Roger Crossland - Red Ice

The KGB never caught on to him. But two years after Pyotr’s death, he was thrown into Lefortovo Prison for initial interrogation. The KGB had at last discovered someone dear to Kurganov. Kurganov was a great irritation to them. One whom they could not touch directly. But Kurganov could be made to regret his actions indirectly, through the punishment of others. That was one established way of dealing with men who shouldered a strong sense of obligation and responsibility. Their file labeled “Kurganov” now had a second subheading after “retribution”: it read “Special Prisoner Vyshinsky.”

There was, I knew, a point when after having fought hard and well that a man deserved to be pulled out of the contest. Someone else could pick up the banner. Vyshinsky had earned a rest.

I looked at the picture again and tried to visualize him with a full beard and without glasses. I couldn’t.

The body, the posture, but most of all, the eyes, would have to do it. The peasant puppet maker’s sad and compassionate eyes. Those pallbearer’s eyes .

“Were we able to get information of the size of the garrison or the layout of the camp?”

“No,” Sato said quietly.

“Keep Myshka on it. I don’t want to play a long shot like this by the seat of my pants.”

The coordinates placed the camp in a valley just west of the Dzhugdzhur Range, over eighty miles from the coast. Navigation would be tough. Magnetic compasses would spin aimlessly in that portion of the world. Solar compasses, which gave readings using the angle of the sun’s rays at a specific time of day, were no more help, since we hoped to move at night.

The stars and terrain features offered our primary means of night navigation. Confronted with a heavy overcast or a good snowstorm, we might have to drop crumbs to find our way out—a procedure which the pursuing Soviet army might find amusing.

In the predawn darkness, I put the twenty-five men through an hour of heavy calisthenics, then took them on a 10,000-meter run. Four or five of the Marseilles group wheezed in a full half hour behind the rest.

“It’s too cold for running…. What was all this jock stuff for?… The only muscle that needed conditioning was the one connected to the right index finger…. We’ve already been through basic training once, we don’t need it again.” One, a chain smoker, quit on the spot. He flew home that night.

After breakfast we mustered in one suite, which became a makeshift classroom. Dravit and Heyer drummed Russian phrases and some written words into heads of varied receptiveness. During breaks, rumors swirled about like blizzard snowflakes. We were learning Russian to impersonate Russians… we were learning Russian to abduct Russians outside of Russia… we were learning Russian to survive in Russia. Dravit, who knew the nature of our mission, smiled enigmatically. I simply pretended not to hear.

In the afternoon Heyer began the cross-country instruction in his quiet competent way. The pale blond Norwegian paired the experienced skiers with the inexperienced and put them through the basics. We carried no packs at first, nor any weapons. Japan put severe restrictions on firearms and in any event, we did not want to attract attention.

As far as anyone knew, we were some burly tourist group. The Japanese are used to tourist groups moving around with martial precision behind a host of flags in matching apparel. We reversed the norm by peppering our wide range of cast-off military clothing with enough civilian items to pass for American casual chic.

The next few days went by without incident. I increased the pace and stress of the physical training and the group sorted itself between the fit and thriving, and the unfit and downward spiraling. Three were keeping up with the cadre of four, a middle-aged ex-French Foreign Legion officer, the Gurkha rifleman, and an ex-German Kampfschwimmer. The legionnaire, d’Epinuriaux, was from Chamonix, where he had at one time tried downhill racing. He was called Chamonix or ’Nix. The stocky Gurkha, Gurung, despite coming from the snowiest region of Nepal had never skied but nevertheless led the novices by sheer force of will. Lutjens, a wedge-shaped German frogman, had been a world-class gymnast.

The ex-Foreign Legion officer, Gaston d’Epinuriaux, had a hawklike face and a long, lean configuration, which combined to remind you of a French halberd. Laconic, precise, he was not the fellow you’d go to first with a new joke. Then again, I was hardly the one to be critical on that point. His cold, unblinking blue eyes were accented by a long-discolored scar that streaked down one side of his face like a bolt of tropic lightning. The steely gray stubble over his ears looked as if it could strike sparks on a hard surface. Everything about him was either hard, cold, or contained.

In the hotel’s hot-spring pool, he’d created a stir among the Japanese guests when they’d seen his bare torso—dimpled with more zippers than a motorcycle jacket. Bayonet work, I’d say. At its dirtiest.

He was a gloomy old soldier, the kind they fear in the Legion because of the cafard . Le cafard was the black beetle that, according to legend, gnawed into men’s brains at those lonely, desolate outposts of which the Legion was fond. It accounted for all manner of murder, madness, and suicide. The quiet ones were always the most dangerous, the morose ones who did their work mechanically. The merest trifle might set them off.

That was the easy answer to his manner, I suspected there was more to it.

The second excelling new skier, Amarsing Gurung, was a Gurkha. It seems useless to say more. “Gurkha” says it all. He was one of those stocky, bandy-legged mountain men from Nepal whose weathered brown faces opened into a dazzling white smile when there was mischief afoot or at the prospect of action with heavy doses of cordite and cold steel. He shaved his head in the old way, leaving only a jet black topknot by which the gods could pluck his fallen body from the field of battle.

Gurung had served Great Britain, as his father, his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father had. He knew his duty, and his wife, who waited loyally for him in Nepal, knew hers. It was somewhat irregular for him to hire out individually, but he was with Dravit, and surely wasn’t wherever Dravit stood a piece of the British Empire? Gurung had languished too long in the garrison in Hong Kong, and a Gurkha must fight, or he was no Gurkha at all. Finally there was the Kampfschwimmer, Lutjens. Physically he could have been Wickersham’s younger brother, but he was a delicately dark Bavarian whereas Wickersham was an oakenly buff Wisconsinite. A top-notch gymnast, he seemed to be always in the air, balanced on his hands, or moving with graceful lunges. Where Wickersham’s face had been hammered into shape, Lutjens’s was chiseled to leave a thin nose and those narrow creases on either side of the mouth associated with well-bred yacht captains, Grand Prix drivers, and men in ads for good scotch. Something about him exuded evening in black tie, svelte debs, and fine crystal. His heavily accented English was hard to follow but I remember overhearing him say, “…a boring death, don’t you t’ink? T’ese escapades of mine will drive Aunt Elga verriickt , which would be a reward in itself, ja ?” From the most sophisticated backgrounds sometimes came the simplest motivations of all: Lutjens waged a dangerous rebellion against a gilt-edged family.

At the other end of the scale, two of the Marseilles group, an ex-British para and an ex-U.S. Marine, developed injuries whose authenticity I doubted, but which gave them an honorable way out.

Heyer, following my lead, increased the complexity and difficulty of our ski maneuvers. Local skiers often glided through small groups of men digging snow caves, bivouacking or assuming strange formations prone in the snow. These skiers whisked by, shrugging off the odd behavior of foreigners.