Exile Hunter (34 page)

“There must be a way
to protect them,” Linder said at last. “But I’m completely at a
loss. Let’s sleep on it and talk again in the morning.”

Kendall, looking
haggard, nodded and closed his tired eyes. A moment later he awoke
with a shudder.

“Just one more thing,
Linder. In case I don’t make it out of this place and you do, will
you promise me something?

“Of course,” Linder
answered.

“Would you go to
Utah, find Patricia and Caroline, and do what you can to help them?”

Linder swallowed hard.

“If I can help them,
I will,” he answered soberly. “But, let’s face it, Roger. I’m
under a life sentence. The odds of my getting out are...” He shook
his head.

“Thank you,”
Kendall replied, and promptly fell asleep.

* * *

On the morning of his
fourth day in the infirmary, Linder awoke to the sound of prisoners
conversing while they waited for the breakfast cart to arrive.
Casting a glance toward Roger Kendall’s bed, Linder found it
vacant. He ran over to it in a near panic and felt that the bedding
was no longer warm.

“How long has he been
gone?” he asked the prisoner in the next bed.

“He fell ill during
the night and they took him to intensive care.”

Linder was still
standing by Kendall’s empty bed when the breakfast cart arrived
with a new orderly, a tall, awkward youth in his early twenties.

“Are you Roger
Kendall?” the orderly asked.

“No,” Linder
replied in an annoyed voice. “What are you talking about?” he
asked, looking in all directions for the missing Kendall.

“That’s too bad,
because if you’re not, I’ll have to take the tray back,” the
orderly answered, allowing a moment for Linder to compose himself.
“You don’t really want to waste good food now, do you?”

Across the aisle,
Linder saw Scotty looking up at him expectantly.

“Oh, I’m sorry.
Forget what I just said,” Linder replied a moment later. “Kendall
will be back in a minute. I’ll hold the tray for him.”

“That’s more like
it,” the young orderly replied with a knowing smile as he handed
over the tray.

The instant the cart
went past, Linder walked the tray across the aisle to Scotty and
returned to his own bed to devour breakfast in time for roll call.

As he rose to leave,
the old native put a hand on his arm to stop him.

“You are not like
others here,” he told Linder. “Your spirit is not spirit of
slave. I see your days here not long. Soon you become free again.”

“What’s that
supposed to mean? That I’m a goner like Kendall?” Linder
protested, alarmed by the prediction. “Well, you’re wrong. I’m
just getting my second wind. Just watch.”

“Not goner. Free
man,” Scotty answered with a serene expression. “I see you walk
away when snow is deep.” The old man fished inside his jacket and
tore out an object sewn into the lining. “But you will need help.
Take this and remember Scotty.”

Without another word,
the native scuttled back to his bed, leaving Linder to stuff the
object into his pocket. Linder hurried out the door and arrived at
the parade ground just in time for roll call.

* * *

As expected, Linder
was assigned to his old work team in the timber-cutting unit, where
Yost assigned him to a light-duty work crew with Sam Burt, Will
Browning, and other former teammates. After three days in the heated
infirmary, Linder had grown unaccustomed to the frigid outdoor
temperatures and spent most of his first day shivering. From time to
time, Yost came by to offer him hot coffee and an extra meal bar. He
also noticed Yost take aside prisoners who appeared to resent
Linder’s special treatment. One of those was a hollow-eyed Rhee,
who had completed his sentence to the Point after a near-miraculous
recovery and was reassigned to the logging unit.

During the final
afternoon break, Linder reached into his pocket for his last piece of
meal bar and felt the object that Scotty had given him that morning.
Upon opening its cloth covering, he found a small plastic compass.
Though cheap and mass-produced, it was liquid-filled for durability,
had a luminous dial and was designed to slip onto a wristband for
easy reference. Linder stuffed it back into his pocket and, for the
first time since arriving at Camp N-320, gave serious thought to what
it might take to mount a successful escape attempt.

Are you prepared to die? Then you are also prepared to escape.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

EARLY FEBRUARY, CAMP N-320, YUKON

On the third day
after his release from the infirmary, Linder took stock of himself.
To his relief, his three days in the infirmary had permitted his body
to recover sufficiently from the disciplinary unit to support a
return to the timber-felling unit.

Now he felt better able
to tolerate the cold, fatigue, hunger, and sleeplessness, all while
keeping a clearer head and a relatively constructive attitude,
something that had eluded him before. It was as if his metabolism had
finally adapted itself to its environment. Even his senses seemed
enhanced; not only those of sight and hearing, but also his taste and
smell and that intuitive sense that prompted him to check a worn
chainsaw blade before it broke or dodge a tree that crashed toward
him from an unexpected direction.

More than that,
Linder’s nightmares ceased entirely and his personality seemed to
have undergone a gradual but perceptible shift. He felt more empathy
for others and could read their emotional states at a glance. At
times, he wondered if he might even be able to read their thoughts.

Perhaps, he thought,
this was because, under Yost’s comparatively benevolent leadership,
the men in the logging unit had grown close to each other. Their
mutual trust, with the notable exception of Rhee, was possible
because the unit was essentially free of Unionist sympathizers and
covert collaborators. This, in turn, resulted from their close
scrutiny of one another, as anyone who expressed approval of Unionism
or sought to evade his fair share of work or harsh working conditions
was shunned and would eventually seek transfer to a worksite where
Unionist toadies were rewarded with less onerous work. And,
conversely, this same close scrutiny enabled Linder to overcome the
initial suspicions of teammates who had heard of his DSS past and to
slowly gain their acceptance.

Buoyed by his newfound
confidence and Yost’s support, Linder let down his stony façade
and slowly opened up to others on his team. The first to gain his
trust was his fellow passenger on the cross-country flight to
Anchorage, Sam Burt, the Congressional staffer who had visited Alaska
on various inspection tours before his arrest and had conducted his
own quiet investigation into the camp system. Next, Linder befriended
Will Browning, the Montana rancher who was one of his original
bunkmates in Hut J-6 and who had been among the survey team rescued
from the blizzard the week before.

After spending years as
an undercover officer, avoiding attention and suppressing his innate
human drive for self-expression, Linder found it liberating to open
up to his workmates on every topic but one: his former line of work.
Though every man on his team was aware he had been in the CIA and
DSS, they did not press him to talk about it. For them, it was
sufficient that Linder now performed his fair share of work, was
willing to help when asked, rarely complained, and could be relied to
resist any notion or utterance tainted by Unionism. And in winning
his workmates’ trust, he slowly regained his self-respect.

But as one day passed
into the next, Linder’s thoughts returned often to Patricia Eaton
and her daughter. During his initial weeks in the Yukon, while he
teetered on the edge of survival, thoughts of Patricia had receded
from his mind. But now, having learned what had become of her and
Caroline, Linder thought of them at a labor camp in some arid Utah
wasteland and felt the shame of having helped to send them there. And
soon after, he realized that, if he needed a new goal to guide what
remained of his life, surely that goal had to be escape. Not to gain
his own freedom, or even that of the team he might bring with him,
but to atone for having robbed Patricia and Caroline of theirs.
Whether or not Patricia chose to accept his help, he would move
heaven and earth to offer it. And perhaps then he could be free.

Until now, like most
prisoners at Camp N-320, Linder had considered escape impossible and
had put the thought out of his mind. The isolation, the distance, the
climate, his lack of resources, and the vastly superior resources of
his captors, seemed insurmountable. But now, he dared to approach the
challenge logically. If I could slip out, how might I do it? And if I
did escape, how might I make my way across two thousand miles of
wilderness to Utah? And then, if I managed to find Patricia and
Caroline, what next? What could I do for them that would make my
ordeal and the risk to Patricia and Caroline worthwhile?

At first, Linder had no
answers to any of those questions. Before long, however, he had
devised a few working hypotheses as to how he might escape the camp
and how, once safely outside, he might make his way south. He shared
a few of those ideas with Sam Burt, who confided to Linder that he,
too, had felt a growing sense of urgency to escape. From that time,
the two men met nearly every day to work on their plan. To avoid
casual eavesdropping or the attention of possible rivals or
informants, Linder drew upon his espionage tradecraft to plan their
meetings at irregular hours and in a variety of places. They spoke
while working, while marching to and from work, and while walking in
the yard before or after meals. Between meetings, each prepared
separately for the breakout.

At the same time,
Linder and Burt became hypervigilant to gaps in camp security and
analyzed the best ways to exploit them across a variety of escape
scenarios. Within two weeks, they developed a tentative escape plan.
But since the plan required at least four and possibly five men to
execute, their first and perhaps greatest risk was to select
co-conspirators and to share the plan with them.

Will Browning, they
agreed, was the first candidate they would approach. His knowledge
and skills acquired as a rancher and outdoorsman in Montana, as an
insurgent in western Canada, and as a prisoner in several of the
northern camps would be indispensable for the escape and the ensuing
trek to freedom. Both Linder and Burt had grown to like and trust
Browning, and each had heard him speak longingly of his family and
ranch in Montana. They were nearly certain he would join them if
invited.

Charlie Yost was next
on their list. He, too, was at home in the woods, likeable and
trustworthy, a natural leader, and, as a foreman, could likely help
them procure the tools and provisions they would need for the trip as
well as cover their occasional absences to prepare for the breakout.
But, at age fifty, Yost would be the oldest of them and might not be
fit enough to keep pace. In addition, his trusted position as a
foreman might deter him from escape because, if the attempt failed,
he could expect punishment even more severe than that meted out to
rank-and-file escapists.

On the other hand,
while it might be useful to recruit a younger man with greater speed
and energy, the pair did not know any of the younger men well enough
to approach them. Too many appeared to be dreamers or chatterers or
perhaps even informants. A single wrong choice could land them all in
the disciplinary unit before taking a single step outside the
perimeter.

When asked to join the
team, Browning agreed without hesitation. Escape had been on his mind
for nearly a year and, though he did not lack ideas to achieve it, he
had not yet found suitable partners. Each time he came close to
inviting someone, he had hesitated on a hunch or some strange
circumstance had intervened. Many a night he had lain awake in a funk
contemplating whether God or fate had turned against him and would
never let him leave Camp N-320 alive.

Buoyed by Browning’s
acceptance, Linder and Burt decided to go forward with their pitch to
Charlie Yost as soon as a suitable opportunity arose. While they knew
Yost was a cautious man who tended to keep his own counsel and that
he would likely be under close scrutiny from the camp security
department, they estimated that, if given the right opportunity, Yost
might bet his life on a chance to escape.

The next day, shortly
before the end of the workday, they set out to steal a
plastic-handled handsaw by replacing it with a damaged saw of the
same type that Burt had found half-buried in the snow several days
before. While Burt left the work team to retrieve the broken saw from
its hiding place and exchange it for the good one, neither Burt nor
Linder noticed Yost observing them from a distance. When Linder
headed toward the toolshed with the broken saw to declare it unusable
and fetch a replacement, Yost moved in to intercept him.

“Where do you think
you’re going?” Yost challenged. The hard edge to the site
supervisor’s voice took Linder by surprise.

“To the toolshed.
Broken saw,” he answered, holding up the damaged tool.

Yost seized it from
Linder and inspected the damaged handle and missing teeth. But he did
not hand the saw back.

“Who broke it?” he
demanded.

“I did,” Linder
replied.

“When did it happen?”

“Just now.”

“You mean today, this
afternoon?”

“That’s right,”
Linder replied.

“Don’t lie to me,
Linder,” Yost warned.

“I wouldn’t…”

“Don’t go there.
Don’t dig yourself any deeper,” the foreman added. “I know that
saw. I’m the one who broke it.”

Linder froze.

“Now, why would
someone clean up a busted old saw and turn it in for a new one?”
Yost went on, as a teacher might question a pupil. “If I were a
stoolie, I might think you were setting up for a breakout.”