Free The Ice Soldier by Paul Watkins Page A

pipe jerked upwards as he clenched his teeth. “Can you indeed?” he replied.
    I gave him the names of the Lucky Six.
    â€œRight, then,” said Lindsay. “You’d better start tracking them down.”
    The only one who refused the offer was Stanley. “I can’t,” he said when I called him on the telephone. “I’m sorry. I just can’t. I refuse to get involved in this madness.”
    â€œWhat madness?” I asked. “This mission?”

    â€œNo, William. The war. That madness.”
    Stanley’s refusal to join us came as no shock to me, although I knew there was more to it than he was telling me just then. I could not bring myself to be angry at him, but that did not stop the others when they heard about it, especially Sugden. For the rest of us, the chance to climb again and the importance that was being attached to this task, whatever it was, gave us all a sense of purpose which we had not felt since we were last together as a group.
    For myself, I wondered if my father might at last find some meaning in the path I had chosen to follow.
    It took two months, but by the end of that time the five of us were assembled at Achnacarry.
    In the weeks ahead, we went on daily marches, for distances ranging between ten and twenty miles, carrying fully loaded Bergen rucksacks. These were very similar to the ones we had used on our own before the war. The only difference was that in addition to our regular gear, each pack was weighted down with two parcels. Each parcel contained four bricks wrapped in canvas. As part of the training, we were also given instruction in low-level parachute jumps. We started out by jumping off towers wearing parachute harnesses attached to ropes, but we quickly moved on to actual jumps from the side door of a Dakota transport plane flying only three hundred feet above the ground. For this, we wore the heavy rimless helmets of the Royal Parachute Regiment and Dennison jump smocks, with their green-and-brown camouflage pattern which seemed to have been applied by a monkey with a paintbrush. Once I got used to the idea of hurling myself into space, the jumps weren’t actually that difficult, since the chutes were the static-line type and opened of their own accord as soon as we leaped from the plane.

    There was such a thing as a reserve chute, normally attached to the chest. But our Polish parachute instructor, a man named Zimanski, informed us a little too cheerfully that we were jumping so near to the ground that these reserve chutes would not have time to deploy if the main chute failed. In other words, if our main chutes did not open, we would not only be dead but would literally break every bone in our bodies.
    â€œEven those little ones in your ears,” said the instructor, pinching the air between his thumb and index finger to show us how small the bones were.
    Zimanski wore a black beret, as opposed to the red berets of the Royal Parachute Regiment. He had been part of what was known as the Free Polish Brigade, made up of those who had managed to escape from the German occupation of their country. Zimanski had been a member of a brigade under the command of General Sosabowski and had been involved with Operation Market Garden, the battle for the Arnhem bridgehead. The men of Sosabowski’s brigade were pretty much slaughtered as they crossed the Rhine, and I’d heard that only a few made it back. Zimanski never talked about this, at least not in English. When he got drunk, however, which he did every night without exception on a homemade alcohol called spiritus, he would burst into our barracks when we were sleeping, turn on the lights, and yell at us in Polish. At times like this, it was impossible to imagine that he was even related to the quiet, broadly smiling man who taught us in the daytime. Invariably, Zimanski would be hauled out of our barracks by the military police. He never put up a fight. As soon as he saw the red