Exile Hunter (25 page)

“Consider that, over
time, each of you will come to resemble the average of the five men
you spend the most time with. Your life span, your work output, your
state of health and state of mind: all will track those of your
closest companions. My advice to you is to surround yourself with the
best men you know. Seek out those with a strong will to survive and a
buoyant spirit. Avoid cynics, shirkers, and parasites. The margin for
error is slim. Pick your workmates well and do your very best every
day not to let them down. Team dismissed.”

When the speech was
over, Yost summoned his foremen and assigned each to one of the newly
formed work teams. The foreman for Linder’s team was the grizzled
Montanan, Browning, who approached his charges and seemed to size up
each man as to his likely contribution to the team’s work quota.
When he passed Linder, he nodded to acknowledge their acquaintance
from the previous night’s discussion in Hut J-6. Out of the corner
of his eye, Linder saw Rhee regard Browning’s gesture with
suspicion.

“How many of you know
how to use an ax?” Browning inquired when he reached the end of the
row.

Eight hands shot up,
among whom Linder recognized more than half from his logging team the
week before.

“Okay, then, you can
teach each other,” Browning directed. “Those who raised their
hands line up here and those who didn’t line up opposite. You’ll
be working in pairs.”

Linder instinctively
went to the end of the line. Somehow, Rhee also ended up in the rear,
opposite Linder, with the annoyed look of someone who had just lost a
game of musical chairs.

“You and Browning set
this up, didn’t you?” Rhee accused. “They sent you to spy on
me.”

“Don’t be
ridiculous,” Linder replied. “If you want to work with someone
else, be my guest.”

“Quiet in the rear!”
Browning barked. “We’re going to start by splitting some short
pieces to see who knows how to swing an axe. Old-timers go first. Now
pick a tool from the rack and have at it. But be careful. There’s
no first aid station out here.”

Linder selected a
twelve-pound maul and split four short logs easily before handing it
to Rhee. But Rhee had already selected his tool, an axe designed for
felling rather than splitting.

“Don’t use that
one. It’ll get stuck,” Linder advised, offering him the maul.

Rhee ignored him and
imitated the swing of a nearby veteran who had selected a lighter
splitting ax. As Linder predicted, the axe head lodged tightly in the
wood. After several failed attempts to pull it out, Rhee gave up,
red-faced and cursing. A moment later, Browning appeared and managed
to work it free.

“Use this instead,”
Browning ordered Rhee, tossing aside the felling axe and handing him
the heavy maul. “But don’t swing too hard. Ease up and let the
tool’s weight do the work for you.”

Again, Rhee ignored the
advice. He swung the maul around with all his might, as if it were a
sledgehammer in an amusement park game. But his swing went wide and
struck the log a glancing blow, striking his own foot. The soldier
winced in pain and hopped up and down on his good leg.

“Of all the stupid…,”
Browning began, but checked himself when he noticed that Rhee was
trembling with anger. The other prisoners reacted with peals of
laughter.

“Here, let me take a
look at your foot,” Linder offered, hoping to divert attention from
Rhee.

“Get away from me,”
Rhee demanded.

“Oh, for heaven’s
sake. Stand still and let me take a look.” Linder approached to
inspect Rhee’s boot.

Suddenly Rhee lowered
his head and rushed at Linder, knocking him off his feet. Bellowing
with rage, he sat straddling Linder’s chest and struck him in the
face with his gloved fists. Linder raised his forearms to protect
himself, then rolled onto his side to topple Rhee onto the snow.

But before Linder could
emerge from under his attacker, the younger man raised himself once
more and reached for the axe handle. In that moment, Linder seized
Rhee by the throat and squeezed hard.

That was what the
guards were waiting for. One of them, an acne-scarred Hispanic, fired
a short burst from his submachine gun into the snow scarcely a foot
from Linder’s face, then brought its buttstock down between the
Rhee’s shoulder blades.

“Who started it?”
the guard demanded, glaring first at Linder, then at Rhee.

Both combatants gasped
for air but made no reply.

“Yo, anybody, who
threw the first punch?” the guard asked the onlookers. But no one
answered.

“Okay. Have it your
way,” he told them. “It’ll be the disciplinary squad for both
of you. Now, on your feet!”

Linder felt the sting
of cold metal against his wrists as the guard handcuffed him and spun
him around.

“Wait a minute,
Sergeant,” came Yost’s voice. “Why are you punishing both men?
The young buck started it; take him and let the other one go. We’re
short of men as it is.”

“Holzer wouldn’t
like that, Charlie,” Rivera objected. “He’ll want them both.”

“Never mind, I’ll
straighten it out with Holzer later,” Yost assured him. “Meanwhile,
please uncuff this man and get the troublemaker out of here.”

When Linder’s hands
were free, the site supervisor took him aside.

“That Korean kid is
insane, you know,” Yost told him the moment they were out of
earshot from the others. “I hear he was a fine soldier. Two Middle
East tours. But the Russian War really messed him up. Do you know he
escaped once already from a camp in Alaska?”

Linder shook his head.
He remembered Rhee saying he had been sentenced to ten years for
escaping the Unionists in Anchorage, but he hadn’t taken it
literally.

“Well, I suspect that
Rhee’s run through most of his nine lives by now,” Yost observed.
“If he survives the punishment squad, I suggest you steer clear of
him.”

“I’ll do that,”
Linder answered.

“You’ve got an
unusual accent. Where are you from?” Yost continued, to Linder’s
surprise.

“I grew up in Ohio.”

“Oh, yeah?” Yost
asked. “What part?”

“Cleveland.”

“Where? East Side?”

“Lyndhurst.”

“Brush High?”

“No, I went away to
boarding school. But my father taught science at Brush. His name was
Ivan Linder.”

“Oh, for God’s
sake. You wouldn’t be Ivan and Rose’s boy, would you?” Yost
pressed. He grinned when Linder confirmed it with a tentative smile.

“You won’t believe
this, but I knew your mother years ago when she worked at the Eaton
Company. And my wife and I learned ballroom dancing from your father
at the Mayfield Country Club. You won’t believe this, but we aren’t
the only East Siders here by a long shot. This place is turning into
quite the Little Cleveland.”

“All we need is some
smokestacks and a polluted river,” Linder quipped.

“No, seriously, we’ve
been getting a handful of Clevelanders with each convoy. West Siders
mostly, militia people. You might want to get together with some of
them.”

By now, Linder was more
than a little surprised at the turn the conversation had taken and
puzzled by Yost’s ingratiating tone, especially since Yost likely
knew by now of his DSS past. But as Yost seemed to mean no harm,
Linder decided to take the man’s friendship at face value.

“If there are that
many of us, do you suppose we could get some kielbasa or fried
bologna up here once in a while?” he deadpanned.

To Linder’s surprise,
the joke failed to draw a smile.

“I doubt that any of
us will taste kielbasa again,” Yost replied, suddenly turning
serious. “If you ever get out of here, have some for me, will you?”

“Will do. I owe you
one.”

“Don’t mention it.
And call me Charlie.”

* * *

When the training
session ended, Linder’s work team was divided into squads of five
men, so that each prisoner could rotate through both lighter and
heavier tasks. While two men worked the crosscut saw, another hacked
off boughs and branches from fallen trees, one piled the waste limbs
for burning, and one measured and marked the downed trunks for the
sawmill. After marking, a foreman counted the logs and turned in his
tally sheet for use in calculating the team’s progress toward the
quota.

At day’s end, the
prisoners returned their tools to the shed and sat round the warming
fires, stretching their bared hands toward the drums to thaw. Linder
studied the array of hands before him, blackened by work and whitened
by frostbite, then gazed into the dull eyes of his fellow prisoners
and watched the shadows of darting flames play against their numbed
faces. As he rose at the whistle to join the column for their return
to camp, he, too, felt the unaccustomed weight of swollen fingers,
the icy jabs in his lungs, and the aching of wasted limbs.

Once in formation, the
men kept their distance from one another like inhabitants of a
plague-infested town. Silence reigned, except when broken by the
despairing cry of someone who fell and then rose in haste to evade a
rifle butt or a dog’s bite. Nonetheless, here and there a few
prisoners kept up a steady flow of poisonous bickering.

“For God’s sake,
knock it off,” one weary prisoner called out at last. “A month
ago most of us would have given our right arm for somebody to talk
to. Now all we do is argue.”

Upon their return to
camp, the men slouched off to the mess hall for dinner. After eating,
some of the newer prisoners remained at the tables to talk or play
cards, while veterans visited friends in other lodges or retreated to
their bunks to rest or do chores. Linder, still overjoyed at having a
warm bunk of his own, returned promptly to Hut J-6. Lying on one’s
bed at the end of the day, lost in reflection, Linder thought, one
should feel free at last. But without hope for the future, he
realized, the difference between work and rest lost its meaning.

Some nights, on the
road back to camp, Linder felt like a drowning man who has survived a
shipwreck and swims desperately toward a distant island. As long as
he struggles against the waves, no matter how great his suffering,
hope makes the pain worthwhile. Only when he realizes that rescue
from the island is impossible, does his true suffering begin. So
while at the end of every workday Linder talked and joked with his
peers like a free man, once the lights went out he lay in his bunk
drowning in despair.

* * *

With each passing day
at the logging site, Linder noticed himself sink further into
exhaustion while his respect grew for the power of cold, hunger, and
fatigue to crush a man’s soul. Out of respect to Yost and his
teammates, he had resolved to give his best effort each day without
regard to fatigue or pain. He also resolved, despite growing
peevishness, to find the admirable qualities in others and to offer
help and encouragement to those in need.

But after four days on
the logging team, Linder felt as if his arms and legs would fall off.
He shivered whenever he stopped to rest and he feared that his output
had sunk below the level required to earn full rations. In short, he
was at the brink of collapse. Yost dropped by that day to inspect the
squad’s work, but he seemed distant, and Linder was too proud to
seek his help.

After dinner, while
lying on his bunk, Linder considered for the first time taking his
own life rather than sink to the level of a beast who would accept
any humiliation merely to stay alive. Until now, he had always
condemned suicide, both on philosophical grounds and from some vague
superstition left behind from years of Sunday school. In the past,
whenever he had faced moral issues of the kind that had led some of
his Agency colleagues to self-destruct, he had always managed to
rationalize his way out by the simple formula of admitting his
mistakes, regretting he hadn’t known better, and vowing not to make
the same mistake twice. But how could he apply that formula to
suicide, which was final? Failing to resolve that question or to
settle on a proper means of killing himself, he put the matter off to
another day.

The next morning,
Linder went through roll call in a daze. As he marched toward the
front gate for his fifth day on the new work team, he lifted his eyes
from the ice-encrusted boots of the prisoner before him and saw
nothing but formless white all around.

Barely a half hour
earlier, he had devoured a bowl of watery oatmeal sweetened with corn
syrup and a mug of coffee, but his hunger was already creeping back.
His near-constant shivering had resumed, since the march through
ankle-deep snow had not been long enough to bring his core
temperature up to par. He raised his free hand to his cheek and felt
a numbness despite the protection of his balaclava and the crude neck
gaiter he had crafted from a discarded strip of fleece. Even worse,
the fingertips of both hands had lost sensation—and this was before
even touching an axe.

Where would he find the
stamina to survive another day? Was it even worth trying? Linder felt
his knees buckle and, for a moment, feared collapse even before he
reached the gate.

He passed the camp’s
administration building, a one-story lodge constructed of spruce logs
and noted a wisp of smoke rising from its stone chimney. As he
imagined warming himself at the huge walk-in fireplace, he felt a
gloved hand tug on his upper arm and pull him out of line with an
unusually soft touch, as if the guard did not want to call undue
attention to his leaving the column.

“It’s the boss,”
the guard said through his face covering. “He wants to see you.”

The column barely
slowed while a pair of armed troops culled Linder from the ranks and
diverted him from the stream of bodies flowing toward the logging
sites.

With both guards
following behind, Linder trudged up the short rise to the command
hut’s front deck and held out his wrists for handcuffing before
being ushered inside.