Operation Loose Ends. The Tsemukhe Road and the Upper Suchan, January 1919
Premise. The War to End All Wars ended on 11 Nov 1918 at 1100AM. The war did not end. The last Bakanov-Babbage engine is running in a hidden station in the Sikhote-Alin, calculating a door for Ithaqua. A Rasputinite cult inside the White Russian supply apparatus has chosen doomsday over defeat. The team must cross a civil war in which every faction wants them dead or useful, recruit a Red artillery general who is only partly sane, and shut the engine without breaking it, because breaking it is exactly what Dr. General Alexi Vladimirovich Bakanov wants.
The volley went over the trucks a yard high. Every pine along the road let go of its snow at once. It came down on the canvas in loads, on the hoods, on the roof of the cab over Adams's head, and the headlamps went white with it, and for a while there was nothing in the world but falling snow and the gramophone still playing somewhere in the dark.
Then somebody laughed. It was a big laugh. It went on until it turned into a cough, and the cough went on until somebody beat the man on the back, and then the laugh came again.
Adams had the trench sweeper across the wheel and his thumb on the safety. He left his thumb where it was. In the bed of the second truck Muldoon had her rifle laid across the cab roof. He did not have to look to know where it pointed.
A man walked into the headlamps.
He was the possibly the biggest man Adams had ever seen. He wore a Tsarist general's greatcoat with the shoulder boards cut away, and the cloth where they had been was darker than the rest. A red armband. A sheepskin hat. A black beard with ice in it. He stopped ten yards from the radiator and spread his arms, and the snow kept coming down on him out of the trees.
"Americans, that was warning!" he shouted. "Russian warning! Very polite! Next one is not warning!"
He looked past the lights at the second truck. At the rifle on the cab roof. He looked at it a long moment. Then he unbuttoned the top two buttons of his greatcoat with great care and tapped the third with one gloved finger.
"Here, mademoiselle? Yes?"
"Yes," Muldoon said.
He bowed to her from the waist. It brought the snow off his hat.
"Dragonov," he said. "General. Commanding Revolutionary Forces of Upper Suchan, and of Tsemukhe, and of the other river, I forget the name, it is very small." He peered at the cabs. "Which is the colonel?"
Quarterburn opened the door of the second truck and got down into the snow.
"I am."
"Good. Come. Is cold. We decide indoors whether to shoot you."
At the edge of the light a small man in a long coat sat on an ammunition box with a lantern at his feet and a ledger open on his knees. A gray scarf was wound up over his mouth and nose. He was writing. He did not look up at the snow or the trucks or the general. He wrote while the general talked, and he went on writing after the general stopped.
"Commissar Zhuk," Dragonov said. “Commissars write down everything." He shrugged and laughed, and coughed. "Come."
#
The partisans wintered in a village of Old Believers whose people had gone deeper into the hills when the war came, the way they always went, carrying their icons and their beards and leaving the houses. Dragonov had taken the prayer house. The stove roared. The icons too large to carry still hung on the log walls, long brown saints giving their blessing with two fingers in the old way, and under them on a trestle table lay a map, a pistol, a samovar, a barrel of pickled mushrooms, and a gramophone with a horn the size of a washtub.
Outside in the yard four long shapes lay on sledges under tarpaulins. Adams had seen a muzzle when the wind lifted a corner. Six-inch, out of the fortress at Vladivostok.
The partisans crowded the back of the room and stood along the walls. Suchan miners black to the knuckles. Koreans in quilted coats. A Chinese boy with a Japanese rifle. Old soldiers of the Tsar with their medals hidden inside their coats. Adams looked for breath. Every one of them had it.
Zhuk sat by the door, as far from the stove as the room allowed, his scarf stayed up, his weasel eyes scanned as his pencil moved across his notebook.
"So," Dragonov said. He sat on the edge of the table. "Americans guard Admiral Kolchak's railway. You are Americans. So you are Kolchak's. So I think I should shoot you, that would make Zhuk happy."
"We are not guarding the railway," Quarterburn said.
"Then why are you here? If you do not guard railway, you are spies. Then I should shoot you also. That would also make Zhuk happy."
"We are hunters."
"Hunting what?"
"Not what ,who, Doctor General Bakanov."
Dragonov took a mushroom out of the barrel with his fingers and ate it and thought.
"This," he said, "would not make Zhuk happy."
At that moment Wang Che came forward unwrapping his face from his scarf. He smiled, then in Russian “when last I saw you in ‘05 you were a Colonel.”
Dragonov looked, squinted “It cannot be, Wang Che?”
“The one and only.”
Dragonov laughed and grabbed the small Chinese man in a great bear hug. “I still have the guns you sold me.”
When he let go Wang Che gasped for breath.
Adams leaned to Wang Che. "You didn’t say you knew the General. Or that you sold him guns."
"I sold guns to everyone," Wang Che said. "That is what neutrality is."
"What's he writing?"Wang Che had passed behind Zhuk on the way in.
"Three columns. Comrades, Useful people and Enemies of the people."
"Where are we?"
"I’m thinking the middle, though Zhuk may not."
Dragonov looked over the crowd, “And not all Americans” he noticed Higgins and his pinned sleeve. "Where?" he said to Higgins.
"Loos."
"Ah. A terrible battle." Dragonov nodded. Then he traced the long scar on his face that ran temple to jaw. "The Prippet Marshes. No one has escaped these years without scars.” Dragonov waved at a Cossack orderly “Vodka!” The Orderly poured vodka into tea glasses for all in the room except Zhuk. They stood, “to scars!” They drank.
Dragonov drew a watch out of his coat. Gold, enameled blue, thin as an eggshell, with a little crown at the stem. He opened it and showed Quarterburn the face. "Now that we have drink, we talk."
Adams had his own watch out before he thought about it, the Hamilton he had set by the Navy Yard clock in Seattle and by the Teesta's chronometer every noon since. He held it beside the general's.
"Your watch is fast, General. Seven minutes."
Dragonov shut his watch and put it away.
"No, Sergeant," he said. "The world is seven minutes slow."
Thorpe had sat through all of it in her black, with her hands in her lap. Now she drew a chair up to the table across from the general and spoke to him in French. An officer's language, and a lady's.
"Mon général. Can you help us?"
Adams followed it. He had learned his French in Jeddah and Bucharest from men who wanted to sell him things, and it served.
Dragonov's face changed. He answered her in French, low.
“When I was of the Tsar’s army it would be unchivalric of me to not help a lady. In our new world order, the Bolshevik does not know chivalry,” he glanced a Zhuk, “or French.”
Thorpe laid the punched card on the map.
Dragonov looked at the card a long time.
Then he crossed himself, two fingers, the old way.
Adam’s watched as Zhuk wrote that down. Though he had no French. Adams had watched his pencil stop when the French began and then start again. He was writing anyway.
I may help you, if you can help me. I know this card, and of this Bakanov, I know what he has done. And I fear he is up to his old tricks. I have lost men, eleven since the Nativity. One at a time, on the river and in the hills. Each time a storm came down a valley, white, out of a clear sky, with the barometer standing still. Each time, when it lifted, there was one man fewer and no tracks just snow . My men say it is the wind," he said. "I tell them the Revolution does not believe in the wind."
"There is a station," Thorpe said. "A machine."
"Where?"
"That is what we are here to find out."
Dragonov got up and went to the window. Outside in the dark the tarpaulins lay over the guns with snow on them. He put his palm flat on the frosted glass.
"Find him, then signal. I have American wireless. You send message" he said in English. "With proof something I can show to him." He jerked a thumb at Zhuk without turning. "Then I bring guns."
He stood with his hand on the glass.
"You find Bakanov," he said. "I burn down his house."
Then he went to the gramophone and wound it and set the needle down, and the horns began to climb out of the washtub horn, and the drum came in under them, and Dragonov stood in the middle of the prayer house with his eyes shut and conducted with a pickled mushroom held between his thumb and finger.
"What's that one?" Talbot said.
"Thus Spake Zarathustra," Muldoon said. "Strauss."
"Who's Zarathustra?" Adams said.
"A prophet," Thorpe said. "He announced that God was dead."
Adams looked up at the long brown saints on the walls with their two fingers raised.
"Not in here he ain't," he said.
#
They left Tsemukhe at first light with a partisan boy riding the running board of the lead truck to take them around the Japanese and Admiral Kolchak’s checkpoints. At the first ridge the boy stepped off without a word and walked home.
At thirty below the Fords did not want to live. Each dawn the oil had gone to tar in the crankcases, and each dawn they built fires under the engines and lay on their backs in the snow feeding the fires with sticks, until the trucks ticked and steamed and caught at last, and the radiators breathed vodka out over the camp. Adams called it the courtship. The chains went on the tires and came off and went on again. The steering froze. Chavez drove the fourth truck with a blanket over his knees and changed hands on the wheel every mile, the whole hand and then the three-fingered one, each in turn inside his coat.
The Japanese held the crossing where the road met the Suchan branch line: a sandbagged hut, a barrier pole, a flag hanging stiff with frost, and six men in fur caps who came out with their rifles at the port. Their lieutenant had a list. He looked at the list and at the trucks and at the list.
"No Americans," he said. "Order of General Otani."
Higgins got down from the cab. He walked to the barrier with a sheaf of papers in his one hand, stamped in four colors and signed in three countries, and gave them to the lieutenant.
”British, my good man.”
The barrier pole went up.
"What did you show him?" Quarterburn said, when Higgins had climbed back in.
"Inter-Allied authority. Transport of Allied property, all very proper, and British."
"Is it genuine?"
"Genuine enough." Higgins tucked the rug around his knees.
Past the railway the road became a logging track, and the logging track became a sledge track, and the sledge track went down onto the river and stopped being anything at all. The river was the road. The maps Fontaine provided had the route drawn in blue pencil with the passes in red, and they drove up the middle of it between pushing through banks of light snow high as the running boards, with Johansson out ahead on skis sounding the ice with a pole. On the third day they came to the Udege.
A bark lodge stood on the bank with its smoke going straight up in the still air. Drying racks, empty. A sledge, eight dogs in the traces, and an old man in a fur robe loading the sledge, who stopped loading when he heard the engines.
Wang Che climbed the bank and spoke to him in Chinese. The old man answered shortly. He looked north up the valley, the way they were going. Then he looked at the trucks for a long while.
"He says the hunting is finished here," Wang Che said.
"Ask him what's up the valley."
Wang Che asked. The old man did not answer at first. Then he simply stated “wind, snow, death.”
That night they camped in a bend of the river under a cliff, out of the wind. The fire burned with a hard bright flame and gave almost no heat. Hunt wrote his letter. Sheehan sat close in. Adams watched the breath come out of him small and thin, a wisp, while everyone else's stood out in front of their faces in clouds. Nobody said anything. Johansson looked. Chavez looked. Then they looked at the fire.
"In the Mora," Chavez said, "we have La Llorona. She drowned her children in the river. Now she walks the river at night crying for them, and any child she finds, she takes." He turned the stick he held in the coals. "My grandmother said, if you hear her crying close, she is far. If you hear her far, she is close."
"That's a hell of a rule," Adams said.
"It is a good rule. You can never be sure."
Adams spat into the fire. "Up home in Tucker County, Granny said if you're out in the woods of a night and you hear somebody call your name, you don't answer. Don't matter whose voice. Your mama's. Your brother's. You don't answer."
"Why not?"
"The haints know your name. They heard your mama holler you in to supper. They been listening since you were born." He put a stick on the fire. "You answer, you tell 'em where you are."
From inside two blankets Higgins said that his nanny had told him much the same about the Inland Revenue.
Adams had the second watch. The fire was down to coals. After midnight the wind came up high in the pines along the cliff, a long sound that rose and fell and rose again, and now and then the river ice split somewhere along its length with a crack Adams felt in his back teeth.
Adams listened. He heard the wind. Only the wind. Adams sat a long while with the trench gun across his knees.
#
Dispatch of J. M. Talbot III, Special Correspondent, The Times-Picayune. Filed Vladivostok, 19 January 1919. Returned to the correspondent with the compliments of three censors.
VLADIVOSTOK, Jan. 19. On this feast of the Russian Epiphany the faithful of this frozen city went down by thousands onto the harbor ice, where [DELETED, U.S. ARMY CENSOR] on motor patrol into Siberia [DELETED] [DELETED, IMPERIAL JAPANESE ARMY] [DELETED, CZECHOSLOVAK CORPS] with your correspondent's own eyes [DELETED] [DELETED] [DELETED]. Relations among the Allies here remain most cordial.
Field journal, Lt. Col. A. Quarterburn, USMC. Upper Suchan, 23 January 1919. In pencil; the ink has frozen in the pen.
Minus thirty-one degrees Fahrenheit at 0600 by Mr. Talbot's thermometer, which he warrants accurate. He warrants his photographs also. Fingers inspected at reveille, all hands. Mr. Wang's left ear doubtful; rubbed with snow over his protests and against Miss Thorpe's advice. Four trucks running.
#
They heard it at nine.
The day had come up clear and cold, the sky pale as skimmed milk and the river white and level between its banks, the four Fords strung out along the ice at fifty yards with their exhaust standing straight up behind them. Then over their engines there was another engine. Higher. Behind them, from the south.
Higgins put his head out of the cab and looked back and said a word the Royal Navy keeps for special occasions.
"Sopwith," he said. "Two-seater. We sold those to the Tsar."
"Whose is it now?"
"Whoever is paying for the petrol."
It came up the valley at the height of the trees, in place of landing gear it had skis, and they could see the two heads in the cockpits and the ring around the rear one and the gun on the ring.
Adams stood on the brake. "Out! Off the ice! Get to the bank!"
In a well practiced move the four Fords broke left and right.
The forward gun opened before it was in range of anything. The rounds walked up the river toward them in a line of white spurts, and where they struck, the ice starred and split and the cracks ran out from each one. The line went past the first truck. Past the second. Under the third, the ice gave way along the cracks.
The trailing Ford tipped back on its rear wheels and slid in. Smith was at the wheel. The cab went under to the windscreen with Smith in it, and Hunt was off the tailboard of the second truck and across the ice on his belly before anyone told him, he tossed a line to Smith and hauled, and Smith came out of the cab onto the ice streaming black water and swearing in Italian. The truck went down behind him with its headlamps lit. Adams watched the two lamps go down green through the water and grow small and go out.
Most of the food had been in that truck.
The machine went over them. The observer stood up at his ring and raked the bank where they lay, and snow and bark flew, and then it was past and climbing and banking away north to come around again.
Smith's coat was freezing on him before he reached the bank. It went stiff at the elbows and then at the shoulders, and his hair stood up white. Hunt and Sheehan stripped him in the snow and rolled him in two blankets and Higgins's greatcoat, and Johansson knelt up out of the snow and emptied a drum from the Annihilator after it. At that range he might as well have thrown the drum. Chavez fired the Browning automatic rifle in bursts, leading it. Muldoon did not fire. She was watching it bank.
"He'll come back down the river," she said. "Same line. He wants the trucks."
Adams lay in the snow and watched the machine turn small and black against the hills, and he thought about Luzon. The Wakwak coming down out of the dark in '02. The Lieutenant with his signal flare, and the bird breaking off to chase the light, and all of them alive because of it.
Quarterburn was down in the snow beside him with his right hand inside his coat.
"You have something," the colonel said.
"Maybe."
"Gunny. Go."
"LaFontain!"
The Frenchman was already beside him with his carbine and the steel cup on its muzzle.
"How many grenades you got?"
"Five."
"Can you make 'em burn white?"
LaFontain looked at him. Then he looked at the second truck, at the crate lashed behind the cab. Barclay's crate. Adams watched him understand.
They broke it open on the tailboard. LaFontain unscrewed the grenade bodies and knocked the charges out of them into the snow, and Adams took his knife to Barclay's slugs, one after another, and poured the gray powder out of each. Magnesium, silver nitrate, salt. One slug. Two. Five. Eight. Eleven. LaFontain packed each body down with his thumb and screwed it shut.
"The fuse is eight seconds," LaFontain said. "I cannot change it. You tell me when he is eight seconds away."
"Every flare pistol in this outfit!" Adams shouted. "On my word, straight up in his face. Not before!"
There were six. Talbot had one, and Thorpe, and Higgins, and Dunn, and Sheehan, and Wang Che, who had bought his own in Vladivostok for a reason he declined to give.
The machine came around. It came down the river at the trees with the forward gun going, and Muldoon stood up on the bank and put the rifle to her shoulder and swung with it, and fired, and worked the lever, and fired. The observer was standing at his ring. He sat down. Then he fell forward over his gun, and the gun swung up and pointed at the sky, and the plane went over them with a dead man riding in the back.
It went north. It banked. It came around.
"He's alone now," Muldoon said. "He'll come lower."
He came lower.
Adams walked out into the middle of the river.
He had a railway fusee in his left fist. He struck it on the ice and it caught and burned red, and he held it up over his head, and the pilot saw it. Adams watched him see it. The nose came around a degree and settled on him.
"Doc always said magnesium does the trick," Adams said, to nobody.
The machine came on. The skis. The wings. The forward gun starting, the white spurts walking up the ice toward him. Adams counted off the dead larch on the left bank, the gravel bar, the second larch, the way he had counted grouse off a ridge in Tucker County when he was nine.
"Now!"
LaFontain fired. The grenade went up out of the cup with a flat bang and turned over in the air. He loaded and fired. Loaded and fired.
"Volley!"
Six pistols went off together and six stars went up red and green and white into the pilot's face, and LaFontain's first grenade burst in front of the propeller with a light that took the color out of the whole valley, and the second burst, and the third, a white wall going up across the river at the height of the trees, magnesium burning in the air, snow and pines and wings and the man in the cockpit all turned to bone by it, and through the middle of it the machine came on out of the light with the pilot's arm thrown up across his eyes.
On the bank Higgins emptied his Webley at it one-handed. No one could see that he hit anything.
The pilot could not see at all. The right wing dipped. The tip caught the pines on the bank and the machine went over on it and cartwheeled into the trees, wing over wing, and the snow came down off every branch for a hundred yards. The engine raced. Then there was no sound.
Adams stood in the middle of the river with the fusee burned down to his glove. The glove was smoking. He dropped the fusee and pushed his hand into the snow.
Then he walked back to the second truck and lifted the lid of Barclay's crate and counted what was left with one finger, row by row. He closed the lid. He sat on it.
"How many, Gunny?" Johansson said.
"Enough," Adams said.
#
The plane lay on its back in the pines with one wing folded under it and the other standing up into the branches. The engine had torn half out of its bearers. Petrol ran out of the tank into the snow, and the stink of it hung in the trees.
The observer hung upside down in his harness in the rear cockpit with Muldoon's bullet in him.
The pilot was alive.
He lay half out of the forward cockpit with the fuselage across his legs. He was young, twenty perhaps, with a fair mustache and a leather helmet trimmed in fur, and his goggles were pushed up and his eyes were burned red from the light. He was laughing. Not loud. He lay in the snow and laughed up at the branches, and the laugh came out of his mouth with nothing on it. No cloud. No steam. Thirty below, and his breath did not show.
Adams knelt and opened the flying coat.
In the breast pocket was a flight order, typed, on good paper. The top of the sheet had been torn off along a ruler, neatly, where a letterhead would be. At the bottom was a wax seal in dark red, pressed with a device Adams did not know, a key with three curled lines rising off it, and under the seal a single word in Russian.
Wang Che read it. "'Steward,'" he said. "It is signed, 'the Steward.'"
"Steward of what?"
Wang Che shook his head.
There was a map too, in pencil on squared paper: the river they had come up, the branches above it, and a saddle between two peaks with a cross on it. Dunn held Barclay's box beside the map. The needle pointed at the cross.
Talbot photographed the order and the seal and the map laid out on the pilot's chest, three plates, kneeling in the snow, and the pilot laughed at him the whole time.
"Ask him who sent him," Quarterburn said.
Wang Che asked in Russian. The pilot stopped laughing. He looked at Wang Che and at the colonel, and he answered in a perfectly reasonable voice, three sentences.
"He says he was sent by the one who owns the wind," Wang Che said. "He says you are too late. He says the one who owns the wind is already here."
Higgins was scratching at his empty sleeve.
Adams saw the frost first. It came across the metal of the cowling in front of his face in ferns, white, branching, faster than frost had any business growing, out across the metal and down the struts and over the dead observer's goggles.
Then the wind stopped.
It did not die down. It stopped. The pines stood still. The snow blowing off the branches hung in the air and came straight down. LaFontain stood up from the wreck with his face gone gray and his hands open at his sides.
Then Adams smelled it. Ammonia, sharp, a stable not mucked out all winter, and under it wet fur, heavy and close.
"What?" Dunn said. He was looking from face to face. "What is it? What do you smell?"
The white out came down the slope.
It came through the pines above the wreck a hundred yards wide and taller than the trees, a wall of snow turning in on itself, and it made no sound at all, and where it touched the pines they went white and were gone. Adams got Dunn by the coat and threw him down the bank and went after him. Somebody was shouting. The white came over the wreck.
For a moment there was nothing. White in his eyes and his mouth. Cold that stopped his heart in his chest and started it again. He heard metal tear.
Then the pilot screamed, and the scream went up. Not away into the trees. Up.
Adams saw a shape in the white above the wreck. A horn. The curve of a back. Legs, and more legs than that, folding.
Then the white went away down the valley and the wind came back all at once and the pines were moving again.
The side of the fuselage was open from the cockpit to the tail, the fabric torn outward and the longerons broken out through it. The pilot was gone. His helmet lay in the snow. His goggles hung from a strut by one strap and turned in the wind.
There were tracks around the wreck in the new snow. Adams went around them twice. Two prints, each as big as a dinner plate. Then four. Then something that was more than four, and he could not make it come out to a number. Then the tracks went up the slope into the pines, and he did not follow them.
Talbot sat in the snow with the camera in his lap. He had got one plate off. He held it up to the light. It was white, and a gray smear in the white, and something darker in the smear that might have been a horn.
"Blurred," he said. "Again." He put it inside his coat. "Still beats anything New Orleans ever had on the Père Malfait."
#
That night they drew the three trucks into a ring with the fire in the middle, and Adams walked the outside of the ring with the salt bag and poured a line all the way around, gray on white, and closed it, and walked it again.
The white came back after midnight.
It did not come in. It went around them. They could hear it walking the circle outside the trucks in the dark, a wind with no weather in it, around and around, and the canvas on the trucks bellied in and out, and the snow hissed along the salt line and stopped there. Inside the ring the air hardly moved. The fire burned straight up.
The others slept, or lay still. Adams and Muldoon had the watch. She sat by the lantern with her sketchbook on her knee and her rifle against her shoulder, drawing.
Adams watched the dark go around. After a while he looked over at the page.
She had drawn the camp from above. The three trucks in their ring. The fire. The salt line, a thin gray circle. Every bedroll with a shape in it, and every shape a person he knew. Hunt with his letter. Sheehan curled small. The colonel on the far side of the fire with his face to the trucks.
Behind the colonel's bedroll, inside the ring, she had drawn something standing. Pale. Taller than the trucks.
And behind it, in the salt line, a gap the width of a boot.
Muldoon's charcoal stopped.
"I don't remember drawing that," she said.
Adams did not turn around. He watched her face.
She looked up, past his shoulder, at the colonel's bedroll.
###