Red Ice

Then he reappeared amid a cat’s cradle of tracer streaks. He sprinted recklessly across the open area between the cooler and the guards’ barracks. Halfway across, he took a hit, which knocked him over as if he’d been hit with an invisible I-beam. He’d been hit in his armor vest. Then he crawled to the corner of the barracks and began cutting down anyone who tried to leave the barracks. Seconds after, Wickersham and I rushed across, smashing the Type 67 through an already-shattered window. Wickersham began raking the inside of the barracks. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Chamonix dragging the recoilless and its ammo across to the far door of their long barracks. The building was propped up on blocks. I crawled under the gauntlet of windows to help him. I knew we were also taking ragged fire from the officers’ quarters, and I could see gray uniforms working around back of the cooler toward the half-tracks.

I jammed a canister round into the recoilless. Canister was the descendant of grapeshot and had the same devastating effect. Chamonix fired through a window. The back blast created a great cloud of snow. I loaded a canister again. Chamonix fired. He was talking but I could no longer hear anything. The roar of the blasts had been too loud. I loaded again and he fired. He turned and said something but it sounded as if he were talking through a calliope. I began to load again but he tapped my arm and shook his head no.

I kicked open the door. The inside glowed brightly. A stove had fallen over and several bunks had caught fire. The place was a slaughterhouse. Grisly chunks of body and bone were smeared everywhere. I tripped over an ownerless boot. In one corner of the barracks I thought I saw something move and aimed to fire. A body tumbled to one side and a woman who had been beneath it rose calmly. She was naked and unmarked. Hard, dark circles had been etched beneath her eyes. I could tell she had been pretty a long time ago—a ballerina, perhaps. She kicked aside the body violently and reached for her prison clothes, which lay in a mound nearby. She looked Chamonix and me up and down with bitter defiance. Who were these grisly specters; masked, cloaked in deathly white, and splattered with blood? New jailers? Probably.

Chamonix found two other women weeping in a concrete-walled shower room. They’d all learned how to survive in this camp long before we arrived.

Outside, small-arms fire peppered from the cooler. Several officers in a rush for the half-tracks had been unable to make it past the cooler. So they had dug in. A few bodies sprawled in the snow outside the officers’ quarters. Puckins and Gurung had picked them off from their eyries. No more than four or five officers could have made it as far as the cooler.

A guard using two zeks as human shields moved out of the shelter of the cooler in the direction of the half-tracks. It was the beer-barrel sergeant. With his free hand he wrenched the prisoners between him and the guards’ barracks. Seconds later he flopped forward, leaving the two zeks bewildered. Puckins had, from on high, plinked the beer-barrel sergeant off with a single round. The zeks hesitated, then scurried out the gate into one of their barracks.

Wickersham, Kruger, and Matsuma had the Type 67 inside the guards’ barracks now and were considering whether to place it out a window or on the roof.

“Can’t return fire on the cooler. Might hit a prisoner,” someone said.

Kruger fell forward with a dark blue hole in his forehead. We ducked instinctively.

“Don’t bother. Just keep the fire aimed up over the cooler until Gurung and Puckins can work up behind the bastards.” Puckins and Gurung had already left the towers and were making a wide circle behind the barracks.

“They’ve stopped firing,” said Wickersham warily.

Three VOKhk officers in gymnasterka tunics hung out the cooler windows by their heels. Each had a prison spoon handle thrust deep below the corner of his jaw. All were decidedly dead. The zeks had settled old scores.

Two shadows raced out the inner fence gate toward the half-tracks.

“The recoilless,” I yelled. Matsuma and Chamonix grabbed the weapon and its ammo. Putting on our skis, we flashed through the gate. One VOKhk guard worked frantically to bring an RPK machine gun mounted in the half-track to bear, as the other started the engine. Chamonix kneeled and Matsuma loaded. The half-track blossomed into flame and the two guards—what was left of them—slumped forward, burning like candles.

Other than the ringing in my ears it was very quiet.

“Shall we,” Chamonix bellowed into my deafened ear, “attend to the liberation.”

“Look what we found.”

Gurung and Chief Puckins herded five Russian guards in front of them—the only survivors. I didn’t like the look in Matsuma’s eye. Giri again.