Exile Hunter (30 page)

“Captain Holzer,
Sir,” the guard announced. “The Deputy has another one for you.
Special orders.”

“Okay, you can go,
Sergeant. I’ll log him in.”

Holzer turned to
Linder.

“From the new
convoy?” he asked.

“Yes, Captain,”
Linder replied.

Holzer gave Linder a
quizzical look, as if annoyed by Linder’s response. At once Linder
realized that, though his response was formally correct, his tone had
been that of addressing a peer, not a superior.

“What’s your name
and sentence, prisoner?” the captain demanded.

“Linder, first name
Warren. Life at hard labor for seditious conspiracy, espionage and
sabotage.”

“Party member?”

“Expelled.”

“What the hell is a
ex-Party member doing in the disciplinary unit? Didn’t Bracken’s
people talk to you about work assignments?”

“I told Bracken he
could assign me wherever he liked.”

“Hold on a
second—you’re not the one from…”

“State Security,”
Linder answered. “But that’s history. I don’t want special
treatment.“

“I wouldn’t have it
any other way,” Holzer replied with a wolfish grin. “You can
start with those rocks over there. Otherwise, work begins when the
trucks drop you off in the morning and ends twelve hours later.
You’ll get bread and hot water at the worksite around midday. Leave
the perimeter for any reason and you’ll be shot without warning. Is
that clear?”

Linder nodded.

“Then get started.”

For the rest of the day
Linder joined a crew of six men assigned to fill sledges with loose
rocks and to pull the sledges up the road to a spot where they were
tipped into a ravine. By the end of the first hour, Linder’s
calloused hands were bleeding where jagged rocks had cut through his
threadbare gloves. By sunset, shortly before four, the muscles in his
shoulders and thighs ached miserably. By the end of the workday at
six, Linder could barely make it down the road to where the trucks
were waiting to take the men back to camp.

The next day Linder
joined the same rock-hauling team. By now, he was anything but
surprised at the lack of team spirit among the men. While each did
his share of the work, there was little talk and no effort to develop
rapport with one another. On the contrary, squabbles broke out over
the most trivial matters and several of these ended in fistfights.
But the combatants were so enfeebled by malnutrition and exhaustion
that the fights usually subsided quickly without posing a mortal
danger. Even so, it alarmed Linder that neither the guards nor other
prisoners ever separated the combatants.

From time to time,
Linder crossed paths with Rhee, who had been assigned to a
pick-and-shovel crew at the opposite end of the worksite. Rhee looked
no better than Linder felt, but seemed to pull himself together
whenever he noticed Linder watching him. By his third day with the
disciplinary unit, Linder noticed that Rhee seemed to quarrel with
someone every afternoon. The former soldier’s eyes grew darker and
more intense with each day, and he glowered at anyone who dared make
eye contact with him. Still, Linder did not give up the idea of
reconciling with Rhee and greeted him daily as if nothing had come
between them. Each time Rhee looked at Linder as if he, and not Rhee,
were the madman.

On his fifth day in the
unit, Linder passed by Rhee’s work crew while they were attempting
to free a half-exposed boulder from the wall of frozen earth
surrounding it. Upon noticing that Linder was watching, Rhee swung
his pick with fanatic determination. Though the tool was not light,
he took powerful swings and would not stop to rest. It was an
astonishing show of strength for someone in his weakened condition.
Then, without warning, the pick fell from his hands and hit the
ground with a dull thud. Rhee stood with legs splayed and swayed for
a moment before his knees collapsed and he dropped face first onto
the frozen earth.

Linder dropped his hod
and ran at once to Rhee’s side. While the prisoner’s teammates
stood by with vacant expressions in their eyes, Linder removed a
glove from the man’s cold hand and pushed up the sleeve to lay bare
the wrist, then held the wrist against his ear to listen for a pulse.
He listened hard but heard nothing but his own racing heartbeat. For
the next minute or two, he sat atop Rhee and compressed the center of
his chest with the heels of both hands at a vigorous rate in an
effort to revive him.

But it did not take
long for a pair of guards to come along and pull him away. At their
order, Linder stood aside while another prisoner lifted Rhee’s
inert body by the armpits and dragged it to the side of the road. A
supervisor would come by before long to check his pulse once more. If
Rhee revived, he would be sent back to work or taken to the
infirmary. If he died, his burial would consist of four prisoners
swinging his naked corpse by its arms and legs into a ravine.
Trembling and out of breath, Linder hoped for Rhee’s recovery, but
quickly picked up his hod and went back to work under the kicks and
curses of his captors.

Later that evening, it
dawned on Linder that he had been wrong to expect any sort of
camaraderie among the prisoners in the disciplinary unit and just as
wrong to have expected friendship from Rhee. Friendship, he realized,
could not thrive under such desperate conditions. Its foundations
must be laid in better times, before misery and hopelessness robbed
men of their last vestiges of emotion. Once firmly established,
friendship could survive extreme hardship. But any hardship that
allowed the bonds of friendship to take root and flourish, he
thought, was not truly profound. In the disciplinary unit, hunger,
exhaustion, extreme cold, and deliberate cruelty combined to create a
level of hardship guaranteed to extinguish even the most heroic
friendship.

On Linder’s seventh
night in the disciplinary unit, a storm blew through camp, leaving
behind two feet of new snow and a mass of frigid Arctic air. The next
morning, en route to the worksite, Linder looked out from the truck
upon hills that glistened in the moonlight like glowing sugarloaves.
Even though the truck’s arched tarpaulin sheltered him from the
wind, the cold squeezed his chest with a vise grip and made it
difficult for him to breathe. When he spit, the phlegm froze in
mid-air.

Upon arriving at the
Point once more in the pre-dawn darkness, Linder despaired of
surviving a twelve-hour workday in such cold. But no sooner did he
utter a dejected sigh than he heard a faint tinkling sound and looked
up to see a million tiny crystals sparkling in the moonlight. The
sound reminded him of the first time he experienced his frozen breath
falling to the ground and realized now that this magical whispering
of stars was the sound of frozen dew falling to earth.

A few moments later,
Holzer announced that, for today only, the prisoners would be
permitted to gather around the oil-drum fires for warmth during the
last five minutes of every hour. The guards grumbled at this,
complaining that the fires belonged to them and not the prisoners,
but they grudgingly moved aside each hour when the whistle blew. The
concession could not have come at a more critical time for Linder,
nor from a more unlikely source, and aroused in Linder a profound
sense of gratitude.

Yet this humane gesture
stood out in stark contrast to the unrelenting callousness of the
guards. These young men, representing every region of the country and
every ethnic group, though certainly not every socio-economic class
and worldview, seemed to have been so brainwashed as to perceive no
commonality at all between themselves and the prisoners. As if to
prove the point, not long after Holzer’s announcement, Linder
overheard fragments of a conversation between a senior guard named
Dorsey and a civilian contractor claiming that lax treatment of
prisoners was counterproductive because it lowered their output and
made them soft and lazy.

“You could give these
loafers steak dinners and a sauna every night and it wouldn’t
improve their work a damned bit,” Dorsey declared between sips of
coffee from his insulated mug. “I think there’s some sort of
chemical reaction that goes on in their brains once they’ve been
out here a few months. Once it happens, that’s it, they’re
worthless.”

“I’ve seen lots of
work gangs in my time, but I’ve never seen rejects like these,”
the contractor agreed. He was a stout fellow in a full-length
sheepskin coat whose porcine face bore the rosy traces of past
frostbite. “Judging by their output on a day like today, it’s a
total waste of government money to go on feeding them.”

The senior guard, also
of hefty build, nodded his assent and felt compelled to add an
insight of his own.

“Anybody who hasn’t
spent a winter up here just doesn’t get it. The thing is, once
prisoners reach this stage, the cold is the only thing capable of
squeezing work out of them.”

Dorsey pointed to the
prisoners huddled around the nearest fire.

“Just look at them.
The cold makes them wave their arms and stomp their feet, whether
they feel like working or not. On days like today, all we have to do
is put tools in their hands and we have a fair chance of getting some
work out of them. Without the cold, forget about it.”

Though the guard’s
conclusion was repugnant, Linder had to admit that his premise was
sound. The cold was clearly on the side of the camp administration.
As the prisoners weakened, they lost their fear of beatings, of
lengthened sentences, even of death itself. One by one, the nobler
emotions of love, friendship, compassion, and pity wasted away,
leaving only the baser ones. And then, even fear, mistrust,
resentment, and hatred withered and died. In their place remained
nothing but utter indifference. Only the quest for warmth and food
kept them going.

Linder held onto this
thought during the final quarter mile of the hike to the worksite
that morning. As his fellow prisoners prepared to take their places
on the icy rock shelf for another day of work, each man’s physical
and mental condition was plain to see. One man would wrap his scarf
more tightly against the cold and stamp his feet in nervous agitation
while another would bow his head calmly in prayer, and still another
would curse and elbow his way to his favored spot. When the hike
ended, the strongest needed no prompting to find their way forward,
while the others merely followed the herd.

Linder’s way of
evading the harsh attentions of the guards was to remain in the
middle of the pack and avoid standing out in any way. At the same
time, he derived some small satisfaction from not being the elbowing
type. At least for the moment, the individual exertion of free will
that separated man from the lower animals remained more powerful than
the baser instinct for survival.

At the back of his mind
lurked the idea that he could end his life at any time if he found
himself losing his humanity. Yet, despite his occasional wavering,
Linder did not feel ready to die. He would perish someday, of course,
but not here, not under the scornful gaze of the guards and in the
company of beaten men willing to trade their souls for an extra
ration of bread.

As he stood beside the
fire at midday for his five minutes of life-saving warmth, Linder
watched the cold red sun hanging low on the horizon, barely above the
jagged peaks of the mountains to the south. He felt a strong wind
rising at his back and noticed that the wispy clouds at sunrise had
thickened and would soon obscure the sun. The last time this had
happened a blizzard had followed within hours.

Ninety minutes later,
the thing he had so greatly feared came upon him, as a fleet of
leaden clouds sailed in from the northwest, sending stinging gusts of
wind ahead of them. Then the snow began to fall, slowly at first,
with a sparse scattering of oversized flakes, and increasing
steadily, until the rock pile where Linder loaded his hod became
hidden under a snowy blanket. Before long, he could barely see his
way between rock pile and dump.

Linder slowed his pace
to cast a sidelong glance at the nearest guard. With visibility so
poor, the guards would have difficulty spotting the slackers and
spurring them on. This meant that he could load his sledge with
smaller rocks and leave the larger ones behind. His primary worry now
was getting back to camp safely. What if the trucks failed to make it
through the snow?

Linder saw a bulky
figure in a dark fur hat and a sheepskin overcoat approach a nearby
guard who warmed his hands at a blazing oil-drum fire. They had a
brief exchange, too muffled for Linder to hear, and then the figure
moved on. A moment later, the guard blew his whistle, a rare event
that usually signaled an escape attempt or a fatality.

“Roll call! Stop what
you’re doing and bring your tools back to the depot! Double-time!”

Linder emptied his hod
onto the ground and headed back down the hill, joining others until
they formed a slow-moving column following each other’s tracks
through the snow. It seemed inconceivable to him that one of these
zombies could have dared to escape. A death, he thought, or perhaps
several of them, was more likely.

When the men had
checked in their tools at the supply depot and formed ranks, the roll
call began. The guards seemed agitated and were quick to lash out at
anyone who stepped out of line. Linder held his breath, fearing the
brutal crackdown they would inflict on the unit if anyone had
actually escaped. At last, the orderly with the clipboard completed
his tally.

“All accounted for,
Captain Holzer.”

Linder took a deep
breath, then stomped his feet and rubbed his hands to stay warm while
he waited in the queue. By now, his fingers and toes were beyond
aching and nearly vibrated with pain. Barely ten meters away, Holzer
emerged from the command hut. He held a steaming mug in one hand and
a portable bullhorn in the other while talking to Sergeant Rivera, a
guard whom Linder recognized from the logging site. Terminating the
conversation with an abrupt nod to Rivera, Holzer emptied his mug
absently into the snow. Then the Captain advanced toward the gathered
prisoners to address them through his bullhorn.