Bantams like Henry Dravit were worth a herd of football linemen in a tight spot, and his record bore the fact out. His baptism of fire had been in the frosty over-the-beach raids of the Korean War. On one occasion, his entire party wiped out and his dry suit shredded by shrapnel, he inadvertently crawled into a North Korean automatic-weapons position, His dubious luck further brought him into one of the first brainwashing experiments. This he found mildly amusing—until things went sour and they threatened to pull out his mustache with pliers. After which they promised to work on other portions of his anatomy.
“Nasty bit of work. After a while a mustache sort of grows on you, seems to me,” he once told me with a laugh. A well-developed sense of irony spiced his conversation.
The next day two North Korean guards were found, their heads twisted northbound and their bodies oriented southbound. Dravit, his mustache, and all his moving parts were gathering momentum southbound. Dravit, then Corporal Dravit, had begun his epic end run from Wonsan to the Funchilin Pass through the entire North Korean army and part of the Chinese. Keeping below ridgelines and moving only at night, he was to skulk three hundred miles in fifteen days, gain two pounds, and retain his mustache.
“Sodding U.S. leathernecks nearly foreshortened my memoirs by several chapters as I entered their perimeter. The retreat from the Chosin Reservoir must have been rather dicey.”
In addition to his Korean experience, he brought along the strength of innumerable winter Royal Marine exercises in Norway. He and Pieter Heyer of the Norwegian Marine-jaegerlag would compose the training cadre. Together they were as capable of preparing us to survive Siberia as anyone who’d never set foot there could.
Originally military service had been intended as a brief diversion before Dravit would become a gardener in earnest alongside his father. There was nothing extraordinary in his signing on; the elder Dravit viewed military service as a chance for Henry to get the sand out of his shoes, and Henry had envied the Royal Marine Reservists he had noticed tramping about the countryside. They seemed an appealing sort: trim, outdoorsy, and wet to the knees. No one was more shocked than he was to find he was good at it, far better than at gardening. When it came to fighting, Dravit, as it developed, was a hang-the-automatic-weapons-we-can-set-those-blokes-running-by-positioning-the-mortar-right-there natural.
Only impatience with civilians, abstractions, and grand strategies had kept him from advancing beyond captain. Since the British hadn’t succumbed to the “up or out” cancer, so loved by the Americans, he continued until retirement, satisfied in his career.
Dravit would be a strong, energetic assistant. I never knew a man who could think so quickly on his feet. For instance, there was that weekend liberty when he’d quelled a potential riot in Nicosia. He had cleared a crowd from a town square using a broom handle in a rather forceful demonstration of bayonet techniques. The Greek and Turkish factions simply stepped aside. They couldn’t believe their eyes. Physically he remained in top condition, and without the gray at his temples could have passed for twenty-nine, though forty-six was closer to the mark. I knew I had been right in guessing he was thoroughly bored with his job as an automatic-weapons salesman. I anticipated he would attend to discipline and day-to-day details in surges of too-long-restrained vigor. A lesser man might not have been able to reconcile such a swashbuckling style with maintenance of high standards and iron discipline.
Dravit contributed one other skill to the project—he had received Russian language training.
A half dozen other telegrams echoed Fitzroy’s Micawberesque response. A greater return for less risk lay just beyond the next wave. In thumbing through the telegrams I noticed that I had still not heard from Pieter Heyer in Ramsund. I relied on Heyer to add depth to the training. Dravit had been trained for cold weather; Heyer was born in it.
Perhaps five men as a core group. Training would have to begin without my knowing how many men I’d need for the actual mission. But first I needed the raw material. I hoped that starting with an additional group of about twenty-five, I could distill the group down to five or ten reliable, field-wise raiders. With these men to augment my original five, we just might be able to finesse a clandestine rescue where a larger group would fail.
The last telegram in the stack was a decoded copy of the one sent to a café owner/soldier-of-fortune recruiter in Marseilles. Though the café owner knew my method of operation, it was advisable to remind him of my specifications in case he was tempted to clear the café of deadwood.
CAFE CAMERONE
MARSEILLES FRANCE
FRAZER
YOKOHAMA JAPAN
REQUIRE 25 DOCUMENTED VETERANS FOR COLD WEATHER HIGH RISK OPERATION STOP LIGHT INFANTRY BACKGROUND STRONG SWIMMERS STOP REPORTING HOKKAIDO JAPAN 7 FEB NO EXTRADITABLE OFFENSES CONTEMPLATED SEND NO BILLION DOLLAR BALLPLAYERS COMMA MOVIE TOUGH GUYS COMMA PRETTY BOYS JUNKIES ALKIES COMSYMPS
There was an unfortunately broad spectrum of quality among paladins.
The plane was packed with businessmen virtually spilling over into the aisles. The lure of economically booming Korea had filled every seat. Half of the passengers stared into open briefcases while the other half exchanged information on the price in “real money” of everything from brassware to sweaters. The passenger next to me, a paunchy man in an overtailored Italian suit, droned on about the merits of his Mercedes diesel and seemed to know the smart price for everything.
I restrained my urge to offer advice. It would be futile. My fellow passenger would undoubtedly blunder through his Korean visit regardless—patronizing, using first names, and backslapping. In looking over the other Western passengers, I wondered what it was that I had been drawn to protect and why.
Yet theirs would be merely human blundering—random, small scale, and self-adjusting. What Kurganov and I fought in our own ways was institutional blundering on a mammoth scale. Its inevitable outgrowth was unending purges, liquidations, relocations, deceptions, and dragooning orchestrated by shortsighted apparatchiks whose blueprints were drafted in applied fear. One of the few luxuries of my present existence was that the foe, totalitarianism, was irredeemably corrupt and as black as Lenin’s shadow. The cause, however, was tinged with gray. Men of my fellow passenger’s stripe left me uneasy. Unlike my comrades in the established militaries, I, as a free lance, righted immediate wrongs and was not plagued with implicitly endorsing the programs that invariably followed. In his present existence Frazer had lost much, but gained purity of action.
A second reason held me back. As a veteran and expatriate I was sadly familiar with the cultural heavy-handedness of the first wave of troops to reach the beachhead. It didn’t matter whether the troops were commandos… or purchasing agents. The ability to identify with the locals was a gift and as common as broken noses among missionaries. It was even rare among such “go native” elite units as SEALs and Special Forces, where identification was a cultivated attribute. The toughness of mind required to reach your objective was the same toughness that locked out external values and influences. Too often those locked-out influences were some foreigner’s seemingly untested values. Within elite units worldwide, perhaps one man in ten stood truly capable of integrating into a combat organization of mixed origin. Yes, Frazer, you were a rare and adaptable fool.