Osterman, still stuck with guarding her and yawning, followed her past the crew quarters back to the adapted conference room. She’d been getting him used to a docile routine.
But instead of meekly going inside this time, Anika whipped around and pulled him in with her.
He didn’t have time to shout because she had her belt around his throat, choking him. He instinctively grabbed for it and pulled it off, which is exactly what she’d hoped for.
She pulled his gun out of the holster and placed it against the back of his head. “Shhhh.”
He froze.
She backed up and shut the door. “Now, get down on the floor, and place your hands behind your back.”
He did. He looked very, very scared. But holding it together. She wanted to pat him and tell him it would be okay, that it was her that would probably end up shot.
Instead, she checked his pockets until she found what she was looking for: more zip ties.
She looped two together to tie his hands and feet behind his back and to one of the bunks. Then she used a torn piece of sheet to gag him. “Can you breathe through your nose okay?” she asked.
He nodded, looking suddenly hopeful.
“Do you know where the man is, that they captured with me? Prudence Jones?”
He nodded. She pulled the balled up strip of cloth part of the way out of his mouth.
“Upstairs in the mess,” he said, voice garbled by the partial unstuffing.
Anika stuffed his mouth again. “I’m very sorry about this,” she told him.
Someone knocked on the door.
She whipped around and trotted up to it, the gun in front of her at the ready. Damn it. She’d barely had time to put her plan into action and it was already falling apart.
Who was this going to be?
The door eased open, and Anika jammed her newly acquired gun against a familiar set of dreadlocks. “Roo?”
He looked at the hog-tied crew member on the floor as she yanked him inside and shut the door. “You looking to escape as well?” he asked, looking over at the tied-up crewman.
“They won’t tell me where they are taking me. I don’t like that.”
“Yeah, I hear you. Usually when I get picked up, I can give my credentials and after a few phone calls, things get all cleared up. This time, they just handcuffed me to a bunk upstairs and put a guard on me.” He held up a gun of his own. “My guard’s relaxing inside a large fridge right now.”
The fact that he hadn’t killed his guard to escape clarified a lot about Roo in that second. Vy was right. Roo was someone she could trust.
She lowered her voice so that the tied-up guard couldn’t hear them. “That rigid-hull inflatable dinghy, the big one? It’s designed to be launched from the moving boat. It has a top speed of thirty knots, which is roughly the same as this ship’s speed,” Anika said. Nanisivik had a number of them at the UNPG station, and she’d trained on them like any other UNPG member. “Can we get somewhere safe with it? You know the area better than I do.”
Roo sucked his teeth loudly and shook his head, his locks slapping his neck and shoulders. He kept his voice low as well. “Depends on how much fuel the dinghy carries. And if we can really outrun this beast once we get away. We been headed west for the last day. Add in two good days of sailing on Spitfire.” His face quirked. He’d just lost his home, she realized. “I’ll know for sure when I get a look at a GPS. But I think so. We can get somewhere north on Victoria Island, then pay for a ride to Cambridge Bay. They have a fairly busy airport; that’ll give us some options for getting to Pleasure Island and meeting up with Vy, just like we’d planned. I still believe your best way to get to Thule is with Vy’s help. Plus, I promised Vy I’d get you there. Don’t want to make this the first time I failed to come through.”
“And we can’t get to Pleasure Island by dinghy?” Anika asked.
Roo shook his head. “No. Too far. Is dangerous enough out here in that thing, and if a storm kicks up who knows what happens to us. But we dead for sure even if we had enough fuel.”
“Okay, Victoria Island then,” Anika agreed. And from there she’d get to Thule and start hunting. “When we get on deck, I won’t fire at the crew. The gun is only for show. I will not be shooting at someone who is innocent, who is trying to do their job. Understand?”
Roo nodded. “Is a running escape, yeah.”
* * *
They ghosted up the stairs, then out onto the deck, guns out, tense. But they met no one. “They are all up in the pilothouse, staying warm and dry,” Anika said, glancing upward in the direction of the lighted windows. Roo leaned over the side of the dinghy to look in while she kept an eye out for anyone coming out onto the deck.
“Do we have enough fuel in the dinghy to get where we need to go?” Anika asked.
Roo leaned over and shook one of the two large red plastic gas cans loosely tied down in the back of the dinghy. “They’re full. Yeah. I’m willing to bet.”
“Then let’s do it.”
“You said you’ve trained on a ship like this? How do we raise the transom?” Roo asked, moving back over behind her.
Anika pointed at the manual controls on the deck. “One gets in the dinghy, another opens the transom then jumps in quick.”
“You ever do it?”
“No. I’ve been on a UNPG patrol boat, but I have never used those controls.”
Roo shrugged. “I spent more time on boats, I’ll go look.”
Out in the rush of wind and cold, they moved quickly across the deck. Anika crawled into the large dinghy and kept low.
“Last chance to back out,” Roo said.
“Do you think we’re really going to a normal jail? Where we could call our lawyers? And talk to our families?”
Roo shook his head. “No, whoever waiting for us at dock, it ain’t police. Trust me. They had the pull to send a ship after us and access to live satellite data to backtrack all ships from Baffin. Including my little one. That scares me.”
“Then we go,” Anika said with a bit more determination than she felt, glancing worriedly back up at the lit-up pilothouse.
“Then we go,” Roo said, and scuttled over to a set of deck controls. He studied them for a moment and then pushed a lever all the way up.
The large metal slab at the end of the ramp clunked upward as motors whined into life, and Roo ran and back leapt into the dinghy.
They both looked up at the pilothouse. The five men inside moved to the rear windows to look out over the deck. Then there was an explosion of movement.
With a final clunk and shudder, the slab came to a stop. Anika was already belted into a seat in front of the windshield and control center. Roo pulled out the hook holding them at the top of the ramp and they started sliding down.
One of the crew burst out of the back of the pilothouse deck with a submachine gun. He was pulling it up to aim.
Roo hit the seat next to her and braced. “Now this is some crazy James Bond shit,” he shouted as they hit the churning froth behind the patrol ship, bucking and spinning, spray slapping the windshield. Anika gasped and sucked in diesel fumes from the patrol ship’s exhaust.
Roo started the motors up and jammed the throttle forward, turning them off to the right.
Gunfire barked out; shots slapped the water in front of them, and then right near the wooden transom of the dinghy. Anika heard wood splinter.
They roared off perpendicular to the patrol boat, engine screaming. Anika could see the compass whirl around, and then settle in. They were headed north.
“Shit,” Roo said, just barely audible over the noise of the engine.
“What?”
He pointed back. A bullet had clipped the transom and ripped open one of the fuel tanks and then left a hole in the fiberglass hull.
“We’re lucky we didn’t blow up,” Anika said, swallowing.
“Losing gas though,” Roo pointed out.
He was right. Seawater sloshed in through the bullet hole,
mixed with gas pouring out of the hole, and then both were draining out of the back of the boat through one of two one-way valves in the transom to allow water to channel out of the boat. They wouldn’t sink, the pontoons around the rigid hull they stood in would stop that.
But they were certainly losing gas.
The Coast Guard ship turned, rolling wildly, to chase them.
Anika crab-walked back, bracing herself against the painful bucking of the dinghy as it hit random waves. Gassy water sloshed around her ankles as she looked around for something to plug the hole.
Nothing.
The plastic tank was hooked up to the engine by black rubber hoses. Anika unstrapped the gas tank and pushed it up onto its side so that the bullet hole was up higher than the level of the remaining gas inside, maybe a third, and then strapped it back in place.
She struggled back forward.
Roo glanced back and nodded in approval at her handiwork.
“What does that do to our escape plan?” she asked.
“We’re still working on the first part here,” he grunted. He waved back at the Coast Guard vessel, which broke the crest of a large wave in a burst of spray as it gunned its engines.
20
Roo never let up on the throttles. Even when the light boat would hit the crest of a wave wrong and leap up, the tip high in the air and threatening to flip them, he kept it all out.
The Canadian Coast Guard ship remained on their tail and Roo struggled to read the GPS as they bounced around.
“Melville Island’s closer by,” Roo finally announced. “Since we lost most of that half tank of gas, we need to change our plan. We getting close to the east side of it and to Byam Martin. We head north instead of south to Victoria like we planned.”
“And?”
“We can bust free from this patrol ship in fifty miles, yeah? There’re a bunch of islands and tight channels off Bathurst. There are some places we can get help around here. If we shake that ship.”
The swells faded. The boat was battering itself over the top of a heavy chop, engines screaming and props cavitating as they burst into the air every few seconds and hit water again.
After a half mile, even that smoothed out.
They had a half-mile lead on the patrol boat, and hitting the smooth water first gave them an even greater lead. And … the patrol boat was slowing.
The swells started up again, though, as Roo carved eastward. As the morning brightened and the grim ocean-pounding race continued, Anika began to just stare bleakly at the ocean directly ahead, anticipating each pounding leap into the air.
It took three hours to reach the coast of Bathurst.
Roo plunged them in between islands, inlets, rocks, and ice. The farther north into these clusters of islands the more ice hung to the edges of the islands, and choked into the channels between them. They were well north of the Northwest Passage here.
Here clumps of ice floated free, the size of small houses or boats. And Roo flew between them, weaving in and out, while a mile behind, the patrol boat finally came to a slow idle.
“Those hulls aren’t built for the level of ice that builds up around the islands north of the Passage,” Roo said, slowing down as well. “South of it is very much ice free, other than the occasional glacier chunks that fall off an island. So these small patrol ships are cheap to build. He’s going to have to call this off.”
They had a two-mile lead on the ship as they hooked around the north end of Alexander Island a couple hours later and saw it slowly turning back.
At that point Roo wasn’t worrying about the patrol boat, but trying to get the weather loaded up on the small GPS unit to see what they were facing next.
* * *
It was a bad situation to be wearing nothing but clothes usually fit for walking about Baffin Island while in an open boat at sea north of the Passage. In the just-slightly-above freezing temperature of the summer, and the salt-spray soak she’d gotten during their full speed sprint, she knew hypothermia was a real risk.
Roo, his face caked with salt, and looking tired and older, was shivering as he piloted them along at quarter throttle.
Anika stood up.
“What are you doing?” Roo asked.
“Locker.”
She walked to the back bench of the boat and forced it open. She found what she was looking for: a first-aid kit. And underneath, three tightly folded thermal blankets.
Roo nodded gratefully as she wrapped one around his shoulders, and then one around herself. “We will keep the other one in the locker, dry,” she said.
Still shivering, Roo huddled into his blanket. “If we can get to Cameron Island, we’ll be okay.”
“What’s there?”
“Bent Horn refinery. There are derricks all over the place out here, but Bent Horn is the closest hub. The refinery is the heart of it, but it’s a corporate town, three thousand people. We’d be able to refit and restart and not attract too much attention if we lucky.”
“Why do you say ‘if we can get there’? Is it the weather?”
“Lotta ice between here and there.”
* * *
The weather quieted into a still, chilly silence. The water turned to glass. The blankets did their trick, warming them up, and Anika relaxed.
“Were they after just me?” Anika asked. “Or you as well?” She’d gotten him into a lot of trouble. Hopefully they, whoever ‘they’ were, thought that Roo was just someone she was using, and not a true accomplice.
“Just you,” Roo said. “I think a lot of people are convinced that you know something about a heavy situation in the Arctic.”
“The nuke?” There it was again.
“Yes, that had come up.” Roo looked to his side at her. “You know anything about it? Vy says you a pilot. A clean one. You all mixed up in this?”
“I am pretty sure I spotted it on a freighter during my last flight, and I wasn’t supposed to.” She wrapped the blanket even tighter, and then summarized the entire nightmare: getting shot down, Tom’s death. The bomb.
And now Coast Guard ships trying to pick her up and take her God only knew where.
“A man tried to kill me on the road, too. Before I went to the commander. I strangled him to death.” She looked over at him. “I think … it’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever done to another human. It took so long. But it was him or me. I didn’t have a choice.”
Roo nodded. He didn’t say anything for a long time as they idled past table-sized chunks of floating ice.
“The worst thing I ever did to another human was marry her,” he said.
“Jesus! Roo!” She half laughed. But when she looked over at him, she saw his clenched jaw and realized he hadn’t been making a joke.
The sound of the water slapping gently against the hull faded as he whispered, “It was a big contract, to get inside a corporation. I used one of the largest shareholders, a widow, who was on vacation in Saba. Spent a year becoming a part of this person’s world, family, influences. A lot of people, they come down to the islands looking for excitement, to cut loose. But she wouldn’t let go, and I couldn’t stop going down this path. It had momentum, like a cart down a hill.”
“So you married her…”
“The company spent tens of millions buying politicians off, allowing them to force spice prices down with government subsidies and support. They were going to devastate the island economies as a side effect, and we had to figure out how to get in so we could stay a step ahead. I made half a million for the mission. Cheaper than the islands trying to outbuy the company’s pet American, Canadian, and European politicians.” He shrugged. “But when it ended, it was like I cut her puppet strings—her world shattered, she slumped away.”
They motored on, mulling over the tempest of their personal landscapes for a while. It was better than focusing on the cold.
“The nuclear weapon thing,” Roo said. “Before, you were a pilot. You paid attention to basic politics, your command structure, y
our job. But you’ve stepped onto a different field now.
“Back in the day of the colonialists, they called it the Great Game. Nation-backed spies crossing the world to pay this group or that, get this person to fight that person, while they stayed in the shadows. Nation’s shadows playing for territory, economics, and more. Nowadays, anyone can play. Non-state actors, corporations, activist groups. Everything’s in play. You down the rabbit hole that lies under the real world, unseen by the good people focusing on they daily bread.”
“I know it exists,” Anika said. “But a nuke?”
“The Arctic Circle is the big spoils.” Roo turned them a bit to pass around a small chunk of ice. “A lot of the Great Game is focused here now. Canada claims most of the Arctic islands here north of it. The U.S. claims ocean out past Alaska.”
“And Northern Europe and Russia, yes. Then China, India, and Brazil pushed hard for the Circle to be international waters, so it’s all up in the air. I do work for the UNPG.”
“Yeah. And the basin is full of gas and natural resources, all easier and easier to get at now that the ice all but gone. Greenland is a natural resources superpower, a few hundred thousand Inuit made rich by nationalized returns of their claims. Canada exploiting these islands hard. And where oil is plenty, intrigue comes with it. Basic history. Middle East, Nigeria, South America … when it’s outside their borders, the other big nations play hard for control of it.” He tapped the console. “Plastic has to be made. It covers the modern world. Motors need to be lubricated. Most nations still move from point to point with oil.”
“And the nuke?” Anika still couldn’t figure out how it played into all this.
“Well, someone has one. Which means someone probably wants to use it. And a lot of people want to know why. And many of them want to stop it. That’s what the Caribbean network is hearing. Most likely, whoever backing this is someone who wants oil prices to rise. That could be anyone: Middle East, Nigeria, South America, solar power manufacturers, green fanatics.”
Arctic Rising Page 12