Red Ice

“Did I say it didn’t tug at me shipping out all the time? I’m glad they’ve got a strong old lady. They all hold up pretty well. All and all.”

He patted his pocket. “I should have worked up a pretty good passel of magic tricks to show them when we get back. It’ll take some practice.”

We just stood there for a while, until the lights went out.

The next morning spotted Wickersham preparing to go through the house-to-house pop-up range on his own time.

I climbed into the range tower, where Chamonix, unsmiling as usual, was manipulating the target silhouettes.

This was the other Wickersham—quiet, intense, exacting. Extra hours spent to make it look easy. Extra hours spent to be sure.

I focused my binoculars on Wickersham. It was snowing gently and Wickersham was halfway through the course. As he rounded a comer, a single gray silhouette popped up with a puff of snow.

I watched his lips move silently, “Two to the body, one to the head….’”

It dropped back.

Another gray silhouette appeared in a window.

The triple tap of bullets occurred once more. “Two to the body, one to the head….”

The second silhouette dropped.

Quiet, intense, exacting—this was the other Wickersham, the second Wickersham who rarely showed himself. The first Wickersham, the more visible Wickersham, clowned as a defense.

Four silhouettes rose: two black, two gray. He peppered the two gray silhouettes, making a little polka step as he shifted his muscular frame to fire from one target to the other. The gray targets were guards. The black targets were prisoners, zeks. I read “two to the body, one to the head” on his moving lips again.

To Wickersham, dealing in life and death was as heavy and ponderous as surgery. It had to be lightened somehow. The warrior should not act too proud or self-important. A trace of Anglo-Saxon fear tinted his view, fear that success and elation brought punishment by the gods. At the banquet, after the slaying of the Grendel and the Grendel’s mother, Beowulf is praised but also warned that conspicuous skill and pride can bring ill luck. The fact that Wickersham had never heard of the Old English tribes or their beliefs did not matter, because a similar manner of living, the same requirements for survival, and a kindred collection of values caused him to arrive at comparable conclusions.

Pride internalized made a good fighter; pride externalized brought bad luck. Since death came so easily on trifles, above all, a man needed luck.

Three gray silhouettes appeared above a courtyard wall. Nine rounds expended and they were down.

“Two to the body, and one to the head/better be sure the rascal’s dead.”

Wickersham’s various business enterprises basically served as a variation to the clowning. The Wisconsinite played bazaar merchant for comic relief. Yet understanding Wickersham wasn’t that straightforward. He did derive secondary satisfaction from making a profit, winning another kind of contest—and creating laughter—which had a way of smoothing over so many rough spots in his travails. Essentially, however, Wickersham did not rest easy with the high stakes of his vocation.

Two silhouettes popped up in the doors on either side of him. They rested on opposite edges of his peripheral vision. He knocked both down with two short bursts.

An alarm went off on the range and Wickersham’s broad shoulders drooped. He sat down in the snow and looked at his AK-47.

“Which one?” I asked Chamonix. The Frenchman flicked the switch on his right with a dour look.

The silhouette on Wickersham’s right rose slowly. It was black with a blowup of Vyshinsky’s picture pasted on its head. Pallbearer’s eyes. The pictures was perforated. One to the head.

“One error equals failure,” Chamonix stated calmly over the range mike.

“Tant pis. Let’s run it one more time.”

In the seclusion of our new training area, we were able to combine live firing with movement on skis. Each man carried an AK-47, except Wickersham, who carried the Type 67 machine gun, and Chamonix, who carried the Russian-made, but Chinese-modified sniper rifle. With us we towed two ahkio sledges. These oblong curved-bottom sledges, when towed by several skiers, could carry a man, or up to two hundred pounds of equipment. We modified both ahkios along the lines of a Norwegian pulk. They were shortened and fitted with tubular towing braces. Once these changes were made, the ahkios could be towed and controlled by just two men. In the ahkios we carried food, tents, and ammunition, but most important, a single Chinese 57-millimeter recoilless rifle. Ironically, the 57-millimeter recoilless had been copied from the American version by the Chinese during the Korean War. It had been discounted as a U.S. weapon only recently. Now the pirated weapon was going to change hands again.