“I’m sorry.…”
“Cut it out. If you wanted to screw us over you would have! You didn’t.”
He grinned halfheartedly.
“Chief, here take this,” Wickersham said. It was an old coin with a square hole in the center. “It’s for luck.”
Then Wickersham walked away. He began picking up paratroopers’ rifles mechanically. One by one he smashed them into useless chunks of wood and steel against a large tree. His eyes were moist.
As were mine.
An hour or so later we heard an explosion behind us, up the valley. Whether he had taken a Russki or two, or whether he had just passed out and taken pressure off the grenade spoon, I would never know.
Chamonix placed his hand on my shoulder. “In a way, our betrayals have something in common. We men of causes and violence exist in their eyes to be used, expended, or betrayed. Oh, their glorious manipulations through things or people! The only ones we can trust are one another. Now they want to use and destroy that small bit of solace, too.”
Puckins didn’t owe me a thing. Ackert was another matter.
The fresh snow drove down in large, awkward flakes, as if churned in some giant glass paperweight. The visibility was fifteen feet, which, given the speed of our withdrawal, meant we were skiing blind. With the snow and direction of the wind, it was understandable why Gurung didn’t notice the dark forms ahead of us. The forms congealed into a herd of reindeer, the cattle of Siberia. Nearby an Evenki drover and his son loomed out of the swirling snow. Unfortunately they saw us at the same moment we saw them.
Instantly they stood at the convergence of five gunsights. Chamonix looked back at me. He had already sized up the situation. The Evenki drover could give pursuing Russian patrols details of our strength and direction of movement. Additionally, none of us was wearing an exposure mask, so the detected presence of Caucasians might upset our China ruse.
Chamonix ran his finger across his throat quizzically. The cold, rational, old-school decision would be to dispatch any witnesses. Chamonix had been through a rough school in the Congo and knew the price of leaving talking trail markers. Shaking my head, I beckoned to Matsuma. After a few false starts, it was soon clear these Evenki did not speak Russian. Fortunately Matsuma knew their language from his early fishing days and his stay with the Evenki after his escape.
The drover and his son had at first assumed we were a Soviet patrol, since the Chinese and Russian winter camouflage uniforms were very similar. Our wounded, and our worn-out condition, aroused their suspicions. They questioned Matsuma, and at the same time he questioned them. The drover and his son huddled together. The father’s face was round with flattened cheekbones. The son, about ten, looked like an Eskimo cherub. Though his father was transmitting caution signals, the boy was overwhelmed by the curiosity these white-suited strangers aroused.
I pulled Matsuma aside. “What do you think?”
“Poor, hardworking Evenki drovers. They get nothing from Roshiajins but a visit from the agriculture commissioner once a year and many publications—which they can’t read but burn well—on reindeer husbandry. They need all this kind of help like they need a ten-kilo block of ice. Kremlin, to them, is as remote as Argentina.”
I studied their faces for any sign of duplicity.
“Frazer Commander, I will tell him we are deserters and corrective labor camp escapees, all right? They are not to mention anything to any soldiers unless asked. I will request they give us food. We need food, rest, shelter, many things. Without them escape can still be very difficult. Vyshinsky is very weak, ne?”
I nodded. Chamonix nodded in agreement. He had fulfilled his duty as devil’s advocate.
Matsuma talked with the drover for a long time. Finally the father indicated that we should all follow him. His son trudged alongside us, his eyes wide and inquiring. We moved into an open area in the taiga and soon I lost all sense of direction. It was reassuring to know that if the snow didn’t cover our tracks the reindeer herd would. In less than an hour, we reached a deserted cabin ornately trimmed with Siberian gingerbread.
Matsuma searched in his jacket for his survival kit. When he found it, he pulled out several ruble notes. As he did this he winked at me. The drover deftly palmed the notes, pulled off his cap, and said something with a little hop.
“We are welcome to share this humble dwelling with him. He plans to graze his reindeer here for a week or so. By then his brother will have returned with his dogsled. You can trust him, I think. He has no use for Roshiajin, either.”
We brushed the snow from our boots, clothing, and equipment and entered the cabin. It had no windowpanes—either they had been taken out or never installed originally. Slat shutters, closed against the wind, helped to keep some heat within the cabin—but not much. The drover and his boy had a pile of reindeer hides in one corner, which they used for bedding. A small-hearthed fireplace that did not draw correctly provided the only heat. The fireplace was constructed in the massive Russian style. Its flue did not rise straight up but wound upward in the ancient labyrinthine manner of tradition. In this efficient way each brick managed to capture some heat and radiate it into the cabin. As time had destroyed portions of the cabin’s wall and roof, and its windows were nonexistent, it was a wonder this fireplace could keep the cabin habitable at all. The drover lent us a few hides but we found the best protection against the cold was huddling together like beach seagulls on a rainy night.
In contrast to our trek toward the camp, when we hadn’t posted sentries, this time I decided to use them. I had three reasons for doing this. First, we were closely pursued. Second, this wasn’t a camouflaged encampment. Third, the watch-spring technique only helped in situations where fresh snow hadn’t concealed your tracks. I divided the party into two watches. One watch would maintain a lookout while the other watch tried to steal some sleep. Since the visibility outside had dropped to less than five feet, I saw no reason to post sentries outside the cabin. They could see just as much peering between the shutter sluts.
As the first group prepared to sleep, Vyshinsky spoke up, still bundled in ahkio blankets.
“Who are you men?”
Chamonix, closest, responded tiredly, “Friends.”
“You are not Chinese…or Russian, that is clear.…” He raised his head, feebly looking us over with his pallbearer’s eyes. “In whose country’s service do you fight?”
The morose Frenchman fingered his bandaged shoulder. “No country’s.”
“No country’s? You are bandits…no, wrong word. There is a discipline here. You are mercenaries?” he asked tentatively.
“Yes, I suppose you could say that,” he replied with growing irritation. Wickersham turned away from his window.
“You do this thing for money?”
“Sure, you know us mercenaries—anything for a price. A well-known type, just a ragtag mob of misfits who couldn’t make it doing anything else. Unloved losers, martial orphans.”
“Yeah, no momma, no poppa, no Uncle Sammy,” Wickersham recited acidly, “the scum of the earth in uniforms cammy.”
“‘What God abandoned, these defended/And saved the sum of things for pay,’” I added.
Vyshinsky realized he had made a mistake.
“Well, as one misfit to five others,” he said gently, “I’m grateful to you all.”
The ninth day wore by slowly. In the faint glow of the fireplace I saw Wickersham wave the Evenki boy over to him. He pointed to the bone amulet the boy wore around his neck on a hide thong. Then he pulled an object from under the bottom of his trouser leg. It was a boot knife with a double-edged, stainless-steel blade and a micarta handle. The boy shied back and then realized the knife was being offered in trade.
The boy picked up the knife with the same calculated indifference he had probably seen his father use bartering with other drovers. He cut a thin strip of hide using the knife and then inspected the edge. He hefted it in his hand. He tapped the handle against a joist. He mea
sured it with his palm, horse-trader style. He shook his head. The knife was too small.
“Hell’s bells,” Wickersham grumbled, and then pulled a flier’s survival mirror from his breast pocket. It was made from some unbreakable material and it had a clear glass peep sight in the center of a Morse code decal on the back. The boy inspected it without returning the knife. He studied his reflection in it. Wickersham showed how to aim it for signaling by using the peep sight. The boy handed him the amulet, keeping both the knife and the mirror.
“Gave away my good-luck piece awhile ago,” he said to himself. “Kid trades harder than a Singapore Chinaman, but I just had to have that neckpiece. Can’t afford to be without a charm now. No, don’t want to run out of luck this far from home.”
I could feel everyone tense. This talk of luck put everyone on edge.
CHAPTER 26
It snowed until late the tenth day, the day of our first scheduled submarine pickup. We set out that night for the coast. We were still about a day and a half’s travel from where we’d buried the kayaks. We would have to travel as far as we could by night and then burrow into the snow during the day. I dreaded this impending day bivouac in the snow. We would be without tents or sleeping bags.
Another matter made me anxious. The submarine was scheduled to be on station to pick us up at midnight of the tenth day and if we didn’t show, to try again at a different location on the eleventh day. We weren’t going to make that first pickup. Making the second pickup would call for fine timing. We must make the second pickup. I didn’t expect the Korean sub to wait around for us if we didn’t.
We skied through the night as rapidly as we could, and when day came we fashioned snow caves. We crawled into three separate caves and waited for dark. One slow-burning candle and two bodies per cave brought the interior temperature of each up into the high thirties. No one slept much. It was too cold, anyway the constant drone of SU-19 jets overhead dispelled any thought of rest. The jets flew search patterns in and out of the surrounding ridges. Twice, pairs of jets cracked by right overhead.
“Flamin’ jets are up and down more often than a hooker’s skivvies,” Wickersham observed with typical hostility. For the most part we shivered in silence.
That night we covered the last miles to the coast. By some freak of nature the temperature rose above freezing. We hit the coast north of our original landing point and had to ski south until we found the stand of stunted birch that marked the kayaks. We departed quickly, abandoning a kayak and not bothering to pull on our dry suits.
After a brief portage, we found a freshly formed channel and slipped our three remaining kayaks between the masses of ice. The rise in temperature had brought fog with it. It seemed we were never very far from fog. This stuff rolled by in uneven patches, which at no time permitted visibility of more than one hundred yards. The mist that glided over the ice fields was like smoke passing over some burned, broken, forgotten place.
With Vyshinsky tucked into Chamonix’s kayak, we brought the kayaks into single file. We began to paddle up the narrow channel, which opened into a larger channel, and then, we hoped, open water. Unfortunately we were not moving as fast as I had hoped, though it appeared we would just make the rendezvous.
Matsuma heard it first—the slow gurgling noise of marine engines at near idle. Carefully laying our paddles across the kayak thwarts, we drifted and waited. If we kept still perhaps the danger would pass. Matsuma opened his end of the spray skirt, reached down to the recoilless, and hefted it to his shoulder. I searched the fog hoping that the noise was coming from a not-too-watchful fishing boat. The chances, however, of meeting a civilian powerboat in these waters were slim.
Then, abruptly, I could trace the outline of a Russian P-class torpedo boat. And then a second P-class. For a second their silhouettes were clear, then they faded back into the fog. I armed several high-explosive projectiles. Armor-piercing rounds would just go in one side of their thin-skinned hulls and out the other. Riding as low in the water as we did, with the mist and icy backdrop concealing us, we still had a chance. I agonized over whether we should initiate fire. There was only one possible answer once they began their turn into our channel. Now they lay between us and the open sea.
Matsuma and I rotated the bow of the kayak forty-five degrees so that the back blast of the recoilless wouldn’t hit the kayaks behind us.
“Get the rear boat’s pilothouse,” I whispered. Matsuma studied the sights. With the rear torpedo boat out of control, neither could turn or back out of the narrow channel. Then, if I could load and Matsuma could resight fast enough with 25-millimeter and .51-caliber fire raining down on us, we might have a chance.
“Ready?” Matsuma said without turning his head.
“Fire in the hole,” I yelled, and tapped him on the shoulder.
Bawhummp.
I looked up to see the pilothouse on the second torpedo boat had flattened over to one side like a folded top hat.
Fifty-one-caliber fire began to rake the ice floes around us. The 25-millimeter mounts fixed without aiming. They weren’t sure where we were. The lead boat fired a torpedo blind and it boiled under all three boats, exploding a hundred yards behind us into ice.
The wet cold made my fingers clumsy as I loaded the second round. We had to keep the lead torpedo boat from transmitting a call for assistance.
“Fire in the hole.”
Bawhummp.
The pilothouse of the lead boat burst open at its seams. The helmsman on the O.O.D. were tossed high into the air.
The deck gunner on the rear boat had the right direction but the wrong elevation now. Rounds whined overhead. The twin 25-millimeter mounts were making wild slashes at the ice fields. All their guns winked fire without stop. My ears were ringing again. I jammed another round in. The lead boat was beginning to turn, using only its engines for steering.
Bawhummp.
The lead boat exploded into a burning hulk, its fuel tanks ablaze. It lit the area and melted away the fog. The deck gunner on the remaining boat could now see us clearly, though the crews of the 25-millimeter mounts were still firing blind from their shielded positions. I loaded. The deck gunner had us now and stitched a burst into Wickersham and Gurung’s kayak. He placed rounds below their waterline.
Bawhummp.
Matsuma had rushed the shot. It blew away a section of deck and the deck gunner fell away from his machine gun. I loaded. Another figure darted out of the hull for it and swiveled the muzzle toward us once again.
Bawhummp.
The second torpedo boat broke into two flaming halves and burned intensely. All that remained of the first boat was a smoking hole in the latticework of free ice. The stench of burning diesel fuel was overpowering.
We had no way of knowing if either boat had transmitted. Gurung had lost a chunk of upper thigh to a .51-caliber bullet. It was all he could do to muster the strength to stuff bits of his torn jacket into the bullet holes below the waterline. I could tell he was close to spiraling into shock. He couldn’t paddle. Wickersham taped over the other holes and tied together the splintered thwart braces, then bailed the kayak dry.
The men were at the end of their ropes. We felt weak and rickety from the unrelenting strain. Each kayak crew had to watch the other to make sure no one fell asleep or collapsed unnoticed.
Our second pickup point was near a stone reef. We paddled to where I figured it ought to be. It wasn’t. I wondered if it mattered, we were already two hours late for the rendezvous.
We paddled in an ever-growing circle until we found the reef. Everything seemed vague and hazy. It took me ten minutes to make thirty-second decisions. Was it exhaustion or hypothermia, and did it really matter anymore? The submarine was nowhere in sight. We were overdue. By rights we would never see the submarine again. I decided not to decide what to do next. We secured a grappling hook between two icy bits of rock on the reef, rafted together, and slept beneath the blanket of fog. If we were going to be discovered we were too expose
d and weary now to resist.
It had turned cold again by the time I awoke.
We bobbed in the low chop off the reef in the predawn light. We had missed our primary and secondary rendezvous. Earlier, during the briefing aboard the sub, I had noticed Commander Cho had only half-heartedly acknowledged my mention of a secondary rendezvous. People who missed their primary did so for a reason and seldom made their secondary. I wouldn’t be surprised if the submarine was cruising the Sea of Japan now.
“There! There! It’s over there. I am seeing it very clear, there.” Gurung pointed north. There was nothing there.
The effect of strain and fatigue on the minds of men adrift in small boats was well known. Sometimes only one man was affected, often there were group delusions. That would be the final humiliation, to go out in a series of phantom ship chases across the Sea of Okhotsk.
“Take it easy, you sure you saw something over there?”
“Yes, being right over at the edge of the fog bank. Right.…” He pointed again and began to feel foolish. He looked down at his wound. “Well, I guess…”
“No, he was wrong. It was over that way!”
Now Wickersham. Was this how it was going to end? I tried to follow his outstretched arm. I had trouble concentrating.
Then, like some plumber’s sea monster, the dull black periscope cut the sea, leaving a feather of white foam. It headed straight for us, then surfaced. It lay dead in the water not more than a few hundred yards away. Though it remained stationary, it seemed to move in and out of the fog, sometimes disappearing altogether.
In the distance I could hear a high-pitched hum. At first I thought it came from the submarine. It grew louder. Then as it drew nearer I gasped in recognition and dug deeply with my paddle.
“We have to make it to the sub—now! Fast as we can make it. Dig in. Chamonix, you’re first aboard with Vyshinsky. Just get him aboard, forget the gear.…”
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