Roger Crossland - Red Ice

Fighting the heavy seaweed, we struggled to keep our heading to the rendezvous point. Everyone worked hard, but I knew we were largely at the mercy of the frigid currents of the Nemuro Straits.

At about 1000, a cold rain washed away the fog and we found we were on the safe side of the Nemuro Straits. The fishing boat was southeast of us and we attracted their attention with a small survival mirror.

Wickersham and Matsuma brought the fishing boat alongside. Everyone was numb from exposure and we’d abandoned swimming and paddling hours before. Puckins’s teeth chattered like castanets, and, dazed, Lutjens groaned softly.

Wickersham reached down from the boat and hoisted men aboard like wet kittens. Matsuma reached for Gurung, who was babbling in hypothermic stupor.

“Keep away from me, Japanese devil. I am Amarsing Gurung, whose father killed more Japanese soldiers than you have teeth in your head,” he said absently. “There being a Russian soldier last night who tasted the kiss of the kukri of Rifleman Gurung.”

Matsuma smiled gently and dragged the soon-unconscious Gurung up over the gunwale.

The Norwegian wood stove crackled and sizzled in our hotel suite. After thawing out, I had slept for twenty-four hours straight. Each one of us had experienced some of the cold-induced symptoms of hypothermia—the dopey sense of well-being, headaches, lethargy—for which rest and warmth were the best therapy. My side was tender where a bit of outboard motor housing had broken the skin. My thighs and knees ached as they always did after a patrol. Legs seemed to absorb most of the tension.

Dravit and Chamonix sat across from me. Neither looked very happy.

“…and I didn’t bother to ask Chamonix to develop the film until just a few hours ago. It didn’t seem necessary.”

He tapped his pipe against the stove.

“The film had been overexposed—all of it—not just the six photographs Captain Dravit had taken,” added Chamonix.

“There were several beads of water within the housing of the camera. You know how watertight a Nikonos is. I opened it with dry hands. The film is useless to us now. Merde! All our efforts for nothing.”

The sullen Chamonix was even more laconic than usual. The legionnaire carried some undisclosed bitterness. He rose, stood rigidly erect, then walked to the door and left the room with a sharp salute and a click of heels. The .51-caliber bullet that had grazed his thigh had been a tracer and instantly cauterized the wound. He didn’t permit himself the luxury of a limp. Vinegar may have flowed through his veins, but the old trooper was flawlessly competent.

“There’s no doubt about it, is there?” Dravit stretched his legs, placing his heels on the stove. “Our tight little band has been penetrated.”

“Can you remember any of the information from the quarterly report?”

“I can remember it all,” he said with a smirk. “It was too hard to come by to trust exclusively to a camera.”

He handed me a scrap of paper. It read: “Garrison of Camp R-3; 43 militarized police—15 with radio or electronics specialties; 207 prisoners; Vyshinsky still carried on the camp roster as special prisoner.”

I placed the scrap in my pocket.

“Put all that on the stock of my shotgun with a grease pencil when we were in the administration building. Didn’t think of it then, but on the way back the bleedin’ camera was on the boat, where anyone could get at it.”

Penetrated—it was bad enough to have others working against us. But one of our own?

“Skipper, it’s about time for the first cut.”

Now that we knew the size of the garrison, we could determine the number of men we would need. “Well, it’s a trade-off: the more men we take, the better our chance of success in a firefight, but the greater our chance of detection—and the more cumbersome the logistics. Let’s make it the Kunashiri eight and take Alvarez and that South African, Kruger, as alternates. Send the rest home with the bonuses.”

The turncoat had to be one of the Kunashiri eight, but they were my most valued men. I couldn’t afford to eliminate any one of them.

I jammed a few more logs into the stove, but it didn’t help. I didn’t seem able to get warm.

The new men were part of the two dozen who’d been recruited in Marseilles. These were the next most talented after Chamonix, Gurung, and Lutjens, and they showed promise.

Juan Ortega Alvarez was a Miami Cuban who specialized in heavy weapons. His high cheekbones; broad, straight nose; and heavy beard made it possible—depending on the depth of his tan—to pass for any nationality inhabiting the zone between 15° South and 35° North latitude. Nearly as massive as Wickersham, his bulk was less sculpted and more evenly distributed than the Wisconsinite’s.

Alvarez found growing up in Miami’s Little Havana a painful, stifling experience. There were pressures, always pressures. His uncle and a brother-in-law had died at the Bay of Pigs. Pressure: he must be prepared to do his part when the next revolution came. He was a mediocre student. Pressure: he was a Cuban and must bring credit upon his family and nationality. He had no occupational goal. Pressure: he must enlist in the Army until he arrived at some other trade valuable to his community. The pressure from family and friends was subtle but deadly.

Halfway through his reluctant enlistment, he realized he liked the life and volunteered for Special Forces, where his bilingual background would be an asset. Despite Army regimentation, he felt freer than he’d ever been in Florida, straitjacketed by the rigorous standards set by desperate, disillusioned émigrés. Ironically, with this sense of freedom came a new pressure, the internal pressure of a growing sense of destiny. It was not that unusual. A haunting sense of destiny was something I, too, could understand. After his second hitch, he left the Army to free-lance so that one day he would have the experience, credentials, and contacts to leave a mark on Cuban history. Castro couldn’t live forever; when the time came, Alvarez would be ready to contribute.

And there was Kruger. It took only one word to set Johannes Kruger trembling: that word was women . He wore a badgered look, a seedy walrus mustache, and no visible muscles. He stammered, too—he had always been that way and it had never mattered—all his troubles emanated from his pursuit by women. Life had been relatively quiet for him as a “recce” corporal with the South African Reconnaissance Commandos. A bit of tracking, an occasional fire-fight with a handful of Cuban-trained Angolans, it was all downright peaceful compared to what followed. After his discharge, Kruger drifted north to Kenya and eventually took a job as a white hunter. He didn’t mind the fact that Kenya had a Kaffir government. After all, it didn’t govern much worse than those bandits in Pretoria, and anyway it wasn’t Marxist. He just didn’t mind. It was the white-hunter job that started it all—this trouble with women. Predatory, continent-hopping socialites who were in the habit of seeking ornamental, absentee husbands stalked white hunters like their male acquaintances stalked wild game. Kruger didn’t mind that, either; conversely, he played it to the hilt. He juggled three transcontinental marriages simultaneously. His expeditions into the bush provided required excuses and much-needed rest during those rare instances when all three wives were in Nairobi at once. It couldn’t last. It didn’t. One night he came home unexpectedly to find wife number two in bed with another man. In a shocking reversal of tradition, and in the heat of the moment, the lover shot the husband. “B-b-bloody fool, if he’d only waited a moment I would have said, ‘Excuse me, I seem to have the wrong flat.’” A battery of lawyers, wives, and girlfriends drove the hobbling Kruger out of Kenya and into the more celibate Brotherhood of Arms.