The Eleventh Man (24 page)

Feeling like a tightrope walker about to launch into space between tall buildings, he nerved himself up and was testing the first footholds in the rock mass when a voice and a growl broke out in startling duet close behind him. The growl was universal, but whatever the voice was saying, it was in Japanese.

A nest of saboteurs: that was the first terrible thought flashing into his mind. Followed by the immediate one that this was prelude to an invasion, the follow-up on Pearl Harbor by the Empire of the Rising Sun. Whatever trick of war he had stumbled into on this alien coast, the enemy language numbed him like a bite by something poisonous. Spread-eagled upright, he could do nothing but cling motionless there while, ever so slowly, a man-size form and a lower one crept into the edge of his vision.

"Sonofagun, Lefty," Sig Prokosch spoke in English this time. "You aren't a Jap at all. Come on down."

Unsticking himself from the rock face, Ben dropped none too gracefully to the beach sand. He turned all the way around to a strapping gray-helmeted figure much more bulkily outfitted than when they had been in football uniform together. A radio pack rode high on Prokosch's back and above that waved the antenna like a giant insect feeler; his field jacket bulged with other military items, including a .45-calibre pistol holstered on one flank of a web belt around his sturdy waist. Hooked into the other side of the web belt was a leash, with a copper-red Irish setter at its end.

The dog ceased its steady growl when Sig dropped a hand to it. Recovering his voice, Ben could only blurt: "You're a tough pair to find."

"Supposed to be," came the modest reply. By now Sig had slung his tommy gun around into proximity with the radio pack and had a hand free to shake with Ben. "Been me, I'd've waited at the hut."

Ben did not go into reportorial reasoning, which was that his previous piece on this old teammate happened to occur during the Coast Guard's version of basic training and amounted to a look at a taciturn block of young male trudging a treadmill of routine; in short, snooze news. This time around, he had come determined to portray Sigmund Prokosch, seaman second class, true-blue Coastie, on an unknown foreshore of the war. First question: "How'd you get so fancy in Japanese?"

"All it means, 'Don't move or I'll shoot.'" Sig shrugged. "They give us these phrase books."

"Well, it sure as hell did the job on me." With the indiscretion of acquaintances who had not laid eyes on one another since their world changed, the two of them traded extended looks. Not that the practiced sentry could be matched at that. One of Sig's traits was a prairie gaze; he seemed to blink only half as much as other people. Those pale blue eyes under wheat-colored hair, in a meaty mess of a face; a fairly alarming combination staring out from a football helmet or a metal military one. Prokosch had played guard next to Animal Angelides at tackle on the right-hand side of the line. Ben would not have wanted to be on the other team opposite those two, one a marauder, the other a boulder. Mindful that he knew the habits more than the person, he unshouldered his pack and searched into it. "Before I forget, I brought you some Hershey's."

The box of candy bars produced a bashful acknowledging smile on the recipient. During football road trips he'd had the reputation of practically living on chocolate sundaes.

"Thanks a bunch, Lefty," Ben received in return. He was going to have to get used to this for the next few days. The nickname applied to him by only five people in the entire world—three now dead—like a tattoo he hadn't asked for.

The candy transaction was watched by the Irish setter with keen interest to the point where his master broke off a square of chocolate and carefully fed it to him. As man and canine chomped in unison, Ben used the chance to ask, "What's the dog about?"

"I say 'Get him' and he gets you." Delivered with a straight face, this was either what passed for a joke with Prokosch or the stolid actuality. Another shrug. "Give you my guess, I think he's supposed to be company for us." The dog's back was stroked with a beefy hand. "Naw, though, Rex here is trained to sniff out Japs, aren't you, boy."

Catching Ben's skeptical glance at the untrodden shore, Sig laid it out tersely: "Fresh water. Their submarine crews sneak in on rubber rafts to fill up." His listener envisioned the possibility. Constant creeks with water the color of tea had intersected the beach all during Ben's hike to here, some he'd been able to scramble across on logs, others he had needed to ford up to his thighs. As he unsheathed his notepad, the thought that he could have stumbled onto Japanese submariners replenishing their drinking supply from this seeping shore made the whole place more creepy than ever.

What Prokosch was saying furthered the feeling. "Raft rats, I call them. If I ever catch them at it and they give me any trouble, I'll put Tom to working on them." He patted the stock of his Thompson submachine gun.

Ben took due reportorial care over
if.
"These rafts, Sig—ever laid eyes on them yourself?"

Prokosch indicated
Not yet.
"Just signs. The buggers can't resist taking a crap on dry land, for sure. Find piles around the creek mouths." His expression registering offense at that, he petted the dog again. "Rex here smells out that stuff and any drag marks that look like where a raft came in and so on. If the signs look fresh enough, we call in the depth-charge boys from the air base at Port Angeles. Done it a couple of times already."

"Have you." Ben groped for any certainty in this. If ever there was a coastline that would breed phantoms, it was this murky Pacific Northwest one. But Prokosch must be able to tell human crap from bear shit, mustn't he? Or was all this just classic jumpy nerves of an isolated sentinel? By any sum it was more than a notepad-carrying visitor bargained for. How would Tepee Weepy react to the story of a Supreme Team member in hide-and-seek with Japanese naval forces, genuine or imagined, in America's own backyard? There was one way to find out. "Any luck?" Ben inquired as he scribbled away.

"Never know," the sentry blunt as the coast he walked. "The flyboys think they spotted an oil slick after they bombed like hell one of those times. Could have been a decoy or from a sunk tanker." He kicked some sand as if his next thought might be hidden under it. "Those tin fish are out there, though. We got a report a while back that a Jap sub came up in broad daylight down in Oregon. Fired a few shells onto some beach. Just to prove they could, I guess." The contemplative Coast Guardsman scanned out past the curling white sets of breakers to the vaster ocean as if mildly daring the enemy to try that on his patrol route, then turned unblinking eyes to Ben. "About time to head for the hut. Ready for a hike, Lefty?"

It was work every step of the way, trying to fathom Sig Prokosch those next days on the challenging coast. Trudging the hours of patrol with him, Ben would catch himself yearning for Jake Eisman's wisecracks or even Dex Cariston's high-flown sparring. Somewhere between shy and offhandedly mum, Sig went his route like a man who had left his conversation at home. Questions to him had to be doled out, circled back to, followed to conclusions somewhere down the road, and there were times Ben felt he would have better luck talking to the dog.

Gradually, though, the thickset guard gave out glimpses of himself unsuspected in four years on the football field and in the locker room. Sig liked to cook; at the hut it invariably fell to him to prepare any meal fancier than fried Spam with canned pineapple atop. He was a twin, a truly startling thought; his sister was a missionary in the Yukon Territory.
If she's anything like him, the natives will convert just to see what's on her mind.
The Prokosch family came from Devon, one of the depot towns sprinkled out of an atlas in the last century when the Great Northern Railway needed names for its stops in the middle of nowhere across the top of Montana. The wrong side of the tracks of Devon at that, Ben divined: the father had always worked as a common section hand, riding a speeder on the rails across the prairie to wrestle creosoted ties into place and disgorge brush and muck from clogged roadbed culverts. A modern coolie. Sig with his accounting degree aspired to one of those American human cannonball advancements in a single generation, a desk job at the railroad home office in St. Paul. Ambition, incentive, a path in the mind with sufficient byways: little by little, the personality practically buried under that gray Coastie uniform began to assume shape as Ben made notes. Yet something kept nagging about Sig's enlistment in the Coast Guard and Ben could not get at it. Phrase it every which way, no clear answer could be drawn as to why someone from one of the most landlocked towns imaginable had chosen to turn into a beachpounder.

Until it emerged that Prokosch had a girl waiting for him back home in Devon. Inasmuch as Sig would have been a serious contender in an ugly contest, this constituted news. It also prompted in Ben a sense of relief that he was not sure he could defend, that the not particularly imaginative man at his side had chosen, with marriage aforethought, to put in his military time away from the front lines. Back at East Base in the farewell round of beers at the Officers' Club, Jake Eisman had leaned back and shrewdly observed, "Benjamin, you're maybe just as glad some of us are stationed stateside." How deny it? Given the toll on overseas members of the Supreme Team, if any of the others could be hoarded to safer duty, so much the better. Obituaries were the dregs of writing; if he never had to write another one it would be soon enough. Now Ben took a fresh look at Seaman Prokosch and asked, "What's this wonder woman's name?"

This brought a bashful dip of the head and the smitten intonement:

"Ruby."

When Sig spoke it, the word glowed as if it were her namesake gem. Love and the salt taste of absence, old as Odysseus, thought Ben as they tromped onward up the beach with the punctual waves always at their side. Wide open at the heart now, Sig poured forth the life he and Ruby were trying to plan in the time to come, that touchstone of all soldiers,
after the war.
Look that in the face long enough, and you begin to question the current sorry state of things. Sig at length reached the point where he brought out:

"Been going to ask you something. You get around in the war. You know about those balloon bombs?"

Ben merely nodded, to see where this would go. As if in some final desperate frenzy, Japan on its side of the Pacific had begun launching slim long-range balloons with explosive devices attached. The aim was to set the forests of the western United States on fire. Some of the balloons, weirdly like miniature paratroopers, had drifted as far as the Rockies. No great damage had been reported as yet, but the devices were worrisome if, as intelligence estimates had it, they were launched hundreds at a time.

Sig indicated the oceanic sky. "We spot any coming, we're supposed to shoot them down, ha." His gaze dropped to the watery horizon and stayed. "Maybe Animal will get first crack at them—Marines are supposed to take the lead, aren't they." A considering tilt of the head. "Kind of funny to think of him at the other end of this water, somewhere." Ben noticed he did not include Danzer, on destroyer duty in what was equally the Pacific, in this musing.

Reflection evidently over, Sig fixed his attention back toward Ben. He for once looked bothered. "They tell us the Japs even have their little kids in school making those balloons. Think that's so?"

"I don't really doubt it."

Sig's expression changed for the worse, which was saying a lot. "There's no limit to what people will do, I guess."

Just then they were coming to a creek mouth, and the Irish setter tugged at the leash.

"Rex thinks he's got something," Sig murmured as he swiftly unslung his tommy gun. In the next motion he handed Ben the .45 pistol from his holster. "Just in case."

Ben took in the situation uneasily. Where the brown-colored creek snaked out of the forest, vegetation proliferated. The dense greenery, too thick to see into, could handily hide a rubber raft and a raftload of touchy Japanese. The American jungle: he had never expected to be going into combat here. Sig showed no such concern.

Weapons ready, the pair of them stayed out of sight as best they could behind driftlogs and approached the verge of the overgrown patch, led by the stalking dog. The question ran in Ben's mind, what armaments would Japanese submariners bring to shore with them?
Probably a hell of a lot more than one tommy gun and one pistol.
As he and Sig edged in, far enough apart not to be raked by a single burst of gunfire, the bloody path above the Bitoi River came back to him full-toned as a film on a screen. In New Guinea the cover for ambush had been tall boonie grass; here it was salal, brush, fir forest. He tried to creep silently through the undergrowth that crowded the flow of water, watching the twisting creekbank ahead for any movement. Sig, with the dog now alertly obedient behind him on the leash hooked into the web belt, was in view one moment and then wasn't. Ben braced, reminded himself to blaze away with the pistol rather than sight in—the .45 would knock an enemy down if it so much as nicked him—and parted the last underbrush into a glade of grass.

Sig was standing there peering at the beaten-down vegetation. "Deer," he called over and shouldered his tommy gun. The dog wagged, awaiting praise.

It was when they resumed their line of march on the other side of the creek, raft rats receding back into the hypothetical, that Sig's line of thought circled around to:

"You got somebody like Ruby?"

"I do." Ben was surprised both by the question and his own answer. By any reading of law civil or military, Cass was anything but that definite in his prospect. And the war was not nearly done with either of them. Yet, for the life of him, he could not have replied other than he did. "She'll be in Seattle when I get there."