Arctic Rising

11

Eventually the pain subsided enough that Anika could sit up, but with a gasp. Unsteadily, on her hands and knees, she crawled over to the dead man.

Who knew about the backup? She’d told Yves. He’d reported up the chain while they were in Resolute. Commander Claude knew, of course.

With shaking hands she checked the dead man’s pockets to see if she could figure out who he was. No wallet. She found his holster underneath his left shoulder. There was no ID in that either.

None of the suit pockets had anything in them.

But his left trouser pocket had a small business card, a small phone, and several hundred euros cash. She looked at the silver money clip holding the cash, but it was blank.

She kept the cash, and then flipped the business card over to read it.

Michel Claude’s name was stamped over the United Nations Polar Guard seal. And it was his contact info.

“What does this mean?” Anika muttered, sitting back down abruptly. “What…”

She ran a hand through her dirtied hair. Take a deep breath, she thought. Slowly. It could just mean this man talked to the commander.

Or it could mean Michel had wanted her killed.

Right?

Someone had cleared the Kosatka in Greenland, and if Tom and Anika had checked their data first, they wouldn’t have bothered to train the scatter camera on the ship. Anika had assumed it was a bribe. But maybe someone inside the UNPG was involved in this, somehow.

Maybe that’s why her scatter camera data had gone missing. And why people were hunting for the backup.

“Oh shit,” she whispered. Maybe Tom hadn’t died of exposure. Maybe he’d been killed.

Someone didn’t want people to know that the Kosatka had been shipping something radioactive.

She had to be really careful, now. It was going to be best to take this information to the police. Someone not in the UNPG.

Only someone with a contact in the UNPG could have known that she had the data backed up, so she couldn’t trust anyone there.

She patted herself down for her phone, while wondering what it was the Kosatka had been carrying. Just nuclear waste? Was that enough to kill someone for? This felt bigger, somehow.

There had been a few stories about people killed over illegal dumping activity, caught up with the wrong people. But that was overseas and far away. But going after UNPG pilots? Whoever was doing this was willing to risk a lot.

Well, they picked the wrong UNPG pilot, Anika thought.

She pulled her phone out. Pieces of screen and plastic shell fell between her fingers onto her lap. The electronic guts spilled out.

Where was the phone she’d taken off the dead man? She found that.

Jenny. She needed to talk to Jenny.

“Jenny? It’s Anika, I need a minute.”

“Anika?” Jenny asked on the other side, her voice tiny and cracked in such a way that it hurt more than Anika’s current pains.

“What happened? We were talking to him.”

“He collapsed later. It was too much of a shock for his heart, they said.”

Anika bit her lip for a long moment. “This might sound weird, but, did you know the doctors and nurses in the room?”

“That…” Jenny also paused. “Are you okay, Anika?”

“I’m okay. I’m sorry. I know it’s weird to ask you. I know you volunteer there sometimes.”

“Yes, I knew them all. They all took it very hard.” Jenny lapsed into quiet crying again.

“I’m so sorry,” Anika said. “Listen, Jenny, someone tried to run me off the road and kill me. I don’t know who, or why, but I think it has something to do with why Tom and I were shot at. I promise you, I’m going to figure out who did this to us, and I swear I’m going to make them pay. Somehow.”

“Oh God, Anika, just be safe. Be safe. I don’t want any more people to die. I don’t think I can handle that.”

“I’ll be okay,” Anika promised, before she hung up. “Don’t worry about me.”

Tom hadn’t been murdered in the hospital. That was a small relief. But the men who’d arranged all this had something to do with the attack on their airship, and that had ultimately killed him. They were still responsible.

Anika took a deep breath and limped her way around the rocks she’d used as cover back down to the road.

Karl’s bike lay upside down, front wheel mangled, the frame bent.

For some reason that left her feeling helpless and broken. Karl had always been good about lending the damn thing to her whenever she let her car lose its charge. She almost depended on the damn thing.

Nothing she took for granted as stable in her life even existed anymore. The bike: mangled. Tom: dead. Jenny: broken. Michel: maybe involved in trying to kill her.

In a short few days, everything had just been yanked away from her. The entire life she had built. Like it didn’t even matter.

And for what?

Some goddamned nuclear waste?

Now that she wasn’t distracted by fighting for her life she started shaking from delayed fear. She leaned over a boulder and threw up. Bright fruit juice and rum splattered against gray rock.

She’d never drink a Belladonna again, she thought, wiping her mouth with the sleeve of the torn-up jacket.

Leaning against another rock to steady herself, she considered dialing emergency services, then decided to call Karl and apologize for the bike.

It was something she had to do, she felt.

“Karl? Karl, it’s Anika.”

There was a long silence on the other side. She guessed he was waking up, slow to understand what was going on. It was three in the morning, after all.

But then Karl exploded. “Jesus, Anika, Jesus, there are people over at your place ripping it apart.”

Anika slid down into a crouch against the boulder. “What?” she whispered. “Tom?”

“They say they’re UNPG MPs and that you’re in some sort of trouble,” Karl said. “Please, let me hear you say it’s bullshit.”

“It’s bullshit,” she repeated numbly.

“I figured. They’re being tight-lipped and following orders from somewhere else. I don’t know the details. The commander wants to talk to you. They got here fifteen minutes ago. Where the hell are you anyway? I didn’t tell them you were on my bike. Probably not smart, but, shit.”

“The bike,” she said, looking across the ground at it. “Karl, I’m really sorry about the bike. Someone just tried to run me over.”

“Run you over? Forget it,” he said. “We can fix it later. Where are you?”

Anika pulled the phone away and looked at it. Was it too paranoid to assume they were being listened to? Or just paranoid enough? She put the phone back to her ear.

“That rope braid on your keychain?” Anika said.

“Yeah?”

“It saved my life. Thank you.” She ended the call. If her commander was caught up in this, or someone in the UNPG was out for her, going back to her place or reporting in for duty was off the list of options.

She groaned as she stood up, steadied herself, and then staggered toward the BMW. The driver’s side door was still open, light spilling out onto the highway. The key fob dangled from the parking brake between the front seats.

A car passed, then slowed down and pulled over ahead of her and the BMW.

A heavyset woman leaned out the window and looked back. “Hey, was there an accident? Are you okay? Do you need me to call for help?”

Anika coiled up the rope, with the stone still on the end, and tossed it onto the smooth leather passenger’s seat. “Yes, the man in this car tried to run me over,” she called back to the concerned woman.

She was thinking about the time she had ejected over some Cameroon rain forest during a training flight. Akinjide, her copilot, had broken a leg landing three miles south of her. She’d lashed him to a travois and dragged him through a hundred and fifty miles of muddy jungle until they’d stumbled across a logging camp with a working radio.

That had been a test of her will. Every day, dragging Akinjide’s useless weight along behind her. Not daring to eat anything she didn’t recognize, fearing it would poison them. Drinking muddy water.

She wasn’t about to be broken. No, the Arctic hadn’t thrown her yet.

But she was thinking that maybe, just maybe, she should have listened to her dad and tried to get a job flying sightseeing tourists around New York. They have airships there, he’d said. Why go to the cold?

Why?

Anika slid gingerly into the driver’s seat of the BMW and adjusted the chair forward.

“Are you stealing that car?” the woman asked. She had gotten out of her car and was standing on the side of the road.

Anika found the window controls and rolled the passenger side window down. “Yes. You should call emergency services,” she shouted, and pulled out onto the highway, leaving a very confused-looking good Samaritan alone on the road.

She had a destination firmly in mind: Commander Michel Claude’s home.