“That’s a pod of belugas,” the captain said.
The more murderous ice that could smash bulkheads awaited us north, in a place where survivors of a submarine fire hopefully still struggled to stay alive.
“It’s gorgeous.”
“Colonel Rush, these shots of the storm were taken three hours ago,” DeBlieu said.
The printouts he handed me showed a mass of corkscrewing gray-black inside the Arctic seas, covering an area as big — when I checked proportions — as Nebraska. It was well formed, with a tight, clear center.
But the view here was pristine, air so clear that I could see three weather systems simultaneously. Directly above, the sky remained pale blue, washed out with cold, that gauzy sun visible. To starboard lay a low, gray mass, the sky of an altogether different planet. To port, a direction which the ship unfortunately seemed to be turning, awaited a ragged, bruised color, a thick, dirty violet that seemed to pulsate with malevolence, smearing the horizon, an advertisement to turn away.
“Clinton says we’ve got a few more hours before we get into the bad stuff,” said DeBlieu.
He indicated a tall, broad-shouldered, barrel-torsoed man standing with his back to us, beside an empty captain’s chair by the port-side window. He scanned the sea with large binoculars. He wore no jacket or hat, just faded jeans and an old brown T-shirt reading, BIG MIKE’S ISLAND SAUCES… HAWAII.
Clinton Toovik calmly lowered the binoculars and wrote something in a small leather-backed notebook, in ink. Then he pulled a plastic pillbox from a pocket, snapped it open, removed something small and pinkish with thumb and forefinger, and popped it into his mouth.
“Pickled muktuk,” he said when DeBlieu introduced us. He held out the open container. “Bowhead skin and blubber.”
“It looks sweet,” Eddie said.
“The black part is skin, the pink fat.” Clinton was about twenty-seven, I judged, with a soft voice, short black hair, and intelligent almond eyes set into a large head.
I tried the muktuk, and found it fishy, not to my taste. “Mmmm,” Eddie said.
Clinton peered ahead, binocs at his thigh. “I been watching that polar bear,” he said, “on the ice floe.”
“What floe?” I asked. I saw no ice.
“There.” I saw, squinting, a series of vague discolored specks on the sea. Or did I see them?
“What bear?”
“Right there.”
I borrowed his binoculars. Now the vague specks looked like ice.
“Look for yellow,” Clinton coached. “It’s fat under the fur.”
Finally I saw a pinprick dot which might have been a pus color. The dot moved right to left. Or was there a dot?
“Big male,” said Clinton. “The female passed with a cub fifteen minutes ago. Males kill cubs. If the cub dies, the female goes into heat earlier. So Mom’s on the run.”
Eddie sighed. “Horny guys the world over,” he said.
The bridge smelled of coffee. The helmsman steered the big ship with a small wheel. Some joker had placed a tiny plastic toy, of an old-style inch-wide ship’s wheel, the size of a Cracker Jack prize, atop a joystick. I noticed a wooden handrail running the length of the ceiling, behind the console, and above rubber flooring.
“You’ll want to hold on to that when the weather hits,” said DeBlieu. “But one advantage of ice is, when we reach the storm, waves’ll be smaller.”
The bridge was a spaceship traversing another world. The U.S. flag snapped ahead. The planet’s curve was evident on the horizon. I borrowed Clinton’s binoculars, and in the distance, a white city skyline leaped into view; a row of high-rise buildings, white as snow, thrust upward; they had to be ice. “There’s land here?” I asked, surprised. “What the hell is that? An island?”
Clinton grinned and DeBlieu said, “It’s your first mirage. Wait until the upside-down ships appear. You’re looking at pancake ice, light stuff, not even a foot thick, but from a distance, with the earth’s curve, well, everything’s different from a distance here. You’ll see when we get there in about twenty minutes.”
The sense grew stronger that we were entering a world where rules were different. Clinton’s smile sank to a frown as he eyed the purple-gray skies. He went outside onto the outer deck, in the wind, then came back five minutes later, none the worse for wearing only a T-shirt. He did not look happy.
“When I was a boy, our elders warned about that,” he said, nodding at the sky ahead.
He looked into my eyes. His own were calm, and I saw deep knowledge there.
“We’re on a rescue drill, right?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“An exercise. Make-believe.”
“You got it,” said Eddie with confidence.
Clinton nodded. “Then I suggest we turn around.”
My mouth felt dry. I looked at the white city that wasn’t really there.
“Oh, we can’t do that,” I said. “Timetables. It’s all about timetables. It takes months to draw up these games.”
He didn’t seem surprised. He just let out air. “Any chance I can have a few minutes to call my wife? I’ve got my own sat phone. The borough’s paying. So you don’t have to worry about cost. Can you open it up?”
I felt a chill. Eddie, over Clinton’s shoulder, had his brows up. Can’t do it.
I knew that Clinton wanted to say things to the woman he loved that wives need to hear from husbands, and husbands need to say to wives. I especially knew this because I had not said them when I should have. I wondered if Clinton had children. But I also wondered, even as I hated myself for thinking it, whether the call Clinton wanted to make really was to his wife.
I slapped him on the shoulder. “It’ll be a great story to tell her when you get home.”
I sounded like a fool, probably like every trader or whaler who’d ever told the Iñupiats a falsehood during their long history. Joe Rush, professional liar.
But I couldn’t open up the sat lines, not yet, not until we were closer, so close that even if the Russians or Chinese discovered what we were up to, we’d get there first. I needed to keep a fucking piece of inanimate machinery out of the hands of strangers. That was more important than this one man talking to his family.
I sounded like every sorry bureaucrat who’d ever frustrated logic, hope, desire, or human need.
“Sorry, Clinton. If we let you call out, we have to let other people do it, too.”
He took it in stride. He just nodded as if his request would have been too easy. I think he knew we were not really on a drill. I’d tell the crew soon enough, but just now, something fatalistic moved into the Eskimo’s deep brown eyes.
With a duckish gait, Clinton turned to leave the bridge, shoulders slightly slumped, his cadence as measured as his quiet voice.
“Where are you going?” DeBlieu called after him.
“My cabin,” Clinton said. “To pray.”
I’d given up on God in an Iraqi bunker one day, years ago, when I saw things that changed me and Eddie. But at the moment, I’d settle for sleep, I realized; restful unconsciousness — just for a while — as my personal savior. For what is God if not the voice in your head that tells you to worry, and when trouble is coming, helps you prepare?
SEVEN
My Humvee rumbled forward, filled with Marines. I looked out and saw desert sky roiling with black smoke from burning Kuwaiti oil fields, to the south. The world was on fire, the air orange, the color of hell, at midday. Ours was supposed to be an easy assignment, but I felt, looking in my binoculars, a premonition, a claw on my spine, a catch in my throat.
“Something’s wrong with that village ahead,” I told Eddie over the radio.
We were thirty miles into Iraq. Our column — four Humvees and an armored personnel carrier, containing my rifle platoon — had been detached from the main attack for special duty, protecting the flank, patrolling outlying villages, dots on the terrain map on my lap. Eddie on the ride-along. “Make sure they’re free of fedayeen, ambushers,” the major had said, sending us out.