The Eleventh Man (48 page)

They drove on in silence, in the white iron winter over the northern half of the world.

The snow glare on the buttes against the clear morning sky lent Great Falls a rim of dazzling ivory.
Wouldn't you just damn know. Perfect flying weather and we're grounded for eternity.

Signing her way through last-minute paperwork, Cass every so often sent a pining look out the ready-room window. Around her, her pilots restlessly filled the wait as best they could, some jokes, some bitten lips to clamp emotion away. Taking extreme care not to show it, she herself was having to fight a case of trembles. So enormously much that was ending today. Everything else that was not. She had survived the war, the P-39, the P-63. Now to survive the situation with Dan. He was a bear some days—a lot of days—in the recuperation that sometimes he did not even seem to want. Other times, his old carnie self came through, he was full of plans, the old notion of barnstorming, flying, wing-walking. She was not sure wingwalking had survived the war.

And when I'm not sure, I start dreaming about Ben, don't I. If wishes were fishes, I'd be Jonah.

One more time, Cass strung herself together. She glanced at the clock next to the flight board, coming onto the hour. "All right, officers, let's get outside and form up."

The eleven women lined up in three ranks at the edge of the long runway. They were in Sunday uniform, white shirt, tan slacks—except for the leather flight jackets worn against the Montana cold, the same dress uniform each of them had worn at graduation from pilot school in Texas, hundreds of flying hours ago. Deep-creased crush hats crowned manes of hair; Cass could have picked every member of her squadron out of a thousand by the way the hat sat. She inspected them one last time as they stood at attention.

"Della, half step right. M.C., half step left. That's Beryl's spot between you."

With a deep breath she gave the command, and the squadron marched along the flight line to the hangar where the inactivation ceremony would be held.

Work on the unpainted bombers and P-63s stilled for a moment as the women mechanics in hairnets and overalls looked around from the wings and platform ladders they stood on, to the WASPs crisply saluting the waiting general. The gathering was not large. A perfunctory honor guard, rifles at rest and flag drooping in the still air of the hangar. The fresh-faced Canadian liaison officer, down from Edmonton for the occasion. Jones with a Speed Graphic camera, blazing away with flashbulb after flashbulb; he had worshipfully let Cass know there would be a set of photographs for each pilot.

The general at the portable podium his aide had set up shuffled his papers as if this were one more chore, glanced up at Cass as if she were personally responsible for his being saddled with Grady's Ladies all this while, and gruffly began.

Standing at attention determined to show him not so much as a quiver, she wondered if there would have been a ceremony at all if the general hadn't had to read out the special letter of commendation—the
renowned flying women of East Base ... service above and beyond the call of duty
—from the Senator.

Rising from his chair like a gallant of old, the Senator came around the table and delivered a forehead kiss to his wife as she settled in her seat. "Good morning, Sadie, light of my life." He stayed standing, looking out the lead-paned windows of the breakfast nook at most of a week's worth of lazy flakes still descending on Washington like tired confetti. "Isn't this town the damnedest place? It doesn't even know how to have a proper blizzard."

His wife helped herself to what little coffee he had left for her in the pot. "I hope, Luther, you aren't going to put yourself in charge of the weather next."

"Not hardly," he drawled. "The Pentagon no doubt will be enough of a snow job, as our daughter the sailor would say." Despite his words, his wife knew he was relishing this lame-duck session of Congress, inasmuch as he was preeminently of the opposite species. The war having spawned so many military bases in the western states, the region at last was in line to seat a formidable old cuss of its own in the main chair of the committee that held the purse strings in such matters, now that the venerable chairman had retired to his peach farm. With his whopping reelection, the Senator fit the bill and he intended to fill it. His plateside reading these mornings was a tome titled
Bureaucracies and Their Foibles.

Her busy day of holiday chores on her mind with Christmas coming fast, his wife somewhat absently waited for him to pull out his dollar watch, his signal of leaving for the Capitol. Today he made a show of consulting its Roman numerals, but a governing instinct of a murkier sort had taken hold of him as it sometimes did. "First thing, I need to futz around in the mail room a little." His wife made a face as he left the table; she didn't like
futz.

Nor the mail room, for that matter. She never set foot into the alcove library where he felt most at home in the otherwise womanized house. And the colored maid was not let in the room, not since the time she tidied by stacking everything together. With the satisfaction of familiarity the Senator again gazed around at the musty bookshelves, the favorite framed
Chicago Tribune
political cartoon showing him as a bowlegged wrangler roping a runaway bull with the head and face of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and last and most comforting of all, the outmoded military trestle tables waiting with seven batches of newspapers, eight to a pile. The weeklies from all fifty-six Montana counties, right here in the Potomac swampland ready for his perusal whenever the spirit moved him. Of all the senatorial perquisites there were, this one especially tickled him. He knew his staff drew straws to see which of them, at the dawn of each week, would have to take a taxi down from the Hill with the bulging mailbag of newspapers and lay them out in prescribed order, and the fact that they despised the chore only made him snort to himself in amusement. Montana was big as hell and just as tricky to represent, and he long since had figured out that having the local view of things fetched into this room for him beat trying to chase down the moods of constituents across a six-hundred-mile swath of earth.

Actually, there was more to it than that. In dismal bunk-houses and drafty line cabins when the century and he were unconquerably young, this gaunt old bone-sprung prairie Caesar had read his way up in the world via weekly compilations of community happenings just such as these; somehow even then he savvied more than was on the page, and the Faustian skills of small-town editors—recording angel one paragraph, gossip-monger the next—he had been careful to reckon with ever since. If nothing else, it appealed to him as cheap insurance for a man in his position. He could see no sign in the insane modern world that the pen was mightier than the sword, but it was damn sure stronger than most campaign speeches.

As he worked through this day's stack of newsprint about livestock prices and the latest run of bad weather, he checked his watch again. The new power that was coming to him with the gavel of the committee needed judicious exercise in the halls of the Senate and he had to allow time for that. He at last was in a position to do something about alphabet-soup wartime projects that did not point straight to victory and he was not going to waste—

The bold line of type caught his eye as he was paging through the
Gros Ventre Gleaner.

T
HOSE
W
HO
G
AVE
A
LL.

At these words something occurred, like a catch of breath but much deeper, in the hardened Senator. He blinked and looked again. He had not seen that heading since World War One. His kid brother had been one of those listed then, mortally wounded in a barrage at Château-Thierry in 1918.

Staring, he bent closer over the column of names of young ones grown to military age in the quarter century since.

Adamic, Stefan, killed in action in New Guinea.

Baker, Raymond, died in military hospital of wounds suffered in the Anzio invasion.

Cooper, Samuel, sailor on the USS
Yorktown,
missing in action.

Copenhaver, Theodore, killed in plane crash during training at Sweetwater, Texas.

Crosby, Vern, killed in action at Leyte...

With a chill he ran his finger on down and down the alphabet of death.
Godalmighty, that many? In one county?
A county— and an editor—he thought he knew like the back of his hand. In their span of political alliances of convenience he considered Bill Reinking a bit soft on Roosevelt, but rock solid other than that. The list broke at the bottom of the newspaper column, and started anew at top of the next.

McCaskill, Alex, killed in strafing attack in Tunisia.

Peterson, Morton, died as prisoner of war in Bataan death march.

Petrie, Laura Ann, Army nurse, killed by artillery barrage behind the lines at the battle for Avranches.

Quigg, James, shot down over Germany, missing in action.

Rennie, Victor, died in England during a bombing raid...

He felt as if he was reading something direly biblical. Old family names of the Two Medicine country, the soul of the state. Heavy loss in more ways than one, and the
Gleaner
editor must have been driven to do this by its unavoidable weight.

The Senator rubbed his long jaw and rapidly riffled through the rest of the weeklies in that stack. The
Choteau Acantha
also listed its county's war dead, as did the
Lewistown Argus,
the
Sidney Herald,
the
Dillon Herald-Examiner.
He hesitated, then started going through the next batch of newspapers from the eastern part of the state. Lists of the war dead showed up in several of the papers from there too, so whatever Bill Reinking had caught was still breaking out elsewhere.

Something else, too. Like father, like son. The Senator went back and counted. Of the sixteen weeklies in the two batches, nearly all had run Ben Reinking's story on the last flight of the Supreme Team's ninth man, Lieutenant Jacob Eisman.

The Senator stalked out to the telephone on the hallway stand and dialed as if incising the numbers.

"Mullen, get me the goddamn figures on how many Montana soldiers have been killed in this war. And then compared to the other states."

As the general finished up and presented the Senator's letter to Cass, his aide stood ready with the bright-colored service ribbons for her to pin on the chests of her pilots. She hoped her hands would be steady enough; she set her mind to making them steady enough. The women mechanics on the wings of all the planes stood watching now. Someone started it by clanging one wrench against another, and then the others began banging their tools, the thunderous metallic applause filling the East Base hangar and rolling out to the glistening buttes.

The hill, white and pyramidal and alone of its kind in the spongy Belgian countryside ahead, sent a chill through Ben as the jeep wheeled through the village of Waterloo to the actual battlefield. When he hastily checked, Maurice's guidebook described the area as gentle farmland when the armies of Europe massed there on a midsummer day in 1815, and the out-of-place hill, so artificially perfect in contour, as a mound of earth built to honor one of Wellington's Dutch generals, the Prince of Orange, wounded in the battle but of the kind he could heroically write home about that night. Ben already was jotting—
the Butte du Lion, name piled on it as sod was heaped in homage to a royal wound—when
Maurice proposed as if on cue: "What do you say we take the high ground, Ben? If glory does not await us there, luncheon does."

From up there, the winter rumple of the land for a few miles around was hard to read as history written in blood. Not much had been made of the battlefield. A modest museum across the road from the mound, not yet back in business since the Germans pulled out. A plaque there on the hilltop diagramming the battle, and a colossal cast-iron lion on a pedestal, supposedly emblematic of the Prince's courage, gazing implacably over the sleeping landscape. Otherwise, the mildly rolling plain of Waterloo looked unaltered since the sea gave it to the land. Yet down at the bottom of the manufactured hill lay the otherwise insignificant low ridge, the Duke of Wellington's high ground, where Napoleon's legions battered themselves to death in charge after charge. Ben measured off a mile with his eye, then another, then a third; incongruous as it seemed, that bit of countryside scarcely big enough to pasture a restless band of sheep had held the army of France, Britain's and armies of other nations scared stiff of Napoleon remaking the map of Europe, and thirty thousand cavalry horses. The only surly aspect at the moment was the weather, low-rolling clouds starting to spit snowflakes, and the forest near Waterloo village that had stood out dark against the snow when they arrived now was gowned in fog. Maurice had brought a thermos of hot drink—it was actually identifiable as tea—and they munched twists of bully beef and squares of chocolate along with it as they deciphered the battle site from the
Trekker's
guide. Then Ben began to write in the notepad and Maurice circled the tight top of the mound clicking photographs to send home to New Zealand.

When the chill began to get to both of them, Maurice at the other end of the lion's parapet sent Ben a look that politely inquired whether he about had enough for his TPWP piece. He did. The notepad held nugget phrases he could refine in the typewriter tonight. Belgium as the unwilling crossroads marched over by contending armies so many times, Waterloo as the sole crossroads in Belgium that counted on a reddened day four generations of soldiers ago. A high-ranking officer on Wellington's general staff who had a mania for resorting to rockets, buzz bombs of the day, although he would have to somehow get that across between the lines. The nearly permanent battlefield dateline,
Somewhere in Europe,
in 1815 here amid fields of Belgian corn and rye, at the moment in the forest and genuine uplands of the Ardennes on the border of Germany. That was part of the hell of war, you could so readily trace it from the past to now in an undiminished bloodline.