at the moment couldn’t think why Snowflakes danced down into the open rear of the half-track. The thickening blanket of snow muted the sound of the vehicle’s treads on the runway matting. For the first time since he’d shakily climbed out of the plane that had brought them to Narssarssuaq, he felt at ease. Even the cold dropped away.
“What?” He was suddenly aware of Zagottis speaking to him, shaking him by the arm.
“You awright, Major? Looks like you’re fadin’ there.” “Fine, fine,” Harry said, and thought it curious how thick his tongue felt. “Just tired. We had to get up early…” He lost his train of thought. “Just tired.”
“Feelin’ pretty good?”
Harry smiled and nodded.
“Want to just nod off, huh?”
Harry nodded again.
“Oh, Christ. Hey, Kneece, help me get him on his feet. C’mon, Major, let’s go.”
“What’s the matter?” Kneece asked.
“He’s been out here too long. Hypothermia.”
Harry found himself on his feet, propped against the rim of the compartment. He felt someone — Zagottis, probably — pull the fur trim of his parka hood away from his face. “Let that wind in there, Major.”
“Is this how it happens?” Harry heard Kneece ask.
“It can sneak up on you like that,” Zagottis said. “First you’re cold, shiver the teeth right outta your head. Then you feel pretty good, like you had a few. It starts seemin’ like a good idea to just lie down in the snow, catch forty winks. ’Cept you don’t wake up. Tell you the truth, Kneece, it’s not a bad way to go.”
*
“How you doin’, Major?” Zagottis asked.
“I’m cold again,” Harry said through chattering teeth. He pulled the woolen Army blanket Zagottis had provided closer round his shoulders.
“Believe it or not, that’s a good sign.” Shrouded in another blanket, Zagottis was standing by his office coal stove stirring a pair of mugs filled with steaming water from a kettle on the stove. He turned away from the mugs to sneeze. “Oh, mannnn,” he groaned after the explosion. “I wish your pal Grassi was still alive —”
“He wasn’t my —”
“— so I could kill’im for givin’ me this goddamn bug.” Zagottis handed Harry one of the mugs. “Hope you don’t mind sharin’ a tea bag; gotta make ’em stretch. How about you, Kneece? I got water for tea, I got a pot of coffee warmin’ up here, too.”
Kneece was slouched in one of the chairs across from Zagottis’s littered desk, flipping back and forth through his small notebook. “Coffee.”
“What’s that taste?” Harry asked, smiling up from his mug. “Honey?”
“Yeah. I got an uncle up in Monterey with his own bees sends it to me.”
Even with a few swallows of honey-sweetened hot tea inside and a blanket tight round him, Harry shivered. The Navy lieutenant commander had been right when he’d said his office was eighty degrees warmer than outside, but that still left it chill enough to maintain a crust of frost on the one window.
Zagottis may have been the air station’s commander, but his office was no more well appointed than the other cubicles in the headquarters Quonset: cramped, the few pieces of furniture scuffed, an uncurtained window offering a monotonous view of falling and fallen snow Behind the desk a row of pegs lined the wall with clipboards filled with rosters, status reports, and the like. The wall to his left was covered with a variety of sector and area maps, some under acetate overlays heavily done with grease pencil markings indicating air routes, patrol sweeps, weather conditions. The opposite wall Zagottis referred to warmly as his “gallery.”
There were, Harry guessed, at least two dozen photos tacked to the plywood partition from small Brownie box-produced images to larger eight-by-tens. Most were typical family photos: groupings of smiling folk Harry presumed to be friends and relatives, from aged elder to cherubic newborn, posed against sundry dining rooms, playgrounds, parlors, picnics in the park, the aforementioned family fishing vessel.
Harry’s eyes settled on a photo showing a young, laughing, sloe-eyed woman on a porch swing with an equally elated Zagottis alongside wearing the Navy whites of an ensign. In the photo Zagottis was holding aloft between them a jolly pile of baby garbed in nothing but a baggy diaper, its pumpkin grin showing the first nubs of new incisors. Harry looked from the illness-dogged features of the lieutenant commander to the smooth-faced lad in the photo. He needed to revise his estimate of the commander’s age: no more than thirty, probably younger.
Zagottis nodded at the photos. “My wife is always sending me pictures. Says they gotta be better to look at than the view I got.”
“She’s got that right.” Kneece was stonily regarding the incessant snow outside the window.
“The novelty of winter wonderlands wearing off, Woody?” Harry poked.
The young captain smiled ruefully “That kinda come back to bite me, didn’t it?”
Harry turned back to the photo. “A boy?”
Zagottis nodded. “That’s right after I got out of OCS. He turned one ten days later, just after I shipped out. Been another birthday go by since then. This’ll be his second Christmas I’m not there.”
“Me, too.” They smiled at each other, sharing the same sense of home.
“Commander.” Kneece cleared his throat. “The two men who survived the crash —”
“Coster and Bell.”
“I’d like to talk to them. I realize Bell might not be in any shape —”
“Kneece, you can talk to ’em all you want, but first you gotta find ’em.” Zagottis gave a last look at his son. He topped his mug of tea with more hot water, then slipped one of the clipboards from its peg, flipped to a particular page, and turned the board over to Kneece. “Communications log,” he explained. “Coster’s a little out of his h
ead after the crash. He sees his cockpit partner get squished like an egg, comes damn close to the same treatment, no surprise he starts to unravel. Takes the sick bay doc a while to calm him down, slip him some dope to get him more or less on an even keel. Soon’s Coster can think clear he’s at me he’s got to send a signal back to the States, very important, top priority. The signal goes to Army GHQ in D C., some light colonel named Edghill. I don’t know what he does for a livin’, but it looks like he was McKesson’s boss. Turn the page; doesn’t take long for Edghill to come back to him.”
Kneece held the clipboard up for Harry. Harry took his seat and flipped through the carbon copies of message forms. As I later saw, they read as follows:
FROM: LT A COSTER
ARMY FLT 103 XRAY
TO:LT COL EDGHILL DC ARMY GHQ
XRAY DISPATCH DATE:12-1-43
ARMY FLT 103 XRAY CRASHED CAPE [sic] FARVEL AIR STATION STOP CO MCKESSON TSGT MARQUEZ KILLED TSGT BELL HURT CARGO DESTROYED STOP PLS ADVISE ASAP END MESSAGE
Harry turned the page for the reply:
FROM:EDGHILL
TO:CO KAP FARVEL
DATE:12-1-43
REPLACEMENT FLT 121 XRAY TO ARRIVE YOUR STATION SOME TIME 12-2-43 STOP HANDLE AS TOP PRIORITY STOP ADVISE COSTER TO BOARD ORDERS AWAITING AT TERMINUS STOP BELL MCKESSON MARQUEZ ALL EFFECTS TO BOARD ON RETURN LEG 12-3-43 END MESSAGE
“They wanted McKesson’s and Marquez’s bodies returned?” Harry asked Zagottis.
“And all their effects. I see this, I shoot one right back. Poor bastard Bell’s in a coma, my doc tells me it’s pretty shaky the kid makin’ it at all, let alone bumpin’ around in a C-47 for a thousand miles. But…” Zagottis nodded Harry back to the communications log:
FROM: LT CMDR ZAGOTTIS
NARSSARSSUAQ AIR STATION TO:LT COL EDGHILL ARMY GHQ
DATE: 12-1-43
M[edical] Officer] STRONGLY AGAINST BELL TRANSPORT STOP CONDITION GRAVE STOP RECOMMEND DELAY IF UNTIL STATUS IMPROVES STOP ADVISE END MESSAGE
FROM: EDGHILL
TO: CO ZAGOTTIS KAP FARVEL
