Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

“Captain—” Lana called out, “thank you for all you’ve done. If you and the others on that beach hadn’t got us off-”

“Ah—” he said, waving aside any thanks. “No problem, Lieutenant. Fish weren’t running yesterday anyways — and don’t call me Captain. Makes me feel like I’m in the navy.”

Shirer watched her effortless laugh, as entranced by her beauty as when he’d first met her. Only she was more mature-looking now — more confident than the girl he had known before the war. And if he could, he would have made love to her right then and there. Her hand was still in his and he said, “My God, I never thought I’d be glad to be shot down.”

“Neither did I! You are feeling better, aren’t you?”

“More than you know.”

Soon they were talking as if they had never parted.

“Where are we headed?” he asked her.

“To Atka,” she answered. “It’ll be about five hours. From there they’ll probably fly us back to Dutch Harbor and you’ll—” Her pause conveyed more to him than she realized. Both of them pretended that they would have more time together once they reached the safety of Dutch Harbor, but both of them had seen enough of the war to know that as soon as he was able, he would be flying again, as every effort would be made to gain air superiority over Adak as a prelude to retaking the island in order to protect Shemya, four hundred miles east of Adak, before it was permanently cut off and overrun by the Russians.

The head nurse, coming down the companion ladder from the wheelhouse, where more of the wounded had been crowded in, noticed Lana was still with the same patient. “Lieutenant Brentwood — could I see you a moment please!” Her tone was admonishing. “We need help on deck.”

Lana rose, taking her hand from his. “Uh-oh. I’m in trouble. I’ll see you at Dutch Harbor.”

“Lana?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“Are you still afraid of pirates?” For a second she didn’t know what he meant.

“They wear eye patches.” He grinned.

She was buttoning up her parka before going on deck. Her

voice was subdued, yet quietly joyful. “I love them,” she said.

“You were very palsy-walsy with that pilot,” the head nurse commented sharply. “Do you hold hands with all your patients?”

“He’s an old friend.”

“So I gathered. But I’d appreciate it if you could spare time to attend to some of the other patients. We have several cases of—”

“Yes, of course,” replied Lana. “I’m sorry. It was selfish of me.”

Surprised and mollified by Lana’s apology, the head nurse put Lana’s lapse of duty down to the battle fatigue they were all feeling. Adopting an equally conciliatory tone, she asked Lana if she would help her secure all the medical supplies they’d had to put on deck to make room below for the wounded. “We’d better hurry,” she told Lana. “Captain Bering says we’ll likely run into some squalls before we reach Atka.”

On the other side of the world, Major Norton, bearing Freeman’s message to Brest, had just finished a terrifying flight with zero visibility in a storm sweeping in over the Ardennes. He had sat, white-knuckled, in the electronic systems operator’s tandem seat in a Luftwaffe Tornado out of Krefeld, eyes closed throughout the 530-mile flight, which the Tornado made in thirty-eight minutes, often flying less than five hundred feet above the ground, courtesy of its contour-scanning radar.

As Norton deplaned, his legs almost buckling under him, the Luftwaffe pilot apologized effusively, telling him, “I am sorry we took so long. But you see, Major, the STO”—by which the pilot meant the Smiths/Teldix/OMI head-up display—”is a little off, you understand, so it was necessary for us to go a little slow.” Adding insult to injury, when Norton arrived at NATO Brest HQ with Freeman’s threat, he discovered that there had been such an uproar from the French public about the dockside strike that the unions were back at work within the hour and the convoy’s supplies were already en route to NATO’s beleaguered Northern Army.

“You wish to go back now?” asked the tired but eager young Luftwaffe pilot.

“No,” said Norton. “I think I’ll sit a while.”

As he headed farther away from the trucks, following the line of the ditch parallel to the road, David Brentwood heard the swishing noise increasing, and now there seemed to be more than one source of the noise. Skis? He crawled up the sharp incline of the embankment but slid back, a hump under his foot giving way. Looking down, he saw it was a child’s body. He hesitated, held the child’s frozen hand, a little boy. Though not expecting a pulse, David checked anyway. There was none. Realizing he could do no more but unable to leave the tiny corpse, he turned the body facedown, the savagery of it all overwhelming him. Unmarried, no children of his own, he found it difficult to judge how old the little boy might have been, but he guessed no more than five or six.

The swishing noise was louder now, and he thought he saw a flashlight through the thick curtain of the blizzard. He touched the boy’s head, the hair frozen stiff, eyes closed, and was about to make his way up to the top of the embankment again when he noticed several more humps in the snow, scattered along the shoulder of the road. One body, a woman’s, was covered by that of a soldier who had obviously fallen on top of her, trying to protect her. The soldier’s uniform was that of the Bundeswehr. Why the advancing Soviet forces had perpetrated such a massacre, he had no idea. Perhaps it was nothing more than that civilians posed inconvenient delays.

Looking back down the road, he saw four figures with flashlights, the black barrel of their slung weapons in contrast to the falling snow. Sliding back down toward the ditch, he ran for another twenty yards or so, and when, glancing back, he could not see them, he quickly crossed the road, ready to slide down the ditch on the other side. There was none, and so he kept running into a snow-covered field. The unexpected, he told himself again. They would not think of looking for him on the dump side of the road.

He saw the dim shapes of trees about a hundred yards ahead of him, a wood, and at the edge he crawled beneath the snow-laden branches. Looking back across the field, he watched as the search party, four of them now, continued down the road. One of them stopped — looking down at what David guessed must be the child’s body. Damn! He shouldn’t have touched the body, disturbed its blanket of snow, because now they knew—

But then they began moving again, stopped, and turned back. Jesus Christ! he admonished himself. You dumb bastard! You stupid, dumb bastard—

They had seen his footprints, and given the heavy fell of snow, they would know he must have crossed the road shortly before. Heaving himself up under the weight of the coat, he began moving through the woods, then paused. Calm down, he told himself. So they were better-equipped, better-armed— and they were already starting to cross the field, following his footprints toward the wood. But he realized it would be much easier for them to pick up his footprints inside the wood where the snowfall was not nearly so windblown. He turned back toward the edge of the wood, unslung the AKM, thought about himself and Thelman on the range at Parris Island, and eased himself into the prone position, seeing the DI, not shouting for once but calmly telling them, “You’ve got time. Relax. Get your breathing under control. You’re going nowhere — and the enemy’s advancing. Don’t panic and start spraying everything in sight. Waste your ammo. Deep breaths! Stumble-Ass, I said deep breath. Exhale, not all of it. Hold — that’s it. Now squeeze the trigger — not your cock, Thelma. Fire, and don’t keep looking at the target. You’re not at the county fair. No dollies or box of chocolates. Move your aim straight to the next one or he’ll move you. You got that, Stumble-Ass?”