Arctic Rising

16

Jim Kusugak dragged the two-person kayak down to a small concrete ramp hidden away behind a rickety wooden pier. A few fishing boats lay scattered around the top of the ramp.

Anika had expected an Inuit kayak when Jim explained the trip to her: something made of sealskin and bone, or wood. She’d seen a few local handmade kayaks.

This kayak was yellow plastic with red racing stripes and what looked like exhaust vents coming out of the back. She’d be just inches above the frigid water.

“Is that really going to hold the both of us?” she asked, thoughts of nuclear warheads and torture set aside as she considered the dangers of riding so close to the ocean. It was time to focus on the little steps just in front of her.

Jim tossed the duffel bag onto the ground. “There’re two neoprene tuiliqs in there. You wear the red one, toss me the green one.”

“A what?”

“Looks like a wet suit and a kilt made out of rubber. Put it on. Put your shopping in the duffel when you’re done.”

Inside the duffel were two pieces of clothing just as he’d described. Sort of like kayak survival suits. He pulled the green one on over his clothes, adjusting the cap around his face, and Anika struggled into the red one.

Jim walked over and inspected it. It was very much a wet suit that started as a hood and then ran down into a long-sleeved shirt. But once down to the waist, the shirt flared out into a skirt with a tough zipper that ran around it, along with a Velcro overlap.

“Looks good.” He pointed at the kayak. “Hop in the front.”

Anika clambered in. There was a comfortable seat in the front hole. Except for a tiny piece of the bow, the kayak was mostly on the concrete.

Jim grabbed the skirt of the tuiliq and zipped it onto a matching zipper running around the seat, sealing her into the front section of the kayak. Then he fastened the Velcro lip on as well. She was a part of the kayak, and waterproofed.

It was an oddly intimate melding of person and tool, she thought, turning around to test how much movement she had.

“I’ve never been kayaking,” she said. “Isn’t there a boat or something we could use for this?”

Jim shoved the kayak halfway into the water, causing her to flail a bit. “No one’s going to stop a pair of sport kayakers from leaving the harbor.” He tossed the duffel bag into the space between them inside the kayak and hopped into his seat.

“Where are we going?”

He looked around. “Out to sea. To meet a friend.”

She wiggled, making the whole kayak roll back and forth with her. “And what if we roll over?”

“It’s a sea kayak, it’s very stable.” Jim zipped himself in, then used the paddle strapped to the top of the kayak to shove it off the ground. “Just relax. Tourists usually pay good money for this sort of thing. Although for them I use a more traditional-styled kayak.”

“I was surprised by all the modern plastic, too,” she admitted. “I guess it is like when people ask me if I had lions in my backyard growing up in Nigeria. Or worse, wore grass skirts.”

She heard a laugh from behind her. “Where did you go to see lions, then?”

“The zoo. Just like everyone else.” Then she amended that. “Well, I flew a bush plane on a circle-around tour of one of Kenya’s wildlife parks for a few months once, but I hated dealing with all the tourists. And the planes were not well maintained. I crashed in a cheetah preserve.”

“Shit. Cheetahs? How did you get out of that?”

“I forced everyone to stay in the plane and I called a helicopter. One man from Brussels panicked—he ran away.”

“I can only imagine what happened to him.”

“Park rangers picked him up, half crazy from dehydration, that night. After that, anyone visiting the park had to pay to carry a GPS beacon to make search and rescue easier.”

Jim picked up the one paddle and began moving them out past the pier with strong, smooth strokes. The kayak gained speed, the bow tapping and slicing through the small waves.

Someone passed by in a long aluminum boat with a loud engine on the back. They waved, and she could feel Jim pause and raise the paddle to wave back.

“It took me a month to make the traditional kayak,” Jim said, as the paddles bit back into the water along with a steady side to side motion as he leaned into the movement. “I don’t go out very far with it, stay close to shore. Not very sure about my workmanship. I mean, yes, I guess my ancestors made them for many generations. My dad died young and my mother wasn’t involved in stuff like that. I had to look up instructions and order the bone ribs from a specialty shop to make the ‘authentic’ kayak. This one I initially purchased for the Kulusuk Race. It’s more handmade than the skin one: I used computer-aided modeling to design it, and sent that off to a fabbing factory that extruded the whole thing for me.”

“What’s the Kulusuk Race?”

“In Aberdeen, Scotland, there’s an old kayak on display in a museum along with the hunting tools and iquilik made from skins that were taken from an Inuit kayaker. He was found in the North Sea in the sixteen-hundreds, and taken back to Aberdeen, but died shortly after.”

“That sounds like a lonely death.”

“So a handful of Inuit kayakers decided to set up a modern race in memory of their distant, lonely ancestor who died in Aberdeen. They started a sea canoe race from Kulusuk, Greenland, to Scotland. Nine hundred miles by kayak. Extreme sports. Die-hard kayakers come from all over the world.”

Anika looked around at the water. Jim had told the truth. The large kayak felt solid underneath them, even with the slight rocking from his paddling. “You actually paddled all the way to Scotland?”

Jim snorted. “I got hit by a squall just after leaving Reykjavik. They fished me out of the water in one of the chase boats and treated me and five others for hypothermia. We spent the rest of the race drinking broth and watching from the decks.”

“And that was in this kayak?” She couldn’t imagine heading off into the deep ocean in this thing.

“Yes, but I’m working on plans for a bigger kayak for this year’s Kulusuk Race. This one is disqualified, now: I’ve made some modifications.”

“What modifications?”

“I’ll show you once we’re out of sight of Arctic Bay,” Jim said, jutting his chin at one of the patrol boats off in the distance. “And well clear of the local water police.”

He paddled them on. It was a good mile and a half before they rounded the rock and Arctic Bay disappeared.

Then Jim snapped the paddle back onto the kayak’s small deck, and reached around behind him. Anika twisted around just in time to see him yank on a cord, and the suddenly alien, and loud, roar of a two-stroke engine filled the air.

The plastic of the kayak thrummed.

“I ripped an old Sea-Doo’s water jet engine out, drilled some holes, and installed it on the kayak,” Jim explained, shouting.

The kayak leapt forward up onto the plane of the ocean’s surface, skimming over it. Jim had his paddles back in hand, tapping the water to keep the kayak upright, or occasionally leaning and carving through the water in one direction or another.

Baffin Island’s northeastern tip was a thick horn that came off the island’s main section and thrust upward in a slow curve. Arctic Bay was deep inside the long inlet created by the space between the horn and the mainland.

As they skimmed northward, the waves grew. Jim slowed down, as the bow of the kayak kept diving into the water. Anika would get, disconcertingly, slammed into the ocean as they descended the back of a passing swell. Water would rise to her armpits, flowing around the tuiliq, and then the kayak would pop out.

Now that he slowed, they motored up and down the swells, the engine in the back of the kayak chuffing quietly along.

Up in the sky, the long streaming fingers of the green, shifting into blue, Northern Lights, reached down toward the horizon, then dissolved into curtains of slowly dancing light.

Closer to the land on the other side of the inlet, the eastern side of Baffin’s horn, the swells faded away again. But Jim didn’t speed them back up.

Anika spotted why. A small catamaran floated at anchor, tucked in behind a rocky peninsula that calmed the water even further.

There were satellite dishes off the back, and solar panels unfurled from stands, like giant, silver sunflowers. SPITFIRE was printed across the left hull in black letters.

“The boat belongs to a man named Prudence Jones,” Jim explained. “He’s an intelligence operative who works in the area.”

Anika spun around, twisting the tuiliq with her, to look at Jim. Was this another trap? “A spy? You’re handing me over to a spy? How is that helpful?”

Jim smiled. “The reason Violet sent you out here is that Jones can get you safely to her retreat. And, because Jones keeps his ear to the ground, he’s someone you should meet in your situation.”

Anika sighed and looked back at the boat. “I guess.”

“Listen,” Jim said, his voice suddenly steely. “Violet is a good person. A lot of people, they freeze First Nations people out of the jobs, forget them, or just think of them as people who sell interesting art and talk about their history. Not Violet. I like her, so do a lot of other people here on Baffin. She’s putting a lot on the line because she likes you, and we don’t want to see her burned because of it.”

“I know she’s good.” Anika turned back around. “I should have taken the cash.”

Jim shook his head. “Jones is one of Violet’s most important working relationships. I’m just asking you to be … careful. She’s already lost The Greenhouse for now. For what it’s worth, I think, having heard what Chernov told me about your problems, that you should meet Jones.”

“Okay. But who does Jones work for?” Anika asked.

Jim smiled and cut the engine off, and they coasted up to the leftmost scooped-back pontoon of the catamaran.

“Jones!” Jim shouted as they bumped up against the fiberglass stairs. He unzipped his skirt from the kayak. “Jones!”

A tall black man with dreadlocks opened the sliding door of the cabin and stepped out into the cockpit to look down at them. He smiled. “Jim fucking Kusugak,” he shouted. “Is good to see you, man.”

“Violet left you a message?” Jim said.

Prudence Jones walked over to the back of the pontoon and held out a hand to Anika. “Anika Duncan, right?”

Prudence Jones, thought Anika as she unzipped herself out of the tuiliq, had to have come from the Caribbean somewhere. The accent was … well, not quite Jamaican as she thought Jamaican should sound. It sounded very much like some of the English Nigerian patois she’d heard on the streets in Lagos.

Prudence had a very light accent, though. He’d been away, and far from home, for a long time, she guessed. “Yes,” she said, and held up a hand.

“Call me Roo,” the tall spy said as he grabbed the offered hand and yanked her right up on out of the kayak onto the steps. “Got some iced beer in the fridge, Jim. You coming aboard?”

“No,” Jim said. He pulled her backpack out and threw it up onto the cockpit deck, then zipped a cover over the exposed hole Anika had sat in. He started paddling backward. “I have to go and post bail for Violet and set up the escape trip.”

Roo sucked his teeth, making a frustrated sound. One familiar enough to Anika that she felt like Roo was a distant cousin she was visiting.

Then what Jim said sunk in. “You didn’t tell me she was in jail!”

Jim nodded. “They were going to be taking her in, they said. Best to keep you in the dark and get you out of Arctic Bay. Don’t worry. I’ll have her out by the morning.”

He fired up the engine, and the kayak surged into motion. Minutes later it was a distant dot.

“So you’re a spy?” Anika said.

“And you a fugitive, yeah…” Roo pointed at the cabin’s door. “Beer?”

The cabin, which sat straddling the large pontoons, was spacious. A U-shaped settee and polished wood table dominated the area as they stepped down a few stairs and went in. Varnished floors sparkled, and the large oval windows let in lots of light.

Roo stepped down a small set of stairs into the right-hand hull, his head now just above the main cabin’s floor. There was a small kitchen laid out along the side of the right hull: three-burner stove, a freezer, and a small fridge. Anika leaned over a wooden rail to see more shelves on her side: spice racks, dishes, and boxes of pasta cluttered them.

She was able to look down toward the back of the right hand hull, and saw a small office with four screens mounted on swinging arms. To the front was a bathroom.

Roo handed her a bottle of Red Stripe. “It’s a cliché,” he said. “But also a taste of home.”

He showed her where she’d be sleeping. The left hull, to the rear, had a twin-sized bunk in the very back. The bathroom was to the very front, and in between was more storage: shelves full of dried goods, cans, a locker of heavy weather gear.

Back up in the main cabin, Anika frowned. “Where do you sleep?” she asked.

Roo pointed to the wall the settee backed up against. “I have a very comfortable room up in there. The door opens on the office you was peeking at by the galley.”

“Oh.”

“And, after this beer, we need to get moving.”

“Where are we going?”

“Pleasure Island. You been?”

“No. I’ve heard of it. That’s where Vy’s hideout is? That’s eight hundred miles of sailing.”

Roo grinned. “The cockpit’s enclosed, so you be helping keep watch. But I don’t want you on deck. Don’t want you washed over, or for anyone to see you.”

“Why the hurry?” She swigged the rest of the Red Stripe, and he took the empty bottle.

“This UNPG cutter that lurks around Somerset Island. Trying to avoid a boarding.” He waved a hand.

“And if we get boarded?” Anika asked.

Roo’s smiled wavered. “Then we have to get creative, yeah?”