The bodies from the Hercules were never found, no surprise to the fishermen who worked nets from Dutch Harbor to Amchitka or anywhere else around the seven-thousand-foot-deep Aleutian Trench. The Bering Sea was a protein soup, from the tiny plankton whose diurnal migrations cluttered your sonar to the big killer whales. If you were dead or couldn’t move, you were feed — and quickly. In any event, Unalaska Coast Guard requested that any fishermen working the waters off the steaming black sands of Okmok Caldera should immediately report any debris they found. The coast guard was upbraided by SOWAC, the local Status of Women Action Committee, for using the word “fishermen,” and it issued the request for “fisherpersons” to assist.
As it turned out, one fisherman, Pete Bering — who was erroneously claimed by the locals to be a direct descendant of explorer Vitus Bering — and his crew were working the waters off Umnak but had been well off the southwestern tip of the island the day of the crash. As it might be a week before Bering had his boat’s hold full of pollack and he could head back toward Dutch Harbor a hundred miles east of him, Bering radioed the coast guard to say that while he and his crew of three had heard a plane overhead, they’d been in heavy fog and so hadn’t seen it go down.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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?”
