Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

When he was first transferred from the chopper to the hospital ship as one of the most seriously injured from HMS Peregrine and one of the first casualties of the Atlantic war, he was simply that — another casualty — and one who, despite the double amputation, was given a fair chance of survival because of his youth. Then the oil-caused pneumonia — which so often lay undetected in a man’s lungs for several days before it was discovered, when it was too late — began racking Spence’s body, depleting his strength so quickly that the earlier prognosis for recovery suddenly changed. In those last desperate days, thousands of miles from home, Lana knew it was not at all unusual for a patient, especially a young man, to transfer to her all the adoration he might have given the woman he would have loved, had he lived. Like so many before him, in war or not, the intensity of William Spence’s feeling for his nurse could be understood only by those who, like him, had lain in the morning hours in that death watch between two and four — who had known the chilling fear that soon they would be no more and who wanted nothing more than a human touch, to reassure them there was hope when there was none.

When the morphine ceased to work, the pain so intolerable that it shamed his manhood and he wept like a child, she drew the sheet down below his waist, unpinned her hair, letting it fall down on him, lips closing about him, her tongue enveloping and drawing him into her own ecstasy until it was his — in the way she had learned from Jay in his gentler honeymoon incarnation period. Was it possible that out of Jay’s evil came good? And for that she was banished to “Devil’s Island,” as Dutch Harbor was called by the Waves. She told herself she no longer cared. She had helped a young man confront death, given him pleasure before the ultimate obscenity claimed him, and no matter how sordid a thing they would make of it behind her back, she knew she had been right and that they would not break her on this island or any other.

As Lana turned around, heading back to the thirty-bed hospital, the blue light changed dramatically. Invading masses of bruised cumulonimbus cloud swept in from the western sea, where the warm Kuroshio Current and the Bering Sea collided to produce the towering thunderhead storm clouds. It was the unmistakable signal that the 124 islands strung along the 3,000-mile arc were about to be hit by yet another millimaw, the name given to the wind storms by the Aleuts who had lived on the sparsely vegetated and forlorn islands even before the promyshlermiki, the Russian fur traders who had settled the barren but sea-rich volcanic outcrops over two hundred years before.

Lana watched the seabirds driven landward by the approaching storm — yellow-tufted puffins, their bright white faces and rust-red beaks atop the black bodies irrepressibly happy-looking, and always bringing a smile to her no matter how depressed she felt. But even in the abundant bird life, from cormorants and fulmars to kittiwakes, she saw pain and battle. Where others reveled in the wildness of the place, she yearned for the quiet life — not boring but the kind of life she had experienced in Nova Scotia while based in Halifax, doing what now she felt she did best, looking after others, hoping not only to help them bear their pain but to escape from her own.

The truth on Unalaska, however, was that to date there had not been much work to do. The island’s main function was twofold: to provide safe anchorage in Dutch Harbor for the U.S., Japanese, and Korean factory ships from the storms that plagued the nutrient-rich fishing ground off the Aleutian Trench, and more important, to serve as a depot between the handful of American bases. As depot, its primary responsibility was to Adak Island Naval Station and tiny Shemya Island, which few Americans had ever heard of and which, being the most western extension of the United States, possessed an air force station and was, as all the interceptor and transport pilots knew, the most heavily armed piece of real estate in the Western world. If ever the Russians moved against the United States’ western flank, Shemya Island and Adak, the big submarine base 360 miles eastward, would be more strategically important than Midway Island over five hundred miles south had been in World War II. The island, which, like England in the Atlantic, was in effect a United States forward aircraft carrier to the Soviet Union, was not something Lana Brentwood had given much thought to, for one’s own world had a way of dwarfing world conflicts that were supposed to dwarf one’s own. Besides, neither she nor anyone else believed the Russians would be so foolish as to head eastward and try to use the island arc as a stepping stone to America’s back door through the Alaskan and the Canadian West Coast.

The millimaw was moving in fast, and by the time Lana reached the hospital, snow flurries mixed with rain were swept in by the millimaw at over ninety miles an hour, the rain and snow striking the Quonset huts horizontally, the only place in the world, the transport pilots told Lana, where such a phenomenon occurred. All around she could hear the beginning of the “Aleutian wail,” which some bureaucrats in Washington, over four thousand miles away, thought was ‘‘Aleutian whale” but which was the peculiar beating and howling sound of the millimaw on the sheer basaltic cliffs and treeless slopes of the islands. She could see the double-glazed windows in the Quonset huts as square orange eyes staring out from the bleakness. Unlike the native Aleuts, some of whom still lived in their underground sod houses or barabaras and who eked out a living subsisting on reindeer and seafood, Lana knew she would never get used to the place. Were it not for the VCR and the big high-definition TV screen they had at the recreation center for the three thousand inhabitants of Dutch Harbor, she believed there would be many more cases of severe depression — to date, the most common complaint at the base hospital.

Some of the men, most of them pilots, had attempted to alleviate their boredom by trying to date her, but she had refused most. Despite the gentleness she’d experienced with William Spence, after her experience with Jay La Roche, she was still leery of men, especially when she discovered that the confidentiality of her naval file, which had spelled out the reason for her banishment, had been breached. They obviously thought she was an easy lay.

The only exception she had even thought of making was a pilot, Lieutenant Alen, who regularly flew the resupply route to the big antisubmarine base on Adak halfway along the chain and on to Shemya and Attu loran station over 420 miles farther west near the international date line between the United States and USSR. He had asked her if she had wanted to go along for a ride to see Attu. She’d said no, but he wasn’t one to be deterred, and this night as she walked into the officers’ club, she saw his boyish grin.

“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked, brushing the snow off her collar.

She felt awkward. “Yes,” she said. “Hot chocolate. If that’s all right.”

“One hot chocolate coming up.” Alen ignored the guffaws of several pilots farther down the bar. Handing her the steaming mug, he asked her if she’d changed her mind about a flight — this time to Adak.

“Not particularly,” she answered, not wishing to be rude but having already seen as many of the forty-six active volcanoes in the chain as she intended.

“What’s the matter? You haven’t got a sense of history? Big battle there in forty-three. Banzai attack by the Japanese. Just kept coming against our boys.”

“Now they‘re our boys,” she said.

“Well, sort of-”

“Last I heard, they’re supposed to be on our side,” she answered.