Gurung had served Great Britain, as his father, his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father had. He knew his duty, and his wife, who waited loyally for him in Nepal, knew hers. It was somewhat irregular for him to hire out individually, but he was with Dravit, and surely wasn’t wherever Dravit stood a piece of the British Empire? Gurung had languished too long in the garrison in Hong Kong, and a Gurkha must fight, or he was no Gurkha at all. Finally there was the Kampfschwimmer, Lutjens. Physically he could have been Wickersham’s younger brother, but he was a delicately dark Bavarian whereas Wickersham was an oakenly buff Wisconsinite. A top-notch gymnast, he seemed to be always in the air, balanced on his hands, or moving with graceful lunges. Where Wickersham’s face had been hammered into shape, Lutjens’s was chiseled to leave a thin nose and those narrow creases on either side of the mouth associated with well-bred yacht captains, Grand Prix drivers, and men in ads for good scotch. Something about him exuded evening in black tie, svelte debs, and fine crystal. His heavily accented English was hard to follow but I remember overhearing him say, “…a boring death, don’t you t’ink? T’ese escapades of mine will drive Aunt Elga verriickt, which would be a reward in itself, ja?” From the most sophisticated backgrounds sometimes came the simplest motivations of all: Lutjens waged a dangerous rebellion against a gilt-edged family.
At the other end of the scale, two of the Marseilles group, an ex-British para and an ex-U.S. Marine, developed injuries whose authenticity I doubted, but which gave them an honorable way out.
Heyer, following my lead, increased the complexity and difficulty of our ski maneuvers. Local skiers often glided through small groups of men digging snow caves, bivouacking or assuming strange formations prone in the snow. These skiers whisked by, shrugging off the odd behavior of foreigners.
On the fourth afternoon, after a timed fifteen-mile ski trek, I let the men go into Sapporo. The liberty would be good for morale and I knew they’d eventually start sneaking off for local color anyway. Consequently, I opted for Sapporo, which could absorb our group without trauma.
A knock on the door interrupted some map work. “As I remember, you said liberty was for all hands, Skipper.”
It was Dravit.
“A good officer must lead by precept and example,” he said, storming into the room before I could reply. “And it is about time you guided me through the mysteries of Kobe beef and Kirin beer, otherwise I will be thought horribly backward by the local ladies and justifiably branded a big-nosed, hairy barbarian.”
“Okay, okay. This map work can wait. Seems about time I renewed my acquaintance with bright lights and civilized living.”
Ice demons menaced us in Sapporo—great crystalline, reptilian demons who had slithered out of crevasses somewhere on Hokkaido and crept down to Odori Park to squat among the snow sculpture. The eighty-foot figures defined the perimeters of the Yuki Matsuri, the snow festival. Their threatening frozen stares sent the hotel bus scurrying down the thoroughfares until it found safety within the brave lights of the entertainment district.
The bus deposited Dravit and me before a well-known businessmen’s nightclub. Dravit’s primary interest was pub crawling, and when I told him what the price of a drink and charming conversation in this expense-account-geared club totaled, he became even more convinced we ought to make our donations to the local economy over a broader range of recipients. “Share the wealth and all that. Might ossify staying all night in one place, actually.”
In addition to the many businessmen, the district swarmed with Japan’s strayed souls. Japan categorized them tribally: the kaminari-zoku, motorcyclists of the “thunder tribe;” the yoromeki-zoku, the voluptuaries of the “philandering tribe;” the taiyo-zoku, the affluent, aimless members of the “sun tribe.” The West didn’t have a monopoly on rudderless ships.
We had no trouble finding other places to visit. The district teemed with bars, tearooms, cabarets, nightclubs, pachinko parlors, and restaurants: the Miyako, the Fuyago, the Kamakura, the Moulin Rouge, the Jazz Inn, the Nevada.… Every street tout offered to guide us to a “number-one nice place.” Instead we followed out our own instincts and concentrated on a string of cubbyhole bars.
The Kamakura—the snow hut—proved attractive. Its frosted-glass booths resembled Japanese igloos or snow huts. “Irasshai-mase,” welcomed a predatory hostess. “Sit down…you drink scotch?… Joni Waluka Red, I bet…best music here, ne? she fired off without taking a breath.
Despite an earlier warning to steer clear of scotch, the most coveted liquor in Japan, Dravit ordered it anyway. He inspected the bottle of Royal something or other when the bartender poured. Dravit twisted the label for me to read.
“Says here this scotch is distilled by appointment to the Queen and ‘manufactured from the finest Scottish grapes.’”
We threaded through the yoru no cho—butterflies of the night—of three more bars, including a karaoke, a tavern for very amateur solo vocalists, until we hit the Transistor Dolly Bar. The name had me puzzled until Dravit—sensitive to these things—noted that not one of the hostesses stood over five feet tall.
The bantam Royal Marine’s eyes lit merrily and several of the girls buzzed about attentively. Each wore a distinctive electronic symbol that matched a button on a console at our table. Dravit punched two buttons, which lit corresponding symbols on a display board over the bar. We heard a short electronic ditty and all but two girls disappeared.
They sat down and graciously listened to Dravit burn out his circuits in pidgin Japanese.
“Bothers you a bit, doesn’t it? That ruddy gentleman’s cashiering they gave you. You hide it well, of course.”
“Of course,” I said, wishing he’d change the subject, but he’d had a few by now. He worried for people doggedly after he’d had a few.
“Try to do some good with no hope of reward and they’ll stomp on your fingers every time.”
He thought a moment.
“Too bloody dedicated, that’s what it is. Ramrods like us are too dedi-bloody-cated for the bleeding system to understand. No frame of reference. They don’t want us ’cause they can’t figure us from a self-interest point of view. I mean, all right, self-interest is a valid enough spur for most pursuits, but getting shot at is just basically contrary to a beggar’s self-interest, bloody clearly it is.”
Dravit’s micro-component dolly refilled his glass.
“So it figures they can’t appreciate a first-rate officer when they see one because they don’t understand why ruddy integrity is so important to the military in the first place. Well, bugger them if they can’t take a joke, that’s what I always say. But it hurts, doesn’t it? Down deep, I mean. You won’t let much show, but an old jolly can tell. You gave it your heart and they rubbed your face in it. Sod ’em. Here’s a chill to the vocationless bastards.”
“About time we moved on,” I said somberly. “Wasn’t someone saying something about spreading the wealth and terminal ossification?”
A few blocks farther on we heard the busy chimes of a pachinko parlor. Pachinko—vertical pinball with marbles instead of steel balls—ranked high among Japanese addictions. We would have gone on had I not seen a familiar bowlegged figure leaning against one of the machines.
Leaning wasn’t quite the right word—propped, maybe. Barry Puckins of west Texas had flown in for a few days on his way. back from the Philippines. The chief would return stateside tomorrow and be back for keeps in a week. Now he stood in a frozen stance, his palms up and his forearms parallel across his stomach. Pinned to his anorak jacket was a note in katakana, and next to him a bargirl he’d liberated somewhere laughed uncontrollably.
Soon a dissipated teenage girl in a motorcycle jacket and a few of her friends shuffled over to Puckins to read the note. She reached into her pocket, tucked something into the pouch of Puckins’s anorak, and touched one of several buttons sketched on the note. Slowly, Puckins rumbled to life like a coin-operated machine.
The girl, a world-
weary urchin, had pressed the button “oil.” With uneven movements he removed his scarf, wrapped it around his head like a turban, and began to drill. When he struck an invisible gusher, he grabbed the girl, danced a mechanical polka of joy, then abruptly wound down and resumed his original fixed and lifeless position. The girl and her friends were in stitches. Something made me think they didn’t often have much to laugh about.
Someone else inserted a coin and pressed “overdrive.” Again he rumbled to life, this time leaning backward as he moved and assuming the appearance of a pilot functioning under high G-forces.
Throughout, his eyes showed neither mirth nor recognition. I figured he’d go on like this until the parlor owner threw him out or he passed out. (The bargirl ran across the street for bottles of beer, which he chugged every time someone pressed “lubrication.”)
By the time we’d left, the pouch of his anorak bulged heavily with coins.
Several bars later we reached the Fuyago, the nightless castle. Its ladies came on shrill and competitive.
At a corner stool I noticed Chamonix with a bargirl as hard and time worn as deck plate. She was doing all the talking—in French, perhaps—in any event he wasn’t holding up his end. He just sat there glassy eyed and expressionless, pouring them back with a vengeance. I saw no reason to disturb them. Empty stools surrounded them like barbed wire.
He downed drink after drink at a steady, unfeeling, unrelenting pace.
“What say you to heading back to that electro-voltaic, double-switch, single-transformer-gizmo saloon, pardner?” Dravit asked brightly.
“Er…danger high voltage?”
As we walked back I thought how there was something drearily automated about this band, that had chosen to march like clockwork pallbearers into the endless cold. At least two mechanical men, one comic and the other grim, had mustered under the command of a weary-eyed, wooden frogman. It must be catching, because now the second-in-command had become partial to ladies whose most intimate workings might be transistorized.
Later that evening, commotion in an alley caught my attention. Dravit had been comparing the economic outlooks of Japan and Korea—at length. I couldn’t see anything as we had passed the alley but there was a distant gritty shuffling of feet and heavy uneven breathing.
“Let’s take a look,” I said, wheeling back into the alley. The alley was deep and intersected another, making a thin T. As we quickened our pace, the clear sounds of a struggle issued from the right arm of the T.
Turning the corner, we were suddenly watching three Japanese men, their backs to an open doorway, holding a resisting fourth man while a fifth flicked a sap at his head. The resisting victim was Wickersham. As I rushed at the man with the sap, he heard my footsteps and whirled into me, flicking the black leather sap at my face. I ducked into Tai otoshi, a judo body-drop throw, smashing his head and shoulders into the brick building’s wall. In the corner of my eye I saw Dravit, his fist wrapped in a scarf, popping neat combinations at another of Wickersham’s assailants. That left two men trying to restrain Wickersham, which was hardly enough. They both let go at once, and one attempted a karate front kick at my groin. I had just time to rotate a hip into the kick and to grab the extended foot with my right hand as I swept away his other leg with my left foot. He dropped hard to the ice-covered pavement. The other, in a brown suit, opened his jacket, reached into the front of his shirt, and under a wool belly wrap. A flash of green-and-red tattooing showed across his bare stomach and I knew what to expect. I brushed Dravit aside and grabbed brown suit’s moving wrist with both hands. The razor-sharp tanto dagger flashed for a split second before I could turn it back into him. The ten inch blade slipped into his visceral cavity to the hilt. He doubled over, then dropped to the pavement. Three men lay on the pavement, the fourth had disappeared.
“Let’s get out of here, they’re yakuza or hired katana.”
“Wha…?” Wickersham started.
“Move, this is all we need.” I surveyed the alley, no one had seen the fight. “I’ll explain later.”
Snaking through more alleys, we finally came to a boulevard and flagged down a cab. Out of breath, we tried to appear casual as the three of us jammed into the little Toyota. Once we were back at the ski resort I began to explain.
“You must have crossed some real pros. The fellow with the short sword either is, or was, yakuza.”
“Yakuza?”
“Japanese gangsters, Oriental organized crime. Centuries ago they were strictly gamblers, but now they’re thugs with traditions and codes.”
“How could you tell? Something special about that knife?” Dravit asked.
“Well, yes. That and the belly wrap and the tattoo. Yakuza are fond of tattooing an entire kimono design on themselves and of using one of those daggers instead of a gun. Now I’ve got a question: What the hell did you do to get them riled?”
“Nothing, honest. What was that other word you used, kata-something?” Wickersham asked.
“Katana, sword. Hired sword. Some yakuza fall from grace with their clans and hire out, like hired guns. Okay, now tell me what started all this.”
“Well, I was over at a place called the Miyako blowing my retainer on… Well, anyway, after a while I noticed a Japanese fellow in a mod brown suit in the corner seemed to be paying me a lot of attention, but never really looking at me. Well, I figured he could mind his business and I’d mind mine.
“Pretty soon this bar dolly was letting me buy her drinks, so I don’t really think too much about my mod friend in the brown suit.”
Wickersham took a deep breath. For the first time I noticed the side of his face was the color of a ripe eggplant.
“Well, this fine bar dolly and I decide to see the rest of town, and it seems everywhere we go I catch a glimpse of Mr. Mod Brown Suit. Later on I don’t see him but I see this other fellow with a turtleneck—a Caucasian maybe—and now he’s everywhere.”
I remembered the man with the turtleneck—Dravit had knocked him out—he might have been Caucasian.
“The night was still young so the bar dolly and I go to this tiny apartment of hers for a nightcap, maybe more, maybe less,” he said with bloodshot discretion.
“About oh-two-thirty I decided to head back here…”
It was 0500.
“…and just as I was going out the door Brown Suit and Turtleneck and two guys I never saw before try to put me out with a sap, but Brown Suit missed me on his first solid try, and from then on I wasn’t standing still for nobody.”
I could imagine their plight. They had missed their chance to coldcock Wickersham, and then were stuck with a 240-pound, five-foot-ten wildcat on their hands. From the look of the side of his face they had managed to tag him a few times.
“I think I broke Turtleneck’s wrist, but the sap man kept trying to make a good tag. I went out, I think once, but came back to, before they could get me anywhere.”
A mugging? Perhaps. But there were easier victims. This carried the earmarks of an attempted kidnapping. I had the uneasy feeling that this attempted snatch and our project were connected.
“Captain Dravit, from now on everyone uses the buddy system on liberty. No one leaves the resort alone. Everyone carries a blackjack, brass knuckles, or a knife.”
Dravit caught my glance. We were under siege and someone wanted one of us to talk with or to. What had been up until now a winter snow festival had taken on a dangerous mood.
Wickersham edged toward the resort’s main building.
“And where do you think you’re going?”
“Get some rest?” Wickersham piped up enthusiastically.
“Uh-huh. You get poleaxed on your own time, you can rest and recuperate on your own time. Be back here in PT gear in fifteen minutes.”
“Yes, sir,” was the sheepish reply.
You’re a hard man, Quillon Frazer. A hard-nosed, stiff-necked, true-to-type ogre. Heaven help you if they ever found out you were fond of them.
CHAPTER 13
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The weary days of training seemed to blur together. Even aches and pains took on an undefined quality until they manifested themselves into one single collective throb.
We found that high-camber mountaineering skis with cable bindings offered the simplest, most serviceable combination for our purposes. We allotted one multi-fuel stove for every two men. The stove was for cooking and for melting snow for water. Water in its different forms constituted the single most influential substance in subfreezing travel. It provided both danger and salvation.
Petty Officer Heyer warned that dehydration was the greatest threat to the ski trooper. Any raiding party was duty bound to stop periodically to melt snow for drinking. Otherwise, the party risked the collapse of its members one by one as assuredly as they would drop on a waterless hike across the Libyan desert. Each skier must examine his urine en route and be sure to drink enough water to keep it nearly clear white. He advised against eating snow directly for it puts a severe strain on the body’s heating system and the crystals cut up the inside of a skier’s mouth. It was only a last-resort procedure.
As dangerous as it was to dry out on the inside, it was equally dangerous to become wet on the outside. Water is a coolant. Its use for that purpose in a car’s engine, he explained, was a good example of that property. Water allowed to turn to ice was an even more effective coolant. It would be a fatal error in Siberia to get wet and stay wet. “Therefore,” he said, “the whole object of movement in cold weather is to stay dry. And that doesn’t just mean don’t go swimming with your clothes on.”
The pale Norwegian tapped his ski pole against the inside of each ski and continued. The threatening source of moisture could be the sea, melted snow on clothing, or sweat generated by overexertion. All these sources would cause discomfort and, over time, hypothermia.
Sweat was the most prevalent problem and it called for constant trade-offs. At any given temperature, less clothing was needed by a man moving vigorously than by a man standing still. If, however, that man moved too vigorously, he sweated and his lighter clothing instantly became a liability. Each skier had to know his sweat threshold and at what point to peel away clothing to avoid sweating.
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