Arctic Rising

19

Anika banged on the door until a young Coast Guard crewman opened it. Her guard. He had a pistol holstered at his hip, and he looked nervous. His name patch said OSTERMAN.

“What do you need?” he asked.

“Where are you taking me?” Anika asked.

“I can’t say, ma’am.”

She leaned against the door, and he took a step back, hand going to the holster. Anika sighed and stepped back, showing that she wasn’t going to try anything stupid. “Can I have a phone, to call my lawyer?” They’d taken everything from her: extra prepaid phone, the wad of cash Vy had given her, her IDs.

Osterman looked around, as if seeking support from an officer. But there were none in the corridor outside the room. “No. You can’t,” he said.

“How is that legal?” Anika demanded.

Osterman looked miserable. “I can’t comment, ma’am.”

He took a step forward, one hand still on the holster, and raised the other to close the door again.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Anika said. “Surely that isn’t something you can’t comment on either.”

He nodded. “Okay. I’ll take you.”

This type of patrol ship usually had eighteen or so sailors and two officers crewing it. The ship had maybe six days of range, which meant it harbored somewhere fairly close by. The ship was based on the same Damen Stan hulls that the UNPG used for its small patrol vessels, so it wasn’t too unfamiliar to Anika.

It meant she also could guess that wherever she was going, it would most likely be a day or two away.

Her personal guard walked her through the crew bunks, and several relaxing members of the crew watched curiously as she was led past them to the bathrooms at the end of the corridor.

She used some paper towels, the industrial-smelling soap in a dispenser, and water from the basin to wash the stench of the anchor rope off her as best she could. Near the end, her guard banged on the door. “What’s taking so long?”

“Cleaning up,” she yelled back. “I was hiding in an anchor locker for almost an hour.”

She opened the door, and he looked suspiciously around and sniffed. She smelled strongly of cheap soap, but had gotten the worst of the dead ocean smell off her.

“Do you have anything to drink or eat?” she asked.

He escorted her back to the sparse room. “I’ll call for something.”

That something was a ham sandwich, a granola bar, and Coke. Anika sat them down on her chosen bunk and ate them as she was locked in again.

She had a day or two left before she was locked up wherever Gabriel had decided to put her, where she would be out of everyone’s way.

And what did he mean by that? That he knew what was happening. And it was something big?

He didn’t mean her harm, she understood that. He did feel he was doing the right thing. And yet, she was still in the dark. She didn’t trust him. And then there was that nuclear device out there.

Remember Karachi? he’d asked. She’d grown up watching the before and after images of crowded Pakistani markets and streets on Lagos cable channels turned into flattened wasteland. She’d had nightmares about the stains: human shapes etched in black silhouettes on the ground. The famous photo of a woman with a veil half-melted onto her face, waiting for medical help outside a UN tent. A second century had tasted the hell of a nuclear event. Who could imagine more?

And then there was this question of vengeance that stirred her mind up every time she returned to it. She couldn’t let it go. The anguish in Jenny’s voice. The smack of the car against Karl’s bike, the feel of a killer’s muscles against hers.

What did it take for evil to prevail? Simply for good people to step aside and let it happen.

She thought of her father’s stories about what Nigeria was like when he grew up. The violence between the religions, the military cracking down too hard while trying to keep order, burning cars in the streets of the small towns far from the stable urbanity of Lagos.

Even when she grew up, when that was all long past, sometimes she saw the scars when out in the countryside: the skeletons of vehicles in the undergrowth by the side of the roads, or still-abandoned houses with blackened, peeling walls.

These things had always been around, an unconscious series of tombstones marking conflicts that only existed in an academic sense for her. And yet, as her father had told her stories, they’d solidified and called out to her more and more vividly.

A brick ruin that was once a grocery store owned by a Muslim man. That empty lot: once a schoolhouse. That new bridge: built over a bombed-out old one.

Her father worshiped stability and had a love of rights, an indignation about suffering. Anika now found herself surprised to find how thoroughly he had infected her with it, despite the things she had seen once she’d left Nigeria.

All those years of manning the machine gun in the cabin of the airship, working as a corporate mercenary, and the cynicism that she lived around, had slid off her. Sure, she found herself an outsider, slow to make friends. But that hadn’t made her any less outraged by what had just happened to what friends she had.

And, she realized, thinking about Commander Michel Claude, friends she might have had without realizing it.

She couldn’t sit still. And suddenly thought about the kids from the Kosatka, who’d disappeared. Maybe Gabriel was a good liar. Maybe those kids were alive, maybe they weren’t. But that wasn’t going to be her. No one was going to disappear Anika.

She knew the layout of the ship, how the crews worked. She was going to get out.

If there was a nuclear device floating around out there, then she was going to help track it down and stop it.

She wasn’t going to allow chaos to descend into her world and turn it upside down. Not if she could do something to stop it.

She waited until the earliest hours of the morning. There were two watches worth of crew trying to get sleep in their darkened bunks, now. The bustle of the day and clanging of boots on metal floors had faded, which meant only seven or so crew were awake and on watch.

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.