Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

Half a world away in Unalaska’s Dutch Harbor, the woman in the jeep coming out of the mist toward the howl of Lieutenant Alen’s Hercules was not the Wave Alen was expecting.

“Where’s Lana?” he asked the Wave sergeant.

“Lieutenant Brentwood can’t make it, sir.”

“She sick?”

“No, sir. She’s sorry, but Voice of America is doing a special report on the NATO front. She’s hoping to pick up some more news about where her brother’s division might be.”

“Oh—” said Alen, trying not to show his disappointment. “Well — thanks for coming out and telling me.” The Wave appeared not to hear him, or was she asking another question, one hand holding down her cap, the other cupped about her mouth against the howl of the Hercules’ four props.

“So?” yelled the copilot to Alen. “What d’you say?” Alen was looking blankly at him. In his disappointment he hadn’t been paying much attention to the Wave sergeant, and there was an awkward moment before he realized that she was asking if she could take the flight to Adak. Unconsciously Alen was letting his eye rove over her body. The Wave outfit was just about the sexiest uniform he’d seen on a woman — the snappy navy cap and the tunic that, whether or not the designer had intended it, had easily sailed through the sea changes of fashion, emphasizing the bust by trying to camouflage it.

“Sure,” said Alen. “O’Sullivan, isn’t it?”

“Reilley,” she corrected him. “Sergeant Mary Reilley.”

“It’s Irish anyhow.” Alen grinned. “Welcome aboard.”

The tall, gangly engineer in his midtwenties from Texas whom they called “the Turk” for a reason no one could figure out was asked to make sure that Sergeant Reilley was strapped in tight. The two-hourly weather adjustment was for millimaws and more of the fog that one minute would obliterate the brutal majesty of the far-flung volcanic islands and the next be blown asunder by a millimaw, replaced by driving rain, snow, and hail all at once.

As the Hercules took off — all by instruments because of the fog — Alen banked quickly, taking the C-130 E, with twenty-one tons of food and electronic supplies for Adak, well away from the hidden and towering mass of Makushin Volcano. The sixty-seven-hundred-foot-high mountain rising immediately west of Dutch Harbor on the northern end of Unalaska was now visible only on his radar. Mary Reilly was asking the engineer on her helmet’s flip mike whether or not it would be possible for them to “hop across” from Adak to Attu Island. She had been told a “horror story,” she said, of how in World War II over fifteen thousand poorly equipped American soldiers, trained for desert warfare, had been sent in against a smaller but much better-trained and dug-in garrison of three thousand Japanese troops. Turk said he didn’t know much about that war. “All I know, ma’am, is that the Japanese are our allies in this one.”

Reilley, voice straining against the background noise of the Hercules, was asking him another question, but she kept forgetting to depress the talk button. She couldn’t believe how much noise military planes made compared to civil aircraft. The Turk was just sitting there watching her lips move, which would have suited him nicely, but he didn’t want to be rude and pointed again to the talk button.

“Oh, yes, sorry,” said Reilley. “I heard they — I mean we — thought the Japanese would use the Aleutians as kind of — you know — stepping stones to the United States.”

“They did,” cut in Alen. “They attacked Dutch Harbor, middle of forty-two. Wanted to sucker our Pacific Fleet up here — what was left of it after Pearl Harbor. Course, they thought we ‘d use Attu and the other islands as stepping stones to them. You’re in a very strategic area, Sergeant—”

“Call me Mary.”

“Okeydoke, Mary.”

“I’m surprised that the Russians haven’t tried something up here,” she said.

“They will,” Alen answered. “When they’re ready. Those sons of—” He paused.

“Bitches,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. Well, they’ve got their hands full right now.”

“I dunno,” countered the copilot. “What I hear is, they’re doin’ pretty good in Europe.”

“Maybe so,” said Alen, “but Ivan’s tricky, man. They could still decide to go for it up here — try our back door. Sure as hell take the NATO heat off their western front.”

“Russkies don’t like two fronts,” said the copilot. “That’s what I heard.”

“That’s it,” said Alen derisively. “Fight the last friggin’ war. Sure way to lose this one.”

“That where Lana’s kid brother is?” asked Turk.

Christ, thought Alen, glancing over at the copilot. The Turk could always be depended on to open his mouth and screw everything up. Just when they were impressing big-chested Mary, Turk had to shift the conversation to another woman.

“Yeah,” said Alen quickly, “he’s somewhere over there.”

“He’s trapped in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket,” said Mary.

“You sure know a lot about this war,” said Turk ingratiatingly. Alen didn’t mind — at least they were back talking about her.

“Not really,” said Mary.

“Shit!” It was the copilot, his exclamation followed by a dull thump on the fuselage. Instinctively Mary pulled her head back. There was another. “Fuck — sorry, miss. Damn seabirds.” Their dark blood and gizzards, splattered on the Hercules’ windscreen, went into long, spidery, scarlet webs under the pressure of the head wind, the Hercules’ air speed now at four hundred miles per hour. Despite the increasing turbulence, driving the birds into the aircraft, the big transport with its twenty-one tons of cargo and a maximum fuel load of thirty tons, loaded at Dutch Harbor to save refueling from Adak’s precious store, was heavy enough to minimize the rough ride. Even so, the impact of the birds had given the Wave a bad fright, and Alen quickly and adroitly steered the conversation back to her knowledge of the war in Europe. Nothing like praise to calm the nerves.

“Heck,” said Reilley bashfully. “I don’t know that much about it. It’s just that Lana and I work the same shift and— well, when she talks about her brothers, she keeps me up-to-date, I guess—”

“How old is he?” asked Turk.

Oh, Christ! thought Alen. There he goes again.

“Oh,” said the Wave, “David’s in his early twenties, I think. He’s been around, though. He was in Korea first— with Freeman.”

Turk let out a low, respectful whistle.

“Well,” interjected Alen impatiently, “if he’s fought with Freeman, he’s a survivor. I wouldn’t worry about him.”

Mary Reilley was nonplussed by Alen’s remark, a tone of condescension in it, but for whom — David Brentwood? Because he, Alen, hadn’t yet seen combat? Or was it disdain for Freeman? Freeman was one of Mary Reilley’s heroes in a world where it was no longer fashionable to have heroes, especially not military ones. To his troops, the general was known as George C. Scott, for, like Patton, Freeman had proved himself daring and, to many, insufferably brave. Convinced of his mission — to “drive back the Mongols,” as he put it, by which, his critics charged, the general meant anyone not born in either “the old British Empire” or “the new American one”—Freeman had given America its first, and so far only, good news in the war. As now, aboard the Hercules, whenever his name was mentioned, it evoked powerful emotions and left no middle ground. The media especially was divided into those who hated to say anything good about him and those who loved saying anything bad about him. But on one point, as Mary Reilley pointed out, there was unanimity: he had turned things around in Korea.