RED ICE

by R. L. Crossland

“Did I say it didn’t tug at me shipping out all the time? I’m glad they’ve got a strong old lady. They all hold up pretty well. All and all.”

  He patted his pocket. “I should have worked up a pretty good passel of magic tricks to show them when we get back. It’ll take some practice.”

  We just stood there for a while, until the lights went out.

  The next morning spotted Wickersham preparing to go through the house-to-house pop-up range on his own time.

  I climbed into the range tower, where Chamonix, unsmiling as usual, was manipulating the target silhouettes.

  This was the other Wickersham—quiet, intense, exacting. Extra hours spent to make it look easy. Extra hours spent to be sure.

  I focused my binoculars on Wickersham. It was snowing gently and Wickersham was halfway through the course. As he rounded a comer, a single gray silhouette popped up with a puff of snow.

  I watched his lips move silently, “Two to the body, one to the head.…’”

  It dropped back.

  Another gray silhouette appeared in a window.

  The triple tap of bullets occurred once more. “Two to the body, one to the head.…”

  The second silhouette dropped.

  Quiet, intense, exacting—this was the other Wickersham, the second Wickersham who rarely showed himself. The first Wickersham, the more visible Wickersham, clowned as a defense.

  Four silhouettes rose: two black, two gray. He peppered the two gray silhouettes, making a little polka step as he shifted his muscular frame to fire from one target to the other. The gray targets were guards. The black targets were prisoners, zeks. I read “two to the body, one to the head” on his moving lips again.

  To Wickersham, dealing in life and death was as heavy and ponderous as surgery. It had to be lightened somehow. The warrior should not act too proud or self-important. A trace of Anglo-Saxon fear tinted his view, fear that success and elation brought punishment by the gods. At the banquet, after the slaying of the Grendel and the Grendel’s mother, Beowulf is praised but also warned that conspicuous skill and pride can bring ill luck. The fact that Wickersham had never heard of the Old English tribes or their beliefs did not matter, because a similar manner of living, the same requirements for survival, and a kindred collection of values caused him to arrive at comparable conclusions.

  Pride internalized made a good fighter; pride externalized brought bad luck. Since death came so easily on trifles, above all, a man needed luck.

  Three gray silhouettes appeared above a courtyard wall. Nine rounds expended and they were down.

  “Two to the body, and one to the head/better be sure the rascal’s dead.”

  Wickersham’s various business enterprises basically served as a variation to the clowning. The Wisconsinite played bazaar merchant for comic relief. Yet understanding Wickersham wasn’t that straightforward. He did derive secondary satisfaction from making a profit, winning another kind of contest—and creating laughter—which had a way of smoothing over so many rough spots in his travails. Essentially, however, Wickersham did not rest easy with the high stakes of his vocation.

  Two silhouettes popped up in the doors on either side of him. They rested on opposite edges of his peripheral vision. He knocked both down with two short bursts.

  An alarm went off on the range and Wickersham’s broad shoulders drooped. He sat down in the snow and looked at his AK-47.

  “Which one?” I asked Chamonix. The Frenchman flicked the switch on his right with a dour look.

  The silhouette on Wickersham’s right rose slowly. It was black with a blowup of Vyshinsky’s picture pasted on its head. Pallbearer’s eyes. The pictures was perforated. One to the head.

  “One error equals failure,” Chamonix stated calmly over the range mike.

  “Tant pis. Let’s run it one more time.”

  In the seclusion of our new training area, we were able to combine live firing with movement on skis. Each man carried an AK-47, except Wickersham, who carried the Type 67 machine gun, and Chamonix, who carried the Russian-made, but Chinese-modified sniper rifle. With us we towed two ahkio sledges. These oblong curved-bottom sledges, when towed by several skiers, could carry a man, or up to two hundred pounds of equipment. We modified both ahkios along the lines of a Norwegian pulk. They were shortened and fitted with tubular towing braces. Once these changes were made, the ahkios could be towed and controlled by just two men. In the ahkios we carried food, tents, and ammunition, but most important, a single Chinese 57-millimeter recoilless rifle. Ironically, the 57-millimeter recoilless had been copied from the American version by the Chinese during the Korean War. It had been discounted as a U.S. weapon only recently. Now the pirated weapon was going to change hands again.

  Daily, Dravit conducted classes on anti-skier booby traps. Using token amounts of explosive, he showed us how to lay out the charges and trigger mechanisms. Then he showed us how to conceal them. Finally, from a distance, he’d slide a weighted ski over the booby trap to demonstrate its effect. Near the end of the third day, one charge didn’t go off. He slid several old skis over it, but it just wouldn’t detonate.

  “Bloody spring must have ice in it. Have to blow it in place.”

  The meticulous operation of disarming a booby trap was an unnecessarily risky procedure. The more prudent course of action was to set another charge alongside the dud and in detonating the second charge, sympathetically blow the first “in place.”

  Dravit skied gingerly to where the booby trap had been set. It was a pressure-, not trip-wire-activated assembly. Near a small tree—about two yards from where it should have been—the charge went off under Dravit’s right ski. It flung the ski up violently and twisted his ankle at a bad angle. Surprisingly, Dravit managed to keep his balance. He coasted backward a yard, then fell over to one side, cursing venomously.

  We were around him in seconds. Chamonix, our acting corpsman, took off Dravit’s ski and mountaineering boot.

  “It’s broken, isn’t it. Ballocks, I know that isn’t where I placed it. Only thing to my credit is that I underloaded the charges. Otherwise, I’d have lost a leg and eaten a ski.”

  Chamonix shook his balding head sourly.

  Wickersham turned to me. “I remember him putting it over there, farther from the tree, too. Someone must have moved the charge.”

  Wickersham was right. Some member of our group had moved it—intentionally. And now my right-hand man wasn’t going.

  His lunch, a few small cups around a stainless-steel rice box, lay nestled in the eye of a storm of paperwork. Concealed behind a stack of binders was a changgi—Korean chess—board with its pieces actively engaged. So he had a passion, changgi. Well, that made him human and more likable, but I wasn’t about to let him know it. For once he was vulnerable.

  “Look, Kim, what the hell have you been doing about security for this operation? I’ve just had a man booby-trapped right out of action while you’re in here diddling with rainy-day games. You’d better set a fire under your people or this project’s over, finished, ended.”

  He blinked and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. The bunker lighting was poor. I pressed on.

  “Let’s understand each other. I’m not irrevocably committed to this rescue or your wonderful code machine, and unless I see I’m getting more support than your acting as a glorified storekeeper for us, I’ve had it.” The words came through clenched teeth. “We’re on your turf now…and we’re still being monkeyed with!”

  The bunker was part of a warren of tunnels deep in a hillside overlooking the Korean eastern coast. The underground fortifications were a legacy from the occupying Japanese forces in the thirties. They now housed Kim and Associates.

  He made mollifying motions with his hand and forced a thin-lipped smile. He’d have to do better than that.

  “Commander, please calm yourself. We haven’t been totally remiss, you know. But you must look at it from our point of view: it is an incredible undertaking to run security checks on your
colleagues, for clearly mere surveillance won’t work. Look at your roster. D’Epinuriaux, for example, has had twenty-three address changes within four countries over three and a half years. Most of your people have more nom de guerres than decent suits, and have disappeared off the face of the earth at one time or other. Most couldn’t come up with enough credit references to swing a soft drink in Hong Kong. We are watching them all closely, but the key is probably in their past contacts, and that’s really slow going. Frankly, you and your comrades have moved outside the sphere of acceptable behavior too long and they’re all suspicious. Give me the authority and I’ll polygraph them all, but I’m sure they’re all going to show some sensitive readings.”

  “Run it anyway. “There was too much at stake to do otherwise. Lie detectors, I knew, could be beaten on rare occasions by psychopaths and extremely facile examinees.

  Kim was hunched defensively behind his desk, his professional pride wounded. He searched the piles of paper for a report.

  “Your former colleague, Commander Ackert, has been cultivating some interesting acquaintances.”

  I’d mentioned my mistrust of Ackert when we’d first arrived in Korea.

  “He met with Max Brown at Narita Airport for an hour yesterday.”

  “Brown? That revolutionary-chic flower bastard? What possibly could those two have in common?”

  “More than you think. Max Brown has become quite respectable lately. He’s forsaken the behavior that landed him in jail during the Days of Rage in Chicago. Why, he’s even written a book and taken to wearing ties. In fact, as administrative aide to Senator Denehy, he is a strong and open supporter of reform through working within the system. Really a heartwarming turnaround, don’t you think?”

  “Oh yes, very touching. It’s a shame some of the former guests at the Hanoi Hilton aren’t around to write him character references. No doubt some of them still hold bitter memories of Brown and his actress friend. The North Vietnamese did some extra shoulder dislocating to coerce those POWs into making anti-U.S. statements alongside Brown and her. Somehow the POWs held out,” I said irritably, and added, “Sure, Brown’s working within the system now. Why, I’ll bet he owns a station wagon and belongs to a country club.”

  Kim just blinked. “We’re fairly sure he’s an agent of influence, but there’s no way to prove it. Anyway, that doesn’t matter right now. It’s Senator Denehy who’s our big worry. Denehy is number two in seniority on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and number three on Foreign Relations.”

  “And?”

  “He wants to make—what’s the expression—a big splash. And Ackert, I’m sure, would like a patron on that committee. A friend in the right places can win a star or two for the collar of an enterprising naval officer, I suspect. You understand.”

  I did, all too well. A deal was in the making: help my political career now and I’ll back your naval career in the future. So Ackert’s interest in my activities was prompted by more than spite. The story he’d given me about the Central Intelligence Agency’s interest had seemed an unlikely half-truth. For Ackert, the military courtier, this was more in keeping with his character.

  Kim studied the pieces on the changgi board. “Denehy’s causes have been growing wilder as his influence within the Senate has increased. His most current cause is to establish virtual control of the U.S. Armed Forces by a new special congressional oversight committee.”

  “Control?” I questioned. “Paralysis would be more like it. But maybe that’s what he has in mind. A neutering of the U.S. defense organization would mesh neatly with his philosophy on how to solve the world’s problems. But how do we enter into all this?”

  Kim picked up a checkerlike changgi piece and pushed it against the edge of his desk. “Denehy’s constituency has been getting impatient with him and he’s up for reelection this fall. He ranks ninety-eighth in attendance at roll-call votes and hasn’t been very responsive to his blue-collar base. He needs an issue for this fall—badly. An exposé of some sort would be best: a Watergate, a Koreagate, an anything-gate. The ideal exposé would underscore his committee seniority and be consistent with his image. He styles himself as an authority on foreign affairs and abuses of military power—by both governmental and private militaries. Oh, how he’d like to link an unsavory paramilitary organization with a big-money U.S. corporation. Kurganov isn’t paying you directly, his corporation Samizdat Publishing International is. Samizdat has made millions and spends much of what it makes on Kurganov’s projects.

  “Despite the fact that there were only a few Americans involved, Denehy wrung incredible mileage out of the mercenary flap in Angola during the mid-seventies. I think he’s preparing to put on a similar show. Here’s his last release.”

  Kim handed me a newspaper clipping.

  The ruthless machismo of the mercenary creed does not lend itself to ideas of democracy, fair play, anti-colonialism, and world peace. I seek a resolution that it be the sense of the Senate that the U.S. government should seek out and foil any vestige of this brand of soulless enterprise. Its practitioners are men without sense, conscience, or compassion.

  “And men like Brown, Ackert, and Denehy are men abounding in sense, conscience, and compassion,” I commented. “Funny. I wouldn’t have characterized Kosciuszko and Pulaski as soulless men, or the Lafayette Escadrille and the Flying Tigers as soulless enterprises.”

  So Ackert was making his grand play. If he could bring them my head at the right moment and under a dark cloud of failure, it would keep a senator with all the perverse ambition and wrongheadedness of a soap-opera patriarch in power, a closet Marxist in influence, and a naval careerist on the inside track.

  From that point on, I pulled out all the stops on training. It did not take the men long to realize they had a traitor among them. If I kept them busy, at least I could keep their minds off that threat. Chamonix stepped into the assistant patrol leader spot. Alvarez, the Cuban who had been an alternate, I added for good measure.

  Skiing, running, swimming, kayaking—we accelerated to a grueling tempo. All anyone could think of was sleep. I moved everyone out of the buildings into our low-profiled Norwegian tents. Keiko was not particularly happy about this development. She felt awkward and lonely watching us from the main building. About the only time she saw me at this stage was when, out of boredom, she strolled to the firing range, and I showed her how to fire an AK-47 and the recoilless rifle.

  There are limits to what you can demand of men in a training situation, so I knew they were glad to hear about the submarine. A message brought word that it would pick us up at Chinhae in four days.

  By way of graduation, Kim arranged for a three-day party for the troops—a three-day knee-walking binge, I suspected. There were a few loose ends I could only tie up in Japan, so I was permitted to break isolation and arrange for a flight to Japan for Keiko and myself. A “last good-bye” trip it could have been called, if I had allowed myself the sentimentality.

  Keiko and I flew by chartered plane to Hachijo, a small island south of Honshu. With its stooped, windswept evergreens, mist-hidden ravines, and moss-covered rocks, the island was straight out of a Japanese woodcut. There we settled into the Three Sisters’ Inn, a quaint old ryokan whose subtly magnificent garden overlooked one of the few stretches of sandy beach on the island. Keiko and I had once judged it the best bodysurfing beach in Japan. Gathering our swim gear into a furoshiki bundle, we jogged down to the evenly formed waves and assaulted the breakers.

  Winter bodysurfing in Japan is not for the faint of heart or the fastidious of technique. It called for compromises. A wet-suit top was a necessity against the cold, but the top prevented a surfer from achieving maximum speed or enjoying maximum mobility. The perfect ride had to be found on another beach in a different climate.

  We gamboled like sea otters in the dark gray waves. I had the raw strength to lunge at a wave, then catch a short reckless ride, before tumbling out of the wave to avoid the rocks some ancient spoilsport
had erected. In contrast, Keiko surfed with limber finesse. She let the waves catch her and carry her down their face. With each ride, she’d execute several directional changes before lacing between the rocks unharmed. The effort was more conscious and plodding for me—stroke, kick, bunch shoulders forward in the wave, raise my head, put my hands to my thighs, and let rip. Once in a dozen tries I might remember to tuck a shoulder in order to turn right or left. Twice I succeeded in sliding both down and sideways through the wet, translucent pipe and heard myself whooping with unrestrained joy.

  The silky sheen upon Keiko’s wetsuit seemed to amplify the swell of her hips and the thrust of her chest. In athletic exhilaration, she never looked lovelier. No cream-puff beauty queen forever fearful of messing up her hair could compete in the same universe with this almond-eyed naiad.

  We returned to the ryokan by alternately shivering and hopping from mossy rock to mossy rock. The dull ache of lung-seared fatigue rated scant attention as we collapsed onto the tatami mats. In the twilight, the physical theme of the day’s activity turned to a sensual preoccupation. We warmed up in the inn’s steambath and then scampered to the hot tubs, which we had reserved that morning. Our supper, though sumptuous, was eaten hurriedly as events built in rapid acceleration. Like two leaves whisked down one of the island’s streams, we, too, were drawn ever faster toward a foreseeable end.

  In the flickering light of a paper lantern she slid aside the door to my room—as if for the first time—proud and erect. She wore an old camouflaged shirt of mine, softened by age, which hung open at the throat, between her generous breasts and down to her firm, flat stomach. She gave a spirited flick to her long ebony hair, and for a second flashed teeth as white as the winter moon. She lifted her arms and crossed them in front of her gravely.

  “You, Frazer, come take what is yours and only yours.”

  She paused.

  “If this be the last time, let us make it a time for remembering in the miserable days ahead.”

  And we did. And it was. I was proud that she did not cry.