RED ICE

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RED ICE Page 10

by R. L. Crossland


  Heyer explained that it was a squad leader’s responsibility to maintain an efficient “no sweat” pace for all, allowing periodic stops to adjust clothing. One of the liabilities of cold-weather cross-country movement was that a group of men, each fit enough to run twenty-six miles in four or five hours, might take three days to cover the same distance on skis in rugged, uphill, tree-covered terrain. Siberia’s taiga-covered coastal plain and mountainous interior would be slow going on skis, but impossible going without them.

  On Heyer’s last day with us, Dravit took over the Russian language instruction. He drilled basic Russian into the troops with the tenacity and subtlety of a pile driver. We weren’t really expecting fluency, just sufficient understanding for survival. The emphasis was not on textbook phrases such as “Which way to your uncle’s pastry shop?”, but rather on the ability to read Danger: Mine Field, or say, “Drop your weapon, comrade, unless you’re prepared to enter the real worker’s paradise.” In any event, the program wasn’t for everyone, and one ex-U.S. Army Airborne veteran threw up his hands in frustration. He later flew back to where people spoke “simple, decent American.”

  By that time, we had continued to accelerate the pace until somewhere during the blur, the survivors had become rock-hard, Russian-babbling, marathon-skiing zombies.

  That evening I took Heyer to the airport. It was the end of his leave, but I could tell he really didn’t want to miss out on an adventure. He kept brushing his blond hair out of his eyes and beginning sentences and not completing them. Finally, before he boarded his plane, he kicked at a lump of snow and said, “They’ll do all right. Just remember, the Soviets were badly mauled by Finn ski troops in World War Two. They’ve never forgotten that beating. Soviet troops teethe on cross-country skis now.”

  Then, as an afterthought, he added, “It’s a good mission. Luck will be with you.” Then he stormed off to the boarding ramp.

  A few hours later, Puckins flew in from California. I watched him leave his plane. The west Texan hadn’t changed much in ten years. He still had those same smooth, freckled Huck Finn looks. I thought of Wickersham, whose face carried the marks of ten years’ innumerable battles and had launched a thousand bar fights. Puckins moved down the ramp with a cowboy’s economy of energy. Several Japanese children waving a paper menagerie of origami foldings—fellow passengers traveling with their families—trailed along in his wake as Vietnamese children had once done. Children had always enjoyed his pantomimes and wordless magic tricks.

  Now, as a chief radioman, he was entitled to the sedate coffee-cup world of chiefs. Yet Puckins had rejected a chief’s prerogatives. In his quiet way, he preferred the world of action and causes.

  “Myshka’s been rolled up.”

  Sato’s news stunned me; Myshka’s work was still unfinished.

  “We think the KGB has him, though we can’t be sure.”

  I lay back in the hotspring pool, trying to ease the pain in my ski-weary legs and to collect my thoughts. The tiled vault echoed with the chatter of hot-spring pilgrims. A busload of them had arrived earlier that afternoon to sample the alleged medicinal qualities of the spring. Though the acoustics of the spa made it virtually impossible to bug, Sato and I whispered anyway—out of habit. Steam rose about six inches off the water, then disappeared.

  “He missed his last mail drop and his apartment is empty.”

  “You’re sure Myshka was one of us?” I asked.

  “Us?” He paused. “He’s a dissident, if that’s what you mean. No doubt about it, he’s been reliable for years.”

  “Still could be a mole.” We both knew of double agents who had been left dormant for years and allowed to burrow deeply into a network.

  “Possibly…but I doubt it. The literary pipeline isn’t worth that kind of an investment. Anyway, if he was being used against this operation, they pulled him too soon. We’ll be wary now.”

  “Wary? Not much to be wary about, we simply can’t go until I have some sense of the size of the camp’s garrison and if Vyshinsky is still there. Was Myshka able to get us any of that information before he disappeared?”

  “No…but he was getting close.”

  “How so?”

  Sato wiped the steam-created sweat from his brow and looked around confidentially. “He was waiting to intercept the quarterly report from Kunashiri, the eastern Siberian payroll center. We learned that much from his last dead-drop message.”

  I searched for the meaning of dead drop. It was a safe place to deposit written messages, which kept sender from ever having to meet receiver. Sato’s law practice seemed to have brought him a rather singular vocabulary.

  Sato went on to describe the administration of the Corrective Labor Colony Section, the agency which ruled the camps in Siberia. The section, a bureau under the Ministry of State Security, had moved its Siberian regional headquarters from Sakhalin to Kunashiri, one of the Kuril Islands, for alleged reasons of efficiency. In 1979, Ivan had moved over 12,000 troops in the Kurils to intimidate Japan. Kunashiri lay just twelve miles off Hokkaido. Perhaps the officials of the section were just lonely and wanted to be where the action was. The actual reason was unimportant. The move could be justified by the extensive use of slave labor right there in the Kurils.

  The quarterly report Myshka was after was very routine. It summarized administration difficulties of the past three months and the status of each of the hundred-plus camps. Interestingly, it appended—with bureaucratic efficiency—current rosters of the VOKhk, or militarized police, guards, and the prisoners at each camp. By directive, this report had to be sent by military mail to Moscow every February 20. That was in two days. Myshka had intended to pry the report out of Gorshnov, the wimpy bureaucrat with the dog. But now Myshka had disappeared.

  “Too bad we haven’t anyone else in Moscow with access to that report. It’s really the key to this operation.” Sato sighed, leaning back into the steam and closing his eyes.

  “Yes, it is too bad, but assuming the dead-drop message was reliable, I have another idea.”

  CHAPTER 14

  On several occasions during training, we had broken out the folding kayaks and our rubber boat for paddle practice on Hokkaido’s eastern coast. Usually on these days, we would also do a few long distance swims in dry suits. I had intended to give greater emphasis to swimming and boat work when we shifted to Korea, but now I knew familiarity was going to come with a more realistic exercise.

  I pulled Chief Puckins aside. “See if you can come up with seven shotguns—the kind with magazines, not the double-barreled variety.”

  He looked at me quizzically.

  “Our weapons for the ultimate raid are waiting for us in Korea. We haven’t time to smuggle military weapons into Japan, and we’re going on an excursion tomorrow. Pick up one hundred forty rounds of buckshot, too. Tell Chamonix I want Wickersham to get some six-round magazine extensions flown in. Customs will never catch on to them. They’re too innocuous looking.”

  Puckins sauntered off with his forefingers aligned, shooting imaginary clay pigeons.

  “Henry”—I motioned to Dravit as we waited for the troops to show up—“we’ve got some business to attend to. It’s going to churn up your training schedule.”

  “Quite right. We were getting into a rut anyway. A little skulduggery?” he queried brightly.

  “We’re going to read Ivan’s mail. Break out the Zodiac F470, its motor, and the dry suits. Have Lutjens test the Nikonos camera and load it with fast film. I’ve got Chief Puckins rounding up some shotguns; they’re the only firearm we can come up with in Japan on such short notice. Let’s take a half dozen of our best students.

  “One other thing. I’m going to call to Yokohama and have Keiko charter Matsuma’s fishing boat for a little night fishing. He’ll probably appreciate the night off.”

  Russian gunboats regularly patrolled the Russian half of the foggy Nemuro Straits between Hokkaido and Kunashiri. Sato had ventured that the volcanic topography of Kunashir
i limited the possible location of the Corrective Labor Colony Section offices to the main village on the island. Dravit and I knew that once we found the offices, we would have to play it by ear.

  By remote good fortune, no moon pierced the tendrils of fog drifting over Matsuma’s village as we drove among the shanties. I was walking to where Keiko said the dinghy would be beached when Matsuma stepped out of the shadows.

  “Matsuma-san, you needn’t be here. We chartered the vessel bare boat.”

  “It is not my boat. You wanted a boat with radar. My boat doesn’t have radar. It is a friend’s boat.”

  “But the arrangement was just for the boat, the boat alone.…”

  “I arranged for the boat, and I will pilot it. That is the situation, take it or leave it.” His voice was cool and mocking. Puckins had worked around to one side of Matsuma. The others were unloading gear.

  “Look, there won’t be enough room for you. We’re going to have quite a few men aboard, and some special equipment…”

  Puckins struck like a cobra. In seconds he choked Matsuma unconscious with a come-along grip. Puckins gently lowered him to the gray sand, rolled him over, bound his wrists with plastic handcuffs, and taped his mouth.

  We had no choice in the matter. We had to see that quarterly report tonight. There wasn’t time to find another boat.

  Puckins and I put him in the dinghy and signaled the others to assemble the gear on the beach. Puckins rowed out to the boat with Matsuma, and when he returned, we loaded the dinghy and the now-inflated rubber boat, or F470. We managed to load the old fishing boat quickly. I looked into the cabin to see how Matsuma was doing. Who would give me coastal information about the Sea of Okhotsk now that we had alienated Matsuma?

  Matsuma was sitting upright. The corners of his mouth beyond the tape were curved in a great smile. Baffled, I tore off the tape to see what the devil he was laughing about.

  “Okiijodan, ne? Big joke, yes? You think I did not know you were not anthropologist from beginning. You think all old men are fools? Your Keiko, she told good story, but I asked around, and her friends say she has an Amerikajin friend who looks like you. That friend is no anthropologist. More like ronin, masterless samurai,” he guffawed through clenched teeth. “That is, if a foreigner could ever come close to being samurai.”

  “Now, you try to start boat without Matsuma’s help.” I tried to start it as the men in the F470 pulled alongside. The key turned, but it wouldn’t start.

  He smiled superiorly. “I have hidden part, will take maybe all night to find.”

  I knew when I was licked. “Okay, okay, what’s the deal? What do you want?”

  “You seem very interested in the Sea of Okhotsk. I think you intend to do harm to the roshiajin. I wish to do harm to the roshiajin, too. I have a debt, an obligation to my brothers…”

  He could only mean the Japanese with whom he’d been imprisoned.

  “…to show the roshiajin they are a country without honor.” His jaw muscles tightened. “They are a country without shame.”

  “What do you want from me?” I said, fully knowing what was to come.

  “Let me go with you. My heart burns to watch roshiajin die. They deserve to die the way they made my brothers die.”

  The Japanese concept of giri had a strong hold on some. Giri was an all-consuming obligation of honor entered into on behalf of one’s comrades. Revenge in its name carried no stigma. Rather, such actions reflected one’s commendable personal integrity and strength of character. Giri did not stem from some contrived fit of pique, but from a sincere sense of obligation.

  I sized him up. He was physically up to it. Fishing was grueling work. Yet he had no military experience.

  “We are not going on a vendetta. You will take orders from me, an Amerikajin, a foreigner. If you cannot take orders, you will not live to return with us, if we return at all.”

  He nodded.

  “We are going to attack a corrective labor camp. Don’t let the others know just yet. Before we’re through, you’ll see plenty of Russians die, all right. And then again, you may end up right back where you started—in one of those camps again, along with the rest of us.”

  His eyes flared. “I will die first.”

  “You may. Very well, we need your help, no doubt of that. You may come along provided you meet the standards everyone else has had to meet. Tonight we’re going to make a covert raid on Kunashiri. You’ll stay with the fishing boat on this side of the straits. We’ll straighten this all out when I get back. Now let’s get under way.”

  After I cut away the handcuffs, he rummaged belowdecks for a few minutes, and then the ancient engine rumbled to life. I took a quick look at the radar. It was an inexpensive bottom-of-the-line model.

  By now, everyone was aboard, and the inflatable half-deflated below the gunwales of the boat. The men of the landing party were oiling down their shotguns and wrapping them in plastic bags. They put their camouflage uniforms in watertight canoe bags. The two boat guards, Wickersham and Lutjens, stood lookout with their short-ranged weapons.

  “We should have brought some rocks aboard,” Wickersham muttered, “Could throw rocks farther than I can shoot this fowling piece.”

  Using our chart, I showed Matsuma where we intended to launch the F470 and where we wished to be picked up.

  At about 2230, we loaded the inflatable and headed for the rocky shores of Kunashiri. Wickersham and Matsuma stayed with the fishing boat. The rest of us—Dravit, Chamonix, Puckins, Gurung, Lutjens, and I—all clad in dry suits, wedged into the small inflatable boat. Our muffled outboard engine pushed us along at about five knots. Seaweed kept jamming the prop, so we stopped periodically, cursed silently, and prayed intently the engine would restart. The seaweed of the Kurils was notorious. I figured a good sprinter could race from island to island in the chain, just resting quick footfalls on the seaweed.

  We didn’t see land until we nearly ran into it. Visibility in the fog was about one hundred yards. We heard breakers and then a great black cliff loomed ahead of us. I had Lutjens cut the engine and drop anchor.

  Without hesitation, Gurung and Chamonix, acting as scouts, slipped over the side. It seemed like hours before they blinked the all-clear signal by light to us from shore. Then the rest of us slid over the slick black thwart tubes with our bags and shotguns. Lutjens stayed aboard as a boat guard. I made a mental note of two distinctive rocks as a navigational range. They’d point the way to the F470 when we returned.

  There’s nothing like a night dip in dark, frigid waters to make you doubt your sanity. The shock of the cold water against the dry suit makes you inhale sharply and wonder if you’ll ever master regular in-and-out breathing again. A night swim has that deceptive peacefulness that foreshadows doom.

  Swimming in pairs, we let the waves wash us in to shore and smash us against the rock-strewn beach. A barnacle-encrusted rock scraped at my knee and I felt a cold trickle of seawater flow down my shin. Dravit nearly lost his equipment bag to a heavy breaker and Puckins’s shotgun clattered against a rock. Quickly, Gurung and Chamonix led us to concealment below an overhanging cliff.

  Like so many volcanic islands, Kunashiri rose from the sea in a series of rocky sloped surges. This was the most desolate portion of the island. The wisps of fog, the heavy waves on the seaweed-covered beach—it would have made a picturesque setting for some less grim activity. But we didn’t have time for reveries, the port and main village were still several miles away. We changed hurriedly into camouflage uniforms, turtlenecks, and watch caps.

  Gurung clicked his tongue against the side of his mouth to catch my attention. He pointed up and about ten yards farther down the ledge. A small red spot glowed above the edge of the cliff. As I started, I gradually made out the silhouette of a man with an AKM rifle, a fur hat, and the long gray belted coat of Soviet winter field dress.

  “Approaching sentry—not to stalk just now,” he whispered thoughtfully. “Too much smoking.”

  I
understood. The worst time to attempt to take out a sentry was when he was smoking. In most militaries, smoking on sentry duty is forbidden, so when sentries do smoke, they are extra wary. They aren’t wary of some enemy stupid enough to be out on a miserable night like this, but wary of their own sergeant of the guard—who knows how to make sentries even more miserable.

  “I am tempted to turn him in,” Gurung said with mock anger.

  Several minutes later, the glow dropped to the ledge. With my nod, Gurung pulled out his big kukri and tested the knife’s edge with his thumb. He turned noiselessly, and then glided along the base of the cliff beyond the sentry. The sentry was very close and we shrank into the overhanging cliff. I could just make out the stocky Gurkha methodically scaling the cliff with the kukri in his teeth. Moments later, the sentry crashed down from the cliff in two distinct thumps—head and fur hat, body and rifle.

  “Son of a bitch!” Puckins exclaimed as the body rolled toward him, stopping inches from his feet.

  “Get the greatcoat before it gets bloody,” Dravit ordered. “Never a bad idea to have an enemy uniform.”

  The ever-gloomy Chamonix, still in his dry suit, jammed the segmented body between two large rocks in the surf zone and piled rocks over it. In a few days, the body would work loose and drift onto the beach. The only man who fit the Russian’s uniform was the man who had buried him—Chamonix.

  We tucked our dry suits and fins into the haversack we’d brought in the watertight bags. Then we began our ascent, with Chamonix close behind us wearing the uniform of a corporal of naval infantry—his AKM at the ready. Shortly, we reached the shoulder of the cliffs.

  “There it is. That dirt road should eventually lead us into the main village. It’s on one of the pre-World War Two maps I found.”

 

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