Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  “They did not like me. We did not—what is your expression?—we did not see eye to eye.”

  “So they put you in a survival suit?”

  “Yes.”

  “And threw you overboard? And then the submarine went away?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  Amaguq followed the conversation, listening. His eyes lit up, and then he nodded. “Your submarine, Grigor? What kind could it have been? A boomer, perhaps?”

  Claudia looked at him, remembered Amaguq saying back during the siege that he had worked with a submarine patrol in the Navy. Of course he would know submarines.

  “A ‘boomer’? I do not know the term,” Grigor said.

  “A nuker,” Amaguq said. “A ballistic missile launching submarine.”

  “Oh.” Grigor shrugged. “I do not know these things. I could not tell you anyway.”

  Tuttu stood, his face red and his fists balling open and shut, open and shut. He slapped the mug of tea out of Grigor’s hands, grabbed the Soviet by the collar and yanked him up.

  “The war’s over. We saved your fucking life, asshole. It was a boomer, right? A fucking nuker, right?” He shoved the sailor down to the floor.

  Grigor picked himself up, started to stand, thought better of it, then sat back down. “Yes,” he said. “The Grigoriopol was a boomer, as you say.”

  “Thank you,” Tuttu said. He sat back down across from the Russian. “Well. Now that we have that settled . . . How the hell did you wind up here?” He motioned to Masu, and she poured Grigor another cup of tea.

  The submariner nodded to the old woman, took the tea, and sipped it again. “We were trying to get back home,” he said. And he told his story.

  * * *

  “No, we did not fire our missiles,” Grigor said first, holding up a hand. “You think that we would?” Tuttu glared at him. “Our mission was deterrence, you see? If we had to fire our missiles, we would have failed in our duty.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” Amaguq said. “Standard nuclear Navy propaganda.”

  Grigor risked a smile, then sipped his tea again. “But it is true, comrade. Still”—he shrugged—“we did not fire our missiles.

  “I think you know of the war, yes?” He smiled a silly grin. “Even in these far-off reaches, word must have come to you.”

  “We know about the fucking war,” Tuttu said. “Get on with it.”

  “Well, imagine what it must have been like for us. Our patrol was the north Pacific, to strike fear in the hearts of your brave generals. The Grigoriopol could hit any of your cities on the West Coast—any city in Alaska. Any village in Alaska, you understand?

  “We went in and out through the Bering Strait like it was our very own house—as it, indeed, is, in a way. You do not keep as many listening stations here, like you do in the Atlantic. We have never understood this. The Soviets rule the Arctic Ocean, it is our Pacific, our Atlantic. With our thousand icebreakers we can go anywhere at any time on the surface, and with submarines—you see, the ice does not bother us. You Americans do not seem to understand ice, seem to fear it.” Grigor looked at Claudia when he said that.

  “We are Alaskans,” Tuttu said. “We are Inupiaq. Do not scare us with talk of ice.”

  Grigor smiled over the lip of his mug, nodded. “No offense. I was speaking only of your motherland, not of you. And so, as I was saying, the Soviet Union ruled the North Pole, and we could go anywhere we wanted at will. If we so desired, we could sneak down your coast—your very backyard!—and enter that vast Pacific and do what we would. Of course, we have Pacific ports as well, and Siberian ports, and icebound as they may be, they are no matter. Not for the Grigoriopol.

  “No one ever caught us, not your antisubmarine forces at Adak”—he grinned at Amaguq—“not anyone. Unless we wanted to be found. We would do this, you know: let you find us, let our great submarine surface just off the coast of California. Ah, would that strike terror into your hearts!”

  “We would do the same,” Amaguq said.

  “Yes, of course, comrade,” Grigor said. He smiled. “It was all the game we played. But when push came to shove—is that the idiom?—when your forces and our forces went on alert last summer, why, we went under. We hid. We waited. What did you hear of the war up here? How did you know?”

  “The radio told us,” Tuttu said. “Our ‘emergency broadcast system.’ A full-scale Soviet attack.” He glared at Grigor. “How could we respond? You got Prudhoe Bay—the oil fields. We heard that one here.”

  “We struck first?” Grigor shook his head. “Impossible. It is not our policy; our Premier swore a doctrine of no first use a decade ago, and we have not changed.”

  “You struck first,” Tuttu said. “That is what the radio said.”

  Claudia looked at the two men, thought of the dud Soviet missile that had hit the camp at Tachinisok Point. She remembered what the radio had said, could hear clearly the shrill voice of the announcer ticking off all the names of the cities that had been hit. Something had bothered her about that . . .

  Grigor shook his head. “I do not want to disagree with those who have saved my life, but—no, we could not have launched a first strike. My orders weren’t—” he stopped, suddenly aware of what he said.

  “Your orders?” Tuttu asked. “Your orders? You would get the orders?”

  “Or execute them,” Amaguq said. “That ‘no first use’ is bullshit. You don’t have a ‘we are happy’ system.”

  “‘We are happy’?” Tammy asked.

  “American submarines constantly receive a ‘we are happy’ signal. If the signal stops, something’s wrong, and they launch their birds. The Soviet subs don’t work that way. They’re first strike weapons.” Amaguq glared at Grigor. “Comrade. That’s what they told us in the Navy, anyway. Or what we heard.”

  “I did not receive any first-strike orders,” Grigor said.

  “But why would you?” Tuttu asked again. “What was your role?”

  Grigor sipped from his tea again, then mumbled from behind the cup. “KGB.”

  “KGB?” Tuttu asked. “KGB?”

  He nodded. “Political officer. My job was to make sure the Grigoriopol’s commander properly executed his orders. All his orders. I got no such orders, friends. You will have to believe me.”

  “I believe you,” Claudia said.

  “Thank you,” he replied.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t,” she said. She sighed, rubbed her eyes. She understood now. Something had bothered her about the dud missile that had killed Natchiq’s sister, but hadn’t exploded. Something had bothered her about the radio announcement from KBRW. Maybe . . .

  “Natchiq,” she asked. “Were you at KBRW when the emergency broadcast system came on?” He nodded. “And did you get a list of the cities that had been attacked?”

  “Yes. Someone from Anchorage. And then Anchorage went off the air. We figured out what that meant.”

  “But the cities back East? You heard about those over the emergency system?”

  “Yes.”

  “No one guessed at those?”

  “No. Why? Should they have?”

  “Yes,” she said. How would the announcer at KBRW know the lower-48 cities had been attacked? She thought. That’s what had been bothering her. She couldn’t figure it out, didn’t understand. Now she did.

  “The emergency system lied,” she said. “No one could have known. The system itself should not have worked, could not have worked. The EMP? You know the EMP?” Grigor shook his head.

  “Electromagnetic pulse,” Amaguq explained. “The big zap?”

  The Soviet nodded. “Da. The thing that destroys electronics. Yes, of course. That is why we use vacuum tubes in so many of our systems.”

  “The EMP would have destroyed any civilian communications. Maybe the military systems would work.”

  “Probably not,” Amaguq said. “It’s a big hole, they don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Yeah,” said Claudia. “Anyway, beyond that
, with a full attack, enough to wipe out all those cities supposedly hit, the stations themselves would be nuked. We couldn’t know, not if the Soviets hit first.”

  “But if they didn’t . . .”

  “There might be a warning. Or someone might lie.” Claudia felt the muscles in her neck tighten, felt her head grow light, felt the life seem to drain from her body. Goddamn them all, she thought. Goddamn my country for starting this thing. “We launched the first strike.” The men looked at her, stunned. Grigor smirked. “But don’t be so noble, Grigor. You would have launched a first strike, too, if we hadn’t beat you to it.”

  “Us? Never. You said—”

  “We beat you to it.” She pointed at him, then waved her arm toward the stove. “Down the coast, south of here, there is a tower of some sort. Part of the Alaskan warning system, you see? On my way up here—I will tell you of this later, these people know what I mean—I passed by this tower. The tower had been destroyed. Two cabins nearby had their windows blown out. A woman—Natchiq’s sister—was killed from a blast, a missile, I think, that crashed but did not explode. The force of the crash knocked the tower down, and broke the glass of the windows, and the flying glass killed Natchiq’s sister. But it did not go off.”

  “A warning tower?” Grigor asked. “You see—it could not have been a first strike, for surely we would take out cities?”

  “True,” she said. “But while it was not a first strike, it was a first-strike attack. Why would you destroy warning systems if you had already been fired upon? Or if you had no intention of first use?”

  “That is what I mean,” Grigor said.

  “You do not know what you mean,” Claudia yelled, “and don’t tell me what you mean. I am an archaeologist, comrade, I analyze events and artifacts and they do not lie. An attack on a warning system tells me one thing: you intended to launch a first-strike, for the first thing you would hit in a first strike, the only reason anyone would launch a first strike, would be to disable any early warning system. You launch a first strike because you don’t want to get caught with your pants down and you want to catch the other guy with his pants down.”

  “But you said the Russkies didn’t launch a first strike,” Natchiq said. “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re right, they didn’t,” Claudia said. “And I think that’s true. But the Soviets—your people, Grigor—would have programmed all their computers, all their systems, for a first strike. That’s what the attack on the tower says. Even after a first strike is useless, you wouldn’t have taken the time to change everything. You’d go ahead and use your old attack scenario, launch a retributive wave as if it were a first strike. Warning systems first. Command and control centers next. Intelligence and computer systems following. Then cities. Am I correct, comrade?” Grigor nodded. “You probably took out Tachinisok—or tried to—from the Grigoriopol. You bastard, you would have gotten Barrow if that nuke had blown.” She stood, the hunters stood, only Masu sat, still sewing, quietly listening. They circled the Soviet.

  “No!” Grigor said. He stood, fists clenched before him. “No, we launched nothing! I swear it! We could not! The crew—the other officers”—he looked down—“they would not let me.”

  “You?” Tuttu asked.

  “Well, not me alone,” he said. “The commander and me.”

  Grigor sighed, taking a breath, and then spat out the words almost without a pause. His English is damn good, Claudia thought. “When we surfaced, we did not hear anything. It is as the sailor said”—he pointed to Amaguq— “we do not have a constant signal. So we must check. And if we hear nothing, we are to surface, at great risk, and attempt communication. We surfaced. We understood what happened. I had my orders, the commander had his orders, and the two of us were to do what duty demanded. But the crew intervened. They locked us up, kept us from launching the missiles.

  “Out in the Aleutian trench, they discarded the missiles. The commander—well, you saw how I was? That is what they did to him. They set him adrift in a survival suit, somewhere near the Aleutians. Perhaps your southern brothers found him, as you found me. They kept me with them, in case we came across any other survivors—I would naturally be contacted in such a case—until they made it to the Arctic. And up here, they set me adrift, off your coast.”

  “And the sub? What happened to it? Did it sink?” Claudia asked.

  Grigor shrugged. “I do not know. The last I saw of it was when they threw me onto the ice. My comrades were very forgiving; they let me have my Kalishnikov and several magazines. What happened to them? Perhaps they went home, to make their own lives. I do not know. I drifted, made it to the ice pack. All I remember was trying to cross the open water, to get to your side, and passing out in the water, and then this hunter”—he pointed at Tuttu—“pulling me to shore.

  “But I did not launch any nukes,” Grigor said firmly. He bit his lower lip, glanced down. “It would have been my duty to do so, and I would have been not ashamed to do that, but the crew did not allow me. You must believe that.” He looked up again.

  Claudia stared at him, looking in his eyes. Grigor blinked his eyes, opened them, caught her glare, stared back at her. He looked to the men, at Tammy, finally at Malgi. Malgi nodded.

  “I believe him,” he said, and sat down. They all sat down. The old man looked at Claudia, then nodded at her. “And I believe you, anthropologist. I believe that our country started this thing, and that this man’s country finished it, and that they would have liked to start it, but we did not give them the chance.

  “It does not matter now, does it?” Malgi asked.

  “No, Grandfather,” Puvak said, “it does not.”

  “Good, boy,” he said. “Gussik, eat.” Malgi waved at Masu, and she put down her sewing and got the seal pot from the stove. “What happened cannot be changed, but what will happen can be.” Masu ladled out a hunk of seal liver, handed Grigor back his plate.

  “Eat, ‘comrade,’” the old man said. “Eat hearty.”

  Chapter 13

  THE dome of the seal hole, the allu, glinted in the low light of the false dawn on the flat plain. New ice had built up seaward of the ridge of the landfast ice, pushing the open lead a thousand yards farther out. Inside the snug darkness of her hood, the allu was a dot at the end of a tunnel, a point of reflected light. Claudia sat with her legs bent before her, one foot against the knee of the other leg. Her rifle laid across her lap, the stock resting on a thigh. She sat on a square of ensolite foam, the foam stiff and hard in the bitter cold, but still insulating her somewhat from the packed snow and ice beneath.

  She had sat like that for what seemed like an hour. That morning, on the way out, Claudia had put on every piece of clothing she seemed to have: two thicknesses of underwear, her wool pants, wind pants over that, turtleneck shirt and pile jacket and the atigi. A balaclava Tammy lent her. Heavy mittens. Still, with all the warm clothing, the cold had seeped into her bones, it seemed, chilling her almost as she sat. Cold: deep cold, numbing cold. She had never felt it possible to feel cold like that, not even the summer of her first trip to Barrow when she had joined the infamous Polar Bear Club—a quick dip into the sea, dodging small icebergs and plunging below the surface, rising up with a yelp and running through new snow to warmth. This, this was far, far colder.

  Spread out along the ice, she knew, the other hunters waited in equal misery. They had separated at the ice ridge and spread out to find allus. The seal holes had not been hard to find in the new ice, the flat ice: like pimples on the fresh skin of a vain teenager, the domes were obvious and apparent if you were looking. Even Malgi had come with them, shrugging off his stiff knee and letting Tuttu know that no other Inupiaq alive could wait out the cold any better.

  She had walked with Malgi to his hole, and he had shown her how to wait for the seal. He had shown her to sit crosswind to the hole, to calculate where in the dome the seal would poke his nose, to figure out where his head would be. He had shown her the angle to hold her rifl
e, and told her when to raise her rifle into position, and when to shoot. And then he had pointed out an allu a thousand yards distant, the allu she now sat before.

  Malgi had said not to watch the hole, but to listen, to crouch in the darkness and warmth of her hood and wait for the seal to come back to its hole, and breathe. “Listen for the first breath,” he had said, “and then prepare.” So she sat before the hole, listening and staring at the glint of light at the end of the tunnel of her hood. As she waited, she thought.

  It was as if she had shut her conscious mind down, the way one would drift off to sleep with an alarm clock ticking beside the bed. The clock would tick and the mind would ignore the sound, but some shred of awareness listened throughout the night for the ringing. The ear would not be ready for any other sound than the alarm sound; it would know, it would alert the brain, and the brain would wake up. As she dreamed while she slept, so she thought as she waited.

  She thought first of the dwindling supply of food in their qaregi, and how other houses surely must be coming to the limits of their allotments. The master stores at the gym grew smaller and smaller. Tuttu had punched some numbers into his laptop a few days before, and had come up with various scenarios based on full rations, half rations, quarter rations, and so on. None of them had been encouraging; even the tenth-ration scenario had them running out of food well before spring. They had not calculated for the Soviet before, but it didn’t matter: Tuttu had calculated for a minimum death rate of three villagers lost over the winter, though he hadn’t advertised that consideration. Already four people had died, Igaluk’s old aunt, two other elders, and one small child. Grigor’s presence balanced Tuttu’s calculations.

  Of course, Claudia thought, Tuttu’s figures had been based on them getting nothing from hunting—a worse case scenario—and already they’d slipped from gloom to hope, slight hope, with Puvak’s seal. Three other houses had gotten seals, too. Someone had found a rotting walrus, dead from the fall, with fresh polar bear tracks around it. The bear hadn’t come back but that hunter had salvaged the meat for Tuttu’s dogs; Tuttu had promised him a bitch from the spring litter.