As before, to feel the coffee radiate its warmth inside him was a pleasure beyond words, as if his body had been fully drained of energy but was slowly recharging. He lapped up the oatmeal before it could go cold, then sipped the coffee slowly to savor its warmth until the last drop was gone. He tucked the bread inside his coveralls for later, unsure when the next meal might come.
* * *
For the next three days, the march pressed eastward along the North Canol Road, as did the storm. By day and by night, the trucks led the way with the beams from their headlamps diffused and dimmed by falling snow. Hour by hour, the prisoners struggled on, obeying the insistent pull of the cable, their boots slipping in the churned up snow. And every hour, one or two men gained release in death.
The flanking guards changed like clockwork every ninety minutes, as the relieved guards jogged forward to seek shelter in the trucks and those relieving them jumped out to take their places, all without any slackening in the convoy’s pace. Time after time, the prisoners reached the top of an exposed ridge and felt the wind strike them full in the face, shrieking like a chorus of demons and making it nearly impossible to open their eyes. Each time Linder felt his face go numb, he breathed into a glove and held the glove against his nose and cheeks to ward off frostbite. He scarcely noticed the rugged beauty of the land, rarely lifting his eyes long enough to view the imposing crags and peaks that stretched along the horizon or the frozen rivers that resembled winding highways to nowhere.
Beyond the town of Ross River, all conventional road signs had been removed and replaced by mile markers planted at ten-kilometer intervals bearing only the distance from some unknown reference point, thus offering little help to anyone who might find himself traveling without a map. These markers drew the prisoners forward, hour after agonized hour, climbing more often than descending, through forests, hills, and valleys, and past the hulks of many a derelict vehicle. By reference to these markers, Linder kept tally of the distance covered each day, generally about fifty kilometers, and the trip’s cumulative distance.
Linder surmised that such prisoner convoys must pass this way regularly because every night the lead truck managed to find a sheltered spot sufficiently large to accommodate the entire convoy. Sometimes, the spots were already enclosed by barbed wire, and a few held FEMA trailers to shelter officers and senior enlisted men. Linder also deduced that the convoy’s commanding officer must be under orders to deliver the maximum number of able-bodied prisoners on arrival because, as the storm worsened, the convoy’s pace slackened and extra care was taken to avoid unnecessary casualties.
As the elevation rose and nighttime temperatures sank, the guards led foraging parties into the woods to gather firewood. Each party of ten was permitted to build a campfire and line the floor of its snow-dugout with pine branches. On the second day, coffee stops became more frequent and by the third day, double rations of oatmeal were doled out at breakfast and doubles of soup at dinner.
Despite these concessions, each morning when the truck horns blared their crude reveille before dawn and guards circulated among the prisoners’ dugouts with portable bullhorns to herd the bleary-eyed men into formation for roll call, orderlies probed snowdrifts with staves and shovels. Most men who failed at first to crawl out from their snow caves responded to these jabs and kicks, but for those who did not, the survivors were pressed into work teams to retrieve their dead comrades’ frozen corpses. Once the names of the deceased had been crossed off the roster, their remains were piled naked along the roadside without any form of identification. With so many guards standing watch, the officer in charge was not overly concerned with the risk of anyone escaping. Any prisoner who evaded the guards and the dogs still faced astronomical odds in the wild without a store of food or a source of warmth.
As Linder stood in formation for roll call on the fourth morning, he examined his fellow prisoners closely in the harsh glare of the trucks’ headlights. They ranged in age from boys in their late teens to men in their sixties. If those aboard his C-130 were at all representative of prisoners on other aircraft, most of his fellow marchers were white-collar workers who had finished college or earned advanced degrees, lived in cities, spent their days in offices and, if they exercised at all, confined it to a few hours per week of walking, jogging, swimming or working out at the gym. Few, he guessed, were accustomed to missing a meal and, if they did, probably made up for it with a snack. Now, having been idle and malnourished for weeks or months during interrogation, they were scrawny replicas of their former selves.
For the older and less fit prisoners, death was not far off, and some seemed to sense it. Linder pitied these prisoners but avoided them for fear that any help he gave them might reduce his own chance of survival. By the end of the fourth day, Linder estimated that the cumulative death toll had exceeded fifteen percent of prisoners and might approach twenty by the following day. For some, death came suddenly and without warning. One middle-aged man of slender build, who stood ahead of Linder in the breakfast line, keeled over like a bird falling off a branch in a hard frost. One shallow cough, a barely audible gasp, a tiny white cloud of breath that hung for a moment in the air, and the man’s head fell onto his chest without his hands leaving his sides.
More than once during the early days of the march, Linder reached the limits of his endurance and questioned whether the short and desolate life he would face at his destination could have any purpose other than as purgatory for his past wrongs. Most of that time, Linder barely said a word to anyone, being completely absorbed with the necessity to stay alive and move forward. Any sense of curiosity about his fellow man or his environment yielded to the twin imperatives of conserving energy and maintaining core body temperature. All around him he saw others withdraw similarly into their private worlds of suffering, each facing the same desperate trial, but not all endowed with an equal capacity to endure.
Linder’s special gift for survival, it seemed, stemmed from an unusually low metabolic rate, which was an unexpected side effect of crash dieting in his youth that now enabled him to conserve precious energy for the road. But unlike certain elite athletes and warriors, whose phenomenal stamina also allowed them to keep their wits even when deprived of food, water, or sleep, Linder devolved into a snarling, unthinking beast whenever faced with even moderate deprivation of his physical needs.
Until now, Linder had largely ignored the young man who shared the cable with him, although he could not help but admire his silent determination. By the third day, it became apparent that his partner was not mentally unstable, as Linder had originally feared. After breakfast on the fourth day, when the weather continued to deteriorate, Linder caught the man’s eye and they exchanged resigned looks as low-flying clouds of leaden hue swept down from the northwest. Linder would have spoken then but his face was too frozen to utter anything intelligible. Talking required too much effort, in any case. So, he did what came naturally and tuned his mind back to Channel Oblivion.
As the morning wore on, even though the two men did not exchange a word, Linder nonetheless felt that he had somehow gained strength from his partner’s example. Occasionally after that, one of the men would glance at the other and receive a grim smile in return, communicated only through the eyes, since their bearded faces were covered at all times by their fleece balaclavas and a coating of rime.
During the lunch break, an older member of their squad, who had been struggling to keep pace, refused to rise even after repeated kicks and truncheon blows. Losing patience with the old man, the guards stripped him naked, bound him hand and foot, and left him moaning in a snowbank to freeze.
“Don’t let it get to you,” the young man said quietly to Linder, as if reading his mind. “Where we’re going, those granddads wouldn’t last, anyway.“
“I understand,” Linder replied. “But some of them aren’t all that old.”
“Young or old, doesn’t matter,” his young partner observed. “Whoever gives up, dies. The old ones just q
uit sooner.”
“What about you? How much more of this can you take?”
“Whatever they throw at me. I hate them too much to die.”
“Me too,” Linder lied. “My name is Warren,” he added after a long silence. “What’s yours?”
“Rhee,” the younger man responded.
“Rhee,” Linder repeated. “Is that your first name?”
“No, it’s Mark. But everybody calls me Rhee.”
“What’s your sentence?”
“Ten years for escaping the Chinese in Manchuria. And another ten for escaping the Unionists in Anchorage.”
“Really?” Linder questioned. “You fought in Manchuria?”
“The camps up here are full of us.”
“But how could that be? You guys were heroes...”
“Maybe so. But they corralled us, anyway. Maybe the President-for-Life was afraid we’d talk about what happened over there.”
Before Linder could ask any more questions, the guards ordered the prisoners to their feet and rained blows on anyone who failed to rise.
Shortly after lunch a howling wind swept in from the north, bringing dull gray clouds scudding lower and lower over the hilltops, until swirling eddies of snow enveloped the column and slowed it to a crawl. Linder shuffled forward blindly, head down and eyes closed, taking his cues from the steady pull of the cable. At last, during the late-afternoon rest break, the trucks formed the usual semicircle at a sheltered spot along a bend in the frozen river that paralleled the road. But the winds continued to tear at the men and carried off any loose snow, making it all but impossible to dig their usual windbreaks and light campfires.
Instead, the prisoners massed together to stay warm, nudging and prodding into wakefulness anyone who nodded off to sleep. All night the wind blew and the snow fell while the men clung tightly to one other and stomped their numbed feet to save them from frostbite. Only the field kitchens, which operated throughout the night to serve the usual sugary coffee, kept the death toll within usual bounds.
On the fifth morning of the convoy, Linder awoke from a fitful sleep to discover that the storm had abated enough for the prisoners to dig the trucks out of their snowdrifts and trample a path ahead of the lead truck to allow the column to move. Linder helped bury the dead in a mound of snow and said a silent prayer over their bodies. It was the first time he had prayed in years but he felt better afterward.
Because of the steadily mounting losses, the officer-in-charge went through roll call twice. When they resumed the journey at last, progress was extremely slow and guards sometimes joined the prisoners in pushing the trucks through deep snowdrifts and up steep slippery grades. The air was so frigid that it burned in Linder’s lungs and made the snow crunch and squeak underfoot. Linder cursed aloud at the pain and for a moment wished his heart would simply stop beating and put him out his misery. After four days on the road, not knowing how much further he had to travel had become an added source of torment. Much like the psychological effect of the indeterminate prison sentence rather than a term of years, Linder felt he would prefer to die now, even if the destination were around the next bend, rather than face trudging on day after day without knowing when it would end.
But, mercifully, that feeling faded in the predawn of the following day, when Linder heard the crack of a tree limb breaking overhead from the force of the wind and looked up to find an arctic sky filled with more stars than he could have imagined. He spent the next hour searching out familiar constellations. Later, when the sun rose at the end of the first march of the day, the column emerged onto a plateau covered with slender larches that Linder found breathtakingly beautiful.
By mid-morning, the highway re-crossed the frozen river it had been tracking and the column veered onto a side road. Linder sensed excitement among the guards, and before long rumors spread among the prisoners that they were approaching their final destination. The pace of the lead truck quickened as if eager to make up for lost time. After lunch, they marched four more hours without a rest.
It was late evening when the column passed through a dense stand of white pine and descended onto a rocky plateau, where Linder spotted lights in the distance. As they grew nearer, he saw swirls of mist and smoke rising from a sturdy log stockade of the kind he had seen only in old western movies, measuring some four hundred meters wide by six hundred meters long. On the near side of the stockade stood a massive rolling gate and, from his elevated vantage point, he noticed a tall barbed wire fence enclosing the stockade to create a peripheral strip of no-man’s land. At each corner of the stockade and at hundred-meter intervals stood guard towers looking like birds’ nests perched on stilts. At a window in the nearest tower, Linder spotted a pair of guards peering out at the column from behind the protruding barrel of a machine gun.
Inside the stockade, he observed a haphazard assortment of modern fabric-covered Quonset huts and primitive log cabins around a vacant parade ground in the front half of the camp. The rear half, separated from the front by a double-walled barbed-wire fence, appeared largely empty but for three rows of elongated log lodges arrayed against the stockade’s rear wall.
As the column of some five hundred exhausted prisoners passed through the gate, scarcely a word was spoken. After nearly five thousand air miles and another hundred and fifty miles on foot, their journey was finally over. Few cared to contemplate that one man in five had not reached their destination.
Once inside the parade ground, the prisoners were detached from their respective cables and allowed to gather around a dozen or more log bonfires set ablaze in advance of their arrival. For the first time since leaving the airport at Ross River, Linder felt a powerful heat penetrate and warm him to the core. He approached as close as he dared to the leaping flames, then sat cross-legged on the ground, his head drooping onto his chest as he succumbed to sleep. But his sleep turned out to be short-lived. For having seated himself in the inner ring of men gathered around the fire, his front and back alternately froze and thawed in the fire’s strong glow and from time to time he had to fend off those in the outer circle who coveted his spot.
Despite the jostling, Linder felt oddly light-headed as he stamped his feet against frostbite and waited for the field kitchens to prepare the last meal of the trip. Not even his physical misery lessened his euphoria as he grasped that the terrible journey was over.
S8
You die first. I’ll die later. Camp saying
LATE DECEMBER, CAMP N-320, YUKON
Linder eyed the rows of log lodges at the compound’s rear end greedily as wafts of smoke scattered in the wind from their sheet-metal chimneys. He hoped against hope that enough vacant beds would be available for every new man to claim his own berth. Some lodges looked freshly built, though all were of the same design, about eight meters wide by about forty long, with doors facing south for shelter against the northwest wind.
Linder estimated that each lodge contained two rows of about twenty triple-deck bunk beds, for a total of more than a hundred prisoners. With three rows of six lodges already built, existing bunks would accommodate more than two thousand prisoners. Depending on the current occupancy rate, it might be a squeeze to take in another five hundred men, even if some of them doubled up or slept on the floor. But lying on the floor of a heated lodge still beat digging a hole in the snow. Linder let out a deep sigh of relief.
The clang of a hammer on a steel rail soon brought the men to their feet again, filing past the field kitchens to collect dinner. Tonight the stew seemed thicker than usual, having been enriched with meat from a caribou the escorts had shot earlier in the day. In addition to their usual soup and bread, each man received a foil-wrapped meal bar from the convoy’s reserve stores, probably to avoid hauling them back to Ross River. In any event, Linder could not remember being as satisfied with a meal since his arrest.
When at last the field kitchens followed the escort trucks out the gate, Linder returned to his bonfire to stare into the dancing flames while
lifting his head from time to time to peer through double-walled barbed-wire fence toward the log lodges. A fresh wind swept down from the north, showering him with sparks from the bonfire’s glowing embers.
The final roll call of the day took place along the barbed wire at the yard’s rear. The guards, dressed in the blue-white winter camouflage uniforms of the Corrective Labor Administration, arranged the new arrivals in blocks of a hundred while a squad of record-keepers consulted their clipboards. They were still apparently sorting out the prisoner roster when an officer entered the yard, flanked on each side by a guard with a submachine gun.
“Attention!” an orderly announced through a portable bullhorn. “The Deputy Commandant will address you now.”
The Deputy was a tall and powerfully built man of around forty, dressed in an officer’s sheepskin overcoat and a military peaked cap. According to the veteran prisoners who had been working among the newcomers to prepare the roster for roll call, the Deputy’s nickname was “Wolfman.” Now Linder could see why. The officer’s shaggy black beard seemed to cover his entire face but for his eyes, with a heavy unibrow nearly connecting to thick sideburns. More than that, he had a flat, upturned nose with flaring nostrils and abnormally large canine teeth.
The Deputy climbed onto a stump and gazed down on the prisoners, inspecting them like a wolf surveying a herd of grazing deer.
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