Red Ice

Die, Frazer, die. You let them down. Two more Russians came at me from behind. I parried one’s bayonet—not before it tore into my triceps. The other thrust at my face, knocking off my fur cap and searing my scalp with his blade as I ducked low. From a squat I swept away his knees with another butt stroke. Brittle from the cold, the rifle stock splintered apart in my hands.

Still the ghastly screaming continued. As I searched for another weapon, powerful arms began to choke me from behind. The hands tried to twist my neck enough to snap it. I crouched and dived at a tree. The tree hit the Russian with sufficient impact to loosen his grip. I turned and, grabbing the insides of his collar, started choking him. I hammered his head against the tree. Then he went limp. I looked at the big red stain around a small hole in his chest. It was the smooth-faced officer. He’d been dead before he’d throttled me, he just hadn’t known it.

I looked around. Wickersham stood erect with his legs braced in the center of a pile of bodies. Chamonix swayed with a bloody shoulder. Matsuma was down on one knee wrapping some cloth around his thigh. I could not see Gurung. Then a Russian body rolled aside. Gurung lay flat on his back, soaked in his victim’s blood. He rose stiffly, unsure of his balance.

The screaming had stopped. It had been mine.

CHAPTER 25

“Take a look at this.” Chamonix held forward a brace of Russian ammo pouches with his good arm. “Only a quarter full. They must have lightened their equipment, too, but they jettisoned ammo. They must have been pretty confident, those heroes of the Soviet Union.”

Puckins, barely conscious, sat propped against a tree. Several bullet holes had perforated his midsection. A stomach wound developed irreversible peritonitis if not attended by a surgeon promptly. We had no surgeon nor would we be able to get one in time. Moreover, we could not stop his bleeding. He only had hours to live. We knew it. Puckins knew it.

“Mister Frazer,” he said. “I owe you, sir.”

“Owe me? I owe you—if anyone owes anything to anybody.”

“No, sir, you don’t understand. I was partially responsible for those… those things. You know… the camera… the police bust… Captain Dravit’s leg… the regulators.”

“You? Why?”

I felt myself wobble with despair and squatted down to have my eyes even with his. He looked old for once. His eyes were glazed with pain, but there were lines of sadness around them, too.

“It was Lutjens and me. Lutjens only at first, but then I got pulled into it. From the very beginning I suspected he… Lutjens… was up to something, from back when we made our little excursion to Kunashiri. He just wasn’t behavin’ quite right. Couldn’t put my finger on it for a long time, until later I remembered Lutjens braggin’… during the arm-wrestling match… about the big debts he’d run up in Germany before he had been forced to skip the country. I guess he was among the high-rollin’ damned from the very first, and he owed some shadowy characters no mean stack of silver. Must have noticed me watchin’ him because just before the police raid in Hokkaido, he bore down on me with a heavy lean.”

What color he’d had seemed to have drained from his face. A snowflake on his cheek refused to melt.

“You know the wife’s a Viet. Somehow… I can’t figure how…. Lutjens had connections in Washington. He had her records checked and of course her application for entry was irregular, awful irregular—enough to win her a quick deportation if someone wanted to press it. When we got married, she thought someone might stop her papers ’cause of her old man being a Saigon deputy police chief….”

The Saigon deputy police chief, the one in the photograph executing a VC terrorist with his police pistol. What the U.S. newspapers hadn’t said in their captions was this incident had occurred in the midst of one of the most cold-blooded, vicious attacks on noncombatants of the war. Special VC assassination squads had been sent into the homes of pro-American Viets and began—as planned—to execute family members one by one, youngest first, while the rest had been made to watch. The deputy police chief had managed to apprehend one of these terrorists.

“So she gun-decked it. Her old man was a hard old Viet. How was she to know they couldn’t deport her for her old man’s righteous anger—but they sure as hell’s fire could deport her for a falsified application. Lutjens kept saying he had a friend named Denehy who’d have her back in Ho Chi Minh City faster than you could say ‘di-di mau.’ Then he’d laugh.”

I’m sure Puckins hadn’t laughed. His eyes now reflected the haunting faces of nine laughterless children.