“Eventually the French government caved in and virtually offered to hand Algeria over to the FLN—not the loyal Moslems who had stood by us—the FLN whose mindless terrorism had been decried throughout the world.
“The Moslem commando company deserted to a man. That day I found Hassim staked to a cork tree with bayonets. He cursed me with his dying breath. Painted in blood across his chest was the message: ‘This is what happens to fools who trust the two-faced Europeans.’
“I couldn’t begrudge the company. ‘Trust me,’ I had told them. ‘Trust me.’ But the country behind me had said, ‘Well, so long, have to be going now. Take care.’
“My regiment, the Premier Regiment Etranger Parachutiste did the honorable thing. It mutinied. Now it is no more—sort of institutional suicide on the grand scale. Matsuma would understand. As for me, I resigned my commission.
“In subsequent years, I have served as un mercenaire with the Sixth Commando of Katanga and for many other causes, but never as an officer. I lost any right to be an officer when as a stupid patriotic junior officer I asked to be trusted and couldn’t be trusted. I am now Sergeant d’Epinuriaux. As un mercenaire I put my faith in no one but my comrades and gauge the sincerity of a cause by the money they’ll pay. And when they betray me it will be with a bullet, not sweet-tasting poison in my mint tea.”
His face flushed.
“I have had my fill of clever-tongued types who can find grand reasons to begin fighting for a cause and as quickly gather splendid reasons to abandon it.
“All we have here are ourselves, and I’m glad of it.”
The steam rose from his ration and curled defiantly around him.
The temperature climbed slowly through the day and next night until by the following morning it was safe to travel. Clouds seized more and more of the available sky. We glided on. Kick, slide.
The gradient, too, was increasing and we were compelled to traverse more often. Finally I had each man affix mohair climbers to the bottom of his skis. Surprisingly, we were covering ground quickly now.
About midday I spotted a musk deer trotting along parallel to us. Perhaps curiosity had overcome its fear of these clumsy green-and-white walking bundles. As my eye followed him, it caught an irregularity. I pulled my binoculars from my jacket.
“Matsuma, have a look. What do you make of that?”
He focused them on a frozen river and then scanned left and right. “Dogsled tracks, a day or two old. Probably Evenki. But maybe we should keep away from them, just the same.”
As if this new development weren’t enough, a disturbing new thought plagued me. Since we’d left the submarine, there hadn’t been a single act of treachery. We’d lost Lutjens and left Dravit. Could Dravit have been the turncoat? The thought stuck in my mind and put a hollow feeling in my chest. There was no man on earth I trusted more than Dravit. We’d been through much together. But hadn’t every man his price? He wasn’t getting any younger and it was time to think of retirement. It would be easy. Dravit was our representative on the submarine. On his say-so they could abandon us with a clear conscience. A large part of our fate rested in his hands.
No, it was all wrong. Men like Dravit never thought of retirement. They slipped into it unconsciously or went out in a blaze of glory. I mulled the situation over and over in my mind. If the little Englishman left us to die, was there any point in fighting it? No, that was wrong, too; the cold must be warping my mind. I wanted to live, to survive. Yet if we did live, and Dravit had betrayed us, life would be marred by one very large void.
We made good progress during the next day, too. All indications were that we were very close to the camp. We seemed beyond exhaustion now, but had to keep moving. The ahkio drained away our strength, but we could not afford to abandon it or its contents. With the closing proximity of the camp, I reminded the point men and rear security people to stay alert.
During one water stop, Puckins deftly pulled a rubber ball from Alvarez’s ear, causing Gurung to laugh uproariously. Puckins had been working on the trick since we’d left the kayaks. Gurung had seen it many times before. Still it was a tough stunt to do with shooting mittens on. Chamonix was clapping his hands together to maintain the circulation when Puckins snatched a sponge cube from the Frenchman’s hawklike nose.
“Enough,” Chamonix barked with mock severity as he motioned everyone up off their packs.
“March or die,” he growled in parody of the well-known legion order. He skied off whistling “Je Ne Regrette Rien” in wavering notes, which mimicked Piaf’s mournful rendition. A significantly haunting tune to hear from one of the Premier Regiment Etranger Parachutiste, it generally foreshadowed bloodletting with a vengeance.
By now fatigue and stress had made everyone giddy. It was our fifth day of sub-zero weather.
CHAPTER 22
The railroad line cut through the tree-covered contours like a child’s finger through cake icing. The absence of drifts over the individual rails meant a train had been by recently. I dead-reckoned we were somewhere southwest of the camp. We paralleled the tracks, staying behind the tree line until twilight, then pitched camp. I didn’t want to stumble onto the camp in the dark.
At about noon of the sixth day, we found the camp in a broad open valley ringed by spruce-covered ridges. Caution required that we study the camp’s routine for at least a full day. The size of the garrison necessitated a night attack. Since it was already noon, that meant we should reconnoiter the camp for the rest of the day and attack during the evening of the following day. We burrowed well back into the tree line and in pairs took turns watching the camp through binoculars.
The camp had been erected in the shape of a large isosceles triangle, with its base parallel to the railroad line. On the opposite side of the line lay large pyramids of logs. Between the camp and the logs, the line split into two spurs. A string of half-loaded flatcars, together with a wood-burning locomotive, rested on the outer spur. The sides of the triangle stretched roughly 250 yards on each side and 150 yards at the base. The triangle had been truncated with internal fences into three bandlike sections. An empty parade ground, scarred by half-track treadmarks formed the base section. Four prison barracks, a mess hall, and some other buildings composed the waist section. We had no trouble identifying each of the commandant’s, officers’, and guards’ quarters in the apex section. A magazine; the radio shack; its electrical generator; and a tall, well-maintained antenna were also located in the apex section.
Near dusk, four gangs of prisoners marched out of the taiga toward the camp. “March” was the charitable term; they stumbled in unison before four half-track trucks. As we watched, a woman near the rear of one formation faltered and collapsed. The half-track behind her didn’t swerve an inch. It continued on, leaving a red stamp at even intervals, from the spot where it had crushed her under its treads.
As the gangs approached the railroad gate, they began to stumble for lead position. Intuitively I knew that the first gang through the gate ate first, and the last gang through ate last… what was left. Like scarecrows trying to fly, they seemed to gain speed by flapping the black rags that covered them. Many dropped out of formation, lacking the energy to continue the race. One man from one gang was the first to reach the gate, barely cutting off a second gang. Two gray-coated VOKhk guards beat back the second gang, swinging their rifles like clubs. At the inner gate, one at a time, the prisoners were searched by two more VOKhk guards. Then they were allowed to enter the section that contained the prison barracks and mess hall. My breath kept fogging up the binoculars. After dark, I switched to the Starlight sniper scope. The scope didn’t work at first so I had to rush back to our bivouac to warm up the batteries while Alvarez covered for me with the binoculars. Using the scope, I studied the three sentry towers at the corners of the camp and recorded significant movement within the camp. Each relieving pair did the same. I noted there were lights on the perimeter but the towers stayed dark.