Polar Star (41 page)

Arkady pulled the curtain from a porthole of luminous gray. Not the glitter of snow, but denser and softer. The gun-slit dawn of a new day in the Bering Sea. “We’ve stopped,” he said.

The grating of steel on ice was gone, though through his feet he felt the engines running. He flicked the bunk lamp on and off; there didn’t seem to be an electrical problem. The ship seemed poised in a vacuum, not silent itself but still and surrounded by silence.

“What about the
Eagle
?” Susan asked.

“If we’re not going anywhere, they’re not going anywhere.” He picked his pants and shirt off the deck.

“It’s follow the leader, and finally you people are the leader?” Susan sat up.

“That’s right.”

“So much for joint ventures. The
Eagle
isn’t built for ice, and Marchuk knows it.”

Arkady buttoned his shirt. “Go to the radio shack,” he said. “Try to raise Dutch Harbor or try the emergency channel.”

“And where are you going?”

Arkady pulled on socks. “Into hiding. The
Polar Star
is a big ship.”

“How long can you do that?”

“I’ll think of it as a form of socialist competition.”

He stepped into his boots and took his jacket from a chair. The haze covered her like dust. She was motionless, all but her eyes, which followed Arkady to the door.

“You’re not hiding,” she decided. “Where are you going?”

He dropped his hand from the knob. “I think I know where Zina died.”

“This whole night was just about Zina?”

“No.” Arkady turned to face her.

“Why do you look so happy?”

He was almost ashamed. “Because I’m alive. We’re both alive. I guess we’re not moths.”

“Okay.” Susan leaned forward. “I’ll tell you what I told Zina. I said, ‘Don’t go.’ ”

But he was gone.

29
The
Polar Star
lay at the bottom of a white well. Fog bounded the factory ship on every side, and the sunlight reflected by the ice sheet and trapped by arms of fog produced an illumination that was both indistinct and overwhelming.

The ship itself glowed; ice had formed on every surface. The deck was a milky skating rink. The net around the volleyball court glittered like a house that had been built crystal upon crystal; the antennas overhead hung heavy as glass. Ice lay on the portholes in opaque extra lenses, and glazed the wood stacked on the superstructure. The ship looked as if it had surfaced like a fish from the Arctic Sea.

“It’s the cable that could not snag which is, of course, thoroughly fouled on the sea floor,” Marchuk said. He had taken Arkady to a corner of the bridge away from the helmsman. The captain hadn’t slept during the night. His beard was overgrown, and when he removed his dark glasses his eyes looked scoured. “We have to sit at dead stop while Hess is below, winding and unwinding the cable, trying to pull out his dick.”

“What about the
Eagle
?” Arkady asked the question Susan had asked him.

Wipers were doing an effective job of smearing ice in arcs across the windshield. On the other hand, the ship was going nowhere, and there was nothing to see except blinding fog. At a squint, Arkady estimated visibility at a hundred meters.

“Be thankful you’re on the right boat, Renko.”

“There’s been no call?”

“Their radio is dead,” Marchuk said.

“Three different kinds of radio and backups, and they’re all dead?”

“Maybe their mast is down. We know they iced up and that there was a lot of rolling. It’s possible.”

“Send someone back.”

Marchuk felt his pockets for a pack, then leaned against the windshield counter and coughed, which was almost the same as having a cigarette. He cleared his throat. “You know what I’m going to do when we get back? Take a rest cure. No drinking, no smoking. Go someplace near Sochi where they clean you out, steam you in sulfur and pack you in hot mud. I want to stay in that mud for at least six months until I stink like a Chinese egg; that’s how you know you’re cured. I’ll come out pink as a babe. Then they can shoot me.” He glanced at the helmsman and then through the door to the navigation room, where the second mate was soberly working charts. The
Polar Star
was locked in ice but it had not stopped moving because, slowly and inexorably, the ice sheet itself moved. “When you get this far north, curious things happen to equipment. There are illusions not just to our eyes. A radio signal goes up and bounces right back. The magnetism is so strong that radio-direction signals are absorbed. You don’t have to go to outer space to find a black hole—it’s right here.”

“Send someone back,” Arkady said again.

“I’m not allowed to as long as the cable is not properly
reeled in. If it’s caught on something buoyant it could be right under the ice; perhaps it could even be seen.”

“Who is the captain of this ship, you or Hess?”

“Renko.” Marchuk flushed, started to bring his hands out of his pockets and stuffed them back in. “Who is a second-class seaman who should be grateful he isn’t chained to his bunk?”

Arkady stepped over to the radar. Though the
Eagle
was still two kilometers behind the
Polar Star
, the green dot on the scope was a blur.

“They’re not sinking,” Marchuk said. “They’ve just iced up, and ice doesn’t give you an echo the way clean metal does. Hess says they’re in good shape; their radios are in working order and they have a fix on his cable. You heard him say that we’re the ones in trouble, not them.”

“And if they disappear from the screen completely, Hess will tell you the
Eagle
has turned into a submarine. Susan will be on the bridge in a second. How are you going to handle her and the rest of the Americans on board?”

“I’ll give them a complete and frank analysis in the wardroom,” Marchuk said dryly. “The main thing is to keep them away from the stern until the cable is hauled in.”

Both factory ship and trawler were frozen into the sheet, bows to the southeast, aimed at the trawlers coming up from Seattle, though neither of the incoming craft showed on the screen no matter what range Arkady punched into the radar scan. He reset the scope at five kilometers to take the
Eagle
’s bearing at 300 degrees.

Marchuk said, “If after another hour Comrade Hess has still not pulled in his cable I will personally cut it and break out of the ice. That will take time because water this cold is dense and the cable will sink slowly. Then I can go back and rescue the
Eagle
. I promise you,
I am not going to let other fishermen die. I’m like you; I want them out on open water.”

“No,” Arkady said, “I like them right where they are.”

Marchuk turned his back to the thump of the wipers. Below him the bow lifted its deck, rust and green paint wearing its ghostly sheen of ice. Beyond the gunwale there was only white: no water, no sky, no distinction of horizon.

“I can’t permit anyone to leave the ship,” Marchuk said. “First, I am not allowed. Second, it would be useless. You’ve walked on frozen lakes?”

“Yes.”

“This is not the same. This is not Lake Baikal. Ice from salt water is only half as strong as from fresh water, more like quicksand than cement. Take a look. In fog like this you can’t see where you’re going. In a hundred steps you’d lose your way. If a crazy man did go out on the ice, he should say good-bye to everyone first. No, not allowed.”

“Have you ever walked on the ice here?” Arkady asked.

Marchuk, the silhouette, bowed to memory. “Yes.”

“What was it like?”

“It was”—the captain spread his hands—“beautiful.”

From an emergency locker Arkady took a pair of life vests and a flare gun. The vests were made of orange cotton over plastic briquettes, with pockets for missing emergency whistles, and straps that tied at the waist over his sweater. The gun was an ancient Nagant revolver, the cylinder and barrel replaced by the squat tube of a flare.

The trawl deck seemed clear. Crossing it, he noticed, too late, someone watching from the high vantage point of the crane cabin. Pavel was a shadow within the glass of the cabin, except where his face peered through a triangular crack. He didn’t react, though. Not until Arkady
was inside the aft house did he realize that with his hood up and the added bulk of the vests under his jacket he had, at least from a distance, disguised himself.

“Arkady, is that you?” Gury loitered in the corridor by the kitchen, passing a hot pilmeni from hand to hand. Pasta flour covered the shoulders of his leather jacket like heavy dandruff.

Arkady was startled, but realized that it was the sheer normalcy of Gury and the cabbage vapors of the mess that had surprised him. With no fishing to occupy them, people could stay below, play dominoes or chess, watch films, catch naps. The ship might be stopped for some unexplained reason, but reasons were rarely explained. They could feel the engines idling below; in the meantime, life went on.

“You’ve got to see this. The usual turd-shaped, meat-stuffed ravioli, but …” Gury bit, choked down half the pilmeni and displayed the remaining half.

“So?” Arkady asked.

Gury grinned and held the pilmeni even closer to Arkady’s eyes, as if displaying a diamond ring. “No meat. I don’t mean the usual ‘no meat,’ with gristle or bone. I mean not within light-years’ distance of any mammalian life form. I mean fish meal and gravy.”

“I need your watch.”

Gury was nonplussed. “You want to know what time it is?”

“No.” Arkady unbuckled the new safari watch on Gury’s wrist. “I just want to borrow your watch.”

“ ‘Borrow’? You know, of all the words in the Russian language, including ‘fuck’ and ‘kill,’ ‘borrow’ is probably the lowest. ‘Lease,’ ‘rent,’ ‘time-share’—these are the words we must learn.”

“I’m stealing your watch.” The compass built into the band was even notched to indicate degrees.

“You’re an honest man.”

“You’re going to report Olimpiada for adulterating our food?”

It took Gury a moment to get back on track. “No, no. I was thinking when we get back to Vladivostok of maybe opening an enterprise, a restaurant. Olimpiada’s a genius. With a partner like her I could make a fortune.”

“Good luck.” Arkady strapped on the watch.

“Thank you.” Gury pulled a face. “What do you mean, ‘Good luck’?” He became more concerned as Arkady moved toward the trawl deck. “Where are you going dressed like that? Will I get my watch back?”

Arkady took the walkway to the stern deck, consciously assuming the deliberate gait of a heavier man. He didn’t glance back at the boat deck in case one of Karp’s team was watching. The red ensign at the stern rail hung stiff with ice. Few footsteps had marred the shiny patina of the deck. At the well over the stern ramp stood a pair of long-suffering crewmen with the red armbands of public-order volunteers: Skiba and Slezko in sunglasses and rabbit-fur hats. When Arkady neared, they recognized him. As they started to block his way he waved them aside. It was a gesture he had seen enough in Moscow, a brusque gesture more with the hand than the arm, but sufficient to prompt the trained response, to chase pedestrians away from speeding motorcades, send dogs racing around a perimeter, dismiss orderlies or disperse prisoners.

Slezko said, “The captain ordered that—”

“No one is allowed—” said Skiba.

Arkady took Skiba’s glasses.

“Wait,” Slezko said. He handed Arkady his Marlboros.

“Comrades.” Arkady saluted them. “Consider me a bad Communist.”

He went down the well. At the landing, the platform where the trawlmasters usually watched nets rise from the sea, the rope was frozen to the rail and he had to kick
it free. He climbed over the rail and wrapped the rope around his sleeve. Going down the rope was not much different from sliding down an icicle. He landed on his heels, which at once went out from under him; letting go, he slid the rest of the way down the ramp and onto the ice.

High overhead, Skiba and Slezko crowded to the stern rail like a pair of stoats peeking over a cliff. On his feet again, Arkady took a bearing from the compass built into the band of Gury’s watch. The ice was solid as stone. He started to walk.

He should have worn double underclothes, socks and felt boots. At least he had good gloves, a wool cap inside his hood and the two life preservers, which provided a surprising amount of insulation. The more he walked, the warmer he got.

And the less he cared. The glasses didn’t so much shade the brilliant fog as define it so that he could appreciate the veils of white vapor shifting around him. He’d once had a similar sensation looking through the window of a plane flying through clouds. The ice was solid, white the way sea ice is when the brine freezes out. Bright as a mirror, though he couldn’t see his image, only an aerated haze frozen within the ice. When he looked back, the ship was fading into the fog. And out of context, Arkady thought. The
Polar Star
was no longer a ship in water so much as a gray wedge dropped from the sky.

Two kilometers at a brisk pace. Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour. How many people got to walk upon the sea?

He wondered whether Zina had looked up from the waves at the looming gray flank of the ship. It was much easier for him; the water was flat, frozen, so much alabaster pavement. When he glanced back again, the
Polar Star
had disappeared.