Red Ice

Daily, Dravit conducted classes on anti-skier booby traps. Using token amounts of explosive, he showed us how to lay out the charges and trigger mechanisms. Then he showed us how to conceal them. Finally, from a distance, he’d slide a weighted ski over the booby trap to demonstrate its effect. Near the end of the third day, one charge didn’t go off. He slid several old skis over it, but it just wouldn’t detonate.

“Bloody spring must have ice in it. Have to blow it in place.”

The meticulous operation of disarming a booby trap was an unnecessarily risky procedure. The more prudent course of action was to set another charge alongside the dud and in detonating the second charge, sympathetically blow the first “in place.”

Dravit skied gingerly to where the booby trap had been set. It was a pressure-, not trip-wire-activated assembly. Near a small tree—about two yards from where it should have been—the charge went off under Dravit’s right ski. It flung the ski up violently and twisted his ankle at a bad angle. Surprisingly, Dravit managed to keep his balance. He coasted backward a yard, then fell over to one side, cursing venomously.

We were around him in seconds. Chamonix, our acting corpsman, took off Dravit’s ski and mountaineering boot.

“It’s broken, isn’t it. Ballocks, I know that isn’t where I placed it. Only thing to my credit is that I underloaded the charges. Otherwise, I’d have lost a leg and eaten a ski.”

Chamonix shook his balding head sourly.

Wickersham turned to me. “I remember him putting it over there, farther from the tree, too. Someone must have moved the charge.”

Wickersham was right. Some member of our group had moved it—intentionally. And now my right-hand man wasn’t going.

His lunch, a few small cups around a stainless-steel rice box, lay nestled in the eye of a storm of paperwork. Concealed behind a stack of binders was a changgi—Korean chess—board with its pieces actively engaged. So he had a passion, changgi. Well, that made him human and more likable, but I wasn’t about to let him know it. For once he was vulnerable.

“Look, Kim, what the hell have you been doing about security for this operation? I’ve just had a man booby-trapped right out of action while you’re in here diddling with rainy-day games. You’d better set a fire under your people or this project’s over, finished, ended.”

He blinked and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. The bunker lighting was poor. I pressed on.

“Let’s understand each other. I’m not irrevocably committed to this rescue or your wonderful code machine, and unless I see I’m getting more support than your acting as a glorified storekeeper for us, I’ve had it.” The words came through clenched teeth. “We’re on your turf now… and we’re still being monkeyed with!”

The bunker was part of a warren of tunnels deep in a hillside overlooking the Korean eastern coast. The underground fortifications were a legacy from the occupying Japanese forces in the thirties. They now housed Kim and Associates.

He made mollifying motions with his hand and forced a thin-lipped smile. He’d have to do better than that.

“Commander, please calm yourself. We haven’t been totally remiss, you know. But you must look at it from our point of view: it is an incredible undertaking to run security checks on your colleagues, for clearly mere surveillance won’t work. Look at your roster. D’Epinuriaux, for example, has had twenty-three address changes within four countries over three and a half years. Most of your people have more nom de guerres than decent suits, and have disappeared off the face of the earth at one time or other. Most couldn’t come up with enough credit references to swing a soft drink in Hong Kong. We are watching them all closely, but the key is probably in their past contacts, and that’s really slow going. Frankly, you and your comrades have moved outside the sphere of acceptable behavior too long and they’re all suspicious. Give me the authority and I’ll polygraph them all, but I’m sure they’re all going to show some sensitive readings.”

“Run it anyway. “There was too much at stake to do otherwise. Lie detectors, I knew, could be beaten on rare occasions by psychopaths and extremely facile examinees.

Kim was hunched defensively behind his desk, his professional pride wounded. He searched the piles of paper for a report.

“Your former colleague, Commander Ackert, has been cultivating some interesting acquaintances.”

I’d mentioned my mistrust of Ackert when we’d first arrived in Korea.

“He met with Max Brown at Narita Airport for an hour yesterday.”

“Brown? That revolutionary-chic flower bastard? What possibly could those two have in common?”