“So almost twice as fast as the ship. What kind of radio do they carry?”
“Standard line-of-sight transmission. You’ve got to see the place you’re trying to reach. On a good day, six miles.”
“I’d need to be near shore, then, to reach it.”
“If you even get there. There could be ice further south. It moves in packs. And you don’t know weather conditions. Things change fast. Look, Colonel, it’s an open boat, for work near the ship, but it’s not for distance, not up here. If you encounter a chop, or waves, you could flip in a second. And you’ll be in the dark. Hit ice at almost thirty miles an hour, and—”
“Lower a Zodiac, Captain. I need to get to Barrow.”
DeBlieu had turned white now, and not from disease, and he came close. He did not want the others nearby to hear.
“You’re saying that our own side is sending a plane to destroy us?”
“I’m saying give me a coxswain to drive the boat, the best person you have. I’m saying get someone on the radio, and stay on it, whether or not you think anyone can hear, and start screaming as loud as you can over the static: We may have an antidote. Keep sending, keep it up until you can’t scream anymore, keep it up while your guys try to fix the cables, in case you get a temporary connection, and then have someone else take over, scream it louder still.”
I started to leave, to get my gear, and turned back.
“Also,” I said, “I advise you to change direction now, head off toward the last place anyone would ever think that you’d go. Turn off every light! Now! Run dark. No radar. No sonar. Find that whiteout we passed and stay inside it. Give yourself every extra second. Maybe, with that electronic disturbance up there, it won’t be so easy to find you. Now, please, lower a Zodiac over the side!”
TWENTY-SEVEN
The coxswain was a master chief named John Kukulka. He was a big, strapping man from Ridgefield, Connecticut, built like a rugby player — ruddy face, fullback shoulders, curly hair and boyish cheeks, and a cheerful disposition as we sat in the Zodiac and were lowered down the starboard side of the Wilmington, to the Chukchi Sea.
“Ever go to Coney Island, Colonel?”
“Once, when I was a kid.”
“Like the rides?”
“Why?”
I saw his even teeth through the dark, white as snow. We wore crash helmets over our balaclavas. We wore thermal underwear and waterproof zip-up mustang suits against cold that would increase at almost thirty knots. Waterproof shells. Waterproof boots. The sky had clouded over. Aurora borealis was reduced to sporadic massive explosions inside the massed clouds. The ship was hidden from satellites. With Zhou gone, there would be no witnesses to whatever was planned to occur.
Now I was one of those Marines on the truck in Afghanistan, trying to reach the U.S. encampment, and whoever had ordered a warplane to hit us was also me, some officer onshore, in the continental United States.
“Coney Island,” John Kukulka said as I felt the buoyant Zodiac rock in the light swell, and as he button-started the motor. “At Coney Island, I liked the Cyclone roller coaster, the Tilt-A-Whirl, the Python, now that was a good one.”
“And why are you telling me this, Kukulka?”
He grinned beneath his helmet. “Because here we go!”
The shock of the water on my face was immediate. The boat seemed to dig in and spurt forward and the bow lifted slightly but not enough so that John Kukulka — at the steering console toward the stern — could not see, with his night vision glasses, what was coming up ahead. The engine sounded monstrous. The ship fell back behind us, went from being a gigantic tanker shape, to a vague block of darkness with a few lights on, to those lights suddenly going off in the distance.
Something hard and angular flashed by at eye level on the port side.
“Ice bit,” shouted Kukulka. “Didn’t even know it was here.”
Now I knew why he’d asked about Coney Island. The little boat corkscrewed and leaped, turned sideways and righted itself. Frigid spray came from three directions. Our floodlight stabbed ahead, bouncing, yet somehow reflecting back into our faces. The sky seemed to press down and try to smother us. I thought, Warplane? What kind? A Hercules that could drop a fire bomb to float down by parachute? An Apache equipped with ship-killing missiles? A Navy jet launching harpoon missiles from twenty miles away, to guide them electronically into the ship?
Radar, I thought. Even with thick cloud cover, a warplane could light up that ship with radar.
“Hey, Kukulka!”
“What, sir?”
“You married?”
“To Lizzie.”
“Kids?”
“Ian. He’s eight.”
“Tell me about Ian.”
The jolly voice called back, “He’s got a birthday coming up.”
“Get a present for him yet, Chief?”
“Yeah, Colonel,” shouted the big man, only the jaunty tone was gone now, and something harder and diligent was there. “I’m going to give him an intact family. I’m going to give him a mom who’s not a widow. And a dad who helps him blow out the candles on Lizzie’s banana cake. I’m going to get you where you need to be, so you can reach someone over our fucking radio, excuse the word, sir.”
At that moment, we hit something, wave, ice, log, who knows what, and we launched into the air again, corkscrewing and starting to flip. Kukulka slammed into the steering wheel, and bounced back. His hands flew off the wheel. His helmet hit the casing again. Blood blossomed from his right eye. I was no longer on the seat. I saw water below at a sixty-degree angle. Colonel Joseph Rush, no longer human, was flying. Colonel Joe Rush and coxswain John Kukulka, like Arctic birds, aloft, in the night.
In Barrow, the clouds blanketed the sky and the light show disappeared and the word finally came from Washington. The general stood up in the rescue squad office, at the airport, said good-bye to the two Eskimo boys. They’d been talking football, which had been pleasantly distracting. They were good kids, curious and smart, and joking with them had made the otherwise torturous wait go faster.
The general made his way downstairs, in his Arctic-issue shearling-lined hat and fleece pants. The F22 awaited him outside the hangar. The wind smelled wet. Inside the plane, huge kayak shapes, bombs, were finned and ready to be guided into the ship.
Their weight made takeoff longer than usual. Once in the air, he turned the Raptor to the north. He trimmed the wings. Dark sea raced by. He stayed below the clouds for better vision. He knew the last satellite coordinates for the Wilmington, but his radar seemed slightly off, possibly due to the light show high above in the ionosphere.
The Raptor had a top range of more than 1,800 miles and could reach air speeds of 1,500 mph, although today he was flying slower. The plane was capable, under combat conditions, of flying 500 miles, maneuvering, attacking an enemy, delivering payloads, and returning home. It was a miracle. He loved the Raptor. Today the route would be shorter, and finding the target should be simple with radar, despite the massive atmospheric disturbances wreaking havoc with satellites and sensors. Once he had visual confirmation of the target — as Washington wanted no mistakes, no bombing of some errant research or German tourist ship — he’d let loose with the 2,000-pound bombs.
The general knew the course that the Wilmington was committed to, and the speed it had been going before the satellites lost view. So he should be able to locate the ship whether or not it lay dead ahead.