The Eleventh Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

important that I find him. Where would he go to hunt elk, do you think?"
    The woman kept her gaze on Ben for some seconds, then came down off the steps. She turned her back to the mountains and pointed. "Likes to say he has his own herd."
    Totally surprised, Ben stared east into the deep V of the river valley and the distant patches of prairie captured between the outline of the bluffs. He had never in his life heard about any elk herd in the Two Medicine bottomlands.
She's putting me on. What do I do now?
Then it sank in on him. The woman was pointing all the way east, to the horizon. To the Sweetgrass Hills, rising like three mirage islands on the earthbrim where the sun came up.
    Back at the car, he took another sighting on the ghostly trio of distant hills. He figured the trip at a hard two hours' drive, but he didn't mind that as much as the direction. He still could not shake the creepy feeling that the law of averages was not working, something was cockeyed; every point on the compass since this set of orders caught up with him in New Guinea was
east.

    East Base had changed beyond sane recognition when he'd alit there, the month before. Only the Black Eagle smokestack stood the same as ever on the transformed prairie—the military in its inexplicable fashion having chosen to install an airfield almost under the shadow of the highest man-made obstacle between Seattle and Minneapolis. Who would have thought Montana was destined to become a staging area for the war in the first place? But the world of war shifted massively when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and with the task of conveying thousands of aircraft to the forces of America's new ally Joseph Stalin, the Air Transport Command had snatched up this base since the last time Ben landed here. Up until now he had not paid much attention to the ATC, something of a stepchild in the military scheme of things, other than the jeer he'd heard in fighter pilot school that the initials stood for Allergic To Combat. Never mind, he tried to tell himself, hadn't he pulled temporary duty at out-of-it outfits before?
    Reporting in, fatigued from bucket-seat flights in C-47 transports, he presented his paperwork in the same tired routine as he'd done countless times, countless places. This time the processing clerk, a bald corporal, furrowed up over the orders before stamping them and handing them back with a dubious "There you go, Lieutenant"—they all did that—then jabbed a finger to the base map on the wall. "Here's your next stop, the clap shop."
    "Cut the crap, okay? I don't have anything." In no mood for dealing further with a cynical paper-pusher, Ben was trying in vain to pick out the bachelor officers' quarters on the map; whatever else the Air Transport Command transported, it brought buildings by the dozens.
    "That's what all the boys say, sir," the clerk sang out. "Commander's orders. He's on a tear about VD. All incoming personnel have to be checked out, first thing."
    Drawing on his annoyance to plot how he might get away with
infectious
in a piece on the level of enthusiasm here, Ben stepped out into the world of East Base. Now that he had a chance to take a good look around, there wasn't a trace of the tar-paper infirmary he remembered before, nor anything else from his last quick TDY here. Mammoth hangars yawned open onto the longest runway he had seen yet in his war travels. Deep inside the hangar nearest him, swarms of mechanics on platform ladders squirmed into open bays of fuselages. Fresh new bombers and fighter planes had to undergo shakedown here after being flown in from factories on the West Coast and before being handed over to Russian pilots waiting in Alaska, he understood that much of the Lend-Lease operation. But he puzzled over the relatively empty flight line, no clusters of aircraft rolled out and sitting ready to go. Instead, great batches of unpainted planes were lined up on an apron behind the hangars, like shorn sheep trying to get out of