Rage of Battle

The older nurse was blushing. “I don’t know. Maybe the National Enquirer or something. Look — you’d better hop on down and see what Jensen—” They heard a torrent of abuse erupting from five rooms down on the west wing.

When she entered the room, the young nurse saw Ray Brentwood was awake, reading. He looked hideous — the night-light reflecting off the tight skin, stretched like pink plastic, blotchy here and there with dead spots. The eyes, having escaped the burn, appeared strange, fixed and protruding like those of a fish, but she realized it wasn’t that anything was wrong with the eyes so much as the rest of his face, especially the nose — so horribly disfigured, off center, and pushed to one side — so that the eyes looked grotesque in their normalcy. She avoided their stare as she checked the frame that had been built over Jensen’s bed, Jensen’s burns being on the lower part of his body and, like Brentwood’s, caused by the extraordinarily high temperatures from a ship’s aluminum superstructure. While the light weight gave the modern ships more speed, the aluminum alloys were unable to sustain high temperatures. In the case of Brentwood’s ship, the guided missile frigate USS Blaine, the white-hot superstructure, collapsing under the stress, tumbled into the fire of other explosions below, taking men down with it into the inferno of the ship’s twisted entrails.

Brentwood was making a terrible piglike snorting noise as he breathed in. The young nurse pitied his wife and wondered how a woman, even with the best will in the world, could ever make love to a man after something like that.

“For Christ’s sake!” Jensen cried. “Gimme a shot!”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jensen. It isn’t time.”

Jensen was sobbing, and she wanted to tell him to stop it. It couldn’t be that bad, she told herself.

“You’ll be fine,” she told him, and knew she was lying. He would be lucky to survive, and if he did, it would be a torture. He no longer had any genitals, and had to be constantly catheterized.

Brentwood’s breathing was getting heavier. She hated it, asking herself why on earth she’d become a nurse in the first place. It had been a terrible mistake. But then, when she had been writing her finals only months before, the world had been at peace, and nursing a guarantee of a job. Now everything had changed. It was another world, one in which death and suffering on such a scale had been unimaginable to the young. The types of wounds she was seeing in this hospital simply hadn’t been covered. Even automobile accidents paled by comparison. She remembered some professor in college assuring them that nuclear weapons had made world war “obsolete.” She wished the fool could have been on the ward with her now, hearing, smelling, the death that hung about the night wards, giving her the creeps, like some obscene voyeur whose presence, though invisible, was palpable in the dark corners of the room.

CHAPTER EIGHT

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 naivete, 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