Fedin called out to Lieutenant Zamyatin that it was time to get up. Vendulka, or Vennie, Zamyatin was a Russian Navy medical officer who'd been on secondment aboard HMS Fearless, the British helicopter carrier, when it was destroyed by the Transition. Now she was one of only eighteen survivors. She emerged from the small room where they'd built three sets of primitive bunk beds, rubbing her eyes and yawning.
The last member of Ivanov's squad, a Turkic-speaking Russian Navy diver, came off the Australian Light Littoral Assault Ship Ipswich. Petty Officer Victor Abizad was still sleeping in the bunkroom, adding his snores to those of Mr. Kim.
As Fedin disappeared into the bunkroom for a quick nap, Zamyatin poured a coffee from the pot atop the camp stove and took his place in front of the displays.
"Josep and Peter are just passing the fourth POD," she announced.
Ivanov grunted in acknowledgement. He busied himself with packing the supplies he and Fedin would need for the thirty-mile hike to the nearest camp just outside Ust Maisk, on the river Aldan. They would lie up and observe the camp for three days before returning. Mr. Kim said that at least a thousand prisoners were being held there under the control of the Ministries of Coal Production and Forests. Many were lowly draftees, caught up in the purge of their units by the NKVD. At least eighty to a hundred, however, were officers. They were being held in a separate compound just outside the main camp. Signal intercepts indicated that they came from a division that had openly rebelled when the NKVD had arrived with orders to detain three quarters of the staff officers on the charge of crimes against the state.
The men were doing punishing physical work in the coal mines of the Lena Basin, living in the most primitive accommodation, on starvation rations, with no medical care. They would not survive the winter. Ivanov's team had traveled to the ends of the earth to find these men, and to liberate them. He and Admiral Kolhammer hoped they would form the nucleus of a Russian resistance.
11
While Julia Duffy was growing up, having received a good deal of her education from popular media, she assumed that the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH, was born in the Korean War.
In fact, the idea of a self-contained medical unit, performing surgery and providing postoperative care immediately behind the front line, was a child of the Second World War. The first MASH units were established in August 1945. Or they would have been.
Duffy drove into the 8066th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in early October 1942, not in Korea, but about a hundred kilometers north of Brisbane, Australia. It looked just as she expected from all those years of watching syndicated reruns on TV: the khaki tents and ramshackle huts made of corrugated iron and ply board, the odd assortment of harried-looking medicos, the sense of barely controlled chaos as waves of casualties arrived on litters. It even boasted a helipad, on a hill cleared of vegetation, just up from a big open area that served as a triage point. The seasons were turning to summer in the southern hemisphere, drying everything out, so that some days she felt as if the air itself might just catch alight. The MASH unit was caked in a fine red dust, stirred up by passing choppers.
There were only nine dedicated medevac choppers in this theater, however, so they tended to fly in only the most critical cases. Marine Sergeant Arthur Snider definitely wasn't critical. He might yet lose his leg, but his life wasn't in grave danger.
His company CO had shoved him onto a Blackhawk that was dusting off five of his comrades who did need to get onto an operating table, and inside of fifteen minutes if they were going to pull through. Those who did survive would do so thanks to Snider, who was the toast of his unit for rallying the counterambush back on Hill 178.
Julia Duffy arrived about an hour and half after Snider, determined to get an interview. She had a shit-hot story to relay back to New York, via Rosanna in Hawaii, if she could just find this guy for an interview.
Her jeep slewed to a halt in a cloud of red dust in front of the hospital's postop ward. She thanked the driver and hopped down, heaving her backpack, Sonycam rig, and machine pistol. She waved away an Australian nurse who came running at her with a horrified look on her lumpy 1940s face. Julia was still matted with gore and filth from the fight back on the line. Her reactive-matrix armor was so heavily caked with blood and mud that she could feel it stiffening up in the warm spring sunlight.
The nurse kept coming. "Are you okay, young man?" she cried out.
Julia eased off her helmet, shaking her hair free.
"Oh!" said the nurse. "I see. You're one of them."
The reporter couldn't help but smile. It was a thin, wan shadow of a smile that peeked out from under the adrenaline backwash and deep body revulsion with which she was so familiar-but a smile nonetheless.
"That's right," she said. "My name's Duffy. I'm looking for a marine corps sergeant, a 'temp, would have come in about ninety minutes ago. Leg wound. Got clipped up on One-seventy-eight in that big ambush this morning."
The woman brightened up considerably. "Oh, you mean Sergeant Snider!" She beamed. "He's still waiting to go into surgery. They say he saved his whole company. There's a Movietone cameraman coming to film him tonight."
"Is there?" Julia said. "Well, I was up on One-seventy-eight myself, this morning, Nurse… Halligan," she continued, reading the woman's name tag. "Do you think I could talk to him?"
Nurse Halligan seemed to consider Julia in a new light now. She took in the befouled armor and the futuristic machine gun; the fighting knife that was still covered in dried, blackened blood; the bandaged hand and the field sutures that had reattached a flap of bruised skin on her left cheek. "Are you one of those special soldiers, Miss Duffy?"
"Actually, I'm a reporter, ma'am. For the New York Times. Normally embedded with the Eighty-second MEU." She hoisted the Sonycam. "But I was on assignment filming the sergeant's platoon this morning. I'd very much like to talk to him now, if I could."
Not for the first time was Julia interested to see the wonder, and even a touch of dread, that so often came over contemporary women when they met their counterparts from the next century. More important, this one displayed no hint of the guarded response that might have characterized a more media-aware individual from her own time.
"Well, it's not usual, but I suppose, if you were with him this morning… of course, of course, just follow me."
For just a moment, Julia allowed herself to enjoy the warmth of the sun on her face, even if that face presented a savage mask to this other woman. She threw the backpack over one shoulder, her MP-5 over the other, and hung the powered-down helmet from an eyehook on her web belt. She then detached the little Sonycam, checked the battery and lattice memory, and slipped her fingers through the hand strap as she followed Nurse Halligan to one of the big preop centers. The Sonycam was little bigger than a pack of cigarettes, and sat quite comfortably in her palm. She wet a fingertip to wipe away a bloody smear that was obscuring part of the lens.
Turned out, the 8066 was a big facility. It looked like it could handle a lot of death and trauma. Julia estimated that they could probably deal with a surge of a thousand or more cases-say, a couple of shattered battalions. She made a mental note to grab a few stats and some background on the unit before she left. There might even be a good feature in it, especially if nobody else had thought to cover the premature birth of the MASH concept.