Forty Days at Kamas (39 page)

"Good morning," Boscov began cordially. "Are your people ready to go?"

"We are,'" Majors replied. "I have the roster if you’d like to check the names."

"We can do that on the bus," Boscov answered.

With that, Colonel Majors strode out from behind the bunker and handed Boscov the list. As he did, he leaned forward and spoke softly into the general’s ear. The two men then stepped aside and conversed quietly for two or three minutes while the rest of us waited. This was the moment that Glenn Reineke had been waiting for. Dish microphones installed on the second floor of a warehouse inside the Service Yard were at that moment capturing the two men's conversation. If Majors were betraying us, we would know very soon.

At last Majors stopped speaking, turned from Chambers, and gestured for the rest of us to follow the escort troops across the no–man's–land. As I took my place in the single–file line heading toward the outer perimeter fence, I thought about how ironic it was to be leaving the camp this way: not slogging back to the worksite, not boarding a train for some northern camp, but joining a sightseeing tour to another camp as a special guest of the bosses.

As soon as we passed through the outer perimeter a squad of submachine gunners led us across the road to our vehicle, a vintage orange school bus with steel anti–grenade mesh covering the windows. This was luxury compared to the boxcars, trucks, and police vans in which we usually traveled. As I inspected the doors and windows of the old bus, I wondered if I was the only prisoner aboard whose thoughts had turned to the possibility of escape.

Each of us gave his or her name as we spread our arms and legs for a weapons search. Then we boarded the bus and took our seats. Every few minutes the chief escort guard repeated the ground rules: only one person per bench, no talking, no lying down, keep your hands in your lap, no passing notes to anyone outside, no papers or writing materials allowed. Violators would be removed from the bus and returned to Kamas. Not wanting to miss the fun, I sat silently, hands folded in my lap, and looked out the window.

A late–model jeep approached from the direction of Heber, stirring a cloud of reddish brown dust as it parked behind a half–dozen other jeeps across the road. The doors opened and Doug Chambers climbed down from the driver's seat. Exiting from the passenger side were Fred Rocco and an attractive but unhappy–looking woman of about thirty whom I assumed was Chambers's wife. Chambers stopped to speak with one of the guards while the woman gave a farewell hug to a pretty brown–haired girl who jumped down from a rear seat.

Something about the girl compelled me to look more closely. She had the same round face, pale complexion, and soft brown eyes as my daughter Claire and even the same hairstyle, complete with long dark bangs falling over her eyes. When she turned to walk around the front of the jeep to the open passenger door, I could see that she even had the same loping gait. It seemed impossible, yet here was a girl who seemed an exact double of my daughter acting the part of the Deputy Warden's daughter. I summoned all my mental powers to will the girl to stop and turn toward me one more time.

She passed behind the jeep and then, as if she had sensed my wish, stopped and looked straight at me. I drew a sharp breath. It had to be Claire, though I knew it couldn't be. I gazed into the girl’s eyes, seeking some glimmer of recognition. But there was none. She climbed back into the jeep, closed the door, and smiled sweetly at Fred Rocco as he took the driver's seat. A moment later the jeep made a U–turn and stirred up a second cloud of dust as it set off toward Heber. I had never hated the Warden more.

Earlier that morning I had resolved to imprint into my memory every feature of the landscape between Kamas and Provo. But as I traveled across the hills into the Heber Valley and then south along the shores of the Deer Creek Reservoir into the Provo River Canyon, I barely noticed the landmarks that passed before me.

My mind was still comparing the face of the girl I had seen to that of the daughter I remembered. If it had been Claire, why didn't she recognize me? Had I changed that much? I looked at my reflection in the bus window and suddenly realized how different I looked from my appearance a year and a half before. My thick crop of graying brown hair was shaven nearly bald, my whisker stubble now largely gray, my ruddy complexion weather–beaten and marred by deep wrinkles, my strong neck now as scrawny as a chicken's. Would even my wife have recognized me?

And if it was indeed Claire, what did that mean? She looked healthy, reasonably happy, and well cared for. She was living with an intact family and not confined to an orphanage or a juvenile detention home. She was relatively close by and would not be impossible to find if by some miracle I succeeded in escaping. And neither Claire nor Doug Chambers nor the Department of State Security seemed aware of any connection between Claire and the prisoner Paul Wagner, Number W–0885.

My mind would not leave it alone. As we drove across the top of the Deer Creek Dam and began our descent down the Provo River Canyon toward Orem, I thought of nothing else.

We reached the Vineyard camp, located to the east of Orem near the shores of Utah Lake, around nine. Driving through Orem was a depressing experience because it was the first time I had seen how completely the Unionist forces had devastated the Wasatch Front during the Events. It had been eight years since the Unionists had defeated the militias in Utah and more than five years since they had exiled the state's remaining Mormon population to hastily erected camps in northern Canada. Yet even now the Orem–Provo corridor remained a charred wasteland. One of my co–workers at the Kamas brickyard, a native Utahn, once told me that fewer than 30,000 residents remained in the Orem–Provo corridor out of a pre–Events population in excess of 200,000. Of those who remained, he estimated that over half were non–natives, mainly troops garrisoned in the area and prisoners of the Vineyard and South Provo labor camps.

The Vineyard camp was slightly smaller than Kamas, holding about 6,000 male prisoners. It was rectangular in shape and consisted of five sections, following the same basic plan as Kamas. A major difference between the two camps lay in the type of work performed by the prisoners. While most prisoners at Kamas were occupied with recycling and mining, most prisoners at the Vineyard camp served the rail yards and rail lines along the Wasatch Front or operated the antiquated steel mill on the shores of Utah Lake.

Our visit to the Vineyard camp was so brief as to be perfunctory. The bus followed the procession of State Security jeeps into the camp's Service Yard and then through a sliding steel barrier to the rear entrance of a cramped mess hall. Once inside the mess hall, we were seated in a side room set up classroom–style with some forty chairs facing a lectern at the front. Within moments of taking our seats, the camp's Deputy Warden appeared at the lectern and summoned a panel of five prisoners who were instantly identifiable by their sleek, well–fed appearance as stool pigeons or warders.

The Deputy Warden led them through a catechism of questions and answers about camp conditions, recent strike activity, and prisoner attitudes toward events at Kamas. The answers were completely in line with Corrective Labor Administration policy. In short, the prisoners described conditions at Vineyard as utopian; they claimed no strikes had occurred there in living memory; and they thoroughly deplored the recent hooliganism at Kamas. Judging from the expressions of boredom on everyone's faces, it appeared that even our captors found the session a complete waste of time.

Less than an hour later, we were led into a similar room at the South Provo labor camp. This camp, holding about 7,500 male prisoners, supplied the labor force for a series of state–run factories that produced prefabricated housing and building materials for government installations throughout the Utah Security District. It was in the South Provo camp that a strike had allegedly broken out in early June after an eagerly anticipated review of cases had produced early releases for only a handful of prisoners, all of them warders.

This time there was no welcoming speech by the Deputy Warden and no pre–rehearsed script for the panel of prisoners. A few minutes after we arrived in the briefing room, a door opened and five shuffling scarecrows in faded coveralls, looking very much like our own mirror images, entered the room. They moved slowly and spoke softly, but their eyes looked straight into ours and we did not doubt for a moment that they told the truth. Without any of their own camp bosses in the room, they told us familiar tales of overwork, malnutrition, exposure to the elements, extreme occupational hazards, and brutal camp discipline. They also told us of hunger strikes, work stoppages, and suicide pacts to protest camp conditions.

The most recent work stoppage had occurred in May but it had taken hold in only one of the camp's three residential divisions, lasted only two days, and had brought about the transfer of no fewer than a thousand striking prisoners to Yellowknife on its third day. What did the Upper Provo prisoners think of the revolt at Kamas? They wished us well, but they judged our revolt hopeless and had no intention of following suit, now or at any time in the future. The present generation of prisoners at Upper Provo had lost their will to resist. When and if a new generation of leaders emerged, they, too, would be spotted promptly and culled. To oppose the bosses, they warned, was futile.

I looked across the aisle at Doug Chambers, Jack Whiting, and the other turnkeys from Kamas. They were making an effort not to gloat, but there was no mistaking the satisfaction they derived from hearing defeat in the feeble voices of the Upper Provo prisoners and seeing discouragement in our eyes.

As soon as the meeting was over, the escort guards called for those who needed to use the toilets to line up at the door. Since Upper Provo was an all–male facility, the women, including Mrs. Chambers, were escorted to a separate facility on the opposite side of the mess hall. After they returned, the guards whisked the visiting prisoners through the cafeteria line and back to the meeting room to eat. The visiting bosses and Mrs. Chambers were taken to the officer's mess to dine with their Upper Provo counterparts.

I took a seat at the end of the table and was surprised when Libby Bertrand sat beside me.

"Something very odd happened in the restroom," she said in a low voice. "Have you ever met Martha Chambers?"

"How could I?" I replied.

"Well, she seems to know you. She approached me in the ladies’ room and said she had a humanitarian message for Paul Wagner. But she said she didn't dare approach you directly because her husband didn't know what she was doing. So she asked me to tell you she has a message from your friend's widow about your wife and daughters. If you want to hear what it is, I'm supposed to meet her again in the restroom after lunch."

Libby looked at me expectantly.

"Well, what do think?" she asked.

"I don't quite know," I replied, my mind racing to sort through all the possibilities. "On the one hand, State Security knows perfectly well what's become of my wife and daughters. It would be easy enough for Chambers to use them as bait. It's a lot less likely that they would know about my friend's widow. What I don't understand is why State Security would go to such lengths to set a trap for us when they could have taken you and me the moment we left the camp this morning."

I fell silent and thought back to Helen Sigler's message about Claire being in Utah, to my vision of Claire while I was in the isolator, and to the girl I saw this morning who looked uncannily like her. If Helen Sigler believed that Claire was in Utah and if Martha Chambers claimed to have a message from Helen about her, wasn't it plausible that the two women knew each other and that Martha Chambers was telling the truth?

"Call me a fool, but I'm inclined to believe her," I said. "How about you?"

Libby nodded.

"But even if I didn't," she added, "as a mother, I'd never forgive myself for not trying to help your girls. And if I'm wrong–well, we can argue about that on the train to Yellowknife."

After lunch, Libby approached the senior escort officer and requested another visit to the toilets before boarding the bus. Martha Chambers waited a discreet interval and asked to do the same.

The moment the women returned, the escort troops led us back to the bus and took attendance one more time. When they allowed us to board, I took the seat directly behind Libby's.

"What was the message?" I asked a short while later.

"We didn't have much time. First, she said your wife and younger daughter are still in detention in Pennsylvania for attempting to emigrate on canceled exit visas. Your older daughter escaped and is close by in Utah. Then she gave me a blank piece of paper from your friend's widow that contains a concealed message. She said you would know how to read it."

I recall virtually nothing about the rest of the trip back to Kamas. All I could think of was Claire and deciphering Helen Sigler's message.

But when we arrived at the barracks, it didn't take long to realize that other events might get in the way. The first sign that something was amiss was the delay in letting us off the bus. Then I saw the surveillance experts on the balcony of the training building peer at us through their telescopes. At the gate to the Service Yard I could sense heightened vigilance in our troops manning the barricades.

But before I could inquire about the increased tension, Glenn Reineke and Ralph Knopfler hustled the entire delegation off to the commission offices for a debriefing. There we reported what we had learned on our trip: that no strike or revolt was currently underway at either the Vineyard or the South Provo camp and that little sympathy existed for the Kamas revolt in either place. We were therefore very much alone and seemed likely to remain that way. The commissioners listened politely but asked few questions. It seemed as if they already knew what we were going to say. Colonel Majors thanked us for our efforts and adjourned the meeting without further comment.