Exile Hunter (21 page)

Linder no sooner
finished his coffee and rinsed his cup with snow than a crushing
sense of hopelessness overtook him. In that moment, the wind shrieked
across the clearing, sending snow up his nostrils and inside his hood
and sleeves until the coffee’s recent warmth was barely a memory.
All around, men stood in the calf-deep snow, some shivering
uncontrollably, and met each other’s gaze with forlorn expressions.
The snow fell more thickly now and lay in drifts up to a man’s
waist in the lee of the trees.

But this period of
standing about aimlessly lasted only a short time, as it was a matter
of survival to evade the paralyzing blast of the wind. Soon one
innovative squad began scraping heaped snow into a rough semicircular
windbreak. The idea spread rapidly and soon rimmed half-craters
appeared all over the compound as men scraped and scratched with
numbed fingers down to the rock-hard earth before stretching out
behind the built-up rim, bodies packed tightly together to evade the
wind’s jagged teeth.

As he watched the
frantic digging, Linder spotted several men near the perimeter
following the example of search-and-rescue huskies who had burrowed
deep into high snowdrifts. He found a drift of his own in the lee of
a lone spruce, fell to his knees and dug a cavity spacious enough to
contain him. Then he crawled inside and lay in a fetal position so
that his back faced the storm and a breathing space remained around
his face. Provided he didn’t suffocate, he might actually survive
the night. But if he did not, the prospect of dying painlessly in his
sleep did not trouble him, given the agony that awaited him on the
march the next day and the day after. Now not even the fear of
nightmares was enough to deter him from seeking rest. Without another
thought, he dropped off into a deep and dreamless sleep.

Linder did not stir
again until a fellow prisoner stepped on him en route to the mess
line. He awoke with a start amid the blare of truck horns and
guttural orders barked from loudspeakers. Wiping the snow from his
eyes with his gloved hands, he was relieved to find that he could
still feel his fingers and toes. But as he rose shivering to his
feet, his breath caught at the stiff wind bearing down from the
north. Following his neighbors, he rushed off to join the coffee
queue.

A row of military-style
field kitchens awaited the prisoners inside a temporary barbed-wire
enclosure. Each cart, which resembled a lunch wagon of the sort that
parked outside factories or sports events, sent plumes of steam into
the sky as it brewed coffee, prepared oatmeal, and baked fresh bread.

Upon catching the aroma
of coffee and bread, Linder saw several prisoners toward the front of
the queue break ranks to charge the cart. Moments later, the nearest
guard officers fired a burst of submachine gun fire into the air and
signaled for dogs to be unleashed. Upon seeing the dogs hurl
themselves at the men who had rushed forward, Linder and the
remaining prisoners instantly obeyed the command to drop and sit. In
the face of such crushing cold, hunger, and violence, only the insane
or suicidal dared to resist.

When order had been
restored, the prisoners were shunted between strands of barbed wire
toward the field kitchens, where servers poured each man a mug of
sugary coffee, filled his mess tin with oatmeal topped by a pat of
margarine, and issued him a brick-sized loaf of bread. Linder’s
turn came after about twenty minutes of waiting in the cold. By the
time he received his coffee, his hands were so numb that he feared he
wouldn’t be able to hold the mug. Following the example of the man
before him, he stacked his bread and mess tin on top of his mug and
pressed down with his right hand while supporting the mug’s bottom
with his left so that he did not have to depend upon his lifeless
fingers to grip the tin or the mug handle.

As before, to feel the
coffee radiate its warmth inside him was a pleasure beyond words, as
if his body had been fully drained of energy but was slowly
recharging. He lapped up the oatmeal before it could go cold, then
sipped the coffee slowly to savor its warmth until the last drop was
gone. He tucked the bread inside his coveralls for later, unsure when
the next meal might come.

* * *

For the next three
days, the march pressed eastward along the North Canol Road, as did
the storm. By day and by night, the trucks led the way with the beams
from their headlamps diffused and dimmed by falling snow. Hour by
hour, the prisoners struggled on, obeying the insistent pull of the
cable, their boots slipping in the churned up snow. And every hour,
one or two men gained release in death.

The flanking guards
changed like clockwork every ninety minutes, as the relieved guards
jogged forward to seek shelter in the trucks and those relieving them
jumped out to take their places, all without any slackening in the
convoy’s pace. Time after time, the prisoners reached the top of an
exposed ridge and felt the wind strike them full in the face,
shrieking like a chorus of demons and making it nearly impossible to
open their eyes. Each time Linder felt his face go numb, he breathed
into a glove and held the glove against his nose and cheeks to ward
off frostbite. He scarcely noticed the rugged beauty of the land,
rarely lifting his eyes long enough to view the imposing crags and
peaks that stretched along the horizon or the frozen rivers that
resembled winding highways to nowhere.

Beyond the town of Ross
River, all conventional road signs had been removed and replaced by
mile markers planted at ten-kilometer intervals bearing only the
distance from some unknown reference point, thus offering little help
to anyone who might find himself traveling without a map. These
markers drew the prisoners forward, hour after agonized hour,
climbing more often than descending, through forests, hills, and
valleys, and past the hulks of many a derelict vehicle. By reference
to these markers, Linder kept tally of the distance covered each day,
generally about fifty kilometers, and the trip’s cumulative
distance.

Linder surmised that
such prisoner convoys must pass this way regularly because every
night the lead truck managed to find a sheltered spot sufficiently
large to accommodate the entire convoy. Sometimes, the spots were
already enclosed by barbed wire, and a few held FEMA trailers to
shelter officers and senior enlisted men. Linder also deduced that
the convoy’s commanding officer must be under orders to deliver the
maximum number of able-bodied prisoners on arrival because, as the
storm worsened, the convoy’s pace slackened and extra care was
taken to avoid unnecessary casualties.

As the elevation rose
and nighttime temperatures sank, the guards led foraging parties into
the woods to gather firewood. Each party of ten was permitted to
build a campfire and line the floor of its snow-dugout with pine
branches. On the second day, coffee stops became more frequent and by
the third day, double rations of oatmeal were doled out at breakfast
and doubles of soup at dinner.

Despite these
concessions, each morning when the truck horns blared their crude
reveille before dawn and guards circulated among the prisoners’
dugouts with portable bullhorns to herd the bleary-eyed men into
formation for roll call, orderlies probed snowdrifts with staves and
shovels. Most men who failed at first to crawl out from their snow
caves responded to these jabs and kicks, but for those who did not,
the survivors were pressed into work teams to retrieve their dead
comrades’ frozen corpses. Once the names of the deceased had been
crossed off the roster, their remains were piled naked along the
roadside without any form of identification. With so many guards
standing watch, the officer in charge was not overly concerned with
the risk of anyone escaping. Any prisoner who evaded the guards and
the dogs still faced astronomical odds in the wild without a store of
food or a source of warmth.

As Linder stood in
formation for roll call on the fourth morning, he examined his fellow
prisoners closely in the harsh glare of the trucks’ headlights.
They ranged in age from boys in their late teens to men in their
sixties. If those aboard his C-130 were at all representative of
prisoners on other aircraft, most of his fellow marchers were
white-collar workers who had finished college or earned advanced
degrees, lived in cities, spent their days in offices and, if they
exercised at all, confined it to a few hours per week of walking,
jogging, swimming or working out at the gym. Few, he guessed, were
accustomed to missing a meal and, if they did, probably made up for
it with a snack. Now, having been idle and malnourished for weeks or
months during interrogation, they were scrawny replicas of their
former selves.

For the older and less
fit prisoners, death was not far off, and some seemed to sense it.
Linder pitied these prisoners but avoided them for fear that any help
he gave them might reduce his own chance of survival. By the end of
the fourth day, Linder estimated that the cumulative death toll had
exceeded fifteen percent of prisoners and might approach twenty by
the following day. For some, death came suddenly and without warning.
One middle-aged man of slender build, who stood ahead of Linder in
the breakfast line, keeled over like a bird falling off a branch in a
hard frost. One shallow cough, a barely audible gasp, a tiny white
cloud of breath that hung for a moment in the air, and the man’s
head fell onto his chest without his hands leaving his sides.

More than once during
the early days of the march, Linder reached the limits of his
endurance and questioned whether the short and desolate life he would
face at his destination could have any purpose other than as
purgatory for his past wrongs. Most of that time, Linder barely said
a word to anyone, being completely absorbed with the necessity to
stay alive and move forward. Any sense of curiosity about his fellow
man or his environment yielded to the twin imperatives of conserving
energy and maintaining core body temperature. All around him he saw
others withdraw similarly into their private worlds of suffering,
each facing the same desperate trial, but not all endowed with an
equal capacity to endure.

Linder’s special gift
for survival, it seemed, stemmed from an unusually low metabolic
rate, which was an unexpected side effect of crash dieting in his
youth that now enabled him to conserve precious energy for the road.
But unlike certain elite athletes and warriors, whose phenomenal
stamina also allowed them to keep their wits even when deprived of
food, water, or sleep, Linder devolved into a snarling, unthinking
beast whenever faced with even moderate deprivation of his physical
needs.

Until now, Linder had
largely ignored the young man who shared the cable with him, although
he could not help but admire his silent determination. By the third
day, it became apparent that his partner was not mentally unstable,
as Linder had originally feared. After breakfast on the fourth day,
when the weather continued to deteriorate, Linder caught the man’s
eye and they exchanged resigned looks as low-flying clouds of leaden
hue swept down from the northwest. Linder would have spoken then but
his face was too frozen to utter anything intelligible. Talking
required too much effort, in any case. So, he did what came naturally
and tuned his mind back to Channel Oblivion.

As the morning wore on,
even though the two men did not exchange a word, Linder nonetheless
felt that he had somehow gained strength from his partner’s
example. Occasionally after that, one of the men would glance at the
other and receive a grim smile in return, communicated only through
the eyes, since their bearded faces were covered at all times by
their fleece balaclavas and a coating of rime.

During the lunch break,
an older member of their squad, who had been struggling to keep pace,
refused to rise even after repeated kicks and truncheon blows. Losing
patience with the old man, the guards stripped him naked, bound him
hand and foot, and left him moaning in a snowbank to freeze.

“Don’t let it get
to you,” the young man said quietly to Linder, as if reading his
mind. “Where we’re going, those granddads wouldn’t last,
anyway.“

“I understand,”
Linder replied. “But some of them aren’t all that old.”

“Young or old,
doesn’t matter,” his young partner observed. “Whoever gives up,
dies. The old ones just quit sooner.”

“What about you? How
much more of this can you take?”

“Whatever they throw
at me. I hate them too much to die.”

“Me too,” Linder
lied. “My name is Warren,” he added after a long silence. “What’s
yours?”

“Rhee,” the younger
man responded.

“Rhee,” Linder
repeated. “Is that your first name?”

“No, it’s Mark. But
everybody calls me Rhee.”

“What’s your
sentence?”

“Ten years for
escaping the Chinese in Manchuria. And another ten for escaping the
Unionists in Anchorage.”

“Really?” Linder
questioned. “You fought in Manchuria?”

“The camps up here
are full of us.”

“But how could that
be? You guys were heroes...”

“Maybe so. But they
corralled us, anyway. Maybe the President-for-Life was afraid we’d
talk about what happened over there.”

Before Linder could ask
any more questions, the guards ordered the prisoners to their feet
and rained blows on anyone who failed to rise.

Shortly after lunch a
howling wind swept in from the north, bringing dull gray clouds
scudding lower and lower over the hilltops, until swirling eddies of
snow enveloped the column and slowed it to a crawl. Linder shuffled
forward blindly, head down and eyes closed, taking his cues from the
steady pull of the cable. At last, during the late-afternoon rest
break, the trucks formed the usual semicircle at a sheltered spot
along a bend in the frozen river that paralleled the road. But the
winds continued to tear at the men and carried off any loose snow,
making it all but impossible to dig their usual windbreaks and light
campfires.