He didn't bother to turn his head. "Sure."
"You're lucky. It was more than the World War II pilots could see. They didn't have radar at first and the weather'd be so bad the pilot waiting for takeoff would have to radio to the guy taking off in front of him to find out if he'd left the ground or not, before he could make his try." She raised her head and looked at him. "And then, once they were in the air, assuming of course they did make it into the air, they were flying on naval charts based on a Russian survey made in 1864.
Assuming of course they could see anything once they got into the air."
"Sounds like fun to me." He rubbed the small of her back, surveying the treeless expanse of bog and rock, and the heaving, swelling sea stretching endlessly beyond.
"Why'd they bother?"
"They had to. If the Japanese took Alaska, they'd have been within bombing range of Boeing. Not to mention Russia. There's only fifty-seven miles of water between the Alaskan and Russian coasts. It was a major Lend-Lease route, through Fairbanks and Nome." She added, "Plus, the Japanese lost at Midway because they were attacking Dutch Harbor at the same time. It split their forces at a time when they were infinitely superior to us in the Pacific."
"Divide and conquer."
"Something like that."
"You know a lot about it."
"There's a book, a good one, on the war in the Aleutians, written by a guy named Garfield. And…"
"And what?"
"And," Kate said, a little embarrassed to discover she was proud of it, "my father was one of Castner's Cutthroats."
Jack looked blank. "One of what?"
"Castner's Cutthroats. Also known as the Alaska Scouts."
He drew back and looked down at her questioningly.
"Don't stop there. Were they some sort of troops, or what?"
Kate grinned. "More 'or what,' if you could believe my father. They were kind of like Special Forces, long on fighting ability and short on discipline, but you could expect that from the kind of men they were. Castner must have hit every bar in the bush signing them up. Dad said there were prospectors, homesteaders, doctors, hunters, trappers, fishermen. I think they even bagged an anthropologist or two, probably out of the University of Alaska."
"They see any action?"
"They went ashore at Attu before the regular troops. It was in-your-face fighting every step of the way. There was even a banzai charge with bayonets, near the end, when the Japanese knew they were beat." Kate shivered.
"Messy. Oh, yeah, Dad could strip his sleeves and show his scars with the best of them."
"Shock troops."
"I guess." Kate looked around again. "I wonder what happened to them."
"Who, Castner's Cutthroats?"
"No. The Anuans."
The rock seat beneath him having been worn indisputably smooth by generations of buttocks before he had taken up residence, Jack was no longer disposed to argue over the existence of an Aleut settlement on Anua. "Maybe they were moved out during the war."
"You said there was no record of a settlement on Anua," she reminded him.
"Oh, yeah. Right." He thought. "Didn't I just read something in the papers about how Congress passed an act to compensate the Aleutian Aleuts for being uprooted from their homes during World War
Kate nodded. "Yeah. In 1989. The survivors got sixteen bucks for every day they spent in the camps."
"What did happen, back then? I never have heard the full story."
Kate's shoulders moved in a faint shrug. "It was war, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and invaded Attu and Kiska. The military authorities could pretty much do as they liked, so they bundled up every last Aleut from the Rat Islands north and settled them in villages in south-central Alaska. After the war, almost none of them were resettled in their original villages, and the soldiers trashed what little housing was left standing. They'd burned or bulldozed most of it anyway, either to keep the Japs from using it or to make way for their own construction."
"But it was war," Jack pointed out.
"I know."
"If things had gone the other way, they could have wound up prisoners of the Japanese."
"Some of them did. Some Aleuts the Japanese took prisoner off Attu and Kiska. In Japan, they put them to work, and even paid them for it." Kate smiled. "When they were repatriated, their biggest difficulty was in getting their Japanese paychecks cashed."
"How come you know so much about this?"
A muscle cramped in her thigh and she grunted and shifted off him. He whimpered a little in protest but didn't stop her. "Jack, I'm an Aleut." She waited for that to register, but he looked blank. "I'm an Aleut living in an area historically inhabited by Athapascans, Eyaks and Tlingits." His blank expression began to change to comprehension, and she nodded. "My family comes from around here somewhere. We were expatriated along with the rest of the Aleuts. We had relatives in Cordova, so we moved to the Park."
"No wonder you took this job."
She ducked her head, embarrassed again, this time to be discovered in a moment of racial sentimentality.
"Yeah. I guess I just wanted to see what the old home place looked like." She squinted up at the sun and added, "We'd better get a move on if we want to make it back to Dutch before dark."
"I've got a tarp in the back of the plane," he said, reaching for his pants.
"So?"
"So, we can tack it over that hole I made in the roof of the dugout."
"Barabara."
"Whatever."
Her smile was reward enough for the thought, and realizing it, he knew he had it bad. In the air the following morning, when he banked the Cessna for a last look at the honeymoon suite in the hot springs, he was sure of it.
As they climbed another thousand feet, over the sound of the engine Kate said, "You think somebody got shot in the barabara?"
"Yup."
"Maybe somebody who was hiding out from somebody else?"
"Yup. "
Kate was unable to keep herself from wondering which one. Alcala or Brown. The sexy ascetic or the teddy bear.
Whose dried and darkened blood had it been that had spilled over the cardboard cases, had mingled with the gravy oozing from the broken cans and dripped down, to lose all color and identity until it became one with the dirt floor?
Could have been both, she realized. No reason why not. The mental picture of the two young men, spending the remaining minutes of their lives cowering between the cases of pork and beans and the rolls of toilet paper, was enough to keep her silent all the way back to Dutch.
FOUR
KATE opened the door into her stateroom and found a human pretzel in the middle of the floor. The pretzel shifted and there was a flash of bleached blond hair.
"Andy? Is that you?" All the relaxed sense of well-being acquired over the last twenty-four hours abandoned her in a rush and she jumped forward, the heavy wooden door banging shut behind her.
"What?" In a single, sinuous twist, the human pretzel resolved itself into a long, lanky human with blond hair flopping into his thin, earnest face. "What's wrong, Kate?"
Kate stared at him, her mouth open. "For a minute I thought-what the hell was that?"
Andy dropped forward, his forehead on his knees, his body folded forward like a cherry popover. "What was what?"
"What you were doing!" she roared, her voice a furious husk of sound. "What are you doing?"
He popped erect, looking bewildered. "It's only yoga, Kate."
"Yoga! Yoga?"
"Sure. You want me to teach you?"
"Yoga." She pulled herself together. "I don't think so. I am not partial to twisting myself into anything it doesn't look like I could twist myself back out of unassisted."