Red Ice

“You are not Chinese… or Russian, that is clear….” He raised his head, feebly looking us over with his pallbearer’s eyes. “In whose country’s service do you fight?”

The morose Frenchman fingered his bandaged shoulder. “No country’s.”

“No country’s? You are bandits… no, wrong word. There is a discipline here. You are mercenaries?” he asked tentatively.

“Yes, I suppose you could say that,” he replied with growing irritation. Wickersham turned away from his window.

“You do this thing for money?”

“Sure, you know us mercenaries—anything for a price. A well-known type, just a ragtag mob of misfits who couldn’t make it doing anything else. Unloved losers, martial orphans.”

“Yeah, no momma, no poppa, no Uncle Sammy,” Wickersham recited acidly, “the scum of the earth in uniforms cammy.”

“‘What God abandoned, these defended/And saved the sum of things for pay,’” I added.

Vyshinsky realized he had made a mistake.

“Well, as one misfit to five others,” he said gently, “I’m grateful to you all.”

The ninth day wore by slowly. In the faint glow of the fireplace I saw Wickersham wave the Evenki boy over to him. He pointed to the bone amulet the boy wore around his neck on a hide thong. Then he pulled an object from under the bottom of his trouser leg. It was a boot knife with a double-edged, stainless-steel blade and a micarta handle. The boy shied back and then realized the knife was being offered in trade.

The boy picked up the knife with the same calculated indifference he had probably seen his father use bartering with other drovers. He cut a thin strip of hide using the knife and then inspected the edge. He hefted it in his hand. He tapped the handle against a joist. He measured it with his palm, horse-trader style. He shook his head. The knife was too small.

“Hell’s bells,” Wickersham grumbled, and then pulled a flier’s survival mirror from his breast pocket. It was made from some unbreakable material and it had a clear glass peep sight in the center of a Morse code decal on the back. The boy inspected it without returning the knife. He studied his reflection in it. Wickersham showed how to aim it for signaling by using the peep sight. The boy handed him the amulet, keeping both the knife and the mirror.

“Gave away my good-luck piece awhile ago,” he said to himself. “Kid trades harder than a Singapore Chinaman, but I just had to have that neckpiece. Can’t afford to be without a charm now. No, don’t want to run out of luck this far from home.”

I could feel everyone tense. This talk of luck put everyone on edge.

CHAPTER 26

It snowed until late the tenth day, the day of our first scheduled submarine pickup. We set out that night for the coast. We were still about a day and a half’s travel from where we’d buried the kayaks. We would have to travel as far as we could by night and then burrow into the snow during the day. I dreaded this impending day bivouac in the snow. We would be without tents or sleeping bags.

Another matter made me anxious. The submarine was scheduled to be on station to pick us up at midnight of the tenth day and if we didn’t show, to try again at a different location on the eleventh day. We weren’t going to make that first pickup. Making the second pickup would call for fine timing. We must make the second pickup. I didn’t expect the Korean sub to wait around for us if we didn’t.

We skied through the night as rapidly as we could, and when day came we fashioned snow caves. We crawled into three separate caves and waited for dark. One slow-burning candle and two bodies per cave brought the interior temperature of each up into the high thirties. No one slept much. It was too cold, anyway the constant drone of SU-19 jets overhead dispelled any thought of rest. The jets flew search patterns in and out of the surrounding ridges. Twice, pairs of jets cracked by right overhead.

“Flamin’ jets are up and down more often than a hooker’s skivvies,” Wickersham observed with typical hostility. For the most part we shivered in silence.

That night we covered the last miles to the coast. By some freak of nature the temperature rose above freezing. We hit the coast north of our original landing point and had to ski south until we found the stand of stunted birch that marked the kayaks. We departed quickly, abandoning a kayak and not bothering to pull on our dry suits.

After a brief portage, we found a freshly formed channel and slipped our three remaining kayaks between the masses of ice. The rise in temperature had brought fog with it. It seemed we were never very far from fog. This stuff rolled by in uneven patches, which at no time permitted visibility of more than one hundred yards. The mist that glided over the ice fields was like smoke passing over some burned, broken, forgotten place.