Kick, slide. My polypropylene underwear was soaked with sweat. If we ever stopped for long it would freeze solid. SNOW DAMMIT. We were low on ammunition and that dwelled on my mind. We had traveled light from the very beginning and had now been in two firefights. Furthermore, we showed signs of the punchiness that meant extreme fatigue, and which adrenaline might not override. The ahkio was difficult to control down the steeper slopes, but we couldn’t risk letting Vyshinsky slide free. Everyone prayed for snow—track-concealing, aircraft-downing snow.
We had to get off our old trail. If it didn’t snow, other paratroopers dropped ahead of us in the daylight would find it and work back. Going downhill at this pace we had covered four days ground in a day and a night. I fretted a half hour away without knowing it.
“All right, veer northeast. Break a new trail,” I said to Matsuma ahead of me. He sent the word up.
“Which way is northeast?” was the reply back.
I skied up to Puckins. “That way, I think.”
Not a star was visible through the cloud cover and it was too early for the sun compass. We began breaking a new trail as the sky lightened in the east.
The Russian squad slalomed down a slope to our left. They tumbled into firing positions mere yards from us. I sensed they were as surprised as we were. Apparently our pursuers had divided into two uneven squads, and this squad had been told to flank us from the north. They had expected us to be farther south—where we would have been, had we kept to our old trail.
Under the circumstances a retreat would have cost about the same as an assault. We assaulted. I cut down a tall Russian with a three-round burst and my weapon went silent, out of ammo. There were too many trees and we were too close for grenades. Still moving forward, I flicked the AK’s bayonet up and drove it into another Russian paratrooper, all the way up to the muzzle. Everyone had kicked off his skis by now.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Puckins fall, red splashes covering his white overblouse. I felt light-headed.
A terrifying, ungodly screaming filled my ears.
The Russians must have been short of ammo, too, because within seconds all firing had stopped.
The screaming wouldn’t stop. I thrust below another paratrooper’s bayonet, I impaled and lifted his body off its feet, and flung it at another charging Russian. The charging Russian’s bayonet stuck fast in his comrade as I pulled free. I smashed into his temple with a driving horizontal butt stroke.
Die, Frazer, die. You let them down. Two more Russians came at me from behind. I parried one’s bayonet—not before it tore into my triceps. The other thrust at my face, knocking off my fur cap and searing my scalp with his blade as I ducked low. From a squat I swept away his knees with another butt stroke. Brittle from the cold, the rifle stock splintered apart in my hands.
Still the ghastly screaming continued. As I searched for another weapon, powerful arms began to choke me from behind. The hands tried to twist my neck enough to snap it. I crouched and dived at a tree. The tree hit the Russian with sufficient impact to loosen his grip. I turned and, grabbing the insides of his collar, started choking him. I hammered his head against the tree. Then he went limp. I looked at the big red stain around a small hole in his chest. It was the smooth-faced officer. He’d been dead before he’d throttled me, he just hadn’t known it.
I looked around. Wickersham stood erect with his legs braced in the center of a pile of bodies. Chamonix swayed with a bloody shoulder. Matsuma was down on one knee wrapping some cloth around his thigh. I could not see Gurung. Then a Russian body rolled aside. Gurung lay flat on his back, soaked in his victim’s blood. He rose stiffly, unsure of his balance.
The screaming had stopped. It had been mine.
CHAPTER 25
“Take a look at this.” Chamonix held forward a brace of Russian ammo pouches with his good arm. “Only a quarter full. They must have lightened their equipment, too, but they jettisoned ammo. They must have been pretty confident, those heroes of the Soviet Union.”
Puckins, barely conscious, sat propped against a tree. Several bullet holes had perforated his midsection. A stomach wound developed irreversible peritonitis if not attended by a surgeon promptly. We had no surgeon nor would we be able to get one in time. Moreover, we could not stop his bleeding. He only had hours to live. We knew it. Puckins knew it.
“Mister Frazer,” he said. “I owe you, sir.”
“Owe me? I owe you—if anyone owes anything to anybody.”
“No, sir, you don’t understand. I was partially responsible for those… those things. You know… the camera… the police bust… Captain Dravit’s leg… the regulators.”
“You? Why?”
I felt myself wobble with despair and squatted down to have my eyes even with his. He looked old for once. His eyes were glazed with pain, but there were lines of sadness around them, too.
“It was Lutjens and me. Lutjens only at first, but then I got pulled into it. From the very beginning I suspected he… Lutjens… was up to something, from back when we made our little excursion to Kunashiri. He just wasn’t behavin’ quite right. Couldn’t put my finger on it for a long time, until later I remembered Lutjens braggin’… during the arm-wrestling match… about the big debts he’d run up in Germany before he had been forced to skip the country. I guess he was among the high-rollin’ damned from the very first, and he owed some shadowy characters no mean stack of silver. Must have noticed me watchin’ him because just before the police raid in Hokkaido, he bore down on me with a heavy lean.”
What color he’d had seemed to have drained from his face. A snowflake on his cheek refused to melt.
“You know the wife’s a Viet. Somehow… I can’t figure how…. Lutjens had connections in Washington. He had her records checked and of course her application for entry was irregular, awful irregular—enough to win her a quick deportation if someone wanted to press it. When we got married, she thought someone might stop her papers ’cause of her old man being a Saigon deputy police chief….”
The Saigon deputy police chief, the one in the photograph executing a VC terrorist with his police pistol. What the U.S. newspapers hadn’t said in their captions was this incident had occurred in the midst of one of the most cold-blooded, vicious attacks on noncombatants of the war. Special VC assassination squads had been sent into the homes of pro-American Viets and began—as planned—to execute family members one by one, youngest first, while the rest had been made to watch. The deputy police chief had managed to apprehend one of these terrorists.
“So she gun-decked it. Her old man was a hard old Viet. How was she to know they couldn’t deport her for her old man’s righteous anger—but they sure as hell’s fire could deport her for a falsified application. Lutjens kept saying he had a friend named Denehy who’d have her back in Ho Chi Minh City faster than you could say ‘di-di mau.’ Then he’d laugh.”
I’m sure Puckins hadn’t laughed. His eyes now reflected the haunting faces of nine laughterless children.
“I played along for a while to get a little thinking space. There was something wrong with Lutjens, more than just a pile of bad debts. He didn’t seem to have been issued a full emotional register. I’ve seen people like him before. They see other people as just objects to be used. Anyway, he was a nasty customer but not really very sharp, if you know what I mean. So I managed to steer him into relatively harmless dead ends—except for Captain Dravit’s booby trap—he did all that on his own. Trouble was, Lutjens was getting thinking space, too, and next thing I know, he plunked a threat to get me yanked out of the Nav’ on top of it all. Mentions Commander Ackert, too. What was I going to do? First no wife, then no job, and nine kids under fourteen? Sulfur and salvation, there just wasn’t any way out I could see in the short run.”