Roger Crossland - Red Ice

Special Prisoner 734 limped to the fallen tree. It lay barely ten meters away, but he was out of breath by the time he reached it. Others trimmed away the branches and slowly began to saw it into sections. Carefully he uncoiled the chain that he had figure-eighted around his shoulders. Though it weighed less than seven kilos, he could not stand upright until it dropped off.

Another man, Special Prisoner 605, made a faint effort to help him fasten the chain to the fallen tree. They kept bits of rag between their hands and the ice-cold metal. The touch of metal in this bitter-cold climate could leave fingers useless for the rest of the day. The guards did not appreciate useless fingers. Neither talked. They had both withdrawn into the zombielike state that pretended to forget the cold.

He noticed that 605’s face was chalky and mottled with greenish brown bruises. Emaciated by the exhausting work of timbering and by lack of food, neither prisoner could survive much longer, but clearly 605 was nearer to death. He had collapsed twice already today and the VOKhk guards had beaten him with the butts of their SKS rifles until he had crawled in the direction of the timber cut.

Special Prisoner 734 wondered about the guards. He wondered where in the socialist republic they found such men. It was not a job many would want.

Before the guards could back the armored half-track into position to tow the log, 605 cried out and fell face first into the snow. Two guards hurried over and began to kick him. Not wake-up kicks, but the kind of kick that would send a soccer ball seventy-five meters. They went on like this for ten minutes—the guards did not tire as easily as the prisoners. Besides it kept them warm.

“Comrade guards, it appears he is dead,” the gang boss said. The boss of the project was a prisoner, too; someone must lead the timbering. His position permitted him to risk addressing the guards.

The boss, two other prisoners, and 734 dragged 605 to one side of the narrow cut in the taiga. Everyone returned to their assigned tasks. The tasks would have taken a healthy man an hour to complete, but took them each a full day.

“Less than six months here,” the boss said, shaking his head. “Why do they send us these Moscow city men?”

The gang boss was like that. Always joking.

It’s not every tenant that gets to enjoy a bath with his landlady. Nor one so attractive as the long-legged porcelain doll opposite me.

But then again the taking of a bath here in Japan has been elevated to a social and spiritual occasion. Furthermore, Keiko, whose well-sculpted form had raised the height of my bathwater, was not your typical landlady.

“You’re not too bad looking for dame hakkojin,” she said, as if studying me for the first time. Dame hakkojin meant literally “useless man the color of luminous white paint.” Keiko was a bit of a Japanese redneck. “You sure you’re not tee-tee bit Japanese?”

I should start at the beginning. Like hundreds of other veterans, I heard the siren call of the Orient and vowed someday to go insanely Asiatic. It was an easy vow to take. A culture as rich and intriguing as Japan’s makes the mere act of living, for an Occidental, an adventure. But above all, Japan still reveres adventure and the chivalrous warrior. My association with Japan has been a happy one.

“Look gray-eyed devil, don’t start horizon-focus routine on me.” She punctuated her comment with a splash. “Ara ma , much better to be bathing with the toothless old man picks up cigarette butts at Tokyo station.”

Her tone softened. “You will not become serious at a time like this, I forbid it. Iya da wa! I don’t like it. You make me sad when you become serious. With you seriousness and sadness are one.”

In any event, the court martial made the decision to follow my vow all the easier. Perhaps if I had solicited publicity at the trial—receiving attention on the magnitude of the trial of Colonel Rheault of the Green Berets—I could have avoided the final injustice of a trial before the long green table. Regrettably that sort of publicity could only compromise other SEAL operations, and I was a man of codes and values and standards, none of which permitted the jeopardizing of men in the field for personal benefit. In the long run it made little difference, for my effectiveness as a military officer would be equally doomed by the taint of publicity or court martial. So I opted for the long green table, an ironic promotion, and an administrative discharge.

Later I met Keiko while salvage-diving off Honshu, in those first lonely months after discharge. As a remedy, she was over-cure for the Service Dress Blues. Raised among the Ama, women abalone divers on Izu Peninsula, she had, I was sure, cornered half the world’s strategic reserve on curves. This in addition to inheriting their incredible endurance and phenomenal resistance to cold.

Like many Japanese women, she giggled into her hands and had a voice that made you think of wind chimes. But there was a pervasive impishness that was uniquely hers. She knew when to bubble with enthusiasm, and still rarer, when to be quiet. Sensitive and intuitive, she could read my moods like a newspaper. She was proud of her heritage and could be damned patronizing in her answers to my foreigner’s questions. Aroused, she was the original Far Eastern spitfire.

Keiko was well known throughout Yokohama as the proprietress of the best restaurant and sushi bar on the waterfront. It was an enterprise she administered with the cool efficiency of a head accountant and the firm hand of a boss stevedore. Somewhere, someone long ago had started the rumor that Japanese women were submissive and fainthearted. Perhaps that was true, but I knew that in her case beneath that elfin manner and soft-spoken exterior lay a spine of 440-carbon steel. Stories about her evictions of unruly customers abounded. What she saw in me I never quite knew, possibly a similar inflexibility in matters of duty.

My delightful bathtub rested in an apartment above that restaurant, in a weathered-wood, quaintly Japanese building she owned. The apartment provided a refuge from the rigors of salvage diving—and the increasing number of free-lance military operations I was being called upon to engineer on a cash basis.

So here we both basked in the big boxlike tub, or ofuro . It had been a long day diving the ice-water salons of the Kamakura Mara, and every fiber of my neck and shoulders ached. A cool plum wine, an accommodating landlady, and a hot bath were surely the sinful answer to a broken-down frogman’s dreams.

Keiko slid lower into the tub until only her beautiful long-lashed almond eyes were above the steaming water. Then, stealthily she kipped from sitting to prone as her eyes glided closer to mine. With an abrupt splash she bussed me and laid her cheek against my shoulder.

“Koibito , you have been captured by famed Japanese sneak attack,” she giggled. “You must think of suitable ransom. There will be no rescue. MacArthur-sama is not around to rally the forces of right. Old Imperial Navel is gone.”

“Have pity, you slippery Ama wench, on an impoverished sailor stranded on these beaches with no hope of ransom. Let’s start with a proposition well-grounded in history. Will unconditional surrender do?” Holding my plum wine unsteadily, I gauged the appropriateness of counterattack.