The Eleventh Man (9 page)

"An upbringing in your father's newspaper office on top of that," the colonel was going on, as if he was ordering parts for something he wanted built, "and you were sharp in class, your grades always up there on the dean's list. Plus that famous football season. Quite the pedigree." Abruptly he shifted ground. "Was it a pact? The eleven of you talking it over and deciding to go into the war sooner than later, one for all and all for one, that sort of thing?"

"No, sir." All for one, one for all? However much else this Pentagon whiz knew, he didn't know Stamper and Danzer. Nor, for that matter, Dex. "Sure, a few of us went to the enlistment office together right after Pearl Harbor. But other than that it was strictly one by one, guys trickling in as they felt they had to, from what I hear."

"Pity. But that doesn't change the essential story, fortunately."

The colonel sprang it then, the Supreme Team coverage for the duration of the war, that Ben's background singled him out for. He listened in a daze as the colonel brought it all home to him. "Naturally we will accredit you as a full-fledged correspondent. You'll be on detached duty to TPWP for the duration, and there are a few ins and outs that go with that. But you'll learn the ropes quickly enough." Then the brief one-sided joust, with Ben heatedly asking whether he had any choice in this and the colonel replying, "Not really. Your orders already have been cut. In fact, I have them here." The man patted an attaché case of an elegance that had nothing to do with military issue.

Heart thudding, knowing this would take endless sorting out between the writing chance of a lifetime and the loss of flying, Ben ended up blurting what he had to:

"Sir, begging your pardon. But following the team all during the war that way, what are we supposed to do"—
what am
I
supposed to
do—"if not everybody makes it through?"

A sharp nod from the colonel. "Good, let's get that contingency out of the way. We've had the casualty figures from other wars run," he said as if Ben had asked that as a favor. Another cigarillo appeared in the manicured hand, another flare of the lighter. The colonel appraised Ben through a puff of smoke before going on. "You aced your statistics course in college, so you'll be interested in what our stix section came up with. An American male of military age had a greater chance of being killed or maimed in, say, a logging camp or a deep-shaft mine than in the front lines of either the Civil War or World War One. Does that surprise you?" He tapped the slightest dab of ash into the ashtray on the desk. "It did us, but not unduly. The size of veterans' groups from both wars indicated that many, many more soldiers survived than people think, and our figures merely back that up. Statistically speaking, in this war we are looking at a nine percent mortality rate for active combatants such as your teammates. Rounding that off to a whole man, as we must"—Ben stared at a human being who could use the law of averages to measure dirt on a grave—"that is one in ten, isn't it. That unfortunate formula of fate or something very like it would occur whether or not we"—he gestured with the cigarillo as if striking that word—"or rather you, Lieutenant, do this."

No uniform of authority Ben had come up against in the many months since held a candle to that. Now he looked at the red-faced East Base commander and informed him he was not at liberty to divulge who was behind this kink in the chain of command, as the general called it. In the same dead-level tone of voice he added: "General Grady, since you ask, my next piece is about a teammate of mine wounded in action. He has one leg left."

Warily the base commander took another look at Ben. "That's a shame, I'm sure. What about the article you said you'd do on Eisman?"

"His turn is coming. Will that be all, sir?"

The flight board still was not doing Cass or him any favors. Chalked slots swarmed with on-time departures and arrivals across the entire vast trellis of routes into and out of East Base, every B-17 and P-39 and all the birds of the air evidently having enjoyed a day of fine weather for flying, with the lonely exception of squadron WASP 1 still sitting in murderous fog in Seattle. Swearing to himself, Ben banged out of the Operations building. He hit the communications section next, to send off the piece on Vic, remembering to threaten the wire clerk with certain demotion and possible dismemberment if he didn't keep a civil tongue toward Jones.

Back out in the dusk breeze where the runway yawned empty, he stood there so sick with the mix of worry and love he felt incapacitated. Nothing prepared a person for this. The way he and Cass had fallen for each other was as unlikely as a collision of meteors. But since it had happened, as hard to sort out, too. The hunger of love. There was no limit to it. Finally he decided there was nothing to be done but call it a day until further word on her flight. His body agonized that there was little hope now of seeing her tonight, even if her squadron lifted off before sunset in Seattle; his brain tried to fight down the wave of desire and encourage the fog to hold so Cass would bunk there for the night instead of flying blind into murk and mountains.

Jake Eisman wasn't bunked in anywhere, he could count on that. Halfway up the whitewashed walkway to the Officers' Club, Ben caught the sound of his penetrating baritone—in their playing days, Jake was restricted to whispers in the huddle lest he be heard the length of the football field—in the mob of song emanating from within; the O Club always tuned up drastically when a planeload of pilots returned from the Alaska run. Ben never ceased to marvel at how fertile the war was for songs. He intended to write about this someday, just for the havoc to be created at Tepee Weepy by lyrics such as Jake was enwrapped in at the moment:

Oh, the Russians are drinking in Fairbanks,
While we fly through snow, ice, and shit.
When we land they shout out, "Thanks, Yanks!
Now watch us bomb Hitler,
And Himmler,
And Fritzie,
And Mitzi,
While you fly through snow, ice, and shit!"

Central as a vat in the bibulous bunch ganged around the piano and hoisting another drink at the end of each chorus, Jake jerked his head toward the bar as soon as he spotted Ben. They hadn't seen each other for a week and the ATC's largest and possibly most boisterous pilot always came back from the far north with more Alaska tales than Robert Service. Tonight Ben was more than ready to let the conversation flow from that direction. Ordering a beer for himself and another as reinforcement for Jake, he drifted to their usual corner table while the bass-and-baritone crowd around the piano roared through a final chorus like sea lions.

Tense as he was about Cass, he didn't manage to have the best face on things when Jake showed up at the table. Jake plainly had been here indulging in beer and song long enough to be justifiably somewhat askew. His dark hair flopped to one side—on him it looked good—and his tie was loosened. His breast pocket nametag was a radical number of degrees off angle; a hand-lettered last name only on everyone else, his as ever notified the world in full: L
T.
J
ACOB
E
ISMAN.

"What's eating you, scribe?" The big man roughed Ben's shoulder with a mitt of a hand as he went around to a facing chair. "A three-day leave don't agree with you? Send the next one my way, and you can freeze your ass over the Yukon while I party."

"Why would they hand me an airplane when they barely trust me with a pencil?" Ben roused himself and got busy deflecting the topic of his leave. "No substitutions allowed anyway, you ought to know that. Grandpa Grady himself told me within this very hour you are the pride of the ATC—"

"Only because I slipped him tickets on the fifty-yard line for the Homecoming game."

"—so there you go, who'll mush the flying dogsleds north if not you? The serum must reach Nome, Nanook."

Jake snorted. "Alaska runs on vodka these days, ain't you heard?"

"War is heck," said Ben, cracking a smile in spite of himself.

"I'll clink to that." Jake tapped Ben's beer bottle with his own, drained what he had left, and reached for the next bottle. "Been meaning to ask you, Ben friend. If I'm so all-fired popular, when do I get my moment of fame again?"

That particular question had more behind it than Ben wanted to deal with. Juggling the Supreme Team pieces into some kind of monthly sequence was always tricky, even without what had happened to Vic and what waited in the file after his. Now this. He said shortly, "Dex is next. No cutting in line."

Jake leaned in, covering the table like a cloud but grinning as he came. "Where is he, Ben? C'mon. Where's the dexterous one putting in his war?"

"Goddamnit, Ice, will you lay off that? I still can't tell you. They'd have me cleaning latrines from here to eternity if I did."
And you wouldn't like knowing.

"That rich sneak," Jake was saying appreciatively. "He's in something like the OSS, isn't he. Greased his way in there with the other blue-blood daredevils. The glamorous war, that'd be his. Parachuting into Krautland in the dark of the moon with a knife between his teeth. That it?"

"Have another beer, Jake."

With lazy grace Jake signaled to the bar for another round apiece. "Top secret, huh? Tell Dex to bag a few of the bastards for me."

Just then the hubbub in the club went up several more notches as yet another flock of pilots came rollicking in. Several of them were shorter guys, fighter plane jockeys who looked even more compact beside the brawn of the bomber pilots, and their particular reason for celebration, Ben could overhear, was that they hadn't had to bounce through the air to the cold of Alaska, only Alberta. Edmonton was the first hop for P-39s, with their limited fuel tanks, and Canadian reserve pilots in need of flying time sometimes ferried the planes onward up the long chain of bush-country airfields to Fairbanks. These flyboys swarming the bar were home from an easy day's work before dark. Glazed, Ben stared past them out the club's picture window to where the defining lines of evening were making the buttes across Great Falls stand out like oldest earthen fortresses. Sundown would reach Seattle in less than an hour, on top of fog. Consumed with fret about Cass, he tried not to hate the lucky fighter pilots elbowing to the bar.

During this there had been a distinct lack of words from across the table, and he realized Jake had been studying him critically. A different kind of grin sneaked onto Jake now. "Benjamin, you've been holding out on me another way. But I found out about it, ho de ho. Can't fool Yukon Jake."

Ben's insides lurched. He and Cass had tried to be as hard to spot as chameleons; how did they stand out all the way to Alaska? "You don't want to believe everything you—"

Impatiently Jake wiped that away with a paw: "I have it on good authority. Shame on you, earning yourself a purple one in your spare time over there in the paradise of the Pacific. What are you, some kind of incognito hero?"

"You're too swift for me," Ben exhaled in some relief, although Tepee Weepy did not want it made known that its supposedly unarmed correspondent had a combat exploit and a scar to show for it. "Where did you pick that up?"

"Carlo the Friesian, who else." Jake sat back, folding his fire-log arms in satisfaction. "Probably comes as a surprise to arty-farty ends, but tackles can write and fullbacks can read. Letter from Carl the other day says you and him got a New Guinea welcome from the Japs and you came out of it with the wound, the Purple Heart, the commendation, the whole schmear. How come you didn't tell me about it?"

Ben started to hide behind a swig of his beer, but was afraid it would come right back up. "It was just a graze." It was everything beyond that for the infantryman an arm's length away from him and Friessen.
And the Jap.
The memory churned in him. The grotesque hand-to-hand struggle on that jungle trail. His three weeks of impatient mending on the hospital ship. "Don't look at me like that, Ice. I'd have told you about it sooner or later."
Maybe.
"It's not something I'm particularly proud of. Correspondents are supposed to stay out of the way of metal objects flying through the air."

"That your next piece?" Jake pressed. "After Dex? Hell, I'll give up my spot to read about it. Carl said it was pretty hairy."

Ben made a zipper motion across his lips, hoping it would end this.

Jake gave a huge sigh of exasperation. "Then I might as well give you a bad time about something else while I'm at it. I read in the newsypaper you went calling on Grady's Ladies. So tell me, how's the hunting there?"

Minimum honesty sounded innocent enough here. "Too many of them are married."

"That's a sonofabitching shame, you know that?" Jake let out over the increased noise, the piano gang lustily singing a filthy tribute to Daisy in the grass. Ben squirmed and wished they would work their way to something that did not rhyme with Cass and the rest.

"I mean, can you imagine a marriage like that?" Jake looked askance at the very idea. "The old lady gets up in the morning, puts on her flying suit and straps on her .45 and goes off to war. Wow."

"Jake, something like that happens these days more than you might think." In the Excelsior Hotel some mornings, for instance.

"I know you," Jake bridged right over that, pointing the neck of a bottle at him, "you were too busy scribbling things down to sniff out the needy bachelor girls for us needy bachelors. Myself, I never get a crack at our sisters in arms. I fly out, they fly in, round and round we go."