Warshot

would totally bewilder as well as destroy her parents — if not her brothers’ careers.

But for Lana this night thousands of miles away from Jay was one of the better ones in “America’s Siberia,” the name given to the remote naval hospital at Dutch Harbor, which for many servicemen on rotation from duty in Siberia was the first piece of America they had seen for months. The weather was bad, as usual, wind, fog, and then eighty-mile-per-hour arctic winds — all within the space of an hour. But she didn’t mind — she was on her way to see the man who had helped her mend. Frank Shirer was an American air ace she’d met briefly years before in Washington and who was now the man she wanted to marry — if that were ever possible. Shirer had been shot down during Freeman’s attack on Ratmanov Island in the Bering Strait when the U.S. carrier Salt Lake City, from which Frank had led the second wave of Tomcats, launched its fighter bomber attack on the rock.

Both he and his radar intercept officer had baled out but were captured by the Siberian SPETSNAZ — the equivalent of allied Special Forces — and, with a cruelty that Lana could still not fathom, one of the SPETS commandos, trying to get Frank to reveal the exact location of the American carrier, had driven a ballpoint into Frank’s left eye, leaving it hanging by the optic nerve. After the fall of Ratmanov, surgeons at Dutch Harbor had put back the eye, but the 20/20 vision demanded of a fighter pilot was gone. Yet as traumatic as it was for Frank Shirer — the man who had once shot down his coequal in the Siberian air force, Sergei Marchenko, after having been downed once by Marchenko himself — to contemplate the end of a brilliant career, it was made worse by the knowledge that Marchenko, whom he had thought he had downed for good over North Korea, had apparently survived. Marchenko’s Fulcrum MiG-29 with its telltale Ubiytsa yanki—”Yankee Killer”— motif, had been sighted by Americans flying patrol over the Lake Baikal cease-fire line.

For Lana, however, the prospect of Frank being out of the war was something for which she was grateful.

For a moment, when she walked into Ward 5 and saw he was gone, all her professional cool left her and she panicked. Sometimes, for no known cause, an infection could develop in a patient overnight and—

She heard a whistle. “ ‘E’s over ‘ere!” It was a cockney voice that always reminded her and Frank of Eliza Doolittie’s father in My Fair Lady. The voice belonged to an irreverent but well-meaning cockney whom they’d appropriately nicknamed “Doolittle” and who was convalescing from burns suffered when General Freeman, in one of the most controversial decisions of the war, had ordered in FAEs — fuel air explosive bombs — over the seven-square-mile Ratmanov Island in the Bering Strait. Freeman had used the overpressure of the air-detonated FAEs — a chemical mist of jellied ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, and polystyrene soap — to detonate mines that the SPETS had laid in anticipation of Freeman’s airborne invasion. Unfortunately, on the small, rocky island the explosion of the FAEs had also caused some “collateral damage,” as the Pentagon had put it, amongst the joint British SAS/U.S. Delta Force commando detachment that had spearheaded the attack on Ratmanov.

“Fought ‘e’d done a midnight flit on yer, did yer, Lieutenant?” asked Doolittle, his bandaged head nodding toward Frank’s empty bed.

Lana smiled with relief, the cockney quickly dousing a cigarette in his tea mug before the ward sister —”Mother Attila,” he called her — spotted him. “Me and Frank nipped out to the lounge for a bit of TV. ‘Masterpiece Theatre.’ Shakespeare.” He nodded cheekily toward Frank, who was returning from the washroom. “Fought it about time ‘e got a bit of bloody culture.” The cockney winked at Lana. “But all ‘e wants to do is ogle the nurses, ‘e does — and read dirty mags. Glad you turned up. Gettin’ right out of control ‘e was. Right, mate?” he asked Shirer, who had shoved the reading glasses prescribed for him into the pocket of his hospital-issue robe.

“Yeah,” continued Doolittle. “ ‘Ere I was tryin’ to educate ‘im, an’ he’s pervin’ at centerfolds. Just as well ‘e got his transfer.”

“Transfer?” said Lana, completely taken aback.

“Washington,” said Shirer, adding disgustedly, “Some damn desk job. Have to be there in a week.”

“I’ll see you two later,” said the cockney. “Tat-ta.”

* * *

Neither of them speaking, Frank and Lana walked out together to the TV lounge. They could hear the “Masterpiece Theatre” theme trumpeting, and saw the blue flickering of the screen. “Lousy reception,” Frank said. “Atmospherics up here are really weird. Met guys say that if it wasn’t for all the cold fronts socking us in, we’d see the aurora borealis. Least that’d be something.”

They walked hand in hand through the lounge and got a disapproving look for it from one of the head nurses coming from the coffee room where they were headed.

“I don’t want you to,” Lana began, “but if you really had your heart set on it, why couldn’t you go back to the carrier in some, you know, administrative—”

“God damn it—” he began, then checked himself. “Sorry. But lookit — if I can’t fly, I don’t want to be on the carrier. Seeing other guys suiting up — couldn’t stand it.”

“I know. Sorry — it was stupid of me—”

“No, no. You’re right. I’ll just — hell, I’ll just have to settle into whatever they give me.” He paused, both hands in his robe. “Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Nothing.” There was an awkward moment’s silence, and without him saying a word, she knew what it was. Doolittle — the cockney — had been pumping him up again with stories about Adolf Galland, Germany’s top air ace, commander of the Luftwaffe in World War Two, having flown and fought with only one eye, the other one glass. Every fighter pilot who had ever had an eye injury had heard about Galland. It was even said that Siberian ace Marchenko, who had reputedly suffered from a slight astigmatism, had trotted out the Galland story to get into flying school, before he’d submitted to a simple laser recontour of the cornea to correct the problem.

“That was in World War Two,” said Lana sharply. “They never flew jets.”

“Yes they did,” replied Frank hastily. “Galland flew the Messerschmidt 263. If they’d produced enough of —”

“I don’t want to hear about Galland,” Lana said impatiently. “All I hear about is Galland and his damned glass eye.”

“How about Bader?” Frank shot back. “British ace. Didn’t have any legs. Can you imagine? Flew without legs. Everyone said it was impossible — thought it was going to be a big handicap. Guess what? It helped him out in a dive. Blood flow — didn’t have so far to go. Could come out of a blackout quicker than anyone else. How about that?”

“That’s great. I’m very happy for him. But I wish Doolittle would clam up for a while. He means well, I know, Frank, but look, hon, the sooner you face it — I mean really face it — me better. No one’s going to let you take up multimillion-dollar aircraft with one eye. Not these days. Don’t you think I’ve asked around?”

It took Shirer by surprise.

“Well, I have. If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t see you near another plane, but I know how much it means — well anyway, the answer’s the same. No deal. Besides, it—” She stopped herself.

“Go on.”

“No, it doesn’t matter.”

“Go on.”

They were no longer holding hands. “All right, I’ll say it. Frank, you’ve got to think of other people as well as yourself. I know how much flying means to you. It’s been your whole life — all you’ve ever cared about. But it’s not just you. It’s—”

“You’re saying I’d be a danger to others?”

She looked straight at him. “Yes.”

“Standard answer,” he said dismissively, plugging in the kettle again for coffee, although it had just been on a raging boil.

“Because it’s the standard truth,” she said. “Anyway, you’d never pass the eye examination without your glasses.”

“Thanks a million.”

“Oh, don’t be so childish. All I’m trying to do is help you. Frank—”

“All right, let’s not talk about it anymore,” he said. “You want sugar?”