Roger Crossland - Red Ice

Soon the passageway was awash with bouncing white objects.

“I told you not to eat those Ping-Pong balls so close to a launch,” Wickersham said reprovingly as he flexed his neck from side to side. “You know this always happens when you mix paddles and Ping-Pong balls at supper. The paddles get frisky and start serving the balls out. I wish you’d stick to pachinko. At least the balls stay in the machine.”

“Aw, perdition (hic). Cut me some slack, Wick.” He made a moue. “ Don’t start with me. You know how I get . Ain’t some of these fellas got enough to think about?”

Gurung, with as much dignity as he could muster, rushed down the ladder to the head again.

I was in a deep depression. It was always the same dark, irritable depression that accompanied me into action. This black mood was upholstered in equal parts of self-doubt and dark recrimination. Was all this the result of my personal madness or was it simply vanity?

This was the deep, very private gloom reserved for leaders. It was the special reserve of those madmen who went out looking for trouble, those idiots who designed nearly attainable missions and executed them themselves. Only a few military leaders experienced this special torment. Others were passively drawn into battle, responding to directives and reacting to threats. Not you. In special operations, the initiative, the organizing, and the execution were often all rolled into one. You sought out trouble spots, generated your own proposals for authorization, and bore the heavy burden of the power of life and death alone.

The mood came before every evolution where I might lose a man. It was like this before every night parachute jump, before every night ship attack, before open boat passages, before assaults up a sheer rock cliff, before every hazardous engagement.

I kneaded my right shoulder. It was throbbing again.

What made me so foolhardy? Who was I to think I could pull this off? Very likely we would all be dead by this time next week.

It was always eerie to be able to see the future in such stark alternatives and be able to set your watch by them. In a week we would all be alive or we would all be dead. Would my name be the last name cursed on one of my own men’s lips? With black humor I wondered if perhaps I had been selected to rid the world of its dangerous, violent, overeager people. People who loved rough sports, danger, and a bizarre camaraderie.

As always, I would persevere and see it through. I was driven to make sense out of nonsense. I was haunted by the need to see that good men were not wasted on mediocre causes and enterprises. I burned with the desire to forcibly turn past experiences in personal pain, discomfort, and courage into something worthy of the price. I would take every ordeal, humiliation, and hardship that we had suffered collectively to end up where we now crouched, and make it worth something. Let something else take that away from us. I would not turn back. They wouldn’t.

Nearly all of us were veterans. Each of us had been badly battered and in the end had become associated with a failed undertaking. We would not accept that assessment as a final score. We would take these failures, but only as setbacks on the way to some larger justifying victory. Someday, perhaps.

I understood all this, as I always had, but I still invariably plunged into black depression. For I had forced the issue, and brought everyone to the test, and after tonight not one of our lives would ever be the same.

Then Dravit beaned me with a Ping-Pong ball.

Once we surfaced, the hatch was tossed open, and men and equipment spewed onto the exposed deck. Whitecaps smashed across the sub’s flatback bow, leaving the deck wet and icy slick. The quarter moon shed just enough light to give the quick-frozen icicles on the cigarette-deck railing a crystalline sparkle. The breeze did not feel unusually cold at first, but you soon knew where you had exposed skin.

We assembled the kayaks just aft and in the lee of the conning tower. Rapidly, the kayaks took form and absorbed our watertight bundles of equipment. We clicked through assembly and loading like a well crafted breechblock with finely fitted tolerances. The mechanism showed a single flaw. Lutjens—in Chamonix’s boat—seemed to be an uncontrolled swarm of thumbs. The weight of the risks of a mission seemed to fall all at once during the last twenty-four hours before a launch. You became so intent on trying to visualize the future that you forgot the present. It was not unusual for even crack troops to become punchy with anticipation.

The sub’s deck left little freeboard, and its guardrails had been removed. One moment the elegant German was standing next to his kayak, the next moment a comber running the length of the deck swept him off his feet and the deck.

Chamonix lunged for him, but had no play left in his safety harness. Someone tossed a line, but by then Lutjens had disappeared under the submarine. Moments later, bits of stained neoprene bobbed in the submarine’s wake.

“Why wasn’t his harness fastened?” Alvarez demanded. The big Cuban sighed as if his worst suspicions had been confirmed. “How could it happen? Not another accident.”

“That Judas-Jonah is still with us,” said Wickersham glumly. He worked his bicep. “I don’t like it, not a bit.”

Chief Puckins interrupted, “I can’t figure it out, either, but one thing’s for sure. If we don’t launch pretty damn quick, the Russki radar is going to draw a bead on this boat.” He drew his hand across his throat.

Matsuma and I eased into our kayak. The old Japanese fisherman took the bow seat, and I the stern seat with the rudder pedals. I waved “all clear” to Dravit and in seconds the submarine began to submerge. The rush of white water tossed the kayaks around mercilessly, but our spray skirts kept us dry. The submarine slipped like a shadow beneath the waves, carrying Henry Dravit, former Royal Marine, and Keiko Shirahama, onetime Ama diver, away—perhaps forever.

“One man dead for sure in exchange for one man’s possible rescue. At best, there can be no net gain,” Chamonix called over the darkness.

I steered a course based on the sub’s last fix. Matsuma suggested course modifications to guide us through the large chunks of free-floating ice.

“I don’t fight to balance any books,” I returned. “Those are the values of someone else’s vocation.

“I fight to bring hope,” I added, addressing no one in particular.

We had severed the logistic umbilical. For the next ten to twelve days, we could forget any outside support. As a small covert force we would be hard to detect, but if detected…

Our kayaks dodged floes as needles of wind-driven spray tormented the paddlers. My use of an azimuth was of secondary value, the real navigation rested in Matsuma’s hands until we reached shore. In March, much of the pack ice began to break up, he had assured me, and the great tidal range and strong currents along this stretch of coast left it navigable to within one or two miles of land.

March weather varied as unpredictably in Siberia as it did elsewhere. Though Siberia averaged only twenty inches of snow a year, a great part of this figure fell in March. March temperatures were generally milder than deep-winter temperatures, but they could plunge to sixty below without warning.

Matsuma and I held the lead position. The synchronized flutter of our double-bladed paddles moved us briskly up and over the rolling black waves. The seawater, which dripped from these paddles, or which splashed over the decks, froze in sheets down the length of our seventeen-foot craft. As we approached land, free ice became more plentiful. Clear passages through the ice fields became narrower and narrower, fanning into small, wandering channels, which forked like branches of a tree. Matsuma showed an unerring instinct for picking the fork that meandered toward pack ice. Then, for a quarter of a mile, we manhandled floes with our paddles to clear a path. Finally, we reached pack ice. There we climbed out and hauled the kayaks onto the ice. We portaged a mile, then hit a belt of open water. Once again we slid the kayaks into the sea. The belt was only a few hundred yards across and then we were back on pack ice. Before us lay disjointed piles of ice in pressure ridges. Here, a false step on seemingly secure ice could flip a man into water far colder than his dry suit provided for.