Forty Days at Kamas (36 page)

By the time our shift ended, the Security Department had counted more than a dozen such breaches along the entire length of the camp's perimeter wall. Peering through the breaches at ground level, we could see that State Security troops had erected their own sandbag barricades opposite ours, complete with machine–gun emplacements. None of us had any doubt that the main purpose of these breaches was to facilitate an assault on the camp.

For several hours that morning, our military and security people deliberated over countermeasures. By noon, they had decided to dismantle the remaining sections of interior wall separating the camp divisions from one another and to use the materials to erect a second perimeter wall of lower height just inside the main wall. As soon as Colonel Majors approved the plan, construction crews set to work.

While they did, the Military Department dispatched additional defense platoons to the inner wall while the Security Department assigned extra sentry coverage. At each security post and defensive position hung a short length of steel rail to ring like a gong in case of attack. Men assigned to defend the breaches were keenly aware that they would be the camp's first line of defense and would confront automatic weapons with little more than swords, pikes, and stones. Even those who initially balked at such a matchup, however, soon adjusted to it and before long took perverse pride in the long odds they faced.

I left the Service Yard at midday to eat lunch, then made my twice–weekly visit to the dispensary to change the dressings on my hands. On my way to the reception window, I noticed a middle–aged couple sitting quietly in a corner. I recognized the man as Earl Cunningham, the Montana rancher whom I had met in the same waiting room nearly three weeks before. Beside him was a frail–looking woman of about sixty, with a gaunt, angular face and limp black hair streaked with gray that fell loose to her shoulders.

I walked over to Cunningham and greeted him.

Cunningham rose to shake my hand, then introduced me to his wife, Irene. I held out my hand and she took it without speaking or making eye contact. Her hand was cold and her grip was feeble.

"Irene's not quite herself," Earl explained. "I found her in a section of the women's camp set aside for invalids. It seems she had a stroke right before Christmas. She doesn't even know who I am."

His voice thickened and he choked back tears.

We sat in silence a few moments longer before the receptionist called my name. I entered the treatment area and in a few minutes Gwen appeared through the curtain that marked off the chronic care ward. Her eyes were red and puffy and her hair unkempt without the gauze ribbon that usually held it in place. She seemed preoccupied and sat down across from me without saying a word.

"Jon sends his greetings," I told her as she reached out to take my bandaged right hand. "He's doing great."

"I’m happy for him," she answered without enthusiasm. She picked up a pair of scissors and cut away the bandage.

"Is there something wrong?" I asked. "You don't seem well."

"Just tired. I’ve been on the night shift and haven't had much sleep."

She examined the wound and began cleaning it with alcohol.

"Are you sure that's all it is?"

"I'm not sure of anything anymore," she answered dully.

She gave me back my right hand and reached out to take the left.

"Is it Jon?" I asked. "Has he visited you since he moved into the barracks?"

"He's visited," Gwen replied irritably as she cut away the bandage on my left hand. "It's just that his leaving made me see what a mess I've made of my life. For years it's been one stupid mistake after another. I don't see any way out of it."

"There's always a way, Gwen. But first you have to decide where you want to be."

"Right now, anyplace would be better than where I am," she said.

Her eyes met mine for an instant and then she looked down again at her lap, where she finished disinfecting my hand and wrapped it with gauze.

"If you want to leave the dispensary, I'm sure they could use your help in one of the other departments…"

She shook her head.

"I don't give a flying hoot about your revolt. I just want to get out of Kamas and start over somewhere else."

Gwen applied the final piece of adhesive tape to my bandage. Before I could think of anything to say, Gwen's eyes told me she was beyond reach.

After leaving the dispensary I returned to the barracks for a nap before dinner. I had just risen and was preparing to leave for the mess hall when I heard distant shouts and whistles and the banging of steel on steel that signified an attack had begun. I ran toward the Service Yard and climbed to the roof of the warehouse that was my observation post.

Jon Merrill was already there, watching the gaps in the wall and giving a detailed description of the action to a messenger from the command post. He explained to me that the enemy had moved a platoon of Tommy gunners into two of the four newly created gaps in the perimeter wall.

Through the gaps I could see a training facility that lay just outside the camp perimeter. Its second–floor verandah was packed with high–ranking police, military, and State Security officers spying on us through binoculars, telescopes, and enormous telephoto lenses. I borrowed a pair of binoculars from Jon Merrill and stared back at them, spotting Fred Rocco, Doug Chambers, General Boscov, and Colonel Tracy among the crowd. They appeared to be watching the reactions of our defenders to their side’s probes. Their men would advance just far enough through the breach to lure our men out from behind their barricades and then their men would retreat behind the wall.

Meanwhile, the video cameras turned and the still cameras captured the fierce postures of our primitively armed fighters. The officers laughed heartily from the safety of their distant balcony, delighting in the bizarre spectacle of impassioned savages confronting their civilized and well–armed opponents.

Suddenly Jon Merrill tugged at my sleeve and pointed to the gate at the far left of the Service Yard. There a squad of Tommy gunners charged from behind the gap in the wall and held their ground as a squad of warders rushed in from behind them to storm our barricades. The Tommy gunners leveled their weapons, ready to offer covering fire to the warders, who used hooks, nets, and lassos to capture our defenders as if they were hunting wild animals.

If the warders were counting on taking a few defenders back for interrogation, however, they were thwarted in this and nearly lost a few men of their own. As it happened, our defenders included elite troops skilled in hand–to–hand combat. Seeing the warders advance without firearms, our troops charged them, whirling and kicking and punching furiously and inflicting worse damage than the attackers had expected. The Tommy gunners resorted to firing over the heads of our men to cover the warders’ escape. They continued to play a game of cat and mouse this way for nearly another hour.

During this final hour of probing, the enemy introduced another tactic that they would use repeatedly in the days to come. They broadcast an appeal for deserters, using loudspeakers mounted on the watchtowers to the east and west of the Service Yard. The appeal varied little each time it was broadcast and generally employed a script similar to the following:

"Prisoners, come to your senses! Don't let the mutineers use you to put off their day of reckoning. Leave the camp now. No unarmed prisoner who approaches the gates will be fired upon. If you come out now you will be treated fairly and will not be charged with mutiny. Drop your weapons and walk past the barricades to the gaps…"

At first many of the prisoners who heard this message were confused. A few closet Unionists seemed sorely tempted to run for the gates but hesitated for fear of being cut down from behind. Within twenty minutes of the first appeal for deserters, however, Glenn Reineke announced over our own loudspeakers that anyone who trusted State Security to make good on its pledge was more than free to leave. He ordered our defenders to hold no one back from deserting. Once we knew we could leave at any time, the sense of urgency disappeared. Not a single prisoner deserted that day.

Seeing that the gambit had failed, the Tommy gunners withdrew and the high–ranking spectators packed their cameras and departed in their vans. But we knew they would be back. The conflict had simply entered a new phase.

C
HAPTER
35

"One day Larisa Fedorovna went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street at that time. She vanished without a trace and probably died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards got mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women's concentration camps in the north."
—Boris Pasternak,
Doctor Zhivago

MONDAY, JUNE 7

DAY 23

Over the weekend every able–bodied supporter of the revolt turned out to work on the massive project of tearing down the interior walls between the divisions and using the rubble to build a new inner perimeter wall. The new wall was set back about fifteen yards from the original and was given added height and thickness where it faced breaches exposing us to gunfire from outside.

All day long while the construction crews worked, the camp bosses broadcast propaganda messages from their network of loudspeakers surrounding the camp. They broadcast live speeches by the Warden and by visiting brass hats. They broadcast recorded speeches by the late President–for–Life and by other Unionist leaders. They even broadcast prerecorded interviews with ordinary citizens of Heber and the Kamas Valley, apparently to impress upon us that we could expect no sympathy from the local population.

In response, Ralph Knopfler's Information Department redirected our own loudspeakers outward to tell our side of the story to the guards and to the troops surrounding the camp. Before long, each side resorted to jamming the other side's messages through simultaneous broadcasting, with the result that the air was filled with unintelligible noise played at earsplitting volume, sometimes well into the night.

On Sunday our Information Department tried a new trick: tying bundles of crude propaganda leaflets to kites and releasing the leaflets as soon as they were over enemy positions. After the first few bundles hit their targets, State Security officers rode across the hills on motorcycles to intercept the leaflets the moment a kite soared above the perimeter wall. We never learned whether the leaflets persuaded any guards or troops to soften their attitudes toward us but we could be sure that the leaflets threatened the bosses when the guards began firing machine guns at the kites. When bullets did not succeed in bringing down the kites, security officers sent up attack kites to tangle strings with ours and bring them down that way.

At breakfast on Monday morning, Ralph Knopfler predicted that the Technical Department would soon have a radio transmitter with sufficient power to reach Mexico City. According to Jerry Lee, the Information Department was busy writing radio scripts aimed at attracting international attention to Kamas.

D.J. Schultz, who sat with us, scoffed at the idea that publicizing the Kamas revolt would have any impact at all on our opponents.

"You could reach every country in the world and raise protests from all of them without making the slightest dent in the bosses' thick skulls," D.J. declared. "The Unionists don't respect public opinion. All they respect is force. And who's going to send troops or planes against Washington over the likes of us?"

"There are other ways of getting to them besides force," Knopfler argued. "There's economic pressure and diplomatic pressure. The Unionists need plenty of things from overseas that the free countries can cut off."

"I'll believe it when I see it," D.J. replied. "Which countries stood up to those bastards when they bombed civilian targets during the Events? Who stood in the way when they invaded Mexico and Canada? Who raised hell when the Unionists executed politicals by the thousands and sent their families to death camps at Hudson Bay?"

"My Lord, D.J., where did you suddenly pick up so much history?" Jerry Lee asked, feigning surprise.

"I’ll admit that I was too young to understand what went on in those days," D.J. said defensively. "But Gary's been holding classes…"

"Don’t take everything Gary Toth tells you at face value, D.J.," Knopfler warned. "Gary has his own axes to grind and sometimes he grinds them pretty hard."

"I've got to start somewhere, Chief."

Knopfler and Jerry Lee exchanged skeptical glances.

As we dropped off our dirty dishes at the kitchen I mentioned that I was on my way to the security offices. D.J. said he was going that way, too.

"You’ve probably noticed that Jerry Lee and I haven't been seeing eye to eye lately," he volunteered as soon as we were alone. "I told him this morning that I'm moving out of the barracks."

"I'm sorry to hear that, D.J." I said. "I thought you two were pretty close friends."

"We were. But since I signed up with Gary’s outfit, we've been arguing a lot. Jerry Lee says they're filling me with hate. I say I'm fighting for what I believe in. Neither of us is willing to change his mind, so I guess the best thing we can do is to go our separate ways."

"Where will you bunk now?" I asked.

"With my martial arts team in Barracks A–7. We start training this week to learn how to use the new weapons the workshops are making for us. Believe me, when the goons enter this camp, they’re going to get the surprise of their lives."

"Is fighting something you enjoy, D.J.?" I asked him. I was surprised at his transformation, having always seen him as friendly and easygoing–hardly the kind of person who enjoyed inflicting pain.

"Not exactly," D.J. replied. "I hardly fought at all until prison. Oh, I had a few years of karate during high school but I never took it seriously. It wasn't until I got banged around during interrogation and in the transit camps that I learned how to dish it out. When I came here and the warders smacked me every day, I felt like I had to pick a fight sometimes just to get the poison out of my system."