The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [88]
The pilot who fell to earth—New Guinea again—near enough the American forces that a patrol was sent out to recover him.
Ben was with them when the spotter plane dropped its flare where the dive bomber had failed to come out of its dive and they thrashed through the jungle in search of the pilot. No one had seen his parachute open for sure, nor did it. The lead man practically fell in the hole the body made in the jungle floor, three feet deep. Then and there Ben had been seized with a stomach-turning fear for Cass, the altitudes at which she did her job a deadly chasm as constant as the sky over him after that. No remedy in sight. He had tried to shake that feeling in his gut—he had enough of those already—but the thought of life without her refused to quite go away. It was going with him throughout this ocean of war, a hue of loneliness always accompanying him now, like another depth to his shadow.
Solitary in the company of the destroyer officers, he at last came up with a response to the question that had pasted O'Fallon's fate onto Friessen's. "No, you're thinking of another teammate of ours. We've lost more than our share."
Danzer had been watching throughout, gray-eyed as a stone visage. He showed no sign any of this fazed him. "It's strange how war has imitated life," he said as if mastering the philosophy for them all. "The middle of the line has taken the hits. Ben and I had the luck to be the ends." Smiling to take the edge off mortal matters, he knocked on the wood trim of the mess table.
"We're jealous of Danzer, you know," one of the older officers said in a joshing tone, if that's what it really was. "You're here to make him famous back home, and as dog robber he already gets to be the first one off the ship when we hit port."
"You wouldn't want the burden of being Slick Nick," Ben answered the officer oratorically enough to draw a laugh. Danzer joined in.
"Still, it's an interesting morale device, isn't it," the executive officer spoke up briskly. The exec was a Naval Academy man, and chafing at this becalmed post in his career climb if Ben did not miss his guess. "Giving people a periodic glimpse—not that your talents can be entirely captured at any one time, Nick—of someone all throughout the war. Rather like time-lapse photography."
Before the executive officer could hold forth further, Ben put in, "Right now I'm the one lapsing," barely covering a yawn. "If you'll excuse me, gentlemen"—he tried to intone it without irony and could not be sure he succeeded—"I'm going to have to hit the sack."
The one advantage of bunking in the sick bay was privacy, which he craved in the crowded confines of the ship. Just me and the aspirin and the sawbones's slab. Those and the unsettling sense of being cast backward in time.
Hands under his head, he lay there on the berth and mulled. It had been, what, nearly a year since his impatient period of mending in a similar medical compartment on the ship off New Guinea. The swollen thoughts of that time returned to him, as haunting as they were contrary. A main one, borne back by the dinner episode: why couldn't Carl Friessen have come out of the hand-to-hand combat on that bloodslick trail with just enough sacrifice of flesh to retire him from the war? The million-dollar wound, shrapnel in the back, a stray bullet in the lower leg, that sent a soldier home for good. His own encounter with a bullet seemed to him the two-bit variety, scarcely deserving of a Purple Heart or anything else, yet the twinge in his shoulder was a message of what might have been. At the time he was disturbed with himself for wanting any of the Supreme Team out of the war; Friessen, Vic, the others were in it of their own choice and who was he to wish carefully calibrated harm to any of them? With what he knew now, he should have called down the heavens in support of such a wish.
That and ten cents would buy a person a dime's worth of difference in this life, wouldn't it. He swung up off the bunk, determined to leave the mood