He nodded. “So? That’s what we all want, isn’t it? A front. You don’t know who the hell you are.”
Lana wanted to say something about his mother — of what she would think if she knew the real Jay La Roche — but instinctively she refrained. It was too dangerous. He was offering a deal. Best to take it while she could. “All right,” she said. “But I’m going back to the States.”
He walked slowly away from the door, stopped, and came back, bottle of Scotch still in hand. “Lana!”
She cringed, her flesh turning cold and clammy, with the sensation of something reptilian crawling over it. She knew what he was going to say. She could tell him not to say it, but to do that would only drag the whole thing out. It was easier to go along, let him play it out, then he’d leave her alone for a few days, if past performance was anything to go by — enough time to pack and make the arrangements. “What?” she asked sternly.
“Love you, babe.”
It was a different man speaking, but she despised the supine, ingratiating tone as much as she hated the psychopath who’d attacked her like an animal.
“Hear me?” he pressed, his voice even, modulated — as forgiving as a father making up with a child after a bad day.
“I hear you,” she said without turning around from the sink.
“Look at me, babe!”
She stared up at him, lost in the mystery of how it was that she had ever been attracted to him. But of course, then he had been someone else. He met her stare and did not avert his eyes from the burning hatred he saw in them.
How could she ever begin to explain to anyone about the disaster that had been her marriage? She had told no one, not even her friends among the nurses she’d worked with in Halifax before her exile to the Aleutians. And certainly not her parents. All they knew was that “things hadn’t worked out.” Certainly she had never gone into any of the sordid details with anyone, and only in her letters to her older brother, Robert, somewhere on duty in the North Atlantic, had she hinted at anything like the full horror of it all.
“Can’t you work things out?” her father had asked. “Your mother and I — well, we’ve had our tiffs now and then. But you don’t just get up and—”
“No!” she had told him. They couldn’t work things out. And that was that. There was no one at Dutch Harbor she could talk to, no one in whom she could confide. There was the padre, of course, but she was only a nominal churchgoer and, at least for now, couldn’t bring herself to resurrect the things she wished exorcised.
She began walking back to the base. At Dutch Harbor, the lights were twinkling brightly against the cold, blue twilight, and beyond, the cloud cover was lifting. The isolation and boredom of the place would have been more bearable if the weather were not so foul, so unpredictable. It wasn’t unusual for rain and snow driven by gale-force winds to sweep down from the Arctic and then the next minute to see clouds rent by the sun.
Her job so far had been to assist in making an inventory of medical supplies throughout the Aleutian Chain, and had it not been for the Unalaska-Alaska flights, the boredom would have been overpowering. Keeping to herself, she had not made any really close friends either here or in Halifax, except William Spence, the young British sailor, when turmoil had enveloped her again. Or had it really? Was her life more the consequence of her own actions than she was willing to admit? Was she what her father so disparagingly called “one of the world’s willing victims”? Was there something deep in her psyche that sought to purge itself by seeking out the worst as a form of punishment? Did she enjoy the “heroic” pain of the victim as an athlete takes secret pride in the pain of the effort? How else could she have possibly become embroiled with the young Englishman, a boy really, who was to die before his twentieth birthday? His loneliness, she had thought, was there for anyone to see, and surely it had only been fate that had put her on the ward aboard the hospital ship when the big Chinook choppers brought young Spence in, hands bloody stubs which had to be amputated following a savage Russian Hunter/Killer attack on the British and American convoy hundreds of miles north of Newfoundland.
When he was first transferred from the chopper to the hospital ship as one of the most seriously injured from HMS Peregrine and one of the first casualties of the Atlantic war, he was simply that — another casualty — and one who, despite the double amputation, was given a fair chance of survival because of his youth. Then the oil-caused pneumonia — which so often lay undetected in a man’s lungs for several days before it was discovered, when it was too late — began racking Spence’s body, depleting his strength so quickly that the earlier prognosis for recovery suddenly changed. In those last desperate days, thousands of miles from home, Lana knew it was not at all unusual for a patient, especially a young man, to transfer to her all the adoration he might have given the woman he would have loved, had he lived. Like so many before him, in war or not, the intensity of William Spence’s feeling for his nurse could be understood only by those who, like him, had lain in the morning hours in that death watch between two and four — who had known the chilling fear that soon they would be no more and who wanted nothing more than a human touch, to reassure them there was hope when there was none.
When the morphine ceased to work, the pain so intolerable that it shamed his manhood and he wept like a child, she drew the sheet down below his waist, unpinned her hair, letting it fall down on him, lips closing about him, her tongue enveloping and drawing him into her own ecstasy until it was his — in the way she had learned from Jay in his gentler honeymoon incarnation period. Was it possible that out of Jay’s evil came good? And for that she was banished to “Devil’s Island,” as Dutch Harbor was called by the Waves. She told herself she no longer cared. She had helped a young man confront death, given him pleasure before the ultimate obscenity claimed him, and no matter how sordid a thing they would make of it behind her back, she knew she had been right and that they would not break her on this island or any other.
As Lana turned around, heading back to the thirty-bed hospital, the blue light changed dramatically. Invading masses of bruised cumulonimbus cloud swept in from the western sea, where the warm Kuroshio Current and the Bering Sea collided to produce the towering thunderhead storm clouds. It was the unmistakable signal that the 124 islands strung along the 3,000-mile arc were about to be hit by yet another millimaw, the name given to the wind storms by the Aleuts who had lived on the sparsely vegetated and forlorn islands even before the promyshlermiki, the Russian fur traders who had settled the barren but sea-rich volcanic outcrops over two hundred years before.
Lana watched the seabirds driven landward by the approaching storm — yellow-tufted puffins, their bright white faces and rust-red beaks atop the black bodies irrepressibly happy-looking, and always bringing a smile to her no matter how depressed she felt. But even in the abundant bird life, from cormorants and fulmars to kittiwakes, she saw pain and battle. Where others reveled in the wildness of the place, she yearned for the quiet life — not boring but the kind of life she had experienced in Nova Scotia while based in Halifax, doing what now she felt she did best, looking after others, hoping not only to help them bear their pain but to escape from her own.
The truth on Unalaska, however, was that to date there had not been much work to do. The island’s main function was twofold: to provide safe anchorage in Dutch Harbor for the U.S., Japanese, and Korean factory ships from the storms that plagued the nutrient-rich fishing ground off the Aleutian Trench, and more important, to serve as a depot between the handful of American bases. As depot, its primary responsibility was to Adak Island Naval Station and tiny Shemya Island, which few Americans had ever heard of and which, being the most western extension of the United States, possessed an air force station and was, as all the interceptor and transport pilots knew, the most heavily armed piece of real estate in the Western world. If ever the Russians moved against the United States’ western flank, Shemya Island and Adak, the big submarine base 360 miles eastward, would be more strategically important than Midway Island over five hundred miles south had been in World War II. The island, which, like England in the Atlantic, was in effect a United States forward aircraft carrier to the Soviet Union, was not something Lana Brentwood had given much thought to, for one’s own world had a way of dwarfing world conflicts that were supposed to dwarf one’s own. Besides, neither she nor anyone else believed the Russians would be so foolish as to head eastward and try to use the island arc as a stepping stone to America’s back door through the Alaskan and the Canadian West Coast.