The President of the United States was not as forgiving of his general as David Brentwood thought he would be. Mayne didn’t question Freeman’s decision to use FAE — after all, the White House and the Chiefs of Staff had given him the authority, and Mayne knew the burden of such responsibility.
“My congratulations, General, on your victory,” said Mayne tersely over the satellite hookup between the White House and Freeman’s Cape Prince of Wales HQ. “Now what in hell were you doing disobeying an order by your commander in chief?”
“Mr. President. I didn’t lead the attack. I went in when I thought the situation warranted it.”
“Don’t dance with me, General. You may have thought the situation warranted it, but I thought I made it clear to you, what we need is your strategy, not your bravado.”
“Mr. President, I understand, but if you’ll forgive me, we didn’t have time for a cabinet meeting on that Starlifter. Sometimes you have to know all the rules in order to break one of them.” He paused. “When necessary.”
President Mayne conceded the point but then, with Trainor and che Joint Chiefs of Staff listening in, he told General Freeman of the pipeline sabotage and how this meant an increased surveillance responsibility for the navy on the West Coast and substantially less naval force to protect Freeman’s flank. Outside the White House the sleet was turning to rain, splattering against the windows, sweeping torrentially across the forlorn patio. “You’ve done the job, Douglas. You’ve knocked out Ratmanov and secured the shortest route to Siberia, but I have to tell you that Intelligence…” He paused, and Freeman could hear him conferring momentarily with Trainor and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including General Grey.
“Douglas… Signal Intelligence as well as Human Intelligence confirm the Siberians have moved the Fifth Army eastward, spearheaded by their Thirty-first Motorized Division.” He was referring to the famed Thirty-first “Stalingrad” Motorized Division, whose forebears had crushed the best the Wermacht had, causing Von Paulus to surrender the entire German Sixth Army.
Freeman knew that what the president was telling him was that Ratmanov had been the easy part. The hard part was about to begin.
The criticism of Freeman’s use of FAE on his own troops was savage; editorial writers across the country lost no time in pointing out that he had lost 51 percent casualties, the highest in any one action since the Tet Offensive and the marines’ fighting retreat from Chosin Reservoir in Korea.
“Well, Dick,” said Freeman philosophically, running the fingers of one hand through his thinning gray hair while he held the offending editorials in his other, “It’s a short step from hosanna to hoot!”
“Yes, sir.”
“By God!” said Freeman, his ire rising, slapping the editorial. “In Europe they said the attack on Minsk was the most brilliant since Sherman wheeled and drove through to the sea. Now they’re pillorying me. Those sons of bitches always root out the negative. And those powdered pricks hiding behind their goddamn cameras, criticizing us with a five-second clip. If they can’t find anything to bitch about, they make it up.” He looked angrily across at Norton. “I don’t read anything here about that pilot of ours.”
“Shirer,” put in Norton.
“Yes, Shirer, that’s it. Remember him from Korea. Brave man. Went in on the deck to try and protect us. No editorials about what those animals — the Siberian ‘elite’—did to him, what they would have done to all of our boys if we’d lost that godforsaken rock.” He picked up his reading glasses and walked over to the map, shaking his head, stopping, taking off his glasses, and tapping Ratmanov.”They don’t think I bleed for those boys, but damn it. Seventy-four casualties, Dick, seventy-four! We lose more than that on the roads every day.” His glasses were tapping the bunch of editorials in his other hand. “Criticism like this, it’s — it’s disproportionate. Fecal diatribe. First operation in history where we went in outnumbered ten to one! Yes, yes, the MEU followed, but we got ‘em by the balls, Dick, and—”
Norton said nothing. Part of being Freeman’s aide was the ability to let the general vent his spleen against “rancid reporters,” whose ego, thundered Freeman, “is ten times as big as any general’s I know.” He paused. “Including mine.”
Norton risked a smile but knew that for the time being silence was the most prudent policy. It was still touch and go.
“For crying out loud, Schwarzkopf lost more than that!”
Norton thought it inadvisable to point out that “Stormin’ Norman” had fielded over half a million men, that Freeman’s 51 percent casualty rate for Schwarzkopf would have meant a quarter of a million casualties. But he knew the general was right, too — it was comparing apples and oranges. It wasn’t simply a numbers game, and he suspected that in the supposedly cool, “objective” halls of the Pentagon there was sheer envy of Freeman’s grandstand style.
“Well, General,” hazarded Norton, “you’re going to have a chance to prove them wrong about you.”
It was a sobering thought, and it stopped Freeman’s outrage against the newspapers and TV editors dead in its tracks. The “opportunity,” he knew, was Siberia. Siberia to Ratmanov was as a sea to an island, its danger far more widespread and unknown. The “tooth to tail”—logistical — problem alone would be the greatest military undertaking in history.
Freeman held the editorials over the waste bin. “One of these—” He indicated a Los Angeles Times column, “—calls the ‘profligate’ with my troops, as if I don’t—” The clipping fell from his hand, and snatching his parka he went out into the Arctic night, swearing at a zipper that took too long to engage.
When the cold air hit him it took his breath away, and in the sheen of twilight, filled with the heavy drumming of transport planes overhead escorting the airborne sapper and engineer battalions who were clearing any remaining minefields and the ice crust off Ratmanov’s summertime airfield, he saw a squiggle of water between the ice floes, and reached for his field glasses.
In the binoculars’ circle he saw a seabird covered with oil, flapping and slipping helplessly on the ice in a futile effort to get airborne, exhausting itself on the floe. Another oil-soaked bird watched helplessly nearby. He thought of Doreen, and how he had not thought of her at all during the battle, of how he might never see her again, and of how many American mothers and sweethearts would think of him as a butcher. But he could not cry — not because at that moment he did not want to or would have been ashamed of it, but because he felt himself constrained by a sense of destiny, of mission. He couldn’t explain it to others, but he knew it was true and would not afford him the luxury of self-pity, calling instead to his side Churchill’s stirring rendition of the ancient psalm: “Arm yourselves and be ye men of valor and be in readiness for the conflict, for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altars. As the will of God is in Heaven even so let it do.”
The brief daylight of the strait was gone and across the darkness that at that moment seemed impenetrable yet across which he knew he must lead the great invasion, lay Sibir — ethereally silent and waiting, a land so vast, so used to consuming her own, that he knew she would not be loath to devour an enemy.
Back inside there were more faxes of editorial criticism. “Armchair strategists!” Freeman harrumphed.”They’re all suffering from Iraqi fever, Dick — the conviction that you can go in against a dug-in enemy and suffer next to no casualties, based on the erroneous assumption that every enemy commander will be as incompetent as Saddam Insane.” Freeman held up his hand as if to forestall any objection. “I’m taking nothing from Schwarzkopf. Didn’t know what they’d be up against, had every right to expect major resistance. And by God, what those pilots did — our boys and those British Tornadoes going in on the deck like that. Magnificent! Brave as the Argentine flyers when they went for the warships instead of the transports in the Falklands. Course the Iraqis — most of ‘em — don’t want to the for a madman. But the Sibirs, Dick—” Freeman shook his head. “Different breed altogether.”
“General, I don’t mean to interrupt, but I’ve got a marine captain — medical corps — wants to see you.”
“Oh, hell, I told them I’m fine. No aftereffects. Just got a bump on my head, that’s all.”
“He insists on seeing you, sir.”
“All right, Dick. Send him in. Meanwhile, I want you to get the invasion book.” It was a six-inch-thick computer printout of everything from guns to gum that American forces would need for the Siberian campaign. “I don’t want to give Novosibirsk any more time man I have to. Landings have to be made simultaneously and within three weeks. What’s the SITREP on the European front? That’s where the Siberians’ll expect our major push.”
“You’re right, General. That’s why it’s a stalemate. They’ve thrown in another ten divisions — a hundred and thirty thousand fresh troops, and they’re keeping our boys and the Brits stalled. We’re still over a hundred miles west of the Urals.”
But already Norton could see Freeman was thinking of the East Siberian offensive, the general telling him, “We’re going to have to make up for a fall-off in navy protection…”
“Sir. The marine captain?”
“What? Oh, yes. All right, send him in. Meantime you can get a progress report for the on that Kommandorsky battle group of ours. I want the Missouri and Wisconsin pounding the bejaysus out of the air field and the sub bases mere. After Ratmanov that’s the one forward bastion we have to knock off. Otherwise the bastards’ll harass our supply lines right across the North Pacific. Salt Lake City’s giving them air cover, right?
“Yes, General.”
“And find out what the Japanese are doing — whether the president’s got them off their ass to help us or whether they’re doing another Gulf, sit-on-your-ass routine.”
“I’ll get on to it right away, sir.”
Capt. Michael Devine was a small, stocky man with an M.D. that had given him his captain’s bars. It struck Freeman, though he hadn’t noticed it while he was on the chopper’s stretcher litter, that the captain must have barely made the marine height requirement.
“Captain,” said Freeman smiling, “now I appreciate your concern for your commanding officer. Commendable but I feel just dandy. So thank you for coming but—”
“General, that’s not why I’m here.”
“Oh.” The diminutive captain looked even smaller as Freeman cocked his head back in surprise.
“Can I speak plainly, sir?”
“Only way, Captain. Shoot.”
“Sir, you requested — ordered — my medics to take you off the stretcher.”
“I did.”
“I understand they — you argued with them.”
Freeman was scowling. “I told them, Captain, to unstrap the from that goddamn contraption so I could get back to killing Russians. That’s what I’m paid for.” Freeman glowered down at Devine. “What’s your beef?”
“General, it took at least forty-five seconds to get you out of that air safety harness. It takes an enemy mortar crew only thirty seconds to bracket us from the moment we land. That means from the point of touchdown to takeoff my men have thirty seconds to load four stretchers litters and to be clear for the chopper’s takeoff. The kind of delay you caused us could cost the a chopper, crew, and wounded.”
Freeman was reddening by the second. He walked to within a foot of the captain’s face, his voice filling the room. “I’ve never been spoken to like that in my life, Captain. I suppose you’re one of those jokers who thinks talking back to the old man gets you kudos.”
“No, sir, but I’m responsible for my men out there. I can’t run a MUST if half my men are killed.” Devine was pasty-faced from the effort.
“Devane, I think you’d better leave. Dismissed!”
“Sir,” said Devine, stepping back, saluting smartly but turning about shakily.
For a moment Freeman was speechless; then he kicked the wastebasket so violently that editorials exploded from it. Putting his glasses on he tried to concentrate on the map of Siberia. The railway, that was the key. In ‘45 Russkies had surprised the Japanese by being able to shift four entire armies from the western front to the far eastern theater in just eight weeks, utilizing 136,000 rail cars on the Trans-Siberian. The gall of that pipsqueak captain walking in… Where the hell did he think he was? Goddamn AMA convention? He snatched the phone. “Dick!”
“Yes, General?”
“That runt of a captain you sent the tore a goddamn strip off me. Me! Said I was endangering his chopper crew. How d’you like that? All I wanted to do was get back in the fighting. Said I could have cost him his whole crew — medics and all. Insolent son of a bitch told the enemy only took thirty seconds to bracket.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, sir, what?” demanded Freeman.
“He’s correct, General.”
“No, he isn’t!” roared Freeman. “It’s twenty-five seconds to bracket, not thirty. Dick?”
“General?”
“Second that son of a bitch from MEU to my HQ. So goddamned smart he can run all the MUSTs.”
“Beg pardon, General, but not as captain. You have to be at least a colonel.”
“All right, make him a colonel. Field commission. No, I don’t want to hear any flak about normal channels. Remember what Von Runstedt said about normal channels, Dick.”
“Have an idea I’m about to find out, General.”
“A trap for officers without initiative. That Devane, he’s read-”
“Devine, sir. Name’s Devine.”
“Well, hell, Dick, with a name like that we’ll have to make him bishop. Walked right up to the and told the I’d screwed up. We need men like that. But Dick—”
“Sir?”
“Not too many.”
“No, sir.”
Freeman was now studying the enlarged satellite pictures of the Kamchatka Peninsula, in particular the region about Petropavlovsk where the enemy had built bombproof sub pens in the nineteen-eighties for forward naval defense. For a moment he couldn’t find his glasses and, cursing, patted his pockets, making a mental note to have one of his aides drill a hole in the magnifying glass handle. As he was shortsighted in only one eye, it would save him forever searching. No way would he wear one of those chains. He grabbed his parka and told the duty officer he’d be outside.
After the pipeline sabotage, two guards had been ordered by Norton to accompany the general wherever he went, just to be on the safe side — with the stipulation, however, that they must stay well back and make as little noise as possible. Pulling his forage cap down tightly beneath the parka hood, the general walked through snow flurries, head down against the wind and thwacking his thermal overlays with a swagger stick given him by CINCLANT — commander in chief Atlantic — at Norwood, U.K., before he’d left Europe.
Trudging through the snow he was doing what Norton and other aides referred to as his “Moses in the Desert”—meditating upon the forthcoming campaign, recalling, as was his wont, the great commanders of history; not their virtues — everyone knew those — but their defects, their mistakes. At such moments he was lost in a kind of reverie of anticipation and awesome responsibility, and now in the flurries of snow that soon gave way to a steady wind, the thought that stole quietly upon him then possessed him and would fuel all his tactics was a conviction that wherever possible he must choose the battleground— not the Siberians. He must force them to come to him — though it was their country — to fight on the ground of his choosing.
The trick, of course, was how to do it. It would involve doing precisely the opposite of what they would anticipate. The master plan excited him; but then, like the mournful cry of an Arctic wolf, the sound of the ice pressure ridges crushing carried the warning that the unfrozen sea to the south was both his way and his impediment to Siberia. Now that Ratmanov had been secured, marine expeditionary forces could be transported by air and air bases secured on the sparsely populated northern tundra of Siberia across the strait, bases from which U.S. air strikes could be made down the shield of Kamchatka Peninsula. But then what? He stopped suddenly in the snow, the two marine guards looking nonplussed at one another, snow now having been replaced by rain. Old “Von Freeman” was seemingly oblivious to the fact.
He had seen the burning bush. The Pentagon would think him mad, as they had thought MacArthur mad when he had decided to hit Inchon—”The worst possible choice,” the experts had told him; as they had thought Hannibal mad for crossing the Alps, extending his supply line against all common sense. And so, too, Schwarzkopf’s commanders had been shocked by the idea of an outflanking left hook around the Republican Guard. And there had been the great failures, too, which, as the Chiefs of Staff had said, were doomed and which had ruined many a career.
When Freeman showed it to Dick Norton, the only officer privy to his plan so far, Norton immediately saw the potential for a debacle. “In the middle of winter, General?”
“Remember Frederick the Great, Dick. ‘L’audace! L’audace! Toujours l’audace!’ “ It was one of the general’s favorite sayings.
“Perhaps, General,” said Norton, “but he won’t be with us.”
“Yes, he will,” said Freeman, and there wasn’t a trace of frivolity in the general’s tone, nor in his eyes. His eyes were fixed on the map. “You know what a steeplechase rider does before the jumps, Dick?”
“No idea, General.”
“Walks the course,” Freeman said, indicating the map. “I’ve walked the course, Dick.” He flashed a smile. “Metaphorically speaking, of course. But I’ve been with them, all right.” His hand swept out over the western front. “The German campaigns, Napoleon’s. But I must confess no one’s been here: Far Eastern TVD. And right now, Dick, those Commies in Novosibirsk are thinking, how can they outfox me?” He turned to Norton once more. “You think they have any surprises, Dick?”
“Be surprised if they didn’t, General.”
“So would I. But what are they?”
Freeman and Norton, together with the rest of his HQ staff, pored over the myriad details for three possible amphibious landings south of the Bering Strait.
Everything was considered: special forces that might be required for beach clearance, amphibious hovercraft going in over the icebreaker-cleared channels in the thicker coastal ice, assault ships, cargo-carrying choppers, airlift Hercules, attack helicopters, landing vehicles, air cover and close ground support from subsonic to Mach 2 aircraft. Then there were engineer and sapper battalions, supertough plastic piping “fascine”—tubes that could be dumped to fill a trench and across which a sixty-ton M-1 tank could pass, as well as flail and grader tanks to clear mines, and fiberglass-hulled mine clearers for the sea lanes. One armored division alone would need 620 thousand gallons of fuel, 319 thousand gallons of water, 82 thousand meals, and 6 thousand tons of ammunition a day. All had to be assigned, integrated into the overall attack plans. Freeman made it his personal responsibility to talk to the catering corps commanders, eliciting individual guarantees that each man in action would receive the required 3,000 calories a day, 4,200 for troops in Arctic battle.
“Kick ass, do what you have to,” Freeman told them. “But remember Napoleon: An army marches on its stomach. If any of you forget it, I’ll have your hide plus a thousand-dollar fine.”
“He’s got no authority to fine us — least not that much,” complained a cook.
“You want to find out?” asked a quartermaster.
The offended man was shaking his head, pleased to see Freeman was moving on to breathe fire over some other poor bastard. “Those SAS guys were right. It’s ‘Von Freeman.’ “
The general had already heard a rumor about the “Von” appellation and asked Norton if it was true.
“Uh, yes, General. ‘Fraid so.”
Freeman made no comment and, seemingly turning to a completely different subject, informed Norton that he’d seen some of the Canadian forces personnel assigned with his command wearing beards.
“Hadn’t noticed, General.”
“Well, I have. I want them off. Today.”
“General, Canadian Navy sort of follows Royal Navy tradition. Allows—”
“I don’t give a goddamn what the Royal Navy allows. I want those beards off. And if you don’t know why, Dick, you’re not doing your goddamn homework.”
“No, sir.”
Sometimes, Norton wrote in his diary that evening, Douglas Freeman could be as ornery as a cut pig. The general, he figured, knew that, like Dracheev, Novosibirsk, in the person of Marshal Yesov, C in C Siberian Forces, had its own surprises; as yet he had no idea what they were.
Though she was thoroughly familiar with the sights and smells of a military hospital, Lana was still unprepared.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” said Shirer gamely, his head completely swathed in bandages that held the compress against his left eye.
“I ‘m…” began Lana, having to compose herself after having heard from the doctor upon her arrival in Anchorage that it was possible that the optic nerve had been partially severed. She smiled bravely, spoke softly. “I’m a nurse, remember?”
“Right,” said Frank. There was no point kidding one another. If the optic nerve was severely damaged, then it would be the end of Frank’s career as a fighter pilot. The fact that it was the same eye that had been injured during his time as a presidential pilot didn’t make it any easier for him to accept. He knew that Lana could live with it, preferring that he never go back into combat, but, like most of his ilk, he lived for flying. Take away that, he told her, and—
Lana said there was no point talking about it till they knew for certain, and she immediately felt guilty. If it had been any other patient she would have listened, knowing it was part of the therapy, but with the man she loved she found herself instead falling back on the bland cliches of reassurance and then just as quickly putting forth the most optimistic prognosis.
“They can do wonders now. Lasers. You know at one time when a retina became detached — remember the Rumpole man?”
Frank thought she meant the actor.
“No, Mortimer, the lawyer who wrote it. His father had both retinas detached. Slipped a few feet one day on a ladder. Blind for the rest of his life. Well, nowadays they can spot weld the retinas back with a laser. Overnight stay in hospital, that’s all. Maybe even day surgery.”
Frank said nothing, trying not to grimace with the pain; the Demerol was wearing off. But Lana had seen too many wounded not to have some idea of what it must have been like when the eye had been gouged, literally hanging by its optic nerve, and later when tiny fragments of foreign material had to be scraped from the eyeball. Sitting down beside his bed, she took his hand in hers and for a moment was transported back to her first casualty of the war — young William Spence — and shivered despite her resolve. She forced another smile. “Well, at least I’ll be seeing more of you — when I can get leave from Dutch, that is.” She tried to make it all breezy, “accentuate the positive,” but could see that either Frank hadn’t heard her or was momentarily overcome with the pain, or both. His hand tightened involuntarily as a spasm pierced the bloody socket of the eye, striking deep inside his skull somewhere.
“What I can’t figure out,” he began, shifting position in the false belief of so many patients that movement itself would relieve the pain when it was really a shift in concentration that momentarily diverted thoughts of the pain, “is why did the bastard do it? There was no point to it. I mean—” Frank forced himself up further in the bed, Lana stacking the pillows behind him, staying close to him, gently massaging his neck. He turned to her, and she could see now how swollen the purplish and dark red tissue around the eyeball was.
“No point,” Frank continued, “trying to get information from me. I mean they were overrun. Under attack. Damn it! What in hell did it matter what airfield or carrier I came from? Our guys were swarming all over them.”
“Vengeance,” Lana said simply, her tone pregnant with the authority of experience. She was thinking of her husband, Jay. “Some people are like that.”
“Doesn’t make sense.”
“Doesn’t have to, Frank. They get a kick out of it.”
“If you’re under attack,” continued Frank, “you do what you have to, I guess. I mean, I know what it’s like in a furball— it’s you or the other guy. But, hell, why would someone come back at you like he did and… it’s.. it’s like shooting some guy in a chute.”
Lana was moved by this streak of naïveté’ in Frank. A few years ago, before she’d been introduced to Jay and was overcome by the poise and wealth of Jay’s jet-setting image, she had met Frank briefly and gone out with him a couple of times, when he was one of the “one-eyed Jacks” of the president’s elite pilot list. Then she would have been — was — the naive one, not him. But with Jay she’d grown up quickly — too quickly, she thought sometimes. After La Roche, his sick sex, the beatings and the threatened tabloid smear of her parents should she even dare to leave him without his “permission,” she had realized, in a rush of growing up, just how brutal life could be. And now she found herself explaining sheer malice to Frank, a quality that was as alien to him as the thought of being grounded for the rest of his life. He was a warrior: a reflection of her dad in his forthrightness, his assumption that bravery under fire was de rigueur and nothing exceptional.
He might be one of America’s top aces, a survivor of the MiG attacks led by the celebrated Soviet who had shot him down and whom Frank had in turn downed over Korea, but about men like Jay LaRoche he would never understand. His ideal of honor, like General Freeman’s, was in one sense ageless and as old, for all the high-tech machines he flew, as the dream of Camelot. Yet it was a vision that in the end sustained him as powerfully as the image of the shark held Jay in awe of sheer power unencumbered by anything “as antiquated,” in Jay’s words, “as principle.”
It almost pained Lana more to see Frank perplexed by evil than to see him in the trauma of the pain; she couldn’t bear to hear him wonder about the kind of cruelty she hoped she had left behind with Jay. She wanted to get him off the subject. “You hear about Marchenko? “
It worked, his attention immediately arrested by the mention of the Soviet top gun. Lana said it as if Marchenko were still alive, which was impossible; Frank’s RIO had seen the Fulcrum burst on impact over Manchuria. Unless…
He felt his heart thumping. “He didn’t get out?”
“That’s the story,” she said. “Course it could be Siberian propaganda. The rumor mill. You know how they love to—” For a split second Shirer was oblivious to his pain.
“But Anderson didn’t see a silk. I mean—” He stopped, casting his mind back. Yes, they had definitely seen the Fulcrum hit. A silent orange blossom against the mountainous folds of snow. “I remember,” he said. “I asked Anderson, ‘Any sign of a chute?”Negative!’ “
“Could he have missed it?” said Lana. “I mean, was it a clear day or—”
Frank felt a stabbing beat between his eyes, like someone driving a stake into his forehead above the bridge of his nose. Damn it. Lana didn’t know a thing about planes — when he’d first talked to her about Mach she thought it was someone called “Mac.” It had become a joke between them: “Mac the Knife!” But in her layman’s ignorance of things aeronautical, she had, with the unwitting luck of people who, like his mother, chose a winner at Churchill Downs because the horse had a “nice name” instead of studying the guide to form, managed to hit the bullseye with her question. There had been cloud, and it was quite possible Anderson had missed seeing a chute. The whole wing could have missed it, high above the stratus, everyone on a high after the shoot, eyes scanning above and behind lest any more bandits should come out of the sun into their cone to even the score.
“You should ask him when you get back,” proffered Lana.
“Back where?” It wasn’t said in self-pity, but until the bandage came off and they’d done the tests, no one would know where he was going. That was the first problem. The second one was that the SPETS had made it impossible for Anderson to answer anything. Frank felt exhausted, the hospital gown clinging to him from perspiration. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her about how Anderson had died, wondering whether they’d found his body yet on a floe. Finding your dead wasn’t a high priority when you were on the eve of a major battle. Since the Siberians were fully expecting Freeman to attack — and were probably buoyed rather man depressed by how close the Americans had come to losing Ratmanov — it was sure to be one of the bloodier battles of the war. The scuttlebutt around the hospital was that Freeman’s convoys were underway even now.
“Frank?” She asked him gently, deciding that they might as well hit it head-on after all. “Have you thought what you might like to do if the tests are negative — if there isn’t much they can do to restore your—”
“No,” he said brusquely, “I haven’t.” His sudden, uncharacteristic mood change was spawned by thoughts of what he’d do if he ever caught up with the SPETS who had — maybe-blinded him in the left eye for life. He didn’t like what he thought of doing and, visibly distressed, tried to evict the thoughts of sheer vengeance as swiftly as an ice hockey forward checking another. But the more he tried, the more persistent they became.
“Don’t fight it,” said Lana with a prescience that surprised him. “My dad always told the you can’t help what you think. It’s what you do that counts.”
Frank shrugged. Was she talking about what he’d like to do to the SPETS or Marchenko—if the Soviet was still alive? Well, he told himself, he wouldn’t be doing much of anything if the doc said the eye was finished. It would be home and repatriation. He knew he couldn’t explain it to anyone who wasn’t a flyer but quite calmly, without a trace of self-pity, Frank Shirer told himself that if he couldn’t fly again, life simply wouldn’t be worm it. Might as well tell a man he’d be impotent for life.
“Sorry, hon,” Lana said, “but I have to go. Get my ride back to Dutch.”
“Damn Dutch.”
“I know, but with Freeman’s—”
“Yeah,” responded Frank, “you’re going to be needed unfortunately.”
When she kissed him she was surprised by the lack of warmth. So preoccupied was he with what the future held for him, his mind wasn’t even on sex.”I’ve asked one of the boys flying the Medevac Hercules,” she told him, “to call the hospital here. Even then I don’t know when I’ll be able to—”
“I know,” he said. “I’ll get word to you soon as I can.”
She didn’t trust herself to answer without getting all teary. For heaven’s sake, Lana, she told herself on the army shuttle bus back to Elmendorf, he’s not dead. But she’d never seen him so dispirited either; more like a small boy sent to the dugout than someone dealing realistically with his situation. Of course, it was never the same when you weren’t the one it was happening to. Everyone knew how to deal with it when they weren’t involved. But it was because she had loved the boy in Frank that made it so terrible. When she left him he’d looked old. Maybe after his pain subsided…
She closed her eyes, gripping her shoulder bag hard as the bus wound up around the ABM sites that ringed Elmendorf, praying for the return of the time during which she had believed absolutely in a benevolent and all-loving God; asking, begging, that Frank’s sight not be damaged beyond repair, that he might fly again.
As rounds began for the doctors at Anchorage Hospital, the sun was shining off the Chugash Mountains, turning them a creamy pink in a breathtaking backdrop to the harbor. Over four thousand miles to the west, outside the KMK — Kuznetsky Metallurgical Kombinat — factory, in Novokuznetsk southeast of Novosibirsk, it was midnight. But there was to be no delay.
The director dismissed the argument of the works’ political officer that it would be better to exact punishment in daylight, where more people would see it, the director’s point being that the offense of the worker, one Dimitri Menisky, talking about the factory work through a haze of vodka among friends, was such a serious breach of security under the circumstances that Novosibirsk would simply brook no procrastination. In any case, argued the director forcefully, the execution within an hour of the man’s arrest would have a salutary effect.
Accordingly Menisky, forty-three, father of two, a boy, Ivan, and a girl, Tatya, was taken outside engine shop three, well away from the pile of scrap metal lest there be any ricochet, and, despite his falling on his knees and begging for mercy, was machine-gunned to death while snow poured through the penumbra of the yellow yard light. His crumpled body was left for one hour, this being a concession to the political officer, to make the point among the other workers. It was superfluous, for within ten minutes of the execution every man and woman in the KMK already knew about the fate of Dimitri Menisky from shop three, and no one was going to say anything to anyone outside the factory about what was going on inside.
The surgeon attending Frank Shirer was twenty-nine, and with his white coat wore an air of authority that his baby face undermined. Not surprisingly he tried to compensate by wearing a no-nonsense, Gradgrind-like countenance, particularly in front of an air ace, projecting a stern preoccupation with facts. For this reason some of the older veterans among the patients called him “Detective Joe Friday”—”Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.”
“Well, Major. Fact is, the tests confirm that vision in the left eye is virtually nil. Even with our technology there’s nothing much…”
Shirer didn’t hear the rest — didn’t want to. His normally rugged, handsome features took on a slate-gray pallor. While the doctor’s voice seemed far off, he was nevertheless acutely aware, as in the rush of a dogfight, of every smell and color about him— a sharp smell of iodine coming from the next bed, the stench of sick from several beds to his right. Yet he looked disbelieving, his mind temporarily rejecting what he had clearly heard; this despite the “fact” that he’d been preparing for it all night. It was as if they had him up past seven G’s in the centrifuge, his body clammy with the shock, feeling like a sponge being crushed by an immense, immovable weight.
“So.” Detective Joe’s voice was floating about the periphery of the spinning, uncontrollable world. “You’ll have to be content with flying a desk from now on. Fact is…”
He couldn’t bring himself to call Lana, the stench of defeat redolent in the hospital’s pervasive and cloying antiseptic as oppressive to him as when he’d first entered. He felt his hatred of the Siberians rising and did nothing to thwart the flood of bile, sensing that if he tried to fight it now, hold it back, it would permanently poison him and make him something he did not want to be. Voodoo priests stuck pins into dolls; all he could do, knowing the improbability of ever meeting the SPETS who had gouged his eye, was envisage shooting down Marchenko, the MiG ace becoming the embodiment of all his disappointment and anger. It was unreasonable, he knew, but you had to focus on something.
When the Wave, her soft, full-bosomed perfume reminding him of Lana, removed the bandage to change the dressing, he could see only a watery, milky image of her. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man was king, but not in the United States Air Force. The “fact,” as Dr. Joe Friday had underscored with his diagnosis, was that the USAF did not, would not, entrust a one-eyed man with seventy million dollars’ worth of merchandise.
A limey, one of a handful of SAS survivors from the “Rat Raid,” was walking up the aisle between the beds, his face a gauze mask. “Whatcha mate? Have a fag?” He offered Shirer a Benson and Hedges. “Course you can’t puff it in ‘ere. Old Muwer Legree’ll be onto you.” The gauze mask nodded toward the head nurse at her station. “Tough old bird,” commented the cockney. “Rawer fight the muwer-in-law — an’ that’s sayin’ somethin’.”
“No, thanks,” said Frank to the proffered cigarettes. “Don’t smoke.” He wanted the man to go away; could never understand limeys properly anyhow.
“Neiver did I — till the punchup started. Miss a drag some-thin’ fierce when I’m in the sheep dip.”
Shirer didn’t know what the hell the sheep dip was and he knew the limey knew he didn’t know so why the hell didn’t he just bug off?
“Slit trench,” explained the gauze mask.”Filled wif all kinds o’ muck: sheep shit, dead rats. You name it, sport, it’s there. Hard to lie in it wivout movin’ for up to twelve hours. No fuckin’ tea party, I can tell you mat.”
“Guess not,” said Shirer disinterestedly.
“Still, I’d rawer a sheep dip than this lot!” He jerked a nicotine-stained thumb toward his mask. “Fuckin’ Phantom of the Opera! Least you got your fuckin’ face, ‘aven’t you?”
Frank knew that JFK had been right: Life was unfair, and in a world where thousands starved while you had the glorious privilege of flying, you had no cause to moan. But the limey didn’t help — at least not then — with his wisecracking camouflaging his own terror beneath the British mask of self-deprecation. Yet this wounded English soldier was to have a profound effect on what would happen to Shirer.
“You a sky jockey?” asked the cockney.
“Was, “said Frank.
“Ah, never say the, mate. Never say the.”
The Brit reminded Frank of Eliza Doolittle’s father: “Get the to the church on time!” He thought about Lana, about whether they’d ever be able to get married, whether the slimeball Jay La Roche would ever release her. Thinking of Lana, he felt himself having what the nurses called a “tent,” the erection pressing against the sheet. He wanted to tell the limey to buzz off; yet he knew what the limey had said was right. You should never say the. But the prospects right then were as bleak as the Aleutians in the winter chill and, like all who are very ill, no matter for how short or long a time, he found it impossible at that moment to imagine he could ever be well again, and that fear was his real terror.