Star Chamber Brotherhood (19 page)

For the first time in many months, Werner had the feeling of being completely alone. On a whim, he looked for an opening in the fence along Boston Common and entered the dimly lit park. Taking shelter under a massive oak, he bowed his head and folded his hands in a way that was long unfamiliar to him.

“I need your help,” he began in a soft undertone. “I don’t see a way to do what’s being asked of me. Just how am I supposed to pull it off? If you really want me to do this thing, could you give me a sign? Just show me the next step or two and I’ll take it from there. After all, this is your plan, not mine. I didn’t request any of it. All I ask is this: show me the way. Please. Amen.”
 

Chapter 11

Flashback: Mid-April, 2026
Mactung Mine, Yukon Territory

The twilight sky appeared a sickly yellow-orange in the glare of the sodium vapor lights surrounding the entrance to the Mactung mine and its nearby tungsten mill. In the frigid air of the Mackenzie Mountains, the clouds of steam rising from the facility gave the place a hellish tinge, as if the depths of the earth were smoldering beneath it.

A guard in a winter camouflage jumpsuit shouted at the prisoner heading the formation. A few meters behind, Werner turned to look back at the mine entrance. He and the other three dozen prisoners had just finished their twelve-hour shift and were headed up the hill back to the fenced enclosure, where the prisoners lived across the road from the miners’ barracks and engineers’ apartments.

The mine’s civilian staff, which included managers, engineers, geologists, assayers, mine and mill supervisors, and most of the equipment operators, worked on three-week shifts, flying in and out from the Macmillan Pass Airstrip. But the prisoners, nearly all of whom worked underground as miners, drillers, mill laborers, and maintenance workers, worked continuously, with only a half day off on Sundays. Officially they were not Mactung employees, but contract workers on loan from the Corrective Labor Administration’s W74 camp, named after the element tungsten, or wolframite, for which W is the chemical symbol and which occupies position 74 in the periodic table.
 

In reality, however, the prisoners they were slave labor and their wages were remitted to the CLA to the state, which remained responsible for their custody and maintenance. Werner’s shift ran from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Upon completing their work, the men were marched directly to the dining hall where they were allowed one hour to eat before returning to their barracks. After another hour the lights were put out. Owing to the long workday and the strenuous nature of their labor, most prisoners used their hour of leisure to do personal chores, read, socialize, or play cards. When the lights went out, nearly all fell asleep within minutes, except for a few young and exceptionally energetic prisoners, who continued to talk or play cards by the light of a pilfered flashlight or miner’s headlamp.

Tonight Werner’s dinner was a starchy stew fortified with caribou meat shot by one of the geologists and given to the prison camp as a humanitarian gesture. But for the frequent supplements of game meat, the nutritional content of the prisoners’ rations would not likely have sufficed to meet the requirements of their hard labor in the mine and the arctic climate.

After dinner, Werner sat on his bunk and watched the wraithlike prisoners around him prepare for bed. With few exceptions, they did not talk to each other or even look each other in the eye, unless it was in pique at some petty infringement of their personal space or some other imagined or bygone offense. As Werner had come to learn since arriving at W74, when men have been reduced to the level of naked survival, camaraderie or civility cannot endure. Under such inhuman conditions, even the strongest human ties erode and dissolve in the solvent of animal instinct.
 

Tonight, however, Werner felt neither empathy nor antipathy toward his fellow prisoners. He was beyond feeling. All that remained was a curiosity about the meaning of it all. How had it come to this? Despite his best efforts, his options had been reduced to two: die or stay alive long enough for his luck to change. Beyond those two choices, his fate was no longer in his hands.

Yet now Werner could no longer deny that his life force was dwindling away. At the time of his arrest in Boston he had weighed in at 220 pounds. Upon his transfer to the Yukon after the Kamas revolt, he was still lean and strong at 185. Though his barracks lacked a scale, Werner now doubted that he weighed much more than 160 and felt his legs and arms weaken perceptibly day by day.

The prisoners at W74 hailed from all over the United States and Canada, plus some POWs from China, the Middle East, and Russia, and they represented a wide variety of backgrounds and occupations. The one thing they had in common was the reason for their arrest—political or security-related offenses—and for this they had been singled out even within the labor camp system.
 

Those who remained outspoken against the Unionist Regime became targets for special abuse. Since they were considered incapable of rehabilitation or reentry into society, regardless of their original sentences, the regime found reasons to extend their release dates, so that it appeared hopelessly out of reach. For such prisoners, including Werner, capitulation, escape, death, or dogged survival long enough to outlast the regime were the only options.

On this frigid Yukon night in the cruel Arctic wasteland, Werner’s faith in his power to survive was close to collapse. Unless something happened soon to change his fate, he would expire one day while carrying a heavy load or climbing a ladder. Or perhaps he would simply fail to wake up in the morning. Or he might grow sick and be sent to the dispensary, where a nurse would euthanize him under the guise of treatment if he failed to recover within a week of admission. Werner recalled Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief, and realized that he was long past denial, anger, and bargaining, instead moving rapidly from depression into acceptance.

Frank Werner had been in the camp system long enough to know that, though the system itself was a crime against humanity, not every person in the DSS or the CLA was evil. Rather than hate them as a class, he preferred not to think of such people at all, and would sooner forgive even a monster like Whiting or Rocco than take revenge against either one of them. In the three years since his arrest, he had come to learn that life demands a steady movement forward to sustain itself and that hatred tends to retard it. So the wistfulness he felt about the end of his life was mainly over what he had failed to do, and not what had been done to him.
 

Werner removed from an inside pocket in his jumpsuit a chunk of bread that he had saved from dinner. He tore off a bite-sized morsel and let it dissolve in his mouth. This was his favorite moment in the day, one of the few when he was not hungry and could take the time to savor his food. He had torn off another morsel and had opened his mouth when he felt a powerful hand snatch the chunk of bread from him. It was a lithe, rail-thin, Hispanic youth who slept at the far end of the barracks with a dozen or more other young prisoners functioning as a gang. Werner watched him scurry off to the safety of his corner, bread in hand. Normally, Werner’s adrenaline would have impelled him to chase the thief down and recover the stolen food, but tonight he just let it happen.

To allow such a thing was not healthy, he told himself. This was the behavior pattern of a last-legger, who sees his end approaching, and not long after stops talking, stops eating, barely goes through the motions at work, and then one day gives away his most prized possessions, even his last reserves of food. When others saw this, they would either shun the last-legger out of superstitious fear, or they’d exploit him without mercy, closing in to take the man’s last stash of food or smokes or spare socks, or brazenly steal the boots and socks right off his feet. Was his own decline already so obvious that it had prompted someone to steal his bread?

Without thinking, Werner’s hand darted inside his coveralls to probe the other inside pocket for the carefully wrapped GI-ration chocolate bar that a soldier had tossed to him from a truck while on the North Canol Road a few months before. Since then, he had preserved the chocolate and turned to it for reassurance like a talisman whenever his spirits were low. To eat it would be pure bliss. To even think of eating it was normally sufficient to help him climb out of a depression.
 

If ever there were a time when he might feel compelled to take a piece, it was now. But upon considering it, Werner realized that he had no appetite. For the first time he could recall, he did not crave the chocolate. Okay, he thought, he wouldn’t eat it just now. But what if he never got the craving back and something happened to him first? It would be a crime to waste the chocolate. Yet he had no friends left to whom he would want to give it.

The overhead lights flickered three times, marking the two-minute signal before lights out. Werner felt compelled to decide about the chocolate now, before darkness fell and someone attempted to steal it. The decision loomed large before him and represented a sort of divide between survivor and last-legger. He brought the bar halfway out of the pocket and glanced surreptitiously inside his jumpsuit. Why was it so hard to decide?

All at once Werner had the sense that someone was coming up behind him. He wheeled around and was startled to see another prisoner of about his own age approach from the next bunk. Though the man’s face looked familiar, he could not recall where he had seen it before.

“What’s the matter, Frank, don’t you recognize me anymore?” the man asked with the tolerant smile of a friend.

Werner looked at him and wondered if his brain had ceased to function properly. He could see the stranger’s face but it seemed somehow out of place; he could not fit it into his usual frame of reference. The man was only slightly shorter than he and was barrel-chested and thick-shouldered, yet trim at the waist. By his receding hairline and weathered complexion, Werner judged him to be nearly his own age. His eyes showed the spark of intelligence and in them Werner detected humor, self-assurance, and a complete lack of fear.

“Don’t you remember our time at Kamas?” the stranger probed gently. “In the brickyard. We worked on the same team for a while, remember?”

Werner could picture the brickyard and he could picture the man as younger, stronger, and more tanned. They had indeed worked together recycling used bricks.
 

“ Dave Lewis?” Werner responded with the barest trace of a smile. “My God, what are you doing here at Mactung?”

“I’ve been here as long as you have, Frank. Don’t you remember the hike along the North Canol Road from N312? I’m bunking on a different floor now and we’ve been working different shifts, so we haven’t crossed paths much lately, but I still keep an eye out for you. Actually, I came to see you because I saw you earlier and had a bad feeling about you. Really, Frank, you don’t look so hot. Are you feeling okay?”

“Oh, I’m a little tired, I suppose,” Werner lied reflexively. “End of the day, you know. But I’ll be okay in the morning. I always am. You’ll see.”

“You were never a good liar, Frank. I saw you with that chocolate bar and I could sense what you were thinking: ‘Do I eat it or do I give it away?’ That’s not healthy, Frank. That bar is yours to hold onto until you walk out of here. You always said it’s going to be your freedom celebration. And it still is. Mark my words.”

“And when will that be, Dave?” Werner replied irritably. “A man doesn’t last forever up here, you know. Drilling is hard work. Damned hard for an old man like me. I thought I was done with manual labor forty years ago.”
 

Lewis sat on the bunk close to Werner and continued softly.

“Actually, Frank, there’s a very good chance that you will be done with it soon, and not the way you may expect. I have some important news, and I wanted you to be the first to know, considering your—”

At that moment the lights went dark and Werner heard the solid thud of the door being bolted shut from outside. In a far corner of the barracks, the young Hispanic prisoners continued their card game illuminated by the bluish light of an LED lamp. Werner’s nearest bunkmates were among them, leaving the two older men alone.

“Considering my what?” Werner demanded.

“Oh, never mind, Frank. My point is that there’s another amnesty coming, much like the one three years ago. And when they announce it, they’re also going to announce the mothballing of the underground tungsten mines that use prison labor. Since the Chinese started selling tungsten again, the world price has crashed and the underground mines up here have become uneconomical. Only the open pit operations will continue operating. The Mactung mine will go on shutdown by the end of this week.”

Werner kept listening, although he wasn’t sure he should believe a word of it.
 

“But here’s where it gets interesting,” Lewis went on. “Most of the prisoners are being sent back to N312 for reassignment to other northern labor sites. But—get this—those who qualify for the amnesty will be sent to the Lower 48 to be processed for release.
For release
!”
 

“That amnesty rumor has been around for months, Dave,” Werner challenged. “Even if it were true, how could it possibly apply to us? The DSS wouldn’t amnesty a Kamas rebel in a thousand years. What possible difference does it make if we die here at Mactung or in some other frozen hole?”

“Listen closely, Frank,” Lewis continued in an encouraging voice. “Something quite remarkable has happened and, as far as I know, it may only affect you and me, since we’re just about the only Kamas rebels left at W74. Don’t ask me how I know this, but after Rocco brought the tanks into Kamas to crush the revolt, he was desperate to cover up what had happened, just in case somebody higher up had second thoughts about it. So when he rounded up the rebel leadership and packed us off to the Yukon, his goal was to make us all disappear. And apparently, he had the bright idea of sending us north with empty transfer files. That meant the new camp commandants would not accountable for us and could do whatever they wanted.” Meanwhile, back in Washington, Rocco’s backers purged the DSS and CLA security files for all the Kamas rebels, dead or alive, back to the date of their arrest. So if a relative inquired about any of us, the official story was that there was no record of the prisoner having ever been in DSS custody. And if anyone inquired about a revolt at Kamas, the story was that the camp closed long before the revolt could have happened.