Red Ice

By that time, we had continued to accelerate the pace until somewhere during the blur, the survivors had become rock-hard, Russian-babbling, marathon-skiing zombies.

That evening I took Heyer to the airport. It was the end of his leave, but I could tell he really didn’t want to miss out on an adventure. He kept brushing his blond hair out of his eyes and beginning sentences and not completing them. Finally, before he boarded his plane, he kicked at a lump of snow and said, “They’ll do all right. Just remember, the Soviets were badly mauled by Finn ski troops in World War Two. They’ve never forgotten that beating. Soviet troops teethe on cross-country skis now.”

Then, as an afterthought, he added, “It’s a good mission. Luck will be with you.” Then he stormed off to the boarding ramp.

A few hours later, Puckins flew in from California. I watched him leave his plane. The west Texan hadn’t changed much in ten years. He still had those same smooth, freckled Huck Finn looks. I thought of Wickersham, whose face carried the marks of ten years’ innumerable battles and had launched a thousand bar fights. Puckins moved down the ramp with a cowboy’s economy of energy. Several Japanese children waving a paper menagerie of origami foldings—fellow passengers traveling with their families—trailed along in his wake as Vietnamese children had once done. Children had always enjoyed his pantomimes and wordless magic tricks.

Now, as a chief radioman, he was entitled to the sedate coffee-cup world of chiefs. Yet Puckins had rejected a chief’s prerogatives. In his quiet way, he preferred the world of action and causes.

“Myshka’s been rolled up.”

Sato’s news stunned me; Myshka’s work was still unfinished.

“We think the KGB has him, though we can’t be sure.”

I lay back in the hotspring pool, trying to ease the pain in my ski-weary legs and to collect my thoughts. The tiled vault echoed with the chatter of hot-spring pilgrims. A busload of them had arrived earlier that afternoon to sample the alleged medicinal qualities of the spring. Though the acoustics of the spa made it virtually impossible to bug, Sato and I whispered anyway—out of habit. Steam rose about six inches off the water, then disappeared.

“He missed his last mail drop and his apartment is empty.”

“You’re sure Myshka was one of us?” I asked.

“Us?” He paused. “He’s a dissident, if that’s what you mean. No doubt about it, he’s been reliable for years.”

“Still could be a mole.” We both knew of double agents who had been left dormant for years and allowed to burrow deeply into a network.

“Possibly… but I doubt it. The literary pipeline isn’t worth that kind of an investment. Anyway, if he was being used against this operation, they pulled him too soon. We’ll be wary now.”

“Wary? Not much to be wary about, we simply can’t go until I have some sense of the size of the camp’s garrison and if Vyshinsky is still there. Was Myshka able to get us any of that information before he disappeared?”

“No… but he was getting close.”

“How so?”

Sato wiped the steam-created sweat from his brow and looked around confidentially. “He was waiting to intercept the quarterly report from Kunashiri, the eastern Siberian payroll center. We learned that much from his last dead-drop message.”

I searched for the meaning of dead drop. It was a safe place to deposit written messages, which kept sender from ever having to meet receiver. Sato’s law practice seemed to have brought him a rather singular vocabulary.

Sato went on to describe the administration of the Corrective Labor Colony Section, the agency which ruled the camps in Siberia. The section, a bureau under the Ministry of State Security, had moved its Siberian regional headquarters from Sakhalin to Kunashiri, one of the Kuril Islands, for alleged reasons of efficiency. In 1979, Ivan had moved over 12,000 troops in the Kurils to intimidate Japan. Kunashiri lay just twelve miles off Hokkaido. Perhaps the officials of the section were just lonely and wanted to be where the action was. The actual reason was unimportant. The move could be justified by the extensive use of slave labor right there in the Kurils.

The quarterly report Myshka was after was very routine. It summarized administration difficulties of the past three months and the status of each of the hundred-plus camps. Interestingly, it appended—with bureaucratic efficiency—current rosters of the VOKhk, or militarized police, guards, and the prisoners at each camp. By directive, this report had to be sent by military mail to Moscow every February 20. That was in two days. Myshka had intended to pry the report out of Gorshnov, the wimpy bureaucrat with the dog. But now Myshka had disappeared.

“Too bad we haven’t anyone else in Moscow with access to that report. It’s really the key to this operation.” Sato sighed, leaning back into the steam and closing his eyes.

“Yes, it is too bad, but assuming the dead-drop message was reliable, I have another idea.”

CHAPTER 14