Checkpoint Charlie (16 page)

“I've read it. But I'd like to hear you describe it.”

“You know much about the weather patterns up here?”

“I helped set up the U-2 program here.”

“Then you know what it's like. Half the time you're in thick fog and hundred-knot winds at the same time. You can't tell up from down. You have to rely on your instruments and if the instruments start to kick around you've had it.”

“That's what happened? Instrument failure?”

“They didn't fail. They just weren't a match for the williwaw. I'd made my descent into the muck — I was down to four thousand feet and still dropping. The only way you can see anything around here is get right down on the deck. The pilots who get lost and get killed are the ones who try to climb out of it. There isn't any top on it. It just goes up forever, right clear to the moon. Anyway I was circling in from the west to line up for my landing approach. They had me on radar and I had my Loran bearings — it should have been fine. But there's an incredible amount of electrical activity in these clouds. My needles were jumping around like they got stung by red ants. I figured that would pass, they'd calm down when I got closer to base and signals got stronger. But then I got a squeal from the tower — I'd gone off their screen behind a mountain on Attu. I figured it had to be the north end of Attu so I pulled hard left and started to climb — I still couldn't see a thing, it was a williwaw blowing out there, and my radar screen was useless because of dozens of false images reflected back from the moisture in the clouds. The next thing I knew I was bellyflopping across Fish Hook Ridge.”

“Belly landing?”

“Landing? No. Accident. Ten feet lower and I'd have crashed nose-first into the cliff. Blind luck, I slid across the top of it instead. I was about three miles south of where I'd thought I was — the wind blew me that far off course in something like forty-five seconds while I was off the Shemya radar screen. I mean it's fantastic up here, the elements. This weather goes up and down like a whore's drawers.”

“So you hit the top of the ridge —”

“And flipped over and busted most of my bones. The plane came apart but it wasn't too bad. Bits and pieces went in various directions. The canopy saved me — it didn't cave in. God knows why. Most of the dashboard fell apart, though.”

“Including the code box.”

“Yeah. Including the code box.” He looked morose.

*   *   *

T
HERE ISN'T
a single tree on Attu — or for that matter on any of the Aleutian Islands — but the tundra growth is a matte on everything and makes for difficult boggy walking, especially for someone as heavy as I am.

We'd had to wait thirty-six hours for a break in the weather. Then the helicopter had shuttled me across to the big island and left me there with a sort of Boy Scout camping outfit in my backpack in case the weather didn't permit the cropper's picking me up at sundown — a strong likelihood.

The chopper pilot had done a bit too much plain-English talking into his microphone and I reprimanded him because he'd said enough to alert a sufficiently sharp-eared Soviet radio monitor to the fact that we were searching for something crucial, valuable and portable on Attu. It added a sense of urgency to my job and made me glad of the portable radio in my pack. We weren't far off the Soviet coast, after all. And I was dismally aware of the fact that if the Soviets sent people in to “help” me hunt for the code box, my own people weren't likely to start World War III over it. Langley's attitude is to do your best but take your losses.

I was dropped off within a hundred yards of the crash site but it took me twenty minutes to get there on foot; I had to crab my way up the cliffs. I wondered how the devil the Japanese and American infantries had managed to fight a war here. In 1943 the entrenched Japanese defense force had been annihilated by 15,000 American troops who somehow made amphibious landings on the beaches. The fighting was wild and vicious. Half the U.S. soldiers had been evacuated on stretchers or left buried on the island — combat wounds, frostbite, shock, trenchfoot, williwaw madness.

All those lives had been expended for it and ever since then it had been ignored by the world: nobody needed it; Attu was as useless as any piece of ground on earth. Uninhabited and unloved. Technically it belongs to the United States and officially it is a National Battlefield Park — like, say, Gettysburg; it has an obscenely large military cemetary. But tourists do not queue up to go there. Nothing exists on the mountainous tundra except mud, grass, brush, snow and the rusting relics of old warfare: abandoned artillery, wrecked planes, discarded canteens, bent M-l rifles, ruined Japanese caterpillar trucks, crushed infantry steel helmets.

The morning was fairly clear — unusual. I could see down the length of Massacre Valley to the foam of Massacre Bay. These place-names dated back to Soviet sealing days in the 19th century when Aleut Indians had been decimated by Russian sailors; in World War II they were eerily fitting. To the east I saw an Air Force jet lift above the Shemya runway and circle away toward Amchitka, the Atomic Energy Commission's private test-hole island, an hour's flight away over the horizon.

I was alone on Attu with the volcanoes and the tundra— a rare distinction in which I took no pleasure. I removed my backpack, anchored it with boulders in case of a sudden williwaw, and began to prowl.

I was resigned to a long dismal search. If the code box had been in plain sight the Air Force people would have found it. So it had fallen into a crevice or tumbled into a pool of mud or rolled down a cliff.

First a snack — two roast beef sandwiches to keep my strength up. They tasted like styrofoam. Then I unlimbered the portable metal-detector and put my nose to the ground, cursing Myerson in a dreary monotone.

*   *   *

T
HE DAY
was wasted. The chopper managed to collect me at sundown; I spent another thirty-six hours on Shemya shooting pool and assuaging boredom before the weather broke and allowed me to return to Attu. Resuming the search I spent five hours clambering cautiously over the east side of the ridge. The metal-detector unearthed dozens of cartridges, rifles, canteens and other souvenirs but no CCT box.

I worked a checkerboard pattern and decided to keep the current sweep inside a seventy-yard radius of the spot where the plane had come apart; my first search, a fifty-yard circle, had proved fruitless. When the seventy-five-yard circle produced nothing I ate lunch and expanded the search area to a hundred-yard radius.

In the afternoon the clouds built up and the wind began to cry across the ridgetops. I went back to my campsite and shouldered into the heavy parka and continued my work muffled in a thick earflapped hat and heavy gloves. I kept one eye on the weather, ready to seek shelter, but it held — the clouds remained a few hundred feet above my 2,000-foot ridge, although I could see snow-squalls offshore that came right down to the water.

At about half past three my search brought me around to the west rim of the ridge. By a fluke the sun broke through at that moment and a painful blade of reflected light stabbed at me from a rubble of volcanic rock two hundred feet below me at the foot of the cliff.

It excited me because rusty relics don't gleam like that. It was the shine of fresh new metal or possibly glass.

*   *   *

I
T WAS
a long climb down because I had to go around. A mountain climber might have rappelled down in five minutes but I'm too old and too fat for athletics. I took my time, going down from rock to rock on the rubber soles of my insulated boots, hanging onto a rope I'd anchored to a boulder at the top.

By the time I made my way around to the point where I'd seen the glimmer the sun had long since vanished again. But I found it anyway, knowing where to look, and it was indeed the Agency's CCT code box — a device similar to an ordinary pocket calculator, full of transistorized printed miniature circuits designed to send and receive messages in codes that were virtually impenetrable by anyone who didn't possess an identical CCT with identically programmed circuitry.

The box was battered and mangled from its fall; unserviceable—but that wouldn't matter to the Russians if they'd got their hands on it. Damaged or not, it would have yielded up its secrets to any examiner of its circuitry. I was relieved to have it in hand.

I contemplated the steep climb back to camp; I made a face. Out of habit and procrastination I turned to survey the horizons — and saw through a notch in the sodden hills a dark silent bulk sliding along the waves, heading out to sea. Even as I watched the submarine its decks began to run awash; it submerged quickly and I might have imagined it except for the motorized rubber dinghy that came birling through the surf onto the strip of volcanic sand that the invaders of thirty-four years ago had code-named Beach Red.

The submarine had come up on the blind side of the island and launched its dinghy and fled immediately. It meant only one thing: they were Russians.

*   *   *

“I'
M SORRY
, Mr. Dark. Ain't nothing flying around here except hangars. We've got a class-A williwaw in progress.

Wind gauge is gusting to a hundred and fifteen knots.

Maybe by morning—”

“Tell the Base CO. there are strangers on Attu. Possibly Soviets. And a submarine lying off the western beach. You got that?”

“Yes, sir. Acknowledge.”

Low sunbeams slanted onto the sea through a distant hole in the overcast. From the rim of the cliff and against the shimmering glare on the ocean I saw the tiny outline of a solitary figure climbing toward me.

I gathered my gear, stowed the CCT in my parka and carried the backpack away down the east face of the ridge toward Massacre Valley. It was slow going in the sucking tundra but I wanted to be well away from the crash site. It was a big island; all I had to do was stay out of sight until I could be picked up.

I secreted the heavy metal-detector under an overhang; I had no further need of it. Then I buckled into the backpack and pressed on.

The light drained out of the sky; the wind came and with it fog. I knew I needed shelter.

The best I could find was a sort of hollow in the rocks. It broke most of the wind. I wrapped up in blankets and dug out an inadequate dinner of sandwiches and bottled vitamin-fruit concentrate. Then I rummaged in the pack for my sole weapon — an airman's lightweight survival carbine. I loaded it and laid it beside me.

The williwaw struck at nightfall and I spent most of the night emphatically miserable in a cringing huddle, clutching the blankets around me with my face buried in cloth and my ears deafened by the cry of the storm.

By the time it eased away, the luminous dial of my watch told me it was only midnight but I was battered and exhausted and dismally cold.

I rooted dry socks out of the pack. My fingers were tingling numb; I had trouble getting the boots off and on. I ate another sandwich and waited for daybreak, thinking about that man I'd seen climbing the ridge. If he found me he wouldn't leave me alive.

My survival through several decades of intelligence capers and Cold War conflicts has been a matter of wits rather than atavistic toughness. I am a poor marksman and have never bothered to learn anything about unarmed combat or pressure-points or outdoor tricks. I have never been painted into a kill-or-be-killed corner; it's not my fashion. I had never killed anyone or tried to. It is my conceit that any fool can kill people. I fancy myself a bit better than that. But if a Soviet scout found me…

*   *   *

“I
T
'
S PEA SOUP
up here.”

“It's often like that, sir, but if you can make your way down to the beach at the foot of the valley it may be clear down there. We'll try to get a helicopter in after you've reached position. We chased their submarine out past the twenty-mile limit. If they've still got anyone on the island he'll keep — just stay out of his way.”

“You can bet on it.” I packed the radio and began the slow descent. Fog and light rain swirled about me.

The wind sluiced down the slope behind me, carrying sound. That was how I got my first warning.

He was making noise with his canteens and metal impedimenta and heavy boots. No more noise than I'd been making — but the wind was in my favor: I heard him first.

I wheeled in alarm and saw him bearing down, vague in the mist — a big man made bulkier by his quilted Siberian parka and his festoonings of equipment: moving fast downhill through the fog perhaps fifty yards above me. The object in his fist looked like a machine pistol: wicked, efficient.

When he stopped and lifted it to aim I flung myself behind a boulder and heard the ricochetting bullets shriek over my head.

I crawled madly — infuriated to a white-hot rage: fear saps a man of his dignity and that's a hateful plight.

*   *   *

“S
HEMYA.
Charlie Dark calling Shemya. For Pete's sake, come in Shemya.”

Nothing: static. I was in a dead-radio pocket.

I caromed off the walls of an overgrown Japanese trench, bouncing off the slippery sides, running as best I could — shambling, really; the mud sucked at my boots. I made random turns in the maze every time I came to a fork. The Japanese had dug miles of trenches.

Finally I stopped and attempted to control my breathing. I'd been making too much racket. Use your head, Charlie — keep your wits because that clown intends to kill you to get his hands on the code box in your pocket.

I moved on, bent low and trying to walk without sound. It was difficult; the boots squished in the muck.

The wind moaned; mist rolled and curled in unpredictable tendrils — one moment I was socked in, blind, and the next I could see blue sky. I kept stopping to listen. At first I heard him banging around up there, running from trench to trench, searching. Then the clamor stopped and I knew he was moving as I was — softly, waiting for me to give myself away.