RED ICE

by R. L. Crossland

  As the day wore on, the crowd in the next room grew more and more rambunctious. Wickersham and Gurung, its inhabitants, were on a good-to-be-alive high and inviting the others in for beer or hot sake. Their room resounded with the bumps and thumps of the spirited horseplay typical of these get-togethers. I could hear Wickersham organizing “Hokkaido’s First International All-Services Arm-Wrestling Tournament.” Before long, Lutjens, Wickersham, and Alvarez had risen to finalist level. I could hear bets called out and furniture being rearranged.

  Dravit was poring over Russian newspapers when someone knocked at our door. “Party’s in the next room over!”

  Frazer-san?” The words had a heavy Japanese intonation. We let the man in. It was a ferret-faced, round-shouldered Oriental in his mid-thirties. He kneeled on one knee like a crapshooter. “O-hikae nasutte, o-hikae nasutte…,” he began, giving the traditional self-introduction of the yakuza.

  “Thank you for kneeling so quickly,” I said, giving the standard response.

  He went on to describe his native province, his clan, its chief, and his connections with the other clans of Sapporo in great detail. None of it meant anything to me, but this was the traditional recitation and it would have been impolite to interrupt. Dravit stood by dumbly, not understanding a word.

  “Frazer-san, a Korean acquaintance of mine in Sapporo who makes a business of knowing things…”

  One of Kim’s KCIA agents must have sent him.

  “…has requested that I relate what information I have gathered about a man who recently met his demise in an alley in Sapporo. This man wore the tattoos of the gamblers’ brotherhood.”

  His words were punctuated by a loud crash and a roar of approval from the gang next door. The semifinals were over. Put your money on Wickersham.

  “The man’s name was Aoki. He left his clan several years ago after an argument with his oyabun, his clan chief. It was well known that he hired out. The rumor has been that he was recently retained by a foreigner. My Korean friend mentioned an attempted kidnapping. Kidnapping is not a normal yakuza undertaking.”

  I had been surprised by the fact that there had been no further attacks or approaches on members of our group after Wickersham’s night in Sapporo. That could have meant one of two things: one, they had given up, or two, they had succeeded in turning one of our men against us. This yakuza’s information plus the camera incident made the latter alternative more likely. I had taken a greater risk than I had realized by raiding Kunashiri. We could have very easily been maneuvered into an ambush. I hoped whoever it was would be content with small-scale sabotage. His position allowed him to effect far worse damage.

  The yakuza reached slowly into his waistband. Dravit took a cautious step forward. The yakuza drew a tanto dagger, then flicked it into a log by the stove. “This is Aoki’s dagger. He brought disgrace to us, and it. Perhaps it will be more use to one who has shown he can use it.”

  An immense crash from next door shook the room. It was followed by yelling and cheering. I could hear Wickersham bellowing over the din, “I win! There’s no match for a Navy SEAL, a rootin’-tootin’, parachutin’, SCUBA-divin’, double-crimpin’…”

  I thanked the nonplussed yakuza with the ferret face.

  “…lead-spittin’, pineapple-throwin’, rubber-coated, K-Bar knife-totin’, star sapphire ring-wearin’ gentleman of experience and resource whose punctuality is only limited by the accuracy of his big fat Rolex diving watch. Oh yeah, one other thing—”

  “Cut the malarkey and drink up. You realize there are children sober in China?” an unidentified voice scolded.

  “I’m the last of the bareknuckle fighters!”

  Third crash.

  Dravit and I burst out of the door to put a halt to the impending brawl.

  When we returned, the yakuza was gone.

  Several nights later, a barrage of knocks on the suite’s outer door startled me from a deep sleep.

  “Open up, please. We are police.”

  Dravit, in the adjoining room of the suite, was already up. He had his boots and trousers on. He shrugged his shoulders. Maybe they were police, maybe they weren’t. This could be a setup. He picked up a chair and hurled it through a back window as I grabbed my clothes. Then we both dropped sixteen feet into a thick blanket of white powder. I could hear glass breaking in the other rooms. Gurung and Wickersham plummeted into the snow a few yards away.

  We found ourselves in the crossed beams of several floodlights. Gray-uniformed policemen circled us—some holding revolvers on lanyards. Wickersham took a poke at one policeman and found himself flat on his back. The Japanese police take their hand-to-hand training seriously.

  “As the inspector said, we are police. Excuse handcuffs please.”

  They herded the nine of us into a waiting police van. Puckins was missing, he’d probably stepped out of his room for a second. Matsuma looked dismayed.

  “Poor showing of Japanese hospitality,” Dravit said, looking around the inside of the van for cameras or bugs. “Seems a group of outdoorsmen can’t enjoy a back-to-nature, consciousness-raising session in peace.”

  Some time later the van rolled into the central police station at Sapporo. Puckins was brought in moments later. They put each of us into a separate interrogation room. I rated one in restful pale green. Two men told me to take a seat.

  “I’m Chief Inspector Koizumi of the Sapporo police. We have reason to believe you are planning to launch a mercenary operation from Japanese soil.”

  He had said “mercenary” as if it hurt his mouth. He ran his fingers through his gray hair.

  “Not me,” I said in partial truth. He didn’t look convinced.

  “Horikawa-san of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs”—he flicked his head toward the other younger man in a well-tailored blue suit—“and I are authorized to forestall any such military operation—by any means we deem fit.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The chief inspector raised one eyebrow.

  “We can hold you indefinitely if we find you constitute a threat to our national security,” said Horikawa, rising from his chair. “And despite your persistence in maintaining this little charade, I am confident we can foil your plans.”

  He was polished and unflappable.

  “I’m sure your contracted services are on some sort of timetable. Most military operations, no matter how ragged, seem to be. We can hold you until your organization and its project have become quite stale.”

  I was beginning to dislike Horikawa; he understood too much. I wasn’t sure about my right to a lawyer, but perhaps I could get one in here anyway.

  “Maybe we can straighten this misunderstanding out,” I said, hoping “straighten” would not mean explain. “Call Kiyoshi Sato at…” I gave them his office number.

  Koizumi and Horikawa looked skeptical as they led me to a cell.

  Legally we had little to offer in our defense, and I couldn’t bring up moral arguments without disclosing the objective of the operation. I didn’t see where Sato could be of help, but it’d give me time to think.

  Someone had tipped them off convincingly that there was an operation afoot. Japan didn’t want to awaken one chilly morning to find that it had been the springboard for a surprise attack against one of its neighbors. Japan had had a bad experience with surprise attacks. Its stance was no different from the United States’ squeamishness over Cuban refugee attacks launched from Florida against Cuba. The conventional diplomatic wisdom deplored such vulgar self-help. I felt the foul, self-serving presence of the Ackert hand in all this.

  The next morning, Sato showed the talents that had earned him a Ginza letterhead. Immediately, with a flurry of accusations, he put the police on the defensive. Furthermore, it developed that he had considerable political clout with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His coup de grâce was suggesting deportation as a solution. That jewel of an alternative could save face for everyone.

  “To where? Who w
ould accept them? They’re bound to be the focus of an international incident wherever they go,” Horikawa stammered.

  I waved Sato over for a whispering session. Then he turned to the two officials. “I believe the Republic of Korea would react favorably to a visit from a small anticommunist veterans group.”

  The chief inspector looked bored, and Horikawa exasperated. Again I was led to my cell.

  Twenty-four hours later, Sato—using the contacts I had suggested—secured our informal deportation from Japan. Horikawa told us in very strong terms that we would never again be granted visas in any sequence that would allow us to assemble in Japan as a group. When pressed, he did admit that as many as four of us could enter Japan during a given period without sanction. And of course, Matsuma maintained his Japanese citizenship. They couldn’t touch him.

  It had been a close call, too close. Our schedule was thrown completely out of kilter. But Korea had been our next stop. What really disturbed me was the uneasy realization that someone—Ackert, perhaps—was determined to stop us and had upped the ante. Each passing day increased our vulnerability.

  The walls of the police station seemed suffocatingly close…but never as close as the walls of a Soviet prison would be.

  CHAPTER 17

  The KCIA put us in isolation immediately upon our arrival in Korea. They quartered us in a hermetically sealed farm village on the eastern coast. For everyone but myself, there would be no further communication with the outside world until we returned from Siberia.

  The village complex consisted of several tiled-roof, one-story structures surrounded by rice fields that gradually acquired, with distance, the energy to bunch up into a rugged mountain chain. Our new home had none of the resort charm of our Hokkaido quarters; it was clearly an often-used staging area whose buildings were nothing more than glorified barracks. Our common opinion might have been prejudiced by our lack of freedom. Korean soldiers carrying submachine guns waved at us whenever our maneuvers brought us near the fence that surrounded the village fields—but they carried submachine guns just the same. The mature, rational view was that they were protecting us from ourselves, but there was little comfort in it. Even the occasional evening movie—black and white, in Korean, with subtitles—heightened the dismal sense of isolation. At least our turncoat could not make contact with his parent agency.

  Keiko delighted in being the only female among the eleven visitors. The troops adopted her wholeheartedly. She was easier on the eyes than any of them were, and she made the whole setup seem more routine.

  Keiko was mesmerized by the Koreans. “Korean people eat with chopsticks,” she observed with great gravity one day.

  “Well, what did you expect? Doesn’t everyone in the Orient?”

  “I was always told they ate with their hands,” she responded confidentially.

  The Japanese and the Koreans were Asia’s eternal Hat-fields and McCoys. Neither nation gave the other much credit. No Korean women ever entered the complex, and despite her growing respect for the Koreans, she was pleased.

  Late the second evening, after a long day’s workout with the kayaks, two Mercedes trucks arrived with the equipment Heyer had requisitioned. I ordered everyone out into the crisp night air to unload the ordnance and equipment.

  Chief Puckins led the working party, which sorted and stored the gear. “Now here we have,” Wickersham started to lecture in grandiose style, “one AK-47, with Chinese markings and a spike bayonet, sometimes called a Type-56 assault rifle. Designed by Kalashnikov, it is gas operated, and carries a thirty-round magazine.…”

  They broke open another box.

  “And here is a Type 67 light machine gun, also Chicom. Well, well…gas operated, and belt fed with a range of eight hundred meters.… Now here’s a delight. A Dragunov SVD sniper rifle with both Chinese and Soviet markings and a convenient little four-power sight, integral range finder, and infrared night-sight accessories.

  “My, my, isn’t this interesting, boys and girls. White camouflage over-uniforms and fur hats with big red stars on the front. Considered very chic in Shanghai.”

  The troops’ eyes were opening wider and wider. The back of the truck was cloudy from the vapor of their breaths.

  “B-b-botha’s beard, what’s this all about?” stammered Kruger, who could restrain himself no more. “Are we doing a rem-m-make of Mao’s Long March?”

  “Close, very close,” I replied.

  Puckins stepped forward. He threw his arms to the heavens in mock despair.

  Keiko gradually assumed the role of cruise director. She participated in training swims. She demanded better food from the KCIA support section and finagled mulberry-paper watercolors out of the guards to brighten our quarters. Irrepressible, she unearthed obscure holidays for us to celebrate at the evening meal. There were special “guest” chefs. Chamonix and Alvarez presided with great success. Kruger and Lutjens’s contributions were utter disasters. She even cajoled Gurung into cooking up a Nepalese meal.

  We normally broke from training an hour or two before the evening meal. The small makeshift galley had the only tables and chairs and the best lighting, so everyone gravitated there.

  In back, Alvarez was cooking something with beans. To one side, Dravit was poring over schedules and equipment lists. At two joined tables, Lutjens was loudly losing at cards with Puckins. The German kampfschwimmer carried on as if he were at Monte Carlo and the croupier had miscounted his chips. Redoubtable, Chamonix sat in a corner with a book, alone as usual.

  “M-m-mama-san, could you stitch up this…?” Kruger started, pulling at his wispy mustache.

  “Mama-san? Who you call mama-san?” she responded, her eyes narrowing. She gave a defiant pistonlike flick to her hips. “Mama-san to wa nan da, kisama! I don’t remember ever wiping your nose for you, you with the Okinawa stone-dog face. But maybe I flatten it for you, if you call me “mama-san” one mo’ time. I look old enough to you to be a mama-san?”

  “No. No, mum. Actually you 1-1-look like a first-class bird, too young to be a commanding officer’s girl…,” the Afrikaner backpedaled.

  “Ara ma! So now you think I look like teenie-bopper, ne? Fresh from the cradle, no wisdom, no character.” She whipped her French braid from one shoulder to the other.

  “Hey, Kruger, you got the chart for…” Wickersham bellowed as he stormed through the door and into the line of fire.

  “You, Petty Officer Wick’sham. This walrus face call me ‘mama-san.’”

  “Uh…hum…er…uh-oh. Kruger, you can’t address Shirahama-san that way,” he offered, shifting his heavy shoulders uncomfortably.

  Unfortunately, he couldn’t resist the compulsion to be evenhanded. “Then again, Shirahama-san, we’re a pretty small group and he can’t very well go around addressing you as…as…”

  His words had run ahead of his thoughts. He fished futilely for a way to complete the sentence.

  “Miss Kosong Perimeter, ja?” Lutjens proposed, gleefully adding fuel to the fire.

  “Miss Kosong Perimeter,” Wickersham echoed with as pleasing a smile as he could muster with his bridge out. Wickersham could be devastatingly charming. It wasn’t going to help him today.

  “Beauty queen name! I carry my own weight. Miss Kosong Perimeter. Korean name. Big joke, very funny.”

  “Now, Kei-chan,” I began, trying to smooth things over.

  “I carry my own weight around here, don’ I?”

  “From where we all stand, you carry it quite well, Kei-chan.”

  “Ha, you’ll see. Not just pretty face. Walrus face, Wick’sham, you’ll all see. You should know better.”

  She turned and rushed off.

  Kruger and Wickersham looked scared.

  There was a tension to being part of the group but not participating in the main event.

  After supper I took a walk around the complex. I found Chief Puckins at the perimeter fence looking down into the valley.

  “You can see lights down there, Skipper. I
reckon it’s a real village.” The Texan rubbed his freckled nose with the back of his mitten. “Kids down there, too.

  “Don’t really know how I can tell.… I just kind of know. Sometimes I think I can hear them laugh…on the wind, sort of. Sure, that’s a village down there by the creek. Villages always have children.”

  “Seems likely,” I replied. There weren’t that many lights. We were fairly close to the DMZ. It might not be a village.

  “Some of the Korean kids look kind of like my half-Viet kids.”

  His strawlike hair flickered in the cold northerly wind. Children meant a great deal to Puckins. In theory they stood for hope, renewal, a reaffirmation of the larger plan. In practice, they were a very personal touchstone for energy and life.

  “Funny, when I’m with my own kids I always know I’m going to have to ship out again, and that doesn’t bother me. It’s just something that’s gotta be done. If I didn’t do it someone else would have to. But I’d do it better because I understand. My kids wouldn’t be anywhere if I hadn’t gone to Vietnam.