by James Abel
“Everyone,” I agreed.
“That’s better,” DeBlieu said. “That’s just a damn sight better. I get sick and tired of you guys sometimes.”
Chief Exec Gordon Longstreet calmly absorbed the information. Clinton Toovik looked resigned, as if he’d expected bad news all along. Marietta Cristobel seemed weighed down with despair, her inability to help more. The worst-looking face belonged to the ship’s medical officer, whose fingernails drummed on her yellow pad, and whose trembling made me decide to drop a pen, and look under the table. Her right knee was bouncing. She was terrified.
Suddenly the ship jolted.
There was a sound resembling steel chains dragging along a trash Dumpster. Then a crunch like a crumbling Volkswagen, and then a soft grinding noise like a 7-Eleven Slurpee machine.
Clinton looked up, almost as if he could see through the hull, to the source of the sound. Now it became claws trying to break through steel, scraping.
“We’ve reached the ice,” he said.
I do not know if fate has consciousness, but thirty seconds later, as if some higher power feared a momentary lessening of resolve, as if the Arctic felt it had to bait us to keep us going, the cabin phone buzzed. DeBlieu picked up quickly. The bridge crew was under instructions not to call unless it was important.
Answering, he listened for a full half minute, said “Thank you,” and put the phone down, lips taut.
“We picked up the Montana radio beam locator,” he said, standing. “They’re two hundred and seventy miles ahead.”
NINE
The storm blasted out of the north and we were blind. Satellite reception was gone now, even with the jammers off. Nature accomplished what the captain had commanded previously, blocking all communication, cutting off the ship. Visibility was reduced to radar. The bridge crew peered like Romans reading entrails at a screen that pulsated with reddish Doppler readings of wind and precipitation. Gusts at 55 mph and rising. A flag that stood straight out beyond the snow-smeared window, and seemed ready to rip from its mooring and disappear into the void. Combine wind and temperature and the chill had dropped to minus eight.
From the bridge she looked small and alone on the forward deck, amid the wet lash of flying snow. She pushed into the wind and reached the prow and stood there, looking out at the ice into which the Wilmington now plowed at a reduced speed, seventeen knots had become fifteen, thirteen, then eleven. I went to my cabin and zipped up my parka. I pulled a stocking hat over my head and went down the corridor, where I pushed down the steel lever unlocking the hatch.
When I stepped outside, the wind that had been muted inside the ship exploded. The steel railing was coated with ice spray and more rocketed into my face with each fierce gust. The wet lash of pounding snow drove me sideways as I left the slight protection of the overhang, marched forward toward the living figurine who stood gazing out as if the day were clear, the wind a pleasant breeze, and she a happy tourist eyeing the northern ocean ahead.
I joined her and said nothing, opting for silence over interrupting thoughts. She seemed unaware of my presence for a few moments, but she knew I was there. When she spoke, it was to shout over wind, but her face remained turned to the storm.
“It’s beautiful. The blizzard boutique.”
“Excuse me?”
The face shifted fractionally in my direction. Her presence was a physical force that shifted molecules of air. “This storm, so powerful. Yet we can just walk inside and take a hot shower and snuggle into bed. When I went to the pole, we didn’t bathe for six weeks. Each night we’d get into the sleeping bags, and our breath would condense, turn to ice. After a while we slept in it. The bags got heavier each day.” She smiled. “My least happy memory of the trip.”
“But still a happy one.”
I could not see her shrug inside the bulky parka, but I sensed her do it. Her sigh was a line of white vapor whipped away by wind. The ship had assumed an up-and-down rhythm timed to oncoming swells. “Colonel, I always feel like the best thing about anything is also the worst. People, for instance. My girlfriends and I, when we were twenty, used to play a game about men. We called it, I married him because . . . I divorced him because . . .”
“What was the game?”
“Ah, I married him because he was the life of the party. I divorced him because he never shut up. I married him because he was stylish. I left because he couldn’t stop buying clothes. See? If you’re not prepared to live with both sides of anything, don’t get involved.”
She seemed comfortable in her own skin, seemed to know why she did things. It occurred to me that what I’d taken for bluntness earlier, rudeness, was merely an impatience with saying things in roundabout ways.
“Why submarines?” I asked.
She looked at me sharply, as if wondering whether I’d really asked, Why submarines for a mere woman? But I hadn’t meant it that way, she seemed to know it, and the look subsided as quickly as it had come.
“Because submarines go places where people can’t.”
The ship struck something harder and we bounced off but continued moving. Her face was elfin inside the furred hood. The gloves made her hands huge on the handrail, and melting ice ran in rivulets down wind creases in her cheeks. Her skin was an outdoorswoman’s, abraded by nature. It would age faster than other women’s skin. Her eyes would remain younger. Her posture was an inverted bow, so that she thrust forward into the violence, as if welcoming it, and her answer came as if we’d been chatting like tourists getting to know each other on a pleasant Arctic cruise.
“Submarines,” she said, “reach a different world.”
“And going on the polar expedition? The same?”
“If two things are the same, why do them?” she said.
She kept looking forward, not ignoring me, simply not wanting to miss the view. The ship wallowed in a small open area—a gap in ice, then slugged through a mass of gust-sheared, flat-topped waves, and plowed into a new floe. But the ice was getting thicker and was clinging to us now.
I looked down. Clumped ice covered every inch of my parka, a coating of gray rubbly slush.
“If you never do anything twice,” I said, “you must get bored with people.”
She peered out through ice-rimmed lashes. I’d been overt, asking that personal question. I was surprised I’d said it, even thought it. I’d not launched into this sort of stumbling, adolescent probing session since I’d met my wife. Some tough Marine you are, I thought.
“Colonel, my father was a history professor. My mother was an engineering professor. All they did was talk. Their friends, also academics. We’d sit at the dinner tables, or in backyards, at parties, and they’d talk and drink and talk and eat. They talked about fascinating places and never went there. They talked about policies and never voted. They made the world outside seem exciting and made me want to do the things they feared, and see places they avoided. For a long time I thought they were scared, and I mocked them. But I just didn’t understand them. One time, I was eighteen, having an argument with my mother, I yelled, You never do anything! You just talk! And she smiled, patted me on the head, and said, But, darling, we like to talk. You’re different. Do things. It’s who you are.”
It was a funny sort of talk to be having in a blizzard. It was the sort of talk you have with a girl at a small restaurant table, with a candle burning between you, with an open bottle of chardonnay. She seemed just at home with herself in a sixty-mile wind as in a restaurant.
“Sounds like you had good parents,” I said.
“I didn’t answer you just to make a chat, Colonel. I answered because now I get to ask you one,” she said.
“Oh?”
“The Marines call you ‘Killer Joe.’ Why?”
I never knew it possible to feel so much heat in a blizzard. They say that Scotch whiskey will warm a man, but it’s nothing compared to
the blast I felt at that moment from my face to my toes. She explained that she’d overheard the Marines talking in the mess, at a table behind her. I’d heard the nickname at Quantico: Killer Joe.
Her eyes turned full on me now, and through the flakes hissing between us, I saw the keen glow of scientific curiosity. For a moment I’d forgotten who I was, and why I no longer deserved things that I’d once thought a basic human right. I’d been wrong to talk with her about anything except the submarine Montana. I deserved this.
The coldness in my voice startled even me. “Why didn’t you just ask the Marines what they meant?”
“I don’t like gossip. If you have a question, either ask the person directly or shut up,” she said.
“Marine nicknames are hard to figure out,” I said.
“Meaning you don’t know why they call you that name? Or that you’re glad the answer isn’t obvious?”
What was I seeing in her face? Amusement at my discomfort? Challenge to the mission leader? Rampant, directionless curiosity that never stopped?
“Meaning that we all have to live with who we are.”
The answer seemed to surprise her. She studied me. “Fair enough, and who you are,” she said, “is the man in charge when we get off the ship, out there,” she said, indicating the storm with a wave, “even though you’re not the one with the most polar experience. So you’re not the only one who has to live with you, Killer Joe.”
She looked like a slush statue, eyebrows white, hood rimmed with white, shoulders coated, breath white.
I retorted, “That seems like a valid reason to ask the Marines. Why come to me?”
“So that’s your answer?” She didn’t seem angered. It was like anything I said provided information. She peered into the microscope. I was the specimen on the slide.
“Yes, that’s it,” I said.
I left Karen Vleska at the prow of the ship, and later, an hour afterward, saw from the bridge that she was still there, a lone human figurehead, her face forward into the elements, the fierce snow blowing around her, as if all else in the world was gone.
Time crawled by. The radio beacon flickered on and off . . .
Ninety-two miles separated us from the Montana . . .
Seventy-four miles . . .
Satellite communication remained blocked, so there was no way to know if the Chinese icebreaker was ahead of us.
DeBlieu announced to the crew the truth about the crippled Montana. There was no point keeping the rescue quiet anymore. He told them—as they stopped work, as they stared at intercom boxes—that we were in a race to save fellow sailors, but he gave the impression that the race was only against time. He did not mention any Chinese icebreakers or submarines. He did not mention potential Russian movement in the region.
Thirty-two miles . . .
The wind was now audible, even when inside the ship, in those rare moments when we didn’t hear ice. It had thickened and both engines ran at full power—probably damaging them, DeBlieu said—and we were like a steel bronco smashing, pushing, nudging, and backing and ramming our way north. In the stairwells we needed to hold railings, moving between decks. During sleep periods the ice clawed and screamed at us on the other side of the hull. I lay in my bunk. I could not sleep. I stared at the mass of wires and vents bouncing and quivering with each impact of steel against ice.
“Colonel, good news. The floe is moving them toward us at a good three miles an hour. We picked ’em up for a minute. Then they were gone again.”
Twenty-two miles . . . Crewmen with ice mallets and baseball bats smashed at ice coating the railings.
As DeBlieu had predicted, once the mission was known, his crew doubled the intensity with which they worked. They brought new care to each job, more attention to detail, whether it was serving steaks in the mess, or checking on the Arktos. It was in their posture and faces and the way the crew, in ones and twos—kids to me—came up in the corridors or mess and volunteered to be part of the rescue trip, if we needed help.
“I grew up in North Dakota, sir, and can move fast on cross-country skis . . .”
“I have a sister in subs, sir. I know she’d want me to go with you.”
I was humbled by their drive, and realized that—as DeBlieu had assured me—his men and women constituted a greater asset than I’d given them credit for. I’d been the too-proud Marine.
Still, it was a race, against time, against death, against the worldly powers opposing us. The ice thickened outside. We had to stop, back and ram, then race through a lead, then hit another floe, then back and ram again. We made teeth-jarring progress. The first iceberg went past, jagged and tall and like a mini-mountain easing by fifty feet to starboard. I saw ice pillars. I saw a floating ice half moon. The bergs came and went like frozen monuments just beyond any clear field of vision.
Meanwhile the wardroom—a large, lit, comfortable lounge down the passageway from the captain’s cabin—became our headquarters. It had a long conference table, thick carpet, comfortable chairs, and was stocked with coffee machines and snacks.
A Marine guard stood outside while Karen Vleska, Eddie, and I went down a list of materials used in Virginia-class subs: rubber compounds, wiring, computer chips, plastics, and parts of strategic metals, anything new, anything that might—if subjected to extreme heat—produce toxic gas. Eddie tried to match the results with charts of toxic chemicals, trying to identify the possible source of the illness aboard the Montana.
Neither Karen nor I made any mention of our previous conversation on the deck.
Eleven miles . . . but we’d slowed to four knots.
Had the Chinese icebreaker gotten there yet?
The beacon failed and lit and failed and came on, and DeBlieu said we’d sailed to the east, or maybe the current had moved the submarine west . . . so we had to change direction.
Eddie and I pored over encrypted files that had blasted through from the director during the brief period when the sat line had been open. Eddie was in his bunk, me in mine.
“Listen to this, Number One,” Eddie said:
The U.S. has become more militaristic since they abandoned a draft Army for a volunteer force. Their Congress, having fewer veterans in it, is more inclined to fight. Democrats wish to prove that they are tough. Republicans see enemies everywhere. The result is a crippled giant seeking to bolster popular support at home—and gain advantages abroad—through military adventurism.
“What are you reading?” I asked.
“It’s a paper that was published by Admiral Xu Lingwei Ha in 2014, identifying the U.S. as the most likely enemy China will face in a future naval war, and urging speedy preparations for a, quote, ‘wide-ranging confrontation that will occur in numerous locations across the Pacific and High North latitudes.’”
Eddie kept reading, “The U.S. sees China as its principal adversary in the Pacific, and the Arctic is a source of wealth and power in the next century. The Russians see the Arctic as their private lake. As tensions heat up and the region becomes more critical to world economies and security, it is likely that both countries will turn to military aggression to defend their spurious claims. Chinese Arctic policy—since we do not border the ocean—must be to obtain every possible advantage now in this opening region before the inevitable clashes occur.”
“Peaceful guy,” I said.
“Yeah, blame every possible problem on old Uncle Sam. Got a toothache? Americans did it. Your Beijing-made car stops suddenly on the Lhasa highway? Evil satellite technology from Silicon Valley, most assuredly! And by the way, as I am an expert at smoothly switching subjects, Number One, I saw you outside with Dr. Karen before.”
“Consulting,” I said.
Eddie grinned. “Hey, if you’re lying about talking to her, I sense the earth moving beneath your feet.”
“That’s ice, and it’s always moving.”
&nbs
p; “Did I tell you that she’s a surfer?”
What I heard in my mind was her asking, Why do they call you “Killer Joe”?
“A surfer? A surfer, Eddie? That’s particularly relevant at the moment. Let’s get something to eat. In another few hours we’ll need the energy.”
Nine hours to go, the instruments said.
I’ve always been amazed at the normalcy that constitutes impending violence. The banana cream cake you fork in as you wait to pick up an M4 and go out into a blizzard looks exactly like the slice you ate at 3 A.M., in a bathrobe, in your home kitchen. The coffee that steams before you emits the same rich aroma that a mug of Folgers did when you read the Sunday sports section in Cleveland, parked on a couch one Sunday, as your wife and kids scowled at you, preparing to go to church.
The cooks broke out the good stuff in expectation of impending danger. The chow line snaked back from the galley, into the main passageway, and the crew heaped their trays with thick steaks and mashed potatoes, and there were four kinds of soft drinks and the fruit bins bulged with Washington State apples, Oregon pears, red bright cherries.
We ate and watched big-screen Armed Forces Network shows: CSI, Yankees baseball, Jurassic Park 2, antisuicide and don’t-drive-drunk commercials. A soldier, weaving out of a bar at 3 A.M., started his car and—
Boom.
The mess deck canted sideways, slowly, and all conversation stopped. “No promotion, for me, honey, all because I had a couple of drinks,” the red-faced corporal on screen was saying. Food hung on forks, midway between plates and mouths. The big hangings on the wall; photos of hard-hatted seismologists working the pipes and winches on the fantail; photos of crew playing touch football on the ice, shirtless; a photo of the launching of the Wilmington, in far-off Louisiana . . . all seemed to be slightly off-kilter.
A creaking and groaning reverberated through the hull. The XO was already heading briskly from the mess. Eyes swung upward. I smelled steamed string beans and potatoes, tuna salad and chocolate sundaes. A wedge of banana cake that had teetered on a table crashed to the deck.