Arctic Rising

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, your 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.”

“Greens?”

“Five major bomb detonations on oil rigs in the Circle in six years, using little boats just like this one with GPS autopilots and a few cameras for navigation. Any more, they get a lot of funding from Saudi princes; every event raises the price of oil.”

Anika thought about that. The real people who had tried to kill her could be someone who was trying to edge out a better trade on the oil futures market.

Where the hell was this mission of revenge taking her? And was there even going to be someone she could hunt down for what had happened?

Down the rabbit hole, Roo had said.

He wasn’t half kidding.