The next day two North Korean guards were found, their heads twisted northbound and their bodies oriented southbound. Dravit, his mustache, and all his moving parts were gathering momentum southbound. Dravit, then Corporal Dravit, had begun his epic end run from Wonsan to the Funchilin Pass through the entire North Korean army and part of the Chinese. Keeping below ridgelines and moving only at night, he was to skulk three hundred miles in fifteen days, gain two pounds, and retain his mustache.
“Sodding U.S. leathernecks nearly foreshortened my memoirs by several chapters as I entered their perimeter. The retreat from the Chosin Reservoir must have been rather dicey.”
In addition to his Korean experience, he brought along the strength of innumerable winter Royal Marine exercises in Norway. He and Pieter Heyer of the Norwegian Marine-jaegerlag would compose the training cadre. Together they were as capable of preparing us to survive Siberia as anyone who’d never set foot there could.
Originally military service had been intended as a brief diversion before Dravit would become a gardener in earnest alongside his father. There was nothing extraordinary in his signing on; the elder Dravit viewed military service as a chance for Henry to get the sand out of his shoes, and Henry had envied the Royal Marine Reservists he had noticed tramping about the countryside. They seemed an appealing sort: trim, outdoorsy, and wet to the knees. No one was more shocked than he was to find he was good at it, far better than at gardening. When it came to fighting, Dravit, as it developed, was a hang-the-automatic-weapons-we-can-set-those-blokes-running-by-positioning-the-mortar-right-there natural.
Only impatience with civilians, abstractions, and grand strategies had kept him from advancing beyond captain. Since the British hadn’t succumbed to the “up or out” cancer, so loved by the Americans, he continued until retirement, satisfied in his career.
Dravit would be a strong, energetic assistant. I never knew a man who could think so quickly on his feet. For instance, there was that weekend liberty when he’d quelled a potential riot in Nicosia. He had cleared a crowd from a town square using a broom handle in a rather forceful demonstration of bayonet techniques. The Greek and Turkish factions simply stepped aside. They couldn’t believe their eyes. Physically he remained in top condition, and without the gray at his temples could have passed for twenty-nine, though forty-six was closer to the mark. I knew I had been right in guessing he was thoroughly bored with his job as an automatic-weapons salesman. I anticipated he would attend to discipline and day-to-day details in surges of too-long-restrained vigor. A lesser man might not have been able to reconcile such a swashbuckling style with maintenance of high standards and iron discipline.
Dravit contributed one other skill to the project—he had received Russian language training.
A half dozen other telegrams echoed Fitzroy’s Micawberesque response. A greater return for less risk lay just beyond the next wave. In thumbing through the telegrams I noticed that I had still not heard from Pieter Heyer in Ramsund. I relied on Heyer to add depth to the training. Dravit had been trained for cold weather; Heyer was born in it.
Perhaps five men as a core group. Training would have to begin without my knowing how many men I’d need for the actual mission. But first I needed the raw material. I hoped that starting with an additional group of about twenty-five, I could distill the group down to five or ten reliable, field-wise raiders. With these men to augment my original five, we just might be able to finesse a clandestine rescue where a larger group would fail.
The last telegram in the stack was a decoded copy of the one sent to a café owner/soldier-of-fortune recruiter in Marseilles. Though the café owner knew my method of operation, it was advisable to remind him of my specifications in case he was tempted to clear the café of deadwood.
CAFE CAMERONE
MARSEILLES FRANCE
FRAZER
YOKOHAMA JAPAN
REQUIRE 25 DOCUMENTED VETERANS FOR COLD WEATHER HIGH RISK OPERATION STOP LIGHT INFANTRY BACKGROUND STRONG SWIMMERS STOP REPORTING HOKKAIDO JAPAN 7 FEB NO EXTRADITABLE OFFENSES CONTEMPLATED SEND NO BILLION DOLLAR BALLPLAYERS COMMA MOVIE TOUGH GUYS COMMA PRETTY BOYS JUNKIES ALKIES COMSYMPS
There was an unfortunately broad spectrum of quality among paladins.