The Eleventh Man (37 page)

When Cass was at last satisfied with the walk-around inspections, she gathered the squadron under the wing of the first P-63 again. "Observations, anyone?"

"Just guessing," Mary Catherine spoke up, "but these things might have more prop slop than we're used to."

"Righto," Cass backed that up. "Stay to hell out of one another's prop wash until we get used to handling these buggies."
That especially means you, Maclaine.
Without making a show of it, she grazed a look down over Della, getting back a flip of blonde hair that might have meant anything. When everyone had had their say about the new planes, Cass slowly addressed the gathering:

"We all more than earned our wings on one of the most cockeyed planes in creation, the P-39, and we're about to again on the P-63, whatever piece of work it turns out to be. It's going to be worth it, let me tell you, it would be even if these things were box kites. Friends and officers," her voice dropped, "flying is the second greatest thrill a woman can know."

She paused, taking in the expressions on her audience, patently quizzical on some, borderline lewd on others.

"The first, you goofs, is
landing!
"

Over the groans and hoots, she threw a little salute of applause acknowledgment and gave the order, "Five times, everybody, touch and go. Linda's bunch first, then Ella's, mine last so I can be right here watching, pilots. Don't get caught up in the scenery, all it means to us is thermals. Let's go." As her aviators headed to their aircraft, she looked around once more at the strange terrain, the ash-colored mountains, the palm tree canyons. Only the military would put pilot training in the California desert for planes the Russians would have to fly across Siberia. Grimacing a bit, she tucked that away for tonight when she wrote either to Dan, wherever he was in the festering Pacific, or Ben, marooned lovelorn back at East Base. She made it a point of honor not to write the same thing to each of them.

"How goes it this fine filthy day of Great Falls sleet, Jones?"

"Uhm, morning, sir. We've got—"

"For crying out loud," Ben impatiently brushed wet tracks of the weather off his flight jacket, "how many times do I have to tell you not to call me—" The words swerved off in the direction Jones's eyes were trying to indicate, to the figure perched on the far corner of Ben's own desk.

"—sir," he finished numbly, staring in recognition of the all-too-evidently waiting personification of the Threshold Press War Project.

"Greetings, Captain." A touch of gray had come to the Gable mustache, and the crinkles at the corners of the commanding eyes appeared substantially deeper. Otherwise, the colonel from Tepee Weepy perching there on the desk edge, as tailored as a rajah abroad, appeared to be taking up in mid-session from two years earlier.

"Jones"—Ben held out a hand in that direction—"may I see this week's manifest of VIP arrivals again?" The corporal plucked up the list and passed it to him as if it was about to blow up.

"Spare your eyes," the colonel advised. "Officially I'm not here."

"Here or not, sir," Ben struggled with everything wanting to uncoil within him, "you're mightily in our thoughts."

"I believe I detect a tone of concern over your recent assignments in that," the colonel responded casually. In that same tone of voice: "Take a break, Corporal. Make it a nice long one."

Jones got out of there fast.

A puckish gaze from the visitor followed him. "Your clerk looks as if he stepped straight out of the homicide lineup, have you noticed?"

"Jones is washed in the blood of the lamb, sir."

"Admirable, I'm sure." The colonel went right to business. "One of your Supreme Team articles—very nicely done, let me say—has been conspicuous by its absence in the newsprint of the land, hasn't it, Captain. Your piece about Seaman Prokosch. We had to spike that piece, and I must tell you it will remain spiked."

"I didn't figure you were saving it for the gold-leaf edition."

"You have every right to be testy about it," the colonel granted.
Testy, my left nut. How about mad as hell? How about terminally pissed off, Mustache Pete?
"However," the practiced voice from Tepee Weepy rippled on, "the balloon bombs are a classified secret and no mention can be—"

"Colonel?" If there was such a thing as whiplash inside the head, Ben suffered it now going from rancor to disbelief. "What's 'secret,'" he blurted, "about those? The Forest Service has people in lookout towers all over the mountains watching for the damn things, the air bases out on the Coast are trying to shoot them down, anyone out here with ears on his head has heard about Jap balloons. We aren't giving away a thing that a dozen states don't already know by saying a guy of ours met up with one."

"This was not a TPWP decision," the colonel's voice rose a notch for the first time. "It comes from highest levels—there is a complete news blackout, in all American newspapers and radio broadcasts, about the balloon bombs. Censorship has been applied for two reasons, we were told in no uncertain terms—to prevent panic by the public and to keep Japan in the dark about the balloons' effects." He favored Ben with an informative glance. "For what it's worth, Captain, the Japs' 'secret' weapon is not starting forest fires anything like intended—the incendiary devices appear to be faulty somehow."

"But not the explosive part," Ben cited darkly. "It worked just fine in blowing Sig Prokosch to bits. And why won't it do it every time some poor fool who doesn't know any better comes across a strange gadget on the beach or out in the woods? Somebody who hasn't read about it because we kept it from them?"

"That calculation, as I said, is not ours to make," the colonel uttered with the patience of bureaucratic practice. "Your understandably heartfelt article on Seaman Prokosch needs a bit of fixing, is all. Simply approach it from the angle that he was killed in a munitions mishap, let it go at that, and then—"

Ben broke in:

"Like the old newspaper joke of describing a hanged man as having been found dead under a tree, do you mean, sir?"

It drew him a look of mixed regard and reassessment. One more time, the colonel cautioned himself that these westerners were prickly.

The congressional hearing a few days before had been sailing along smoothly, the colonel concealed in plain sight amid the row of brass and braid and blue serge in back of the director of the Office of War Information as he testified, when a voice twanged out from down the line of senators.

"Mister Chairman, might I put in about two bits' worth of questions, just to earn my keep?"

"I yield to my friend, the gentleman from Montana."

"Thank you kindly." The Senator pulled at his weathered beak of a nose for a long moment as if tugging loose whatever was stored in his head, then addressed the OWI chief. "There's one setup here in the scheme of things you're in charge of that I'm a little curious about. It for some reason gets funded as a 'project'—year after year, I might add—instead of a line item. I think you know the one I mean."

The OWI man smoothed back his hair and made his bureaucratic escape. "The colonel, here with me, will need to address that."

"Trot the fellow on up to the witness chair," drawled the Senator.

Hastily tucking away the dispatches he had been skimming, the colonel took the seat indicated. He was barely there before the Senator was asking, "How about enlightening us on just what your agency does?"

"Glad to, Senator. At TPWP we—"

"Where I come from," the Senator interrupted, "big initials like that are only used on the hides of cows. Might we have the full name of your outfit for the record?"

"Naturally." The colonel cleared his throat. "The Threshold Press War Project was conceived to disseminate news stories about our armed forces that otherwise would not reach the public. To fill a void in the home front's awareness, you could say."

"Why is the government in the business of dishing out news, through you?"

"If I may explain, Senator. The larger newspapers have their own war correspondents or the financial wherewithal to subscribe to the wire services. Our mission is to provide items of interest to the less prosperous news enterprises, primarily the smaller dailies and weeklies."

"That's all the newspapers in my neck of the woods," the Senator noted. "Would you say people in states such as mine get their picture of the war pretty much from you?"

"A decent proportion of it, Senator, if we're doing our job right," the colonel said carefully. "We want the folks at home to know the great service to this country their sons and daughters are providing—it's all part of the war effort."

The Senator leaned forward with a long-jawed smile, one old wolf to another. "Furnish them some heroes to help keep their morale up, would you say?"

"The genuine exploits of our fighting men and women deserve to be told, in our view," the colonel skirted that as wide as he could. "I would submit, Senator, that your constituents are as eager as any others for such news."

"In Montana we're a little leery of bragging people up too much ever since General Custer," the Senator stated, drawing laughter in the hearing room. He studied the colonel as if marking his place in a chapter, then sat back saying: "No further questions for now, Mister Chairman."

"Let's have a chin-chin about what's wanted of you, Captain Reinking," the colonel came out with now, still occupying a corner of the desktop in all apparent ease. He paused to tap one of the little Cuban stinkers out of a cigarillo pack and fire it up with a flick of his lighter. Considerately he blew the smoke away from Ben and at the same time fixed total attention on him. "You seem a bit bothered by the recent course of events in your war coverage. I sympathize, over Angelides and Prokosch—'the dear love of comrades,' as I believe a poet put it. But the war did not end with them. There are still your other teammates—"

"That's what's on my mind, sir," Ben could not stop himself. "The way it's turned out, some of the guys barely stood a chance of making it through while others—" He halted, not sure where the next words would take him.

"Share it out bold, Captain. It's just the two of us here."

Ben mustered it for all he was worth.

"How much has Tepee—TPWP had to do with where the ten besides me have ended up in the war?"

The colonel managed to look surprised. "Why think the fate of your teammates is any of our doing? I grant you, some have had the worst possible luck. Need I point out that war does not necessarily deal the cards fair?"

"Does that mean the deck has to be stacked? Sir?"

"The 'deck,' to call it that, is too much for any of us to get our fingers around," the colonel maintained.

"Maybe so," Ben said, unsatisfied. "But sir, whatever accounts for it, this whole thing with the Supreme Team has turned out way to hell and gone different from what you projected, hasn't it. I mean, why keep on with the series? Shouldn't we just scrap it now? Six men gone—I've tried, but for the life of me I can't see what's to be gained by serving up my buddies in obituary after obituary." He stared squarely at the colonel. "Dead heroes serve a purpose, do they?"

"We are not dealing"—the colonel stopped—"not trafficking in that sort of thing, Captain, what kind of cynics do you think we are?" Reaching down to a wastebasket, he mashed out the stub of his cigarillo, and treated himself to another. "Thanks to your talents," he resumed levelly, "the story of the eleven of you, whatever misfortunes have been along the way, is one of the epics of this war. So we are not, repeat not, going to scrap the series." The tone softened. "Modify it a bit, perhaps." He waved away a slight cirrus of smoke. "Let's proceed to the reason I'm here. I wanted to brief you personally on the war outlook as we at TPWP see it, to provide some needed perspective"—
needed by you to the point where you now shut up and listen or else,
his tone implied—"about your assignments from here on."

Ben did listen, with every pore. The colonel's briefing came down to saying he did not have to see himself as a war correspondent into perpetuity; there was optimism at knowledgeable levels in Washington that the war could be over within a year.
From their lips to God's ear, as Jake would say.
The colonel sprinkled in some pep talk about once-in-a-lifetime coverage chances as Germany and Japan, in whichever order, were ground down into surrender.
Depends on the lifetime, doesn't it.
By the time the TPWP view of things had been fully impressed upon him, not a word had been uttered about how he was supposed to handle the due pieces on Dex and Moxie, leaving him as baffled as ever. If that didn't amount to scrapping the Supreme Team, what did? What was "modify" supposed to mean?

"Now as to your next orders, Captain," the colonel had arrived at. "It may not surprise you that you'll be going overseas—"

Well, here it is,
and with something strangely like the spin of a compass in himself Ben began trying to set his mind to it,
that ticket to Somewhere in Europe. Moxie, you win the sterling pencil-pusher for a change.

"—you'll need to tidy up with your clerk, finish up any pieces you're working on, you may be gone a good while—"

Or a bad one, Colonel, given the history of this.

"—and when the time is nearer, we'll let you know your departure date—"