The Eleventh Man (10 page)

Good thing, too. That's all I'd need next after Jones, you linking up with that she-wolf blonde in Cass's flight.
"Airships that pass," Ben philosophized hopefully.

"Besides, I don't need any of your hotshot WASPs," Jake stated with startling primness. Then leered goofily. "I've got something of my own going. Tell you about her sometime." Ben was surprised. It wasn't like Jake to be mysterious about any female conquest.

"You made them sound pretty good, you know." This time Jake spoke soberly, and Ben went back on guard. "Like maybe they could handle the Alaska run, Ben buddy?"

"All I say in the piece was some of them, all right, a bunch of them have as much flying time as any of you and if they were handed a map could quite possibly find their way to Fairbanks. But I didn't mean—"

"I'm for it," Jake broke in. "Let the WASPs fly that run and send me after Germans. Sooner the better."

Ben sat up. "Jake, serious a minute. Bombers over Germany get the guts shot out of them—when I was at St. Eval doing the piece on Moxie I saw them land with holes the size of boxcar doors. You really want in on that?"

"If that's what it takes, hell yes. I don't like what Hitler has in mind for me if the crazy little dipshit wins the war."

"Plenty of those bomber pilots end up bailing out over occupied territory," Ben said slowly. "POW camps are no picnic." His throat was tight as he tried to find a right way to say it. "What I hear is that the first thing they do is check dog tags to sort people out. No telling what they'd do to you, Ice."

"You think that's not on my mind?" Jake replied in the quietest tone he was capable of. "But I figure it this way," the voice took on a calculating timbre, "those ack-ack assholes have to single me out from a lot of guys dropping bombs on them, first."

Goddamn it, don't count on that.
Half in despair, Ben stood ready to point out that the law of averages had not been any suit of armor for certain Supreme Team members so far, but Jake knew as much about that as he did, almost. It was always a mistake to see the workhorse fullback known as the Iceman, the sportswriters' consensus pick for All-American at that position in hallowed '41, as mainly a physical specimen. Jake stood 6'3" in stocking feet but the upper several inches were brain. The chips in his grammar from smelter work were deliberately maintained, Ben understood; in Black Eagle, the melting pot under the smokestack, someone like him had to make his words register on people high, low, or in between, as needed. Drinking with Jake was treacherous, but in any other human endeavor Ben would have trusted him with his life. Seven years they had been friends, since the high school all-star game that put them together on a team for the first time. Then hundreds of TSU football practices, banter, bull sessions, a long winning streak of camaraderie. Joshing arguments were nothing new between them; this had turned into something far beyond that. Ben felt he had to pierce the matter:

"That's why you wanted me to hurry up and do the piece on you, isn't it. So you could wave it at somebody who might have some influence and say, 'Hey, I'm a famous guy, wouldn't it be great to have me over there bombing the balls off the Germans?'"

"Couldn't hurt, could it?" Jake responded defiantly. Then just as quickly looked sheepish. "Sorry I asked. Sonofabitching war, I don't know what gets into a guy." He set about working himself toward normal with a boost of beer. "I mean it, though, about getting over there somehow. Ben? I'm not saying you got any pull, because if you did, you'd be up, up, and away like the rest of us, wouldn't you. But if you ever stumble across any, remember your poor deserving teammate, okay?" The old grin came back. "Who's gonna look out for me if not you? What's that poem"—Jake pronounced it pome—"'
O Captain! My Captain!
'"

Relieved, Ben responded in the same vein: "You're looking for pull from someone who took a demotion from civilian life, are you? Good thinking, Ice. Didn't I help you crib your way through the logic course any better than—"

Jake was holding up a hand for silence. He cocked an ear at the preliminary commotion from the piano. "It's bad luck not to sing this one. Everybody in." Swinging his beer bottle to the beat, Jake joined in mightily to the swelling roar of music that filled the building:

Bought the farm, bought the farm!
Crashing the plane leads to harm!
There was blood on the cockpit,
and blood on the ground.
Blood on the cowling,
and blood all around.
Pity the pilot,
all bloody with gore,
For he won't be flying
That airplane no more.

After the last chorus tailed off into drinking, Jake looked across at Ben. "You're not singing these days?"

"Frog in my throat."

"You really are off your feed. C'mon, Ben, it's just a song. Lets off the steam."

"I know what it lets off, for Christ's sake." He shoved back from the table and popped to his feet. "Just remembered, I need to check something in Ops. A VIP flight I'm supposed to keep tabs on in case there's any brass worth interviewing. Be right back."

He sprinted to the Operations building, slowing only as he walked into the room where the flight board covered one wall, hoping the clamor of his heart was not loud enough for the night Operations staff to hear. As ever, he whipped out his pad and stood there jotting random flight information, scanning the entire board like a good working reporter, but the chalked entry for WASP 1 midway down instantly had told him what he needed to know. Since meeting Cass he had never imagined looking forward to a bed without her in it, but the three white letters—RON—up there for blessed REMAINING OVERNIGHT did the job.

Back at the Officers' Club, he veered to the bar. "Fill the tray," he told the barman.

The bartender crowded beer bottles onto the round serving tray until there were ten or a dozen, Ben didn't bother to count. He picked it up and steered toward the table.

Jake surveyed the forest of bottles on the tray. "What's all this?"

"Anesthesia. I have something to tell you about Vic."

"I interrupted the greatest movie never made, didn't I," Cass's murmur came from the region of the hard-used pillow.

"Immortality will just have to wait," Ben's came from where his head blissfully rested on her.

"How many
t
's in that?"

"You are a merciless woman." Still hazed over with the spell of their lovemaking, he lay clinging to her in the wreckage of the sheets, every part of the two of them bare except for wrist-watches—they hadn't taken the time to unstrap those. Hers, the type with luminous numerals that was issued to pilots, showed she had slipped into the room at the Excelsior merely twenty minutes ago. Before he could even get up from the typing table to greet her she'd slid the bolt home on the door and turned to him saying, "I guess we have some catching up to do." In the next breath they were at each other, kissing every direction, and here in the aftermath the creaky room with its flung clothing and kicked-off bedcovers looked like the muss after a spirited rummage sale; the one spot their mess hadn't touched was the portable typewriter with the page of script Ben had been pecking away at, and he couldn't help knowing half of that was crossed out untidily as usual.

"Bulletin for you." She was stroking the back of his head with a motion tender and tense at the same time. "This'll have to be another short night. I fly out again at 0600."

"Why didn't you say so? I'd have moved the bed closer to the door."

She chuckled and swatted him behind the ear. "Fool."

"Probably."

Mustering strength enough to lift himself onto one elbow, he gazed down at this woman he should not be with as if committing her every feature to memory. The attentive cheeky face that a few years back could have been of the calendar kind but now could serve on a recruiting poster; Cass was dramatically weather-tanned, a trace whiter around the eyes where the goggles masked her while flying. Dark brown hair naturally wavy, which she kept authoritatively short off her shoulders; she'd told him she cut it herself with a razor blade, there wasn't ever time to command a squadron and visit a beauty shop both. The invitation of her snug peach-perfect breasts, and the tomboy thrift of her body on down. Already he was hungry for her again, in a way beyond what they had just been doing in bed. Fresh from the night before, when his imagination had given her up for lost, the ache with her name on it cut through to his bones. Life without Cass? Last night had shown that wasn't life, it was barely existence. What kind of a passion pit was the dark of the mind, where he had struggled every way he knew and still ended up so far gone on this woman?
And if they catch us at this, we're goners of another kind. Double jeopardy, Cass. The law of averages isn't doing the two of us any favors either.

Watching his mood turn, Cass headed off whatever he was about to say. "Save it for the chaplain, okay? We're not the first ones who ever caught the screw flu and—"

"This is more than that, Cass, you know goddamn good and well it's more."

"—call it what you want to, it always comes down to one of two things, doesn't it. We either quit with this or go at it like crazy while we still have the chance. Right now we don't seem to be much good at quitting, I'd say." She flicked him the urgent smile that showed the irresistible tiny gap between her front teeth, and he melted like a schoolboy and knew it. Deeply and rigorously they kissed again, running their hands silkily here and there, as if keeping track of everything in the book of hotel-room romance. "Welcome back, by the way," he murmured when their heads were clear enough. "I never knew I hated fog so much."

Her voice rose from where she lay. "Those shiny-pants lamebrains last night couldn't make their minds up to scrub that flight when they couldn't even see to the control tower." Cass disposed of the Seattle military hierarchy while flat on her back. "They held us in the ready room until full dark, the chickenshits. What did they think, we'd be able to see better in the fog at night, like bats?"

She rolled sharply up onto an elbow, facing Ben from so near he could feel the warmth of her breath on his face. "While I'm at it. Know what, Scar?" she resorted to a mock growl as her free hand lightly traced along the groove in his skin where he had been wounded. "You need a thicker hide in more ways than one. You'd be better off not checking the flight board when I fly."

"Doesn't matter. I'd be worried to death that way too."

Something like a wince came to her hazel eyes. He saw her start on a word, then draw it back.

Finally Cass wrinkled her nose at him. "Hopeless man, I guess there's no cure for what ails you then. Hey, that reminds me"—she pushed off him, and slick as a seal, flipped herself over and around, instantly onto her feet at the side of the bed—"before we got distracted, I was going to offer a guy a drink. One thing about Seattle, the Navy commissary is never short on scotch." Not bothering with clothes she padded across the room, evidently oblivious to the cold linoleum and all else, to where her ready-bag had been dropped by the door.

Ben sat up to take in the sight of her on parade. Stripped, Cass was as slim and wiry as a jockey, medium height for a woman, a perfect fit for the notoriously snug plane she flew; the P-39 carried the reputation that the aircraft company's president, a little guy, had scooted into the mock-up of the cockpit not realizing it wasn't full-scale, declared it just right, and started production that very day. The consequence supposedly was that male air cadets had to have their butts measured to see if they could fly the thing, and when that proved to be too much trouble, the P-39s were Lend-Leased off to the Soviet Union where 5'6" Laplanders flew them. Ben was journalistically skeptical of any of that, but he could not argue with the fact that Captain Cass Standish's trim but shapely behind was a commanding one, in or out of a Cobra fighter plane.

Cass knelt at the bag, triumphantly plucking the pint of scotch out. "That's funny," he called over as he appreciatively took in her and the bounty in her hand, "they didn't teach me naked bartending in officers' candidate school."

"Man's world," Cass retaliated. "Women always have it tougher." She picked up the single cloudy tumbler from the dresser, looking around. "Does this dump have two glasses?"

"I keep one in the bottom drawer. For visiting royalty."

"Flattery will get you," she purred.

"I'm not so hot on the rest of my manners. I forgot to ask—survived the USO one more time, did you?" He knew she had been stuck with one of those extraneous duties that are slapped on when an officer isn't looking, East Base liaison to the United Service Organizations at the downtown Civic Center. The USO did such things as hold theoretically chaste dances where servicemen could meet young ladies from the leafy neighborhoods around and bring entertainment acts to town; since General Grady in his perpetual tear against venereal disease and other debilitations had put thirty Great Falls whoopee establishments off limits, the Civic Center outfit had no lack of customers. By Cass's telling, the goody-goody nature of the USO just about drove her up the wall. On the other hand, it was the perfect chance for her to sneak the few blocks to this skid row hotel.
They ought to see her now,
bare as the day she was born while she excavated the absent glass from amid the underwear he'd forgotten he dumped in that drawer.

"I just smiled until my back teeth hurt," she was reporting of the earlier part of her evening. "Luckily they don't miss me at all. Joe E. Brown is over there making faces at them right now."