The Eleventh Man (30 page)

The squawk of a loudspeaker in some tuck of the ship broke in on them. Overhead came the shufflefoot sounds of sailors doing whatever sailors do. Ben waited for those to pass before testing out: "The real thing when it comes—you know where?"

It drew a shrug. "Scuttlebutt says it'll be Guam."

That was how Tepee Weepy figured it, too, Ben knew, or he probably would not have been on this troop deck with this particular member of the Supreme Team at this moment. No other target in the island-hopping campaign would rate bigger headlines. Guam had been surrendered in the war's earliest days when American garrison troops in pie-tin helmets found themselves facing a Japanese invasion juggernaut; there wasn't an admiral or a general in the Pacific who didn't want it back with a vengeance. Ben felt he needed to share his reading of the situation. "Andy? Say it is Guam. The big brass will pull out all the stops if it is. But the Japs aren't saps. They aren't about to say, 'So sorry, here, have your famous island back.' It could be a bloodbath."

Angelides looked at him solemnly and turned to go below. "I prefer showers."

At barely first light, the side of the troopship gray as a lingering shade of night, the Marines in full combat gear descended the cargo nets.

Below in the landing craft that kept bumping against the ship hard enough to jar him half off his feet, Ben craned up at the mass of humped forms as they came. Angelides was a marvel to watch. Somehow keeping an eye on the entire teeming shipside, he shambled down the mesh of rope rungs one-handed, reaching to any of his unit who needed steadying on the swaying net, injecting alacrity into those who lacked it: "Come on, you guys, you're slower than smoke off of shit. Move, move!" Only after the last of his men thudded safely into the boat did he swing free of the net and give the high sign to the coxswain at the tiller.

Ben's notepad could not hold it all. The bay was a serrated wall of troopships, the landing boats busy around each in the choppy moat of ocean, helmeted men collected in shoulder-to-shoulder embarkation as ancient as Troy. As soon as a landing craft was loaded to crowded capacity, it revved away into the coral shallows just offshore. Ramps flopped down like drawbridges and the Marines waded into the crotch-deep surf.

Ben piled off with the others, struggling against the weight of the water. Angelides, large sarge to the life, surged ahead while steadily prodding his outfit. "Everybody spread out. Six feet apart. Benson, don't you know what six feet looks like? It's the size of your goddamn grave if you don't spread out, meathead. Michaels, Krogstad! Haul that sonofabitching thing in closer, I don't give a rat's ass if it is bigger than you are." That pair was pulling a rubber raft, empty but still all they could handle in the surf swirl. The footing was treacherous on the sharp coral and more than once Ben had to catch himself from going face-first into the water. Around him by the dozens, and along the shoreline by the hundreds, Marines advanced at an encumbered gait with their rifles held high and dry. After about a hundred yards of this, the assault force clambered off the coral reef to the sands of Eniwetok. By all evidence visible to Ben the practice landing had gone as well as such things could. On the other hand, on the slight lift of land beyond the beach were situated volleyball courts rather than Japanese gun emplacements.

Panting and soaked to his midriff, Ben stayed close to Angelides as he lustily deployed his forces. When the order came down the line to halt the landing exercise, Angelides turned to check on him. "How do you like island-hopping so far?"

Ben squeezed water out of a pocket ruefully. "Why couldn't you have joined the ski troops or some other outfit that isn't half-drowned all the time?"

"And miss tropical paradise like this? No way." The big sergeant got busy again issuing orders, one of which sent a couple of men back down to the waterline to collect the small rubber boat, and Ben asked what it was for.

"What, that?" Angelides looked bemused to be asked. "You're looking at our hospital ship."

At those words, Ben felt the shiver of memory of his shipboard infirmary stay—the Purple Heart suite—after the shoulder wound. "Part of the Corps lore," Angelides was saying as if he had been asked that section of the Marine manual. "Get the wounded to shore with the rest of us. That thing's the best way I know how." He rumbled a humorless laugh. "A lifeboat for the wet-ass infantry, you could call it."

Ben gazed at the rubber boat, Angelides' seagoing ambulance. He thought of Prokosch, the width of the ocean away, on watch for the enemy floating in to a creek mouth. Rafts. In the middle of the most mechanized war in history.
What are the odds? Huck and Tom against the gods of war.

Back aboard the troopship, the entire lower half of his uniform stiff with salt from the surf, Ben had barely made it to his bunk when a seaman stuck his head through the main hatchway and bawled: "Reinking? Lieutenant Reinking?"

"Over here, sailor."

"Message for you, topside."

D
ANZER PIECE A DANDY.
W
ILL BE EXCELLED ONLY BY YOUR NEXT, SPOKEN AS WELL AS WRITTEN: NEW FIELD FOR YOU TO STAR, ARCHIVAL RECORDING OF BEACHHEAD INVASION.
L
IBRARY OF
C
ONGRESS ASKED THIS FAVOR AFTER
A
RMY,
N
AVY AND
A
IR
C
ORPS ALL NIXED IT. TPWP KNOWS POSTERITY WHEN IT FALLS IN LAP, THUS RECORDING EQUIPMENT BEING RUSHED TO YOU.
F
OLLOW
M
ARINES ASHORE AT WHATEVER ASSAULT BEACH WITH EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT AND ALL POSSIBLE SOUND EFFECTS.
H
ISTORICAL RECORD, ORAL AND AURAL, IS THE GOAL
.

P.S. T
ECHNICAL AIDE ACCOMPANYING EQUIPMENT, DON'T FRET
.

Ben read it again with just as much disbelief as the first time through.
Where do the Tepee Weepy bastards come up with these ideas? They're turning me into the khaki version of Loudon. A play-by-play of an invasion.
Starring, naturally, a certain keyed-up sergeant and the outfit he would lead against enemy fire.

The ship's radioman and the code clerk both were watching him with apprehension. "Any reply, sir?" the coder asked as if he very much hoped not.

"Yes. Send: P
OSTERITY DOESN'T KNOW WHAT IT'S GETTING.
"

When he went back down into the hold to tell Angelides he was going to be famous of a kind, the bunk compartment was in such uproar he figured the poker game had drawn blood. It turned out to be simply mail call. Squirming through clamorous Marines clutching letters and packages from home, he worked his way to his bunk hoping to hear his name called, but it was all already there on the blanket, postal riches in a heap.

Flat on his back in the next bunk reading the sole V-mail letter that had come for him—from his uncle—Angelides commented: "You're a popular guy. I must have answered up for you twenty times."

"The stuff's been chasing me all over the Pacific, thanks for nabbing it," Ben rattled out his gratitude. As if fondling gifts, he sorted the pieces of mail into piles. The long-awaited treasure, Cass's letters. Weeks' worth of
Gleaners,
his father's fillers at the bottom of columns peeking out:
The only hope a person can be sure of is his own hatful.
Envelopes with his mother's wellschooled penmanship. A couple of blunt cheery notes from Jake Eisman done in pencil and beer. So many patches of his life, suddenly catching up with him. Almost reverently he slit open the letters from Cass and sped through the first one and the last, saving the others to savor more leisurely.

Ben, love—

How does a person write to a writer? I feel like a backward kid with a crayon. Maybe I can start by saying how much there is of you to miss. I can't turn around without remembering some crazy thing we did together. You've only been gone a week and I already have such a bad case, what is this going to be like from here on?...

...Nine weeks gone, letter no. 9 to you, and I at least know you're okay so far by reading you in the paper. You look good as ever in print, but no substitute for the warm body. Must sign off for now, we take off for Edmonton in an hour. I'll waggle my wings toward Hill 57 as we go.

Keep low out there, you with the typewriter.

Cass

Her P-39 met the first of the rough air at the Sweetgrass Hills that afternoon.

It was an ordinary Edmonton run, although Cass long since had absorbed the cockpit wisdom that flying through thin air is never exactly ordinary. On a summer day of this sort, however, from fifteen thousand feet above these borderland plains between Montana and Alberta, usually you could see around the world and back again. But right now in the telltale tremor of air above the humpbacked hills her eyes would not leave the sight of the weather making itself, big prairie clouds ahead where none should be, building up alongside the Rockies over toward Calgary.
Who came up with that meteorology briefing we got, a blind man? "Clear and calm," my fanny.
Customarily the squadron could scoot in behind such weather cells before the cloud piles sucked the energy of heat from the prairie and rolled off eastward building into major thunderstorms. What was coming at the squadron looked major enough.
We get caught in glop like that, we'll be lucky to know where our own wingtips are.

She checked around on her pilots. Beryl waggled her wings, showing she was watching the same cloud pattern. Off Cass's other wing, Mary Catherine made the universal hand signal as if pinching her nose against stinko weather. The plane in back of Cass was steady as if being towed, and she felt both relieved and guilty about that. Della Maclaine was on compassionate leave—a death in the family, it happened to everybody sooner or later. The TDY pilot filling in from the Michigan group was always on the mark, where Della as a rule was casually acquainted with the mark. Cass knew she should not be thinking about how much better the squadron flew without Della, but it was the kind of thing the mind does. Instinct was fully working during all this. She radioed the others and Linda's B flight and Ella's C flight farther back: "Instrument conditions, everybody. We need to try to bust through ahead of the worst of it."

The worst, however, was approaching at whatever a thunderstorm's top speed was, coupled with the fighter planes' velocity of three hundred and fifty miles an hour. In mere minutes the P-39s were bucketing uncomfortably in unpredictable air, and the cloud pile had closed in around and above. Within the murk, in the tight cave of the cockpit Cass constantly scanned her ranks of dials, flying the radio beam that would lead to the Edmonton airfield wherever the other side of this weather was, having to trust that her pilots one and all were doing the same.

She was straining to see if there was any sign of this box canyon of clouds giving way ahead, when blue crackles of light danced along her wings.

Whoa. This isn't so good.

St. Elmo's fire, playful static electricity, was known to forecast lightning. No pilot wanted a bolt of electricity sparking through the instrument panel. Already Cass was back on the radio: "Heads up, everybody. We're going downstairs to get under this. Prepare to descend to fifteen hundred feet, repeat, fifteen hundred."
That's low, but it's like the damn Fourth of July up here.
Down there, her hope was, lightning would be drawn to the ground instead of to P-39s. "Ride the altimeter real careful. Let's don't add to the magic number, hear?"

The magic number, sarcastically named, was a figure Ben had looked up when he wrote his piece about the squadron. One of the points of pride Cass and the others wore as openly as the WASP patch on their sleeves was that their safety record was better than the male pilots' in the chancy endeavor of ferrying un-proven aircraft. Out of roughly a thousand WASPs, he found at the time, a total of twenty-two had been killed in crashes. Since then, of course, the so-called magic number had kept creeping higher as the women pilots' time in the air mounted up.

Like a bird flock seeking a pond of calm, the dozen airplanes nosed downward, shimmying and bucking in the turbulence of the storm. Accustomed as every P-39 pilot was to the ungainly torque of the engine mounted behind, this was like flying at the mercy of a cyclone. When her altimeter reading touched fifteen hundred feet on the nose, Cass leveled off, scanning right, left, and behind through the sheeting rain for the other planes. She could make out something that in all likelihood was the fuselage of Mary Catherine's aircraft and she had every confidence in Beryl off her other wing.
At least we're not lit up like neon signs.
The malicious upper-atmosphere wind reached down this far, however, and the sluggish progress was consuming fuel at a disturbing rate. Cass checked and rechecked the plasticine map strapped to the thigh of her flying suit. They would make it to Edmonton without dry tanks if they could feel their way down out of the headwind. The lack of contour lines on the map attested to flat country below. Even so. "All pilots. Descend to a thousand feet, we'll hold there if we can see the ground, repeat, if. Nobody get to thinking too much, just keep riding the beam. Edmonton is there, it always has been. Let's just damn do it and get this flight over with, officers."

This day, the magic number did not change.

The hours of the day in their circling of the earth returned now to the troopship. Spellbound by the immediate presence of Cass in the inked words, Ben read the letters over again, knowing all the while there was another recipient of her lines of love or whatever approximated it.