Exile Hunter

by Preston Fleming

  Linder’s neighbor atop the next bunk was a hard-faced logging veteran of sinewy frame named Will Browning, a Montanan approaching fifty years of age who had fought for an anti-Unionist militia during Civil War II. Browning knew the North Country well, having fled to Edmonton before the annexation of Canada and joined a Canadian partisan unit soon after. His ten-year sentence for sabotage against an oil pipeline in Alberta had begun early the year before. The Montanan had been among the camp’s early prisoners and had helped to construct it.

  Nearly a dozen prisoners gathered around Browning to ask him questions about the camp. Though the men were exhausted from the day’s work, they felt excited at having a place of their own and were not yet ready to sleep, since a quarter hour remained before lights-out. With no guards or trusties to overhear them, they also felt emboldened to talk freely about their new home and were eager to learn more about it. The camp’s name, Browning revealed, was N-320, with the “N” representing the North Canol Road, and the “320” representing the kilometer post nearest the camp’s access road. The facility, located some five hundred kilometers south of the Arctic Circle, had served as a logging and mining support complex for nearly three years.

  Browning explained that the Canol Road had been built during World War II to connect the oil fields of Norman Wells along the Mackenzie River to the refinery at Whitehorse, some five hundred kilometers to the west. After the war, when expensive Mackenzie River oil was no longer needed to defeat the Japanese, the pipeline to Whitehorse and the North Canol Road were abandoned. Although southern portions of the road were reopened for tourism and mining at the end of the twentieth century, the road fell into disuse once again early in the new millennium, when the Events hit and the flow of tourists dried up virtually overnight.

  At this point, a few of the prisoners lost interest and drifted away. Linder noticed, however, that the faces of those who remained fairly glowed with curiosity. Some were young and some well past forty, but each seemed to have a burning need to learn all they could about the camp system and how it could have arisen in secret across vast areas of the American and Canadian West. These men would be the last to die, Linder mused, or the first to escape.

  “So why did they bother reopening the Canol Road at all, and why build a camp all the way out here, in the middle of nowhere?” asked a wild-eyed twenty-something whom Linder had noticed earlier that day on the logging crew.

  “It would probably have reverted to wilderness except for one thing,” Browning answered. “When the Unionists invaded southern Canada and turned that country into a satellite state, everything changed up here. Soon after that, when our side lost the Manchurian War, Alaska became America’s front line against the Chinese. So the President-for-Life promptly declared martial law in Alaska, the Yukon and British Columbia and set aside resource-rich areas of Alberta and the Northwest Territories as restricted zones.”

  “So what are restricted zones, then? Aren’t they under martial law, too?” another prisoner asked from the bunk below Browning’s.

  “The difference is that, along the Pacific Coast, there’s supposedly a threat of Chinese attack, so militarizing the region would make sense,” Browning replied. “But further inland there’s no credible threat from the Chinese, so the Unionists had to give their land grab another name.”

  “Okay, I understand the U.S. wanting to grab Canadian oil and gas, but what’s the point of a camp like this?” the youth with the wild eyes shot back. “There’s no oil within hundreds of miles, and if there were, none of us would know how to drill for it.”

  “Ahh, now you’re getting to the heart of the matter,” Browning replied, peering down at his audience from his high bunk. “You see, the regime didn’t want to face an insurgency in Canada, so they set about driving out the locals by seizing property along the major roads and restricting travel into the backcountry. That’s what has enabled the Unionists to colonize the region with camps like N-320. And what the camps offer is cheap captive labor to do grunt work on basic infrastructure while technicians are brought in under contract to ramp up production of oil, gas, gold, tungsten, and rare earth elements. In fact, the camps are so important to national defense and the economy that the President-for-Life gave the Corrective Labor Administration complete dominion over the restricted zones up here from the Pacific to Hudson Bay.”

  “Will is right,” came a familiar voice from behind Linder’s bed. Linder turned around and recognized the bearded face of Sam Burt. “I learned about the CLA when I was working on Capitol Hill,” Burt continued. “Ever since the Allied retreat from Manchuria, the CLA has been building dozens of new corrective labor camps up here every month. Behind a phony curtain of military secrecy to hide the fact that thousands of American servicemen who escaped from Russia are being held in those camps.”

  To Linder’s surprise, Burt’s disclosure was met with silence. Perhaps the other prisoners simply couldn’t believe what Burt was telling them, or perhaps they were too shocked or depressed to talk about it. In any event, the listeners responded by huddling more tightly together and changing the topic of their questions to everyday camp life.

  Their initial questions centered on work assignments and camp discipline. The most desirable work, Browning explained, took place indoors in offices, dispensaries, kitchens, workshops, and garages, where one could avoid the perils of frostbite, exhaustion, logging accidents, mine cave-ins, and arbitrary shootings by trigger-happy guards. Indoor work was reserved for selected professionals, technicians, and skilled tradesmen, along with a small number of Unionist Party members, DSS informants, and favorites of the camp administration.

  The vast majority of prisoners at Camp N-320, however, formed the general labor pool and worked outdoors at mining, logging, construction, road building, and snow clearing. Of those in mining, some worked outdoors at gold placer sites that operated only in summer, while others worked a longer season at open-pit mines for tungsten or drilling mud and still others all year long in underground hard-rock mines. The loggers plied their trade in every season, though sometimes filling in as road-builders or snow-clearers as the need arose.

  Although all outdoor labor was to be avoided, according to Browning, the most onerous tasks were reserved for the disciplinary units. As punishing as a general laborer’s life might be, that of a disciplinary laborer was nothing short of desperate. Since he received only two-thirds of the daily food ration allotted to general laborers and could earn more only by meeting a steep production quota, few could remain in such a unit for more than a few weeks without slipping into a tailspin. In a disciplinary unit, it was impossible to conserve energy through slacking, because the foremen and guards drove the prisoners relentlessly. The only respite, other than outlasting one’s sentence in the unit, was to inform against one’s mates in return for supplemental food rations, delivered during secret interviews with a camp security officer.

  Now that enough lodges were completed to house nearly all the newcomers, Browning predicted that at least half of the men assigned to lodge construction would receive new work assignments the next day after roll call. That would be the critical time, he advised, for anyone with special skills to speak up to avoid assignment to the general labor pool. But he cautioned against complaining too loudly or creating a disturbance over one’s assignment, as anyone labeled as a troublemaker also risked being sent to a disciplinary unit.

  At this, Browning’s listeners shook their heads in despair. How could they possibly navigate such a narrow passage between salvation and damnation, they asked each other. What counted as a valuable skill? And how did one press his case for special treatment without being seen as an agitator?

  While they debated this among themselves, Linder thought back to his exchange with Bracken and considered the price he could expect to pay for having refused the Deputy’s offer of special treatment. He possessed no technical skills that could legitimately exempt him from the general labor pool. And once his fellow prisoners learned of his
service in the DSS, some would doubtless target him for abuse, making clashes likely. If sent to a disciplinary unit for defending himself, Linder resolved to go willingly and endure it as best he could. No matter what they did to him, he would not accept any favor or advantage at the expense of his fellow prisoners or take the government’s side against them. He had come too far for that.

  * * *

  Linder awoke the next morning with a start. Outside the hut, someone hammered on a length of steel rail to sound reveille. The warmth of the nearby stove had permitted him to sleep more deeply than he had in months. He pulled his thin Army blanket tightly around his shoulders and closed his eyes in hopes of resuming his dream for a few more moments. Except for the occasional nightmare, he had not dreamt in weeks.

  In this dream, Linder was preparing dinner in his flat overlooking Limassol Harbor while a tanned Patricia Kendall, barefoot in a white embroidered caftan, set the dinner table. Across the room, the doors to the balcony stood open and their gauze curtains stirred in the steady offshore breeze. As he watched Patricia lay the silver beside each plate, he noticed that she had set three places. On the sofa, young Caroline Kendall lifted her eyes from her paperback novel and smiled at him as she might for a favorite uncle. At that moment, the vision faded to black.

  “On your feet!” a voice barked a few steps away in the darkened barracks.

  “Two minute warning!” the voice repeated, while whacking a nightstick against one of the wooden pillars of Linder’s bed. The intruder’s black armband designated him as a trusty, a senior prisoner who received special privileges and extra rations in return for enforcing discipline against his campmates.

  Linder pulled off his blanket and let his stockinged feet dangle over the edge of the bed. He took a moment to stretch his arms over his head, then retrieved his hat and gloves from under his pine-needle pillow and lowered himself gently to the sawdust-strewn floor. He had barely pulled his boots onto his feet when the trusties returned with nightsticks raised. Linder bolted for the door and escaped into the frigid darkness just ahead of them.

  Moments later, Linder joined the stream of prisoners shuffling toward the latrine and from there to the mess hall. He downed his breakfast quickly so as not to be late for roll call. Standing at ease before the assembled prisoners, the Deputy Commandant waited with a handful of veteran prisoners and civilian experts gathered behind him. Linder guessed that, as Browning had predicted, the experts had come to help screen the new arrivals for qualified technicians and skilled workers.

  For the next three hours, while the new prisoners stood in loose formation, the experts announced a series of occupational specialties and called for prisoners to step forward if they possessed the requisite skills. Linder was intrigued at seeing men who had first identified themselves as salesmen, lawyers, accountants, and schoolteachers, step forward now to claim expertise as carpenters, bricklayers, mechanics, and electricians.

  When the screening was complete, nearly a hundred men had been reclassified as technicians, while those remaining were assigned to ordinary work teams designated A through R. To reduce the potential for conflict among the men, no one was told which teams would be assigned to mining, logging, or heavy construction, or to lighter work like snow removal or the sawmill. A man would know only who was assigned to each lettered work team and no more.

  Even after the assignments were read aloud, a lively exchange took place among the men, as those eager to work with friends searched for someone willing to trade places. The guards and trusties tolerated this to a degree, but once a team’s roster was recorded, no further changes were permitted.

  Linder did not discover that his team had been reassigned to logging until their truck deposited them outside the tool shed where he had started every workday since his arrival at camp. Although timber felling had become familiar to him by now and he had become fairly proficient at it, the work was depleting his fat reserves at an alarming rate and he fretted over how he could possibly survive the winter as a logger.

  Almost as worrisome to him was the discovery that Rhee was also on his team. Since learning of Linder’s past in the DSS, the former soldier seemed to have focused his entire animus toward the Unionist regime onto his former chain-mate, apparently from some paranoid notion that Linder had been sent to inform against him.

  A few minutes after having gathered at the tool shed, Charlie Yost stood before the assembled logging teams and reintroduced himself as site supervisor. Then he proceeded to lay out the work rules, the division of labor, the calculation of output quotas, their link to rations, and what he expected of each man as their work supervisor.

  Yost cautioned the men that, though strenuous physical labor under such harsh conditions was not beyond the ability of a reasonably healthy man, the question was how long one could expect to remain healthy.

  “Logging is one of the heaviest forms of labor in the camp,” he noted. ”Few men last more than two years at it. Most succumb to illness or injury within a year. Some of those recover if given lighter work, but for most loggers, the path out of the forest leads through the mortuary.”

  Yost paused to let the assessment sink in. While some of the younger men seemed oblivious to it, most shuffled their feet nervously, shot furtive glances at the faces of those around them, and set their jaws with a grim resolve.

  When Yost spoke again, he stressed that unit cohesiveness was essential to individual and collective survival and left the men with a piece of advice:

  “Consider that, over time, each of you will come to resemble the average of the five men you spend the most time with. Your life span, your work output, your state of health and state of mind: all will track those of your closest companions. My advice to you is to surround yourself with the best men you know. Seek out those with a strong will to survive and a buoyant spirit. Avoid cynics, shirkers, and parasites. The margin for error is slim. Pick your workmates well and do your very best every day not to let them down. Team dismissed.”

  When the speech was over, Yost summoned his foremen and assigned each to one of the newly formed work teams. The foreman for Linder’s team was the grizzled Montanan, Browning, who approached his charges and seemed to size up each man as to his likely contribution to the team’s work quota. When he passed Linder, he nodded to acknowledge their acquaintance from the previous night’s discussion in Hut J-6. Out of the corner of his eye, Linder saw Rhee regard Browning’s gesture with suspicion.

  “How many of you know how to use an ax?” Browning inquired when he reached the end of the row.

  Eight hands shot up, among whom Linder recognized more than half from his logging team the week before.

  “Okay, then, you can teach each other,” Browning directed. “Those who raised their hands line up here and those who didn’t line up opposite. You’ll be working in pairs.”

  Linder instinctively went to the end of the line. Somehow, Rhee also ended up in the rear, opposite Linder, with the annoyed look of someone who had just lost a game of musical chairs.

  “You and Browning set this up, didn’t you?” Rhee accused. “They sent you to spy on me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Linder replied. “If you want to work with someone else, be my guest.”

  “Quiet in the rear!” Browning barked. “We’re going to start by splitting some short pieces to see who knows how to swing an axe. Old-timers go first. Now pick a tool from the rack and have at it. But be careful. There’s no first aid station out here.”

  Linder selected a twelve-pound maul and split four short logs easily before handing it to Rhee. But Rhee had already selected his tool, an axe designed for felling rather than splitting.

  “Don’t use that one. It’ll get stuck,” Linder advised, offering him the maul.

  Rhee ignored him and imitated the swing of a nearby veteran who had selected a lighter splitting ax. As Linder predicted, the axe head lodged tightly in the wood. After several failed attempts to pull it out, Rhee gave up, red-faced and cur
sing. A moment later, Browning appeared and managed to work it free.

  “Use this instead,” Browning ordered Rhee, tossing aside the felling axe and handing him the heavy maul. “But don’t swing too hard. Ease up and let the tool’s weight do the work for you.”

  Again, Rhee ignored the advice. He swung the maul around with all his might, as if it were a sledgehammer in an amusement park game. But his swing went wide and struck the log a glancing blow, striking his own foot. The soldier winced in pain and hopped up and down on his good leg.

  “Of all the stupid…,” Browning began, but checked himself when he noticed that Rhee was trembling with anger. The other prisoners reacted with peals of laughter.

  “Here, let me take a look at your foot,” Linder offered, hoping to divert attention from Rhee.

  “Get away from me,” Rhee demanded.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Stand still and let me take a look.” Linder approached to inspect Rhee’s boot.

  Suddenly Rhee lowered his head and rushed at Linder, knocking him off his feet. Bellowing with rage, he sat straddling Linder’s chest and struck him in the face with his gloved fists. Linder raised his forearms to protect himself, then rolled onto his side to topple Rhee onto the snow.

  But before Linder could emerge from under his attacker, the younger man raised himself once more and reached for the axe handle. In that moment, Linder seized Rhee by the throat and squeezed hard.

  That was what the guards were waiting for. One of them, an acne-scarred Hispanic, fired a short burst from his submachine gun into the snow scarcely a foot from Linder’s face, then brought its buttstock down between the Rhee’s shoulder blades.

  “Who started it?” the guard demanded, glaring first at Linder, then at Rhee.

  Both combatants gasped for air but made no reply.