The sharp black peaks and volcanic sores of the windswept islands that stretched in a scythelike arc for over three thousand miles between Alaska and Russia first appeared to the astronauts like the emerald spine of some enormous exotic sea creature. There was nothing exotic about them for Lana Brentwood. From the moment she landed at Dutch Harbor on the northeastern end of tomahawk-shaped Unalaska Island, she thought there must be no lonelier place on earth. No wonder they called it America’s Siberia.
Beneath the enormous steel-gray clouds of cumulonimbus that constantly rolled in over Makushin Volcano toward the narrow neck of the harbor, Lana saw a white dot bursting out from the fibrous sky that was mixed with steam coming off the sulfurous fumaroles of Mount Vsevidof on Umnak Island to the west. With unerring grace, the dot swooped down over the polished black clumps of kelp that washed in from the cold Bering Sea immediately to the north and from the Pacific to the south. She pulled the string of her parka hood tight against the bone-aching chill of late October and, stepping to the side of the road that skirted the forlorn haven of Dutch Harbor, fixed her binoculars on the bird. It was a glaucous-winged gull.
Two months before, the woman whose beauty had once gained her offers to model in New York and delivered her to a disastrous marriage with the tall, lean, and eminently successful Jay La Roche couldn’t have told the difference between a glaucous-winged gull and any other of the hundreds of species of birds. But two months ago she had been a nurse, quietly nursing her psyche back to health after the trauma of her having left Jay. He was one of the high-flying conglomerate stars and chairman of the La Roche pharmaceutical and cosmetic empire, and his job had necessitated frequent business trips abroad. At first she’d been allowed to accompany him on his globe-trotting hops, from New York to London, Shanghai to Paris, and London to Melbourne, and at first she had enjoyed them. But then it soon became clear to her that Jay was combining business with a seemingly endless string of one-night stands.
Lana looked back now with a mixture of incredulity and self-loathing at how hard she’d tried to “accommodate” him — as he urbanely put it to her, in tones that made her feel nothing less than a country hick in the fast social world where the mores of an admiral’s daughter seemed quaintly, even ludicrously, out of place.
At first she’d blamed herself, for her naïveté, for what Jay repeatedly reminded her was her “lack of experience.” And she had blamed her parents for not having prepared her. It had taken her more than a year to realize that no one but a masochist could have prepared her for Jay La Roche, for whom a menage-a-trois, which Lana would not participate in, was viewed as the least kinky of sexual preferences. Then one night in his apartment in Shanghai, just after his mother, whom Lana liked, had flown home from staying with them, and the servants were on their night off, she was trapped. She had seen how his mother’s visit had put enormous pressure on him. Instead of being able to spend his days and nights whoring — he was always very careful to have the boys as well as the girls examined by his bevy of highly paid physicians — he’d been forced to show himself at home in the evenings, his stable of sexual partners quarantined in the luxurious surroundings of the Jinjiang Hotel. He told Lana he wanted her. She asked him why he didn’t go to the Jinjiang. “No,” he’d replied. “First, I want you. “Twisting her hand till she was on her knees, he told her, smiling, his gray eyes glistening, “You don’t understand, do you?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t.” When she wouldn’t let him urinate on her, as part of his latest complex ritual, he tried what he screamed at her was the “slut stuff,” beating her so badly, it had nearly killed her. She vowed it would never happen again, thinking that now there was more than infidelity as a reason for leaving him, she was finally free. That no court in the land would refuse a divorce. But Jay’s money and influence, she discovered, could fix that, too. He told her he’d contest any divorce.
“Why?” she had cried, or rather mumbled, through her swollen lips, sobbing, “You hate me. I hate you.”
“No you don’t,” he told her arrogantly. “No matter how much you think you hate me, I was the first, baby. That counts for something. Forever.”
She managed a contemptuous smile, not normally part of her repartee, the taste of blood metallic in her mouth. “You’re not the first.”
“You lying bitch!” He had her by the throat, screaming that he’d kill her, but now she didn’t care. It was too indescribably awful to go on.
“Who was it?” he demanded, shaking her, throwing her to the floor.
“I’m not telling you,” she gasped.
“Was it that fucking pilot?” he shouted, shaking her so violently, her head felt like a rag doll’s.
It was the bravest thing she’d ever said to him, and she believed later that the only reason he hadn’t killed her was that he was making so much noise about it, screaming and smashing everything in sight, that one of the wealthier Chinese playing at mah-jongg and losing badly in one of the other penthouse suites complained to the police.
By the time the Chinese police arrived — two men in a motorcycle and sidecar — Jay had the minister for trade on the line, and the two policeman left with a dozen cans of Coca-Cola each — eight days wages. Lana still had enough courage to be scornful. “You think you can buy off a divorce with Coke?”
“With Coke,” he said, turning the pun back at her, “I could buy Jesus Christ!”
“You’re sick.”
He unzipped his fly and, pouring Scotch on it, walked toward her. “Listen, you little daddy’s whore, I could buy your chicken-shit daddy, the admiral, if I wanted. Don’t you push me. I could have a dozen Chinks up here in a flash-all testifying you’d sucked them off in Tiananmen Square. I can buy anything in this country, and don’t you forget it.” His voice rose as he kept coming toward her, waving the Scotch for effect. “I can buy anything in any fucking country. Cunt-tree. Get it?”
Lana had sat cowering from him, but now she merely looked away in her revulsion. He was mad. And she knew if she looked at him now, he would kill her. He pushed it into her face, slapping her with it. “You try to divorce me, pussy willow, and I’ll drag so much shit in the papers that your mommy and daddy won’t show their faces outside their little fucking house. Understand?”
She didn’t answer.
“Understand?” he bellowed. “And your fucking brothers’ll be the fucking joke from here to Peoria. Got it?”
She was terrified.
“I can’t hear you,” he taunted in a singsong voice.
“Yes,” she said very quietly.
“All right, you bitch. Now open your mouth.” She wouldn’t.
“You want Daddy and Mommy in trouble? And how about you? You want to end up a friggin’ monster like that brother of yours?”
Her gut turned. She knew he was right. He could buy anything. It was childish to imagine anything else. He had bought half of Shanghai, and party officials from the Bund to Beijing. They were all in his pocket.
“Hey!” He grabbed her hair, shaking her violently. “I own half the tabloids, sweetheart. And I can buy the rest just like that—” He tried to snap his fingers but failed. Against all caution, in spite of her terror, or perhaps because of it, she laughed.
He had his hands around her throat again, pushing the thumbs hard up into her. As she gasped for air, he jammed it into her mouth, thumping her head against the wall, screaming again how he could ruin her, her family, how he could do anything he wanted. She thought of Frank Shirer, the pilot who had taken her out in Washington before she’d ever met Jay La Roche. They’d made love, but it hadn’t been good — her first time and painful beyond belief — but Shirer had been kind the moment he realized he was hurting her. She could see him now, the pale blue eyes, quick yet serene, the eyes of one of the navy’s top guns, of a man who wouldn’t blink at danger, she’d thought, but a man who was warm and loving. And funny. He’d put on the “nuclear” eye patch that he’d kept since his stint as one of the pilots of Air Force One. It had frightened her at the time, but now she clung to the memory of it, so different it was from the horror of Jay in her mouth. Frank Shirer, wherever he was, was as different from Jay La Roche’s type as you could imagine.
Suddenly La Roche’s whole body shuddered violently, smacking her head hard against the wall, and then, breathing laboriously, satiated, he stumbled back from her, turning, his back to the wall, sliding down, eyes closed. “I love you,” he said.
The terrible thing was, she knew he meant it. She ran to the bathroom and vomited.
Early in the morning, his eyes bleary from drink, he staggered from the bedroom, picking up a spilled bottle of Scotch on the way. She could tell from the way he paused to pick it up rather than kicking it out of the way as he normally would have that he was entering his magnanimous “let’s be reasonable” phase — his “must,” as he called it, now expended.
Still half-drunk, standing unsteadily in the bathroom doorway, his shirt out, his reflection reeling, disappearing from view in the mirror, his body reeking of deodorant, sweat, and booze — so powerful, it seemed to engulf her — he told her, his tone of magnanimity as revolting to her as the sight of his spent body, “If you don’t want to stay with me, okay. But—” he used the bottle as a pointer “—don’t you ever try for a divorce. You’re mine.”
No matter how much she had rinsed and washed her face, she still felt dirty. “So you want a respectable front,” she said bitterly, holding an ice pack to her jaw.
He nodded. “So? That’s what we all want, isn’t it? A front. You don’t know who the hell you are.”
Lana wanted to say something about his mother — of what she would think if she knew the real Jay La Roche — but instinctively she refrained. It was too dangerous. He was offering a deal. Best to take it while she could. “All right,” she said. “But I’m going back to the States.”
He walked slowly away from the door, stopped, and came back, bottle of Scotch still in hand. “Lana!”
She cringed, her flesh turning cold and clammy, with the sensation of something reptilian crawling over it. She knew what he was going to say. She could tell him not to say it, but to do that would only drag the whole thing out. It was easier to go along, let him play it out, then he’d leave her alone for a few days, if past performance was anything to go by — enough time to pack and make the arrangements. “What?” she asked sternly.
“Love you, babe.”
It was a different man speaking, but she despised the supine, ingratiating tone as much as she hated the psychopath who’d attacked her like an animal.
“Hear me?” he pressed, his voice even, modulated — as forgiving as a father making up with a child after a bad day.
“I hear you,” she said without turning around from the sink.
“Look at me, babe!”
She stared up at him, lost in the mystery of how it was that she had ever been attracted to him. But of course, then he had been someone else. He met her stare and did not avert his eyes from the burning hatred he saw in them.
How could she ever begin to explain to anyone about the disaster that had been her marriage? She had told no one, not even her friends among the nurses she’d worked with in Halifax before her exile to the Aleutians. And certainly not her parents. All they knew was that “things hadn’t worked out.” Certainly she had never gone into any of the sordid details with anyone, and only in her letters to her older brother, Robert, somewhere on duty in the North Atlantic, had she hinted at anything like the full horror of it all.
“Can’t you work things out?” her father had asked. “Your mother and I — well, we’ve had our tiffs now and then. But you don’t just get up and—”
“No!” she had told him. They couldn’t work things out. And that was that. There was no one at Dutch Harbor she could talk to, no one in whom she could confide. There was the padre, of course, but she was only a nominal churchgoer and, at least for now, couldn’t bring herself to resurrect the things she wished exorcised.
She began walking back to the base. At Dutch Harbor, the lights were twinkling brightly against the cold, blue twilight, and beyond, the cloud cover was lifting. The isolation and boredom of the place would have been more bearable if the weather were not so foul, so unpredictable. It wasn’t unusual for rain and snow driven by gale-force winds to sweep down from the Arctic and then the next minute to see clouds rent by the sun.
Her job so far had been to assist in making an inventory of medical supplies throughout the Aleutian Chain, and had it not been for the Unalaska-Alaska flights, the boredom would have been overpowering. Keeping to herself, she had not made any really close friends either here or in Halifax, except William Spence, the young British sailor, when turmoil had enveloped her again. Or had it really? Was her life more the consequence of her own actions than she was willing to admit? Was she what her father so disparagingly called “one of the world’s willing victims”? Was there something deep in her psyche that sought to purge itself by seeking out the worst as a form of punishment? Did she enjoy the “heroic” pain of the victim as an athlete takes secret pride in the pain of the effort? How else could she have possibly become embroiled with the young Englishman, a boy really, who was to die before his twentieth birthday? His loneliness, she had thought, was there for anyone to see, and surely it had only been fate that had put her on the ward aboard the hospital ship when the big Chinook choppers brought young Spence in, hands bloody stubs which had to be amputated following a savage Russian Hunter/Killer attack on the British and American convoy hundreds of miles north of Newfoundland.
When he was first transferred from the chopper to the hospital ship as one of the most seriously injured from HMS Peregrine and one of the first casualties of the Atlantic war, he was simply that — another casualty — and one who, despite the double amputation, was given a fair chance of survival because of his youth. Then the oil-caused pneumonia — which so often lay undetected in a man’s lungs for several days before it was discovered, when it was too late — began racking Spence’s body, depleting his strength so quickly that the earlier prognosis for recovery suddenly changed. In those last desperate days, thousands of miles from home, Lana knew it was not at all unusual for a patient, especially a young man, to transfer to her all the adoration he might have given the woman he would have loved, had he lived. Like so many before him, in war or not, the intensity of William Spence’s feeling for his nurse could be understood only by those who, like him, had lain in the morning hours in that death watch between two and four — who had known the chilling fear that soon they would be no more and who wanted nothing more than a human touch, to reassure them there was hope when there was none.
When the morphine ceased to work, the pain so intolerable that it shamed his manhood and he wept like a child, she drew the sheet down below his waist, unpinned her hair, letting it fall down on him, lips closing about him, her tongue enveloping and drawing him into her own ecstasy until it was his — in the way she had learned from Jay in his gentler honeymoon incarnation period. Was it possible that out of Jay’s evil came good? And for that she was banished to “Devil’s Island,” as Dutch Harbor was called by the Waves. She told herself she no longer cared. She had helped a young man confront death, given him pleasure before the ultimate obscenity claimed him, and no matter how sordid a thing they would make of it behind her back, she knew she had been right and that they would not break her on this island or any other.
As Lana turned around, heading back to the thirty-bed hospital, the blue light changed dramatically. Invading masses of bruised cumulonimbus cloud swept in from the western sea, where the warm Kuroshio Current and the Bering Sea collided to produce the towering thunderhead storm clouds. It was the unmistakable signal that the 124 islands strung along the 3,000-mile arc were about to be hit by yet another millimaw, the name given to the wind storms by the Aleuts who had lived on the sparsely vegetated and forlorn islands even before the promyshlermiki, the Russian fur traders who had settled the barren but sea-rich volcanic outcrops over two hundred years before.
Lana watched the seabirds driven landward by the approaching storm — yellow-tufted puffins, their bright white faces and rust-red beaks atop the black bodies irrepressibly happy-looking, and always bringing a smile to her no matter how depressed she felt. But even in the abundant bird life, from cormorants and fulmars to kittiwakes, she saw pain and battle. Where others reveled in the wildness of the place, she yearned for the quiet life — not boring but the kind of life she had experienced in Nova Scotia while based in Halifax, doing what now she felt she did best, looking after others, hoping not only to help them bear their pain but to escape from her own.
The truth on Unalaska, however, was that to date there had not been much work to do. The island’s main function was twofold: to provide safe anchorage in Dutch Harbor for the U.S., Japanese, and Korean factory ships from the storms that plagued the nutrient-rich fishing ground off the Aleutian Trench, and more important, to serve as a depot between the handful of American bases. As depot, its primary responsibility was to Adak Island Naval Station and tiny Shemya Island, which few Americans had ever heard of and which, being the most western extension of the United States, possessed an air force station and was, as all the interceptor and transport pilots knew, the most heavily armed piece of real estate in the Western world. If ever the Russians moved against the United States’ western flank, Shemya Island and Adak, the big submarine base 360 miles eastward, would be more strategically important than Midway Island over five hundred miles south had been in World War II. The island, which, like England in the Atlantic, was in effect a United States forward aircraft carrier to the Soviet Union, was not something Lana Brentwood had given much thought to, for one’s own world had a way of dwarfing world conflicts that were supposed to dwarf one’s own. Besides, neither she nor anyone else believed the Russians would be so foolish as to head eastward and try to use the island arc as a stepping stone to America’s back door through the Alaskan and the Canadian West Coast.
The millimaw was moving in fast, and by the time Lana reached the hospital, snow flurries mixed with rain were swept in by the millimaw at over ninety miles an hour, the rain and snow striking the Quonset huts horizontally, the only place in the world, the transport pilots told Lana, where such a phenomenon occurred. All around she could hear the beginning of the “Aleutian wail,” which some bureaucrats in Washington, over four thousand miles away, thought was ‘‘Aleutian whale” but which was the peculiar beating and howling sound of the millimaw on the sheer basaltic cliffs and treeless slopes of the islands. She could see the double-glazed windows in the Quonset huts as square orange eyes staring out from the bleakness. Unlike the native Aleuts, some of whom still lived in their underground sod houses or barabaras and who eked out a living subsisting on reindeer and seafood, Lana knew she would never get used to the place. Were it not for the VCR and the big high-definition TV screen they had at the recreation center for the three thousand inhabitants of Dutch Harbor, she believed there would be many more cases of severe depression — to date, the most common complaint at the base hospital.
Some of the men, most of them pilots, had attempted to alleviate their boredom by trying to date her, but she had refused most. Despite the gentleness she’d experienced with William Spence, after her experience with Jay La Roche, she was still leery of men, especially when she discovered that the confidentiality of her naval file, which had spelled out the reason for her banishment, had been breached. They obviously thought she was an easy lay.
The only exception she had even thought of making was a pilot, Lieutenant Alen, who regularly flew the resupply route to the big antisubmarine base on Adak halfway along the chain and on to Shemya and Attu loran station over 420 miles farther west near the international date line between the United States and USSR. He had asked her if she had wanted to go along for a ride to see Attu. She’d said no, but he wasn’t one to be deterred, and this night as she walked into the officers’ club, she saw his boyish grin.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked, brushing the snow off her collar.
She felt awkward. “Yes,” she said. “Hot chocolate. If that’s all right.”
“One hot chocolate coming up.” Alen ignored the guffaws of several pilots farther down the bar. Handing her the steaming mug, he asked her if she’d changed her mind about a flight — this time to Adak.
“Not particularly,” she answered, not wishing to be rude but having already seen as many of the forty-six active volcanoes in the chain as she intended.
“What’s the matter? You haven’t got a sense of history? Big battle there in forty-three. Banzai attack by the Japanese. Just kept coming against our boys.”
“Now they‘re our boys,” she said.
“Well, sort of-”
“Last I heard, they’re supposed to be on our side,” she answered.
“Support capability. Escorted our troop ships to Korea. But they’re crafty. Tokyo hasn’t actually declared war on the Soviets. Or China.”
“If they’re supporting us, aren’t they on our side?”
“What I’m saying is, they haven’t pulled out the stops. Not even with the North Koreans hitting a few of their west coast ports. Economically they’re more powerful than most, but they need oil, raw materials. If that stops, Japan stops. They want to alienate as few countries as possible.”
“Sounds like a bit of a high-wire act to me,” said Lana.
“It is. Come on, come see Adak. Your brother’s on a pig-boat, isn’t he?”
She didn’t know whether he meant Ray or Robert.
“Sub,” he explained.
“Oh, yes. He is.”
“Then it’s your patriotic duty to see Adak. Cheer the boys up. Big sub base there.”
“I was going to watch the new movie tonight.”
Alen shook his head. “There isn’t any.”
“Lieutenant,” replied Lana, “I heard it announced this morning. Some new Jane Fonda movie.”
“It got lost.”
She glanced across at him, shaking her head. “You guys. You never forget. She apologized, you know — to the Vietnam vets.”
“No, she didn’t. She said she was sorry if she upset any of them. She didn’t apologize for what she said. Still Hanoi Jane.”
“That was a long time ago, Lieutenant. Anyway, I heard Vietnam might come in on our side — if China goes up against us.”
“No one knows what China’ll do,” said Alen. “They don’t like the Russians any more than we do. Anyway, to hell with it. Let me take you to Adak.” He lowered his voice and smiled. “Maybe we can stop along the way.”
She hesitated. “I’m still married, Lieutenant.”
“Why don’t you use your married name?”
“Because I don’t like it and it’s none of your damned business.” She realized for a second that she would never have talked like that before she’d known Jay. He’d taken some of her civility along with her innocence, and she hated him as much for that as for anything else. And she’d been taught not to hate anyone.
“Sorry,” said the lieutenant. “You’re right. It’s none of my business what name you—”
She didn’t want to say any more, but something bottled up inside her kept rising. “You think I’m an easy mark?”
Alen’s eyes avoided hers, his gaze now shifting out, looking at the swirling snow. “Yeah, I did,” he conceded. He looked back at her. “I was out of line.” He walked away and opened the door, to a howl of protest from the bar, greeting the icy wind.
“Lieutenant?” she called.
He turned, shut the door, hand still on the handle, flecks of snow in his sheepskin collar. “Yes?”
“Maybe some other time,” she said.
“Sure.”
When he left the Quonset hut, Lana felt drained; a conversation like that with a man these days was harder on her than the hospital’s night shift. She always thought she’d be able to handle it better after knowing Jay, but her confidence had been so badly shaken by him, it penetrated any brave front she presented.
Arriving on the ward, she was told the head nurse wanted to see her. A rush of apprehension took hold of her. The last time a head nurse, the “Matron” in Halifax, had wanted to see her, it had been the disciplinary hearing about Spence, followed by exile to the godforsaken islands. Lana already felt guilty as she made her way around the potholed blacktop of the quad to the head nurse’s station on the first floor, snow melting the moment it landed on her cape, the thought that each snowflake in the world was different comforting her. To date, the head nurse at Dutch Harbor had given no sign that she was a dragon, like Matron, a prune-faced, portly woman who acted quickly to dampen high spirits the moment anyone looked like they might possibly be enjoying themselves, if such a thing was possible on the Aleutian bases. Still, Lana knew that all head nurses, by bent of their responsibilities, were usually sticklers for rules and regulations, and as she entered the Quonset hut, she was trying to think of which one she’d violated. The clock above the reception desk showed she was five minutes late for her shift.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but the snow—”
The head nurse waved her apology aside and gave her the notification from the Department of the Army that her kid brother David, a member of a rapid deployment force, was missing in action—”somewhere” on NATO’s central front.
They all thought she took it very well. The truth was, however, that as much as Lana wanted to cry — crying for her having always acted as a tranquilizer — she couldn’t, for the simple fact was that she and David weren’t that close. At twenty-four, being the youngest of the family, David hadn’t seen much of Lana, who, though she hadn’t finished college because of Jay, was in her third year when he was still in high school. There was simply too big a gap between them, so much so that they hardly ever wrote to one another, the only news between them passed on by her mother and father in his letters home before he’d been wounded. Yet in other families, different ages didn’t seem to make a difference. Why was it? she wondered. Was it because of her father, a kind enough man but of the old “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” school? The boys had always been dissuaded from wearing their emotions on their sleeve. Or had it to do with their expectations, the difference of what they each wanted in life so disparate, David in political science before he joined the marines, she in the jet set world of Jay La Roche. Perhaps the lack of communication on David’s part had more to do with his disapproval of Jay La Roche. He had said nothing about her leaving La Roche — whether it was desertion or disapproval, she didn’t know.
As she walked back from the head nurse’s station and into the ward, she felt as if she were suddenly in a goldfish bowl. Everyone clearly knew about her brother missing — how did news travel so fast? — expecting the gung ho “I can take it” exterior. It was a strain accepting the condolences. She felt smothered by everyone’s sympathy, wishing they would just go away. She wanted to be alone, away from the island, a chance simply to sit, think for herself.
She dialed the pilots’ quarters.
“Lieutenant Alen please?”
She heard whistling at the other end of the line and ribald laughter. She almost hung up, but he was on the line. His voice reminded her a little of Frank Shirer. From the noises she could hear in the background, he was taking a ribbing about talking to her, but he was polite, clearly refusing to be suborned by the grunts of the macho pack in the background.
She paused for a few seconds. “I don’t know your first name,” she said with some amazement.
“That’s all right. It’s Rick.”
“When are you scheduled to go to Adak?”
“In the morning. Oh five hundred.”
“Kind of early.”
“There’ll be a break in the weather then — or so they say.”
“Okay, but if I come along, I’ll have to be back for the dog watch. You think that’ll be a problem?”
“No problem at all. Ah — Lana?”
It was the first time he’d called her by her first name.
“Yes?”
“Sorry about your brother.”
“Thanks.”
When he got off the phone, Alen stiffened his right arm from the elbow up, slapping his left hand hard down on the bicep, driving the rigid forearm into the air. “In like flint!”
There was a chorus of encouragement: “Way to go!” and someone yelling, “Rick the dick!”
He grinned boyishly, and immediately felt ashamed.
“Better strap her down, Rick. Could be a rough ride.”
Everyone wanted to be copilot, but the assignments hadn’t changed — nor had the forecast for a break in the cloud cover around five in the morning.
“Gobble, gobble!” shouted a navigator.
That night Alen slept fitfully, but he didn’t worry. Sometimes when he was bone-weary, against all common sense, he got so hard, it felt like steel. The only thing that worried him was that if she touched him, he mightn’t be able to wait. The closer it got to the 0400 preflight call, the more relaxed and sleepy he became. When he did doze off, he was in a dream — the plane on automatic pilot, the commanding officer of Adak now bawling Alen out for his violation of orders — bringing a Wave on a “goddamned joyride” in the middle of a combat zone. And Alen with no pants on, telling the CO that Lana was merely fulfilling the requirements of her posting — putting in at least thirty hours as required by Waves for the purposes of ATF— air time familiarization — which the pilots called “airtime fucking. “ Alen also pointed out Washington’s rationale — that in the event of the Aleutians being attacked, the Waves would have to help the pilots ferry back the most seriously wounded to either Dutch Harbor or beyond to Anchorage in Alaska, and yet the only flight time most of them had was on the civilian flight from the lower forty-eight states.
At 0407 on the morning of October 17, Alen was feeling so thick from lack of sleep, it took three cups of coffee to pump him awake. The weather report was holding, though in the “caldron of storms,” as the volcanic Aleutians were called, the projected rise in barometric pressure could very quickly disappear. When he got to the fogbound airstrip, the latest weather posting, only an hour old, still called for clearing. But Lana was nowhere in sight.
“Come on,” said the copilot, “let’s go.”
Alen looked plain miserable as the AC-130 E Hercules’ four turboprops sputtered to life, throwing off curls of exhaust into the pea-soup morning. He glanced anxiously at his watch. The most he could delay on preflight recheck was ten minutes. And the weather was getting worse.
“Goddamnit!” said Alen, looking past the copilot at the fog-shrouded runway. “C’mon, c’mon! What the hell’s she doing?”
“Checking her diaphragm!” shouted the copilot.