RED ICE

by R. L. Crossland

  I introduced myself as an American anthropologist interested in the environmental factors affecting the Siberian Evenki—a thin, short-term cover.

  He responded in rough, harsh Japanese. Was I, he asked, one of those useless Caucasian scientists making it impossible for his sons to hunt whales? No, I responded, pointing to ancestors who had hunted whales over the entire Pacific. After all, it was true. That seemed to satisfy him.

  “We spent an hour or more talking about the sea and marine life. Finally I asked him if he’d be interested in talking to a few of my associates in Korea about the western rim of the Sea of Okhotsk. Mentioning a fee that must have been too much, I sensed a resurgence of suspicion.

  “It has been many years since I cut the waters of the Okhotsk. I would think that now the Roshiajins are on such affectionate terms with the western countries that there would be better sources of the information you ask…at less expense. But fishing is poor, ignorant work, and I know little of such things. Perhaps in scientific matters one should not put trust in what they say.”

  His impassive oak brown face could have belonged to the Indian of a nickel, an Aleutian eskimo, an Amazon head-hunter, or a Mongolian border guard—it told nothing. I held the vague suspicion he was laughing at me behind the tight-skinned mask, but could not be sure. In any event he was a man to respect and I needed his help. I wondered if he, too, knew, or was I just getting jumpy about this project?

  PART III

  CHAPTER 10

  The mid-February snow lay like a crisp, pale comforter across the volcanic mountains of Japan’s Hokkaido. The thin evergreen tree cover approximated Siberia’s, and the terrain reflected other similarities. The lonely wind wove in and out of the volcanic peaks and then struck out with its icy fangs at an isolated ski resort nestled among the comforter’s folds.

  Known for its volcanic hot springs, the resort evidenced an architecture teetering unsurely between the design demands of a Swiss chalet, an Ainu village, and a Victorian hotel. Bear totems mixed with soft-drink machines in its main lobby, but its aged, unpainted wood exterior seemed at peace with its surroundings.

  I had waited as long as I could for firm intelligence. Training must start now. A review of my muster list revealed a cadre of four: Dravit, Heyer, Puckins, and Wickersham. Puckins couldn’t join us until the last week of training and Heyer would only be around for training. Depending on the size of the prison camp’s garrison, an additional three to ten men might be required. Estimating a two-thirds dropout rate, I had requested my Marseilles café owner send out thirty men. He had sent twenty-five. On his own initiative, Dravit had recruited a Gurkha rifleman.

  We had booked nearly every room in the small resort describing ourselves as a foundation-funded ex-con readjustment clinic. The manager’s reluctance had been dispelled by generous flurries of cash. The cover story, I hoped, would account for some of our recruits’ disreputable appearances and keep away fainthearted meddlers.

  At five A.M. Dravit jammed everyone into one suite and held muster. Most of them looked athletic and carried the usual assortment of scars and broken noses. On the slopes and cross-country trails they would appear to be just a few more Caucasian ski bums, some perhaps who had not found their way back from Sapporo 1972. Dravit laid down the rules in English.

  “Since we’re training in a civilian resort, the usual military courtesies will be dispensed with. From here on out you are ex-cons communing with nature for the good of your souls on some screwball American grant. This does not, however, mean that orders are not to be obeyed, it only means that orders won’t sound as much like orders as they might, ay?”

  He punctuated his points with neat jabs, using his left hand. Dealing with weapons and men, the tangibles came so easily to Dravit. He fell into the right rhythm naturally. I envied his easy ability to control the day-to-day problems always fought at close quarters.

  The men, sitting on the floor or on the beds, gave him their complete attention. Few showed any expression.

  “Lieutenant Commander Frazer will be in command. He will be paying the accounts and calling the tune. Should any of you get out of tune, it will be me you’ll be seeing, then. Not a lad amongst you wants to see me, do you, lads?

  “If anyone wishes to drop out at any time prior to deployment, all he has to do is check out of his room and use the open-return airline ticket—the one in the top drawer of the bureau in your room.”

  A battler, the ravages of physical pain and hard use were etched across the nose pounded bridgeless and the high, broad cheekbones. His mustache was the only part of him that didn’t look repaired. Changes in mood rippled across his ruddy face like a series of flag hoists, and kept his audience deftly off balance.

  “Once we leave Japan things will get more difficult. Our destination will become a bit more obvious; therefore, no one leaves the project—alive, that is. We’re a trifle touchy about security, the truth be known. A flamin’ rear-echelon type with a big mouth could do us a world of harm. I’ll send a beggar to his reward before I’ll let him send me to mine. Right?”

  The trim little Englishman tilted his battered head back and forth as he talked, bobbing and weaving, unconsciously flicking combinations into empty air. The heavy scarring around his eyes gave the lids a droopy cast, but the overall impression was one of vigor and determination. You could knock Dravit down forever and he’d still keep getting up. Pick a fight with Dravit at your peril; to keep him down you had to give serious consideration to killing him.

  “Like a little toy tank,” an aristocratic-looking German whispered irreverently to the man next to him.

  They each nodded as he caught their gaze. The terms and conditions of employment were fairly standard in this work.

  He was drawing them in masterfully.

  So intuitive and self-disciplined. You’d never believe his home life was so much burning wreckage. Two divorces. Three children in their mother’s custody.

  Military marriages had been rough on Dravit. The odds had played against him. In the service, your time with your family was short and intense. The relationship tended to run to one of two extremes: either you played the benign, good-natured patsy home from the seas or you attempted to make up for lost time and brought your job’s iron discipline and hard attitudes home with you. Dravit had played both extremes, and lost both times. No matter, I liked him and relied on him. Unlike his families, we had his exclusive attention for the full duration of the job. In any event, he would be the closest thing I would have to a friend on this project. That is, if there were such a thing as a commanding officer having friends.

  “Mr. Frazer here will fill you in on the general nature of our sojourn into the frosty climes”—he grinned villainously—“where it’s always double drill and a frozen canteen.”

  I rose slowly. I knew I didn’t have Dravit’s casual, cultivated menace acquired from years below decks. Ghosts of the room’s earlier conversations hung in the air.

  So this was that naval officer they’d been talking about…A SEAL, huh?… Well, he looks like he’s in shape, got the bearing of a bloody brigadier… Sure, sure, very impressive, but can he fight?… What the hell’s the Navy know about free-lance war making anyway? A likely bunch of paladins those white-linen boys would make.… Tight-lipped bastard, ain’t he, I’ll bet he can be a thoroughgoing son of a bitch when he wants to.… Man, are they gonna lay heavy words on us without a drink?

  First impressions counted, and I had to convince twenty-five adventurous men—to follow me to some unknown place—in order to do some unknown martial deed—against some unknown adversary. My right shoulder ached again and I tried unsuccessfully to avoid clearing my throat.

  “I’m Frazer…ex-U.S. Navy…SEALs. I’ve led a raid or two in the past fifteen years—nothing that ever showed up in the newspapers—and lived to tell about them. Wickersham, Dravit, and Heyer will vouch for me. Most of you are wondering what this is all about, and if you’re getting paid too much or too little. From the
look of most of you, too much. In looking around, you’ve probably figured out that after the required dose of SEAL-type training, we won’t have enough men to depose a small government, or even knock over its treasury. You’re right.”

  Heads were leaning toward me attentively. I scanned their faces; they were from everywhere: a Norwegian, a Frenchman, a Gurkha, a Cuban, a German, a South African.…

  “We’re going to execute a long-range amphibious raid requiring extensive cross-country skiing, some small craft work, and perhaps some swimming or scuba diving. We will be bringing back a willing passenger, code-named Eurydice for now. We can expect that Eurydice’s hosts will take a dim view of our intrusion, not to mention Eurydice’s abrupt departure…”

  Wickersham had climbed up on a bed and was bouncing up and down, executing imaginary stem Christies like a slalom racer. His bridge was out again and he was grinning maniacally. Dravit moved to coldcock him but I waved him off.

  “…which may occasion the use of arms, the demolition of some buildings, the detonation of a booby trap or two…”

  There were shouts.

  “…and, if my SEAL inclinations can be satisfied, the sinking of a few ships.”

  Three or four had sprung to their feet. A chair tipped over backward. There was a rush of secondary conversations. The excitement of it was in the air.

  “Listen up,” Dravit barked.

  Yes, we had recruited the right men. Tired of scrambling for dollars through seedy con games, flyblown hijackings, smuggling small things for hawk-faced dowagers, gigoloing fading heiresses, futile searches for galleons and Aztec gold—they craved the simple, incisive action of combat seasoned with the smell of powder and the exhilarating sense of life where death stalked closest.

  “But before we deploy I must, I will, be sure that we are ready, that every man going is in crack physical condition, his reflexes sharp, his knowledge of his responsibilities to the group thorough, and his ability to survive in the cold total. Your skills will be as good as they have ever been or could ever be.

  “Before then you will be tired, frustrated, and hate the sight of Dravit and me. For we are going to torment you along through our own graduate-level course on war prowling; teach you the rudiments of a strange language, bring you to the edge of freezing so you’ll know that cold is death, not just negative-degree readings; exhaust you until you know what second wind is, third wind…hundredth wind; all so we will survive and succeed where a conventional military unit would not dare to begin.”

  Wickersham stood shaking his ham-sized fist like some comic-opera generalissimo, then hosing down waves of invisible ski troops. His buffooning offered a good sign. Capture their imaginations and they would follow you into the cocked jaws of hell.

  CHAPTER 11

  Two days before the recruits had arrived, Sato visited me late in the evening there at the ski resort. He had scribbled a message on a notepad and handed it to me. It read: “EURYDICE Vic. 56° 05’ 37”N 135° 40’ 16”E LUMBER.”

  Without saying a word he tore up the two pages below the message so no impression remained.

  “How reliable is all this?” I had a right to ask.

  “Very, I think.”

  “How about giving me a little background so I can judge? I will be wagering lives on this information. You don’t have to give me your whole network, just some indication of how it works.”

  “Even so, I will probably be jeopardizing the entire network,” he said, sighing. “It’s easy to follow threads back and forth. Well, anyway, I suppose you do have a right to know. Let’s step outside for a walk. They have eavesdropping devices for outdoors, too, you know. Parabolic reflectors, I think they call them, but their application is difficult.”

  I put on an old convoy coat and stepped out into the lightly falling snow. For once the flakes were dropping straight down.

  “An underground pipeline smuggled Kurganov’s first works page by page out of his camp and Russia. After his exile, he managed to get in touch with the man who was the western termination point of the pipeline and on occasion transmit to Russia’s forgotten men as he had once transmitted when he, too, was a forgotten man.

  “One point on the pipeline, in the middle of Moscow, is run by someone who goes by the code name Myshka. He had developed a certain flair for eliciting information from the local ministries, not a usual pipeline requirement. His information is invariably accurate, but until now of little real value to us.

  “For a long time, Myshka had an ineffectual neighbor who walked a pitifully mangy dog of indefinite breed. Everyone in their cooperative apartment building avoided the pair on their daily sorties. Fortunately Myshka endeavored to befriend the miserable pair, not without benefit. The man worked in the Ministry of State Security. The dog was without redeeming social value.” This is the tale that Sato told:

  Aleksandr Gorshnov, a lower-level bureaucrat, often complained to Myshka about his lack of future in the ministry. Wiping his glasses, Gorshnov would bemoan his meager salary and puzzle over the prosperous life-style of another civil servant of the same grade in his office.

  “Watch him closely,” Myshka suggested sagely. “Maybe he augments his income; we all know there are limits to thrift.”

  It turned out that the fellow civil servant held a post in the Camp Administration Section, Prisoner Transport. He knew where each prisoner was going, but only by place-name and mailing address. Gorshnov’s associate sold that information to relatives who were often afraid to inquire or correspond with the imprisoned relative. Each movement meant the relative still lived. No movement for years could only mean death, if you knew the system. Access to such information brought personal prosperity.

  Gorshnov learned his associate’s habits more energetically than he had ever done anything in his life. Within a few weeks he had become adept at rifling through his associate’s desk and soon knew the details of prisoner transport. Pain, anguish, and death turned a nice profit. And he was grateful, telling Myshka the source of his newfound success.

  Shortly Myshka developed a relative named Vyshinsky and had to plead with Gorshnov—though not too long—to accept money for disclosure of the camp’s place-name. He himself worked in the Moscow Forestry Institute. He compared the camp’s place-name with maps and lists of lumber-product sources in eastern Siberia and crosschecked it with large-scale maps showing railroad spurs. In this way he managed to identify the camp industry and pin its location down precisely. In a sparsely settled area where place-names could cover hundreds of square miles, the location had to be exact.

  “He then enciphered the coordinates into one rather bad poem, which he smuggled through the pipeline. If intercepted by the KGB, the simply coded message would likely be overlooked by the KGB in its joy of interception. Finding evidence of one crime, they would be too satisfied to search for evidence of another.

  “Myshka, in a flash of literary bravado, code-named Vyshinsky Eurydice—an allusion that would be obvious to any literary-minded pipeline receiver.”

  “Eurydice?” I questioned. The name sounded familiar. “Eurydice…now I remember. It’s mythology, she was Orpheus’s wife. Orpheus tried to retrieve her from the home of the dead, from Hades. Yes, very good, the allusion seems appropriate.”

  “Not too appropriate, I hope,” Sato whispered. “Orpheus failed.”

  “Vyshinsky. Tell me about Vyshinsky. I need to know him when I see him. We will have gone an awfully long way to pick up the wrong Vyshinsky,” I said slowly, trying to work some of the stiffness out of my right shoulder.

  “I have a file taped into the dead space of my car door,” the Japanese lawyer responded. “It should tell you as much as you need to know.”

  I sat in his car and read by the glove-compartment light.

  The file contained a grainy full-length photo of a small, thin man in coveralls. The photo was poor but it showed the receding hairline, the glasses, and the small schoolmaster-ish goatee. He was alone and his posture was stooped and s
tiff.

  The first thing you noticed was that the eyes held you. They expressed a deep lingering, but contained pain. They were sad, compassionate eyes. Pallbearer’s eyes. Here was a man who had lived life as a human punching bag, but instead of bouncing back, he had just absorbed, and the leather had begun to wear thin.

  The second quality about Vyshinsky that caught my attention was the pipe-cleaner unreality of his physique. He seemed awkwardly assembled, like a mannequin. Despite his work clothes, it was clear that this was a cerebral man, to whom his body was a mere accessory.

  I scanned the photo once more—a round, sensitive head connected to a pencil-thin neck, mounted on uneven, narrow shoulders, teetered on an unlikely waist that left a good deal of coverall fabric to spare. The overall picture was of a man as frail and brittle as an oyster cracker.

  Kurganov knew his man; Vyshinsky wouldn’t last six months at forced labor in a gulag.

  I flipped through the various entries. Sato’s file had been expertly done.

  In 1930 Stalin decided to liquidate the kulaks.

  The kulaks were moderately successful peasant farmers who had made their appearance after the overthrow of the feudal landlords during the Russian Revolution. For a little over a decade, the peasants were forgotten while the Bolsheviks turned their attentions to the industrialization of the cities. Untouched, the kulaks gravitated toward a market economy and eventually made the error of holding back the sale of their crops until prices reached what they considered to be the proper level.