Arctic Front

already knew about the fate of Dimitri Menisky from shop three, and no one was going to say anything to anyone outside the factory about what was going on inside.

* * *

The surgeon attending Frank Shirer was twenty-nine, and with his white coat wore an air of authority that his baby face undermined. Not surprisingly he tried to compensate by wearing a no-nonsense, Gradgrind-like countenance, particularly in front of an air ace, projecting a stern preoccupation with facts. For this reason some of the older veterans among the patients called him “Detective Joe Friday”—”Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.”

“Well, Major. Fact is, the tests confirm that vision in the left eye is virtually nil. Even with our technology there’s nothing much…”

Shirer didn’t hear the rest — didn’t want to. His normally rugged, handsome features took on a slate-gray pallor. While the doctor’s voice seemed far off, he was nevertheless acutely aware, as in the rush of a dogfight, of every smell and color about him— a sharp smell of iodine coming from the next bed, the stench of sick from several beds to his right. Yet he looked disbelieving, his mind temporarily rejecting what he had clearly heard; this despite the “fact” that he’d been preparing for it all night. It was as if they had him up past seven G’s in the centrifuge, his body clammy with the shock, feeling like a sponge being crushed by an immense, immovable weight.

“So.” Detective Joe’s voice was floating about the periphery of the spinning, uncontrollable world. “You’ll have to be content with flying a desk from now on. Fact is…”

He couldn’t bring himself to call Lana, the stench of defeat redolent in the hospital’s pervasive and cloying antiseptic as oppressive to him as when he’d first entered. He felt his hatred of the Siberians rising and did nothing to thwart the flood of bile, sensing that if he tried to fight it now, hold it back, it would permanently poison him and make him something he did not want to be. Voodoo priests stuck pins into dolls; all he could do, knowing the improbability of ever meeting the SPETS who had gouged his eye, was envisage shooting down Marchenko, the MiG ace becoming the embodiment of all his disappointment and anger. It was unreasonable, he knew, but you had to focus on something.

When the Wave, her soft, full-bosomed perfume reminding him of Lana, removed the bandage to change the dressing, he could see only a watery, milky image of her. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man was king, but not in the United States Air Force. The “fact,” as Dr. Joe Friday had underscored with his diagnosis, was that the USAF did not, would not, entrust a one-eyed man with seventy million dollars’ worth of merchandise.

A limey, one of a handful of SAS survivors from the “Rat Raid,” was walking up the aisle between the beds, his face a gauze mask. “Whatcha mate? Have a fag?” He offered Shirer a Benson and Hedges. “Course you can’t puff it in ‘ere. Old Muwer Legree’ll be onto you.” The gauze mask nodded toward the head nurse at her station. “Tough old bird,” commented the cockney. “Rawer fight the muwer-in-law — an’ that’s sayin’ somethin’.”

“No, thanks,” said Frank to the proffered cigarettes. “Don’t smoke.” He wanted the man to go away; could never understand limeys properly anyhow.

“Neiver did I — till the punchup started. Miss a drag some-thin’ fierce when I’m in the sheep dip.”

Shirer didn’t know what the hell the sheep dip was and he knew the limey knew he didn’t know so why the hell didn’t he just bug off?

“Slit trench,” explained the gauze mask.”Filled wif all kinds o’ muck: sheep shit, dead rats. You name it, sport, it’s there. Hard to lie in it wivout movin’ for up to twelve hours. No fuckin’ tea party, I can tell you mat.”

“Guess not,” said Shirer disinterestedly.

“Still, I’d rawer a sheep dip than this lot!” He jerked a nicotine-stained thumb toward his mask. “Fuckin’ Phantom of the Opera! Least you got your fuckin’ face, ‘aven’t you?”

Frank knew that JFK had been right: Life was unfair, and in a world where thousands starved while you had the glorious privilege of flying, you had no cause to moan. But the limey didn’t help — at least not then — with his wisecracking camouflaging his own terror beneath the British mask of self- deprecation. Yet this wounded English soldier was to have a profound effect on what would happen to Shirer.

“You a sky jockey?” asked the cockney.

“Was, “said Frank.

“Ah, never say the, mate. Never say the.”

The Brit reminded Frank of Eliza Doolittle’s father: “Get the to the church on time!” He thought about Lana, about whether they’d ever be able to get married, whether the slimeball Jay La Roche would ever release her. Thinking of Lana, he felt himself having what the nurses called a “tent,” the erection pressing against the sheet. He wanted to tell the limey to buzz off; yet he knew what the limey had said was right. You should never say the. But the prospects right then were as bleak as the Aleutians in the winter chill and, like all who are very ill, no matter for how short or long a time, he found it impossible at that moment to imagine he could ever be well again, and that fear was his real terror.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Northern Pacific

“Quantity has a quality of its own,” said Freeman in his address to the task force commanders gathered aboard the Marines’ LHD amphibious assault ship the USS Winston Davis. “It’s a Leninist dictum the Russians have embraced ever since the Bolshevik Revolution. Their reasoning is simple: throw enough at the enemy, overwhelm him with numbers of tanks, ships, planes, and men, and some are bound to get through, enough to breach our defenses. Your job, gentlemen, now, and my job when we go ashore, is to stop them. Stop them so effectively that even if a few can get through it won’t be enough to impede us. The attendant danger for us, however, is not the Siberians; it is that in stopping them we will adopt an overly defensive mode. That would be a crucial mistake. Our job is to attack, to take Irkutsk just west of Lake Baikal. Irkutsk is the key, gentlemen! If we take Irkutsk our air force will be able to radiate out into the industrial heart of Siberia. Without Irkutsk our bombers’ fighter escorts would have to have in-air refueling — distances are too great. So our job is to attack the Siberian shield to get far enough in so that our fighters don’t have to refuel in air and become sitting ducks.”

He paused, eyes taking in the collective brass in the ship’s rigged-for-red situation room. “There’s another old adage, gentlemen, as true now as it was for Sherman: Offense is the best defense.” His fist clenched. “Go forward to meet them. Engage at every possible point. The entire Soviet military philosophy rests upon the necessity of the quick victory before their administrative deficiencies — their overcentralization — constipates their lines of supply. In this their navy and air force are no different from their army. They’ll throw everything — everything they’ve got at us, but if you can hold and advance you’ll turn the tide. Attack, gentlemen! Attack! That’s the strategy here.”

Freeman’s message to the noncommissioned officers and men throughout the Seventh Fleet’s task force was much more succinct. “Nothing in history compares with this battle. Siberia, the only country now capable of imposing its will on the rest of the world, is testing our will. Novosibirsk had a chance for peace and chose war instead. Well, we’re going to give it to him — in spades. Now, you navy boys, it’s your job to get us there. And I know you will, and when you do, I promise you we’ll kick ass from Kamchatka to Kiev. God bless you all.”

There was a complaint from one of the female quartermasters in the task force about the exclusion of women in his address. Freeman was taken aback when Norton so advised him.

“What the hell does she mean?” he asked Norton, the latter’s grimace the first sign of seasickness as the two men made their way up from the mess deck to the open air of the 41,000-ton amphibious assault ship Winston Davis. It was one of scores of ships in the task force carrying supplies for Second Army, including the amphibious assault vehicles, attack and transport choppers, and AV-8 Harrier ground support fighters needed for the eighteen hundred marines aboard each ship.

“She noted, General,” explained Norton, “that you didn’t mention women once in your address, whereas you used the expression ‘navy boys’ several times.”

“Oh, for Chrissake, Dick! Navy gals were the ones who flew the lead choppers into Pyongyang.”

“Yes, General, I know, but in the interest of morale… We’ve got over five hundred women in the twenty- thousand-man — I mean ‘person’—assault force.”

“Yes, yes, all right. What’s her name?”

“Quartermaster Sarah Lee.”