“Yo, anybody, who threw the first punch?” the guard asked the onlookers. But no one answered.
“Okay. Have it your way,” he told them. “It’ll be the disciplinary squad for both of you. Now, on your feet!”
Linder felt the sting of cold metal against his wrists as the guard handcuffed him and spun him around.
“Wait a minute, Sergeant,” came Yost’s voice. “Why are you punishing both men? The young buck started it; take him and let the other one go. We’re short of men as it is.”
“Holzer wouldn’t like that, Charlie,” Rivera objected. “He’ll want them both.”
“Never mind, I’ll straighten it out with Holzer later,” Yost assured him. “Meanwhile, please uncuff this man and get the troublemaker out of here.”
When Linder’s hands were free, the site supervisor took him aside.
“That Korean kid is insane, you know,” Yost told him the moment they were out of earshot from the others. “I hear he was a fine soldier. Two Middle East tours. But the Russian War really messed him up. Do you know he escaped once already from a camp in Alaska?”
Linder shook his head. He remembered Rhee saying he had been sentenced to ten years for escaping the Unionists in Anchorage, but he hadn’t taken it literally.
“Well, I suspect that Rhee’s run through most of his nine lives by now,” Yost observed. “If he survives the punishment squad, I suggest you steer clear of him.”
“I’ll do that,” Linder answered.
“You’ve got an unusual accent. Where are you from?” Yost continued, to Linder’s surprise.
“I grew up in Ohio.”
“Oh, yeah?” Yost asked. “What part?”
“Cleveland.”
“Where? East Side?”
“Lyndhurst.”
“Brush High?”
“No, I went away to boarding school. But my father taught science at Brush. His name was Ivan Linder.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. You wouldn’t be Ivan and Rose’s boy, would you?” Yost pressed. He grinned when Linder confirmed it with a tentative smile.
“You won’t believe this, but I knew your mother years ago when she worked at the Eaton Company. And my wife and I learned ballroom dancing from your father at the Mayfield Country Club. You won’t believe this, but we aren’t the only East Siders here by a long shot. This place is turning into quite the Little Cleveland.”
“All we need is some smokestacks and a polluted river,” Linder quipped.
“No, seriously, we’ve been getting a handful of Clevelanders with each convoy. West Siders mostly, militia people. You might want to get together with some of them.”
By now, Linder was more than a little surprised at the turn the conversation had taken and puzzled by Yost’s ingratiating tone, especially since Yost likely knew by now of his DSS past. But as Yost seemed to mean no harm, Linder decided to take the man’s friendship at face value.
“If there are that many of us, do you suppose we could get some kielbasa or fried bologna up here once in a while?” he deadpanned.
To Linder’s surprise, the joke failed to draw a smile.
“I doubt that any of us will taste kielbasa again,” Yost replied, suddenly turning serious. “If you ever get out of here, have some for me, will you?”
“Will do. I owe you one.”
“Don’t mention it. And call me Charlie.”
* * *
When the training session ended, Linder’s work team was divided into squads of five men, so that each prisoner could rotate through both lighter and heavier tasks. While two men worked the crosscut saw, another hacked off boughs and branches from fallen trees, one piled the waste limbs for burning, and one measured and marked the downed trunks for the sawmill. After marking, a foreman counted the logs and turned in his tally sheet for use in calculating the team’s progress toward the quota.
At day’s end, the prisoners returned their tools to the shed and sat round the warming fires, stretching their bared hands toward the drums to thaw. Linder studied the array of hands before him, blackened by work and whitened by frostbite, then gazed into the dull eyes of his fellow prisoners and watched the shadows of darting flames play against their numbed faces. As he rose at the whistle to join the column for their return to camp, he, too, felt the unaccustomed weight of swollen fingers, the icy jabs in his lungs, and the aching of wasted limbs.
Once in formation, the men kept their distance from one another like inhabitants of a plague-infested town. Silence reigned, except when broken by the despairing cry of someone who fell and then rose in haste to evade a rifle butt or a dog’s bite. Nonetheless, here and there a few prisoners kept up a steady flow of poisonous bickering.
“For God’s sake, knock it off,” one weary prisoner called out at last. “A month ago most of us would have given our right arm for somebody to talk to. Now all we do is argue.”
Upon their return to camp, the men slouched off to the mess hall for dinner. After eating, some of the newer prisoners remained at the tables to talk or play cards, while veterans visited friends in other lodges or retreated to their bunks to rest or do chores. Linder, still overjoyed at having a warm bunk of his own, returned promptly to Hut J-6. Lying on one’s bed at the end of the day, lost in reflection, Linder thought, one should feel free at last. But without hope for the future, he realized, the difference between work and rest lost its meaning.
Some nights, on the road back to camp, Linder felt like a drowning man who has survived a shipwreck and swims desperately toward a distant island. As long as he struggles against the waves, no matter how great his suffering, hope makes the pain worthwhile. Only when he realizes that rescue from the island is impossible, does his true suffering begin. So while at the end of every workday Linder talked and joked with his peers like a free man, once the lights went out he lay in his bunk drowning in despair.
* * *
With each passing day at the logging site, Linder noticed himself sink further into exhaustion while his respect grew for the power of cold, hunger, and fatigue to crush a man’s soul. Out of respect to Yost and his teammates, he had resolved to give his best effort each day without regard to fatigue or pain. He also resolved, despite growing peevishness, to find the admirable qualities in others and to offer help and encouragement to those in need.
But after four days on the logging team, Linder felt as if his arms and legs would fall off. He shivered whenever he stopped to rest and he feared that his output had sunk below the level required to earn full rations. In short, he was at the brink of collapse. Yost dropped by that day to inspect the squad’s work, but he seemed distant, and Linder was too proud to seek his help.
After dinner, while lying on his bunk, Linder considered for the first time taking his own life rather than sink to the level of a beast who would accept any humiliation merely to stay alive. Until now, he had always condemned suicide, both on philosophical grounds and from some vague superstition left behind from years of Sunday school. In the past, whenever he had faced moral issues of the kind that had led some of his Agency colleagues to self-destruct, he had always managed to rationalize his way out by the simple formula of admitting his mistakes, regretting he hadn’t known better, and vowing not to make the same mistake twice. But how could he apply that formula to suicide, which was final? Failing to resolve that question or to settle on a proper means of killing himself, he put the matter off to another day.
The next morning, Linder went through roll call in a daze. As he marched toward the front gate for his fifth day on the new work team, he lifted his eyes from the ice-encrusted boots of the prisoner before him and saw nothing but formless white all around.
Barely a half hour earlier, he had devoured a bowl of watery oatmeal sweetened with corn syrup and a mug of coffee, but his hunger was already creeping back. His near-constant shivering had resumed, since the march through ankle-deep snow had not been long enough to bring his core temperature up to par. He raised his free hand to his cheek an
d felt a numbness despite the protection of his balaclava and the crude neck gaiter he had crafted from a discarded strip of fleece. Even worse, the fingertips of both hands had lost sensation—and this was before even touching an axe.
Where would he find the stamina to survive another day? Was it even worth trying? Linder felt his knees buckle and, for a moment, feared collapse even before he reached the gate.
He passed the camp’s administration building, a one-story lodge constructed of spruce logs and noted a wisp of smoke rising from its stone chimney. As he imagined warming himself at the huge walk-in fireplace, he felt a gloved hand tug on his upper arm and pull him out of line with an unusually soft touch, as if the guard did not want to call undue attention to his leaving the column.
“It’s the boss,” the guard said through his face covering. “He wants to see you.”
The column barely slowed while a pair of armed troops culled Linder from the ranks and diverted him from the stream of bodies flowing toward the logging sites.
With both guards following behind, Linder trudged up the short rise to the command hut’s front deck and held out his wrists for handcuffing before being ushered inside.
The Deputy Commandant was seated behind a battered oak desk. Bracken looked up from a ledger he was reviewing to address his visitor abruptly and without warmth.
“You know why you’re here, Linder. I won’t waste your time with niceties when we both have work to do,” Bracken told him. “This is my final offer. Work with us undercover and in six months we’ll make you a trusty. You’ll have a bunk in one of the best cabins along with double rations. Refuse and you’ll join the disciplinary unit. There you’ll be a bag of bones within a week.”
Linder lowered his eyes and focused his mind on the answer he had settled upon days before when Bracken had offered him a similar choice.
“Assign me wherever you like. I won’t be an informant.” Though he could barely articulate the words with his frozen lips, their intent was clear.
To Linder’s surprise, Bracken did not explode at him. Instead, the Wolfman frowned, shook his bearded head in disgust, and rose from his desk to retreat into the darkness at the rear of the lodge. Moments later, Linder noticed another figure dressed in guard’s coveralls emerge from the shadows to take Bracken’s seat at the desk.
Linder was aghast when the new man suddenly raised his head. “Look at me,” the stranger commanded in a voice he knew.
To Linder’s utter surprise, the man before him was Bob Bednarski. At once Linder’s mind became lucid, his vision clear, and a fresh vigor infused his limbs. He gazed at the man across the desk. This was not the arrogant bully he had known from Cleveland and Beirut. Now Bednarski’s expression was tentative, anxious, even fearful, beneath his bluff façade. He also appeared twenty or thirty pounds lighter than the man who had visited his cell in the Beirut embassy; the loose flesh on his formerly rotund face sagged into papery jowls.
Bednarski picked up the polished stone paperweight that served as base for an ornamental desk flag in the style of the Unionist “New Stars and Stripes,” the banner that the rebels called the Flag of Lies because it no longer stood for a free republic. For a moment, Linder thought Bednarski might throw the paperweight at him, flag and all.
But instead of belligerence, Linder detected distress, even desperation, in Bednarski’s eyes, and this set his mind racing to turn the man’s weakness to his advantage. Slowly the ex-Base Chief released the paperweight and drew the heavy oak chair out from behind the desk toward a matching chair at Linder’s side. As Bednarski invited the prisoner to sit, Bracken stood several paces away, behind Linder and out of his field of vision. On seeing Linder’s wary expression, Bednarski gave a rasping laugh that resembled a dull knife scraping rusty iron.
“The Department has studied your contacts with Philip Eaton and his daughter all the way back to the Creation,” Bednarski declared. “We know everything worth knowing about you and the Eatons. We can prove that you were in league with the old man even before he looted the Cleveland banks. We also have a list of your visits to Patricia in London. There’s no point in denying it, Linder. You’ve been lying to the Department about Patricia Eaton from day one.”
“That’s garbage and you know it, Bob,” Linder replied, the words distorted by his numbed lips. “I refuted that theory a hundred times. Read the interrogation reports.” Linder shook his head in disbelief that Bednarski had come all the way to Camp N-320 to dredge up tired old charges that he ought to have known were baseless after Linder refuted them the first time they were raised.
“Is that so? Then why does Patricia’s husband agree with our version of events? Even Kendall had to accept the truth once we showed him the evidence.”
“Then Kendall’s a fool,” Linder answered without so much as a blink. “After the wringer you’ve put the poor bastard through, he’d probably say his wife screwed the entire British Parliament if it would get him extra rations.” Linder struggled to imagine what additional evidence the DSS might have fabricated against him and what they had to gain by tormenting Roger Kendall with it.
“No, you’ve got Kendall all wrong,” Bednarski insisted. “Actually, he was pretty torn up when he found out what you and his wife were up to. But why not ask him yourself? He’s right here in this camp.” At this, the former Base Chief paused to measure Linder’s reaction and caught a startled look that Linder could not conceal. “But don’t wait long. I’m told Kendall is in rotten condition after his stay in the disciplinary unit. The same one you’ll be going to if you don’t change your tune pretty fast.”
Linder felt the heat of anger rise within, giving him renewed strength.
“Why do you people go on wasting your time with old rubbish?” he challenged Bednarski. “Even if it weren’t a total fabrication, what would it matter?”
“What matters, my friend, is that Philip Eaton held onto what he looted from those Cleveland banks till the day he died. And we think Roger and Patricia know where it is. Up to now, they’ve both claimed that no more loot exists. But we think they’re lying, because our finance people have calculated that Eaton couldn’t have spent more than a fraction of what went missing that day in Cleveland. The rest of it must still be cached away somewhere, and we think Patricia or Roger or one of Eaton’s old militia contacts can lead us to it. Which is where you come in.”
Linder crossed his arms, sat back in the chair, and gazed at Bednarski as if he had landed from Mars. But the ex-chief went on, unfazed.
“Headquarters thinks we have one more shot at getting to the bottom of this. And you’re going to help us do it.”
Bednarski watched Linder for a reaction but found none.
“You see,” he continued, “the Department has assembled here in this camp all the captured members of the Cleveland militias having any connection at all to the downtown bank job. The idea was to let them to talk freely among themselves. Where knowledge may have been compartmented, our aim was to bring the all the pieces together in one place.
“We also let the prisoners know that, if any of them provides information that leads us to the loot, his life will get a lot easier. Your assignment, Linder, is to make friends among the Clevelanders and find out where the money went. If you agree, Holzer and I will identify target prisoners to you and help you to locate them inside the camp. If you don’t, we’ll keep squeezing you until we get what we want or there’s nothing left to squeeze.”
“And if I were to succeed in finding what you want, what’s in it for me?” Linder asked.
“We’ll have you transferred to a light-duty camp in the Lower Forty-Eight, perhaps somewhere warm like Utah or Arizona,” Bednarski offered. “But don’t expect to be set free or get your old life back. You’re still a traitor, Linder, and your life sentence stands.”
Linder looked away in disgust, and in that moment, he noticed a sheepskin coat and hat hanging from a hook on the wall behind Bracken’s desk. These were of the grade issued to ranking
camp officials like Bracken. By contrast, the threadbare coveralls and jacket that Bednarski wore were standard issue for guards and low-level support staff. All at once it struck Linder how far Bednarski’s fortunes had fallen. Despite the man’s show of bravado, his situation was nearly as desperate as Linder’s.
“So what will it be?” Bednarski demanded with beads of sweat forming on his forehead.
“Count me out,” Linder answered.
“It’s a pity,” Bednarski responded. “You might have saved yourself, Linder. Instead, you’ll work until you keel over like one of your damned old trees.”
Bednarski looked over Linder’s shoulder and shot Bracken a concerned look. The Deputy said nothing, merely pressing a buzzer for the guards to come and take Linder away.
“And what does Neil have to say about all this?” Linder ventured while waiting for the guards to arrive. “Does he know we’re having this conversation?”
Bednarski’s cheeks flushed and Linder knew he had struck a nerve.
“What kind of stupid question is that?” Bednarski shot back. “All of this, every last twist and turn, has been Denniston’s brainchild. He’s been tracking the Eatons ever since the three of us stood outside the Cleveland Federal Reserve with our thumbs up our asses while the old man and his crew got away with the money. Denniston is the one who put us both here, for God’s sake! He couldn’t care less about you or me. All he cares about is getting his hands on Eaton’s cash.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Linder retorted. “The Neil I know would never do that.” Though he felt in his heart that Bednarski was right about Denniston, it was now his turn to bluff.
Bednarski gaped at Linder in apparent disbelief before uttering a hoarse belly laugh.
“So you think that Neil-Boy is your friend and gives a bloody rat’s ass about what happens to you? Well, I hate to be the one who ruins your day, pal, but I can assure you that Neil Denniston is not your friend and probably never was. He has hated your guts for as long as I have known him. When the three of us were together in Beirut, I was amazed that you still trusted that weasel. He brought you to Beirut to destroy you and I was stupid enough to believe that I would come out of it with a pile of dough.”
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