Free Where Love Has Gone by Harold Robbins Page A

ready room, debating the serious tactical aspects of the war—like would Pat make the Dragon Lady before she copped Terry’s cherry, or would Daisy Mae ever succeed in freeing Li’l Abner of Momism.
    In between these high-level discussions, we ran out of our planes when the siren shrieked and
    went up and came down again, then sent our drawers to the little black Fuzzies who did our laundry so that we would be ready for the next flight. There is something very unaesthetic about dying in stained underwear. Almost un-American you might say.
    I made it to Lieutenant Colonel the hard way. My flight commander was shot out of the sky in front of me and I was moved up into his place. I remember what I thought when they swapped my gold oak leaves for silver. Like everybody dies, now it’s my turn.
    But I’d been lucky. I still remember the surprise I’d felt at the sudden needle-like pain lacing up my back. The instrument panel disintegrated before my eyes as the Jap Zero spun out over my head and into the water, while I tried to get away from the one beneath me. I don’t know how I made it back to the airstrip. I seemed to be floating in a sea of jelly, and then the plane hit the ground and rolled over. Somewhere in the distance I heard someone yelling and felt hands pulling at me. They were warm hands, comforting hands, even though they were trying to take me away from the beautiful heat that surrounded me.
    I closed my eyes and gave myself up to them. It was about time I got to that jungle I’d read so much about. I smiled to myself.
    This was more like it. I was lying on the beach at Bali Bali and a thousand bare-breasted beauties all looking like Dorothy Lamour were parading up and down and the only problem I had was to decide which one of them I would choose for that evening.
    This was one dream I would never give up. MacArthur would just have to learn to get along without me.
    I was shipped back stateside as soon as I was well enough to travel.
    5

    __________________________________________

    I didn’t learn that Nora had won the Eliofheim Award until the second week in July, and then only when I happened to see her picture on the cover of Life .
    Since February, when I’d been hit, I’d put in five weeks in a hospital in New Guinea, then seven more in the Veterans’ at San Diego, after which I’d been discharged as good as new. I had a thirty- day leave coming before returning for reassignment, so I went back to La Jolla, renting a small boat on which I could eat and sleep and begin to soak up a little sun.
    I’d been dozing on a deck chair when the thud of a bundle hitting the deck woke me. I opened my eyes to see a boy standing at the edge of the dock grinning at me. I made it a point not to read the daily papers. I’d had enough of the war. But I had asked the newsstand to drop off a few magazines every week.
    I stuck my hand in my pocket and spun a half-dollar in the air. He caught it with all the grace of Joe DiMaggio pulling down a high fly ball.
    I leaned over and picked up the bundle and pulled the string that held it together. The magazines slid to the floor and I picked up the first one that my hands touched.
    I stared at the picture of the oddly familiar-looking dark-haired girl on the cover, and I remember thinking how nice it was that they’d finally gotten off the war kick. Then I realized why the girl seemed so familiar.
    It was there in small white block letters: NORA HAYDEN—WINNER OF THE ELIOFHEIM FOUNDATION AWARD FOR SCULPTURE.
    I looked at the picture again and the old itch came back. The luminous dark eyes, the oddly sensual mouth over the proud, almost haughty, chin. It was like yesterday, though it had been almost a year since I’d seen her.
    I opened the magazine. There were more pictures inside. Nora working in the small studio out in back of her mother’s house. Nora smoking, while sketching out an idea. Nora sitting at a window, her face silhouetted by the light behind her. Or