Checkpoint Charlie

“Yes, sir. Acknowledge.”

Low sunbeams slanted onto the sea through a distant hole in the overcast. From the rim of the cliff and against the shimmering glare on the ocean I saw the tiny outline of a solitary figure climbing toward me.

I gathered my gear, stowed the CCT in my parka and carried the backpack away down the east face of the ridge toward Massacre Valley. It was slow going in the sucking tundra but I wanted to be well away from the crash site. It was a big island; all I had to do was stay out of sight until I could be picked up.

I secreted the heavy metal-detector under an overhang; I had no further need of it. Then I buckled into the backpack and pressed on.

The light drained out of the sky; the wind came and with it fog. I knew I needed shelter.

The best I could find was a sort of hollow in the rocks. It broke most of the wind. I wrapped up in blankets and dug out an inadequate di

The williwaw struck at nightfall and I spent most of the night emphatically miserable in a cringing huddle, clutching the blankets around me with my face buried in cloth and my ears deafened by the cry of the storm.

By the time it eased away, the luminous dial of my watch told me it was only midnight but I was battered and exhausted and dismally cold.

I rooted dry socks out of the pack. My fingers were tingling numb; I had trouble getting the boots off and on. I ate another sandwich and waited for daybreak, thinking about that man I’d seen climbing the ridge. If he found me he wouldn’t leave me alive.

My survival through several decades of intelligence capers and Cold War conflicts has been a matter of wits rather than atavistic toughness. I am a poor marksman and have never bothered to learn anything about unarmed combat or pressure-points or outdoor tricks. I have never been painted into a kill-or-be-killed corner; it’s not my fashion. I had never killed anyone or tried to. It is my conceit that any fool can kill people. I fancy myself a bit better than that. But if a Soviet scout found me…

*   *   *

“IT’S PEA SOUP up here.”

“It’s often like that, sir, but if you can make your way down to the beach at the foot of the valley it may be clear down there. We’ll try to get a helicopter in after you’ve reached position. We chased their submarine out past the twenty-mile limit. If they’ve still got anyone on the island he’ll keep — just stay out of his way.”

“You can bet on it.” I packed the radio and began the slow descent. Fog and light rain swirled about me.

The wind sluiced down the slope behind me, carrying sound. That was how I got my first warning.

He was making noise with his canteens and metal impedimenta and heavy boots. No more noise than I’d been making — but the wind was in my favor: I heard him first.

I wheeled in alarm and saw him bearing down, vague in the mist — a big man made bulkier by his quilted Siberian parka and his festoonings of equipment: moving fast downhill through the fog perhaps fifty yards above me. The object in his fist looked like a machine pistol: wicked, efficient.

When he stopped and lifted it to aim I flung myself behind a boulder and heard the ricochetting bullets shriek over my head.

I crawled madly — infuriated to a white-hot rage: fear saps a man of his dignity and that’s a hateful plight.

*   *   *

“SHEMYA. Charlie Dark calling Shemya. For Pete’s sake, come in Shemya.”

Nothing: static. I was in a dead-radio pocket.

I caromed off the walls of an overgrown Japanese trench, bouncing off the slippery sides, ru

Finally I stopped and attempted to control my breathing. I’d been making too much racket. Use your head, Charlie — keep your wits because that clown intends to kill you to get his hands on the code box in your pocket.

I moved on, bent low and trying to walk without sound. It was difficult; the boots squished in the muck.

The wind moaned; mist rolled and curled in unpredictable tendrils — one moment I was socked in, blind, and the next I could see blue sky. I kept stopping to listen. At first I heard him banging around up there, ru

He was the hunter. It put the burden on him. Realizing that, I knew my best chance was to stop.

The boulder had been too huge to shift so they had curled the trench around it, undercutting its belly. I wouldn’t find better cover. I crouched under the overhanging rock and took out the survival carbine, cocked it and waited.

*   *   *

I THOUGHT of trying the radio again but that was no good. They couldn’t help me in the fog — and he might hear my voice.

I heard the suck of bog around his boots.

He was up high on the mountainside somewhere above the trench. The rock above my head prevented me from seeing him — and prevented him from seeing me as well: maybe I had a chance.

He was still searching for me and that meant it was more than mere curiosity. He knew I had the code box; otherwise he’d have been satisfied to run me off the search area. Possibly he’d found the abandoned metal-detector and drawn his conclusions from that; or maybe he’d seen my tracks at the foot of the cliff where I’d recovered the CCT. A man adept at reading tracks could have —

Tracks. The realization grenaded into me. I’d left huge tracks in the muddy trench. Not being an outdoorsman I hadn’t even thought of it before.

My tracks led to this spot. They didn’t lead away from it.

Too late now to think about sweeping mud over them. All I could do was pray he didn’t see my spoor.

But he found it.

*   *   *

THE TRENCH WALLS were nine or ten feet high. If the Japanese had used ladders they had long since rotted away. The only way to get down was to jump; the only alternative was to travel along the trench to a distant point where the walls were lower.

I listened to him come. He was near the boulder, just above me. He went back and forth a couple of times. I could see what he saw: tracks on one side, no tracks on the other.

I heard the harsh metal clack when he worked the mechanism of the machine pistol.

Then unaccountably his boots moved away.

It took me a moment to understand. Then I realized. The trench was too wide for him to leap across it. And he couldn’t jump down in plain view of me. He was heading along the trench to jump into it beyond the bend and come at me carefully on a level.

While I listened to his footsteps recede I knew I couldn’t stay here. Some primitive impulse drove me out of my shelter — back the way I’d come, sliding my feet into the tracks I’d already made.

I approached the bend and stopped, my back to the wall, searching the rim above me. Then I heard him again — he was past the bend; something clanked.

I slid along the wall, coating the parka with muck. I was in time to see him jump right down into my view.

*   *   *

THE MUCK betrayed him. His feet slid out from under him and he sprawled. The machine pistol slid out of his hand into the mud, jamming itself muzzle-first with the handle protruding at an angle.

I took a pace toward him and spoke in Russian: “Be still.”

He froze. His face came around — a big flat Mongol face, the face of a Siberian Tatar Cossack.

I trained the carbine on him. “Take it easy, Tovarich.” But my heart pounded. His face was preternatural, terrifying. His dark eyes burned at me. Then they flicked toward the machine pistol just beyond the reach of his long powerful arms.