Red Ice

As the small KAL airliner lifted from the runway at Tokyo’s Narita Airport, I unloaded my worn briefcase and reread the telegrams I had received and deciphered prior to takeoff. They had been transmitted using a variation of the book code—not a terribly original crypto method, but for our purposes, effective. Each message left Yokohama in number groupings disguised as the price column on an invoice telegram. The addressee would, on receipt of the telegram, purchase three preselected monthly magazines—magazines without regional editions, and different ones for each addressee—to be used as decoding keys. The first price code group indicated which magazine and which page applied to the subsequent twenty-one characters. Every three characters gave the line and ordinal position of a letter in the underlying message. Then the process was repeated using another group, and this time twenty-four characters, progressing in added groups of three until the message was completed. No printed letter on a magazine page was ever used twice, and this was the marvel of the system. It could not be broken by a statistical frequency of letter-use analysis. In any given English paragraph of a minimum size, the letter e will appear most often, then s, then t, etc., and that’s how you broke elementary codes. Furthermore, our messages were too short for a computerized hit-or-miss analysis. But the code was only as secure as its users.

FRAZER

YOKOHAMA

WICKERSHAM

LITTLE CREEK VIRGINIA

YES STOP BETWEEN ENLISTMENTS COMMA HAVE UP TO 180 DAYS STOP YOU SUPPLY DATES

GORDAN

FRAZER

YOKOHAMA

PUCKINS

CORONADO CALIFORNIA

REQUIRED WESTERN PACIFIC DEPLOYMENT IN MAY STOP TENTATIVE YES COMMA NEED TIME FRAME STOP WIFE EXPECTING PUCKINS NINTH TWO WEEKS

BARRY

Petty Officer First Class Gordan Wickersham and Chief Barry Puckins had been members of my platoon in the western Pacific. They presented an odd combination of personalities and would comprise part of the nucleus of the rescue organization.

Wickersham’s eternally over-revving mind was held captive in a body as powerfully muscled as a Wisconsin brewery horse. When he wasn’t brawling or womanizing, it was his singular mission in life to bring the military into the free enterprise system. On at least three occasions, I’d had to stop him from setting up a corporation to sell shares in captured booty. Yet there was no finer M-60 machine gunner in Vietnam. This Clydesdale of a man lumbered to the sound of the guns.

I could see Wickersham standing before me, grinning not quite angelically, showing a one-inch gap of missing teeth in his upper jaw and thoughtfully stroking his cauliflower ear. He was explaining how he had only borrowed the commodore’s jeep… that the fact that the shore patrol had found it sans tires, battery, upholstery, and canvas top was due to unfortunate vandalism by persons unknown… which he would rectify by “fixing their wagons,” but first he had to make a visit to the Salvation Army mission in Manila… to visit an elderly, ailing lady… whom he knew through one of the stewards. As an experienced interpreter, I guessed all this to mean he’d intended to sell the whole jeep but got stiffed; and by elderly, he meant over eighteen; and by ailing, he meant she had a fever that needed quenching.

With his bridgework in, he had the battered good looks that some women found exciting; generally the slinky, long-legged types you found draped off hulking prizefighters. His slabs of muscle weren’t only for show. In basic training, several instructors had wagered he couldn’t climb a thirty-foot rope with twin steel-90 diving tanks on his back. They lost.

Gordan Wickersham was one of five sandy-haired, heavy-shouldered sons born to a long-suffering beer salesman. How Milwaukee ever survived the intersibling competition among these five brawling, hockey-playing, ever-competing, and always-enterprising young public enemies is a monument to its civil defense organization. The competition was cutthroat, and their dares and challenges bordered on the suicidal. The end product was an odd blend of loyalty, swagger, hostility, and intelligence. As a result of his immersion in this strenuously masculine environment, a good fight, a touch of heavy-handed buffooning, a ready wench, and an easy dollar meant home. And all he needed from life.