Red Ice

After breakfast we mustered in one suite, which became a makeshift classroom. Dravit and Heyer drummed Russian phrases and some written words into heads of varied receptiveness. During breaks, rumors swirled about like blizzard snowflakes. We were learning Russian to impersonate Russians… we were learning Russian to abduct Russians outside of Russia… we were learning Russian to survive in Russia. Dravit, who knew the nature of our mission, smiled enigmatically. I simply pretended not to hear.

In the afternoon Heyer began the cross-country instruction in his quiet competent way. The pale blond Norwegian paired the experienced skiers with the inexperienced and put them through the basics. We carried no packs at first, nor any weapons. Japan put severe restrictions on firearms and in any event, we did not want to attract attention.

As far as anyone knew, we were some burly tourist group. The Japanese are used to tourist groups moving around with martial precision behind a host of flags in matching apparel. We reversed the norm by peppering our wide range of cast-off military clothing with enough civilian items to pass for American casual chic.

The next few days went by without incident. I increased the pace and stress of the physical training and the group sorted itself between the fit and thriving, and the unfit and downward spiraling. Three were keeping up with the cadre of four, a middle-aged ex-French Foreign Legion officer, the Gurkha rifleman, and an ex-German Kampfschwimmer. The legionnaire, d’Epinuriaux, was from Chamonix, where he had at one time tried downhill racing. He was called Chamonix or ’Nix. The stocky Gurkha, Gurung, despite coming from the snowiest region of Nepal had never skied but nevertheless led the novices by sheer force of will. Lutjens, a wedge-shaped German frogman, had been a world-class gymnast.

The ex-Foreign Legion officer, Gaston d’Epinuriaux, had a hawklike face and a long, lean configuration, which combined to remind you of a French halberd. Laconic, precise, he was not the fellow you’d go to first with a new joke. Then again, I was hardly the one to be critical on that point. His cold, unblinking blue eyes were accented by a long-discolored scar that streaked down one side of his face like a bolt of tropic lightning. The steely gray stubble over his ears looked as if it could strike sparks on a hard surface. Everything about him was either hard, cold, or contained.

In the hotel’s hot-spring pool, he’d created a stir among the Japanese guests when they’d seen his bare torso—dimpled with more zippers than a motorcycle jacket. Bayonet work, I’d say. At its dirtiest.

He was a gloomy old soldier, the kind they fear in the Legion because of the cafard. Le cafard was the black beetle that, according to legend, gnawed into men’s brains at those lonely, desolate outposts of which the Legion was fond. It accounted for all manner of murder, madness, and suicide. The quiet ones were always the most dangerous, the morose ones who did their work mechanically. The merest trifle might set them off.

That was the easy answer to his manner, I suspected there was more to it.

The second excelling new skier, Amarsing Gurung, was a Gurkha. It seems useless to say more. “Gurkha” says it all. He was one of those stocky, bandy-legged mountain men from Nepal whose weathered brown faces opened into a dazzling white smile when there was mischief afoot or at the prospect of action with heavy doses of cordite and cold steel. He shaved his head in the old way, leaving only a jet black topknot by which the gods could pluck his fallen body from the field of battle.