Ian Slater - Arctic Front

“Kick ass, do what you have to,” Freeman told them. “But remember Napoleon: An army marches on its stomach. If any of you forget it, I’ll have your hide plus a thousand-dollar fine.”

“He’s got no authority to fine us — least not that much,” complained a cook.

“You want to find out?” asked a quartermaster.

The offended man was shaking his head, pleased to see Freeman was moving on to breathe fire over some other poor bastard. “Those SAS guys were right. It’s ‘Von Freeman.’ “

The general had already heard a rumor about the “Von” appellation and asked Norton if it was true.

“Uh, yes, General. ‘Fraid so.”

Freeman made no comment and, seemingly turning to a completely different subject, informed Norton that he’d seen some of the Canadian forces personnel assigned with his command wearing beards.

“Hadn’t noticed, General.”

“Well, I have. I want them off. Today.”

“General, Canadian Navy sort of follows Royal Navy tradition. Allows—”

“I don’t give a goddamn what the Royal Navy allows. I want those beards off. And if you don’t know why, Dick, you’re not doing your goddamn homework.”

“No, sir.”

Sometimes, Norton wrote in his diary that evening, Douglas Freeman could be as ornery as a cut pig. The general, he figured, knew that, like Dracheev, Novosibirsk, in the person of Marshal Yesov, C in C Siberian Forces, had its own surprises; as yet he had no idea what they were.

Though she was thoroughly familiar with the sights and smells of a military hospital, Lana was still unprepared.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” said Shirer gamely, his head completely swathed in bandages that held the compress against his left eye.

“I ‘m…” began Lana, having to compose herself after having heard from the doctor upon her arrival in Anchorage that it was possible that the optic nerve had been partially severed. She smiled bravely, spoke softly. “I’m a nurse, remember?”

“Right,” said Frank. There was no point kidding one another. If the optic nerve was severely damaged, then it would be the end of Frank’s career as a fighter pilot. The fact that it was the same eye that had been injured during his time as a presidential pilot didn’t make it any easier for him to accept. He knew that Lana could live with it, preferring that he never go back into combat, but, like most of his ilk, he lived for flying. Take away that, he told her, and—

Lana said there was no point talking about it till they knew for certain, and she immediately felt guilty. If it had been any other patient she would have listened, knowing it was part of the therapy, but with the man she loved she found herself instead falling back on the bland cliches of reassurance and then just as quickly putting forth the most optimistic prognosis.

“They can do wonders now. Lasers. You know at one time when a retina became detached — remember the Rumpole man?”

Frank thought she meant the actor.

“No, Mortimer, the lawyer who wrote it. His father had both retinas detached. Slipped a few feet one day on a ladder. Blind for the rest of his life. Well, nowadays they can spot weld the retinas back with a laser. Overnight stay in hospital, that’s all. Maybe even day surgery.”

Frank said nothing, trying not to grimace with the pain; the Demerol was wearing off. But Lana had seen too many wounded not to have some idea of what it must have been like when the eye had been gouged, literally hanging by its optic nerve, and later when tiny fragments of foreign material had to be scraped from the eyeball. Sitting down beside his bed, she took his hand in hers and for a moment was transported back to her first casualty of the war — young William Spence — and shivered despite her resolve. She forced another smile. “Well, at least I’ll be seeing more of you — when I can get leave from Dutch, that is.” She tried to make it all breezy, “accentuate the positive,” but could see that either Frank hadn’t heard her or was momentarily overcome with the pain, or both. His hand tightened involuntarily as a spasm pierced the bloody socket of the eye, striking deep inside his skull somewhere.

“What I can’t figure out,” he began, shifting position in the false belief of so many patients that movement itself would relieve the pain when it was really a shift in concentration that momentarily diverted thoughts of the pain, “is why did the bastard do it? There was no point to it. I mean—” Frank forced himself up further in the bed, Lana stacking the pillows behind him, staying close to him, gently massaging his neck. He turned to her, and she could see now how swollen the purplish and dark red tissue around the eyeball was.

“No point,” Frank continued, “trying to get information from me. I mean they were overrun. Under attack. Damn it! What in hell did it matter what airfield or carrier I came from? Our guys were swarming all over them.”

“Vengeance,” Lana said simply, her tone pregnant with the authority of experience. She was thinking of her husband, Jay. “Some people are like that.”

“Doesn’t make sense.”

“Doesn’t have to, Frank. They get a kick out of it.”

“If you’re under attack,” continued Frank, “you do what you have to, I guess. I mean, I know what it’s like in a furball— it’s you or the other guy. But, hell, why would someone come back at you like he did and… it’s.. it’s like shooting some guy in a chute.”

Lana was moved by this streak of naïveté’ in Frank. A few years ago, before she’d been introduced to Jay and was overcome by the poise and wealth of Jay’s jet-setting image, she had met Frank briefly and gone out with him a couple of times, when he was one of the “one-eyed Jacks” of the president’s elite pilot list. Then she would have been — was — the naive one, not him. But with Jay she’d grown up quickly — too quickly, she thought sometimes. After La Roche, his sick sex, the beatings and the threatened tabloid smear of her parents should she even dare to leave him without his “permission,” she had realized, in a rush of growing up, just how brutal life could be. And now she found herself explaining sheer malice to Frank, a quality that was as alien to him as the thought of being grounded for the rest of his life. He was a warrior: a reflection of her dad in his forthrightness, his assumption that bravery under fire was de rigueur and nothing exceptional.

He might be one of America’s top aces, a survivor of the MiG attacks led by the celebrated Soviet who had shot him down and whom Frank had in turn downed over Korea, but about men like Jay LaRoche he would never understand. His ideal of honor, like General Freeman’s, was in one sense ageless and as old, for all the high-tech machines he flew, as the dream of Camelot. Yet it was a vision that in the end sustained him as powerfully as the image of the shark held Jay in awe of sheer power unencumbered by anything “as antiquated,” in Jay’s words, “as principle.”

It almost pained Lana more to see Frank perplexed by evil than to see him in the trauma of the pain; she couldn’t bear to hear him wonder about the kind of cruelty she hoped she had left behind with Jay. She wanted to get him off the subject. “You hear about Marchenko? “

It worked, his attention immediately arrested by the mention of the Soviet top gun. Lana said it as if Marchenko were still alive, which was impossible; Frank’s RIO had seen the Fulcrum burst on impact over Manchuria. Unless…

He felt his heart thumping. “He didn’t get out?”

“That’s the story,” she said. “Course it could be Siberian propaganda. The rumor mill. You know how they love to—” For a split second Shirer was oblivious to his pain.