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 nightmare 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.
Because she hadn’t confided in anyone, especially her parents, she sometimes felt that her mother thought she expected too much. But all she wanted was a marriage like Beth and Ray’s — not perfect by any means, but built on bedrock, not on shifting sand. Or was it bedrock? Could it ever be? Perhaps Beth wasn’t confiding in anyone either — keeping it bottled up inside and caged by pride. At least Beth would have the children. Jay had wanted them, a son especially, but his violence took care of that, too, and induced a miscarriage in Lana. He’d got mad about that. As usual, that was her fault, too, but — God forgive her — she had seen it then and saw it now as a blessing, not to herself but for the child who would have grown up with Jay — a nightmare that Beth, with all her troubles, didn’t have to contend with. Perhaps Jay would change? No, she thought, he wouldn’t.
The Humvee’s horn startled her, and she stepped smartly to the shoulder of the road and turned to see the driver.
“Lieutenant Brentwood?” It was a sergeant from Dutch Harbor HQ. “You’re wanted back at the base, ma’am. Commander Morin’s request.”
“Requested or ordered?” Lana asked, though she didn’t really care, her sharp tone merely one of fright.
“He didn’t say, ma’am.”
“It’s all right, Sergeant,” said Lana, moving around to the passenger side. “I’m not going anywhere. Just out for my daily constitutional.”
“Yes, ma’am. Pretty soon you’re gonna need more than that anorak.”
Jay La Roche still on her mind, Lana read more into the sergeant’s comment than he meant. They didn’t call the Aleutian’s “America’s Siberia” for nothing — it felt like exile, the need for companionship, for women, ever greater than was usual for a military base. And for some, like Lana, who’d committed an infraction against the rules, the Aleutians posting was meant to be an exile, a punishment, and with your punishment came your file: “Severely reprimanded for conduct unbecoming an officer,” in Lana’s case. Would it have been unbecoming, she thought wryly, for a noncom nurse to have given young Spence the comfort of sexual release? There had been a lot of jokes in her wake about the “unbecoming” bit, but by now she was used to it. At least she’d developed an armor against the more vulgar suggestions and leers of men who had been given the choice of Unalaska or permanent latrine duty at Parris Island or Camp Lejeune. After what her brother David had gone through in marine boot camp at Parris Island, Lana could well understand why some chose the blustery isolation of the Aleutians. And now, David was God knew—
She turned on the driver. “Is it about my brother?”
The sergeant was pumping the brakes on a patch of black ice and shifting down so the truck roared. “What’s that, ma’am?” he shouted.
“Colonel Morin — has he got news of my brother, David?”
“No idea, ma’am. All I was told was to come and get you.”
She felt cold now in the pit of her stomach. What was so urgent that on this godforsaken island in this godforsaken chain, the base commander had sent out a Humvee for her? It was either David or Robert. Or was it their parents? Perhaps all of them. It couldn’t possibly be—
“Ma’am?”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you something off the record?”
She nodded — not sure whether she should have.
“You ever go out with enlisted men?” asked the sergeant.
“No.”
“Just thought I’d ask.”
“I–I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to sound like that — it’s not — I don’t go out with anyone, Sergeant.” Oh, Lord, she thought, now they ‘d say she was a lesbian. No they wouldn’t— not after young Spence and her conduct “unbecoming an officer.” Or maybe that wouldn’t make any difference? From the men’s point of view, up here, any woman would do. Even so, she hadn’t meant to offend the sergeant. “I didn’t mean to sound—”
“S’all right, ma’am. I understand.”
No you don’t, thought Lana. Now she was confused in her anxiety over why she’d been sent for. She desperately wanted reassurance, her old fears suddenly resurfacing; a feeling of vulnerability and fright combined overwhelmed her. She wished Shirer were here. What she wouldn’t give for a man to hold her, to love her. Not sex, not to start with anyway. Just to be held. As she watched the light fading from Dutch Harbor, the hills around the base took on a chilling blue aura, at once beautiful, ethereal almost. And threatening.
“You wanted to see me, Commander?” asked Lana, trying to read in his face what it was all about before he spoke.
“Yes,” answered Commander Morin. “Close the door, will you, Lieutenant.” There was another man in the Quonset hut — a fisherman by the look of his rough white Cowichan knit sweater, its bald eagle wings in full span across the man’s barrel-shaped chest. At first glance he gave the impression of being overweight, but Lana realized it was probably the oilskins covering his considerable frame that gave her the impression.
“Lieutenant Brentwood,” said Morin, a small, stocky man, his height in marked contrast to the considerably bigger man, whom he introduced as “Mr. Bering,” Bering’s wild salt-and-pepper beard framing a time- and wind-ravaged face.
Bering reminded Lana of the prewar magazine Alaska Men—maybe it was still being published. In Alaska, men, outnumbering eligible females three to one — now five to one with the troops stationed there — had advertised in the magazine in the lower forty-eight states for prospective mates. Bering had a burly, honest look about him, clearly undaunted by the unfamiliar military surroundings, though it wasn’t the kind of location she would expect to find him in. He looked born to the sea. Lana wondered why the man, in his late thirties, perhaps early forties, and fit-looking now that she saw him closer, wasn’t in uniform until Morin introduced him as a “crabber.” Shellfish meat from the Aleutians was now in ever-higher demand in Japan and the United States, with Japan’s fleet of shellfish trawlers unable to break out north of Hokkaido Island into the fishing grounds of the vast North Pacific because of the Soviet sub blockade that extended from Vladivostok to Kamchatka Peninsula. Without the American fish supply to Japan via Hawaii, and the long southern route around the sub packs, Japan would soon be in the same position as Britain had been when Hitler’s U-boat blockade threatened to bring that country to its knees. All the Soviets had to do was delay the food supplies to Japan as effectively as they had interfered with the NATO reinforcements across the Atlantic — close the ring for another twelve weeks — and the equation of men and materiel would shift decidedly to the Soviets’ favor. Then there would be no way out, except nuclear, and that was no way at all.
Morin was asking Lana how well she knew Captain Alen. She was sitting, feeling too bulky and hot in the overheated room, and asked for permission to remove her parka. Bering, who had taken a seat to the right of the commander’s desk, sat with his arms draped nonchalantly about the back of the plastic molded chair, blue eyes unapologetically X-raying her newly revealed shape.
“I want you to understand, Lieutenant,” began Commander Morin, shifting his gaze to Bering, “both of you, that this meeting is strictly off the record.” It struck Lana then that Bering was really a regular naval officer — the unkempt beard and ruddy cheeks a front, along with the easy affability and apparently unconcerned air. But for what? Drugs on the base?
“Mr. Bering,” explained Morin, “is a longtime resident of Unalaska.”
“Oh—” said Lana, smiling. Waiting.
Morin looked down at a three-ring binder, paused for a moment. “How long did you know him, Lieutenant?”
Bering was making her feel undressed. “The pilot?” pressed Morin, irritated that he hadn’t the effect on her that Bering obviously did. “The Hercules that crashed.” Morin was looking up at her.
“Not long at all,” said Lana.
“He’d invited you to fly to Adak with him. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You didn’t go?”
What was Morin on about? Lana wondered. It was a dumb question. Of course she didn’t go — otherwise she’d be dead.
“Why was that? Records show you were off duty. You didn’t report in sick, did you?”
“No, sir, but I’d just received a wire from the War Department about my brother the night before the flight. He’d been reported missing in action. On the morning I was to go with Lieutenant Alen, I picked up a VOA broadcast about the situation in Europe and I decided to stay and listen.”
Morin nodded, his eyes back on the file, then up at her again. The sound of the electric clock on the wall behind him was a taint buzz, which Lana could now hear quite distinctly in the silence of the room.
“Yes,” said Morin. “I’m sorry.” He paused. “You ever see him drunk?”
Lana was nonplussed. “No — not that I—”
“I don’t mean in duty,” said the commander. “Socially?”
“No,” replied Lana. “I hardly knew him… He invited me up for the run to Adak, that’s all.”
“How about his copilot, then?”
“I didn’t know him at all, Commander.”
Morin was tapping a pencil on the desk, letting it slip through his fingers, reversing it, obviously in a quandary.
“I don’t think,” proffered Lana, “that he was the type to get drunk before a flight, sir, if that’s what you’re concerned about. Anyway, as far as I remember, the plane was hit by volcanic debris when Mount Vsevidof blew.”
“Yes,” said Morin, rolling the pencil back and forward between his hands. “That’s what we thought. We did have a four point six on the Richter — but that’s not unusual for this part of the world. Anyway, it doesn’t usually accompany an eruption. Weather boys tell me they’d expect something around seven point one for the volcanoes to blow their tops.” He paused, leveling the pencil at Bering. “This gentleman says he was in the area off Vsevidof that morning — how far out did you say?”
Lana liked Bering, so laid-back, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his coveralls, legs outstretched as if he might be getting ready to take a nap. “ ‘Bout seven — ten miles,” he told the commander. “Halfway between Mount Vsevidof and Okmok Caldera.” He was smiling at Lana. “Next island west of us, miss. Caldera’s the ash lip of the old volcano-still steams a lot. Adds to the fog. But I never heard the noise, you see — I mean the noise of anything being thrown up-volcanic rocks. They go through the air with a kind of hissing noise. Lava starts to cool as it flies through the air and when it hits the sea. Once you’ve heard it — you never forget.”
“But,” cut in Morin, pressing into his left palm hard with the pencil’s eraser and looking straight at Lana, “he thinks he heard—”
“Know I heard, Colonel,” said Bering, though he was still watching Lana.
“All right,” Morin corrected himself, “he heard another sound.”
“Well,” said Bering, “like I said, I saw the flash first. Then a booming sound a few seconds later.”
“He thinks,” said Morin, “that it was a missile.”
Now she told the commander she realized why he was so concerned — it looked as if one of their own aircraft in the fighter umbrella that constantly patrolled the Aleutian arc had accidentally shot down the Hercules, killing Alen, the copilot, engineer, and nurse Mary Reilley. The military called it “friendly fire,” but you ended up just as dead.
“No,” the commander corrected her. “I’ve done a thorough check of that possibility. No fighter cover over the area at that time.” He glanced up at the map of the Aleutian arc, where he’d ringed the wild, grass-topped basalt group generally known as the Islands of Four Mountains, which thrust out of the sea three hundred miles west of Unalaska’s Dutch Harbor.
“A Bogey?” suggested Lana, surprised at her ready use of the preflight lingo she’d picked up at the base.
The commander shook his head. “Nothing on our radar. Nothing at all.”
“But,” interjected Lana, “our radar at Shemya Island and Adak should have picked up anything coming our way. I mean—”
“Exactly,” said Morin, mildly irritated that she knew enough to ask the question. “Shemya’s phased radar and Adak Naval Station should have seen anything coming our way — at least half an hour warning. Even if they were flying at Mach 2.” The commander paused. “Which is why the Russians would like to take those two stations out — reduce our warning time.”
“Then how,” pressed Lana, “would a missile—”
“That’s why I’ve asked you here,” said Morin. “To check out Alen. If they’d goofed up, accidentally fired off a flare or whatever, it might have been what Mr. Bering believes—”
“It wasn’t a flare, Colonel. I’d bet old Sea Goose on that.” He smiled at Lana. “My trawler.”
“Oh.”
“It was going way too fast for a flare, Commander,” continued Bering. “I’ve seen enough of those from Search and Rescue to know the difference.” Without taking his hands out of his pockets, Bering indicated the map. “Looked to be coming up from the vicinity of Four Islands.”
Now Lana realized precisely what it was that the commander was worried about. If a missile had been fired at the Hercules from a submarine, then it most likely had advance notice of the aircraft’s destination and so its probable flight path. Lana was about to assure the commander that she certainly hadn’t told anyone, but—”I–I did mention it to Nurse Reilley when I found out I couldn’t go for the ride.”
“The nurse who went instead of you?” asked Morin.
“Yes. She took my place. But she would hardly have had time to tell anyone—”
“I’m not saying she did,” responded the commander. “But all it takes is for someone to send a millisecond burst signal to the sub. At least a dozen or so people on the base knew the plane was doing a supply run to Adak.”
“But wouldn’t we pick up a signal like that?” asked Lana.
“Yes, and I’ve checked all signals as well as fighter patrol times — and I’ve had the reports from Adak and Shemya cross-referenced on that day. Nothing. They don’t show any sub intercept.”
Lana thought he’d snap the pencil in half as he sought an explanation.
“I don’t think you’ve got a security leak,” said Bering. “Plane just happened to be there. Too much damn coincidence otherwise.”
The pencil was still, Morin clearly relieved by Bering’s implied conclusion — that no one in Morin’s command was an agent, that it was simply coincidence, that the downing of the Hercules had occurred in Dutch Harbor’s area of responsibility.
But the commander’s satisfaction was short-lived as he reminded himself how the military was loath to believe in coincidence. It was too often a cover-up for incompetence. And God knew there were enough dissatisfied people posted to the Aleutians that he couldn’t dismiss the possibility his command had a leak. In any event, it was a case of cover your ass, which meant checking out the Four Mountains as well as requesting a security sweep of any civilians on the island, many of them of Aleut-Russian heritage from the days when Dutch Harbor was used as the main base for Russian fur sealers. The Aleuts had been poorly treated during World War II, many interned in run-down fish canneries on the Alaskan mainland. It was quite possible the Russians had infiltrated at least a few of them. On the one hand, if he sent any of his men to do a search of the four small islands, it would raise the question of a possible spy or spies, and it wasn’t a smart move careerwise to stir anything up if you couldn’t deliver. On the other hand, if an aircraft could be brought down anywhere over the thousand-mile arc, America’s back door was open.
Perhaps it had nothing to do with anyone on the island-perhaps a missile was fired from a sub. After all, in the Second World War Japanese subs — the big I boats — had shelled Oregon and California. But then, how could Morin explain how the noise of an enemy sub had gone undetected, given the extensive network of sonar arrays around the Aleutians? A sub story just wouldn’t stand up. But if Bering was right, if a missile had been fired from one of the islands, it was unlikely that out of the ten types of Soviet air-to-surface missiles, they would use anything as big as an SS-19 with its range of forty-eight hundred miles. It was much more likely they would use something like the shorter-range, shoulder-mounted “Grails,” which could have been fired low and fast enough to evade Dutch Harbor’s radar 130 miles to the east. It would have taken only a few seconds from a base somewhere on the four small islands to bring down the big Hercules.
Morin asked Bering if, seeing he knew the island so well, he would be prepared to act as scout for a search-and-destroy mission to the Four Islands.
Bering thought about it and said he would — on one condition.
“Which is?” pressed the commander anxiously.
Bering replied that as an “independent fisherman,” he didn’t have the benefits of any group medical insurance, especially as he was separated from his wife, and that now his two teenagers were in “braces,” the cost of dental treatment was keeping him broke.
“Leave it to me,” said Morin. “From here on in, you’re covered. I’ll get the paperwork done this afternoon. Don’t worry about it.” The commander’s gaze shifted to Lana, then back to Bering. “I’ll organize a platoon and transport. But I want this whole operation kept under wraps.”
“Then we should use my trawler,” put in Bering. “If there is anyone on the islands up to no good, there’s no point in advertising we’re coming.”
“But you’ll have to land somewhere. They’ll see your trawler coming whether they suspect anything or not.”
“Not if I go in fog, they won’t. And that’s the forecast for the next week.”
“All right,” said Morin, smiling appreciatively. “Sounds good to me.”
“Okay,” said Bering enthusiastically. “Would you like to come along, Miss Brentwood?”
She blushed despite herself. Was he serious? “I’ll stay here with the commander.”
“Lucky commander,” said Bering mischievously. Morin was decidedly embarrassed.
As she and Bering left the Quonset hut, the sky above them was studded with stars, but even now wisps of fog could be seen sneaking into the harbor, and for want of anything better to say, Lana noted the obvious. “Think we’ve seen the end of the good weather for a while.”
“I’ll be back,” said Bering. “I’d like to take you out when I get back. Okay with you?”
“Why — yes, I suppose—”
“Great.”
The next minute he was gone, into the night, heading back toward the docks of Dutch Harbor, his fisherman’s wet-weather coat draped over his arm — like a helpless slave, Lana thought, and she felt a stirring in her.
“Heard the scuttlebutt?” asked her roommate almost the moment she returned to barracks.
“What?” asked Lana.
“They think there’s some Commie missile base down on one of those islands. We’re probably going to see some action around here shortly.”
Lana didn’t know what shocked her most — news of the search-and-destroy mission having already leaked or that her roommate seemed so eager to see “action”—which meant broken bodies for the Waves.
“After this gig,” the girl told Lana, “in Civvy Street they’ll be begging us to work in OR.”
“If,” said Lana, “there’ll be any ORs left.”
“Ah — we’ll win, honey.”
“Like we did in Vietnam,” said Lana.
“You’re a gloom cloud all of a sudden. Morin chew your ass out?”
“No.”
“Cheer up then. Nobody’s going to push the big button. They’re not crazy, lady.”
“If they’re not crazy,” said Lana, “they wouldn’t have started a war in the first place.”
“I don’t know,” said the bubbling roommate. “Sometimes there’s no other way. Sometimes you have to fight.”
What depressed Lana more was that her fellow Wave was right. Sometimes there was no other way. Either that or you simply walked away in defeat as she had with Jay.
Her roommate, running late for her shift, grabbed her cape. “You know anything about this Bering?”
“No,” said Lana.
“Oh, come on, Lana. You were with him in Morin’s office.”
“Yes, but I mean I don’t know anything about him. Some kind of — fisherman — I don’t know.”
“Some kind of fisherman… I’d like to go fishing with him. I’d like to get him under the sheets — in between them— or on top of them — and…”
“All right,” said Lana.
Though he had just sunk the Yumashev, Robert Fernshaw’s initial rush of victory as he ditched gave way to empathy for the hundreds of Russian sailors miles away who, like him, were at the mercy of the Atlantic. Now and then he could glimpse patches of them through the crazily tilting rectangle of his life raft’s flap as the raft slid up and down the walls of ever-deepening troughs. The Exocet Fernshaw had fired had been so devastating that he knew many of the Russian crew wouldn’t have had time to make for the life rafts. Caught for a moment atop a huge, sweeping swell, he saw the dot of the Russian chopper hovering over the stricken sailors, winching a dozen or so aboard and — it looked like — ferrying others from the oil-streaked water to the few lifeboats. But how far could the chopper go? Even on a full tank, the Hormone’s range wasn’t much more than four hundred miles.
Fernshaw stopped thinking about the Russians, any sympathy he may have had for them as fellow human beings being quickly dissipated by the reality of the war. It wasn’t NATO’s divisions that had breached the Fulda Gap and started the war. Anyway, they certainly weren’t going to worry about him. He checked that his raft’s SARS — salt-activated radio-to-satellite beacon — was working and was struck by the irony that if an Allied ship was over the horizon, it would probably see, via satellite relay photos, the scores of Russian sailors in the water first, and would miss him altogether if the beacon packed it in after the first few hours of full-power transmission.
The swells that had been mere scratches on a blue slate from the air were now growing alarmingly, the high, white cumulus bruising, and the ocean no longer deep blue but a relentless and endless gray. But perhaps, he told himself, the swells that seemed to have grown more precipitous in the last five minutes were not harbingers of worsening weather but merely appeared more ominous beneath the leaden sky. Then he saw the Hormone, its coaxial rotors a black blur, and for a moment or two Fernshaw was convinced he was about to die, his heart pounding, thinking of his wife and four-year-old boy, the cloying smell of the claustrophobic rubber raft closing in on him, making him nauseated.
All his training against G forces was of no avail in the heaving chaos of the sea, where one second he felt his whole body grow lighter as the raft swept up the side of a fifteen-foot swell before plummeting, his stomach churning, into the next trough. Not a religious man, Fernshaw nevertheless said a prayer for deliverance, and it was only when he glimpsed the Russian chopper suspended above him, a buoyancy bag inflated around each of its four wheels, a rescue cable and harness still dangling from its side door, that he dared hope fate was finally lending him a hand — that the old law of the sea of enemies helping one another when they were in peril might yet prevail. One of the Russians in the Hormone, immediately behind the copilot, was dimly visible through the salt-speckled Perspex of the chopper. On impulse, Fernshaw waved. The man waved back and the chopper rose.
In the chopper several of the Yumashev’s rescued crew members made to cross the Hormone’s cabin to look out, but the pilot, alarmed by their abruptly shifting the chopper’s center of gravity, brusquely ordered them to “Sadit’sya!”— “Sit down!” A young cook, still shivering, ignored the order and remained standing, one hand on the cabin rail, the other clutching a rough woolen navy blanket about his shoulders, his wet hair and beard matted with oil sludge. As he watched the silvered barrel toppling from beneath the chopper, the bright orange raft slid bumpily down a swell’s steep incline as the chopper banked.
The sea erupted seconds later, the depth charge’s fuse set for poverknostny kontakt— “surface contact”—its shock wave visible, a huge ring shuddering and racing out from its epicenter, the tent-shaped raft miraculously still inflated but tumbling down the outside of a high, foaming column of water, as if caught in a mossy, green waterfall, the enemy pilot’s body, limp and lifeless, hitting the water before the raft.