Rage of Battle

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