Warshot

reached Baikal, the latter when he’d used fuel air explosives over Ratmanov. La Roche’s tabloids in particular had alternated between making him a saint and a “warmonger.” Presently they were saying that he was a man “obsessed” by war, unable to see that “there could be an end to it.”

They were right, he was a warrior — saw the world with a warrior’s eye — but there was nothing he could do about that. It was the way he was made. When they walked on the spring grass, people marveled at the beauty of swallows sweeping low, so close to yet never quite touching the grass, their darting blue-metal sheen a thing of joy to watch. Freeman enjoyed watching them, too, but he knew that it was the feet of the people visiting the park that scared up insects which the swallows then swooped low to kill, and that this was every bit as much a part of the scene as was the beauty. Even the most tranquil scene he could remember— the tidal pools he and Doreen had seen around Monterey— were in fact miniature seas populated by creatures for whom battle was never ending. You fought or you died.

* * *

Dutch Harbor was in darkness. If the aurora borealis was “kicking up its ‘eels,” Doolittle said, “some ruddy great clouds are in the way, mate.” But his fellow patient, Frank Shirer, wasn’t listening. The flier, his convalescence rapidly coming to an end, was engrossed in the Wall Street Journal that Doolittle had given him. It wasn’t a paper Frank normally perused. Neither did Doolittle, investment to the cockney constituting an eternal mystery. “Stocks” in his family were things Robin Hood was put in if the Sheriff of Nottingham ever caught him. Doolittle dragged heavily on his cigarette, glancing down at the Xeroxed page he’d inserted into the newspaper so that no passersby, including the MD he called “Joe Friday”—”Just the facts, soldier”—could see Frank studying it. “Bit of a fudge,” Doolittle conceded.

“Fudge?” replied Frank. “It’s downright cheating!”

“Well, mate, this is the first time I’ve ever ‘eard that a man who wants to get ‘imself killed is cheatin.’ That’s a new one, that is. Personally, I wouldn’t do it — I’ve already done my bit, squire. For me it’s out on the old compo— disabled soldiers’ pension to you — and a deck chair on Brighton Beach, lookin’ at the birds strolling’ up an’ down. An’ I don’t mean bloody sea gulls. Yep — that’ll do me nicely, that will. Me, the deck chair, wiv a jar o’ Flower’s bitter.” He exhaled, cigarette smoke appearing to come from every orifice in his head behind the bandages that covered the horrible burns he’d suffered during the taking of Ratmanov Island. “And that’s what I’d do if I were you, mate,” he advised Frank Shirer. “Crikey, you’ve already done your bit for king and country. Besides, you got a good-lookin’ bird. That Lana’s a real corker, she is. All you need, mate, is the ruddy beach. Instead, what you want to do? Go up in one of them bloody death traps again.”

Doolittle took another heavy drag on the Player’s, leaned back and shook his head, hands together, head smoking again like a double boiler about to blow. He leaned over and, tapping the Xerox of the Snellen eye chart, told Frank conspiratorially, “Best day’s Monday, see? When old Joe Friday ‘sn’t around. The new doc’s a bit unsure of ‘imself, so ‘e’s followin’ the same bloody routine day after day. Same chart, same sequence. Ail you have to know is which letter’s where. Right? He puts ‘is black patch stick over your good eye and asks you what you see. You can make out the blur wiv your bad eye can’t you?”

“Yes — just.”

“There you are, then. ‘E points to the third blur in the fourth row and you’ve got it. ‘Cause you memorized the chart. Right? Piece o’ cake!”

The smoke came pouring down from the cockney’s nostrils like a dragon, and Frank drew back out of range.

“They’re so many guys ‘e’s got to do, see?” explained Doolittle. “Even if he changes the routine from one blur to another, you memorize the chart, you’ve got it. Besides, you got one big thing going for you, old cock.”

“Yeah,” said Frank wryly. “I could be court-martialed.”

The cockney laughed; which was appropriate, Frank thought. Doolittle wouldn’t be the one on a charge.

“Nah, mate. Listen — what you forget is, none of these guys wants to pass the test. What they want — what you’d want, if you weren’t so bloody daft — is to get home fast as they can, start usin’ the old joystick in bed, not up in the blue fucking yonder.”

For Doolittle, his “plan to put one over” on the authorities — in this case, a greenhorn MD fresh from medical school and not yet wise to the ways of the army — was a bit of a lark. But to Frank it meant a restless night of old dreams, of Adolf Galland, the one-eyed German Luftwaffe ace, of the British ace Douglas Bader and the Canadian Rosin, who, after a seven-year court battle with the army, had won the right to be a paratrooper, despite having only one eye. Visions of Lana invaded the dreams as she fought her way through the crowd of pilots, not saying a word; and through it all there was the crackle of fighter pilots mixing it up in a furball, a Soviet MiG-29 going into the radar-defying stall slide, Sergei Marchenko, the Mikoyan Works emblem on the Fulcrum’s fuselage, coming at the Tomcat at Mach 1.2 in a steep dive, the MiG’s thirty-millimeter cannon winking, followed by two white puffs as two Aphid air-to-air missiles streaked toward Shirer, his copilot yelling, “I’ve been hit”—and all because of information overload on the one good eye, misreading the Heads-Up display. He pulled the Tomcat hard out of the “Finger Four” formation, going into the scissors so as to get Marchenko to overfly him, get the Tomcat into the MiG’s cone. But then it was the Tomcat, his radar intercept officer screaming, Marchenko’s Fulcrum now in the Tomcat’s cone of vulnerability. There was a bang, the Cat shuddering violently and Frank screaming at his RIO to get out. The next second he pulled the strip, heard the explosive bolts go, felt the wind tearing at his face, like rushing through some vast refrigerator, and heard the snap of his chute opening, the RIO’s on fire, going down like a Roman candle.

“Shush!” said a calming voice. “You’ll wake the whole ward.” And then the voice was gone. It was dark, only the dim pinpoints of light on the IV drip monitors telling him he was still in hospital.

They had been the same nightmares that had plagued him for weeks, nightmares that he hadn’t told Lana about and which had been responsible for his sudden mood shifts— unlike him, but which, he knew, Lana had noticed with increasing anxiety. And so finally, now, with the arctic wind howling mournfully about the hospital at Dutch Harbor, he made the decision. To hell with the nightmares. There was no way he wanted to live the rest of his life, like so many, haunted by regret. He’d have to find out in the only way he knew how. He’d do a bit of a “fudge,” as Doolittle had put it. Besides, before they put him in a cockpit, he’d have to pass on ground simulators. There he wouldn’t kill anyone if his single-eye vision couldn’t cope. The worst he’d do would be to flunk the course. He’d risk a court-martial in the event that the green doctor wasn’t as green as Doolittle figured.

He got up, put the hospital robe around him, and made his way quietly through the ward and to the right, toward the TV room. He could hear that someone else was watching — an old Johnny Carson rerun — Buddy Hackett telling a joke about a guy yowling, “Wah — wah — wah,” with awful genital pain. “… So the guy goes to see doctor after doctor. Finally the only thing they could do, they said, was to remove his testicles. They didn’t have any other answer. After his operation, the guy goes to a men’s clothing store, buys a new suit, asks for a couple of ties, and asks for size thirty-four waist underpants. The clerk says he should get a size thirty-six. The guy tells the clerk he knows what he wants and it’s a size thirty-four. Clerk runs a tape measure around the guy’s waist and says, ‘No, sir. If you wore a thirty-four you’d have terrible pain in the testicles.’ Wah — wah — wah!”

Shirer roared laughing; he was feeling so good now that he’d made the decision. The man watching the show, another pilot who’d also been wounded over Ratmanov, was just sitting there, hands tremulous. “You okay?” asked Frank.

The pilot shook his head but kept looking up at Frank. For help. Shirer saw a packet of cigarettes in the man’s robe pocket, and though he didn’t smoke, he took one and lit it up for the guy and sat with him, watching the Carson show. The longer he sat there, the more he wondered if somehow he should take the guy’s condition as a warning — remembering one time how a top gun on Salt Lake City who graduated top of the class got shot down after fifteen missions. Everyone thought he was fine after, and he was, for seven more missions. Then bam! Everything came apart. Now, just hearing the sound of going on afterburner made him a head case.

When you were young you never thought you’d crack up.

* * *

It was the first time in months that General Freeman had seen his aide, Dick Norton, unshaven and in pajamas, the flannelet bottoms sticking out from underneath the greatcoat like red-and-white-striped barber poles. As he came through the door and pulled the blackout curtain aside, a flurry of snow blew in after him like an angry ghost. Despite the fact that his quarters were only ten yards from the HQ Quonset, Norton already looked half frozen. Freeman knew it must be urgent.