Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

The pencil was still, Morin clearly relieved by Bering’s implied conclusion — that no one in Morin’s command was an agent, that it was simply coincidence, that the downing of the Hercules had occurred in Dutch Harbor’s area of responsibility.

But the commander’s satisfaction was short-lived as he reminded himself how the military was loath to believe in coincidence. It was too often a cover-up for incompetence. And God knew there were enough dissatisfied people posted to the Aleutians that he couldn’t dismiss the possibility his command had a leak. In any event, it was a case of cover your ass, which meant checking out the Four Mountains as well as requesting a security sweep of any civilians on the island, many of them of Aleut-Russian heritage from the days when Dutch Harbor was used as the main base for Russian fur sealers. The Aleuts had been poorly treated during World War II, many interned in run-down fish canneries on the Alaskan mainland. It was quite possible the Russians had infiltrated at least a few of them. On the one hand, if he sent any of his men to do a search of the four small islands, it would raise the question of a possible spy or spies, and it wasn’t a smart move careerwise to stir anything up if you couldn’t deliver. On the other hand, if an aircraft could be brought down anywhere over the thousand-mile arc, America’s back door was open.

Perhaps it had nothing to do with anyone on the island-perhaps a missile was fired from a sub. After all, in the Second World War Japanese subs — the big I boats — had shelled Oregon and California. But then, how could Morin explain how the noise of an enemy sub had gone undetected, given the extensive network of sonar arrays around the Aleutians? A sub story just wouldn’t stand up. But if Bering was right, if a missile had been fired from one of the islands, it was unlikely that out of the ten types of Soviet air-to-surface missiles, they would use anything as big as an SS-19 with its range of forty-eight hundred miles. It was much more likely they would use something like the shorter-range, shoulder-mounted “Grails,” which could have been fired low and fast enough to evade Dutch Harbor’s radar 130 miles to the east. It would have taken only a few seconds from a base somewhere on the four small islands to bring down the big Hercules.

Morin asked Bering if, seeing he knew the island so well, he would be prepared to act as scout for a search-and-destroy mission to the Four Islands.

Bering thought about it and said he would — on one condition.

“Which is?” pressed the commander anxiously.

Bering replied that as an “independent fisherman,” he didn’t have the benefits of any group medical insurance, especially as he was separated from his wife, and that now his two teenagers were in “braces,” the cost of dental treatment was keeping him broke.

“Leave it to me,” said Morin. “From here on in, you’re covered. I’ll get the paperwork done this afternoon. Don’t worry about it.” The commander’s gaze shifted to Lana, then back to Bering. “I’ll organize a platoon and transport. But I want this whole operation kept under wraps.”

“Then we should use my trawler,” put in Bering. “If there is anyone on the islands up to no good, there’s no point in advertising we’re coming.”

“But you’ll have to land somewhere. They’ll see your trawler coming whether they suspect anything or not.”

“Not if I go in fog, they won’t. And that’s the forecast for the next week.”

“All right,” said Morin, smiling appreciatively. “Sounds good to me.”

“Okay,” said Bering enthusiastically. “Would you like to come along, Miss Brentwood?”

She blushed despite herself. Was he serious? “I’ll stay here with the commander.”

“Lucky commander,” said Bering mischievously. Morin was decidedly embarrassed.

As she and Bering left the Quonset hut, the sky above them was studded with stars, but even now wisps of fog could be seen sneaking into the harbor, and for want of anything better to say, Lana noted the obvious. “Think we’ve seen the end of the good weather for a while.”

“I’ll be back,” said Bering. “I’d like to take you out when I get back. Okay with you?”

“Why — yes, I suppose—”

“Great.”

The next minute he was gone, into the night, heading back toward the docks of Dutch Harbor, his fisherman’s wet-weather coat draped over his arm — like a helpless slave, Lana thought, and she felt a stirring in her.

“Heard the scuttlebutt?” asked her roommate almost the moment she returned to barracks.

“What?” asked Lana.

“They think there’s some Commie missile base down on one of those islands. We’re probably going to see some action around here shortly.”

Lana didn’t know what shocked her most — news of the search-and-destroy mission having already leaked or that her roommate seemed so eager to see “action”—which meant broken bodies for the Waves.

“After this gig,” the girl told Lana, “in Civvy Street they’ll be begging us to work in OR.”

“If,” said Lana, “there’ll be any ORs left.”

“Ah — we’ll win, honey.”

“Like we did in Vietnam,” said Lana.

“You’re a gloom cloud all of a sudden. Morin chew your ass out?”

“No.”

“Cheer up then. Nobody’s going to push the big button. They’re not crazy, lady.”

“If they’re not crazy,” said Lana, “they wouldn’t have started a war in the first place.”

“I don’t know,” said the bubbling roommate. “Sometimes there’s no other way. Sometimes you have to fight.”

What depressed Lana more was that her fellow Wave was right. Sometimes there was no other way. Either that or you simply walked away in defeat as she had with Jay.

Her roommate, running late for her shift, grabbed her cape. “You know anything about this Bering?”

“No,” said Lana.

“Oh, come on, Lana. You were with him in Morin’s office.”

“Yes, but I mean I don’t know anything about him. Some kind of — fisherman — I don’t know.”

“Some kind of fisherman… I’d like to go fishing with him. I’d like to get him under the sheets — in between them— or on top of them — and…”

“All right,” said Lana.

Though he had just sunk the Yumashev, Robert Fernshaw’s initial rush of victory as he ditched gave way to empathy for the hundreds of Russian sailors miles away who, like him, were at the mercy of the Atlantic. Now and then he could glimpse patches of them through the crazily tilting rectangle of his life raft’s flap as the raft slid up and down the walls of ever-deepening troughs. The Exocet Fernshaw had fired had been so devastating that he knew many of the Russian crew wouldn’t have had time to make for the life rafts. Caught for a moment atop a huge, sweeping swell, he saw the dot of the Russian chopper hovering over the stricken sailors, winching a dozen or so aboard and — it looked like — ferrying others from the oil-streaked water to the few lifeboats. But how far could the chopper go? Even on a full tank, the Hormone’s range wasn’t much more than four hundred miles.

Fernshaw stopped thinking about the Russians, any sympathy he may have had for them as fellow human beings being quickly dissipated by the reality of the war. It wasn’t NATO’s divisions that had breached the Fulda Gap and started the war. Anyway, they certainly weren’t going to worry about him. He checked that his raft’s SARS — salt-activated radio-to-satellite beacon — was working and was struck by the irony that if an Allied ship was over the horizon, it would probably see, via satellite relay photos, the scores of Russian sailors in the water first, and would miss him altogether if the beacon packed it in after the first few hours of full-power transmission.