A mugging? Perhaps. But there were easier victims. This carried the earmarks of an attempted kidnapping. I had the uneasy feeling that this attempted snatch and our project were connected.
“Captain Dravit, from now on everyone uses the buddy system on liberty. No one leaves the resort alone. Everyone carries a blackjack, brass knuckles, or a knife.”
Dravit caught my glance. We were under siege and someone wanted one of us to talk with or to. What had been up until now a winter snow festival had taken on a dangerous mood.
Wickersham edged toward the resort’s main building.
“And where do you think you’re going?”
“Get some rest?” Wickersham piped up enthusiastically.
“Uh-huh. You get poleaxed on your own time, you can rest and recuperate on your own time. Be back here in PT gear in fifteen minutes.”
“Yes, sir,” was the sheepish reply.
You’re a hard man, Quillon Frazer. A hard-nosed, stiff-necked, true-to-type ogre. Heaven help you if they ever found out you were fond of them.
CHAPTER 13
The weary days of training seemed to blur together. Even aches and pains took on an undefined quality until they manifested themselves into one single collective throb.
We found that high-camber mountaineering skis with cable bindings offered the simplest, most serviceable combination for our purposes. We allotted one multi-fuel stove for every two men. The stove was for cooking and for melting snow for water. Water in its different forms constituted the single most influential substance in subfreezing travel. It provided both danger and salvation.
Petty Officer Heyer warned that dehydration was the greatest threat to the ski trooper. Any raiding party was duty bound to stop periodically to melt snow for drinking. Otherwise, the party risked the collapse of its members one by one as assuredly as they would drop on a waterless hike across the Libyan desert. Each skier must examine his urine en route and be sure to drink enough water to keep it nearly clear white. He advised against eating snow directly for it puts a severe strain on the body’s heating system and the crystals cut up the inside of a skier’s mouth. It was only a last-resort procedure.
As dangerous as it was to dry out on the inside, it was equally dangerous to become wet on the outside. Water is a coolant. Its use for that purpose in a car’s engine, he explained, was a good example of that property. Water allowed to turn to ice was an even more effective coolant. It would be a fatal error in Siberia to get wet and stay wet. “Therefore,” he said, “the whole object of movement in cold weather is to stay dry. And that doesn’t just mean don’t go swimming with your clothes on.”
The pale Norwegian tapped his ski pole against the inside of each ski and continued. The threatening source of moisture could be the sea, melted snow on clothing, or sweat generated by overexertion. All these sources would cause discomfort and, over time, hypothermia.
Sweat was the most prevalent problem and it called for constant trade-offs. At any given temperature, less clothing was needed by a man moving vigorously than by a man standing still. If, however, that man moved too vigorously, he sweated and his lighter clothing instantly became a liability. Each skier had to know his sweat threshold and at what point to peel away clothing to avoid sweating.
Heyer explained that it was a squad leader’s responsibility to maintain an efficient “no sweat” pace for all, allowing periodic stops to adjust clothing. One of the liabilities of cold-weather cross-country movement was that a group of men, each fit enough to run twenty-six miles in four or five hours, might take three days to cover the same distance on skis in rugged, uphill, tree-covered terrain. Siberia’s taiga-covered coastal plain and mountainous interior would be slow going on skis, but impossible going without them.
On Heyer’s last day with us, Dravit took over the Russian language instruction. He drilled basic Russian into the troops with the tenacity and subtlety of a pile driver. We weren’t really expecting fluency, just sufficient understanding for survival. The emphasis was not on textbook phrases such as “Which way to your uncle’s pastry shop?”, but rather on the ability to read Danger: Mine Field, or say, “Drop your weapon, comrade, unless you’re prepared to enter the real worker’s paradise.” In any event, the program wasn’t for everyone, and one ex-U.S. Army Airborne veteran threw up his hands in frustration. He later flew back to where people spoke “simple, decent American.”
By that time, we had continued to accelerate the pace until somewhere during the blur, the survivors had become rock-hard, Russian-babbling, marathon-skiing zombies.
That evening I took Heyer to the airport. It was the end of his leave, but I could tell he really didn’t want to miss out on an adventure. He kept brushing his blond hair out of his eyes and beginning sentences and not completing them. Finally, before he boarded his plane, he kicked at a lump of snow and said, “They’ll do all right. Just remember, the Soviets were badly mauled by Finn ski troops in World War Two. They’ve never forgotten that beating. Soviet troops teethe on cross-country skis now.”
Then, as an afterthought, he added, “It’s a good mission. Luck will be with you.” Then he stormed off to the boarding ramp.
A few hours later, Puckins flew in from California. I watched him leave his plane. The west Texan hadn’t changed much in ten years. He still had those same smooth, freckled Huck Finn looks. I thought of Wickersham, whose face carried the marks of ten years’ innumerable battles and had launched a thousand bar fights. Puckins moved down the ramp with a cowboy’s economy of energy. Several Japanese children waving a paper menagerie of origami foldings—fellow passengers traveling with their families—trailed along in his wake as Vietnamese children had once done. Children had always enjoyed his pantomimes and wordless magic tricks.
Now, as a chief radioman, he was entitled to the sedate coffee-cup world of chiefs. Yet Puckins had rejected a chief’s prerogatives. In his quiet way, he preferred the world of action and causes.
“Myshka’s been rolled up.”
Sato’s news stunned me; Myshka’s work was still unfinished.
“We think the KGB has him, though we can’t be sure.”
I lay back in the hotspring pool, trying to ease the pain in my ski-weary legs and to collect my thoughts. The tiled vault echoed with the chatter of hot-spring pilgrims. A busload of them had arrived earlier that afternoon to sample the alleged medicinal qualities of the spring. Though the acoustics of the spa made it virtually impossible to bug, Sato and I whispered anyway—out of habit. Steam rose about six inches off the water, then disappeared.
“He missed his last mail drop and his apartment is empty.”
“You’re sure Myshka was one of us?” I asked.
“Us?” He paused. “He’s a dissident, if that’s what you mean. No doubt about it, he’s been reliable for years.”
“Still could be a mole.” We both knew of double agents who had been left dormant for years and allowed to burrow deeply into a network.
“Possibly… but I doubt it. The literary pipeline isn’t worth that kind of an investment. Anyway, if he was being used against this operation, they pulled him too soon. We’ll be wary now.”
“Wary? Not much to be wary about, we simply can’t go until I have some sense of the size of the camp’s garrison and if Vyshinsky is still there. Was Myshka able to get us any of that information before he disappeared?”
“No… but he was getting close.”
“How so?”
Sato wiped the steam-created sweat from his brow and looked around confidentially. “He was waiting to intercept the quarterly report from Kunashiri, the eastern Siberian payroll center. We learned that much from his last dead-drop message.”