Checkpoint Charlie

by Brian Garfield

  I looked at Joe Cutter and Leonard Ross. Neither of them was at all amused. Cutter said, “He’s a class-A wonder, Myerson is.”

  Ross, who is young and collegiate and manages to retain a flavor of naïveté despite several years in the service, brooded at Dennis. “Why the hell did you do it?”

  Dennis sat listlessly with smoke trickling from his nostrils. He only stared bleakly at the tabletop; he neither stirred nor responded to Ross’s question.

  I said, “I don’t see any need for blood. Dennis, are you ready to sign a confession?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  Joe Cutter said, “You could commit suicide.”

  “Not me.”

  “Then you haven’t got a choice.”

  “What if I deny the charges?”

  I only stared him down and he understood. If he didn’t cooperate he’d be terminated — if not by me then by somebody else working under Myerson’s instructions.

  “If I sign a confession what happens then?”

  I said, “You go to prison. It’s the best we can do. We can’t have you getting bitter and selling the rest of your inside knowledge to the Comrades. After a few years you’ll get out on parole after the information in your head has become obsolete.”

  Cutter said, “Take the deal, Dennis. It’s a better offer than you’d get anywhere else.”

  Dennis took the deal.

  * * *

  I DROVE OUT to the airport with Joe Cutter. When we queued for our flight he said, “One of these days Myerson’s going to force you to kill somebody, or get killed.”

  “He keeps trying to,” I agreed. “He’s perverse.”

  “Why don’t you get out, then? God knows you’re old enough to quit.”

  “And do what?” I walked away toward the plane.

  * * *

  Charlie in

  the Tundra

  “ATTU,” Myerson said.

  “Gesundheit,” I replied.

  He sneered. “The island of Attu. Westernmost island in the Aleutian chain off the coast of Alaska. Nearer to Siberia than to North America. Pack your woolies, Charlie.”

  I scowled. “Attu has been of utterly no importance to anybody since May 1943. Is this your version of sending me to Siberia? What are my transgressions?”

  “They are too many to enumerate. In fact it might be an interesting idea to see about stationing you there permanently. Do you have any idea how many American soldiers got frostbitten up there in the War? He blew cigar smoke in my face. “The limo’s waiting — Ross will brief you on the way to the airport. It seems one of our gadgets is missing.”

  * * *

  “IT WOULD be tedious for us if the Russians got their hands on it,” Ross said in the car on the way to my digs to pick up my clothes. “We’d have to change our codes and computer cypher programs.”

  “Is the pilot all right?”

  “Concussion and a few fractures. He should be fine, eventually. Up there they learn how to crack up easy. The Air Force collected the plane and most of the debris and barged it over to the island of Shemya — it’s only a few miles away and that’s where the Air Force base is.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve been there before?”

  “Twenty-odd years ago on the U-2 program.”

  Ross was intrigued; he’s still a collegiate at heart — young enough to be eager-beaverish. “What’s it like up there?”

  “The end of the world.”

  * * *

  ROSS SAT on the windowsill and watched me pack my thermal socks and longjohns. “Anyway,” he said, “it wasn’t until they hauled the wreckage back to Shemya and sorted through it that they realized the computer code transceiver was missing. Conclusion is it’s still on Attu but they’re reluctant to send a team of men back to go over the crash site with microscopes — if the Russians espied the activity they’d realize something important is missing. I suppose if we merely send one man to scout around it won’t draw that much attention from their satellite cameras. But one thing I don’t understand — why’d they pick on you? It’s not your sort of job. Why not use an Air Force man already stationed up there at Shemya? It’s only a few miles away.”

  “It wasn’t an Air Force caper,” I said. “It was ours. The pilot was ours, the mission was ours and the CCT box is ours. I’m sure the Air Force volunteered to keep looking for it but the Agency told them to lay off —‘We’ll take care of it ourselves.’ The usual interservice nonsense. As for why me, it’s probably because I’ve been there before. And because if there’s a miserably uncomfortable job Myerson always likes to see that it gets tossed in my lap.”

  “Why don’t you quit, Charlie? He makes your life hell and you’re past retirement age anyway.”

  “What, and give Myerson the satisfaction of knowing he drove me out?”

  * * *

  THE LONG TRIP entailed a change of planes at Seattle, an overnight stop in Anchorage and an all-day island hopping flight out the thousand-mile length of the Aleutian chain aboard one of Bob Reeve’s antiquated but sturdily dependable DC-6 bush transports. Flying regular schedules through that weather Reeve’s Aleutian Airways has somehow managed to maintain an astonishing record of safety and efficiency—indeed, it is one of the few airlines in the world that conducts a profitable business without Government subsidy.

  I was dizzy from crosswind landings and wild takeoffs at Cold Bay, Dutch Harbor and the Adak Naval Base. We bypassed Amchitka because they had fog blowing across the runway at ninety knots. Eventually we mushed down onto Shemya, the penultimate Aleutian— a flat dreary stormy atoll hardly big enough to support the runways of its air field. It was only October but the island was slushy with wet snow. A typical grey Aleutian wind drove the cold mist through me as I lumbered down the portable aircraft stairs and ducked into the waiting blue 4x4 truck.

  The only above-ground structures were the enormous reinforced hangars that sheltered our DEW-Line combat planes and the huge kite-winged high-altitude spy planes that had supplanted the U-2 in our Siberian overflight program. The hangars were left over from the War — they’d been built to house B-29 Superfortresses for the invasion of Japan that never eventuated. Everything else on the island — a top-secret city housing several thousand beleaguered Air Force personnel — was underground out of the weather. The weather in the Bering Sea is the worst in the world.

  I checked in with base command and was trundled to a windowless motel-like room in Visitors’ Quarters; ate an inadequate supper in the officers’ cafeteria and then went to visit the injured pilot.

  He was a chunky Texan with thick short sandy red hair, freckles and an abundance of bandages and plaster casts. His eyes were painfully bloodshot — evidence of concussion.

  “Paul Oland,” he said. “Afraid I can’t shake hands, Mr. Dark. Pull up a pew there.”

  I sat, not quite fitting on the narrow chair. “How’re you making it?”

  “They tell me I’ll be flying again in a few months, to my surprise. Sheer dumb luck. I should’ve been dead.”

  “Tell me about the accident.”

  “Well, I’d been at 120,000 feet over Kamchatka and I was on my way back with a lot of exposed film. They’ve recovered all the film, by the way. It’s all in the debriefing report.”

  “I’ve read it. But I’d like to hear you describe it.”

  “You know much about the weather patterns up here?”

  “I helped set up the U-2 program here.”

  “Then you know what it’s like. Half the time you’re in thick fog and hundred-knot winds at the same time. You can’t tell up from down. You have to rely on your instruments and if the instruments start to kick around you’ve had it.”

  “That’s what happened? Instrument failure?”

  “They didn’t fail. They just weren’t a match for the williwaw. I’d made my descent into the muck — I was down to four thousand feet and still dropping. The only way you can see anything around here is get right down on the
deck. The pilots who get lost and get killed are the ones who try to climb out of it. There isn’t any top on it. It just goes up forever, right clear to the moon. Anyway I was circling in from the west to line up for my landing approach. They had me on radar and I had my Loran bearings — it should have been fine. But there’s an incredible amount of electrical activity in these clouds. My needles were jumping around like they got stung by red ants. I figured that would pass, they’d calm down when I got closer to base and signals got stronger. But then I got a squeal from the tower — I’d gone off their screen behind a mountain on Attu. I figured it had to be the north end of Attu so I pulled hard left and started to climb — I still couldn’t see a thing, it was a williwaw blowing out there, and my radar screen was useless because of dozens of false images reflected back from the moisture in the clouds. The next thing I knew I was bellyflopping across Fish Hook Ridge.”

  “Belly landing?”

  “Landing? No. Accident. Ten feet lower and I’d have crashed nose-first into the cliff. Blind luck, I slid across the top of it instead. I was about three miles south of where I’d thought I was — the wind blew me that far off course in something like forty-five seconds while I was off the Shemya radar screen. I mean it’s fantastic up here, the elements. This weather goes up and down like a whore’s drawers.”

  “So you hit the top of the ridge —”

  “And flipped over and busted most of my bones. The plane came apart but it wasn’t too bad. Bits and pieces went in various directions. The canopy saved me — it didn’t cave in. God knows why. Most of the dashboard fell apart, though.”

  “Including the code box.”

  “Yeah. Including the code box.” He looked morose.

  * * *

  THERE ISN’T a single tree on Attu — or for that matter on any of the Aleutian Islands — but the tundra growth is a matte on everything and makes for difficult boggy walking, especially for someone as heavy as I am.

  We’d had to wait thirty-six hours for a break in the weather. Then the helicopter had shuttled me across to the big island and left me there with a sort of Boy Scout camping outfit in my backpack in case the weather didn’t permit the cropper’s picking me up at sundown — a strong likelihood.

  The chopper pilot had done a bit too much plain-English talking into his microphone and I reprimanded him because he’d said enough to alert a sufficiently sharp-eared Soviet radio monitor to the fact that we were searching for something crucial, valuable and portable on Attu. It added a sense of urgency to my job and made me glad of the portable radio in my pack. We weren’t far off the Soviet coast, after all. And I was dismally aware of the fact that if the Soviets sent people in to “help” me hunt for the code box, my own people weren’t likely to start World War III over it. Langley’s attitude is to do your best but take your losses.

  I was dropped off within a hundred yards of the crash site but it took me twenty minutes to get there on foot; I had to crab my way up the cliffs. I wondered how the devil the Japanese and American infantries had managed to fight a war here. In 1943 the entrenched Japanese defense force had been annihilated by 15,000 American troops who somehow made amphibious landings on the beaches. The fighting was wild and vicious. Half the U.S. soldiers had been evacuated on stretchers or left buried on the island — combat wounds, frostbite, shock, trenchfoot, williwaw madness.

  All those lives had been expended for it and ever since then it had been ignored by the world: nobody needed it; Attu was as useless as any piece of ground on earth. Uninhabited and unloved. Technically it belongs to the United States and officially it is a National Battlefield Park — like, say, Gettysburg; it has an obscenely large military cemetary. But tourists do not queue up to go there. Nothing exists on the mountainous tundra except mud, grass, brush, snow and the rusting relics of old warfare: abandoned artillery, wrecked planes, discarded canteens, bent M-l rifles, ruined Japanese caterpillar trucks, crushed infantry steel helmets.

  The morning was fairly clear — unusual. I could see down the length of Massacre Valley to the foam of Massacre Bay. These place-names dated back to Soviet sealing days in the 19th century when Aleut Indians had been decimated by Russian sailors; in World War II they were eerily fitting. To the east I saw an Air Force jet lift above the Shemya runway and circle away toward Amchitka, the Atomic Energy Commission’s private test-hole island, an hour’s flight away over the horizon.

  I was alone on Attu with the volcanoes and the tundra— a rare distinction in which I took no pleasure. I removed my backpack, anchored it with boulders in case of a sudden williwaw, and began to prowl.

  I was resigned to a long dismal search. If the code box had been in plain sight the Air Force people would have found it. So it had fallen into a crevice or tumbled into a pool of mud or rolled down a cliff.

  First a snack — two roast beef sandwiches to keep my strength up. They tasted like styrofoam. Then I unlimbered the portable metal-detector and put my nose to the ground, cursing Myerson in a dreary monotone.

  * * *

  THE DAY was wasted. The chopper managed to collect me at sundown; I spent another thirty-six hours on Shemya shooting pool and assuaging boredom before the weather broke and allowed me to return to Attu. Resuming the search I spent five hours clambering cautiously over the east side of the ridge. The metal-detector unearthed dozens of cartridges, rifles, canteens and other souvenirs but no CCT box.

  I worked a checkerboard pattern and decided to keep the current sweep inside a seventy-yard radius of the spot where the plane had come apart; my first search, a fifty-yard circle, had proved fruitless. When the seventy-five-yard circle produced nothing I ate lunch and expanded the search area to a hundred-yard radius.

  In the afternoon the clouds built up and the wind began to cry across the ridgetops. I went back to my campsite and shouldered into the heavy parka and continued my work muffled in a thick earflapped hat and heavy gloves. I kept one eye on the weather, ready to seek shelter, but it held — the clouds remained a few hundred feet above my 2,000-foot ridge, although I could see snow-squalls offshore that came right down to the water.

  At about half past three my search brought me around to the west rim of the ridge. By a fluke the sun broke through at that moment and a painful blade of reflected light stabbed at me from a rubble of volcanic rock two hundred feet below me at the foot of the cliff.

  It excited me because rusty relics don’t gleam like that. It was the shine of fresh new metal or possibly glass.

  * * *

  IT WAS a long climb down because I had to go around. A mountain climber might have rappelled down in five minutes but I’m too old and too fat for athletics. I took my time, going down from rock to rock on the rubber soles of my insulated boots, hanging onto a rope I’d anchored to a boulder at the top.

  By the time I made my way around to the point where I’d seen the glimmer the sun had long since vanished again. But I found it anyway, knowing where to look, and it was indeed the Agency’s CCT code box — a device similar to an ordinary pocket calculator, full of transistorized printed miniature circuits designed to send and receive messages in codes that were virtually impenetrable by anyone who didn’t possess an identical CCT with identically programmed circuitry.

  The box was battered and mangled from its fall; unserviceable—but that wouldn’t matter to the Russians if they’d got their hands on it. Damaged or not, it would have yielded up its secrets to any examiner of its circuitry. I was relieved to have it in hand.

  I contemplated the steep climb back to camp; I made a face. Out of habit and procrastination I turned to survey the horizons — and saw through a notch in the sodden hills a dark silent bulk sliding along the waves, heading out to sea. Even as I watched the submarine its decks began to run awash; it submerged quickly and I might have imagined it except for the motorized rubber dinghy that came birling through the surf onto the strip of volcanic sand that the invaders of thirty-four years ago had code-named Beach Red.

  The submar
ine had come up on the blind side of the island and launched its dinghy and fled immediately. It meant only one thing: they were Russians.

  * * *

  “I’M SORRY, Mr. Dark. Ain’t nothing flying around here except hangars. We’ve got a class-A williwaw in progress.

  Wind gauge is gusting to a hundred and fifteen knots.

  Maybe by morning—”

  “Tell the Base CO. there are strangers on Attu. Possibly Soviets. And a submarine lying off the western beach. You got that?”

  “Yes, sir. Acknowledge.”

  Low sunbeams slanted onto the sea through a distant hole in the overcast. From the rim of the cliff and against the shimmering glare on the ocean I saw the tiny outline of a solitary figure climbing toward me.

  I gathered my gear, stowed the CCT in my parka and carried the backpack away down the east face of the ridge toward Massacre Valley. It was slow going in the sucking tundra but I wanted to be well away from the crash site. It was a big island; all I had to do was stay out of sight until I could be picked up.

  I secreted the heavy metal-detector under an overhang; I had no further need of it. Then I buckled into the backpack and pressed on.

  The light drained out of the sky; the wind came and with it fog. I knew I needed shelter.

  The best I could find was a sort of hollow in the rocks. It broke most of the wind. I wrapped up in blankets and dug out an inadequate dinner of sandwiches and bottled vitamin-fruit concentrate. Then I rummaged in the pack for my sole weapon — an airman’s lightweight survival carbine. I loaded it and laid it beside me.

  The williwaw struck at nightfall and I spent most of the night emphatically miserable in a cringing huddle, clutching the blankets around me with my face buried in cloth and my ears deafened by the cry of the storm.

  By the time it eased away, the luminous dial of my watch told me it was only midnight but I was battered and exhausted and dismally cold.