Cold as it looked, rising bleak and forbidding out of the fog, Dutch Harbor was a welcome sight to Lana and the evacuees from Adak after hours of force-six winds, more than enough seasickness to go around on the boat, and air sickness on the Hercules flight from Atka.
When they got ashore, the news of the American-led breakout from the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket was general knowledge, but as yet, news of David’s action had not been received. In fact, the only news about her family was a letter from her mother, its postmark showing that it had been mailed a week before.
At first, after Frank had left her to report to the base commander, Lana had looked forward to reading the letter, but before long it had made her feel thoroughly depressed. Her mother told her how excited she was about Robert’s imminent marriage to Rosemary Spence, lamenting the fact that none of the family could be there, all together again. She was naturally worried about David but reported that Ray was “coming along” and that “your father is still doing too much and has started bringing work home with him after some ‘tiff’ at the office.”
Lana rushed through the remainder of the letter, feeling more angry than grateful. It was good to hear from home, but her mother had started using a kind of Pablum code with her ever since Lana had had what her mother called her “little problem” with Jay — as if avoidance of discussing anything unpleasant would make it go away. She had never been like that until Ray was so badly burned on the Blaine. What did her mother mean, she wondered, by Ray “coming along”? And what exactly was Father’s “tiff” at work?
When Lana finished reading the letter, she realized that what was really eating away at her was what would happen to Frank. They had hardly stepped ashore when he was requested to report to Colonel Morin. She was afraid that he would have to report back to the carrier as soon as possible. She told him he wasn’t ready, that after what he’d been through in the last few days, he needed rest — and that she didn’t have any qualms about telling Morin that.
But he’d gone all macho on her and said that if he had to go, he had to go, that “someone owes those marines back there.”
And she knew he was right. But the thought of losing him, just when she’d felt her life was coming together again, filled her with such anxiety that although all she wanted to do was sleep — she couldn’t.
When Shirer came back from Morin’s office, he told her he didn’t have to go back to the carrier — at least not immediately, not until he and the squadron of F-14s being ferried the following day to Dutch Harbor had flown an attack and reconnaissance mission over Adak.
As wind-driven rain swept the runway at Dutch Harbor, the red-vested ordnance man stepped out from beneath the wing of Shirer’s F-14, holding the red streamers up, showing Shirer that all safety wires had been removed — the bombs and missiles now ready. Shirer gave him the thumbs-up okay, and within a minute the afterburning thrust of the twin Pratt and Whitney turbofans had the Tomcat aloft, leading the other nine in arrowhead formation for the 450-mile mission to Adak. Climbing fast, they leveled out at ten thousand feet, keeping subsonic, wings on full spread to conserve fuel for the nine-hundred-mile return trip. This would give the planes well over an hour above and around Adak, where each plane would drop its concrete Divers to crater the runway, hopefully rendering it unusable for the Russians until a U.S. seaborne and combined-ops invasion could be mounted. Any dogfights, of course, would drastically decrease the time over target to a matter of minutes. With the afterburners kicking in, the Tomcats would consume a third of their fuel in less than four minutes at full war speed.
As Dutch Harbor slid back on the snail-gray sea, Shirer, for the first time since his carrier sorties in the Sea of Japan, worried if he would return. Yet he was not so much afraid as impatient. No other woman had made such an impression on him — merely to be near her was exciting, an excitement only increased by anticipation. Having been unable to spend any time with her since their arrival in Dutch Harbor with the rest of the evacuees from Adak, he found it difficult now to think of anything else. Last night he’d dreamed of having her, but each time they embraced, she drew away from him— shy or afraid, he couldn’t tell. Perhaps both. He told himself not to get all hung up about it — to expect too much. If war had taught him anything, it was that. And a relationship took time, or so they said. But who had time in a war?
At fifteen thousand feet, they were over Umnak, a hundred miles west of Dutch Harbor, and he could see the white cone of Okmok Caldera and the black patches that warned of the turmoil below the surface. The next instant they were in thick cloud, which had ballooned up under the pressure of a westward-flowing millimaw, covering the western Aleutians all the way from Atka to Amchitka Island. Even the most experienced pilot was leery of going into soup on passive radar and radio silence, but any signal emanating from the Tomcats could provide a homing beam for an enemy missile.
Keeping on radio silence, not even talking to their RIO in the backseat until the last possible moment, Shirer and the other ten pilots began their descent toward Adak, instruments telling them they were okay but every pilot wanting to see for himself the IAP of Cape Adagdak on the northern side of Mount Adagdak, which would bring them over Clam Lagoon and Kulak Bay to the left of Andrew Lagoon, where they would pass between Mount Moffet on their right, Mount Reed to their left, exiting over Shagak Bay and Adak Strait on the western side of the island.
Coming down through the cloud, his cockpit in a constant slipstream of moisture, Shirer saw the weather clearing and switched on the active radar, jammers, and the four cameras in the nose.
Suddenly the cloud broke, Adak dead ahead, the sea a shining cobalt blue shot through with silver, three dots-fishing boats, most likely — far left on Kulak Bay.
Almost immediately the sky started to smudge with AA fire, the gutted remnants of Adak Base, like some vast, scattered campfire, racing toward them at over six hundred miles an hour as their first bombs toppled and they climbed to avoid the shock waves. He saw an orange wink from one of the fishing boats and his alarm was flashing — the trawler had fired a missile. Shirer released chaff and flares to thwart its trajectory, felt his Tomcat buffeted, the F-14 to his right gone.
“Bogey four high, four high!” someone was yelling. He glimpsed the MiG closing, reduced speed, slid left in a defensive break, hoping the Russian would overshoot. Instead the Russian stayed with him, diving down, as Shirer went into a rolling scissors, the two fighters turning fast around each other, waiting for a shot. Suddenly Shirer found himself in the MiG’s cone of vulnerability, the three green arcs on Shirer’s HUD not yet cutting the MiG’s image, the bars widening, Shirer gaining but the MiG still outside the impact lines. The Russian wiggled left, right, high left, but Shirer was still on him, the sea a blue wall far to his left.
“Angel Two, Angel Two…” came his radar operator’s voice, warning him he was at two thousand feet. He hauled the Tomcat into a steep climb, saw the Russian behind him, then dropped like a stone, the HUD’s circle on the MiG’s tail for a millisecond. Shirer pressed the button and felt the staccato tug of the twenty-millimeter multibarreled cannon. The tail was gone, the MiG’s cockpit flashed in the sun, the pilot ejecting, his chute ballooning now miles behind the Tomcat. By now Shirer was fifty miles out to sea, and as he headed back toward Adak, he saw the palls of smoke from the bombs of the other eight fighters. Swooping low in one last pass, coming in west of the island, he saw the trawler lost in a thick smoke, but it hadn’t been hit, the smoke camouflage of its own making. The cockpit went milky, and for a moment he thought he’d hit a seabird, but the radio officer told him it was tracer coming up from the trawler.
Climbing, banking hard left now out beyond Sitkin Sound east of the island, he came back in, upwind of the trawler, its smoke no longer affording it as much protection, its tracer still feeling up toward him. He centered the dot and gave the trawler a one-second burst, his tracer dancing on the deck, shattering the wheelhouse, but still the trawler kept firing, Shirer recognizing it now as the boat that had evacuated them from the island.
“That thing must be armor-plated between the bulkheads,” said Shirer’s RIO. Now everything slid into place, explaining the tracer he’d seen pouring in from the sea to Adak Base the night he was shot down.
“Maybe he’s got a titanium hull?” the RIO half joked.
“Not for much longer,” said Shirer. The trawler was centered, and Shirer released his FAE-fuel air explosive — the trawler engulfed in an ovoid canopy of fire.
As he climbed down from the cockpit, thanked the ground crew, and walked across the tarmac toward the debriefing hut, the weather was piteously cold, some of the worst he’d ever seen, but he couldn’t care less, for Lana was waiting. Though he knew that shortly he and she would be part of this new war in the Aleutians, for now at least they would be together, and just as when he was in the air, high above the earth, where time was measured not by the hour but by the second and life rushed in the vein, it was the quality of the time they would have together that was important, not its duration. Not even the fact that the camera recon showed that the Flogger he had shot down had probably been the one that had brought him down particularly interested him. There was no doubt the Flogger’s logo — a Russian name that translated as “Marchenko” above a rampant black bear crushing a bald eagle in its claws — would stay with him. And it was certain that the two air forces would clash in battles yet to come. But until then, he would spend as much good time with Lana as possible.