Roger Crossland - Red Ice

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YOKOHAMA

WICKERSHAM

LITTLE CREEK VIRGINIA

YES STOP BETWEEN ENLISTMENTS COMMA HAVE UP TO 180 DAYS STOP YOU SUPPLY DATES

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YOKOHAMA

PUCKINS

CORONADO CALIFORNIA

REQUIRED WESTERN PACIFIC DEPLOYMENT IN MAY STOP TENTATIVE YES COMMA NEED TIME FRAME STOP WIFE EXPECTING PUCKINS NINTH TWO WEEKS

Petty Officer First Class Gordan Wickersham and Chief Barry Puckins had been members of my platoon in the western Pacific. They presented an odd combination of personalities and would comprise part of the nucleus of the rescue organization.

Wickersham’s eternally over-revving mind was held captive in a body as powerfully muscled as a Wisconsin brewery horse. When he wasn’t brawling or womanizing, it was his singular mission in life to bring the military into the free enterprise system. On at least three occasions, I’d had to stop him from setting up a corporation to sell shares in captured booty. Yet there was no finer M-60 machine gunner in Vietnam. This Clydesdale of a man lumbered to the sound of the guns.

I could see Wickersham standing before me, grinning not quite angelically, showing a one-inch gap of missing teeth in his upper jaw and thoughtfully stroking his cauliflower ear. He was explaining how he had only borrowed the commodore’s jeep… that the fact that the shore patrol had found it sans tires, battery, upholstery, and canvas top was due to unfortunate vandalism by persons unknown… which he would rectify by “fixing their wagons,” but first he had to make a visit to the Salvation Army mission in Manila… to visit an elderly, ailing lady… whom he knew through one of the stewards. As an experienced interpreter, I guessed all this to mean he’d intended to sell the whole jeep but got stiffed; and by elderly, he meant over eighteen; and by ailing, he meant she had a fever that needed quenching.

With his bridgework in, he had the battered good looks that some women found exciting; generally the slinky, long-legged types you found draped off hulking prizefighters. His slabs of muscle weren’t only for show. In basic training, several instructors had wagered he couldn’t climb a thirty-foot rope with twin steel-90 diving tanks on his back. They lost.

Gordan Wickersham was one of five sandy-haired, heavy-shouldered sons born to a long-suffering beer salesman. How Milwaukee ever survived the intersibling competition among these five brawling, hockey-playing, ever-competing, and always-enterprising young public enemies is a monument to its civil defense organization. The competition was cutthroat, and their dares and challenges bordered on the suicidal. The end product was an odd blend of loyalty, swagger, hostility, and intelligence. As a result of his immersion in this strenuously masculine environment, a good fight, a touch of heavy-handed buffooning, a ready wench, and an easy dollar meant home. And all he needed from life.

The moderating influence on Wickersham was the silent Texan, Puckins. No officer could possibly devote the time required to effectively monitor Wickersham’s activities. Fortunately, through some strange symbiotic chemistry, he was given to relinquishing ascendancy to Puckins long before Puckins had ever made chief. It was the Clydesdale and the cowboy. They formed an inseparable team, a vibrant lamination of the physical and the spiritual.

Born and raised in west Texas, Barry Puckins carried the classic lean and bowlegged cowboy build, but he could swim like a Waikiki beachboy. His redheaded Huckleberry Finn looks fit well with his disposition toward silent mirth. He could draw more laughs with a few wordless movements than a good comic working a half-hour routine.

Humor formed only one component of a complex man, a man who was essentially a fundamentalist of the Old Testament mold. He’d graduated from a Texas Bible college—it was surprising how many SEALs had attended some seminary or other. His grandfather had stormed into Texas as a six-gun-carrying, circuit-riding preacher, and I remember Puckins showing me a picture of his parents that bore a dry resemblance to American Gothic . It would, however, have been a mistake to label Puckins cloistered or otherworldly. “Easy to see He made the world chock-full of different adventures and places. Cinders of hell, it’d be a sin and darned unnatural not to grab the opportunities laid before us,” he’d confided to me in one of his rare wordy moments. “I hold there’s gotta be a reason for it. Sure as they’ll be no thermostat control for you an’ me in the next life. There’s somethin’ to it.” In this vein he had bounced around before joining the Navy. He’d tried everything from miming in Ghirardelli Square to bartending in a Houston skivvyhouse.

Reconciliation of religion with his eventual profession wasn’t difficult. Certain Moslem sects viewed the killing of each infidel as bringing oneself another step closer to Paradise. Puckins’s attitude toward dispatching communists was analogous, but not quite so simple. In its essence, communists were anti-God, therefore Puckins was anti-communist.

Furthermore, or perhaps as a logical progression from his religious convictions, Puckins was a bedrock family man devoted to his wife and squad of kids. He showed a strong feeling for children in general, and they for him. There’s an old saw that men in sapper or demolition units are either mad, married, or Methodist. Since madness is relative and I was a member of the same unit, I would have no way of judging that point, but as to the latter two categories, Puckins was very much married and very nearly Methodist.

The Korean stewardesses alternately hovered and darted about the aisles with gracious laughter and the tinkle of glass.

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YOKOHAMA

FITZROY

HARARE ZIMBABWE

REGRETS STOP ON TO DEAL OF CENTURY POSSIBLE ACQUISITION PRECIOUS STONES STOP MAY NEED ASSISTANCE SOON STOP STAY AVAILABLE STAY HEALTHY

I had known Fitzroy in Vietnam, too. He had been an outstanding trooper with the crack Australian Special Air Service. His tracking ability was legendary—from a heel print he could give you race, religion, and blood type. I had hoped to use his skills in reverse in Siberia perhaps to elude or confuse trackers.

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YOKOHAMA

DRAVIT

MANCHESTER ENGLAND

AFFIRMATIVE COLD CLIMES RAIDING STOP QUERY DESPOILING ANTARCTIC WEATHER STATION COMMA TIBETAN STRONGHOLD OR BIRDSEYE FOOD FACTORY

Captain Dravit, formerly of the Royal Marines would be my second-in-command and likely the oldest member of the raiding party. His steadfast competence was often downright unnerving, but hardly surprising from a gardener’s son who’d worked his way up through the ranks. Barely five foot four inches tall in jump boots, he sported a first-rate handlebar, which had become something of a trademark.

Bantams like Henry Dravit were worth a herd of football linemen in a tight spot, and his record bore the fact out. His baptism of fire had been in the frosty over-the-beach raids of the Korean War. On one occasion, his entire party wiped out and his dry suit shredded by shrapnel, he inadvertently crawled into a North Korean automatic-weapons position, His dubious luck further brought him into one of the first brainwashing experiments. This he found mildly amusing—until things went sour and they threatened to pull out his mustache with pliers. After which they promised to work on other portions of his anatomy.

“Nasty bit of work. After a while a mustache sort of grows on you, seems to me,” he once told me with a laugh. A well-developed sense of irony spiced his conversation.

The next day two North Korean guards were found, their heads twisted northbound and their bodies oriented southbound. Dravit, his mustache, and all his moving parts were gathering momentum southbound. Dravit, then Corporal Dravit, had begun his epic end run from Wonsan to the Funchilin Pass through the entire North Korean army and part of the Chinese. Keeping below ridgelines and moving only at night, he was to skulk three hundred miles in fifteen days, gain two pounds, and retain his mustache.