“It wasn’t an Air Force caper,” I said. “It was ours. The pilot was ours, the mission was ours and the CCT box is ours. I’m sure the Air Force volunteered to keep looking for it but the Agency told them to lay off —‘We’ll take care of it ourselves.’ The usual interservice nonsense. As for why me, it’s probably because I’ve been there before. And because if there’s a miserably uncomfortable job Myerson always likes to see that it gets tossed in my lap.”
“Why don’t you quit, Charlie? He makes your life hell and you’re past retirement age anyway.”
“What, and give Myerson the satisfaction of knowing he drove me out?”
* * *
THE LONG TRIP entailed a change of planes at Seattle, an overnight stop in Anchorage and an all-day island hopping flight out the thousand-mile length of the Aleutian chain aboard one of Bob Reeve’s antiquated but sturdily dependable DC-6 bush transports. Flying regular schedules through that weather Reeve’s Aleutian Airways has somehow managed to maintain an astonishing record of safety and efficiency—indeed, it is one of the few airlines in the world that conducts a profitable business without Government subsidy.
I was dizzy from crosswind landings and wild takeoffs at Cold Bay, Dutch Harbor and the Adak Naval Base. We bypassed Amchitka because they had fog blowing across the runway at ninety knots. Eventually we mushed down onto Shemya, the penultimate Aleutian— a flat dreary stormy atoll hardly big enough to support the runways of its air field. It was only October but the island was slushy with wet snow. A typical grey Aleutian wind drove the cold mist through me as I lumbered down the portable aircraft stairs and ducked into the waiting blue 4x4 truck.
The only above-ground structures were the enormous reinforced hangars that sheltered our DEW-Line combat planes and the huge kite-winged high-altitude spy planes that had supplanted the U-2 in our Siberian overflight program. The hangars were left over from the War — they’d been built to house B-29 Superfortresses for the invasion of Japan that never eventuated. Everything else on the island — a top-secret city housing several thousand beleaguered Air Force personnel — was underground out of the weather. The weather in the Bering Sea is the worst in the world.
I checked in with base command and was trundled to a windowless motel-like room in Visitors’ Quarters; ate an inadequate supper in the officers’ cafeteria and then went to visit the injured pilot.
He was a chunky Texan with thick short sandy red hair, freckles and an abundance of bandages and plaster casts. His eyes were painfully bloodshot — evidence of concussion.
“Paul Oland,” he said. “Afraid I can’t shake hands, Mr. Dark. Pull up a pew there.”
I sat, not quite fitting on the narrow chair. “How’re you making it?”
“They tell me I’ll be flying again in a few months, to my surprise. Sheer dumb luck. I should’ve been dead.”
“Tell me about the accident.”
“Well, I’d been at 120,000 feet over Kamchatka and I was on my way back with a lot of exposed film. They’ve recovered all the film, by the way. It’s all in the debriefing report.”
“I’ve read it. But I’d like to hear you describe it.”
“You know much about the weather patterns up here?”
“I helped set up the U-2 program here.”
“Then you know what it’s like. Half the time you’re in thick fog and hundred-knot winds at the same time. You can’t tell up from down. You have to rely on your instruments and if the instruments start to kick around you’ve had it.”
“That’s what happened? Instrument failure?”
“They didn’t fail. They just weren’t a match for the williwaw. I’d made my descent into the muck — I was down to four thousand feet and still dropping. The only way you can see anything around here is get right down on the deck. The pilots who get lost and get killed are the ones who try to climb out of it. There isn’t any top on it. It just goes up forever, right clear to the moon. Anyway I was circling in from the west to line up for my landing approach. They had me on radar and I had my Loran bearings — it should have been fine. But there’s an incredible amount of electrical activity in these clouds. My needles were jumping around like they got stung by red ants. I figured that would pass, they’d calm down when I got closer to base and signals got stronger. But then I got a squeal from the tower — I’d gone off their screen behind a mountain on Attu. I figured it had to be the north end of Attu so I pulled hard left and started to climb — I still couldn’t see a thing, it was a williwaw blowing out there, and my radar screen was useless because of dozens of false images reflected back from the moisture in the clouds. The next thing I knew I was bellyflopping across Fish Hook Ridge.”
“Belly landing?”
“Landing? No. Accident. Ten feet lower and I’d have crashed nose-first into the cliff. Blind luck, I slid across the top of it instead. I was about three miles south of where I’d thought I was — the wind blew me that far off course in something like forty-five seconds while I was off the Shemya radar screen. I mean it’s fantastic up here, the elements. This weather goes up and down like a whore’s drawers.”
“So you hit the top of the ridge —”
“And flipped over and busted most of my bones. The plane came apart but it wasn’t too bad. Bits and pieces went in various directions. The canopy saved me — it didn’t cave in. God knows why. Most of the dashboard fell apart, though.”
“Including the code box.”
“Yeah. Including the code box.” He looked morose.
* * *
THERE ISN’T a single tree on Attu — or for that matter on any of the Aleutian Islands — but the tundra growth is a matte on everything and makes for difficult boggy walking, especially for someone as heavy as I am.
We’d had to wait thirty-six hours for a break in the weather. Then the helicopter had shuttled me across to the big island and left me there with a sort of Boy Scout camping outfit in my backpack in case the weather didn’t permit the cropper’s picking me up at sundown — a strong likelihood.
The chopper pilot had done a bit too much plain-English talking into his microphone and I reprimanded him because he’d said enough to alert a sufficiently sharp-eared Soviet radio monitor to the fact that we were searching for something crucial, valuable and portable on Attu. It added a sense of urgency to my job and made me glad of the portable radio in my pack. We weren’t far off the Soviet coast, after all. And I was dismally aware of the fact that if the Soviets sent people in to “help” me hunt for the code box, my own people weren’t likely to start World War III over it. Langley’s attitude is to do your best but take your losses.
I was dropped off within a hundred yards of the crash site but it took me twenty minutes to get there on foot; I had to crab my way up the cliffs. I wondered how the devil the Japanese and American infantries had managed to fight a war here. In 1943 the entrenched Japanese defense force had been annihilated by 15,000 American troops who somehow made amphibious landings on the beaches. The fighting was wild and vicious. Half the U.S. soldiers had been evacuated on stretchers or left buried on the island — combat wounds, frostbite, shock, trenchfoot, williwaw madness.
All those lives had been expended for it and ever since then it had been ignored by the world: nobody needed it; Attu was as useless as any piece of ground on earth. Uninhabited and unloved. Technically it belongs to the United States and officially it is a National Battlefield Park — like, say, Gettysburg; it has an obscenely large military cemetary. But tourists do not queue up to go there. Nothing exists on the mountainous tundra except mud, grass, brush, snow and the rusting relics of old warfare: abandoned artillery, wrecked planes, discarded canteens, bent M-l rifles, ruined Japanese caterpillar trucks, crushed infantry steel helmets.