Exile Hunter (23 page)

“My guess is that
they’re selecting out the Party members,” Rhee answered. “They’ll
all get soft jobs in the kitchen or the hospital while we knock
ourselves out hauling logs.”

“Do the Party Members
ever refuse?” Linder knew it was an odd question for him to ask,
but he had to think fast before his name was called. Though he was
resolved not to accept favored treatment for his former Party
membership, to be known in camp as having been a Party Member and a
DSS man might make him a pariah, whether he refused special treatment
or not.

“Never,” Rhee
snorted. “Without protection from the bosses, those bastards
wouldn’t last a week in a camp like this.”

As if on cue, one of
the assistants stood at the head of the queue and called out more
names.

“The following
prisoners step forward: Adler. Berkowitz. Linder,” he bellowed.

The prisoner who had
vomited at the sight of the throttling pulled himself together and
stepped forward.

“Berkowitz here,”
he responded in a halting voice.

“Adler to the front,”
the assistant continued.

“Adler’s a
scratch,” Rhee volunteered, jerking a thumb toward the gate where
the killer’s corpse was being hauled. “How about giving his job
to me?”

The assistant ignored
him.

“Linder next,” he
ordered. “Step forward.”

“Over here,” Linder
replied, raising his hand. “Why do you want me?”

“The Deputy wants to
see you.”

“What for?”

The assistant
unbuttoned the flap of his holster and drew a pistol.

“Nobody likes a
smart-aleck,” he answered, pointing the pistol’s muzzle at
Linder’s nose while a guard knocked Linder to the ground with a
vicious blow to the ribs.

“Up!” the orderly
barked, and the two guards pulled Linder to his feet.

Linder could barely
breathe as the guards dragged him forward to within a few paces from
where the Deputy Commandant now questioned Berkowitz, well out of
earshot of the other prisoners. The Party member held out his hands
in supplication. With his squinting eyes, stubby yellow teeth and
protruding ears, Berkowitz resembled a rodent and squealed with
delight when Bracken sent him off to join the other Party faithfuls
in the administration building.

The guards brought
Linder forward next. Bracken’s gaze remained on the list attached
to his clipboard.

“Name, date, and
place of birth?”

“Warren Linder. March
19, 1982. Cleveland, Ohio,” Linder recited.

“Crime and sentence?”

“Seditious
conspiracy. Espionage. Sabotage. Sentenced to life at hard labor.”

Bracken raised his head
and smiled. His eyes showed a spark of curiosity. He called for an
aide to bring him Linder’s transfer file.

“It says here you
were an officer in the Department. Is that right?”

“Yes,” Linder
answered impassively.

“Do any of the other
prisoners know about this?”

“I doubt it.”

Bracken’s eyes
narrowed and his expression slowly developed into a smile.

“How would you like
to practice your old trade here with us, Linder?”

Linder’s eyes flashed
with anger.

“I’d rather
starve.”

The Deputy Commandant
feigned disbelief.

“You don’t seem to
understand. I’m offering you a chance to stay alive. Help us out
and in a few years, you might get lucky and catch an amnesty or a
case review. Meanwhile, you’ll have enough to eat and a roof over
your head. How about it?”

“I’ll take my
chances along with everyone else,” Linder responded.

“Suit yourself,”
Bracken answered indifferently. “But don’t think you can blend
into the herd. You’re a marked man, Linder. Your trial judge
recommended the maximum sentence and so did the Department. I see
here that your former boss even wrote a special sentencing request.
By the way, it wasn’t for clemency.”

“My old boss?”
Linder asked uneasily. “What was his name?”

Bracken glanced at the
clipboard.

“Denniston,” he
replied.

Linder drew a short
breath. “Always nice to know where you stand with your own people,”
he answered with feigned indifference. “May I go back to my work
team now?”

“You can go straight
to hell as far as I care,” Bracken replied, turning away.

A few moments later
Linder found his work team boarding a truck to one of the logging
sites.

“What did the bastard
want?” Rhee asked.

“He offered me
special treatment if I turned stool pigeon,” Linder replied.

“So you belonged to
the Party?”

“I did,” Linder
admitted.

“But you weren’t
like Adler, were you?” Rhee demanded, shaken by Linder’s
admission. “I mean, you didn’t…”

“I was an officer in
the DSS, Mark. I did a lot.”

Rhee’s face expressed
shock and betrayal. Tears welled in his eyes.

“Of all the people…”
he began in a low voice. “You. A stinking Unionist rat…”

Linder could see his
former partner’s hands ball into fists, but Rhee made no move to
strike. Linder let out a deep breath and turned away, head lowered,
to stand at the rear of the queue. All eyes avoided him as he passed.

Although it should not
have come as a surprise to him, only now did Linder grasp the full
repercussions of his decision to be open about his former DSS
employment while refusing favorable treatment for it. As soon as word
of it spread around the camp, his fellow prisoners would shun him for
having served the apparatus that stole their freedom and, beyond
that, would suspect him of spying on them. At the same time, the camp
officers and guards would consider him a traitor for having disavowed
his prior service. Yet, for all that, Linder knew he could not have
decided otherwise.

At last a truck came
along to deliver the work team to the logging site, where veteran
loggers were already busy instructing newcomers in the use of the
two-man crosscut saw.

“This is absurd,”
one newcomer grumbled as Linder joined the group. “Where are the
chain saws around here?”

The lead instructor, a
lanky, craggy-faced Midwesterner of indeterminate middle age by the
name of Charlie Yost, appeared to have expected this reaction.

“The chain saws were
all sacrificed to the war effort a long time ago, so don’t waste
your time bellyaching. As for these crosscuts, they worked just fine
for us and they’ll be good enough for you once you learn how to use
them.”

Yost resumed the
instruction. A quarter of an hour later, the team members picked up
their allotment of crosscuts, axes, hand saws, shovels, sledge
hammers, and log splitting wedges from the tool shed and set off down
an icy path, escorted by four guards and a pair of snarling guard
dogs.

“Let’s go, old man!
Move that fat ass of yours!” a young guard ahead of Linder shouted
at a pot-bellied prisoner in his late fifties, whose loose-fleshed
jowls suggested that he once had been even fatter.

The fat man lost his
concentration and slipped on the ice, sliding down the hill on his
bottom and nearly bowling over the prisoner in front of him. In a
flash, the guard who had urged him on bolted forward and kicked the
prisoner in the buttocks while permitting his dog to snap its jaws
within inches of the fat man’s face. But for reasons Linder did not
fully comprehend, he felt pity for the pot-bellied prisoner and,
without thinking, stepped between him and the snarling dog. A moment
later, the fat man clambered to his feet, apparently unharmed, but
scarcely looked at Linder as he rushed to step back in line. The
guard laughed, as if to mock the futility of Linder’s gesture.

After a mile’s hike,
the team reached a logging road and followed it to a clearing strewn
with sawdust, pine needles, and cut branches. Waist-high stumps of
pine and spruce studded the landscape fifty meters to either side.

“You men with
hatchets and hand saws, get to work stripping those logs,” Yost
ordered. “Gather the branches when you’re done and pile them
along the roadside like you see here. Those of you with crosscuts,
come with me.

Linder examined one of
the stumps at close range and was surprised to see that the roots did
not extend very deeply into the earth before spreading out for many
feet in all directions. Yost noticed Linder’s interest in the stump
and pointed out the rock-hard layer of gravelly soil beneath the
roots.

“Permafrost,” he
noted. “The roots can go only so far down before it’s like
hitting bedrock. That’s why you see so many of these trees blown
over.”

Yost pointed to the
edge of the clearing and directed the men to go on ahead.

“Get moving!” he
roared. “The faster we drop wood the sooner you can move into your
new huts!”

They stopped at the
edge of the clearing. Within it, red flags atop iron stakes marked
the area where trees were to be cut.

“You there—pick up
the other end of this crosscut and do exactly as I do,” Yost
ordered Linder, seizing one end of the two-man saw.

Yost and Linder took up
positions on opposite sides of the tree and began to draw the saw’s
jagged teeth back and forth across the bark, releasing the sharp odor
of pine. Linder put all his strength behind his pushes and pulls,
aiming to impress his instructor.

“Not so hard or
you’ll give us both a heart attack,” Yost instructed. “Slow and
easy. We’ll be doing this all day and there won’t be any food
till we’re back in camp.”

Whatever Yost’s
occupation might have been before his arrest, by now he had become an
expert lumberjack. He showed the men how to cut and release in a way
that insured the tree fell in the desired direction. When the saw’s
teeth dulled and became embedded in the trees tough center, he showed
them how to free the blade without damaging it, sharpen it by filing,
and use an axe to clear a new channel for cutting. When the time came
to sever the final attachment between trunk and stump, he showed the
men how to avoid injury if the trunk lurched suddenly to the side
when the tree toppled.

Each time a tree
crashed to earth, the men rubbed their aching muscles and wondered
how much longer they could keep pace. For five minutes of each hour,
the foreman permitted the prisoners to warm themselves at fires laid
in oil drums for the guards. At midday, the men were permitted a tea
break. By the end of the day, they could barely drag themselves back
up the icy track to the tool shed, where Yost took the roll and
directed the teams to queue up for the trucks that would carry them
back to camp.

On their return this
first night, members of Linder’s team lined up outside the camp
mess hall, waited to collect their soup, bread, and coffee, and
carried it outside to eat around the campfires lit in the yard. To
Linder, the mess hall food tasted nearly the same as what the field
kitchens had served, except that the camp’s soup was thicker and
meatier, thanks to the officers’ contribution of caribou and moose.
After roll call, Linder found a spot close to a fire and dropped off
to sleep the moment he hit the ground.

* * *

Every day the routine
was the same. Awake at five for breakfast. Roll call at six. Then the
hour-long journey by truck and on foot to the logging site, where
work began in the pre-dawn darkness at half past seven. The workday
lasted until half past five, when the men headed back to camp for
dinner. On their return each day, Linder and his teammates inspected
the piles of logs delivered to the construction site and surveyed the
progress made in laying foundations for the next row of lodges.

From time to time, Yost
allowed the teams to collect pine needles for bedding and pillows,
branches for kindling, and unused lengths of log for firewood. Twice
during the first week, nighttime snowfalls hid trees felled the
previous day and required the team to bring down additional ones to
meet their quota. When at last they had achieved the norm, Yost put
the men to work extracting stumps where new logging roads were
planned, using picks to break the frozen ground and axes to sever the
stumps from their buried roots.

Nearly three weeks
after his arrival at the camp, Linder and his team moved into their
new home, Hut J-6. It stood at the end of the fourth row of lodges
and Linder considered it the most beautiful building he had ever laid
eyes on. After weeks of fitful sleep while burrowed under the snow,
to have a bunk of his own at last made him feel like a king. Inside,
the lodge smelled of freshly cut pine and of the smoke that leaked
from the three crude sheet-metal stoves placed at the building’s
ends and center. Along either side of the hut stood twenty
triple-tier bunks, each laid with a thin mattress, a brown wool
blanket and a canvas pillow stuffed with pine needles.

Dreading a possible
fight over bunk selection, Linder had offered half a meal bar to a
teammate to give up his position toward the front of the column
marching back to camp the night they moved into the lodge. On
arrival, Linder rushed in to claim a top-level bunk near the stove at
the center of the lodge where drafts from the doors were less likely
to penetrate. As expected, fistfights broke out among the prisoners
last to enter, as the difference between an interior bunk and one
near the door could become a matter of life and death as the winter
wore on.

Linder’s neighbor
atop the next bunk was a hard-faced logging veteran of sinewy frame
named Will Browning, a Montanan approaching fifty years of age who
had fought for an anti-Unionist militia during Civil War II. Browning
knew the North Country well, having fled to Edmonton before the
annexation of Canada and joined a Canadian partisan unit soon after.
His ten-year sentence for sabotage against an oil pipeline in Alberta
had begun early the year before. The Montanan had been among the
camp’s early prisoners and had helped to construct it.