As with most penal institutions, this one had been designed with the primary aim of keeping certain people in, rather than keeping others out. The camp’s officers had mimicked the camp’s design in setting their priorities. As ordered, the three sentries sat inert in their towers wearing heavy sheepskin coats. With their rope ladders drawn up into their tower crow’s nest, they focused their attention on the prisoners’ barracks, occasionally standing to stretch their legs, clap their hands, or adjust the tiny wood stove, which seemed to add little to their comfort. Most of the time they sat so still it was difficult to tell if they weren’t dozing.
Gurung had to cut through two additional fences, but he was the first to reach his designated tower. I saw his kukri flash from its scabbard as he left his skis behind and began to feel his way up the tower struts. Puckins reached his tower seconds later. He ascended quickly, pulling himself up hand over hand, letting his legs hang slack. When he reached the sentry’s platform, he drew a length of wire, with toggles at either end, from his coat. A quick flick of the looped garrot and the sentry was clawing at his neck. In a minute the struggle was over. Puckins pushed the body aside and, unslinging the Dragunov, covered the third sentry on the far side of the camp carefully gauging windage and elevation.
Gurung was having a difficult time. He had barely had time to swing under his sentry’s platform when that sentry had stood up to load more wood into his stove. When the sentry sat down again, Gurung waited. Then in a rapid succession of movements he was at the railing, then slashing his kukri toward the back of the sentry’s neck. At this moment the sentry chose to stand up again. The razor-sharp kukri slashed through several layers of clothing into the sentry’s back. The sentry screamed and fumbled for his rifle. The scream echoed through the valley—then stopped abruptly with Gurung’s second stroke.
The third sentry on the far side of the camp stood up and took aim. A cracking report shattered the valley’s peace for a second time. In the far corner, the sentry dropped his rifle, pitched forward, and toppled to the snow beneath his tower like a broken gray doll.
Puckins raised the barrel of the Dragunov, satisfied with his shot.
CHAPTER 23
“Stand by.”
From their position on top of the ridge, Chamonix and Alvarez fired an armor-piercing round from the recoilless rifle into the mobile generator. The generator supplied power for the radio shack and most of the camp. The distant whine of the generator stopped with a resounding thump and a shower of sparks. Chunks of metal clattered against the side of the radio shack.
“Let’s hit it…now!”
The rest of us pulled our suede face masks into place, patted our body-armor vests, and placed our ski tips parallel. I could hear shouting from the guards’ barracks. The wind whistled under my fur ear flaps, knocking back my white hood as I made a few clumsy turns to keep my velocity under control until I shot through the gap in the fence. Moments later I was barreling through the breach. I could hear the hiss of six sets of skis behind me. I could hear snow being kicked aside as they, too, plunged through the two fences and across the camp yard. Someone fell behind me—in time with a rifle shot from the barracks—but was up before I dared to look back.
Several half-clothed guards—I thought I recognized the beer-barrel sergeant—were already out of their barracks’ side door. I fired a fan of tracers from a crouch, never bothering to reduce speed. Chamonix and Alvarez, with the recoilless, took cover near the radio shack and took aim at the door of the snowdrift blister that was the magazine. The magazine erupted in a terrifying geyser of iridescent flame. That signaled the end of the garrison’s hope for automatic weapons or additional ammo. I turned to watch the recoilless crew, only to see Alvarez stagger as blood gushed from his upper thighs below his body armor. Three more hits made him do a macabre soft-shoe before he collapsed, leaving a trail of bright red snow. His feet still moved, pushed, drove the body another yard, leaving a slushy, scarlet skid mark.
Shifting his position a few degrees, Chamonix waited for Alvarez to load the next round. He hadn’t seen him go down. The next target was the guards’ barracks.
The SKS fire from their barracks was withering. Wickersham, Matsuma, and I had to take shelter behind an ell of the cooler. Kruger, at another corner of the cooler, was covering the officers’ quarters and had eliminated the watch-standers in the radio shack. I felt a round rip through the side of my quilted jacket, deflect off my body armor, and scrape hotly up the inside of my left arm. Wickersham was laying down automatic-weapons fire with the Type 67. Matsuma had disappeared.
Then he reappeared amid a cat’s cradle of tracer streaks. He sprinted recklessly across the open area between the cooler and the guards’ barracks. Halfway across, he took a hit, which knocked him over as if he’d been hit with an invisible I-beam. He’d been hit in his armor vest. Then he crawled to the corner of the barracks and began cutting down anyone who tried to leave the barracks. Seconds after, Wickersham and I rushed across, smashing the Type 67 through an already-shattered window. Wickersham began raking the inside of the barracks. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Chamonix dragging the recoilless and its ammo across to the far door of their long barracks. The building was propped up on blocks. I crawled under the gauntlet of windows to help him. I knew we were also taking ragged fire from the officers’ quarters, and I could see gray uniforms working around back of the cooler toward the half-tracks.
I jammed a canister round into the recoilless. Canister was the descendant of grapeshot and had the same devastating effect. Chamonix fired through a window. The back blast created a great cloud of snow. I loaded a canister again. Chamonix fired. He was talking but I could no longer hear anything. The roar of the blasts had been too loud. I loaded again and he fired. He turned and said something but it sounded as if he were talking through a calliope. I began to load again but he tapped my arm and shook his head no.
I kicked open the door. The inside glowed brightly. A stove had fallen over and several bunks had caught fire. The place was a slaughterhouse. Grisly chunks of body and bone were smeared everywhere. I tripped over an ownerless boot. In one corner of the barracks I thought I saw something move and aimed to fire. A body tumbled to one side and a woman who had been beneath it rose calmly. She was naked and unmarked. Hard, dark circles had been etched beneath her eyes. I could tell she had been pretty a long time ago—a ballerina, perhaps. She kicked aside the body violently and reached for her prison clothes, which lay in a mound nearby. She looked Chamonix and me up and down with bitter defiance. Who were these grisly specters; masked, cloaked in deathly white, and splattered with blood? New jailers? Probably.
Chamonix found two other women weeping in a concrete-walled shower room. They’d all learned how to survive in this camp long before we arrived.
Outside, small-arms fire peppered from the cooler. Several officers in a rush for the half-tracks had been unable to make it past the cooler. So they had dug in. A few bodies sprawled in the snow outside the officers’ quarters. Puckins and Gurung had picked them off from their eyries. No more than four or five officers could have made it as far as the cooler.
A guard using two zeks as human shields moved out of the shelter of the cooler in the direction of the half-tracks. It was the beer-barrel sergeant. With his free hand he wrenched the prisoners between him and the guards’ barracks. Seconds later he flopped forward, leaving the two zeks bewildered. Puckins had, from on high, plinked the beer-barrel sergeant off with a single round. The zeks hesitated, then scurried out the gate into one of their barracks.
Wickersham, Kruger, and Matsuma had the Type 67 inside the guards’ barracks now and were considering whether to place it out a window or on the roof.
“Can’t return fire on the cooler. Might hit a prisoner,” someone said.
Kruger fell forward with a dark blue hole in his forehead. We ducked instinctively.
“Don’t bother. Just keep the fire aimed up over the cooler until Gurung and Puckins can work u
p behind the bastards.” Puckins and Gurung had already left the towers and were making a wide circle behind the barracks.
“They’ve stopped firing,” said Wickersham warily.
Three VOKhk officers in gymnasterka tunics hung out the cooler windows by their heels. Each had a prison spoon handle thrust deep below the corner of his jaw. All were decidedly dead. The zeks had settled old scores.
Two shadows raced out the inner fence gate toward the half-tracks.
“The recoilless,” I yelled. Matsuma and Chamonix grabbed the weapon and its ammo. Putting on our skis, we flashed through the gate. One VOKhk guard worked frantically to bring an RPK machine gun mounted in the half-track to bear, as the other started the engine. Chamonix kneeled and Matsuma loaded. The half-track blossomed into flame and the two guards—what was left of them—slumped forward, burning like candles.
Other than the ringing in my ears it was very quiet.
“Shall we,” Chamonix bellowed into my deafened ear, “attend to the liberation.”
“Look what we found.”
Gurung and Chief Puckins herded five Russian guards in front of them—the only survivors. I didn’t like the look in Matsuma’s eye. Giri again.
“Matsuma, gather up the four gang bosses and invite them to the commandant’s quarters. It’s time for that briefing you’ve prepared. Tell the other prisoners not to start running off on their own—we’re going to help them with an organized escape.”
It was better to keep Matsuma busy. The Japanese say that with some debts of honor one can only begin to pay one one-thousandth of the debt. I didn’t want him reducing the fraction’s denominator.
Matsuma turned to a group of prisoners standing uneasily on a barracks’ stoop. Their features were a map of the Soviet Union—Yakut, Kazakh, Uzbek, Belorussian, Armenian, Ukrainian, Russian. One Mongolian girl reminded me of Keiko. Ivan bestowed his favors with equanimity. The USSR is an equal-opportunity oppressor.
“We come as friends…,” he began.
I turned to Puckins. “Lock them up in the cooler. Some of their friends should be by to release them shortly. Then take some of the C-4 and blow out the insides of the radio shack after you pull those items we need. That way Ivan won’t realize what’s missing.
“One other thing, Chief. Have someone smash the radios in the half-tracks. Then have Gurung and Wickersham gather up any ammo they can find. We may need it.”
“Right, sir.”
He returned in half an hour.
“Here they are, the crypto assembly and the code books.” He held out several looseleaf binders and a mass of electronic circuitry about the size of a typewriter. “The charges are set.”
“Good. Very good.”
The radio shack erupted in fiery splinters, shattering the false dawn. Tiny bits of knobs, wires, and metal plate hummed down around us. What was left of it burned in indifferent competition with the guards’ barracks/pyre. Prisoners, in a festive mood, milled about the two bonfires. In Siberia, holidays were where you found them.
CHAPTER 24
“Who are you?”
The four gang bosses sat in the center of the commandant’s office. We stood along its sides. Light flickered from a kerosene lantern onto the commandant’s well-appointed oak desk. Matsuma and Gurung stood in front of them without their exposure masks.
Matsuma pealed off his white overblouse to reveal a green quilted jacket with red collar flashes but devoid of insignia. He moved stiffly. I guessed the hit to the body armor had broken a rib or two. “We are soldiers of the People’s Republic of China. We are liberating all the concentration camps of the Russian imperialists in this area and seizing the Trans Siberian Railway.”
“Are we your captives?” asked an Armenian gang boss with a heavy beard.
“By no means. We have admired the courage of you who have challenged the Kremlin adventurists. You are free to go. In fact, that is why we have asked you here. One gang will divide up the camp’s food and supplies into four equal parts. Then, by lot, the other gangs will be allowed to choose which quarter they want. It will be up to each gang boss to parcel up the supplies among his individual gang members. You should take the three remaining half-tracks and the train. That’ll give you a head start. Head in different directions for about half a day, then abandon them and split up. We figure a VOKhk relief detachment will get here by rail within twenty-four hours.”
A straw-haired old boss with deep-sunken eyes stood up. “Can you help us get into China?”
“No,” Matsuma stated firmly. “We have liberated you, that is all we can do. Escape for us, in the event our army does not succeed, will be difficult enough.”
“How can we possibly survive?”
“I don’t know. All I can say is winter is nearly over and this is a large, sparsely settled region. With the guards’ portion added in, you’re going to have more food than you would have had otherwise. Anyone who wishes can of course stay in the camp until the raid has been discovered and the new guards arrive.”
“Not bloody likely,” another gang boss said, then spit for emphasis. It left a dark spot on the commandant’s Persian rug.
“They don’t look very Chinese to me. Some of these men are too big, even for northern Chinese,” a short gang boss with Mongolian features and no teeth said, pointing to Chamonix and Wickersham, “and why are they still wearing masks?”
Matsuma looked to me.
“Tell them we freedom fighters of the People’s Republic do not observe class or race distinctions. Ours is an international struggle.” I said to Matsuma in Japanese. He translated.
They guffawed.
“And it is in your self-interest for us to be Chinese. If we are Chinese, the Kremlin must order a border-long mobilization. If any zek reveals to anyone we are not, then the Kremlin can concentrate all its resources into catching us and recapturing you. Convince your zek gangs that we are all dog-eating Chinamen and be content. There is an ancient Chinese proverb: ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’”
They nodded understanding.
“One more thing,” I said. “Where is Special Prisoner Seven Thirty-four?… Vyshinsky?”
“That goner? He’s in sick bay.”
The old man raised himself up on his elbows. There was no color in his drawn features and his eyes were rheumy. Those pallbearer’s eyes.
“You’re from Kurganov, aren’t you?” he started timidly. “I’ve been expecting you.”
Only a few zeks remained in the sick bay. Most of the ailing had been carried to the half-tracks by their friends. Outside I could hear the bustling of prisoners dividing up the supplies.
“Yes…how did you know?”
“Myshka. Myshka told me.”
It was clear he felt uncomfortable with direct communication. His life had been built around double meanings and oblique references.
“Myshka told you? Here?”
“A queer twist of fate brought him here—just a few weeks ago. We were in the same work gang. He died here…just a few weeks ago.”
Vyshinsky fell back onto his cot. His breathing was heavy and erratic. He couldn’t have lasted much longer here.
“He told me Kurganov had considered rescuing me. The young man said it was a useless hope. He hadn’t had time to obtain some special information there in Moscow for you people outside.”
Vyshinsky’s voice had a mournful, wheezing quality to it. “He wasn’t made to survive in these camps—too dreamy, too proud. He was a poet, you know. Funny how those literary ones are—either they’re like Kurganov and survive forever, or they’re like Myshka and get their brains kicked out in a matter of weeks.”
He coughed and his pipe-cleaner body shook uncontrollably.
“All right, let’s get you bundled up for transport. You’re going on a sleigh ride.”
“Troika?” he said with a frail smirk.
“Ahkio. Not as enjoyable by half.”
Wickersham lifted Vyshinsky from the cot effortlessly.
By midmorning we were ready to evacuate the camp. There was enough talent among the zeks to drive the train and the half-tracks. Probably enough to drive a space shuttle.
The riders of one half-track had broken into the commandant’s liquor supply and were passing a bottle around. They sang bittersweet Russian folksongs in a haunting harmony.
A wizened old Ukrainian whirled through one of those Slavic dances, where the dancer alternately squats and kicks with his arms crossed, on the bed of the vehicle. He whirled and kicked, and kicked and whirled like some sad and marvelous mechanical toy. The old zek drew from some invisible source of energy.
As a group they were no worse off than before. There was little else I could do. The decision to flee had been theirs. My inexpert opinion was that the majority would be dead within a month. In any event they would die free…with hope. Who really knew what their chances were? After all, it was their country.
Chamonix stepped forward and saluted. “All secured and ready for departure.”
The gang bosses assumed Matsuma was in command of our party. Each walked up and gave him a hug. That was Lutjen’s, Alvarez’s, and Kruger’s memorial. For three good unfaltering men there would be no other.
We skied east, avoiding our old trail. Clouds were building in the west at an alarming rate. The barometer had dropped, indicating an impending weather change. The temperature hovered at five degrees below. Kick, slide.
In the early afternoon, I heard the drone of a plane overhead. It was a troop transport with four propellers. Paratroops.
The plane flew to the camp a couple ridges behind us and circled twice. Then it spilled out a chain of parachutes. It took less than a minute to deploy one hundred Soviet paratroops. The paratroopers wore white camouflage uniforms similar to ours. Suspended from their harnesses were skis and equipment bags. Their ’chutes drifted lazily behind the last ridge.
I had assumed we would have more time to make our escape. I had also assumed that we would be pursued by prison guards rather then elite shock troops. Over the years Ivan had claimed to have invented many things. He truly did invent airborne military operations. Ivan has seven airborne divisions—Uncle Sam, one.
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