Red Ice

I could imagine their plight. They had missed their chance to coldcock Wickersham, and then were stuck with a 240-pound, five-foot-ten wildcat on their hands. From the look of the side of his face they had managed to tag him a few times.

“I think I broke Turtleneck’s wrist, but the sap man kept trying to make a good tag. I went out, I think once, but came back to, before they could get me anywhere.”

A mugging? Perhaps. But there were easier victims. This carried the earmarks of an attempted kidnapping. I had the uneasy feeling that this attempted snatch and our project were connected.

“Captain Dravit, from now on everyone uses the buddy system on liberty. No one leaves the resort alone. Everyone carries a blackjack, brass knuckles, or a knife.”

Dravit caught my glance. We were under siege and someone wanted one of us to talk with or to. What had been up until now a winter snow festival had taken on a dangerous mood.

Wickersham edged toward the resort’s main building.

“And where do you think you’re going?”

“Get some rest?” Wickersham piped up enthusiastically.

“Uh-huh. You get poleaxed on your own time, you can rest and recuperate on your own time. Be back here in PT gear in fifteen minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” was the sheepish reply.

You’re a hard man, Quillon Frazer. A hard-nosed, stiff-necked, true-to-type ogre. Heaven help you if they ever found out you were fond of them.

CHAPTER 13

The weary days of training seemed to blur together. Even aches and pains took on an undefined quality until they manifested themselves into one single collective throb.

We found that high-camber mountaineering skis with cable bindings offered the simplest, most serviceable combination for our purposes. We allotted one multi-fuel stove for every two men. The stove was for cooking and for melting snow for water. Water in its different forms constituted the single most influential substance in subfreezing travel. It provided both danger and salvation.

Petty Officer Heyer warned that dehydration was the greatest threat to the ski trooper. Any raiding party was duty bound to stop periodically to melt snow for drinking. Otherwise, the party risked the collapse of its members one by one as assuredly as they would drop on a waterless hike across the Libyan desert. Each skier must examine his urine en route and be sure to drink enough water to keep it nearly clear white. He advised against eating snow directly for it puts a severe strain on the body’s heating system and the crystals cut up the inside of a skier’s mouth. It was only a last-resort procedure.

As dangerous as it was to dry out on the inside, it was equally dangerous to become wet on the outside. Water is a coolant. Its use for that purpose in a car’s engine, he explained, was a good example of that property. Water allowed to turn to ice was an even more effective coolant. It would be a fatal error in Siberia to get wet and stay wet. “Therefore,” he said, “the whole object of movement in cold weather is to stay dry. And that doesn’t just mean don’t go swimming with your clothes on.”

The pale Norwegian tapped his ski pole against the inside of each ski and continued. The threatening source of moisture could be the sea, melted snow on clothing, or sweat generated by overexertion. All these sources would cause discomfort and, over time, hypothermia.

Sweat was the most prevalent problem and it called for constant trade-offs. At any given temperature, less clothing was needed by a man moving vigorously than by a man standing still. If, however, that man moved too vigorously, he sweated and his lighter clothing instantly became a liability. Each skier had to know his sweat threshold and at what point to peel away clothing to avoid sweating.

Heyer explained that it was a squad leader’s responsibility to maintain an efficient “no sweat” pace for all, allowing periodic stops to adjust clothing. One of the liabilities of cold-weather cross-country movement was that a group of men, each fit enough to run twenty-six miles in four or five hours, might take three days to cover the same distance on skis in rugged, uphill, tree-covered terrain. Siberia’s taiga-covered coastal plain and mountainous interior would be slow going on skis, but impossible going without them.

On Heyer’s last day with us, Dravit took over the Russian language instruction. He drilled basic Russian into the troops with the tenacity and subtlety of a pile driver. We weren’t really expecting fluency, just sufficient understanding for survival. The emphasis was not on textbook phrases such as “Which way to your uncle’s pastry shop?”, but rather on the ability to read Danger: Mine Field, or say, “Drop your weapon, comrade, unless you’re prepared to enter the real worker’s paradise.” In any event, the program wasn’t for everyone, and one ex-U.S. Army Airborne veteran threw up his hands in frustration. He later flew back to where people spoke “simple, decent American.”