“They’re not my concern,” I said.
I hung up, knowing that resentment was building two miles away. I’d not been told that a State Department official was aboard, and hoped the director had dealt with that. The last thing I needed was a high-end squabble.
At least the captain didn’t call back. He would fly ashore.
The runway came up quickly, abutted by high grass, tundra. I saw a two-story Easter egg — blue corrugated metal terminal and a warehouse-style hangar beside it, inside of which I glimpsed, through open sliding doors, a couple of small jets and two copters. Men in yellow foul weather gear wheeled an old Bell 412 — North Slope Borough Rescue Squad — out, into light rain. It would — along with a parked Coastie copter, ferry Marines and supplies out to the ship, and displaced scientists back.
Good. Three copters means faster loading.
My two dozen Marines — sitting in bolted-down airline-style seats, or affixed to net webbing on the sides of the fuselage — were dressed like science research and support staff, our cover story for locals. Anyone watching us, especially tourists with cameras, would see “civilians” who lay whale acoustic buoys or fix machinery; they wore thick jeans, Northern Outfitter boots, hooded parkas, and wool caps, enough of a disguise to fool casual observers in an airport, as we didn’t want some Eskimo kid or tourist or scientist tweeting or sending Facebook messages about Marines boarding ships in Barrow. The clothing was perfect, but considering the jarhead haircuts and the way the guys stuck together, and the efficient way they took orders, they wouldn’t fool a professional observer for fifty seconds.
Arctic tech crews are usually big, jovial, loose-moving bearded boys and high-spirited women from Minnesota and Wyoming, or ropy types, motorcycle racers and boat bums from Cape Cod. My guys were clean shaven, serious, quiet.
Also back there were crates we’d taken on in Fairbanks, from the Arctic combat school, an impressively named, but undermanned, basement warren at the air base, for which the generals were perpetually trying to get more funds.
The crates were stenciled: WHALE ACOUSTICS BUOYS; BOWHEAD STUDY, WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTE AND LAMONT-DOHERTY EARTH OBSERVATORY.
In reality the boxes contained M4 carbines, M16s equipped with 40 mm M203 grenade launchers, Kevlar vests, eight kinds of antibiotics and burn medicines — including Cipro, zanamivir, ribavirin, and xapaxin — chemical decontaminants, snow goggles, portable propane generators, incendiary explosives, snow camouflage uniforms, microscopes, oxygen canisters, surgical masks, terrestrial satellite-jamming equipment, oil drums of bleach, encrypted sat phones, snowshoes and cross-country skis, three-finger mittens and boot liners, all the gear the modern Arctic warrior needs to do his job on a rescue mission while knowing there may be combat involved.
Another coffin-shaped crate, labeled TOOLS, carried Bibles, small wooden crosses, four small Jewish stars, and 154 folded-up plastic zip-up body shrouds.
Farther in back of the fuselage were two tied down big Arktos amphibious carriers, superb hybrid vehicles built in Canada, tank-like cabs with thick glass windows and steel tank treads, that could bull over ice but float on water. Propulsion in the water came from high-thrust, low-speed jets.
Each Arktos could hold fifty people, more on top. They were ungainly, a pumpkin color, built for visibility, not stealth, good for rescue, but not a fight. We could carry extra sleds and skis for Marines on top. The crafts would be driven on their own power to the Wilmington, and loaded by crane.
I tried not to think about the men and women trapped on the ice, five hundred miles north of Barrow… winds rising, snow blowing, medicine and food running out, their medical officer burned to death, possibly no one alive by the time we got there at all.
The director had told me an hour ago, “No change, except that the storm is getting worse. Gusts at fifty-three now.”
We halted and a trio of forklifts growled toward the plane. With a mechanical groan, the back of the Globemaster shoveled open to form a ramp. Cold wind and rain blew in. The Marines unlashed themselves from side netting, and got to work unloading. Two squads, twelve men each. One major, two gunnery sergeants, and the rest enlisted men, none of whom I’d ever met. They moved efficiently, but there was also something in the faces of those men, the young ones and veterans alike, something hard and unpleasant when they glanced my way. A guess as to the source would be Major Donald Pettit, who lived with my ex-wife, and commanded the rapid response squads that had been put under my control.
I’d first learned of Pettit’s existence on the day that Nina moved in with him. She’d phoned me to make sure I heard the news from her, not from anyone else. She’d assured me that she’d met the guy eight months after our separation, and had not dated him until three months after that. I believed her. Nina doesn’t lie. But that didn’t mean I didn’t feel like taking a swipe at Pettit’s jaw when I met the big man on the tarmac in Fairbanks. I suppose he felt something of the same, and his guys sensed the extra testosterone saturating the air.
Marine males locking horns.
Pettit seemed to avoid looking my way.
I suppose we’d have to deal with this eventually, but at the moment, with things to do, the clarification session would come later. I saw a copter landing. It would carry the captain. And I needed to talk to that man now.
Get yourself under control.
Look, I respect the Coast Guard. I’ve always admired the altruism involved in joining up, the choice to serve the country by providing humanitarian aid, helping victims of hurricanes, fires, ship sinkings. But combat-wise, even on a normal cutter you find, at most, a handful of crew allowed to carry weapons, there to arrest drug runners or smugglers. The Wilmington was built for science. It was a floating lab. Its crew consisted of a few veteran chiefs and otherwise mostly kids, eighteen- and twenty-year-olds whose expectations of emergencies ran to fires or sinkings, not battle, terrorism, or disease.
The good part was, they had extensive training in first aid and rescue. I’d need both. But if fighting broke out, they couldn’t help me. I’d asked the captain ashore because, until precautions were in place, I couldn’t discuss that on the ship.
“I shut down communications as you requested,” Captain DeBlieu said with a slight standoffishness marking his professional courtesy, “but I’ll need a reason why if you want me to keep that order in place.”
We occupied cushioned swivel chairs in the Borough Rescue Squad office, taking the measure of each other, alone, as the pilots had given us privacy. The room was divided into comfortable cubicles with land-line phones, computers, Atlanta Braves coffee mugs, and logbooks on desks. We could have been in any town in Idaho or Arizona.
I glimpsed boarding proceeding out a window — ship scientists to shore, crates to the Wilmington. Beyond the airport were some of the town’s one- and two-story wooden homes, perched on concrete pilings to keep them from melting into permafrost when they heated. I saw gravel roads. Traffic. A three-story office building. Eskimo kids on bicycles, wearing Windbreakers, even at thirty-six degrees. Satellite farms sat out on the tundra, huge dishes and golf-ball-shaped geodesic domes to protect sensitive equipment. Barrow’s radar, the old DEW line warning system, had been set up during the Cold War to warn of incoming Russian attacks. Local equipment still served as America’s Arctic front line. But it had been designed for threats from the past.
“Colonel Rush, my crew has been at sea for three months straight without a break. They’re tired. They miss home. They want to talk to their families. I’d like a good reason why I’m telling them they can’t.”