Exile Hunter (19 page)

Linder turned to face
his neighbor. It was an earnest and intelligent face, with a long
nose and cleft chin, sparkling blue eyes and a wide expressive mouth.
Unlike most of his fellow passengers, the neighbor was clean-shaven,
with only a day’s growth of stubble, and his thinning hair was
trimmed to a buzz cut. But his face and neck had the flaccid look of
someone who had spent long months in prison and his overalls were as
worn and soiled as anyone’s. Linder formed the impression that his
seatmate was an intellectual of some sort, but not an agitator or
conspirator of the kind who posed an obvious threat to national
security.

“How do you know so
much about the camps?” Linder inquired, straining to be heard over
the background noise and already feeling hoarse from raising his
voice after using it so little in recent months.

“I worked for a
Congressman. He had a seat on the Armed Services Committee, so I got
to visit some bases up there.”

“What are you in
for?” Linder asked.

“Sedition,” the man
replied. “A tenner.”

“I'm envious,”
Linder offered with the trace of a smile. “I got life. If you can
call it that...”

“Wow. What did they
pin on you to deserve that?”

“Treason, sedition,
sabotage, espionage. They even tossed in some tax evasion,” Linder
replied.

“Well, you must have
really rocked the boat. Would I be correct in guessing you were a
public servant of some kind? A whistleblower, perhaps?”

“I was in
intelligence,” Linder answered, having decided during his
interrogation not to conceal his prior line of work from his fellow
prisoners. “Whether we served the public is another question,”
Linder added. “But no whistles were involved.”

“I’m Sam Burt,”
the seatmate answered with an engaging smile. “Call me Sam.” He
extended his right hand to grasp Linder’s left, which was as far as
both could reach, since each prisoner’s hands were shackled to his
waist chain.

“I’m Warren,”
Linder replied.

“Tell me, Warren,”
Burt asked with a wry smile, “if you were one of them, what are you
doing in here with us?”

“The Party ran low on
enemies and resorted to eating its young. One day you’re marching
in lockstep with history, and the next you’re frog marched off to a
cell somewhere,” Linder answered with a sardonic smile.

“And just how long
might one expect a life sentence to last in a northern camp?” Burt
asked.

“A few months, a few
years,” Linder answered evasively, looking at the floor. “I
suppose some might make it to ten,” he added, looking up at Burt.
“I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

“Well, I’m counting
on it being good,” Burt declared with a determined look. “I
certainly don't plan on dying up there before I complete my
sentence.”

“Nor do I,” Linder
replied. Though he liked what he saw in Burt, he had little interest
in continuing the conversation. Instead, he felt a growing urge to
sleep, perhaps brought on by the low lighting and the white noise of
the jet engines. “Look, there’s a time for everything,” he
added. “Let’s get some rest and talk again later, okay? The
flight’s going to be a long one.”

And without waiting for
a response, Linder leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

* * *

The Boeing landed two
or three hours later, presumably for refueling. While the doors
opened and some of the crew deplaned, all prisoners remained shackled
to their seats. The stench of vomit, urine, and feces was
overpowering and the open doors did little to dispel it. After about
forty minutes, the doors reclosed and the aircraft took off again for
a flight that Linder guessed lasted about five hours. As soon as they
were airborne, Linder and Burt resumed their discussion, sharing
their stories and revealing their hopes and fears with the desperate
frankness of men newly emerged from solitary confinement. Each found
something to like in the other, and though they would likely be
separated on arrival, they agreed to do their best to seek each other
out during the days ahead.

Night had fallen by the
time the prisoners queued up to descend the boarding stairs onto a
snow-covered tarmac under an array of dazzlingly bright halogen
floodlights. To the right of the Boeing was a twelve-foot chain-link
fence topped by razor wire, while to the left, separating the
prisoners from the airfield, were at least thirty soldiers with
submachine guns and nearly as many dog handlers.

Once their eyes
adjusted to the bright lights, the two men gave the airfield a
careful look around and Burt told Linder that they had probably
landed at Elmendorf Air Force Base, outside Anchorage, Alaska, the
primary hub for nearly everything that the U.S. government flew in or
out of Alaska since the Manchurian War had broken out four years
earlier. Though the floodlights made it difficult to see beyond the
apron where the 757 was parked, Burt pointed out two more 757s, a
couple of 737s, and an unmarked 747 further down the runway.

“If there were a way
out of here, now would be the time.” Burt mused as they queued for
the yellow school buses that would take them on the next leg of their
journey.

“Don’t even think
about it,” Linder replied, cocking a thumb at the soldiers and the
dogs. “Those dogs would tear us to pieces if the guards didn’t
shoot us first.”

They both cast a glance
at a deep-chested Alsatian panting at its keeper’s side not twenty
feet away.

“But once we’re in
camp that’ll be it for the rest of our lives. Are you willing to
face that?” Burt protested.

“Escape is dangerous
anytime and anywhere,” Linder acknowledged. “With security like
this and no head start, an attempt right now would be suicide. I’m
not willing to cash it in just yet.”

“Are you married?”
Burt asked suddenly.

Linder shook his head.

"Any close
family?"

“A sister,” Linder
replied.

“So if you got out,
where would you go?”

“I’m not sure,”
Linder answered. “I’d go to my sister, except that’s the first
place they’d look. Not so good for her…”

“I know what you
mean,” Burt replied softly. “I figure that, if I made it to
Philadelphia to see my wife and kids, they’d probably nab me on the
spot. But, if I ever do escape, that’s exactly where I’m going.
To me, family is everything. It'd be worth it.”

Linder opened his mouth
but thought better of it. He didn’t want to add to the man’s
mental burden by pointing out the suffering the DSS would inflict
upon his family if he were ever known to have escaped.

The queue moved forward
rapidly as more buses arrived. Once aboard, the prisoners were taken
to a one-story brick terminal building in a secluded corner of the
base. Burt pointed out several indications that the small terminal
did not belong to the Air Force, but rather to the Corrective Labor
Administration, an arm of the Department of State Security.

To Linder’s eye, the
CLA airfield appeared to be used much more heavily than the rest of
the air base. He counted nearly a dozen assorted aircraft lined up
for loading or unloading, including six C-130 military transports and
assorted small propjets, mostly Embraer, Fokker, and Dash-8, each
configured to hold about fifty passengers. Burt explained that the
CLA organized nightly departures to airfields all over Alaska and the
Yukon, for both prisoner transport and resupply.

Suddenly, Linder felt
his face break out in a cold sweat and his back muscles seize up. He
began to shiver.

“Worried?” Burt
asked, noticing the change in him.

“What does it
matter?” Linder answered, avoiding Burt’s gaze.

“It matters that you
decide to control it,” Burt replied.

“Nobody can control
the past. What’s done is done.”

“Forget the past,”
Burt urged. “The present is all there is. You can do whatever you
want with it.”

But Linder turned away
without a response, his head lowered and his arms wrapped around his
shoulders to conserve heat. Whatever misery lay ahead, he knew he had
earned it. What he could not decide was whether it was better to stay
alive and atone for what he had done or die early to avoid the
suffering.

When more buses
arrived, the prisoners formed a new queue and boarded one of the
parked C-130s, this one configured to carry over a hundred
passengers, and thus to accommodate just under half the prisoners
arriving on the 757. Once again, Linder was seated next to Burt, but
by now his urge for self-expression had waned and he found himself
more interested in listening to the conversations of other prisoners
around him.

Accordingly, during the
next two and a half hours in flight, Linder remained silent while
Burt spent much of the time in intense discussion with the young
passenger on his left, who pelted him with endless questions about
the forced labor camp system, Alaska’s military bases, and the fate
of American troops who were evacuated to Alaska after their defeat in
the Manchurian War, all of which were familiar topics to Burt by
virtue of his work for a Congressman on the Armed Services Committee.

Four years earlier,
tens of thousands of America’s best combat troops had escaped by
air and sea from the Russian Far East port of Vanino to Sakhalin
Island and Japan, in a Dunkirk-style evacuation, when Chinese forces
broke through the Allied defensive lines and seized Russia’s
Primorskiy and Khabarovsk Provinces. Photos and videos of evacuated
U.S. soldiers in their forest-green camouflage uniforms crowding
Anchorage’s docks and airports had appeared in newspapers and
television broadcasts across America, yet within a few weeks had
vanished from the news, never to appear again in the state-controlled
media.

“When the troops
arrived in Anchorage, it was all anyone could talk about,” the
young man recalled. “The evacuation seemed like a miracle.
Everybody was eager for the survivors to make it back to the Lower
Forty-Eight, so we could hear what really happened over there. Then
nothing,” the younger man protested. “No media, no phone calls,
no cards or letters. As if a curtain dropped.”

“Did you have a
family member over there?” Burt asked.

“My cousin,” the
young man answered.

“Did he make it
back?”

“Absolutely. He
called my Aunt from the harbor in Ketchikan. Then he disappeared.”

“You know, I haven’t
spoken to anyone about this in a long time,” Burt continued
uneasily. “But I guess there’s no longer any reason not to, given
where we’re going. You see, four years ago I worked on Capitol Hill
and we were getting frantic calls every day from constituents about
relatives deployed over there. We were in constant contact with the
Pentagon.

“The day after the
evacuation hit the news, the brass announced that the returning
troops would be needed to help defend Alaska against a possible
Chinese counterattack. For a couple of weeks, the word was that some
of the evacuees would be redeployed to shore up weak points in our
northern defenses. We were given a toll-free number for military
families to call, but hardly anybody got through. Finally, about a
month after the evacuation, some brigadier called to tell the
Congressman that all information about the status of our POWs and the
military evacuees was now classified. Total blackout.”

“So what do you
suppose happened?” the younger man pressed.

“I don’t know,”
Burt replied. “But I have a hunch that we may meet some of them
before long.”

* * *

The C-130 turboprop
landed with a groaning thud and rolled to the end of the runway
before opening its rear cargo ramp under an overcast sky. When the
guards finally unshackled him, Linder rose from his seat and stumbled
down the cargo ramp onto the crackling snow. A shrieking, whipping
wind made him gulp involuntarily, then gasp for air. As soon as he
left the lee of the aircraft, the cold quickly penetrated the porous
cotton fabric of his coveralls, especially the area still moist with
urine, and he ran to join the nearest mass of shivering men huddled
together for warmth.

Under the sickly yellow
glare of mercury vapor floodlights, Linder watched the newly falling
snow scatter in all directions by powerful gusts of wind. Two or
three inches of fresh flakes had settled and drifted across the
airfield’s apron where the prisoners stood, stomping their feet and
flapping their arms in a vain effort to stay warm. Beyond the tarmac,
snow lay at least a foot deep, with drifts two or three times that
height. Like most of the prisoners, Linder was dressed in light
coveralls and sneakers, without hat, gloves, or overcoat. His misery
at being thrust out into the subzero air was compounded by hunger,
thirst, muscle cramps, and disorientation from spending the day
chained to his seat in a windowless aircraft.

Following the example
of those around him, Linder soon left the huddle briefly to empty his
bladder into the nearest available snowdrift. When he first heard
distant shouting behind him, he paid no attention. But when he felt a
crushing blow to his right shoulder from a guard’s baton and heard
the deep-throated bark of a dog closing in on him, he ducked and
sidestepped to avoid another blow, or worse.

“Ride’s over,
boys,” the dog handler bellowed over the animal’s snarls. “Time
to form up. Let’s go.”

The guards herded
Linder and the others toward a narrowing at the far end of the apron,
where pine branches had been woven through the chain-link fence to
break the wind. Inside the funnel-like pen, a trench latrine had been
dug but no one stepped out of line to use it. As the milling crowd
reached the narrowest point of the funnel, the guards forced the
prisoners to line up two abreast, then directed them into a second
pen, where civilian orderlies ordered them to strip naked to receive
new winter uniforms.