Checkpoint Charlie

“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.

*   *   *

THERE 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 a

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.

*   *   *

THE 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.

*   *   *

IT 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?”