Sachs = asshole.
Clinton brightened. “Well, if you do come, you can help carry packs, fifty-pounders, well, feels more like eighty in a storm. We’ll suit you up… Can you snowshoe? Or maybe we’ll need crampons to get up and down the ivus and—”
Sachs broke in. “Ivus? What’s ivus?”
“Mountains of ice that just come, suddenly, out of nowhere. My aunt Martha, once she was out on the beach, and…”
Sachs poured himself water from a carafe.
Sachs said, pompously and thoughtfully, “You make some points, Clinton. Thank you for providing this perspective, yes, interesting. A need for speed. Speed is crucial. Hmm.”
He’s going to drop out, I thought.
“We don’t have to decide right at this minute,” Sachs said, trying to save face.
The screen remained dark but suddenly the director’s voice was in the room again, amid static.
“Secretary Sachs is to come along if contact is imminent,” he said, as if he’d heard the last exchange. I knew then that Sachs had been right about one thing. If he was coming, backroom Washington was now fully in the mix.
As if the director understood my thinking, had given me a moment to catch up, he added, in a tone I understood, and which was also clearly intended for whoever sat with him, “Colonel Rush, you remain in charge, of course.”
Meaning: I’m sorry he has to come with you. Ignore Sachs if you have to fight.
Easy for him to say. Sachs would be with me, not him.
“Last thing. Security,” I said. “I want all phones checked on the ship, see if anyone even tried to call out. I want all deck cameras checked to see if anyone was outside at any time, trying to call out.”
DeBlieu okayed it, but said, “Colonel, the better sat phones can access out from the cabins. You don’t need to go outside to use them.”
“Do it anyway,” I said, angered at the lapses. “Also, from now on when we open sat channels, the crew goes on the buddy system. Two-man teams. And you’ll announce that anyone trying to call out for any reason will be violating national security laws, and arrested.”
DeBlieu stared down at the table, and when he looked up, I saw a quiver of anger on his lips. But I’d misread the reason. He had no problem with security precautions. It was my attitude that pissed him off.
“I don’t know where you got the idea that my crew is not professional, Colonel. They’re every bit as patriotic as your goddamn Marines anywhere on Earth. You tell my people the sub’s in trouble? Well, they’re working at one hundred percent now, but they’ll up it even more. You tell ’em this is high security and they’ll button their mouths faster than my ex-wife used to when I’d call her during the divorce. I welcome the chance to show you what we do. We’re the eyes of the United States in the Arctic. We’re up here in the snow while you’re lying in the goddamn sun in summer. So tell us what you need. But you will not disrespect my crew. Understand?”
I liked him tremendously, the little engineer with the quivering mustache and dark, goofy military glasses and very real rage. And I saw pride in their captain in the eyes of the chief exec and the communications officer.
“Captain, I apologize. I’m asking for your help.”
“For my crew’s help.”
“Yes, your crew’s help. Thank you.”
DeBlieu told the exec, in a dry voice I’d not heard from him previously, “Make sure to interview the Marines who came aboard, too. Colonel Rush and Major Nakamura also.”
“Everyone,” I agreed.
“That’s better,” DeBlieu said. “That’s just a damn sight better. I get sick and tired of you guys sometimes.”
Chief Exec Gordon Longstreet calmly absorbed the information. Clinton Toovik looked resigned, as if he’d expected bad news all along. Marietta Cristobel seemed weighed down with despair, her inability to help more. The worst-looking face belonged to the ship’s medical officer, whose fingernails drummed on her yellow pad, and whose trembling made me decide to drop a pen, and look under the table. Her right knee was bouncing. She was terrified.
Suddenly the ship jolted.
There was a sound resembling steel chains dragging along a trash Dumpster. Then a crunch like a crumbling Volkswagen, and then a soft grinding noise like a 7-Eleven Slurpee machine.
Clinton looked up, almost as if he could see through the hull, to the source of the sound. Now it became claws trying to break through steel, scraping.
“We’ve reached the ice,” he said.
I do not know if fate has consciousness, but thirty seconds later, as if some higher power feared a momentary lessening of resolve, as if the Arctic felt it had to bait us to keep us going, the cabin phone buzzed. DeBlieu picked up quickly. The bridge crew was under instructions not to call unless it was important.
Answering, he listened for a full half minute, said “Thank you,” and put the phone down, lips taut.
“We picked up the Montana radio beam locator,” he said, standing. “They’re two hundred and seventy miles ahead.”
NINE
The storm blasted out of the north and we were blind. Satellite reception was gone now, even with the jammers off. Nature accomplished what the captain had commanded previously, blocking all communication, cutting off the ship. Visibility was reduced to radar. The bridge crew peered like Romans reading entrails at a screen that pulsated with reddish Doppler readings of wind and precipitation. Gusts at 55 mph and rising. A flag that stood straight out beyond the snow-smeared window, and seemed ready to rip from its mooring and disappear into the void. Combine wind and temperature and the chill had dropped to minus eight.
From the bridge she looked small and alone on the forward deck, amid the wet lash of flying snow. She pushed into the wind and reached the prow and stood there, looking out at the ice into which the Wilmington now plowed at a reduced speed, seventeen knots had become fifteen, thirteen, then eleven. I went to my cabin and zipped up my parka. I pulled a stocking hat over my head and went down the corridor, where I pushed down the steel lever unlocking the hatch.
When I stepped outside, the wind that had been muted inside the ship exploded. The steel railing was coated with ice spray and more rocketed into my face with each fierce gust. The wet lash of pounding snow drove me sideways as I left the slight protection of the overhang, marched forward toward the living figurine who stood gazing out as if the day were clear, the wind a pleasant breeze, and she a happy tourist eyeing the northern ocean ahead.
I joined her and said nothing, opting for silence over interrupting thoughts. She seemed unaware of my presence for a few moments, but she knew I was there. When she spoke, it was to shout over wind, but her face remained turned to the storm.
“It’s beautiful. The blizzard boutique.”
“Excuse me?”
The face shifted fractionally in my direction. Her presence was a physical force that shifted molecules of air. “This storm, so powerful. Yet we can just walk inside and take a hot shower and snuggle into bed. When I went to the pole, we didn’t bathe for six weeks. Each night we’d get into the sleeping bags, and our breath would condense, turn to ice. After a while we slept in it. The bags got heavier each day.” She smiled. “My least happy memory of the trip.”
“But still a happy one.”
I could not see her shrug inside the bulky parka, but I sensed her do it. Her sigh was a line of white vapor whipped away by wind. The ship had assumed an up-and-down rhythm timed to oncoming swells. “Colonel, I always feel like the best thing about anything is also the worst. People, for instance. My girlfriends and I, when we were twenty, used to play a game about men. We called it, I married him because… I divorced him because…”