Arctic Front

them.”

“Vengeance,” Lana said simply, her tone pregnant with the authority of experience. She was thinking of her husband, Jay. “Some people are like that.”

“Doesn’t make sense.”

“Doesn’t have to, Frank. They get a kick out of it.”

“If you’re under attack,” continued Frank, “you do what you have to, I guess. I mean, I know what it’s like in a furball— it’s you or the other guy. But, hell, why would someone come back at you like he did and… it’s.. it’s like shooting some guy in a chute.”

Lana was moved by this streak of naivete’ in Frank. A few years ago, before she’d been introduced to Jay and was overcome by the poise and wealth of Jay’s jet-setting image, she had met Frank briefly and gone out with him a couple of times, when he was one of the “one-eyed Jacks” of the president’s elite pilot list. Then she would have been — was — the naive one, not him. But with Jay she’d grown up quickly — too quickly, she thought sometimes. After La Roche, his sick sex, the beatings and the threatened tabloid smear of her parents should she even dare to leave him without his “permission,” she had realized, in a rush of growing up, just how brutal life could be. And now she found herself explaining sheer malice to Frank, a quality that was as alien to him as the thought of being grounded for the rest of his life. He was a warrior: a reflection of her dad in his forthrightness, his assumption that bravery under fire was de rigueur and nothing exceptional.

He might be one of America’s top aces, a survivor of the MiG attacks led by the celebrated Soviet who had shot him down and whom Frank had in turn downed over Korea, but about men like Jay LaRoche he would never understand. His ideal of honor, like General Freeman’s, was in one sense ageless and as old, for all the high-tech machines he flew, as the dream of Camelot. Yet it was a vision that in the end sustained him as powerfully as the image of the shark held Jay in awe of sheer power unencumbered by anything “as antiquated,” in Jay’s words, “as principle.”

It almost pained Lana more to see Frank perplexed by evil than to see him in the trauma of the pain; she couldn’t bear to hear him wonder about the kind of cruelty she hoped she had left behind with Jay. She wanted to get him off the subject. “You hear about Marchenko? “

It worked, his attention immediately arrested by the mention of the Soviet top gun. Lana said it as if Marchenko were still alive, which was impossible; Frank’s RIO had seen the Fulcrum burst on impact over Manchuria. Unless…

He felt his heart thumping. “He didn’t get out?”

“That’s the story,” she said. “Course it could be Siberian propaganda. The rumor mill. You know how they love to—” For a split second Shirer was oblivious to his pain.

“But Anderson didn’t see a silk. I mean—” He stopped, casting his mind back. Yes, they had definitely seen the Fulcrum hit. A silent orange blossom against the mountainous folds of snow. “I remember,” he said. “I asked Anderson, ‘Any sign of a chute?”Negative!’ “

“Could he have missed it?” said Lana. “I mean, was it a clear day or—”

Frank felt a stabbing beat between his eyes, like someone driving a stake into his forehead above the bridge of his nose. Damn it. Lana didn’t know a thing about planes — when he’d first talked to her about Mach she thought it was someone called “Mac.” It had become a joke between them: “Mac the Knife!” But in her layman’s ignorance of things aeronautical, she had, with the unwitting luck of people who, like his mother, chose a winner at Churchill Downs because the horse had a “nice name” instead of studying the guide to form, managed to hit the bullseye with her question. There had been cloud, and it was quite possible Anderson had missed seeing a chute. The whole wing could have missed it, high above the stratus, everyone on a high after the shoot, eyes scanning above and behind lest any more bandits should come out of the sun into their cone to even the score.

“You should ask him when you get back,” proffered Lana.

“Back where?” It wasn’t said in self-pity, but until the bandage came off and they’d done the tests, no one would know where he was going. That was the first problem. The second one was that the SPETS had made it impossible for Anderson to answer anything. Frank felt exhausted, the hospital gown clinging to him from perspiration. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her about how Anderson had died, wondering whether they’d found his body yet on a floe. Finding your dead wasn’t a high priority when you were on the eve of a major battle. Since the Siberians were fully expecting Freeman to attack — and were probably buoyed rather man depressed by how close the Americans had come to losing Ratmanov — it was sure to be one of the bloodier battles of the war. The scuttlebutt around the hospital was that Freeman’s convoys were underway even now.

“Frank?” She asked him gently, deciding that they might as well hit it head-on after all. “Have you thought what you might like to do if the tests are negative — if there isn’t much they can do to restore your—”

“No,” he said brusquely, “I haven’t.” His sudden, uncharacteristic mood change was spawned by thoughts of what he’d do if he ever caught up with the SPETS who had — maybe-blinded him in the left eye for life. He didn’t like what he thought of doing and, visibly distressed, tried to evict the thoughts of sheer vengeance as swiftly as an ice hockey forward checking another. But the more he tried, the more persistent they became.

“Don’t fight it,” said Lana with a prescience that surprised him. “My dad always told the you can’t help what you think. It’s what you do that counts.”

Frank shrugged. Was she talking about what he’d like to do to the SPETS or Marchenko—if the Soviet was still alive? Well, he told himself, he wouldn’t be doing much of anything if the doc said the eye was finished. It would be home and repatriation. He knew he couldn’t explain it to anyone who wasn’t a flyer but quite calmly, without a trace of self-pity, Frank Shirer told himself that if he couldn’t fly again, life simply wouldn’t be worm it. Might as well tell a man he’d be impotent for life.

“Sorry, hon,” Lana said, “but I have to go. Get my ride back to Dutch.”

“Damn Dutch.”

“I know, but with Freeman’s—”

“Yeah,” responded Frank, “you’re going to be needed unfortunately.”

When she kissed him she was surprised by the lack of warmth. So preoccupied was he with what the future held for him, his mind wasn’t even on sex.”I’ve asked one of the boys flying the Medevac Hercules,” she told him, “to call the hospital here. Even then I don’t know when I’ll be able to—”

“I know,” he said. “I’ll get word to you soon as I can.”

She didn’t trust herself to answer without getting all teary. For heaven’s sake, Lana, she told herself on the army shuttle bus back to Elmendorf, he’s not dead. But she’d never seen him so dispirited either; more like a small boy sent to the dugout than someone dealing realistically with his situation. Of course, it was never the same when you weren’t the one it was happening to. Everyone knew how to deal with it when they weren’t involved. But it was because she had loved the boy in Frank that made it so terrible. When she left him he’d looked old. Maybe after his pain subsided…

She closed her eyes, gripping her shoulder bag hard as the bus wound up around the ABM sites that ringed Elmendorf, praying for the return of the time during which she had believed absolutely in a benevolent and all-loving God; asking, begging, that Frank’s sight not be damaged beyond repair, that he might fly again.

* * *

As rounds began for the doctors at Anchorage Hospital, the sun was shining off the Chugash Mountains, turning them a creamy pink in a breathtaking backdrop to the harbor. Over four thousand miles to the west, outside the KMK — Kuznetsky Metallurgical Kombinat — factory, in Novokuznetsk southeast of Novosibirsk, it was midnight. But there was to be no delay.

The director dismissed the argument of the works’ political officer that it would be better to exact punishment in daylight, where more people would see it, the director’s point being that the offense of the worker, one Dimitri Menisky, talking about the factory work through a haze of vodka among friends, was such a serious breach of security under the circumstances that Novosibirsk would simply brook no procrastination. In any case, argued the director forcefully, the execution within an hour of the man’s arrest would have a salutary effect.

Accordingly Menisky, forty-three, father of two, a boy, Ivan, and a girl, Tatya, was taken outside engine shop three, well away from the pile of scrap metal lest there be any ricochet, and, despite his falling on his knees and begging for mercy, was machine-gunned to death while snow poured through the penumbra of the yellow yard light. His crumpled body was left for one hour, this being a concession to the political officer, to make the point among the other workers. It was superfluous, for within ten minutes of the execution every man and woman in the KMK