He nodded.
“We are going to attack a corrective labor camp. Don’t let the others know just yet. Before we’re through, you’ll see plenty of Russians die, all right. And then again, you may end up right back where you started—in one of those camps again, along with the rest of us.”
His eyes flared. “I will die first.”
“You may. Very well, we need your help, no doubt of that. You may come along provided you meet the standards everyone else has had to meet. Tonight we’re going to make a covert raid on Kunashiri. You’ll stay with the fishing boat on this side of the straits. We’ll straighten this all out when I get back. Now let’s get under way.”
After I cut away the handcuffs, he rummaged belowdecks for a few minutes, and then the ancient engine rumbled to life. I took a quick look at the radar. It was an inexpensive bottom-of-the-line model.
By now, everyone was aboard, and the inflatable half-deflated below the gunwales of the boat. The men of the landing party were oiling down their shotguns and wrapping them in plastic bags. They put their camouflage uniforms in watertight canoe bags. The two boat guards, Wickersham and Lutjens, stood lookout with their short-ranged weapons.
“We should have brought some rocks aboard,” Wickersham muttered, “Could throw rocks farther than I can shoot this fowling piece.”
Using our chart, I showed Matsuma where we intended to launch the F470 and where we wished to be picked up.
At about 2230, we loaded the inflatable and headed for the rocky shores of Kunashiri. Wickersham and Matsuma stayed with the fishing boat. The rest of us—Dravit, Chamonix, Puckins, Gurung, Lutjens, and I—all clad in dry suits, wedged into the small inflatable boat. Our muffled outboard engine pushed us along at about five knots. Seaweed kept jamming the prop, so we stopped periodically, cursed silently, and prayed intently the engine would restart. The seaweed of the Kurils was notorious. I figured a good sprinter could race from island to island in the chain, just resting quick footfalls on the seaweed.
We didn’t see land until we nearly ran into it. Visibility in the fog was about one hundred yards. We heard breakers and then a great black cliff loomed ahead of us. I had Lutjens cut the engine and drop anchor.
Without hesitation, Gurung and Chamonix, acting as scouts, slipped over the side. It seemed like hours before they blinked the all-clear signal by light to us from shore. Then the rest of us slid over the slick black thwart tubes with our bags and shotguns. Lutjens stayed aboard as a boat guard. I made a mental note of two distinctive rocks as a navigational range. They’d point the way to the F470 when we returned.
There’s nothing like a night dip in dark, frigid waters to make you doubt your sanity. The shock of the cold water against the dry suit makes you inhale sharply and wonder if you’ll ever master regular in-and-out breathing again. A night swim has that deceptive peacefulness that foreshadows doom.
Swimming in pairs, we let the waves wash us in to shore and smash us against the rock-strewn beach. A barnacle-encrusted rock scraped at my knee and I felt a cold trickle of seawater flow down my shin. Dravit nearly lost his equipment bag to a heavy breaker and Puckins’s shotgun clattered against a rock. Quickly, Gurung and Chamonix led us to concealment below an overhanging cliff.
Like so many volcanic islands, Kunashiri rose from the sea in a series of rocky sloped surges. This was the most desolate portion of the island. The wisps of fog, the heavy waves on the seaweed-covered beach—it would have made a picturesque setting for some less grim activity. But we didn’t have time for reveries, the port and main village were still several miles away. We changed hurriedly into camouflage uniforms, turtlenecks, and watch caps.
Gurung clicked his tongue against the side of his mouth to catch my attention. He pointed up and about ten yards farther down the ledge. A small red spot glowed above the edge of the cliff. As I started, I gradually made out the silhouette of a man with an AKM rifle, a fur hat, and the long gray belted coat of Soviet winter field dress.
“Approaching sentry—not to stalk just now,” he whispered thoughtfully. “Too much smoking.”
I understood. The worst time to attempt to take out a sentry was when he was smoking. In most militaries, smoking on sentry duty is forbidden, so when sentries do smoke, they are extra wary. They aren’t wary of some enemy stupid enough to be out on a miserable night like this, but wary of their own sergeant of the guard—who knows how to make sentries even more miserable.
“I am tempted to turn him in,” Gurung said with mock anger.
Several minutes later, the glow dropped to the ledge. With my nod, Gurung pulled out his big kukri and tested the knife’s edge with his thumb. He turned noiselessly, and then glided along the base of the cliff beyond the sentry. The sentry was very close and we shrank into the overhanging cliff. I could just make out the stocky Gurkha methodically scaling the cliff with the kukri in his teeth. Moments later, the sentry crashed down from the cliff in two distinct thumps—head and fur hat, body and rifle.
“Son of a bitch!” Puckins exclaimed as the body rolled toward him, stopping inches from his feet.
“Get the greatcoat before it gets bloody,” Dravit ordered. “Never a bad idea to have an enemy uniform.”
The ever-gloomy Chamonix, still in his dry suit, jammed the segmented body between two large rocks in the surf zone and piled rocks over it. In a few days, the body would work loose and drift onto the beach. The only man who fit the Russian’s uniform was the man who had buried him—Chamonix.
We tucked our dry suits and fins into the haversack we’d brought in the watertight bags. Then we began our ascent, with Chamonix close behind us wearing the uniform of a corporal of naval infantry—his AKM at the ready. Shortly, we reached the shoulder of the cliffs.
“There it is. That dirt road should eventually lead us into the main village. It’s on one of the pre-World War Two maps I found.”
We patrolled along two parallel ruts, which soon became a potholed macadam road. Twice the oncoming, fog-rimmed headlights of military trucks forced us to dive headlong for the cover of drainage ditches.
By 0200, we had reached the main village. A massive seawall defined the rim of the harbor, and below the wall stretched a half dozen yards of pebble beach. We kept in the shadow of the seawall until we were even with the point where the old map indicated the police station would be. The single-story building that abutted the seawall evidently hadn’t changed purposes in forty years. It was still a police station. As Dravit and I had guessed, the Ministry of State Security building was not far away—in fact, a sign indicated it was the large old building of pre-World War II vintage on the landward side of the police station. The imposing two-story concrete building towered over the police shack. A foghorn, strange and haunting, sounded in the distance.
I hand-signaled for Gurung, our point man, to reconnoiter the two buildings. A half hour later, he reported that the first building was a joint civil and military police station, with a policeman posted outside on the road that led to the seawall. The second building, the State Security building, was darkened except for an inner hallway. A VOKhk guard sat in the hallway and made rounds of the building at regular intervals.
We wound our way to the street, which ran behind both buildings and moved single file down the three-foot-deep stone drainage trench that bordered it. This street divided two rows of shops—all closed—but whose owners lived in their back rooms. Farther down, a saloon resounded with the singing and carousing of Russian soldiers. The State Security building stood right behind the saloon. We vaulted a fence and ducked into the long row of shop backyards. A slow-motion steeplechase through tiny gardens, over plank fences and bamboo trellises, and around large fish baskets ensued. Finally, we arrived at the hazy void between the saloon and the ministry building and scrambled over the fence that separated the two.