I was ranking officer on my team.
I admired the director but was also wary of someone who always believed he knew the best course for the rest of the world.
The director liked to quote Benjamin Franklin. But I think he was talking about himself.
“Patriotism is relentless.”
Franklin was not a soldier, but he signed the Declaration of Independence. Had America lost its revolution, he would have been hung. He understood choice, and that is my measure of a man, the ability to make decisions.
I arrived at my small cedar-sided home in twenty minutes. A black Ford pulled into my driveway sixty seconds after that.
By 2:30 A.M., I was in an Air Force Falcon clawing through a late-summer thunderstorm as it flew toward Fairbanks, and I read a series of encrypted “eyes only” reports on the submarine Montana, my heart pounding.
I kept thinking about 107 surviving men and women on the ice, far north of me. It seemed like a big number. It would be small compared to the danger I headed toward in the end.
TWO
From the air, Barrow looked more like the last place on Earth than the place where our world could end, which, I’d learn soon, was the case. The big Globemaster transport made a wide turn over the frigid ocean and angled back toward the airport’s lone runway, its four mighty engines spewing air. The roar was tremendous. We were at the top of North America. The town of 4,500 — mostly Iñupiat Eskimos — hugged the junction of the Chukchi and the Beaufort Seas, waters frozen for centuries until recently, now passable to ships in summers. The water looked black as anthracite. I didn’t see any ice out there. The big stuff, the pack, I knew, would come farther north.
Alaska is so big that if you superimposed it over the continental United States, one end would cover North Carolina and the other would touch California. We’d roared over the Brooks Range, the peaks seeming to reach up and try to knock the plane from the sky. Dall sheep stared back from snowy crests. Then the mountains had dropped away and the land had become brown tundra, rolling grass-covered hummocks and thousands of elliptical freshwater lakes. Shaped like sunglass lenses, they threw back golden glare through rainbows of vapor: mist tendrils, fog, drizzle. The sense — gazing out — was of flying through gigantic lungs.
I’d slept for an hour, files on my lap, and had the dream about a girl from Smith Falls, more memory than imagination: a time-lapse vision of a slim twenty-year-old with long chestnut hair, fawn-colored eyes, and an Irish freckled face, a stunner, a beauty, naked, her legs folded, sitting on an old yard-sale carpet in my old college dorm; a beam of morning sun slanting in to highlight the curve of hip, smooth inner thigh, triangular three-freckle pattern on a small foot, above clenched toes. A girl doing something mundane, speaking to her mother on a telephone, on the first night we’d slept together. Yes, Mom, I’m fine. No, Mom, we didn’t drink wine. A girl who, at that moment, had seemed the most breathtakingly beautiful image I’d ever seen. I’d married that girl, but the early vision we’d shared of each other had not lasted.
Still, it had not occurred to me then that years later, after many stunning views — elephants grazing at dusk in Angola, glaciers two hundred feet high calving in Antarctica, the moon on jungle canopy in Nicaragua — the simple image of a girl in a dorm room would stand out.
Some people think nightmares are the worst dreams from which to awaken. But it’s beauty that gets you. Not ugliness; glory that ambushes you with the bittersweet touch of remorse, slipping through the unconscious to a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor who traded family for duty; the barest whiff of regret that comes when you open your eyes in the morning, before the tasks of daily living wipe it away, that glimpse of solitude that, I’d realized, in rare moments, comes with membership in the unit, although no one tells you that when you join.
I’d chosen to confess to my wife what I’d done, and watched her close up to me forever.
The last image, before I shot awake, was a coiled, black, old-fashioned rubber telephone cord pressed against a white breast, leaving a pink mark. Can you beat it? Just a plain phone line, and I’d woken with a hole in my gut, the copilot’s hand on my shoulder, and with the sour knowledge that the man who shared Nina’s bed now was behind me in the plane.
“Sir, we’ve raised the ship.”
I tried to wipe the dream from my mind as I made my way to the cockpit. I saw, at sea, a red shape on the horizon. Up until now we’d been unable to reach the icebreaker, and I’d cursed the poor state of U.S. military technology in the Arctic. The mightiest military power on Earth is more than ten years behind the other polar nations, having spent all our monies on wars in the Mideast.
The copilot gestured me to the jump seat and I pulled a headset from the cockpit wall. The coming conversation would be delicate. All Captain Maurice DeBlieu — his file said — knew so far was that his normal scientific mission had been canceled, he’d been ordered to send all research staff ashore, he was about to undertake an unknown mission, and that the Secretary of Homeland Security herself (Homeland Security, not the Pentagon, runs the Coast Guard) had hopefully told him to give a Marine lieutenant colonel named Joseph Rush platinum-quality treatment on his ship.
The voice that came over the line was clear, professional, vaguely Southern, Virginia or northern North Carolina, I guessed. The file on my laptop held a photo of a black man with a thin, neat mustache, thick black framed glasses, and dark brown eyes that looked directly into the lens, as if challenging the photographer to finish up so Captain Maurice DeBlieu could get back to work. He had nine years in the Arctic, six as top man on the ship.
“DeBlieu,” he said.
He hadn’t been appointed guardian of the nation’s lone functioning icebreaker by being a laggard. The Coast Guard was used to hosting guests in the Arctic, but not having guests tell them what to do. This next part could be awkward, especially as I’d requested that he not be informed yet as to the exact nature of the mission.
So when I asked him to meet me ashore, instead of on his ship, he requested that I hand the headphones to the pilot, and a moment later, the pilot politely but firmly requested identification. When he read the laminated card to DeBlieu, the captain still insisted that during personnel changeovers he preferred to monitor things from his ship, and not go ashore.
“Safety reasons,” he said. “If something happens to us out there, there’s no one to help. We’re it. So I like to watch everything up close.”
“I understand, sir. Security situation.”
He paused, curiosity in his voice. “Look, Colonel. I’m sure my people and yours can deal with loading issues. My understanding is that wherever we’re going, we have to hurry. So why not talk on the ship while boarding proceeds.”
This was precisely what I needed to avoid, and I said, “I’ll explain onshore. Also, I’m afraid I have to ask you to cut off all communication from the ship now. No e-mails, no cell phones. Cut all satellite access.”
No response.
I said, “Captain, if you’ll take the first chopper over, I’ll meet you in the terminal and explain fully.”
“Explain? I’ve got thirty pissed-off scientists here, and one furious Assistant Deputy Secretary, State Department, demanding explanations for kicking them off the ship. No one told us why. These scientists get a seven-week research cruise each summer. If they miss the window, once the big ice comes back, they lose the year.”