Dana Stabenow - Dead in the Water

Her spirits rose with her body temperature, and the ghosts she had felt pressing about her as she worked in the dugout dissolved in the wisps of steam that rose from the water's surface. She looked at Jack, one corner of her mouth curling. The challenge was implicit. He gritted his teeth and bent over to unlace his boots. She watched with enjoyment, and went so far as to hum the tune to "The Stripper" when he got to his belt. He had a terrible time with the buttons on his jeans.

When he lowered himself into the water next to her Jack was amazed to discover that this wasn't some perfidious Shugak practical joke after all. The water was hot, but not too hot. It bubbled up around him in a natural Jacuzzi and sizzled right through his skin into his bones.

"Oh, yeah," he said, relaxing with a long, satisfied groan.

Curious, he tasted the water. "It's not very salty," he said in surprise.

"It's probably a mixture," she said, leaning back and closing her eyes. "Salt from the spray, fresh from underground."

He looked over and admired the way her body shone up at him through the water. It was a perfect body in his eyes, compact, well muscled, just the right balance of lean to soft, lithe in motion and at rest. Her face was broad across the cheekbones, softening to a small, stubborn chin that held up a wide, determined mouth.

Her hazel eyes tilted up at the sides with the hint of an epicanthic fold. Even the twisted scar that stretched across her throat almost from ear to ear looked right today, a badge of honor, an emblem of courage. A warning, too. Anyone who had a scar like that and was still around to wear it was not someone you wanted to mess with.

She opened her eyes and caught him admiring, and after that they didn't talk for a while.

"Nice day," Jack said, in an inadequate expression of postcoital bliss.

"Enjoy it," Kate replied, her face nuzzled into his neck. "It'll get worse."

The lover in him didn't move a muscle. The pilot looked nervously over her head to the southeast for signs of an incoming weather front, and found only the merest wisps of cloud low on the horizon. "How do you know?"

"Because in the Aleutians the one rule is, if the weather is good, it'll get bad. And if it's bad, it'll get worse. During the war, the air force lost two times the amount of casualties and five times the amount of planes to weather and mechanical trouble due to weather than they did in combat." She mustered up enough energy to point. "See the end of the runway?"

He didn't bother to turn his head. "Sure."

"You're lucky. It was more than the World War II pilots could see. They didn't have radar at first and the weather'd be so bad the pilot waiting for takeoff would have to radio to the guy taking off in front of him to find out if he'd left the ground or not, before he could make his try." She raised her head and looked at him. "And then, once they were in the air, assuming of course they did make it into the air, they were flying on naval charts based on a Russian survey made in 1864.

Assuming of course they could see anything once they got into the air."

"Sounds like fun to me." He rubbed the small of her back, surveying the treeless expanse of bog and rock, and the heaving, swelling sea stretching endlessly beyond.

"Why'd they bother?"

"They had to. If the Japanese took Alaska, they'd have been within bombing range of Boeing. Not to mention Russia. There's only fifty-seven miles of water between the Alaskan and Russian coasts. It was a major Lend-Lease route, through Fairbanks and Nome." She added, "Plus, the Japanese lost at Midway because they were attacking Dutch Harbor at the same time. It split their forces at a time when they were infinitely superior to us in the Pacific."

"Divide and conquer."

"Something like that."

"You know a lot about it."

"There's a book, a good one, on the war in the Aleutians, written by a guy named Garfield. And…"

"And what?"

"And," Kate said, a little embarrassed to discover she was proud of it, "my father was one of Castner's Cutthroats."

Jack looked blank. "One of what?"

"Castner's Cutthroats. Also known as the Alaska Scouts."

He drew back and looked down at her questioningly.

"Don't stop there. Were they some sort of troops, or what?"

Kate grinned. "More 'or what,' if you could believe my father. They were kind of like Special Forces, long on fighting ability and short on discipline, but you could expect that from the kind of men they were. Castner must have hit every bar in the bush signing them up. Dad said there were prospectors, homesteaders, doctors, hunters, trappers, fishermen. I think they even bagged an anthropologist or two, probably out of the University of Alaska."

"They see any action?"

"They went ashore at Attu before the regular troops. It was in-your-face fighting every step of the way. There was even a banzai charge with bayonets, near the end, when the Japanese knew they were beat." Kate shivered.

"Messy. Oh, yeah, Dad could strip his sleeves and show his scars with the best of them."

"Shock troops."

"I guess." Kate looked around again. "I wonder what happened to them."

"Who, Castner's Cutthroats?"

"No. The Anuans."

The rock seat beneath him having been worn indisputably smooth by generations of buttocks before he had taken up residence, Jack was no longer disposed to argue over the existence of an Aleut settlement on Anua. "Maybe they were moved out during the war."

"You said there was no record of a settlement on Anua," she reminded him.

"Oh, yeah. Right." He thought. "Didn't I just read something in the papers about how Congress passed an act to compensate the Aleutian Aleuts for being uprooted from their homes during World War

Kate nodded. "Yeah. In 1989. The survivors got sixteen bucks for every day they spent in the camps."

"What did happen, back then? I never have heard the full story."

Kate's shoulders moved in a faint shrug. "It was war, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and invaded Attu and Kiska. The military authorities could pretty much do as they liked, so they bundled up every last Aleut from the Rat Islands north and settled them in villages in south-central Alaska. After the war, almost none of them were resettled in their original villages, and the soldiers trashed what little housing was left standing. They'd burned or bulldozed most of it anyway, either to keep the Japs from using it or to make way for their own construction."

"But it was war," Jack pointed out.

"I know."

"If things had gone the other way, they could have wound up prisoners of the Japanese."

"Some of them did. Some Aleuts the Japanese took prisoner off Attu and Kiska. In Japan, they put them to work, and even paid them for it." Kate smiled. "When they were repatriated, their biggest difficulty was in getting their Japanese paychecks cashed."

"How come you know so much about this?"

A muscle cramped in her thigh and she grunted and shifted off him. He whimpered a little in protest but didn't stop her. "Jack, I'm an Aleut." She waited for that to register, but he looked blank. "I'm an Aleut living in an area historically inhabited by Athapascans, Eyaks and Tlingits." His blank expression began to change to comprehension, and she nodded. "My family comes from around here somewhere. We were expatriated along with the rest of the Aleuts. We had relatives in Cordova, so we moved to the Park."

"No wonder you took this job."

She ducked her head, embarrassed again, this time to be discovered in a moment of racial sentimentality.

"Yeah. I guess I just wanted to see what the old home place looked like." She squinted up at the sun and added, "We'd better get a move on if we want to make it back to Dutch before dark."

"I've got a tarp in the back of the plane," he said, reaching for his pants.