The Eleventh Man (17 page)

As the flight of P-39s pulled away to the north, Jake's voice crackled on the intercom again. "There they go, Grady's Ladies into the Great Canadian Beyond. You happy now, newspaper guy?"

"All God's chillun got the wings they earned, Ice."

From Edmonton on, the flight was a relay race from one bush-country airstrip to the next, with malicious weather in the way. Between Watson Lake and Whitehorse, Ben had to abandon the nose cone; he hated losing the vantage point, but riding there had become too much like being the hood ornament on a snow tractor. Shaking with chill, he retreated to the table corner offered by the navigator. Then through the earphones came the further numbing news that the aircraft's heater had frozen up and quit. He'd thought it might be a prank back there in sunny Great Falls when Jake made him put on double layers of long underwear, three pairs of heavy socks, a fur-lined hooded flying suit over his flight jacket, and a chamois face mask. The Yukon climate was not impressed. The cold, some perverse apex at this altitude, went through fur, fabric, and skin alike. It seemed possible his blood had turned to slush. He not only couldn't take notes, he could not even make a fist. Time seemed frozen to a standstill. What the hell did Jake want missions over Germany for? This was bad enough. Hunched there helplessly in the refrigerated body of the bomber, he could not get beyond wishing he had something to thaw out with. A blowtorch, maybe. When Ladd Field at Fairbanks at last presented its snowy self, he was hoping the frigid chamois would not take his face off with it.

In the warming hut that seemed tropical, Jake drew him aside. "So, Benjamin, the transport from Nome doesn't pick us up until morning. How do you want to celebrate the layover?"

"Thawing out."

"Wallflower." Jake delicately fingered a frost-abused ear as if to make sure none of it had dropped off. "Got a little something I better tell you." He took a circumspect look toward the other end of the hut where the rest of the crew was loudly stomping and rubbing warmth into themselves, then leaned in close to Ben and whispered:

"I'm getting Russian tail."

Still numb enough that he was not sure he had heard right, Ben checked the lusty expression on Jake and saw that he had. "Are you." If his enterprising friend had come across some Muscovite hot number in an Alaskan whorehouse, so what? "They owe you some, I guess."

"Yeah, wouldn't the Cossacks just cream their britches?" Jake grinned proudly.

"Who's the unlucky woman?"

"She's a pilot."

Ben stared at him.

"Well, was a pilot. She's missing a few parts—got all the right ones, though. But a couple of fingers." Jake waggled a hand with the last two digits down out of sight. "Those pissant Nazis like to shoot back. Now she's a bug driver."

This, Ben found nearly as stupefying as the pilot part. The runway they had just come in on was pulverized ice, gray banks of chips spewed up by metal grippers in countless plane tires, with furrows that were more like ruts to land into. Buzzing around out there in thirty below, on one of the little tow tractors called bugs, sounded to him like a job for only the hardiest Eskimo. Or a madwoman. Or worse.

"Jake, or should I just say Bonehead—"

"Ben, Ben, hold it down, okay?"

"—get your mind up from between your legs and think about this a little, will you? What the hell are you doing, bucking for a Section Eight? Anybody the Russians trust enough to station here is apt to be a Red, like those big stars on the sides of these planes, remember? And the United States government does not look kindly on the Communist Party."

"What are they going to get me for, consorting with an ally?" Ben's point did cause Jake to reflect. "I wouldn't be surprised if she diddled a commissar or two along the way to get here. She knows her diddling."

"Will you listen a goddamn minute? You and Tractor Woman—"

"Katya. Katya Gyorgovna Zhukova. The Russians really go in for names."

"Jake, we're heading to the mess hall," the copilot called. "You two coming?"

"My scribe and me have got matters of national importance to attend to. You're in charge, Charlie, see you at breakfast."

The copilot gave a wave and was on his way. "What happens when you get famous."

Ben was furiously fumbling out of the last of his layers of flying gear. "Do you have a lick of sense left at all? Maybe you're living on love, but I need chow."

"You're going to get it, don't worry," Jake soothed. "The Russkies have their own mess hall and they like to talk shop with B-17 pilots. C'mon, you're gonna meet Katya."

He wondered if he was imagining, but the crowded mess hall smelled to him straight off the pages of Dostoyevsky. Cabbage, dank wool clothing, copious boot grease. Feeling as if he was in another world, he spooned up the formidable soup and devoured hunks of bread while Jake alternately ate and banked his hands through the air in testimony to the maneuvering capabilities of B-17s. Across the table, Russian pilots who looked like either plowboys or middle-aged pirates—the generation between had largely been wiped out by the Germans' demonic sieges from Leningrad to Sevastopol—listened monastically. Amid the bulky men, a woman who was not at all what Ben had expected—trim, keen, authoritative; she reminded him alarmingly of Cass—translated Jake's effusions and Russian spatters of questions.

"Yakov, they say, how big bomb pile?"

"Bomb load, right, three tons," Jake made an expansive gesture, "do you have those back home?"

"
Tonna,
" Katya reported and translated the tonnage, drawing the first smiles from the Russian airmen.

At first Ben had been relieved to see other American uniforms in the roomful of brown drab, a plump major and a couple of shavetail aides sitting with an ascetic-looking Russian majordomo of some sort. The major proved to be the liaison officer, which meant he was there only under obligation, and in a matter of minutes had sent over the more diminutive of the aides to inquire why they were not in their own mess hall with everyone else.
Awful good question, shorty.
Jake pulled out all the stops, citing Ben as a big-shot correspondent chronicling Lend-Lease and the peerless pilots of both nations. When the underling relayed that, the major gave them an edgy look, but he directly departed and so did the thin-featured political commissar or whatever he was. The entire room sat at attention until the man was out the door. The moment he was gone, Katya relaxed and turned to Ben. "You are from
gazeta?
" Her voice was throaty and adventurous, and in spite of himself he could imagine how smoky it would sound in bedroom circumstances.

"Gazettes of all kinds, right, Ben?" Jake trumpeted. "He's as important in our country as your guys on
Pravda.
"

"Thanks all to hell for the comparison," Ben snapped. The Russian airmen were getting to their feet, taking their leave with stiff nods. As the mess hall began to empty out, a contingent dressed like Katya, male and female alike in thick-ply ground crew coveralls, drifted over curiously. She rattled out something and they sat down.
Wonderful, Ice. Now we're the main attractions at the zoo.
Of all there was to worry about in this, he figured he might as well start way up the list. Katya was watching him bright-eyed. "You have the same name as a very famous person," he speculated.

She burst out laughing. "No, no! Marshal Zhukov is not my family. He is great man, we are no ones."

Ben wanted that to be true. Zhukov was the titan of the Eastern Front, reputedly able to stand up even to Stalin's midnight military whims, and with geography on his side he had held out until he could start bleeding the German invaders to a slow death. The glut of war on Soviet soil seemed beyond sane comprehension. Two years now since Hitler made Napoleon's old mistake and turned thousands of miles of Russian snow into the blood of both sides; Ben had access in the correspondents' pool reports to the riveting dispatches of the Red Army frontline daredevil Vasily Grossman and discerned from Grossman's crafty coverage that survivors of the struggle had been through hell from both the enemy and their fanatic rulers. His eyes slipped to Katya's right hand and the sacrificed fingers. The million-dollar wound, a piece of body exchanged for a grant of existence. Before he could ask her what kind of aircraft she had flown—he had a spooky feeling it was a P-39, but that very well might have been Cass on his mind—Jake interjected. "They use this place as a canteen after it shuts down. Get ready to toast Mother Russia, Benjamin my boy."

Vodka made an immediate appearance. Glasses were splashed full and hoisted in accompaniment to a unison cry of "Na
zdrovya!
" Jake winked across at him. "That much Russian I know. 'Good health,' buddy." Wary from Cass's coma cola elixirs, Ben tested what sat so innocently clear in his glass. It tasted like springwater that had been tampered with by a moonshiner. While the Russians tossed theirs down he took a medium swig and clamped his fist around the glass to hide the fact that he hadn't emptied it. Nonetheless the bottle was making the rounds again and another toast was necessary, this one Jake's "To
bolshoya semnadtsi!
" The Russians banged the table in homage to big bombers and gulped down. Here came the bottle again.
Holy damn, they inhale the stuff.

Katya leaned toward him as if what she was about to say was vital. "Kheminveh. You have meet in the war?"

The Ernie question. He'd had it dozens of times.
You'd think Hemingway invented the written word.
"I met him once, yes." He did not say it had been in the bar of the Savoy in London. He hiked his shoulders up and huffed out his chest to show the Hemingway mien. "Built like a bull. He was on assignment for
Collier's—
"

"Coal? Kheminveh write about stove thing?"

"It's a magazine." Ben pantomimed flipping pages.

"With us
magazin
is on gun." Katya was impatient to reach her point. "Question. Kheminveh famous in Soviet Union, we all read. Hero in
The Sun Up Again.
Is he steer, not bull?"

Jake woke up to the topic. "Wait a minute. I read that. The guy lost the family jewels? Where'd it say so?"

"That's Hemingway for you," Ben sought to explain and realized the vodka wasn't helping. "He doesn't outright
say—
"

Jake shook his head in disbelief. "Weird. Did you ask him?"

"Of course I didn't ask him, the whole point of the goddamn book is—"

"Whoa. How can that be, the guy has lost his valuables and we're supposed to read it between the lines? I'd say that's news, it ought to be spelled out in black and white."

"Kheminveh is kid us, da?" Katya contributed. She shook her head censoriously. "We have saying: 'What is write in ink, axe cannot cut off.'"

It hit him then, along with whatever shot of vodka the count was up to by now. He chortled and couldn't stop, laughing himself silly while others around the table tittered in anticipation. Finally he caught enough breath to say it. "That character's name is Jake! Get it, Ice? He's a
Jake
and his working part is missing in action and yours is present and accounted for and—" Jake guffawed and vowed to write Hemingway a complaining letter. Katya reddened and grinned foxily, translating in a rapid low purr to the other Russians. They caught on and roared.

Wiping his eyes—a bit of a sting there; he crazily wondered whether vodka could reach the eyelids—Ben focused as best he could on Katya. "Question for you." Her expression froze at a degree of politeness. "You flew. Tell me about that, please?"

"
Nachthexen.
" Katya rapped her breast sturdily, then fluttered a hand through the air while giving out an eerie high-pitched whistle. It was the kind of sound you could feel on your skin, and Ben tried not to twitch.

"It stumped me at first, too," Jake broke in. "But they've got great big mothwing biplanes called Polikarpovs that just about float through the air. Our darling here flew one of those. Two-seater, so what they'd do, she and a woman bombardier would go out in the middle of the night and get up a little altitude, just behind the front lines, then cut the engine and glide over the German side," his outsize hands tracing that out in the air. "The bombardier had the explosives in her lap, she'd toss the bomb package out, blow up some Germans, and Katya would rev the engine back on and they'd haul ass out of there." Jake nearly bent double in fealty to the next episode. "Here's the best part. The Germans are down there scared shitless, all they can hear is the wind in the wingstruts as Katya and her chum come drifting over. They run around yelling '
Nachthexen!
' Night witches!"

"Was good, flying," Katya said quietly. She pantomimed steering a tow tractor. "Day witch now." Shrugging, she reached for the latest vodka bottle with the remnant of her hand.

Dazed, Ben sat out the rest of the evening that stretched toward morning. He felt he had to, he was Jake's alibi for consorting with allies who happened to be Red as their crimson flag. The conversation whenever toasts weren't being made crashed along in two languages and in between. At some point Jake volubly told the joke about the dude who was invited to a fancy barbecue and worried whether he would be able to tell cow pie from caviar and which fork to use with which. Katya's back-and-forth lingo had turned giggly, but Ben was numbly aware she could hold the tongue-tangling booze better than he could, they all could. In the haze of alcohol, muddled images kept coming to him. Cass wingwalking amid the struts of a whopping biplane with a grinning Katya in the cockpit cutting the engine, on and off, on and off.
Sonofabitching war. Women didn't start it, why does it have to drag them in?
He tried to ward it off, but New Guinea replaced Alaska at terrible intervals, the grassy ambush, gashed bodies everywhere mingling with a teletype ticker absurdly chattering in the middle of the trail.