And Clausewitz had said war demands resolution, firmness, and staunchness.
A friend of mine had gone to work for the CIA. He had said that through their written testing they could tell if you had a sense of destiny. It was an important point. Anyone who volunteered to put himself in harm’s way had to feel that someday, in some way, he would be needed to fit into some important event.
Unconventional warfare was my fate. I was a fast learner in a field where no two operations were alike. I could absorb complex theory and give it concrete and immediate application. Evident, too, was my knack for carving order out of chaos, for organizing and directing. Finally there was something about me, some personality quirk that made me the type of officer the right kind of men wanted to follow. Resolution? Firmness? Staunchness? I could never be sure.
In any event I knew what I did best. It was the only thing I could do with more than half a heart. It was, for better or worse, what I was destined to be.
And a naval officer, a specialist in unconventional warfare, was what I knew I could never, ever be again…in any sanctioned manner.
My shoulder ached more than ever.
I spent the trip back to Yokohama, gazing out the window, hefting and sorting plans like an old woman buying fruit. My concentration was so total I nearly missed my stop.
An attack on the Russian mainland would be tough enough. The unforgiving Siberian winter narrowed the margin for error until it was the size of the peephole in an interrogation-room door.
Keiko sensed my preoccupation and quietly went about cooking supper. She studied her cooking intently, singing some soft Japanese song as I drafted a barrage of telegrams to Coronado, Little Creek, Manchester, Marseilles, Harare, Ramsund, and Chinhae.
When she was about to go down to work, she kissed me lightly on the forehead, and then as I rose, kneed me full force in the groin. While I staggered back trying to catch my breath, she bowed politely and left.
Ama women require attention and are never, never to be taken lightly.
CHAPTER 5
As the small KAL airliner lifted from the runway at Tokyo’s Narita Airport, I unloaded my worn briefcase and reread the telegrams I had received and deciphered prior to takeoff. They had been transmitted using a variation of the book code—not a terribly original crypto method, but for our purposes, effective. Each message left Yokohama in number groupings disguised as the price column on an invoice telegram. The addressee would, on receipt of the telegram, purchase three preselected monthly magazines—magazines without regional editions, and different ones for each addressee—to be used as decoding keys. The first price code group indicated which magazine and which page applied to the subsequent twenty-one characters. Every three characters gave the line and ordinal position of a letter in the underlying message. Then the process was repeated using another group, and this time twenty-four characters, progressing in added groups of three until the message was completed. No printed letter on a magazine page was ever used twice, and this was the marvel of the system. It could not be broken by a statistical frequency of letter-use analysis. In any given English paragraph of a minimum size, the letter e will appear most often, then s, then t, etc., and that’s how you broke elementary codes. Furthermore, our messages were too short for a computerized hit-or-miss analysis. But the code was only as secure as its users.
FRAZER
YOKOHAMA
WICKERSHAM
LITTLE CREEK VIRGINIA
YES STOP BETWEEN ENLISTMENTS COMMA HAVE UP TO 180 DAYS STOP YOU SUPPLY DATES
GORDAN
FRAZER
YOKOHAMA
PUCKINS
CORONADO CALIFORNIA
REQUIRED WESTERN PACIFIC DEPLOYMENT IN MAY STOP TENTATIVE YES COMMA NEED TIME FRAME STOP WIFE EXPECTING PUCKINS NINTH TWO WEEKS
BARRY
Petty Officer First Class Gordan Wickersham and Chief Barry Puckins had been members of my platoon in the western Pacific. They presented an odd combination of personalities and would comprise part of the nucleus of the rescue organization.
Wickersham’s eternally over-revving mind was held captive in a body as powerfully muscled as a Wisconsin brewery horse. When he wasn’t brawling or womanizing, it was his singular mission in life to bring the military into the free enterprise system. On at least three occasions, I’d had to stop him from setting up a corporation to sell shares in captured booty. Yet there was no finer M-60 machine gunner in Vietnam. This Clydesdale of a man lumbered to the sound of the guns.
I could see Wickersham standing before me, grinning not quite angelically, showing a one-inch gap of missing teeth in his upper jaw and thoughtfully stroking his cauliflower ear. He was explaining how he had only borrowed the commodore’s jeep…that the fact that the shore patrol had found it sans tires, battery, upholstery, and canvas top was due to unfortunate vandalism by persons unknown…which he would rectify by “fixing their wagons,” but first he had to make a visit to the Salvation Army mission in Manila…to visit an elderly, ailing lady…whom he knew through one of the stewards. As an experienced interpreter, I guessed all this to mean he’d intended to sell the whole jeep but got stiffed; and by elderly, he meant over eighteen; and by ailing, he meant she had a fever that needed quenching.
With his bridgework in, he had the battered good looks that some women found exciting; generally the slinky, long-legged types you found draped off hulking prizefighters. His slabs of muscle weren’t only for show. In basic training, several instructors had wagered he couldn’t climb a thirty-foot rope with twin steel-90 diving tanks on his back. They lost.
Gordan Wickersham was one of five sandy-haired, heavy-shouldered sons born to a long-suffering beer salesman. How Milwaukee ever survived the intersibling competition among these five brawling, hockey-playing, ever-competing, and always-enterprising young public enemies is a monument to its civil defense organization. The competition was cutthroat, and their dares and challenges bordered on the suicidal. The end product was an odd blend of loyalty, swagger, hostility, and intelligence. As a result of his immersion in this strenuously masculine environment, a good fight, a touch of heavy-handed buffooning, a ready wench, and an easy dollar meant home. And all he needed from life.
The moderating influence on Wickersham was the silent Texan, Puckins. No officer could possibly devote the time required to effectively monitor Wickersham’s activities. Fortunately, through some strange symbiotic chemistry, he was given to relinquishing ascendancy to Puckins long before Puckins had ever made chief. It was the Clydesdale and the cowboy. They formed an inseparable team, a vibrant lamination of the physical and the spiritual.
Born and raised in west Texas, Barry Puckins carried the classic lean and bowlegged cowboy build, but he could swim like a Waikiki beachboy. His redheaded Huckleberry Finn looks fit well with his disposition toward silent mirth. He could draw more laughs with a few wordless movements than a good comic working a half-hour routine.
Humor formed only one component of a complex man, a man who was essentially a fundamentalist of the Old Testament mold. He’d graduated from a Texas Bible college—it was surprising how many SEALs had attended some seminary or other. His grandfather had stormed into Texas as a six-gun-carrying, circuit-riding preacher, and I remember Puckins showing me a picture of his parents that bore a dry resemblance to American Gothic. It would, however, have been a mistake to label Puckins cloistered or otherworldly. “Easy to see He made the world chock-full of different adventures and places. Cinders of hell, it’d be a sin and darned unnatural not to grab the opportunities laid before us,” he’d confided to me in one of his rare wordy moments. “I hold there’s gotta be a reason for it. Sure as they’ll be no thermostat control for you an’ me in the next life. There’s somethin’ to it.” In this vein he had bounced around before joining the Navy. He’d tried everything from miming in Ghirardelli Square to bartending in a Houston skivvyhouse.
Reconciliation of religion with his eventual profession wasn’t difficult. Certai
n Moslem sects viewed the killing of each infidel as bringing oneself another step closer to Paradise. Puckins’s attitude toward dispatching communists was analogous, but not quite so simple. In its essence, communists were anti-God, therefore Puckins was anti-communist.
Furthermore, or perhaps as a logical progression from his religious convictions, Puckins was a bedrock family man devoted to his wife and squad of kids. He showed a strong feeling for children in general, and they for him. There’s an old saw that men in sapper or demolition units are either mad, married, or Methodist. Since madness is relative and I was a member of the same unit, I would have no way of judging that point, but as to the latter two categories, Puckins was very much married and very nearly Methodist.
The Korean stewardesses alternately hovered and darted about the aisles with gracious laughter and the tinkle of glass.
FRAZER
YOKOHAMA
FITZROY
HARARE ZIMBABWE
REGRETS STOP ON TO DEAL OF CENTURY POSSIBLE ACQUISITION PRECIOUS STONES STOP MAY NEED ASSISTANCE SOON STOP STAY AVAILABLE STAY HEALTHY
JACK
I had known Fitzroy in Vietnam, too. He had been an outstanding trooper with the crack Australian Special Air Service. His tracking ability was legendary—from a heel print he could give you race, religion, and blood type. I had hoped to use his skills in reverse in Siberia perhaps to elude or confuse trackers.
FRAZER
YOKOHAMA
DRAVIT
MANCHESTER ENGLAND
AFFIRMATIVE COLD CLIMES RAIDING STOP QUERY DESPOILING ANTARCTIC WEATHER STATION COMMA TIBETAN STRONGHOLD OR BIRDSEYE FOOD FACTORY
HENRY
Captain Dravit, formerly of the Royal Marines would be my second-in-command and likely the oldest member of the raiding party. His steadfast competence was often downright unnerving, but hardly surprising from a gardener’s son who’d worked his way up through the ranks. Barely five foot four inches tall in jump boots, he sported a first-rate handlebar, which had become something of a trademark.
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
FRAZER
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, liquidation
s, 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.
As we began our descent, a stewardess pulled down the blinds on each of the windows. After nearly thirty years, the Republic of Korea must still function on a wartime basis. The blinds were pulled to prevent observation of the port defenses of Chinhae, Korea’s principal naval center.
At the small Chinhae air terminal, I was met by a middle-aged naval officer built low and solid like a cinder block. Commander Pak directed the maritime unconventional warfare section of the Korean 25th Squadron and consequently smiled only with his eyes. The rest of the smile had been eroded by too many covert amphibious reconnaissances into North Korea with too many good men lost and too many imprisoned—never to be freed.
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