Reveille for the camp came about two hours before dawn. Men lined up at the mess hall and at another building, which must have been the sick bay. Apparently if a zek claimed to be sick, he lost his chance to eat. Then the men lined up at the inner gate and were frisked as they entered the parade ground. Any extra clothing was confiscated and the zek had to strip it off right there in the fifteen-below open air. When concealed food was discovered, it was ground beneath a guard’s boot.
“Look at that.” Wickersham, who shared my watch, pointed to the gate. Something shiny glittered in the snow near a prisoner held by two guards. A sergeant with three yellow stripes across his sky blue shoulder boards was lashing the zek across the face with a quirt.
“Must have tried to smuggle a knife out with him,” Wickersham offered as he watched the scene intently.
The VOKhk sergeant was built like a beer barrel. He had to look up at the prisoner—until after the savage, methodical working-over, the prisoner sagged to the ground. Another guard, a major, walked over to the squat sergeant. At first I thought he was going to put a stop to it, but he just put his hands on his hips and watched. When the prisoner passed out, the major had two other prisoners carry the unconscious zek to a building within the triangular apex section of the camp. It was probably the punishment block or “cooler.”
Wickersham watched the beer-barrel sergeant strut away. “Fellow sure likes his work. I think he’s got it in for that work gang now.”
Then, as if to prove his words, six of the guards hustled back to the guardroom and came out with crowbars. They walked to one barracks and pried out the window frames. The effect on the gang was visible. They slumped dejectedly. No windows on a barracks in sub-zero weather was a virtual death sentence.
Wickersham shook his head. He pointed to the punishment block. “That may be the cooler”—he swung his quivering mitten toward the windowless barracks—“but it’ll be no cooler than that one.”
It was a play on words, but no joke.
I sketched the camp with a ski pole in the snow. “That’s the camp generator. That, we think, is the camp magazine. That building is the guardroom and guards’ quarters. Does everyone understand what he has to do?”
Each man nodded as I caught his eye. Matsuma had a distant look. I guessed he was meditating his way through some samurai purification ritual on his feet.
“Matsuma, let’s keep a clear head through this. Your responsibilities to the living of this group take precedence over revenge for the dead.”
“I will do duty to all.” He bowed his head slightly.
I studied the camp through the Starlight scope, carefully avoiding the perimeter lights, whose brightness could burn out the scope’s delicate sensors. The whole valley seemed agonizingly still. Occasionally the moon poked through the clouds, but its effect was fleeting. Once or twice a door slammed in the officers’ quarters or the guardroom. The valley was so quiet that each door slam seemed only yards away.
Puckins and Gurung crawled down to the barbed-wire fence. They advanced, sliding their skis under them, with their hands in the toe straps and their rifles around their necks. Puckins cut the lower five strands between two posts on the apex section’s perimeter. He left the top electrified strands alone. Puckins’s cut breached an opening about four feet wide and three and one half feet high. He then cut through the second perimeter fence. He bowed with a flourish, gestured Gurung through, and then handed him the wire cutters.
As with most penal institutions, this one had been designed with the primary aim of keeping certain people in, rather than keeping others out. The camp’s officers had mimicked the camp’s design in setting their priorities. As ordered, the three sentries sat inert in their towers wearing heavy sheepskin coats. With their rope ladders drawn up into their tower crow’s nest, they focused their attention on the prisoners’ barracks, occasionally standing to stretch their legs, clap their hands, or adjust the tiny wood stove, which seemed to add little to their comfort. Most of the time they sat so still it was difficult to tell if they weren’t dozing.
Gurung had to cut through two additional fences, but he was the first to reach his designated tower. I saw his kukri flash from its scabbard as he left his skis behind and began to feel his way up the tower struts. Puckins reached his tower seconds later. He ascended quickly, pulling himself up hand over hand, letting his legs hang slack. When he reached the sentry’s platform, he drew a length of wire, with toggles at either end, from his coat. A quick flick of the looped garrot and the sentry was clawing at his neck. In a minute the struggle was over. Puckins pushed the body aside and, unslinging the Dragunov, covered the third sentry on the far side of the camp carefully gauging windage and elevation.
Gurung was having a difficult time. He had barely had time to swing under his sentry’s platform when that sentry had stood up to load more wood into his stove. When the sentry sat down again, Gurung waited. Then in a rapid succession of movements he was at the railing, then slashing his kukri toward the back of the sentry’s neck. At this moment the sentry chose to stand up again. The razor-sharp kukri slashed through several layers of clothing into the sentry’s back. The sentry screamed and fumbled for his rifle. The scream echoed through the valley—then stopped abruptly with Gurung’s second stroke.
The third sentry on the far side of the camp stood up and took aim. A cracking report shattered the valley’s peace for a second time. In the far corner, the sentry dropped his rifle, pitched forward, and toppled to the snow beneath his tower like a broken gray doll.
Puckins raised the barrel of the Dragunov, satisfied with his shot.
CHAPTER 23
“Stand by.”
From their position on top of the ridge, Chamonix and Alvarez fired an armor-piercing round from the recoilless rifle into the mobile generator. The generator supplied power for the radio shack and most of the camp. The distant whine of the generator stopped with a resounding thump and a shower of sparks. Chunks of metal clattered against the side of the radio shack.
“Let’s hit it… now!”
The rest of us pulled our suede face masks into place, patted our body-armor vests, and placed our ski tips parallel. I could hear shouting from the guards’ barracks. The wind whistled under my fur ear flaps, knocking back my white hood as I made a few clumsy turns to keep my velocity under control until I shot through the gap in the fence. Moments later I was barreling through the breach. I could hear the hiss of six sets of skis behind me. I could hear snow being kicked aside as they, too, plunged through the two fences and across the camp yard. Someone fell behind me—in time with a rifle shot from the barracks—but was up before I dared to look back.
Several half-clothed guards—I thought I recognized the beer-barrel sergeant—were already out of their barracks’ side door. I fired a fan of tracers from a crouch, never bothering to reduce speed. Chamonix and Alvarez, with the recoilless, took cover near the radio shack and took aim at the door of the snowdrift blister that was the magazine. The magazine erupted in a terrifying geyser of iridescent flame. That signaled the end of the garrison’s hope for automatic weapons or additional ammo. I turned to watch the recoilless crew, only to see Alvarez stagger as blood gushed from his upper thighs below his body armor. Three more hits made him do a macabre soft-shoe before he collapsed, leaving a trail of bright red snow. His feet still moved, pushed, drove the body another yard, leaving a slushy, scarlet skid mark.