Forty Days at Kamas (45 page)

A moment later, Majors resumed his walk toward the Service Yard but more slowly, as if lost in thought. I waited until a trio of other commissioners caught up with him on the road then followed behind. By the time they reached the sandbag bunker that faced the eastern gate, I was only a few steps behind. I overheard the other commissioners pepper Majors with questions about the Central Committee members' impending visit and how to handle the camp's transition back to government authority. Judging by his monosyllabic responses, it seemed to me that Majors was still reeling from Boscov’s rebuff.

I approached Majors and told him that Reineke would be along shortly with one last batch of deserters for the Warden to take with him.

"Nobody told me about any more deserters," he grumbled.

"The Warden has already approved it," I said. "Glenn will be along in a minute with the list."

"He'd better make it quick. Our visitors seem eager to leave."

At that moment, Reineke and the two jailers came within view with eleven manacled prisoners in tow, including Gaffney, Bernstein, and Skinner. I stepped aside as Reineke handed Colonel Majors a handwritten list. By now, Majors was busy conversing again with General Boscov and gave the list only a cursory glance before signing it and handing it back. Reineke took up the list with a barely suppressed smile and carried it to the Warden, who made a quick count of the manacled deserters. Then Rocco ran his finger slowly down the list, folded it, and stuffed in his pocket.

In the confusion of the moment, I joined my handcuffed companions without attracting undue attention and followed them across the buffer zone to the main gate and out into the no–man's–land. Judging from the absence of catcalls, no one behind the barricades seemed to have noticed that I was among the deserters. As relieved as I was to have escaped their attention, I felt ashamed to have become, officially and undeniably, Paul Wagner the turncoat, the deserter…the rat.

Even with Boscov, Tracy, and Rocco leading the way, never in my life had I felt as exposed and vulnerable as I did that evening traversing the ploughed earth between the camp’s exterior wall and the perimeter fence. We marched in the long shadow of the wall under the menacing stare of machine gunners who kept their sights trained on us every step of the way. Before us the hills were still awash with the warm yellow glow of the setting sun. But between us and the hills was a forbidding series of obstacles: barbed wire, electrified fences, deep trenches, massive berms, and a cordon of troops and armor sufficient to destroy the camp many times over.

At last we passed through a gate in the electrified perimeter fence and were told to stop before the open doors of a waiting prison van. There a familiar squad of warders herded us into the van with a flurry of curses and a hail of blows from their fists, boots, and truncheons. I recognized Grady and Mills among them and they recognized me. That entitled me to extra slashes of the truncheon against my buttocks and back.

Once the doors slammed shut behind us, the van drove for only a few minutes over the bumpy dirt roads before turning us loose again inside a corral–like enclosure, some fifty yards on a side and twelve feet high, constructed of barbed wire and concrete stanchions. After a few moments, the same squad of warders pulled up behind us in a jeep, tossed a jerry can of water and pile of army blankets at us, and warned us to get some sleep. They promised to be back before dawn to put us to work.

Now that the sun was below the horizon, the dry air cooled rapidly and I shivered in my thin blanket as I tried in vain to sleep. Not only was the ground hard and rocky, but the incessant roar of the bulldozers on the other side of the berm made rest impossible.

As I lay on my back and looked up into the clear moonlit sky, I thought about what the dawn would bring, both for our small squad of deserters and for the nearly 8,000 prisoners left inside the camp. Those who accepted the Warden's glib lies at face value and expected Central Committee members to arrive the next morning doubtless slept better than those who expected tanks to roll through camp before breakfast. Reineke, Knopfler, and Gary Toth were no doubt already circulating among the sentries, pickets, and front–line fighters, warning them that their moment of trial would soon be upon them and encouraging them to live up to the trust of their fellow prisoners.

I imagined Jerry McIntyre and his scientists burning their notes and sketches in open oil drums to keep them from falling into enemy hands. And I imagined more oil drums blazing outside the bathhouse where the Military Department kept its office and at the Security Department in the old women's jail. All the weapons the Technical Department had designed were deployed by now, all the Military Department's war plans had been implemented, and all the Security Department's secret intelligence taken into account.

I formed a mental picture of the mess halls where the camp's various religious congregations would be gathered to pray on the eve of their own special Judgment Day. Some would be praying for deliverance, some for forgiveness, and others for strength to endure whatever might come. There would be hymns and chants and responsive readings by the light of homemade candles along with silent meditation in the dark.

I thought of the sick and the wounded and the mentally ill lying in their dispensary beds, some aware that their lives might change entirely by morning, others blissfully unaware. And I thought of Georg Schuster and his nurses and the responsibility they bore, not only for their current patients, but for the many hundreds who might become casualties the next day.

I thought of the newlyweds and the newly joined lovers who had already received far more joy in their short time together than they had ever allowed themselves to hope for once the dark curtain of arrest fell upon their lives. I wondered what plans they were making to remain united once the revolt was over, whether in Kamas, Orem, Provo, Yellowknife, or the peaceful land beyond the grave.

I thought of my fellow observation post watchers, including Jon Merrill, who would be the first to see the flares go up, the machine guns open fire from the watchtowers, and the tanks tearing through the perimeter walls and fences. Would they sound the alarm when they realized that an attack was at hand or would they be paralyzed with fear? During their long vigil, would any of them remember me as a friend or would they curse me roundly as a traitor?

After all the thoughts and images had collided into one another and joined to spin around in my head, I thought of my family. I thought of my wife, Juliet, and daughter, Louisa, still captives in Philadelphia but by now aware that they would soon be free to leave America and to begin a new life in exile. I thought of Claire, who had enjoyed relative freedom over the last few months but had been forced to learn more about life and fate than any twelve–year–old should have to.

I even dared to imagine myself released from Kamas, reunited with my wife and daughters to spend the rest of our lives overseas. But I also dared to peer down into the abyss, where I saw myself half–frozen, working a pick and shovel in a northern mine, determined to survive my sentence against all odds and to reclaim what remained of my life when the nightmare came to an end.

The frightful image of the northern mine jolted me to attention. With a mental clarity I had not experienced since the isolator, I realized that I could hear the somber whisperings of Brian Gaffney and Steve Bernstein, lying many yards to my right, as well as the yipping of coyotes in the far hills.

Suddenly I understood that the reason I could hear the coyotes was that the bulldozers had stopped roaring. The night was totally still. Before long even the whispering stopped as the other prisoners dropped off to sleep. I felt the muscles in my neck and shoulders relax as the accumulated tension of the day slowly loosened its grip. I imagined the same sense of relaxation passing over every barracks in camp, as those who had been kept awake night after night by the clatter of the earthmovers sank into sleep. And then I slipped into a deep, if not entirely blissful, slumber of my own.

C
HAPTER
43

"You don't put an enemy down with sermons. You have to burn him."
—Nicolai Ceausescu, Romanian dictator

THURSDAY, JUNE 27

DAY 38

I felt a sharp pain in my ribs and emerged from a deep and dreamless sleep. A dark figure loomed over me poised to kick again. I rolled onto my side and missed the full impact of the blow.

"Get up, vermin," came a shout from one of the black–helmeted warders who surrounded us. "You’re late for work."

A faint moonglow penetrated through the clouds, enough to make out the shapes of the other men within the barbed–wire pen. With kicks, shoves, and whacks from their nightsticks, the warders herded us in a single–file line toward a two–ton truck. While we waited, a short, sallow–cheeked lieutenant in a neatly pressed camouflage uniform handed us each a rough plastic–fiber sack of the kind used to make sandbags.

"Get into the back of the truck and pull the sack over your head so that it bunches up around your neck," the lieutenant instructed. "I'll be watching you out the back window. Go!"

With that, he pulled a .45–caliber automatic pistol from his holster and waited for us to obey his command.

We slipped the bags over our heads and in a moment the truck lurched forward. Despite the loose weave of my sack, within moments I felt that I would suffocate. After the longest four or five minutes of driving in my life, the truck slowed, crossed a shallow ditch, and came to a lumbering stop.

"Pull off the sacks and leave them in the truck," the lieutenant ordered.

When my eyes adjusted to the light I saw that the truck was parked behind a row of a dozen or more heavy battle tanks, lined up ten yards apart behind the berm that rose between us and the camp's outer wire. The tanks’ cannon barrels tilted over the edge of the berm as if to fire point–blank into the camp. Several turret hatches were propped open for the tank drivers to perform last–minute checks. A .50–caliber heavy machine gun protruded from each turret.

Arrayed twenty yards behind the tanks was a similar row of armored personnel carriers. In the APC closest to me, a crewmember poked his head out the forward hatch to gaze down upon us with disdain.

Our young escort officer waited a few more moments for our eyes to adjust before speaking.

"Okay, hop down, hustle over to the tent on the double, and form a single rank three paces behind the other prisoners."

About fifty yards away, well to the rear of the APCs, stood a spacious, straight–sided tent of the kind used for Army field headquarters. Not far from the tent some twenty prisoners were lined up at arm's length from one another. We formed a new rank behind the other prisoners as we had been told.

In the semi–darkness I could see three uniformed men emerge from the tent. They looked older and stockier than the lieutenant who had accompanied us on the truck, and I guessed it was they who were in command here.

"Stand at attention," the lieutenant ordered us. "Colonel Tracy will address you now."

We stood and waited for the colonel to speak. I glanced down the line and saw many familiar faces among these Unionist sympathizers and agents. They held their heads up proudly now, as if to proclaim their undying loyalty to the Party. But it was hard not to see in them the sniveling naysayers they had been in the days and weeks before.

Colonel Jim Tracy paced deliberately back and forth before us in camouflage battle dress, his chest puffed up with a thorough appreciation of his own importance, then stopped to fix us with a solemn gaze.

"In a few minutes the punitive force gathered here will advance to crush the mutiny that has festered in this camp for the past forty days. A key objective of our mission is to identify the mutiny's ringleaders and bring them to justice.

"Each of you volunteers will be assigned to one of the armored vehicles that will enter the camp in the second wave. Once your assigned sector has been brought under control, your job will be to assist the security detail in identifying prisoners and in checking their names against our watch list.

"You will be unarmed and are not to take part in any fighting. Once you cross the outer perimeter, anyone who attempts to desert or refuses to carry out an order will be shot without warning. Do I make myself clear?"

The prisoners in the front rank remained at attention. Those of us in the back row looked at each other in quiet bewilderment. We had not volunteered for any of this.

Tracy seemed to sense our confusion.

"Are there any questions about what you are expected to do?" he asked, searching our faces with his penetrating stare.

"Yeah," someone called out not far to my right.

"What is it?" the colonel barked.

"I never volunteered for anything," the speaker declared angrily. "No way I’m riding back into camp on one of your damned tanks!"

The voice belonged to the former deputy capo of the camp's thieves, Randy Skinner.

Colonel Tracy stepped aside to confer with our young lieutenant. A minute later he addressed us again.

"I stand corrected. Those of you who came over last night were not asked to volunteer. Never mind, I'm asking you now. If you volunteer, you'll receive the same reward as the others: a one–third reduction in your remaining sentence. If you refuse, you'll be sent north. So there you have it. All those in the second rank who volunteer, step forward two paces."

Everyone stepped forward except for Skinner, Brian Gaffney, and me.

"Very well, Lieutenant," Tracy concluded with a self–satisfied nod, "Deliver the volunteers to their assigned vehicles for the assault. Bring the others to me."

The prisoners who volunteered were loaded onto the troop truck and dispatched down the line of APCs, one prisoner to each armored vehicle.

Next the lieutenant summoned the waiting squad of warders to bring Skinner, Gaffney, and me to Colonel Tracy's tent. As we approached I recognized Tracy’s two colleagues as Doug Chambers and Jack Whiting. Both seemed agitated and restless. It occurred to me that Skinner, Gaffney, and I were not the only ones whose futures were in jeopardy should events go the wrong way.