“Prisoners,” he began, “You have come here for one reason: to work. Each of you has been convicted of crimes against the state for which you are expected to make amends through physical labor. If you labor hard enough, you may someday leave this facility as a free man. If you do not work, you will not eat. I expect you know where that path leads.
“My name is Bracken. I am the Deputy Commandant of this camp. I expect each of you to learn our rules and follow them to the letter or reap the consequences. Morning roll call begins at six, with departure for worksites at half past. Those who claim they are too sick to work may report to the dispensary before breakfast for an examination. Any diagnosis of unfitness for duty must be made before roll call. No exceptions. Those judged fit will report to roll call on time whether they have eaten or not.
“Your first assignment will be to construct shelter for yourselves. Those barracks,” the Deputy added, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the log huts across the wire, “were built by prisoners just like you. You will do the same or die in the attempt. That is all.”
The Deputy Commandant’s reference to building new barracks dashed Linder’s hopes of spending his first night at camp under a roof, even if on a bare floor. For the next hour or more, he stood in the windswept yard brooding over the news while orderlies called the roll and distributed blankets. It was nearly midnight when he returned to the bonfire, numb with cold and barely able to walk.
At breakfast the following morning, Linder’s shivering hands could hardly hold his tin of oatmeal to his face without spilling its precious contents. If not for an ample ration of coffee, he feared he might not even make it through roll call. While waiting for that event to begin, Linder watched dozens of miserable men return from the dispensary, having forfeited breakfast in the vain hope of being found unfit for work. He marveled at the inhumanity of officials who devised and enforced so cruel a system. His years of service to the same DSS that condemned men to camps like this now seemed like a chapter from another lifetime.
Directly after breakfast, fifty or more veteran prisoners of the camp arrived on the parade ground and were presented to the new arrivals as the men who had built the lodges and surrounding stockade. These prisoners, in their new role as technical advisors, were to organize and train the newcomers to build barracks for themselves and then for two thousand more new men to follow. By Linder’s calculation, this worked out to twenty new lodges, roughly doubling the camp’s capacity.
The supervisors went to work at once assigning the men to teams and seeking out architects, engineers, carpenters and various skilled workers from among the newcomers. Those with no special skills were issued axes, hatchets, and two-man crosscut saws and organized into crews of twenty for work at nearby logging sites.
Amid the confusion, Linder and Rhee found themselves assigned to the same crew and waited together in line for a truck to carry them to their worksite. While they stood before the gate, Linder heard scuffling and cursing from behind. He turned in time to see a tall prisoner with red-rimmed eyes and sunken cheeks sitting astride a smaller man; he was pummeling the smaller man’s bloodied face with both fists.
“Ah, there is a God!” the larger man exclaimed in bitter triumph. “I knew I’d find you one day!”
He struck again with all his strength but delivered only a feeble glancing blow to his victim’s cheekbone. By now, his chest heaved so with the exertion that he could barely speak between rasping breaths.
“Remember me? Well, I remember you!” the tall man continued. “You’re the lying scum who bore false witness at my trial!”
The victim, a wiry prisoner of about forty-five, whose salt-and-pepper hair spilled out from under his watch cap in tight ringlets, replied by spitting a wad of bloody mucus into his tormentor’s face.
“And I’d do it again. You damned moneymen had it coming to you!” he sneered without apparent fear or remorse.
“Well, take a good look at me, because I’m the last moneyman you’ll ever see,” the tall man replied and wrapped his long-fingered hands around his foe’s neck.
To Linder’s surprise, the other prisoners watched but made no move to intervene. One onlooker, horror-stricken to see deadly violence at such close range, doubled over and vomited onto his boots. His teammates groaned in disgust and shoved the weakling out of the transportation queue.
By the time the guards noticed the scuffle, the tall man had made good on his threat. The face of his one-time accuser had turned a ghastly bluish gray. A pair of guards, who looked no older than twenty, trotted up to the victor and struck him from behind with their rifle butts before hauling him to his feet while dispatching a colleague to find the Deputy Commandant. Within minutes, Bracken arrived, gave the corpse a swift kick as a check against malingering and, having forced the killer to kneel, fired a single pistol shot to the back of his head. The guards then ordered the quaking bystanders to drag the pair of corpses out the gate by their hands and feet.
Moments later, the Deputy joined a pair of assistants questioning a succession of prisoners who had been culled out from the herd. One after another, these prisoners were either escorted to the camp administration building or assigned to a work team.
“Why are those men getting special treatment?” Linder asked Rhee.
“My guess is that they’re selecting out the Party members,” Rhee answered. “They’ll all get soft jobs in the kitchen or the hospital while we knock ourselves out hauling logs.”
“Do the Party Members ever refuse?” Linder knew it was an odd question for him to ask, but he had to think fast before his name was called. Though he was resolved not to accept favored treatment for his former Party membership, to be known in camp as having been a Party Member and a DSS man might make him a pariah, whether he refused special treatment or not.
“Never,” Rhee snorted. “Without protection from the bosses, those bastards wouldn’t last a week in a camp like this.”
As if on cue, one of the assistants stood at the head of the queue and called out more names.
“The following prisoners step forward: Adler. Berkowitz. Linder,” he bellowed.
The prisoner who had vomited at the sight of the throttling pulled himself together and stepped forward.
“Berkowitz here,” he responded in a halting voice.
“Adler to the front,” the assistant continued.
“Adler’s a scratch,” Rhee volunteered, jerking a thumb toward the gate where the killer’s corpse was being hauled. “How about giving his job to me?”
The assistant ignored him.
“Linder next,” he ordered. “Step forward.”
“Over here,” Linder replied, raising his hand. “Why do you want me?”
“The Deputy wants to see you.”
“What for?”
The assistant unbuttoned the flap of his holster and drew a pistol.
“Nobody likes a smart-aleck,” he answered, pointing the pistol’s muzzle at Linder’s nose while a guard knocked Linder to the ground with a vicious blow to the ribs.
“Up!” the orderly barked, and the two guards pulled Linder to his feet.
Linder could barely breathe as the guards dragged him forward to within a few paces from where the Deputy Commandant now questioned Berkowitz, well out of earshot of the other prisoners. The Party member held out his hands in supplication. With his squinting eyes, stubby yellow teeth and protruding ears, Berkowitz resembled a rodent and squealed with delight when Bracken sent him off to join the other Party faithfuls in the administration building.
The guards brought Linder forward next. Bracken’s gaze remained on the list attached to his clipboard.
“Name, date, and place of birth?”
“Warren Linder. March 19, 1982. Cleveland, Ohio,” Linder recited.
“Crime and sentence?”
“Seditious conspiracy. Espionage. Sabotage. Sentenced to life at hard labor.”
Bracken raised his head and smiled. His eyes showed a spark of curiosi
ty. He called for an aide to bring him Linder’s transfer file.
“It says here you were an officer in the Department. Is that right?”
“Yes,” Linder answered impassively.
“Do any of the other prisoners know about this?”
“I doubt it.”
Bracken’s eyes narrowed and his expression slowly developed into a smile.
“How would you like to practice your old trade here with us, Linder?”
Linder’s eyes flashed with anger.
“I’d rather starve.”
The Deputy Commandant feigned disbelief.
“You don’t seem to understand. I’m offering you a chance to stay alive. Help us out and in a few years, you might get lucky and catch an amnesty or a case review. Meanwhile, you’ll have enough to eat and a roof over your head. How about it?”
“I’ll take my chances along with everyone else,” Linder responded.
“Suit yourself,” Bracken answered indifferently. “But don’t think you can blend into the herd. You’re a marked man, Linder. Your trial judge recommended the maximum sentence and so did the Department. I see here that your former boss even wrote a special sentencing request. By the way, it wasn’t for clemency.”
“My old boss?” Linder asked uneasily. “What was his name?”
Bracken glanced at the clipboard.
“Denniston,” he replied.
Linder drew a short breath. “Always nice to know where you stand with your own people,” he answered with feigned indifference. “May I go back to my work team now?”
“You can go straight to hell as far as I care,” Bracken replied, turning away.
A few moments later Linder found his work team boarding a truck to one of the logging sites.
“What did the bastard want?” Rhee asked.
“He offered me special treatment if I turned stool pigeon,” Linder replied.
“So you belonged to the Party?”
“I did,” Linder admitted.
“But you weren’t like Adler, were you?” Rhee demanded, shaken by Linder’s admission. “I mean, you didn’t…”
“I was an officer in the DSS, Mark. I did a lot.”
Rhee’s face expressed shock and betrayal. Tears welled in his eyes.
“Of all the people…” he began in a low voice. “You. A stinking Unionist rat…”
Linder could see his former partner’s hands ball into fists, but Rhee made no move to strike. Linder let out a deep breath and turned away, head lowered, to stand at the rear of the queue. All eyes avoided him as he passed.
Although it should not have come as a surprise to him, only now did Linder grasp the full repercussions of his decision to be open about his former DSS employment while refusing favorable treatment for it. As soon as word of it spread around the camp, his fellow prisoners would shun him for having served the apparatus that stole their freedom and, beyond that, would suspect him of spying on them. At the same time, the camp officers and guards would consider him a traitor for having disavowed his prior service. Yet, for all that, Linder knew he could not have decided otherwise.
At last a truck came along to deliver the work team to the logging site, where veteran loggers were already busy instructing newcomers in the use of the two-man crosscut saw.
“This is absurd,” one newcomer grumbled as Linder joined the group. “Where are the chain saws around here?”
The lead instructor, a lanky, craggy-faced Midwesterner of indeterminate middle age by the name of Charlie Yost, appeared to have expected this reaction.
“The chain saws were all sacrificed to the war effort a long time ago, so don’t waste your time bellyaching. As for these crosscuts, they worked just fine for us and they’ll be good enough for you once you learn how to use them.”
Yost resumed the instruction. A quarter of an hour later, the team members picked up their allotment of crosscuts, axes, hand saws, shovels, sledge hammers, and log splitting wedges from the tool shed and set off down an icy path, escorted by four guards and a pair of snarling guard dogs.
“Let’s go, old man! Move that fat ass of yours!” a young guard ahead of Linder shouted at a pot-bellied prisoner in his late fifties, whose loose-fleshed jowls suggested that he once had been even fatter.
The fat man lost his concentration and slipped on the ice, sliding down the hill on his bottom and nearly bowling over the prisoner in front of him. In a flash, the guard who had urged him on bolted forward and kicked the prisoner in the buttocks while permitting his dog to snap its jaws within inches of the fat man’s face. But for reasons Linder did not fully comprehend, he felt pity for the pot-bellied prisoner and, without thinking, stepped between him and the snarling dog. A moment later, the fat man clambered to his feet, apparently unharmed, but scarcely looked at Linder as he rushed to step back in line. The guard laughed, as if to mock the futility of Linder’s gesture.
After a mile’s hike, the team reached a logging road and followed it to a clearing strewn with sawdust, pine needles, and cut branches. Waist-high stumps of pine and spruce studded the landscape fifty meters to either side.
“You men with hatchets and hand saws, get to work stripping those logs,” Yost ordered. “Gather the branches when you’re done and pile them along the roadside like you see here. Those of you with crosscuts, come with me.
Linder examined one of the stumps at close range and was surprised to see that the roots did not extend very deeply into the earth before spreading out for many feet in all directions. Yost noticed Linder’s interest in the stump and pointed out the rock-hard layer of gravelly soil beneath the roots.
“Permafrost,” he noted. “The roots can go only so far down before it’s like hitting bedrock. That’s why you see so many of these trees blown over.”
Yost pointed to the edge of the clearing and directed the men to go on ahead.
“Get moving!” he roared. “The faster we drop wood the sooner you can move into your new huts!”
They stopped at the edge of the clearing. Within it, red flags atop iron stakes marked the area where trees were to be cut.
“You there—pick up the other end of this crosscut and do exactly as I do,” Yost ordered Linder, seizing one end of the two-man saw.
Yost and Linder took up positions on opposite sides of the tree and began to draw the saw’s jagged teeth back and forth across the bark, releasing the sharp odor of pine. Linder put all his strength behind his pushes and pulls, aiming to impress his instructor.
“Not so hard or you’ll give us both a heart attack,” Yost instructed. “Slow and easy. We’ll be doing this all day and there won’t be any food till we’re back in camp.”
Whatever Yost’s occupation might have been before his arrest, by now he had become an expert lumberjack. He showed the men how to cut and release in a way that insured the tree fell in the desired direction. When the saw’s teeth dulled and became embedded in the trees tough center, he showed them how to free the blade without damaging it, sharpen it by filing, and use an axe to clear a new channel for cutting. When the time came to sever the final attachment between trunk and stump, he showed the men how to avoid injury if the trunk lurched suddenly to the side when the tree toppled.
Each time a tree crashed to earth, the men rubbed their aching muscles and wondered how much longer they could keep pace. For five minutes of each hour, the foreman permitted the prisoners to warm themselves at fires laid in oil drums for the guards. At midday, the men were permitted a tea break. By the end of the day, they could barely drag themselves back up the icy track to the tool shed, where Yost took the roll and directed the teams to queue up for the trucks that would carry them back to camp.
On their return this first night, members of Linder’s team lined up outside the camp mess hall, waited to collect their soup, bread, and coffee, and carried it outside to eat around the campfires lit in the yard. To Linder, the mess hall food tasted nearly the same as what the field kitchens had served, except that the camp’s sou
p was thicker and meatier, thanks to the officers’ contribution of caribou and moose. After roll call, Linder found a spot close to a fire and dropped off to sleep the moment he hit the ground.
* * *
Every day the routine was the same. Awake at five for breakfast. Roll call at six. Then the hour-long journey by truck and on foot to the logging site, where work began in the pre-dawn darkness at half past seven. The workday lasted until half past five, when the men headed back to camp for dinner. On their return each day, Linder and his teammates inspected the piles of logs delivered to the construction site and surveyed the progress made in laying foundations for the next row of lodges.
From time to time, Yost allowed the teams to collect pine needles for bedding and pillows, branches for kindling, and unused lengths of log for firewood. Twice during the first week, nighttime snowfalls hid trees felled the previous day and required the team to bring down additional ones to meet their quota. When at last they had achieved the norm, Yost put the men to work extracting stumps where new logging roads were planned, using picks to break the frozen ground and axes to sever the stumps from their buried roots.
Nearly three weeks after his arrival at the camp, Linder and his team moved into their new home, Hut J-6. It stood at the end of the fourth row of lodges and Linder considered it the most beautiful building he had ever laid eyes on. After weeks of fitful sleep while burrowed under the snow, to have a bunk of his own at last made him feel like a king. Inside, the lodge smelled of freshly cut pine and of the smoke that leaked from the three crude sheet-metal stoves placed at the building’s ends and center. Along either side of the hut stood twenty triple-tier bunks, each laid with a thin mattress, a brown wool blanket and a canvas pillow stuffed with pine needles.
Dreading a possible fight over bunk selection, Linder had offered half a meal bar to a teammate to give up his position toward the front of the column marching back to camp the night they moved into the lodge. On arrival, Linder rushed in to claim a top-level bunk near the stove at the center of the lodge where drafts from the doors were less likely to penetrate. As expected, fistfights broke out among the prisoners last to enter, as the difference between an interior bunk and one near the door could become a matter of life and death as the winter wore on.
Exile Hunter Page 17
