65 Below (11 page)

The two men glared into each other’s eyes.

Krisler spoke. “Well, sir, I’ve got to be getting back to my seminar. Paid a lot of money to get here, you know, and they’re talking about a new technique for skinning and stuffing those little weasel-like creatures today.” He winked devilishly at the girl and added as he walked away, “Tell Louise I said hello. We’ll have to get together at your convenience once we get back.”

As he stepped down the hallway, he heard Connie speak to Sloan. “Who is Louise?”

“She’s my secretary. Let’s go get a drink.”

So Krisler had no problem getting, among other things, the most prime trap line in the interior of the state authorized for the rest of his final tour in the Air Force.

Marcus entered the snow-covered forest trail via an open space about six feet wide that was packed by regular snowmobile use. The trail snaked through the spruce, birch, alder, and willow in a meandering fashion. About a mile down the trail from Johnson Road, the first of the bright yellow ribbon trap markers hung loosely on a snow-laden branch of a low-slung spruce tree. Marcus halted his snowmobile and raised the bright beam of a large halogen spotlight to the base of the tree from which the ribbon drooped.

A roundish, medium-brown furry shape lay motionless in the snow beneath the canopy of branches. Marcus dismounted the idling vehicle and waded through a powdery sea of thigh-deep snow over to the creature.

It was a marmot, a species of large groundhog that normally hibernates through the winter. The animal had probably been fooled into waking up by the recent warmer temperatures, and it had gone out for a stretch. The dead creature’s mouth hung open, exposing yellow buckteeth and its tongue, which glittered with ice crystals. The body was frozen solid as stone.

“Well, my little friend,” muttered Marcus through the white neoprene Gator face-covering he wore to keep the chill air from freezing his lungs, “looks like you should’ve stayed in bed.”

Marcus tossed the stiff, frozen carcass into the back of the long sled, then took off for the next trap about a quarter of a mile down the trail. He arrived to find that it was empty. He remounted the snowmobile and kept going. The next several snares had various creatures in them, followed by a number of empty traps. The pattern continued throughout the morning as he moved along the trail collecting a variety of animals. The prizes consisted mainly of fox and rabbit, with the singular addition of the first marmot. There was also one fair-sized lynx that, unlike the relatively cheap fox and rabbit pelts, would make some good money for his friend Krisler.

Dawn rose gracefully over the arctic landscape. The snow-covered spruce trees pointed skyward, their branches laden with impossibly heavy looking mounds of drooping snow, like white icing on a thickly frosted cake. The scene looked like a surreal painting on a picture postcard. If seen in an image online or in a magazine, people outside Alaska would find it hard to believe that this was an actual place.

As Marcus moved along the trail, he passed a series of unnatural-looking mounds. The hexagonally shaped hills were a group of abandoned military ruins that had at one time been nuclear missile bunkers. The area was studded with the former secret installations of Cold War-era Nike missiles that had been pointed over the pole toward the Soviet Union from the fifties until the fall of the “Evil Empire” in the late eighties.

Now, long abandoned in lieu of changing threat scenarios and newer technology, the bunkers that had housed masses of cylindrical devices that could have wiped earth of humanity a thousand times over were covered in leafless, frozen vegetation consisting mostly of spreading willow and tangled alder. In spite of the snow and vegetation, the bunker’s general shape was still visible beneath the snow, like an ancient monument to war hidden in the forest.

1. Chapter 9
   

At noon, Marcus stopped for a break to eat some lunch. After satisfying the hunger pangs in his stomach with a hot MRE meal pack, he lay back on the long seat of the snowmobile, set his feet on the pile of gear in the sled, and closed his eyes for a short nap.

Deep sleep fell on him within minutes. Random dream images passed through his mind. Lonnie appeared before him, pleading for forgiveness and then weeping as she looked at his tombstone. He saw the faces of his mates from the Royal Marines and other friends with whom he had served over the years. He heard the voice of Captain Mike Farris, a Recon Marine who went on to become a pastor. Mojo, you’ve got to let it go…let it go …let it go…

Lonnie weeping. Marcus's mother in a hospital bed. His father lying face down in the snow.

Suddenly Marcus lurched back to the conscious world with a jolt. The dream evaporated as his right hand instantly yanked the Springfield from its scabbard next to his head. The rifle slid quickly out of the padded tube as he rolled off the machine and assumed a defensive posture behind the cover of the seat pad. Twenty years of fighting and killing had honed his reflexes to the point that such maneuvers required no thought—they just happened, sometimes subconsciously.

What had caused him to leap into action?

He thought for a moment, listening in silence.

There had been a sound of some kind—a sharp, metallic sound. He had only briefly caught it in that moment between sleep and consciousness, but it had been there.

Metal, like a shovel or a pick.

He listened more, but heard nothing.

Hmmm. Must be a maintenance crew from base doing some work. Man, am I jumpy.

Just as he was about to dismiss it, the sound came back. It was a short burst of clinking and scraping. It reverberated through the empty wilderness in the distance.

Then he heard voices. Several men’s voices spoke briskly from far away. The snow muted their words beyond understanding. Marcus decided he would take a look to see who they were and what they were doing.

He strapped on snowshoes over his bulbous white military surplus bunny boots and went to the sled, to his backpack. He took the Zeiss high-powered binoculars out of his pack and stuffed them into the chest pocket of his parka. He reached into his bag and grabbed a large, white linen hooded over-coat, which he pulled on around his parka.

The sheet-like material covered him down to his thighs. The plain white covering rendered every part of him above the knees almost invisible against the background of virgin snow that lay over everything in sight.

Marcus left the rest of his gear and set off in the direction of the voices, directly northwest of the trail. The metallic clinking and scraping had become rhythmic. It sounded as if someone were trying to dig through concrete with a pickaxe. Every so many beats, there was a solid, stone-like crack, then the metallic sound resumed, beating the same rhythm.

Realizing that if they were military personnel they may not graciously accept the idea of a civilian coming up on the work they were doing, Marcus would verify who they were before walking into their area. It would also be good stalking practice. He hadn’t needed to sneak through snow for a long time, and this gave him a good opportunity to make sure he kept that skill up to par.

If they were friendly looking, he would approach them. If they or their work seemed like something that ought not to be disturbed, he would simply fade back into the wilderness.

Marcus stealthily moved forward until he was able to make out the voices more clearly. He stopped, crouched in the snow, and sat still. He relaxed his body to get his breathing under control. He concentrated intently on identifying what he heard. As he sat in the quiet of the forest, a nervous trepidation crept over him. Some of the voices occasionally spoke loudly, calling out an order to someone else.

When he drew closer, Marcus’s ears picked up details of their voices, their tones, inflections, and sounds. They were not speaking English. It took several seconds before his mind adjusted and he recognized the language of the speakers—Korean. At first he did not recognize the dialect.

Marcus had been stationed in South Korea off and on throughout his career, and in the early nineties had done a one-year exchange tour with the South Korean ROK Marines, one of the toughest organizations he had ever encountered. The ROK Marines performed almost weekly raids into North Korean territory; often snatch & grabs or psy-ops missions, during which they would attempt to kidnap an enemy soldier, or simply slit the throat of every third man in a barracks while they slept in their beds, then slink back across the border in the darkness.

Initially, Marcus thought they were South Korean soldiers on a training exercise, but something sounded strange. The way they talked, and some of the words they used—their grammar did not follow the South Korean speech patterns he remembered. The words rose and fell to the wrong rhythm. Inflections rose when they should’ve fallen, too much accent on certain syllables and sounds. The voices spoke openly in the forest fifty yards ahead of him. Marcus suddenly recognized their accent. Alarms went off in his brain.

They were North Korean.

Marcus’s mind shifted to a tactical bearing. Whoever these men were, it was unlikely they belonged here. He lowered himself deeper into the snow and moved carefully forward to investigate.

If these were North Korean soldiers, they were probably special operations. They would have guards posted, snipers.

Thirty yards from the source of the voices, Marcus knelt low in the snow. He stayed motionless for several minutes. From an observation post somewhere nearby, a soldier was watching the forest. Before he could move any further, Marcus had to find that guard.

Marcus scanned the area slowly with his binoculars from right to left and back again. As he made the second sweep, he found what he was looking for. A wisp of steam floated from within a small mound forty yards to his left and halfway between him and what sounded like the main party. He watched the mound and saw the steam rise again, highlighted against the dark gray and brown of the stark vegetation. It was the breath of a man.

He stared intently through his binoculars at the ground beneath the misty fingers that slowly rose from the snow-covered forest floor and found what he was looking for—an angular black object, dull and metallic. The front sight of a rifle, a Kalashnikov, became barely visible amidst a shadowy tangle of dark twigs covered in dollops of snow.

It was a good sniper hide. Marcus had been lucky that he came from the angle he did as he approached the site. He was only barely out of the soldier’s field of view.

He crept stealthily past the sniper, even keener to any and every noise and movement in the wintry forest. The sounds of the arctic wilderness in winter have a different quality to them than in summer. Snow muffles some sounds, while the hard, frozen trees and rivers may echo others loudly. What sounds like someone walking in the distance, may turn out to be one’s own footsteps reverberating between the trees.

Marcus rose silently and moved through the forest landscape with absolute skill and natural talent, as one both born in the forest and trained as a warrior.

As he drew near the source of the voices, he could clearly hear their brisk conversation. He crouched low and skirted the area until he had moved behind a stand of willows. The cluster of thin, straight branches burst up and out from the snow atop a small rise that looked twenty yards down into the area of the voices.

Through the tight clump of leafless sticks, Marcus could make out half a
dozen
men surrounding a hole in the ground, around which the snow had been cleared away. Piles of gear were laid out in an organized fashion. There was another man in the hole looking down and talking. All of the men were armed with folding stock AK-74 assault rifles, side arms visible.

Marcus took up the binoculars and looked closer. The six men around the hole were leaning over, looking down into it and commenting to one another. A second man stood up inside the hole and gave directions to the group above. One of them ran to a pile of equipment and brought back a black metal crow bar.

One of the men outside the hole put a radio up to his mouth and spoke. Marcus saw
movement
out the corner of his eye, about thirty yards away to the northwest of the hole. He turned his binoculars in the direction. Another man, a white smock over his clothing, strode into main group, holding two rabbits up by their ears.

One of the men down by the hole shouted. “Aigo!
Chungshi Dongmun! Toki kachua! Toki do mashiso!”

The men started clapping their hands and exclaiming how delicious the rabbits would be for their dinner. As he came down, the man with the radio put it back up to his mouth and spoke. There were now nine men that Marcus could see—the sniper he had passed, and probably two or three more out on guard posts.

As he observed the men, there was a sudden burst of excitement in the hole. The one who had ordered the crowbar stood up and shouted to the others. All but two of them ran back to the hole. The other two discussed how to prepare a meal of the rabbits. Marcus understood enough of the conversation to form a strong idea of what they were talking about.

“Bali! Hurry up! This is it! We’re almost in! Come here and help pull this metal cover off! Bali!”

Ropes were lowered into the hole. Five men on top tugged with extreme exertion against whatever was down there. After a full minute of strained pulling, there was a metallic crack, like a broken bell being rung, and the five men moved backwards, pulling their load to the surface.

Over the side of the hole rose what looked like a several-hundred-pound sheet of steel, about three-by-three feet square and more than an inch thick. After setting it down, the men looked into the hole. One of the men stood up with an expression of frustration wrinkling his face.

“Aigo! More concrete and rebar! These Migook don’t want anyone getting into this bunker. We will keep digging until we get through the crack. We know it is less than half a meter thick.”

“Captain Park,” said one of the soldiers. “Let me trade places with you for a while. I am ready for more digging.”