White Heat (37 page)

    She
slung the coil of rope over her shoulder and backed rapidly towards the door.
Once she was out she turned and ran, swinging her legs in a skiing motion,
skimming across the hummocky muskeg, just as her mother had shown her many,
many years before. The chase scenes she knew so well from the movies flipped
unbidden through her mind and her breath pooled out into the chill air. When
she reached the other side of the landing strip she stopped and looked back but
there was no one following.

    At
the edge of the plateau, she gathered herself, took off her mufflers and
quickly repacked her bag. Over the other side of the landing strip, Moller's
shed lay obscured. Around her, the tundra glowed silver blue. She turned to
face her destination. Though it was not dark, the lights of the
Arctic
Princess
blazed in the harbour. Already Nuuk seemed like a world away. She
took a deep breath and began her descent towards the sea.

    It
was well past midnight before she reached the quayside and stood before the
ship. The gangplank was down and the vessel rose and fell softly on the swell.
From inside there came the sound of music but there was no one on deck. It was
cold, and the air smelled of ice. The harbour was empty.

    Edie
looked about to check she wasn't being watched and stepped onto the gangplank.
The ship was older and scruffier than she'd imagined, the paint peeling, a light
crusting of rust across the joints and rivets. The music was much louder than
it had seemed on shore.

    She
slipped onto the main deck and took her bearings. There was no sign of any
guard. It seemed they were all below, making the most of their passenger-free
evening. Every so often female laughter broke through the beat and a tangy
alcohol haze rose upwards on the breeze. If all went well, she'd have the
Zodiac in the water in a matter of minutes. Feeling cheered by this thought,
Edie began a slow slide around the darkened cabin rooms towards the aft deck.

    She
had reached the captain's cabin, when, with no warning, the deck door suddenly
swung open and a man's face appeared. In the backlight from the corridor, she
could see leathery skin fading out to silhouette. For a moment he seemed not to
see her, then his gaze fell full on her face. He smiled the wavy smile of a
drunk and stepped out onto the deck. Edie shrugged her right shoulder so the
rifle and harpoon were hidden behind her back.

    The
man stared at her for a moment then said something in Danish.

    Edie
shrugged, hoping he would consider the gesture sufficient answer and return
below deck.

    'You're
local?' he said, this time in English.

    Edie
nodded. 'Danish very bad. I clean.'

    'Oh,'
the man said. He tapped his nose with his finger. 'We are making a very big
mess tonight.' He laughed at his own joke. 'Plenty for you to do.'

    And
with that he retreated back inside the ship and closed the deck door. She saw
his shadow passing into the passenger cabin area, and then disappear.

    Edie
breathed out the thrumming in her chest. Then she slid onto the stern deck,
avoiding the neat coils of rope and chain. Making her way around the railings
she reached the Zodiac on the port side. The inflatable was in no better shape
than its mother ship, but someone had at least bothered to pull a tarp over the
outboard. Both oars were sitting inside, along with several coils of rope, a
lifebelt and two large jerry cans marked 'gasoline' and 'water'. The holding
ropes led up to a winch and the boat itself was enclosed in a kind of cradle.
At the base of the winch itself was a large metal flap covering the controls.
She gave the lowering button a small, experimental push. An alarmingly loud
clanking sound started up. For a moment Edie froze, waiting for
a
nearby
door to fling open and a security detail to come bounding out. Snatching up her
bag, the rifle and harpoon she threw them under the tarp. That way if anyone
did come she could feign innocence, say she was using the deck as a high
lookout from which to spot seal moving in the water.

    Quickly
attaching ropes to the grab handles on each side, she passed them around both
deck cleats to attach each to the winch with a hitch knot. She took out a piece
of maktaq from her bag and used it to grease the winch and its handle. Then
slowly, carefully, she began to turn the winch, easing in the lengths of rope.
The winch responded to the greasing, the only sound coming from it a faint
clicking as the rope torqued around the barrel.

    She
returned to the Zodiac and, using her hunting knife, carefully cut the cradle
and the restraining ropes, waiting for the little boat to steady before
beginning the slow process of letting out the winch ropes. At the other end of
the ship, loud, off-key attempts at 'I Will Survive' drifted from the state
room. When the ropes finally went slack, Edie pulled the winch lever into the
locked position then set about tying Moller's rifle, the harpoon and her pack
with bowlines onto a single rope so they could be lowered into the Zodiac
afloat on the black water. Now there was no turning back. She took a deep
breath to calm herself, grabbed at the rope and began to rappel down the ship's
side.

    Soon
she was reaching out for the Zodiac, taking hold of the grab handles and
pulling herself in. Cutting the keeper ropes, she pushed off from the
Princess
and began to row steadily out into open water. The sea loomed vast
and inky, joined seamlessly at the horizon to the sky. The oars constantly hit
bergy bits and scraped jarringly against growlers. Rowing close to the shore
she followed the coastline until, looking back, all she could see of Qaanaaq
was a faint bloom of light pollution far away. It was only then she allowed
herself to turn towards the shore.

    She
slept in the boat on the beach and woke to the matt, chalky light of the summer
day. She boiled water and melted a piece of jerky into it. The coast here was
completely unknown to her, but the story of Welatok's journey had been passed
down so meticulously across the generations that it felt oddly familiar. She
intended to stop off at Siorapaluk, the last and most northerly settlement,
pick up some food and get directions for the safest passage into Etah and the
dig site.

    The
outboard started and the Zodie began bumping across the swell in a favourable
wind so that by the time the sun was fully over the horizon, the settlement was
already in view as a sprinkling of dots sitting below cliffs so jammed with
dovekies and murres that they writhed like maggoty meat. As she approached, the
smell of guano was almost overpowering. Before long, she guessed, the birds
would be heading back south.

    She
pulled into the little bay then chuntered slowly up to a long jetty and tied up
while two young boys and a girl of six or seven watched with a mixture of
excitement and fear.

    Are
you from the government?' one of the boys asked.

    Edie
pointed out across the water. 'No, from over there.'

    The
children looked at one another as though they'd never heard of such a thing.
Eventually, the little girl said:

    
'Illiyardjuk
,
an abandoned child?'

    
'Immaluk
.'
A long time ago.

    'What
are you now?' the girl asked, more boldly this time.

    Edie
thought about it. Finally she said,
‘Saunerk
.' A bone.

    Ever
since Joe died, she had felt like the framework of some unfinished soul. The
children laughed and led her to the store, diving about, shouting '
saunerk,
saunerk'.

    Inside,
the cashier, a thick-set Inuk with a bloodless- looking face, followed her
around the aisles, keeping a few paces behind, pretending to be assessing the
stock. She in turn pretended not to notice him, casually picking out another
box of ammunition, some rope, a flensing knife, and another plastic jerry can for
water, then adding to this a large tin of syrup, a few pieces of cinder toffee
and some tea bags.

    'Going
hunting?' he said, ringing up her things.

    'You
could say that.'

    The
man began packing her purchases into a plastic bag. He looked up and met her
eye. The look was not friendly.

    He
handed her the change from her shopping, pressing the coins into the palm of
her hand so hard they left little rings.

    The
children were standing outside the store, wearing hopeful expressions. She pulled
the toffee from her bag and watched them reach out for it, whooping and racing
away.

    She
carried the shopping back to the Zodiac without running into anyone else. Apart
from the children, the settlement seemed dead. From the numbers of seabirds and
the sheltered coves she could tell that it would be good hunting here. The
locals were probably out, stocking up their meat caches in time for the dark
period.

    The
thought brought on a wave of homesickness. This time last year she would have
been out seal hunting with Joe. Now instead she was hunting for the truth and
that was like hunting a fish in murky water with nothing but your hands. You
could never see the whole of it, only little flashes here and there, and when
you reached out, it slid from your grasp.

    The
turf and sod huts of Etah, long since abandoned, lay at the base of a small
fiord surrounded by mountainous crags whose multiple erosions provided the
nesting ledges and coves for dovekies. Like those further south at Siorapaluk,
the birds were preparing to return to sea, but for now their presence created a
tremendous noise and stink. Anyone on land would not hear the noise of the
engine over the great chorus of bird chatter. To be on the safe side, Edie cut
the engine anyway, and carried on with the oars.

    At
the far end of the fiord, a launch bobbed at anchor, its keeper tied several
times around a boulder on the beach. Of the two Russians there was no sign. She
found a small concavity in the cliffs with a long, concealed strip of pebbled
beach, hauled the Zodie beyond the tide line and tied up to a nearby rock with
a buntline hitch. She meant to find the men and then, what?

    What
would she do with them then? Kill them? If they had killed Joe, she would pull
the trigger without a second thought. But in her heart she already knew it
wouldn't be like that. She suspected that whatever she had stumbled upon was
bigger than Taylor and Wagner, bigger even than Joe. Most likely the Russians
were minor players, grunts in some huge and complex enterprise that would
eventually render the Arctic the same as everywhere else, a landscape held to
ransom by human need.

    She
imagined corralling the men into the launch at gunpoint, taking them the fifty
kilometres across open water to Ellesmere. Then what? They'd still be hundreds
of kilometres from the nearest settlement. Perhaps she could leave them there,
tied up, and head down to Autisaq to fetch help. But abandoning them like that
would make them hopelessly vulnerable to wolves and bear.

    She
thought once more of Joe. She was pretty sure now that he'd witnessed Andy
Taylor's death and someone had murdered him to keep him quiet. What she
couldn't work out was how they had managed it. A plane landing or even an unfamiliar
snowmobile arriving in the settlement would have been spotted and reported.

    Felix
Wagner came to mind, then the zig-zag footprint with the ice bear at its heart.
Everything pointed to the possibility that the Russians, or at least their
handlers at Beloil, had an accomplice in Autisaq. Which meant that whoever had
killed Joe was someone he knew. The thought winded her. How could anyone who
knew the man believe that Joe would have taken his life? The betrayal made her
nauseous.

    The
light was fading now and the sky was too cloudy for the sun to break through. A
sudden feeling of exhaustion swept over her and it struck Edie that she had not
slept a whole night since Joe died. For now, she needed to rest. Finding the
men would be easy, she was sure of that. In all this vast space there was
nowhere to hide from eyes who knew what to look for. They would have left
traces, prints in the muskeg, disturbances of the willow and old fire circles.

    Creeping
back across the shale, Edie clambered into the Zodie. Tonight she would sleep
inside the boat with the tarp pulled over the top.

    She
woke with the strong sense that someone was holding something to her head. Then
she registered the gun. The man on the other end was the skinny Russian who had
landed in Autisaq a few months before, claiming to want to hunt duck. She'd
seen him strolling along the road towards the store. It was a relief, in a way,
to know her search was over. This was the encounter she had been hoping for,
albeit not in quite the manner she'd imagined. Her hunch had been right.