Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

“Yeah,” agreed Turk. “We were damned near in the drink over there.”

Alen interjected that it was kind of “strange” for a nurse to like a combat general, adding, “I heard Freeman was the first general on our side to use women in combat. That right?”

Mary said nothing. The lieutenant was starting to get on her nerves, his comments less questions than taunts against what he obviously thought were her “butch” sensibilities. Hell, thought Mary, it wasn’t her fault Lana couldn’t make it.

“That right?” pressed Alen. “Chopper One in the Pyongyang raid was flown by a ‘skirt’?”

“You want to be in combat, miss?” asked Turk, looking puzzled.

“ I don’t want to be in combat, but heck, if you can do the job, what difference does it make whether you’re—”

The next two thuds on the fuselage interrupted her. “But I mean if we’re outnumbered by the Russians, and we are, then—”

The next instant she was flattened out, arms pinned hard back against the fuselage, her mouth gasping like a stunned fish. Turk was gone — out of the flapping, gaping hole where his monitor console had been — and there was a long, bluish light in front of her, fluttering like a silk scarf — a tongue of high-octane flame — and above it a roaring, then all about crashing sounds as the crated cargo shifted and came adrift, crashing through its webbing straps, the Hercules now in a spin, the suction tearing at her, ripping open her tunic, the icy blasts so powerful, she felt as if her nostrils were burning. Alen slumped in his seat, the copilot shouting, “Mayday!… Mayday!…”

Wreckage from the Hercules was found sliding up and down the swells about fifteen miles north of the smoking Okmok Caldera, a volcanic cone on the eastern end of Umnak Island 130 miles west of Dutch Harbor. In a feat of oceanographic skill unmatched since the Howard Hughes-CIA “Glomar Challenger” retrieval of a sunken Soviet Golf-class submarine in the 1960s, a U.S. Navy two-man submersible, flown in from Valdez over nine hundred miles away, located the black box from the Hercules.

As well as the hard disk recording of the chitchat between cockpit and the unauthorized Wave passenger, the USAF investigators flown in from Anchorage were able to agree that the transport had been operating under normal procedure. The radar, the black box showed, had been on, but the investigators noted that in the heavy fog, no doubt exacerbated by wind shear conditions from the approaching millimaw, an error could have been made by either Lieutenant Alen or his copilot in interpreting the blips occurring on the radar. Most of the blips recorded on the radar strip were confirmed by thumps faintly discernible on the sound disk; thus it appeared that whatever it was that had struck the Hercules, passing through the engineer’s position, could have been mistaken for yet another seabird approaching — possibly a royal albatross. These big birds had a seven-foot wingspan and were easily capable of giving a very distinct blip on the plane’s high-definition radar.

This explanation by the USAF investigators was accepted by the Dutch Harbor board of inquiry, particularly as meteorological reports from the small settlement of Nikolski on the western end of Umnak Island confirmed that quake tremors, registering 4.6 on the Richter scale, and intermittent volcanic activity from the seven-thousand-foot-high Mount Vsevidof on the western end of the island had been recorded. Volcanic activity in and about the Okmok Caldera, at the eastern end of the island, was suspected as boulder-sized rocks thrown up, even at subsonic speed, by either volcano could have easily doomed the aircraft. An act of God.

Even so, the commanding officer of Dutch Harbor was severely reprimanded for having allowed the unauthorized flight of Sgt. Mary Eileen Reilley, and the officer commanding the Wave detachment, Maj. Brenda Sharp, was named in the issuances of an upcoming naval inquiry as an “interested party.” In navy parlance this meant that because Major Sharp had not signed a piece of paper, her career was effectively finished. For this, as well as for Sergeant Reilley’s death, the major in her turn held Lana Brentwood directly responsible. The scuttlebutt — and now the gossip was much cruder and harsher than before — was that Brentwood had jerked off some Limey back East, had been sent to Siberia, and had now screwed up the Wave CO, and done in an NCO while she was at it. The advice given every new arrival to Dutch Harbor was “Stay away from Lana.” She was unlucky.

The bodies from the Hercules were never found, no surprise to the fishermen who worked nets from Dutch Harbor to Amchitka or anywhere else around the seven-thousand-foot-deep Aleutian Trench. The Bering Sea was a protein soup, from the tiny plankton whose diurnal migrations cluttered your sonar to the big killer whales. If you were dead or couldn’t move, you were feed — and quickly. In any event, Unalaska Coast Guard requested that any fishermen working the waters off the steaming black sands of Okmok Caldera should immediately report any debris they found. The coast guard was upbraided by SOWAC, the local Status of Women Action Committee, for using the word “fishermen,” and it issued the request for “fisherpersons” to assist.

As it turned out, one fisherman, Pete Bering — who was erroneously claimed by the locals to be a direct descendant of explorer Vitus Bering — and his crew were working the waters off Umnak but had been well off the southwestern tip of the island the day of the crash. As it might be a week before Bering had his boat’s hold full of pollack and he could head back toward Dutch Harbor a hundred miles east of him, Bering radioed the coast guard to say that while he and his crew of three had heard a plane overhead, they’d been in heavy fog and so hadn’t seen it go down.

When the brooding gray mountains of cumulus shifted above Unalaska, there were moments of stunning wild beauty — the United States’ wind-riven bases in the Aleutians changing suddenly from fog-shrouded bleakness to a cold but clear sky, an expanse of Arctic turquoise that in a moment seemed to clear the mind of island fever. At nightfall the lights of Dutch Harbor would take on a sparkling quality in the pristine Arctic air, reminding Lana Brentwood of the summer nights as a child in the Sierra Nevada, of the days before the war when the whole family would go camping. The days had been hot and dry, the nights getting colder, just before Labor Day and the start of the new school year.

Those nights came back to her now as she went for her evening stroll on the road leading from the bluish cold of Dutch Harbor. She could smell the coming of winter in the air and instinctively pulled her Wave’s parka about her, the Quallofil lining sighing as it collapsed, a sound that brought back memories of a favorite red down jacket her father had given her. Things had been so predictable then, the sad end of summer, the anxiety-veined anticipation of the new school year, and a new jacket from her parents. Most kids took jackets as standard fare, but her father wasn’t an admiral then, and on a captain’s pay, with the three boys and her to put through school, a new jacket was something to celebrate. Later, when she married Jay La Roche, a think coat was no big deal, but now at least she didn’t have to fear Jay anymore. The world might be at war, but she wasn’t — at least not with him — and save for her brief encounter with the horror of battle wounds she had seen when caring for young William Spence aboard the hospital ship on the East Coast, the war was a long way away from Unalaska.

She knew that with the western tip of the Aleutian chain pointing toward Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, her feeling of isolation from the war was in fact very much an illusion. The big Soviet missiles on Kamchatka pointing toward the United States were countered by the United States’ missiles on Shemya, which, despite its small size, was the most heavily armed place on earth. Its missiles were only minutes from the Russian mainland. Lana offered up a silent prayer to any power that might exist that so long as the war remained CONHTTECH— in the jargon of the strategist, conventional high-tech war — a war in where there might still be a chance that all would not disintegrate, killing millions, suffocating the earth, reason might yet prevail in the madness. She pulled the jacket more tightly about her, the very chill of the thought of nuclear holocaust adding to the chill of the Arctic front.