Christopher Cartwright
The Aleutian Portal
To my good friend Mike Riley, whose sense of humor and love of the outlandish were the basis for this novel.
Chapter One
The passenger studied the face in the old American passport.
He bit his lower lip as his eyes locked onto the photo. It looked distant, almost forgotten, yet familiar too. Like a relative he’d once known well, who had passed away when he was just a child. He’d been living a lie so long he’d almost forgotten how to distinguish it from the truth. He read the name along the bottom line out loud, Ryan Balmain. That too, seemed familiar to him, yet somehow aberrant and grotesque — because for nearly twenty years he’d lived in Russia under the name of Sergei Orlov.
Hearing the sound of his real name brought back a flood of memories. Some good, some not so much, and one in particular he’d spent that entire time trying to forget. He sat on the portside observation deck looking out as though he was a passenger on a cruise ship without a care in the world. But like everything else about him, that too was a deception. He was neither a paying passenger, nor was he on a cruise ship, and despite his outwardly calm appearance, he was terrified. He was on board the Russian owned, Gordoye Dostizheniye — a five-hundred-and-sixty-foot cargo ship.
The captain of the vessel had been heavily bribed so his name was not entered into the ship’s registry. Nor was there any financial or other way to make a connection between him and the customized shipping container, numbered 404. The owner of the large container was registered to a Rare Arts and Antiquities House in Seattle. The captain made it abundantly clear to him that the onus would be on Balmain to enter the USA on his own, and that if he was caught, the captain would cast him off as a stowaway.
Balmain felt his chest tighten as he imagined the ramifications of getting caught. No, he needed to illegally enter his own country of birth. Balmain had once been an undercover operative for the CIA, but that was a long time ago. His parents died when he was still in basic training. He had no siblings and few friends — certainly none who would notice if he disappeared — and as a consequence a recruiter from the CIA contacted him for an undercover mission.
He thought about the recruiter, too. Had they sent anyone else, he might have rejected the idea at the outset. But they had sent Margaret — a young, attractive woman, with dark red hair and olive-green eyes, which he recalled were as inviting and tempting as the Devil. She was to be his mentor, and despite a nagging uncertainty, he was never able to reject her offer. Like a beguiled teenager, he’d accepted what she proposed — and as a consequence had spent the last two decades living a lie in isolation in a foreign country.
Reminiscences!
Balmain snapped the passport shut, as though by doing so he could erase the image of her face from his memory. Margaret had unwittingly been the greatest source of his happiness, regret, and profound remorse over the course of his life.
He thought about the fateful night when everything changed. To save her life, he had to maintain a secret so dangerous, that it might just destroy the current structure of modern civilization.
Balmain forced himself to smile with the practiced expertise of a spy. It had been long enough that he doubted he still had anything to fear. He’d done some terrible things in those days. But that part of his life had been over for a long time — nearly twenty years to be exact. He’d stayed away from that past, living and working as a fisherman in the coastal port of Pavek, Russia, on the edge of the Siberian Sea.
Not many days went by without thinking about that night all those years ago. His crime had remained buried for nearly two decades. He had doubted that anyone would ever ask about it in his lifetime. And then all that had changed two weeks ago — when he received a call from a girlfriend from long ago, and his crime came crashing down upon him. After all this time Margaret needed the truth to be brought to the surface. No, he would pay for that crime. It would be a sacrifice he was only too willing to make. But the question remained, would he still be able to protect her? Could he protect any of them?
He glanced upward. The sky was a crisp, empty cerulean blue. Even though the time was only 2:45 a.m. the permanent sun of the arctic summer shined with an obtuse glare on the north-eastern horizon. The air this close to the Arctic Circle was just shy of freezing. He wore a heavy woolen jacket, which he’d pulled upward until it covered the lower half of his face. On his balding head, he wore a thick beanie pulled down until the only visible aspect of his face was his eyes — dark brown, nearly black with specks of gold that had once made him highly attractive as a young man.
Even that much betrayed the physical harshness of the life he’d led. The skin around his eyes bore tiny creases and damaged blood vessels, the give-away marks of an alcoholic. His eyes were intense and the pupils heavily dilated. The U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and Russian Warships were all out there — anything, even a small aircraft could mean trouble. The approach of a US Navy vessel, Coast Guard, Russian Warship, or even any fixed or rotary wing aircraft. He found nothing. The sea was a glassy millpond devoid of any other vessels.
It was a relief. Not that he expected any trouble. His crimes were committed long ago. His eyes darted across the coast, taking note of the tiny island of Little Diomede, with its big brother behind it. Balmain waited a few minutes and then stood up, ready to take refuge in the dark confines of container 404 once more.
He reached for the door, but stopped short of opening it. Balmain’s eyes were fixed on the little island to the portside. It looked impossibly familiar. No, it couldn’t be! He remained transfixed, as the Gordoye Dostizheniye passed what appeared to be the same bit of land for the second time in the past few minutes. He’d been lost in thought, watching the sea from the portside observation area below the amidships deckhouse. But the tiny island of Little Diomede, with Big Diomede on the horizon it was distinctive. He could swear they’d passed by them only a couple minutes ago.
The tower of containers on the deck behind him prevented a visual from the opposite side of the cargo ship. From the deckhouse itself, situated high above him between the stacks of containers and straddling the ship from port to starboard, he’d be able to command a 360-degree view. With no sense of movement aboard the heavy vessel, he couldn’t be sure the ship was circling, which was the only explanation he could come up with. It was immediately followed by the conclusion that there was only one reason for the Gordoye Dostizheniye to circle back around in the middle of the Bering Strait — someone wanted to board the ship.
It meant someone knew he was on board. And that person almost certainly knew the contents of the specialized shipping container numbered 404.
How could THEY possibly know that it had survived all these years?
Balmain opened the door and started to climb the steps. He could hear the pounding of blood in the back of his ears as he climbed the series of steel steps to the bridge that stood nearly a hundred feet above the waterline. Balmain had expected to face the consequences of his past actions. But not here and not now, where it served no purpose whatsoever. When he reached the top, he burst open the door and entered the bridge.
Inside he found a very different chaos than the one he feared. Officers barked observations and commands at each other, while the captain stood at the port side of the deckhouse, focusing on something in the distance.