The Eleventh Man (5 page)

Trim as a terrier within the folds of the coveralls, she was wiping her hands on a grease rag while she eyed Ben up and down. If looks could kill, she did not need a fighter plane on her side. Squinting up as she glared down, he parked his hands in the pockets of his flight jacket, hoping a casual approach might simmer her down. "Don't get the wrong idea. I'm only checking in. Which means I have to be checked out, they tell me. Look, miss, I'm not trying to be fresh."

She did a little something to the collar of her greasy coveralls, and an insignia flashed out. "Try 'Captain,' why don't you."

Too late he caught sight of the ready-bag sitting in the cockpit hatch, with WASP wings and a squadron commanding officer's striped star stenciled on it.
Just my luck with this base, I light in here and brush up against a queen bee.
"Next time I'll be sure to, Captain. Steer me to the infirmary and I'll have my IQ checked along with the rest, how about?"

"Three buildings down from Ops, where the control tower is, and ask for the short-arm inspector. If your IQ is where I think it is, you can have both done at once." She finished him off with a last dismissing look. "Crew chief!" she was moving on to her next victim even before he turned away. "Who looked over this engine, Helen Keller? The points are burned. I want them filed down and reset before I take this crate for a checklist run."

Glad to get out of there with his hide on, Ben went and presented himself at the infirmary for the evidently important process of dropping his pants. A clean bill of health promised to be his only gain for the day, however. At his next stop, the BOQ clerk did not even make a pretense of looking up an empty bunk for him. "You're billeted downtown, transient basis. The Excelsior Hotel."

A memory clicked from college days; the Alka-Seltzer was one of the wino flophouses on First Avenue South. "How the hell come? I'm here TDY, not transient."

"Because it says so here. Orders from headquarters, sir."

Ben resisted the impulse to whip out his higher set of orders and wipe the smirk off the clerk with them. He didn't want that reputation until he knew more about what this damn base had become. Stoically he listened to the clerk recite the daily schedule of the shuttle bus between the base and downtown Great Falls. Meanwhile a fresh-faced private with an armband marking him as the runner from the orderly room had come in, and was hovering nearby. He broke in:

"Lieutenant Reinking?"

"I was when I got here."

"General Grady wants to see you."

"Who?"

"The commanding officer of the base, sir. Wants to see you."

"As in, this minute?"

The runner nodded nervously.

Ben slung his duffel behind the desk where the clerk had no choice but to watch it. Before turning to go, he asked: "Do you have a Lieutenant Eisman bunked here?"

The clerk showed a sign of life. "Sure do—the football All-American? Ever see him play? I bet he didn't even have to run, he could just walk through the other team."

"Tell him the moving target is back." Ben glanced at the orderly-room runner waiting edgily to escort him to the headquarters building. "Lead on, Moses."

As if some signal had been given, East Base began to hum with activity while the runner led him through the military maze of buildings. Fire engines trundled to their ready spot near the end of the runway, followed by the medical corps ambulance, known on every air base as the meat wagon. Next, the flight line went from empty to maximally busy in a matter of minutes. A spate of P-39s took off one after another and headed north, leaving their chorus of roar behind. Other fighter planes, likely the checkout flights, were being rolled out of the big hangar he had blundered into. Ben watched it all; another day in the war, of the six hundred and some he had been through. Back here, he could tell time by the sun, and he aligned the other zones around the world with it now. The clock of war was in his head every waking minute. It was close onto noon here, so in England the day was drawing down and Moxie Stamper would be in a supper chow line on a secure bomber base if he was lucky. Carl Friessen would be in a foxhole listening to the night noises of the New Guinea jungle. On the destroyer zigzagging in the Pacific, Nick Danzer already was in tomorrow; Danzer, with his taste for any advantage, would like that. Member by member of the Supreme Team, Ben memorized anew the time difference from here to there, adjusting himself toward the schedule of teletype messages that followed him from base to base.

The one-star officer in charge of East Base evidently had been building up a head of steam while waiting for the TPWP interloper. Base commanders generally did. Ben sometimes wondered if that's why they were called generals.

Ben's salute still was in the air when this one, an obvious old ranker with a face like he'd been eating fire, started in on him. "So you're here to make us famous. I'm not sure I like that."

Nice even-tempered base you run here, General—everybody pissed off all the time.
Ben stood his ground by standing at attention until the personage behind the desk was forced to say, "At ease, shit's sake, man." The general peered at the lieutenant down all the rungs of rank between them. "Well? Why us? Why can't we get on with what we're doing without your outfit, whatever it is"—he glanced with abhorrence at the Threshold Press War Project patch on Ben's shoulder—"poking its nose in?"

"Somebody cut me the orders, sir. Confidentially, I'd prefer to be doing something else in the war."

The
confidentially
did not go down well with the general. "Then tell me this. Are you here to play up the women pilots?"

The presence of WASPs and the hangarful of female mechanics had come as definite news to Ben when he blundered into it all. The commander's resistance sharpened his instinct some more. "It depends, sir."

The commander dug a finger in his ear. "On what?"

"What you mean by 'play up.' Just so you know, General"—Ben had a moment of panic; he had been in front of so many of these one-star lifers in charge of obscure bases that he'd lost track of the name here—"General Grady," he picked it up from the nameplate on the desk and plunged on, "I'm an accredited correspondent as well as a soldier. Those hats don't always fit the way other people would like to see them, but I'm stuck with wearing both. You have to understand, sir, I'm assigned to write about things of interest to—"

"These females were wished onto me, and so were the Russkies," the commander blared; for a moment Ben wondered if the man was deaf from too much prop wash. "That doesn't mean everybody and his dog has to read about them." He shot a non-negotiable look across the desk. "Those Supreme Team write-ups of yours, bunk like that, that's all right. Good for the war effort. Lieutenant Eisman has a wild hair up his ass whenever he's on the ground, but he's a good flier—write your brains out about him for all I care. As long as I'm in charge here, that's the kind of thing I want to see, due tribute for my men who fly these planes to Alaska. Is that understood?"

"Duly noted, sir. I'll be doing a piece on Jake Eisman as soon as—"

"That's all, Reinking," the commander swung around in his chair to peruse some imagined event out on the flight line. "Go see the adjutant," came the imperial drift of order over his shoulder, "he'll fix you up with desk space somewhere."

Where does the military find these types, central casting?
Ben let silence do its work before he cleared his throat and uttered:

"But sir?"

The general's chair grudgingly swiveled in his direction again.

"The situation is," Ben stated as if he had been asked, "I'm under orders to do other stories, too, wherever I see them." He had been in front of enough base commanders to have perfected a polite stare that nonetheless underlined his standard message: "Orders from Washington, sir."

"Lieutenant, shit's sake, we're all under orders from Washington!"

Not like mine, Buster.
He reached to the zipper pocket of his jacket. "May I?"

Eyeing him more narrowly now, the general reached for the folded orders. He opened them with impatience and read at top speed. Then went back over the words, evidently one by one. Sucking in his cheeks, he handed the paper back to Ben. "Why didn't you say so?" he rasped. "Carry on, Lieutenant, it sure as shit looks like you will anyway."

On the way out, Ben had taken a closer look at a base map to locate the ready room where the WASPs would be waiting for takeoff.

***

East Butte, the farthest of the Sweetgrass Hills, was keeping its distance as Ben drove the undeviating dirt road from the map-dot town of Chester where he had gassed up again; every time he looked, the rumpled rise of land ahead added another fold of steep ridge, another tuck of timbered canyon large enough to swallow an elk herd and an old hunter.

The geography definitely did not budge in his favor while he had to change flat tire number two, in a wind doing its best to blow the hubcap away. Off to the west where he had started this day, the Rockies were a low wall on the horizon. Ben glanced up at the midafternoon sun and cursed with military fluency.
Toussaint, you old SOB, I can about hear Vic laughing at what you're putting me through. I thought I liked hunting, until today.

While he grunted over the lug nuts and the bumper jack and the lug nuts again, that other time of hunting came back to him, the Christmas vacation—in 1940 before the war meant much in America—when Jake Eisman and Dexter Cariston and Vic rode home from college with him to go after deer. So ungodly much had happened to the Treasure State teammates since, but what a benign autumn that was. Bruno's coaching had not yet turned apocalyptic as it would the next season, and they could feel reasonably good about the team's seven-and-three record, topped off by beating Butte Poly in the Copper Cup game. Ben searched closely in his memory as he tightened the tire on. Did he have it right, were he and his hunting companions already breathing the heights of the next football season, their senior year of crazy glory, there under the mind-freeing palisades of the Rockies? Time colors such occasions. By then the draft was somewhere on their horizon, but so was the knowledge that the previous time the world had gone to war, America sat out most of it. So, as far as the four of them knew then, in some not distant future they would victoriously hang up their cleats, Ben would take a newspaper job until he mastered the art of movie scripts, Dex would go on to medical school and save the human race, Jake would return to the Black Eagle smelter but in a spotless office where his engineeering and metallurgy degree hung on the wall, and Vic would play basketball for the barnstorming Carlisle 'Skins from one end of the continent to the other.

You could dream those types of dreams when the rifle in your hand was of civilian make. The whole batch of them tramped their legs off in the rough country there below the mountain reefs for a couple of days, never even seeing a deer but honing in on one another in high spirits. When Vic and Dex stopped to catch their wind on a sharp slope, Jake, who was mass and momentum combined, blew them a fart in passing and went on up the trail telling the world two halfbacks did not add up to a fullback. How lucky, the puffing pair agreed between themselves, to have someone the size and mentality of a horse along to pack out all the meat the two of them were going to get. It was Ben's country, there along the continent-dividing upthrusts west of Gros Ventre, and he was content to guide and grin until his face ached and try to stay on the lookout for deer. The last afternoon, a fine four-point buck strolled out of the timber on the ridgeline above them, nicely silhouetted but at extreme range. The other three looked at Vic, who had grown up on rifle-taken venison. Dex Cariston in particular stood back; his family, pioneer Helena merchants risen to various kinds of financial dominance, could have bought the Rocky Mountains as a hunting preserve, and he went out of his way never to appear presumptuous. "I'll give him a try," Vic accepted the general vote of confidence and flopped down to settle his .30-06 across a downed tree. But he was rusty—a man can't spend his autumns playing major college football and keep his shooting eye up too—and after he fired, the buck simply turned its head, antlers tipped a bit to one side, as if quizzical about all the noise. Ben and the others crouched waiting for Vic to touch off a second shot, but instead he clicked the safety on his rifle and looked up at them, poker-face serious. "Isn't that the damnedest thing you ever saw? A dead deer standing there looking at us." They all were laughing so hard they could not get their rifles up before the deer bounded off into the jack pines.
We'll never get him now, will we, Vic, old kid.

Ben threw the flat tire on top of the other one in the trunk of the car and dusted off his hands. Some night soon, he knew, he and Jake would meet at the Officers' Club to do their best to drink away what had befallen Vic, and the next morning they would put on their unbloodied uniforms the same as always. He winced at the next thought: Dex was another story.

Right now the puzzle was geography. Stumps of a mountain range that they were, the Sweetgrass Hills sat wide on the prairie and Ben knew he could not afford to waste miles circling East Butte the wrong way. He guessed west—traveling by wagon, Toussaint might have come cross-country from that way—and aimed the Packard in that direction on the loop road around the sprawling butte, hoping. This time the first place he asked at, a wind-peeled farmhouse, paid off. The farm couple, the Conlons, were acquainted with Toussaint Rennie, not necessarily by choice; for as long as they could remember, he passed through their place at this time of year, nodding politely and heading on up to elk territory. If they had to guess, they would say he might be somewhere up the old mining road to Devil's Chimney. Something tingled at the back of Ben's neck: east again.