Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

If the war did go nuclear, then pray she’d go in the fireball and not suffer the horrible, lingering death of radiation. The thought of her hair falling out in clumps was more terrifying to Lana than all the other horrible possibilities, like those that had afflicted Ray, the burn on his face making him a walking nightmare so that even his children could not find it in them yet to look straight at him. According to the last letter her mom had sent her, Ray’s appearance was changed again. Whether it was the eighth of ninth operation, Lana no longer knew. And despite their mom’s assertion that Ray was looking “better and better,” Lana saw no change in the photograph, an awful, polished plastic sheen instead of a face of real skin that made it look like a tight mask, its stretched-skinlike quality not diminished by the prints, which were not glossy but matte-finished. Lana’s use of mattes instead of glossies was a deliberate attempt to delude herself of the reality: that with all the magic of laser and plastic surgery — and it was magic in what it could sometimes do — Ray would never look normal again. She was surprised that Beth and Ray were still together, with him a virtual prisoner in La Jolla’s Veterans’ burn unit outside San Diego, and Beth up in Seattle with the two children. For a moment Lana was jealous — at least they were together in the way it mattered. An old line from her favorite movie came to her, and she could see Katharine Hepburn alone and lonely in Venice and counseling a beautiful blonde who was complaining about her husband, “Don’t knock it, cookie. Two’s the most beautiful number in the world.” Well, it was if the other one wasn’t Jay La Roche.

Because she hadn’t confided in anyone, especially her parents, she sometimes felt that her mother thought she expected too much. But all she wanted was a marriage like Beth and Ray’s — not perfect by any means, but built on bedrock, not on shifting sand. Or was it bedrock? Could it ever be? Perhaps Beth wasn’t confiding in anyone either — keeping it bottled up inside and caged by pride. At least Beth would have the children. Jay had wanted them, a son especially, but his violence took care of that, too, and induced a miscarriage in Lana. He’d got mad about that. As usual, that was her fault, too, but — God forgive her — she had seen it then and saw it now as a blessing, not to herself but for the child who would have grown up with Jay — a nightmare that Beth, with all her troubles, didn’t have to contend with. Perhaps Jay would change? No, she thought, he wouldn’t.

The Humvee’s horn startled her, and she stepped smartly to the shoulder of the road and turned to see the driver.

“Lieutenant Brentwood?” It was a sergeant from Dutch Harbor HQ. “You’re wanted back at the base, ma’am. Commander Morin’s request.”

“Requested or ordered?” Lana asked, though she didn’t really care, her sharp tone merely one of fright.

“He didn’t say, ma’am.”

“It’s all right, Sergeant,” said Lana, moving around to the passenger side. “I’m not going anywhere. Just out for my daily constitutional.”

“Yes, ma’am. Pretty soon you’re gonna need more than that anorak.”

Jay La Roche still on her mind, Lana read more into the sergeant’s comment than he meant. They didn’t call the Aleutian’s “America’s Siberia” for nothing — it felt like exile, the need for companionship, for women, ever greater than was usual for a military base. And for some, like Lana, who’d committed an infraction against the rules, the Aleutians posting was meant to be an exile, a punishment, and with your punishment came your file: “Severely reprimanded for conduct unbecoming an officer,” in Lana’s case. Would it have been unbecoming, she thought wryly, for a noncom nurse to have given young Spence the comfort of sexual release? There had been a lot of jokes in her wake about the “unbecoming” bit, but by now she was used to it. At least she’d developed an armor against the more vulgar suggestions and leers of men who had been given the choice of Unalaska or permanent latrine duty at Parris Island or Camp Lejeune. After what her brother David had gone through in marine boot camp at Parris Island, Lana could well understand why some chose the blustery isolation of the Aleutians. And now, David was God knew—

She turned on the driver. “Is it about my brother?”

The sergeant was pumping the brakes on a patch of black ice and shifting down so the truck roared. “What’s that, ma’am?” he shouted.

“Colonel Morin — has he got news of my brother, David?”

“No idea, ma’am. All I was told was to come and get you.”

She felt cold now in the pit of her stomach. What was so urgent that on this godforsaken island in this godforsaken chain, the base commander had sent out a Humvee for her? It was either David or Robert. Or was it their parents? Perhaps all of them. It couldn’t possibly be—

“Ma’am?”

“Yes?”

“Can I ask you something off the record?”

She nodded — not sure whether she should have.

“You ever go out with enlisted men?” asked the sergeant.

“No.”

“Just thought I’d ask.”

“I–I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to sound like that — it’s not — I don’t go out with anyone, Sergeant.” Oh, Lord, she thought, now they ‘d say she was a lesbian. No they wouldn’t— not after young Spence and her conduct “unbecoming an officer.” Or maybe that wouldn’t make any difference? From the men’s point of view, up here, any woman would do. Even so, she hadn’t meant to offend the sergeant. “I didn’t mean to sound—”

“S’all right, ma’am. I understand.”

No you don’t, thought Lana. Now she was confused in her anxiety over why she’d been sent for. She desperately wanted reassurance, her old fears suddenly resurfacing; a feeling of vulnerability and fright combined overwhelmed her. She wished Shirer were here. What she wouldn’t give for a man to hold her, to love her. Not sex, not to start with anyway. Just to be held. As she watched the light fading from Dutch Harbor, the hills around the base took on a chilling blue aura, at once beautiful, ethereal almost. And threatening.

“You wanted to see me, Commander?” asked Lana, trying to read in his face what it was all about before he spoke.

“Yes,” answered Commander Morin. “Close the door, will you, Lieutenant.” There was another man in the Quonset hut — a fisherman by the look of his rough white Cowichan knit sweater, its bald eagle wings in full span across the man’s barrel-shaped chest. At first glance he gave the impression of being overweight, but Lana realized it was probably the oilskins covering his considerable frame that gave her the impression.

“Lieutenant Brentwood,” said Morin, a small, stocky man, his height in marked contrast to the considerably bigger man, whom he introduced as “Mr. Bering,” Bering’s wild salt-and-pepper beard framing a time- and wind-ravaged face.

Bering reminded Lana of the prewar magazine Alaska Men— maybe it was still being published. In Alaska, men, outnumbering eligible females three to one — now five to one with the troops stationed there — had advertised in the magazine in the lower forty-eight states for prospective mates. Bering had a burly, honest look about him, clearly undaunted by the unfamiliar military surroundings, though it wasn’t the kind of location she would expect to find him in. He looked born to the sea. Lana wondered why the man, in his late thirties, perhaps early forties, and fit-looking now that she saw him closer, wasn’t in uniform until Morin introduced him as a “crabber.” Shellfish meat from the Aleutians was now in ever-higher demand in Japan and the United States, with Japan’s fleet of shellfish trawlers unable to break out north of Hokkaido Island into the fishing grounds of the vast North Pacific because of the Soviet sub blockade that extended from Vladivostok to Kamchatka Peninsula. Without the American fish supply to Japan via Hawaii, and the long southern route around the sub packs, Japan would soon be in the same position as Britain had been when Hitler’s U-boat blockade threatened to bring that country to its knees. All the Soviets had to do was delay the food supplies to Japan as effectively as they had interfered with the NATO reinforcements across the Atlantic — close the ring for another twelve weeks — and the equation of men and materiel would shift decidedly to the Soviets’ favor. Then there would be no way out, except nuclear, and that was no way at all.