weather was gray, but at least it wasn’t too cold. The air felt about like late autumn back home. And the tundra here wasn’t as spongy as it was down closer to camp. But the rocks and hidden mud still made it a little precarious.
Pop followed me, and I guessed it had to be tough for him to keep his balance, being old and scrawny. But he didn’t complain about the footing. That would have been far down his list.
“Tell me the truth, Private,” he said, wheezing. “This is a punishment, correct? The lieutenant colonel stopped me on Main Street a few months ago and asked me to come to dinner and read one of his stories. But my boys were with me, so I said, ‘Certainly, if I may bring these gentlemen along.’ At which point the invitation evaporated. That incident blistered his ass, and that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
I turned to face him but kept moving, walking backward. “I don’t think so. When he sent me up here this morning, it didn’t have anything to do with you. I was supposed to look for an old Aleut lodge that’s around here somewhere. The colonel said it’s probably about three-quarters underground, and I’d have to look hard to find it.”
Pop was still wheezing. “That’s called an
“He has a report of enlisted men using it to drink booze and have relations with some of the nurses from the 179th,” I said. “He wants to locate it so he can put a stop to such things.”
Pop frowned. “Someone’s lying. The 179th has twenty nurses here at most. Any one of them who might be open to ‘such things’ will have a dozen officers after her from the moment she arrives. No enlisted man has a chance. Especially if the lady would also be required to climb a mountain and lower herself into a hole in the ground.”
“Doesn’t matter if it’s true,” I said. “I didn’t find no lodge anyway.” I turned back around. We were almost there.
“That still leaves the question of why we’re up here,” Pop said.
This time I didn’t answer. Although he was a corporal, Pop didn’t seem to grasp the fact that an enlisted man isn’t supposed to have a mind of his own. If an officer asks you to dinner, or to a latrine-painting party, you just say “Yes, sir.” And if he tells you to go for a ride up a volcano, you say the same thing. There’s no point in asking why, because you’re going to have to do it anyway.
“Are we walking all the way around the mountain?” Pop shouted, wheezing harder. “Or is there a picnic breakfast waiting behind the next rock? If so, it had better not be another Spam sandwich.”
“You didn’t have to eat it,” I said.
Pop started to retort, but whatever he was going to say became a coughing fit. I stopped and turned around to find him doubled over with his hands on his knees, hacking so hard that I thought he might pass out.
I considered pounding him on the back, but was afraid that might kill him. So I just watched him heave and thought that if he died there, the colonel would ream my butt.
Pop’s coughing became a long, sustained ratcheting noise, and then he spat a watery black goo onto the tundra. He paused for a few seconds, breathing heavily, then heaved again, hacking out a second black glob. A third heave produced a little less, and then a fourth was almost dry.
Finally, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and stood upright again. His face was pale, but his eyes were sharp.
“Water,” he said in a rasping voice.
I ran back to the jeep, stumbling and falling once on the way, and returned with a canteen. Pop took it without a word, drank, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“That’s better,” he said. He sounded almost like himself again. He capped the canteen and held it out without opening his eyes.
I took the canteen and fumbled to hang it from my belt. “What was that?” I asked. “What happened?” I was surprised at how shook-up my own voice sounded. God knew I’d seen worse things than what Pop had hacked up.
Pop opened his eyes. He looked amused. “‘What happened?’” he said. “Well, that was what we call coughing.”
I gave up on fixing the canteen to my belt and just held it clutched in one hand. “No, I mean, what was that stuff that came out?” I could still see it there on the tundra at our feet. It looked like it was pulsing.
“Just blood,” Pop said.
I shook my head. “No, it ain’t. I’ve seen blood.” I had, too. Plenty. But none of it had looked this black.
Pop glanced down at it. “You haven’t seen old blood,” he said. “If this were red, that would mean it was fresh, and I might have a problem. But this is just old news coming up.”
“Old news?” I asked.
“Tuberculosis, kid. I caught it during the
I wasn’t worried about that. But I was confused. “If you were in the Great War, and you caught TB,” I said, “then how could they let you into the Army again?”
Pop grinned. Those bad false teeth had black flecks on them now. “Because they can’t win without me.” He gestured ahead. “Let’s get this over with, Private, whatever it is. I have to go back and start cracking the whip soon, or there might not be a newspaper tomorrow.”
So I turned and continued across the slope. I could see the hillock I’d marked with rocks a few dozen yards ahead. I hoped Pop wouldn’t go into another coughing fit once we crossed it.
V
POP’S EYEBROWS ROSE WHEN HE SAW THE EAGLE, BUT OTHERWISE IT DIDN’T seem to faze him.
“Well, this is something different,” he said.
I nodded. “That’s what I thought, too.”
Pop gave a small chuckle. “I’m sure you did, Private.” He looked at me with his narrow-eyed gaze, but this time it was more quizzical than annoyed. “When I asked you what this was about, you said it would be better if you just showed me. Now you’ve shown me. So what the hell does the lieutenant colonel want me to do? Write this up for
“I think that’s the last thing he wants,” I said. “He says this thing could hurt morale.”
Pop rolled his eyes skyward. “Christ, it’s probably low morale in the form of sheer boredom that did this in the first place. Human beings are capable of performing any number of deranged and pointless acts to amuse themselves. Which is precisely what we have here. The brass told us we couldn’t shoot the goddamn ravens, so some frustrated boys came up here and managed to cut up a bald eagle instead. And they’ve expressed their personal displeasure with their military service by setting up the carcass as a perverse mockery of the Great Seal of the United States.”
“The what?” I asked.
Pop pointed down at the bird. “There’s no olive branch or arrows. But otherwise, that’s what this looks like. The Great Seal. Aside from the evisceration, of course. But I suppose that was just boys being boys.”
“You think it was more than one guy?” I asked.
Pop looked at me as if I were nuts. “How on earth would I know?”
“You said ‘boys.’ That means more than one.”
“I was speculating. I have no idea whether this was a project for one man, or twenty.”
I tossed the canteen from hand to hand. “Okay, well, do whatever you have to do to figure out who it was.”
Now Pop looked at me as if I weren’t only nuts, but nuts and stupid, too. “There’s no way of knowing who did this. Or even why. Speculation is all that’s possible. The bird might have been killed out of boredom, out of hatred, or even out of superstition. I have no idea.”
None of that sounded like something I could report. “But the colonel says you used to be a detective. Before you wrote the books.”
Pop took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I was a Pinkerton. Not Sherlock Holmes. A Pinkerton can’t look
