Ian Slater - Arctic Front

“You lyin’ bastard!” charged Aussie.

“No, no,” said Choir seriously. “True, boyo. Siberians love the sun. Now, you could get a Humvee from the car pool… That a possibility, Sarge?”

“I suppose,” said the sergeant, “it could be arranged for the ‘Hero of Baikal.’ “

“Fair dinkum?” asked Aussie, meaning, was it true or were they pulling his leg. “They go topless?”

“No!” said the sergeant, going over a “lost property” report. “They take it all off, old son. That’s what I’m told.”

“Yeah?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, I might stay, then,” said Aussie.

“Course,” added Choir, “you don’t have to go to the river beaches to find it, I’m told. Place in Khabarovsk—’Bear’ Restaurant. KGB used to use it, so they say. Lot of crumpet there now, I’m told.”

“Hey, I’m loaded for Bear, fellas!”

“I know,” said Choir.

The sergeant wasn’t listening any more. The quartermaster in one of the Second Army’s supply battalions had sent a fax saying that enough American artillery uniforms had been stolen to equip a whole battery of 155 howitzers. Someone said the uniforms had probably ended up being flogged on the black market south of the Siberian-Outer Mongolian border, in Ulan Bator. The Mongolian party officials, always much closer to the Soviets than the Chinese, whom they hated, were apparently allowing a lot of free enterprise these days — or at least what they thought was a lot of it.

“Hell,” one sergeant said, looking at the fax, “we’re selling army surplus stuff all the time anyway.”

“Yeah, but not stolen stuff. Anyway, it’s the wrong time of year to be flogging off winter gear — soon be spring. Strange.”

An hour before he was to leave Irkutsk, after three days of having to perform what he called one of the most distasteful duties “of my career,” shaking hands with Siberians and officers from the Outer Mongolian garrisons, Freeman took time off, sightseeing, with Norton accompanying him.

From the frozen onion dome of Irkutsk’s Church of the Crucifixion, they gazed out over the ancient city of the Transbaikal city. The church from which they were admiring the sight, Freeman informed Norton, had been the administrative center for all the Russian Orthodox churches in Russkaya Amerika— ”Russia-America.”

“Irkutsk,” he told Norton, “was also the most important trading center on Baikal on the way to Russia-America-Alaska. That is, before some congressman, who everyone thought was nuts, bought Alaska.”

Freeman was squinting against the brilliant white light of the snow-covered chimneys idly issuing curlicues of smoke into the pristine winter air.

“You know where the Alaskans would be if we hadn’t bought it?” Freeman answered his own question. “In the silver mines of Nerchinsk — slaves of the tsar. Huh. Tsars were almost as bad as Stalin when it came to slave labor in the mines. Usual flogging was a hundred strokes with the plet— three-strand rawhide. You had to walk there from here — Irkutsk — and if you faltered and fell, you died where you fell. Hell, in the mines they didn’t even note a prisoner’s death. In World War Two we sent Wallace, the vice president, over to Magadan in the northeast to have a look at their gold mines there.

“Well, of course they did a Potemkin village on him — all the prisoners were well fed, looking great. They should have been. Bastards were members of the NKVD — secret police before they changed the name to KGB.” Freeman shook his head disbelievingly. “Unbeknown to the vice president, it was the head thug of the camp, the director — and his wife, as much a thug as he was — who had shown them around. It was pathetic. The VP’s sidekick, a professor, went back to Washington, said the head of the camp they’d toured was a man who had ‘a deep sense of civic responsibility.’ Thug had another job — people’s representative of Birobidzhan. Jewish autonomous region. Some of the Jews figured it was time to leave.” Freeman turned eastward and from the tower looked over the taiga beyond the city in the direction of Lake Baikal. “Can’t imagine why, can you?

“You see,” Freeman’s voice echoed as he walked down the steeple’s stairwell, “that’s what continues to amaze me, Dick. They send over intellectuals with the naïveté of a four-year-old to assess the situation. No wonder we have to end up fighting them. It’s the four-year-olds who are dictating the cease-fire.”

Norton didn’t answer. Politics was deep water in the army, something the general was blindly naive about, for all his sophistication in matters military. It wasn’t until they were out of the church, walking toward the general’s staff car, four U.S. outriders starting up their motorcycles, that Freeman, seeing trucks of the Siberian Fifth Army rolling past the Cathedral, said, “To think we came so far, Dick. Over a thousand miles in from the Siberian coast, damned near past Baikal, which,” he added, “we wouldn’t have if I hadn’t authorized that FAE strike on Ratmanov.”

Norton nodded his assent.

“And,” continued Freeman, “had it not been for those Brentwoods and other men…”It was then that Norton saw tears in Freeman’s eyes. “Freedom,” he told Norton, “sometimes exacts a terrible price but in my heart of hearts, in this Freeman that only Freeman sees, Dick — I believe that ultimately we have to pay for it, buy it in blood.” He exhaled wearily. “So that bloodless gentlemen can call the a ‘warmonger’ without the shooting the sons of bitches.”

On the way out to the airport, U.S. MPs flanking him, their motorcycles throwing up fine trails of snow, Freeman glanced back and pointed out the frozen fountain in front of the Angara Hotel. “In spring, they tell the they swim in that fountain.” He turned back to Norton. “I was struck by that fact, because it shows how they use everything they have. Tough, too, swimming so early in the thaw.”

The general fell into a deep, reflective mood. Finally when he spoke, his tone was one of mellow speculation laced with warning. “Come spring I don’t know where the hell I’ll be. Those clowns in Foggy Bottom are regrouping to get the home as soon as they can. Well, home is where my war is, Dick, and I want to know the moment the first lake cracks — the moment the melt starts.”

Norton was jolted by the implication. “You think they’ll try something, General?”

“Spring thaw’s very bad for armor, Dick. Floods, mud. If I was that son of a bitch Yesov, that’s when I’d counterattack. Catch us with our pants down.”

“Lord, General, I hope you’re wrong.”

“It’s a cease-fire, Dick. Not a surrender.”

“Well,” said Norton confidently, “we’ve got the Russian president, Chernko, on our side. He should keep them in line. Did good work for us in Moscow.”

“We’ll see,” said Freeman, watching a hawk hovering high toward Lake Baikal.

In Anchorage Lana, sitting and talking with Frank earlier, had now been overtaken by a combination of exhaustion and relief at the news of the cease-fire and was dozing, resting her head on the edge of the bed.

Gingerly, not wanting to wake her, Frank reached for the newspaper cutting the limey had left him on the bedside table. It was a clipping from a six-month-old Stars and Stripes Backgrounder column talking about how Soviet air ace Sergei Marchenko, before he had gone missing over North Korea, had clashed with Soviet air officialdom. Apparently his vision had been deficient in one eye — below the standard required by the Air Force Academy — and he had tried, unsuccessfully, to invoke the case of General Adolf Galland, Germany’s top air ace and head of the Luftwaffe Fighter Command, who had flown not only the prop-driven Messerschmitt but also the first jet fighter, the Messerschmitt 262. He had done it with only one eye, the other being glass.