Ian Slater - Arctic Front

“But Anderson didn’t see a silk. I mean—” He stopped, casting his mind back. Yes, they had definitely seen the Fulcrum hit. A silent orange blossom against the mountainous folds of snow. “I remember,” he said. “I asked Anderson, ‘Any sign of a chute?”Negative!’ “

“Could he have missed it?” said Lana. “I mean, was it a clear day or—”

Frank felt a stabbing beat between his eyes, like someone driving a stake into his forehead above the bridge of his nose. Damn it. Lana didn’t know a thing about planes — when he’d first talked to her about Mach she thought it was someone called “Mac.” It had become a joke between them: “Mac the Knife!” But in her layman’s ignorance of things aeronautical, she had, with the unwitting luck of people who, like his mother, chose a winner at Churchill Downs because the horse had a “nice name” instead of studying the guide to form, managed to hit the bullseye with her question. There had been cloud, and it was quite possible Anderson had missed seeing a chute. The whole wing could have missed it, high above the stratus, everyone on a high after the shoot, eyes scanning above and behind lest any more bandits should come out of the sun into their cone to even the score.

“You should ask him when you get back,” proffered Lana.

“Back where?” It wasn’t said in self-pity, but until the bandage came off and they’d done the tests, no one would know where he was going. That was the first problem. The second one was that the SPETS had made it impossible for Anderson to answer anything. Frank felt exhausted, the hospital gown clinging to him from perspiration. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her about how Anderson had died, wondering whether they’d found his body yet on a floe. Finding your dead wasn’t a high priority when you were on the eve of a major battle. Since the Siberians were fully expecting Freeman to attack — and were probably buoyed rather man depressed by how close the Americans had come to losing Ratmanov — it was sure to be one of the bloodier battles of the war. The scuttlebutt around the hospital was that Freeman’s convoys were underway even now.

“Frank?” She asked him gently, deciding that they might as well hit it head-on after all. “Have you thought what you might like to do if the tests are negative — if there isn’t much they can do to restore your—”

“No,” he said brusquely, “I haven’t.” His sudden, uncharacteristic mood change was spawned by thoughts of what he’d do if he ever caught up with the SPETS who had — maybe-blinded him in the left eye for life. He didn’t like what he thought of doing and, visibly distressed, tried to evict the thoughts of sheer vengeance as swiftly as an ice hockey forward checking another. But the more he tried, the more persistent they became.

“Don’t fight it,” said Lana with a prescience that surprised him. “My dad always told the you can’t help what you think. It’s what you do that counts.”

Frank shrugged. Was she talking about what he’d like to do to the SPETS or Marchenko— if the Soviet was still alive? Well, he told himself, he wouldn’t be doing much of anything if the doc said the eye was finished. It would be home and repatriation. He knew he couldn’t explain it to anyone who wasn’t a flyer but quite calmly, without a trace of self-pity, Frank Shirer told himself that if he couldn’t fly again, life simply wouldn’t be worm it. Might as well tell a man he’d be impotent for life.

“Sorry, hon,” Lana said, “but I have to go. Get my ride back to Dutch.”

“Damn Dutch.”

“I know, but with Freeman’s—”

“Yeah,” responded Frank, “you’re going to be needed unfortunately.”

When she kissed him she was surprised by the lack of warmth. So preoccupied was he with what the future held for him, his mind wasn’t even on sex.”I’ve asked one of the boys flying the Medevac Hercules,” she told him, “to call the hospital here. Even then I don’t know when I’ll be able to—”

“I know,” he said. “I’ll get word to you soon as I can.”

She didn’t trust herself to answer without getting all teary. For heaven’s sake, Lana, she told herself on the army shuttle bus back to Elmendorf, he’s not dead. But she’d never seen him so dispirited either; more like a small boy sent to the dugout than someone dealing realistically with his situation. Of course, it was never the same when you weren’t the one it was happening to. Everyone knew how to deal with it when they weren’t involved. But it was because she had loved the boy in Frank that made it so terrible. When she left him he’d looked old. Maybe after his pain subsided…

She closed her eyes, gripping her shoulder bag hard as the bus wound up around the ABM sites that ringed Elmendorf, praying for the return of the time during which she had believed absolutely in a benevolent and all-loving God; asking, begging, that Frank’s sight not be damaged beyond repair, that he might fly again.

As rounds began for the doctors at Anchorage Hospital, the sun was shining off the Chugash Mountains, turning them a creamy pink in a breathtaking backdrop to the harbor. Over four thousand miles to the west, outside the KMK — Kuznetsky Metallurgical Kombinat — factory, in Novokuznetsk southeast of Novosibirsk, it was midnight. But there was to be no delay.

The director dismissed the argument of the works’ political officer that it would be better to exact punishment in daylight, where more people would see it, the director’s point being that the offense of the worker, one Dimitri Menisky, talking about the factory work through a haze of vodka among friends, was such a serious breach of security under the circumstances that Novosibirsk would simply brook no procrastination. In any case, argued the director forcefully, the execution within an hour of the man’s arrest would have a salutary effect.

Accordingly Menisky, forty-three, father of two, a boy, Ivan, and a girl, Tatya, was taken outside engine shop three, well away from the pile of scrap metal lest there be any ricochet, and, despite his falling on his knees and begging for mercy, was machine-gunned to death while snow poured through the penumbra of the yellow yard light. His crumpled body was left for one hour, this being a concession to the political officer, to make the point among the other workers. It was superfluous, for within ten minutes of the execution every man and woman in the KMK already knew about the fate of Dimitri Menisky from shop three, and no one was going to say anything to anyone outside the factory about what was going on inside.

The surgeon attending Frank Shirer was twenty-nine, and with his white coat wore an air of authority that his baby face undermined. Not surprisingly he tried to compensate by wearing a no-nonsense, Gradgrind-like countenance, particularly in front of an air ace, projecting a stern preoccupation with facts. For this reason some of the older veterans among the patients called him “Detective Joe Friday”—”Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.”

“Well, Major. Fact is, the tests confirm that vision in the left eye is virtually nil. Even with our technology there’s nothing much…”

Shirer didn’t hear the rest — didn’t want to. His normally rugged, handsome features took on a slate-gray pallor. While the doctor’s voice seemed far off, he was nevertheless acutely aware, as in the rush of a dogfight, of every smell and color about him— a sharp smell of iodine coming from the next bed, the stench of sick from several beds to his right. Yet he looked disbelieving, his mind temporarily rejecting what he had clearly heard; this despite the “fact” that he’d been preparing for it all night. It was as if they had him up past seven G’s in the centrifuge, his body clammy with the shock, feeling like a sponge being crushed by an immense, immovable weight.