Exile Hunter (42 page)

“So where will you
go, Sam, back to Delaware?” Browning asked.

“Not on your life.
Everybody knows me there. They’d arrest me on the spot,” he
replied. “No, I’m going to find a small town in Idaho or Wyoming
where a stranger can carve out a small niche for himself and be left
alone. Once I find a way to support myself, my goal is to sit down
and write a book.”

“What kind of book?”
Linder asked. “What’s the title?”

“I want to call it
‘The Book of Revelations,’” Burt answered earnestly.

“I believe the name
is already taken,” Linder replied with a flippant tone. “And it
was a real downer.”

“So is this one. It’s
about how the Unionists took over the government. I was working on
Capitol Hill when it happened and saw things that nobody dares talk
about.”

“What sort of
things?” Linder asked.

“The Unionist coup,
for one,” Burt answered. “I was there when the President for Life
dissolved Congress, created the one-party state, purged the military,
sealed the borders, and created the labor camps. And when the new
rubber-stamp Congress went back into session, I was chief of staff
for the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, so I had a
ringside seat all during CWII, the Canadian and Mexican incursions,
and the Manchurian War.”

Mark Rhee suddenly
raised his eyes from the campfire. “So can you tell me how the hell
we got roped into fighting the Chinese in Russia?” Rhee asked.

“I can, but you’re
not going to like it,” Burt warned.

“I didn’t like
fighting it, either,” Rhee remarked in a bitter tone. “Or being
thrown into a camp for losing. Only six men from my company survived.
So I feel like I’ve kind of earned the right to know.”

Burt shot Linder an
anxious look over Rhee’s reaction.

“You know, if the DSS
realized how much I knew when they arrested me, they probably would
have killed me on the spot,” Burt continued. “In the detention
facility, I didn’t breathe a word of the things I’d seen. It’s
still hard for me to talk about it. That’s why I feel compelled to
write it down.”

“But what if the book
never gets out?” Linder asked, his curiosity piqued. “Wouldn’t
it be a good idea to share the highlights with us to make sure the
information doesn’t get lost?”

“Maybe,” Burt
conceded. “It’s just hard for me to open up about it. I’ll have
to think it over.”

“You do that,”
Linder agreed. “Now let’s change the subject. Does anyone have a
good story to tell before we hit the sack? How about you, Scotty?”

The native gave a
pensive look and shook his head.

“Maybe one of your
cooking stories, Sam?” Linder pressed. “You could conjure up one
of your virtual desserts for us.”

“No, don’t,” Rhee
complained. “Hearing about food drives me crazy.”

“I don’t think I
could tonight, anyway,” Sam Burt added. “My guts are still
screwed up from all the fish I ate.”

“Anybody else?”
Linder asked.

“All right, then,
who’d like to join me for a virtual nightcap?” Linder suggested.
“Does anybody here drink whiskey?”

“Now you’re
talking,” Browning ventured.

“Sure, go for it,”
Burt added.

“Any objections?”

Rhee and Scotty
remained silent.

“Okay, close your
eyes and put your drinking shoes on, because we’re all going to the
High Mountain West Saloon in Park City, Utah, for a nightcap. Now
imagine our limo has just pulled up to the curb and we’re stepping
out now. The temperature is below zero, but it’s a dry cold and we
have our goose down jackets on and our fur hats pulled over our ears,
so we’re toasty warm. All we have to do now is cross the street to
a one-story building with a weathered two-story facade that looks
like an old-time mechanic’s garage.

“We step inside, hang
up our coats in the entrance hall, and enter the bar, walking past a
huge stone fireplace stacked with cut wood. And as we pass the
fireplace, we each take a split log and toss it onto the fire. Just
feel that heat on your face and tell me you aren’t getting mighty
thirsty.”

“I’m parched,”
Burt broke in. “Get the bartender over here.”

The others laughed and
Linder went on.

“All right, then.
We’re all seated at the bar now, on high rough wooden stools. The
bar itself is polished hardwood, but nothing fancy. Around us are
just enough people to make the place friendly but not too crowded.
And in the background, you can hear Hank Williams singing ‘Your
Cheatin’ Heart.’

At that, Browning let
out a cowboy whoop, and Linder went on.

“’I’m buying
tonight,’ I tell Jimmy, the bartender. Jimmy has been at the saloon
for years and makes a fine Manhattan. ‘Rye Manhattans all around,
straight up,’ I say. Jimmy nods and lines up his ingredients on the
counter: a bottle of house-made four-year old rye, red vermouth,
bitters, brandied cherries, an ice-filled pitcher, and five stemmed
cocktail glasses. The ice cubes are so cold that they stick to his
hand when he tries to toss a few into the sink to leave more room for
the whiskey.”

“Enough with the ice,
Linder,” Rhee protested. “I haven’t had enough time by the
fireplace yet.”

“No problem—switch
stools with Will and get closer to the fire. Cocktails are meant to
be sipped ice cold, so you need to warm yourself up first. Good then,
now we’re going to watch Jimmy mix. First, he pours five hefty
slugs into the pitcher, adds vermouth, and splashes in equal dollops
of Angostura and orange bitters. Then he stirs with a long spoon
instead of shaking, to avoid diluting the blend and making it cloudy.
Finally, he pops a brandied cherry into each glass, fills it up to
the brim, and plants a glass in front of each of us with a cocktail
napkin laid underneath. Are we thirsty yet, gentlemen?”

“Parched. Can I drink
it now?” Browning asked eagerly.

“Go ahead, take a
generous first sip. Feel the silky burn as it slides down your throat
and warms your chest from the inside out. Then pay attention as a
pale haze fills your head and filters down to relax your neck and
shoulders. On your next sip, feel the fog gather at the base of your
skull and note how your memory for names and places has slipped just
beyond reach.”

“My God, I actually
feel it,” Burt blurted out.

“Then take another
pull, plant your elbows on the bar, and look around. Watch the
flaming logs in the fireplace and give the man next to you a warm
smile and a pat on the back. It’s a quiet winter night in old Park
City and soon you’ll be off to bed to sleep it off and start a new
day.”

The men went silent and
Linder waited before speaking again.

“Uh-oh. Has the
feeling started to fade?” Linder asked without waiting for a
response. “No problem. ‘Jimmy, one more round for my friends and
me.’ Two will be our limit tonight, because after two stiff ones,
diminishing returns set in. Wouldn’t you know it, Jimmy is two
steps ahead of us. He has a fresh pitcher ready and tops up each
man’s glass. Now, take a sip and feel the lovely burn as it goes
down, then the gathering fog in your brain and the sense of
effortless release.

“Very slowly now, and
with great care so as not to spill our drinks, we rise on wobbly legs
and gather around the fireplace to bask in its warmth just a little
while longer. We look around the room again and all the faces are
smiling, everyone is our friend, and all our troubles have faded
away.”

* * *

For the next two
days, the fugitives followed the Nahanni River through rugged canyons
and wooded hillsides, crossing tributaries and skirting frozen
rapids. All day long, Mark Rhee rarely left Sam Burt’s side,
grilling him ceaselessly with questions about the Manchurian War, its
origins and prosecution, the rout of the Allied Expeditionary Force
sent to relieve the Russians, the cover-up that followed, and the
detention of tens of thousands of surviving combat veterans in Alaska
and the Yukon upon their return.

But by the second day,
the river grew wider and the temperatures dropped and the men were
unable to find suitable logs to break through the ice to catch fish.
They became hungry again and Burt had difficulty keeping up. At
first, Rhee volunteered to lighten Burt’s rucksack, then carried
nearly its full contents in his, and let Burt take turns for both of
them in the snowshoe rotation. He even offered to share his meager
rations but Burt refused.

Linder and Browning saw
this and shared their surprise over Rhee’s uncharacteristic show of
compassion. The two men had long sensed that the Manchurian War was
what had undone Rhee and that the President-for-Life’s abandonment
of U.S. troops in the field lay at the core of the man’s
bitterness. Yet, they were at a loss to explain how or why Burt’s
lengthy discourses on the war could have made him feel differently
about it. Perhaps Burt’s patient attentiveness to him had helped
soothe some deep sense of neglect or abandonment that predated even
the war.

Whatever the dynamics,
Linder was alarmed when on the morning of the third day, Rhee
staggered into camp with his coveralls encased in ice. Though his
face was numb and he could barely speak, the panic in his eyes and
the absence of Sam Burt led Linder to conclude that the two men had
fallen through the ice in an attempt to catch fish. While he and
Browning struggled to subdue Rhee, remove his soaked coveralls and
wrap him in a foil-laminate survival blanket, Scotty set off in
Rhee’s tracks to search for the missing Burt.

The native returned a
few minutes later with a somber expression.

“Hot springs. Weak
ice. River take him.”

The four men remained
at the campsite for another day until Rhee was fit to resume the
journey. When he did, the taciturn, bitter Mark Rhee of old was back.

* * *

No sooner did they
resume the journey to the southeast than they sensed a change in the
weather. That night, a thin halo surrounded the full moon, and Linder
could see the fingers of high clouds streaking in from the north.

“Snow moon,” Scotty
pronounced. “Snow storm here tomorrow. Must find shelter tonight.”

The men made good time
all day, now that they had three pairs of snowshoes for four men and
a weakened Burt no longer held back the pace. One less mouth to feed,
as well, Linder thought, but felt ashamed immediately after. As
Scotty had said at the outset, each man in the group had something
vital to contribute, and now that two of the original six were gone,
the team would be poorer for it.

When the storm broke,
the men were encamped in a forest under a lean-to erected from fallen
trees and fir branches. Food was low again, as fish had become
scarce, and Scotty had not replicated his early luck in bringing down
a hare. At the same time, the terrain had grown steeper, with
ice-encrusted rocks adding to the danger and requiring frequent
detours.

As the snow fell, the
four men talked for hours about their plight and how far they had to
go before reaching Fort Liard and the outskirts of civilization. When
conversation flagged, the stillness of the brooding mountains seemed
to engulf them. Linder did his best to resist feelings of self-pity
while wrestling with a desperate fear that now, with hundreds of
heart-breaking kilometers behind them, the tide of fate might have
turned against their desperate project.

While he suspected that
Browning and Rhee, and perhaps even Scotty, might suffer their own
private pangs of despair, none showed signs of wavering. With each
dawn, the outlook always seemed to brighten for a while. Though fear
still lurked in some dark corner of his brain, movement and action
and the application of rational thought to daily challenges kept it
at bay.

After the storm,
desperately short of food and sensing that the Liard River basin
might lie just ahead, the team fell prey to a compulsive urge to keep
moving to the point of exhaustion. The flames of obsession were
stoked anew each time one of them uttered a cheery “Keep it up”
or “Not far now” to the others. No one pleaded for a few minutes
of rest. They just went on, walking the stiffness out of their joints
and the chill of the dark hours from their spent bodies.

But as fatigue set in,
each new irritation piled onto the one before and their nerves became
as tightly strung as piano wires. At night, they were too agitated to
sleep but by morning, they felt too drained to get back on their
feet. Any one of the four might have succumbed and drifted into a
deadly sleep but, as somebody else was always slogging forward, all
four kept pace.

“We’ve got to keep
moving while we still have light,” Browning urged as the sun sank
below the ridge. “We must make it into the next valley before
dark.”

Around the next bend,
they came upon a mighty waterfall, where the water broke free from
the ice and plunged nearly a hundred feet into a churning pool.
Scotty directed the others to wait while he scouted for a traverse
that would avoid a frontal assault on the granite cliffs to either
side of the falls. The men were only halfway across the traverse when
darkness fell and they dared not continue for fear of slipping on the
rime-encrusted rock.

They found shelter for
the night on a broad ledge where snow had accumulated in deep drifts.
Though the snow was not deep enough to permit burrowing, the men
punched through the hard crust to create a shallow dugout for
huddling together out of the wind. To their dismay, the lack of wood
nearby made a campfire impossible.

Before long, Linder
felt as miserable as he had been on the coldest night of his forced
march from Ross River to Camp N-320. But now, no food wagons were on
hand to offer hot coffee and oatmeal. Though sleep lay on his eyelids
like lead weights, he remained awake, sitting cross-legged with arms
linked through those of Browning, Scotty and Rhee, knowing that to
doze off meant risking death from freezing. Each man became his
brother’s keeper, watching for nodding heads and drooping eyes.
Three times Rhee, the arch-sleeper, let his chin sag and snored, and
each time Linder elbowed his ribs and jostled him back to
consciousness. At intervals, the men rose and jogged in place,
stamping their feet to restore the circulation to their stiff limbs.