Roger Crossland - Red Ice

He downed drink after drink at a steady, unfeeling, unrelenting pace.

“What say you to heading back to that electro-voltaic, double-switch, single-transformer-gizmo saloon, pardner?” Dravit asked brightly.

“Er… danger high voltage?”

As we walked back I thought how there was something drearily automated about this band, that had chosen to march like clockwork pallbearers into the endless cold. At least two mechanical men, one comic and the other grim, had mustered under the command of a weary-eyed, wooden frogman. It must be catching, because now the second-in-command had become partial to ladies whose most intimate workings might be transistorized.

Later that evening, commotion in an alley caught my attention. Dravit had been comparing the economic outlooks of Japan and Korea—at length. I couldn’t see anything as we had passed the alley but there was a distant gritty shuffling of feet and heavy uneven breathing.

“Let’s take a look,” I said, wheeling back into the alley. The alley was deep and intersected another, making a thin T. As we quickened our pace, the clear sounds of a struggle issued from the right arm of the T.

Turning the corner, we were suddenly watching three Japanese men, their backs to an open doorway, holding a resisting fourth man while a fifth flicked a sap at his head. The resisting victim was Wickersham. As I rushed at the man with the sap, he heard my footsteps and whirled into me, flicking the black leather sap at my face. I ducked into Tai otoshi , a judo body-drop throw, smashing his head and shoulders into the brick building’s wall. In the corner of my eye I saw Dravit, his fist wrapped in a scarf, popping neat combinations at another of Wickersham’s assailants. That left two men trying to restrain Wickersham, which was hardly enough. They both let go at once, and one attempted a karate front kick at my groin. I had just time to rotate a hip into the kick and to grab the extended foot with my right hand as I swept away his other leg with my left foot. He dropped hard to the ice-covered pavement. The other, in a brown suit, opened his jacket, reached into the front of his shirt, and under a wool belly wrap. A flash of green-and-red tattooing showed across his bare stomach and I knew what to expect. I brushed Dravit aside and grabbed brown suit’s moving wrist with both hands. The razor-sharp tanto dagger flashed for a split second before I could turn it back into him. The ten inch blade slipped into his visceral cavity to the hilt. He doubled over, then dropped to the pavement. Three men lay on the pavement, the fourth had disappeared.

“Let’s get out of here, they’re yakuza or hired katana .”

“Wha…?” Wickersham started.

“Move, this is all we need.” I surveyed the alley, no one had seen the fight. “I’ll explain later.”

Snaking through more alleys, we finally came to a boulevard and flagged down a cab. Out of breath, we tried to appear casual as the three of us jammed into the little Toyota. Once we were back at the ski resort I began to explain.

“You must have crossed some real pros. The fellow with the short sword either is, or was, yakuza .”

“ Yakuza ?”

“Japanese gangsters, Oriental organized crime. Centuries ago they were strictly gamblers, but now they’re thugs with traditions and codes.”

“How could you tell? Something special about that knife?” Dravit asked.

“Well, yes. That and the belly wrap and the tattoo. Yakuza are fond of tattooing an entire kimono design on themselves and of using one of those daggers instead of a gun. Now I’ve got a question: What the hell did you do to get them riled?”

“Nothing, honest. What was that other word you used, kata-something?” Wickersham asked.

“ Katana , sword. Hired sword. Some yakuza fall from grace with their clans and hire out, like hired guns. Okay, now tell me what started all this.”

“Well, I was over at a place called the Miyako blowing my retainer on… Well, anyway, after a while I noticed a Japanese fellow in a mod brown suit in the corner seemed to be paying me a lot of attention, but never really looking at me. Well, I figured he could mind his business and I’d mind mine.

“Pretty soon this bar dolly was letting me buy her drinks, so I don’t really think too much about my mod friend in the brown suit.”

Wickersham took a deep breath. For the first time I noticed the side of his face was the color of a ripe eggplant.

“Well, this fine bar dolly and I decide to see the rest of town, and it seems everywhere we go I catch a glimpse of Mr. Mod Brown Suit. Later on I don’t see him but I see this other fellow with a turtleneck—a Caucasian maybe—and now he’s everywhere.”

I remembered the man with the turtleneck—Dravit had knocked him out—he might have been Caucasian.

“The night was still young so the bar dolly and I go to this tiny apartment of hers for a nightcap, maybe more, maybe less,” he said with bloodshot discretion.

“About oh-two-thirty I decided to head back here…”

It was 0500.

“…and just as I was going out the door Brown Suit and Turtleneck and two guys I never saw before try to put me out with a sap, but Brown Suit missed me on his first solid try, and from then on I wasn’t standing still for nobody.”

I could imagine their plight. They had missed their chance to coldcock Wickersham, and then were stuck with a 240-pound, five-foot-ten wildcat on their hands. From the look of the side of his face they had managed to tag him a few times.

“I think I broke Turtleneck’s wrist, but the sap man kept trying to make a good tag. I went out, I think once, but came back to, before they could get me anywhere.”

A mugging? Perhaps. But there were easier victims. This carried the earmarks of an attempted kidnapping. I had the uneasy feeling that this attempted snatch and our project were connected.

“Captain Dravit, from now on everyone uses the buddy system on liberty. No one leaves the resort alone. Everyone carries a blackjack, brass knuckles, or a knife.”

Dravit caught my glance. We were under siege and someone wanted one of us to talk with or to. What had been up until now a winter snow festival had taken on a dangerous mood.

Wickersham edged toward the resort’s main building.

“And where do you think you’re going?”

“Get some rest?” Wickersham piped up enthusiastically.

“Uh-huh. You get poleaxed on your own time, you can rest and recuperate on your own time. Be back here in PT gear in fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” was the sheepish reply.

You’re a hard man, Quillon Frazer. A hard-nosed, stiff-necked, true-to-type ogre. Heaven help you if they ever found out you were fond of them.

The weary days of training seemed to blur together. Even aches and pains took on an undefined quality until they manifested themselves into one single collective throb.

We found that high-camber mountaineering skis with cable bindings offered the simplest, most serviceable combination for our purposes. We allotted one multi-fuel stove for every two men. The stove was for cooking and for melting snow for water. Water in its different forms constituted the single most influential substance in subfreezing travel. It provided both danger and salvation.

Petty Officer Heyer warned that dehydration was the greatest threat to the ski trooper. Any raiding party was duty bound to stop periodically to melt snow for drinking. Otherwise, the party risked the collapse of its members one by one as assuredly as they would drop on a waterless hike across the Libyan desert. Each skier must examine his urine en route and be sure to drink enough water to keep it nearly clear white. He advised against eating snow directly for it puts a severe strain on the body’s heating system and the crystals cut up the inside of a skier’s mouth. It was only a last-resort procedure.