Red Ice

The moderating influence on Wickersham was the silent Texan, Puckins. No officer could possibly devote the time required to effectively monitor Wickersham’s activities. Fortunately, through some strange symbiotic chemistry, he was given to relinquishing ascendancy to Puckins long before Puckins had ever made chief. It was the Clydesdale and the cowboy. They formed an inseparable team, a vibrant lamination of the physical and the spiritual.

Born and raised in west Texas, Barry Puckins carried the classic lean and bowlegged cowboy build, but he could swim like a Waikiki beachboy. His redheaded Huckleberry Finn looks fit well with his disposition toward silent mirth. He could draw more laughs with a few wordless movements than a good comic working a half-hour routine.

Humor formed only one component of a complex man, a man who was essentially a fundamentalist of the Old Testament mold. He’d graduated from a Texas Bible college—it was surprising how many SEALs had attended some seminary or other. His grandfather had stormed into Texas as a six-gun-carrying, circuit-riding preacher, and I remember Puckins showing me a picture of his parents that bore a dry resemblance to American Gothic. It would, however, have been a mistake to label Puckins cloistered or otherworldly. “Easy to see He made the world chock-full of different adventures and places. Cinders of hell, it’d be a sin and darned unnatural not to grab the opportunities laid before us,” he’d confided to me in one of his rare wordy moments. “I hold there’s gotta be a reason for it. Sure as they’ll be no thermostat control for you an’ me in the next life. There’s somethin’ to it.” In this vein he had bounced around before joining the Navy. He’d tried everything from miming in Ghirardelli Square to bartending in a Houston skivvyhouse.

Reconciliation of religion with his eventual profession wasn’t difficult. Certain Moslem sects viewed the killing of each infidel as bringing oneself another step closer to Paradise. Puckins’s attitude toward dispatching communists was analogous, but not quite so simple. In its essence, communists were anti-God, therefore Puckins was anti-communist.

Furthermore, or perhaps as a logical progression from his religious convictions, Puckins was a bedrock family man devoted to his wife and squad of kids. He showed a strong feeling for children in general, and they for him. There’s an old saw that men in sapper or demolition units are either mad, married, or Methodist. Since madness is relative and I was a member of the same unit, I would have no way of judging that point, but as to the latter two categories, Puckins was very much married and very nearly Methodist.

The Korean stewardesses alternately hovered and darted about the aisles with gracious laughter and the tinkle of glass.

FRAZER

YOKOHAMA

FITZROY

HARARE ZIMBABWE

REGRETS STOP ON TO DEAL OF CENTURY POSSIBLE ACQUISITION PRECIOUS STONES STOP MAY NEED ASSISTANCE SOON STOP STAY AVAILABLE STAY HEALTHY

JACK

I had known Fitzroy in Vietnam, too. He had been an outstanding trooper with the crack Australian Special Air Service. His tracking ability was legendary—from a heel print he could give you race, religion, and blood type. I had hoped to use his skills in reverse in Siberia perhaps to elude or confuse trackers.

FRAZER

YOKOHAMA

DRAVIT

MANCHESTER ENGLAND

AFFIRMATIVE COLD CLIMES RAIDING STOP QUERY DESPOILING ANTARCTIC WEATHER STATION COMMA TIBETAN STRONGHOLD OR BIRDSEYE FOOD FACTORY

HENRY

Captain Dravit, formerly of the Royal Marines would be my second-in-command and likely the oldest member of the raiding party. His steadfast competence was often downright unnerving, but hardly surprising from a gardener’s son who’d worked his way up through the ranks. Barely five foot four inches tall in jump boots, he sported a first-rate handlebar, which had become something of a trademark.

Bantams like Henry Dravit were worth a herd of football linemen in a tight spot, and his record bore the fact out. His baptism of fire had been in the frosty over-the-beach raids of the Korean War. On one occasion, his entire party wiped out and his dry suit shredded by shrapnel, he inadvertently crawled into a North Korean automatic-weapons position, His dubious luck further brought him into one of the first brainwashing experiments. This he found mildly amusing—until things went sour and they threatened to pull out his mustache with pliers. After which they promised to work on other portions of his anatomy.

“Nasty bit of work. After a while a mustache sort of grows on you, seems to me,” he once told me with a laugh. A well-developed sense of irony spiced his conversation.