Exile Hunter (24 page)

Nearly a dozen
prisoners gathered around Browning to ask him questions about the
camp. Though the men were exhausted from the day’s work, they felt
excited at having a place of their own and were not yet ready to
sleep, since a quarter hour remained before lights-out. With no
guards or trusties to overhear them, they also felt emboldened to
talk freely about their new home and were eager to learn more about
it. The camp’s name, Browning revealed, was N-320, with the “N”
representing the North Canol Road, and the “320” representing the
kilometer post nearest the camp’s access road. The facility,
located some five hundred kilometers south of the Arctic Circle, had
served as a logging and mining support complex for nearly three
years.

Browning explained that
the Canol Road had been built during World War II to connect the oil
fields of Norman Wells along the Mackenzie River to the refinery at
Whitehorse, some five hundred kilometers to the west. After the war,
when expensive Mackenzie River oil was no longer needed to defeat the
Japanese, the pipeline to Whitehorse and the North Canol Road were
abandoned. Although southern portions of the road were reopened for
tourism and mining at the end of the twentieth century, the road fell
into disuse once again early in the new millennium, when the Events
hit and the flow of tourists dried up virtually overnight.

At this point, a few of
the prisoners lost interest and drifted away. Linder noticed,
however, that the faces of those who remained fairly glowed with
curiosity. Some were young and some well past forty, but each seemed
to have a burning need to learn all they could about the camp system
and how it could have arisen in secret across vast areas of the
American and Canadian West. These men would be the last to die,
Linder mused, or the first to escape.

“So why did they
bother reopening the Canol Road at all, and why build a camp all the
way out here, in the middle of nowhere?” asked a wild-eyed
twenty-something whom Linder had noticed earlier that day on the
logging crew.

“It would probably
have reverted to wilderness except for one thing,” Browning
answered. “When the Unionists invaded southern Canada and turned
that country into a satellite state, everything changed up here. Soon
after that, when our side lost the Manchurian War, Alaska became
America’s front line against the Chinese. So the President-for-Life
promptly declared martial law in Alaska, the Yukon and British
Columbia and set aside resource-rich areas of Alberta and the
Northwest Territories as restricted zones.”

“So what are
restricted zones, then? Aren’t they under martial law, too?”
another prisoner asked from the bunk below Browning’s.

“The difference is
that, along the Pacific Coast, there’s supposedly a threat of
Chinese attack, so militarizing the region would make sense,”
Browning replied. “But further inland there’s no credible threat
from the Chinese, so the Unionists had to give their land grab
another name.”

“Okay, I understand
the U.S. wanting to grab Canadian oil and gas, but what’s the point
of a camp like this?” the youth with the wild eyes shot back.
“There’s no oil within hundreds of miles, and if there were, none
of us would know how to drill for it.”

“Ahh, now you’re
getting to the heart of the matter,” Browning replied, peering down
at his audience from his high bunk. “You see, the regime didn’t
want to face an insurgency in Canada, so they set about driving out
the locals by seizing property along the major roads and restricting
travel into the backcountry. That’s what has enabled the Unionists
to colonize the region with camps like N-320. And what the camps
offer is cheap captive labor to do grunt work on basic infrastructure
while technicians are brought in under contract to ramp up production
of oil, gas, gold, tungsten, and rare earth elements. In fact, the
camps are so important to national defense and the economy that the
President-for-Life gave the Corrective Labor Administration complete
dominion over the restricted zones up here from the Pacific to Hudson
Bay.”

“Will is right,”
came a familiar voice from behind Linder’s bed. Linder turned
around and recognized the bearded face of Sam Burt. “I learned
about the CLA when I was working on Capitol Hill,” Burt continued.
“Ever since the Allied retreat from Manchuria, the CLA has been
building dozens of new corrective labor camps up here every month.
Behind a phony curtain of military secrecy to hide the fact that
thousands of American servicemen who escaped from Russia are being
held in those camps.”

To Linder’s surprise,
Burt’s disclosure was met with silence. Perhaps the other prisoners
simply couldn’t believe what Burt was telling them, or perhaps they
were too shocked or depressed to talk about it. In any event, the
listeners responded by huddling more tightly together and changing
the topic of their questions to everyday camp life.

Their initial questions
centered on work assignments and camp discipline. The most desirable
work, Browning explained, took place indoors in offices,
dispensaries, kitchens, workshops, and garages, where one could avoid
the perils of frostbite, exhaustion, logging accidents, mine
cave-ins, and arbitrary shootings by trigger-happy guards. Indoor
work was reserved for selected professionals, technicians, and
skilled tradesmen, along with a small number of Unionist Party
members, DSS informants, and favorites of the camp administration.

The vast majority of
prisoners at Camp N-320, however, formed the general labor pool and
worked outdoors at mining, logging, construction, road building, and
snow clearing. Of those in mining, some worked outdoors at gold
placer sites that operated only in summer, while others worked a
longer season at open-pit mines for tungsten or drilling mud and
still others all year long in underground hard-rock mines. The
loggers plied their trade in every season, though sometimes filling
in as road-builders or snow-clearers as the need arose.

Although all outdoor
labor was to be avoided, according to Browning, the most onerous
tasks were reserved for the disciplinary units. As punishing as a
general laborer’s life might be, that of a disciplinary laborer was
nothing short of desperate. Since he received only two-thirds of the
daily food ration allotted to general laborers and could earn more
only by meeting a steep production quota, few could remain in such a
unit for more than a few weeks without slipping into a tailspin. In a
disciplinary unit, it was impossible to conserve energy through
slacking, because the foremen and guards drove the prisoners
relentlessly. The only respite, other than outlasting one’s
sentence in the unit, was to inform against one’s mates in return
for supplemental food rations, delivered during secret interviews
with a camp security officer.

Now that enough lodges
were completed to house nearly all the newcomers, Browning predicted
that at least half of the men assigned to lodge construction would
receive new work assignments the next day after roll call. That would
be the critical time, he advised, for anyone with special skills to
speak up to avoid assignment to the general labor pool. But he
cautioned against complaining too loudly or creating a disturbance
over one’s assignment, as anyone labeled as a troublemaker also
risked being sent to a disciplinary unit.

At this, Browning’s
listeners shook their heads in despair. How could they possibly
navigate such a narrow passage between salvation and damnation, they
asked each other. What counted as a valuable skill? And how did one
press his case for special treatment without being seen as an
agitator?

While they debated this
among themselves, Linder thought back to his exchange with Bracken
and considered the price he could expect to pay for having refused
the Deputy’s offer of special treatment. He possessed no technical
skills that could legitimately exempt him from the general labor
pool. And once his fellow prisoners learned of his service in the
DSS, some would doubtless target him for abuse, making clashes
likely. If sent to a disciplinary unit for defending himself, Linder
resolved to go willingly and endure it as best he could. No matter
what they did to him, he would not accept any favor or advantage at
the expense of his fellow prisoners or take the government’s side
against them. He had come too far for that.

* * *

Linder awoke the next
morning with a start. Outside the hut, someone hammered on a length
of steel rail to sound reveille. The warmth of the nearby stove had
permitted him to sleep more deeply than he had in months. He pulled
his thin Army blanket tightly around his shoulders and closed his
eyes in hopes of resuming his dream for a few more moments. Except
for the occasional nightmare, he had not dreamt in weeks.

In this dream, Linder
was preparing dinner in his flat overlooking Limassol Harbor while a
tanned Patricia Kendall, barefoot in a white embroidered caftan, set
the dinner table. Across the room, the doors to the balcony stood
open and their gauze curtains stirred in the steady offshore breeze.
As he watched Patricia lay the silver beside each plate, he noticed
that she had set three places. On the sofa, young Caroline Kendall
lifted her eyes from her paperback novel and smiled at him as she
might for a favorite uncle. At that moment, the vision faded to
black.

“On your feet!” a
voice barked a few steps away in the darkened barracks.

“Two minute warning!”
the voice repeated, while whacking a nightstick against one of the
wooden pillars of Linder’s bed. The intruder’s black armband
designated him as a trusty, a senior prisoner who received special
privileges and extra rations in return for enforcing discipline
against his campmates.

Linder pulled off his
blanket and let his stockinged feet dangle over the edge of the bed.
He took a moment to stretch his arms over his head, then retrieved
his hat and gloves from under his pine-needle pillow and lowered
himself gently to the sawdust-strewn floor. He had barely pulled his
boots onto his feet when the trusties returned with nightsticks
raised. Linder bolted for the door and escaped into the frigid
darkness just ahead of them.

Moments later, Linder
joined the stream of prisoners shuffling toward the latrine and from
there to the mess hall. He downed his breakfast quickly so as not to
be late for roll call. Standing at ease before the assembled
prisoners, the Deputy Commandant waited with a handful of veteran
prisoners and civilian experts gathered behind him. Linder guessed
that, as Browning had predicted, the experts had come to help screen
the new arrivals for qualified technicians and skilled workers.

For the next three
hours, while the new prisoners stood in loose formation, the experts
announced a series of occupational specialties and called for
prisoners to step forward if they possessed the requisite skills.
Linder was intrigued at seeing men who had first identified
themselves as salesmen, lawyers, accountants, and schoolteachers,
step forward now to claim expertise as carpenters, bricklayers,
mechanics, and electricians.

When the screening was
complete, nearly a hundred men had been reclassified as technicians,
while those remaining were assigned to ordinary work teams designated
A through R. To reduce the potential for conflict among the men, no
one was told which teams would be assigned to mining, logging, or
heavy construction, or to lighter work like snow removal or the
sawmill. A man would know only who was assigned to each lettered work
team and no more.

Even after the
assignments were read aloud, a lively exchange took place among the
men, as those eager to work with friends searched for someone willing
to trade places. The guards and trusties tolerated this to a degree,
but once a team’s roster was recorded, no further changes were
permitted.

Linder did not discover
that his team had been reassigned to logging until their truck
deposited them outside the tool shed where he had started every
workday since his arrival at camp. Although timber felling had become
familiar to him by now and he had become fairly proficient at it, the
work was depleting his fat reserves at an alarming rate and he
fretted over how he could possibly survive the winter as a logger.

Almost as worrisome to
him was the discovery that Rhee was also on his team. Since learning
of Linder’s past in the DSS, the former soldier seemed to have
focused his entire animus toward the Unionist regime onto his former
chain-mate, apparently from some paranoid notion that Linder had been
sent to inform against him.

A few minutes after
having gathered at the tool shed, Charlie Yost stood before the
assembled logging teams and reintroduced himself as site supervisor.
Then he proceeded to lay out the work rules, the division of labor,
the calculation of output quotas, their link to rations, and what he
expected of each man as their work supervisor.

Yost cautioned the men
that, though strenuous physical labor under such harsh conditions was
not beyond the ability of a reasonably healthy man, the question was
how long one could expect to remain healthy.

“Logging is one of
the heaviest forms of labor in the camp,” he noted. ”Few men last
more than two years at it. Most succumb to illness or injury within a
year. Some of those recover if given lighter work, but for most
loggers, the path out of the forest leads through the mortuary.”

Yost paused to let the
assessment sink in. While some of the younger men seemed oblivious to
it, most shuffled their feet nervously, shot furtive glances at the
faces of those around them, and set their jaws with a grim resolve.

When Yost spoke again,
he stressed that unit cohesiveness was essential to individual and
collective survival and left the men with a piece of advice: