He thought, We’ve got a tanker up here somewhere if I need a bit more time, need to refuel in the air. But if there are no problems, thirty minutes maximum. Thirty more minutes and I’ll circle while she burns, to make sure the ship goes down, and then I’ll go home, and resign and get drunk.
The Zodiac flew left and righted itself and smacked down into the ocean again as the prop bit into the water. The craft spun left. I fell back in. Kukulka lay on the bottom, facedown, in water, as another wave towered overhead.
I crawled to the wheel and managed to right us. We were climbing a wave, me at the wheel, fighting the pull. We topped it and sledded downward. In the trough, I cut speed, knelt, and turned Kukulka over, got the helmet and balaclava off. His head was bloody but he was breathing. His eyes looked glazed. I heard a rattling sound in his chest. Broken ribs.
“John? You with me here?”
No answer.
There was nothing I could do but make sure he was free to breathe. I took the wheel and continued south. Was it south or had we turned around? The engine fought me like an animal. The waves came sideways, and remembering what Clinton had said about snow, and wind lines, I aimed at the same angle into each wave, hoping this meant we were continuing in our prior direction. There were no stars. The compass needle swung left, then right. The bursts of explosions — more disturbances in the low clouds — pockmarked the heavens. The clouds seemed about to drop on our heads.
The turbulence let up and the engine sputtered but kept going. Kukulka was sitting up the next time I looked, then lying down again, but faceup, at least. The things you recall. The things you remember. I was a kid in Massachusetts. I used to stay up late on Sunday nights and watch black-and-white horror movies on our rabbit-ear TV with Dad. One creepy one, which I loved, was The Incredible Shrinking Man, and this old movie, ridiculous as it sounds, came back to me now. I recalled how in the film, a man in a motorboat — out for a weekend pleasure cruise — drives through mist on the ocean. A few days later the guy starts shrinking, losing weight. At first he likes it. He’s trim! Healthy! Then, as he keeps getting smaller, he worries that he’s sick.
By the end of a month the guy is the size of a midget, then a six-year-old, a two-year-old, and finally he’s so small he lives in a dollhouse, but he keeps getting smaller, and in the end he can’t even be seen with the naked eye. He’s so small that he slips out of the house through a mesh screen, to stare in wonder at the multitude of stars above, and decide that however small you are, you are still part of something great, something larger.
Bullshit. I never felt as small as I did on that Zodiac, bumping through blackness. Time seemed suspended. There was only horror in feeling helpless and disconnected and mute.
The ocean changed. Without ice to blanket down waves, swells grew larger. We jetted up the side of a wall, and coasted down, corkscrewing. Sideways, we hit a wall of water coming out of nowhere, but somehow I kept us afloat. We passed through soaking icy spray. In the bottom of the Zodiac I saw a flopping, gasping fish. I reached down with one hand, holding the wheel with the other. I picked up the wriggling, suffocating creature. I dropped it into the sea. Let something here stay alive.
Without stars, I had no bearing. I could have been driving in any direction, through hell, the world a weightless, directionless intensity, our speed immeasurable, the velocity of despair. The speedometer had jammed. I looked at my watch. Were we moving at almost thirty miles an hour? If we were, and we’d been eighty miles from shore when Kukulka hit the throttle, surely we’d be getting close to the north coast of Alaska by now.
I tried the radio. Nothing.
I tried again. It was soaking wet, like everything here, but DeBlieu had said the thing was waterproof.
Then I heard a rumble in the sky. I thought, Shit, thunder, another storm. The roar came from directly ahead. It seemed to sweep toward us. The sound grew enormously and then there was a mighty whoosh above and I knew I’d been wrong about the source as the fighter plane swept past, leaving a vague ghost of contrail from its massive nozzle.
I tried to reach the pilot on the radio. Maybe on flight band it might work. I shouted into the set that he should leave the ship alone, that we’d found an antidote, that the sick were getting better, that he should check with Washington, tell them the news.
I heard scratchy static in my ears.
Had DeBlieu changed course?
I hoped so. But there was no way, even if he had, that the Wilmington could evade that monster for long.
The engine sputtered… and caught, slowed, and surged ahead.
I thought in prayer. Please God, let him miss the ship.
Kukulka groaned and rolled onto his side, but his face remained above the water that sloshed in the Zodiac.
“This is Lieutenant Colonel Joe Rush of the Coast Guard icebreaker Wilmington. Is anybody there?
“Mayday! This is Lieutenant Colonel Joe Rush of the icebreaker Wilmington! If anyone is listening, please respond!
“This is an emergency. If you can hear me, I cannot hear you. Please call the following phone number in Washington and tell whoever answers that you’ve heard from me and to call back the plane!”
No answer.
I said out loud, “Hey, Clinton, are you sure this business about direction is right?”
Up was down. North was south. Maybe I’d turned us completely around, beneath the skyless heavens, and headed back toward the North Pole.
Kukulka was groaning, sitting up a little, and trying to get my attention. His face was a sheet of blood, but he was able to shout. I heard him over the engine.
“What, Chief?”
“How far away would a ship have to be, Colonel, for us to hear an explosion?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’d hear it, right? Or even see something, a light, a spark, something?”
I kept going.
I drove up and into the side of a massive, heaving wave.
“This is Joe Rush of the icebreaker Wilmington. Is anyone listening?
“This is Joe Rush from the Wilmington. If you can hear me, please call the following number…”
What’s the point? I thought.
I heard a different kind of static, a burst that sounded like someone talking.
“Buzzzz… static… buzzzzzz… Seth!”
It sounded like a woman. Or a kid. I said, “Please try again. I cannot hear you. Hello?”
“Buzz… buzzz… my uncle Elmore… he said… buzz.”
“This is Lieutenant Colonel Joe Rush. Who am I speaking to?”
“Seth Itta! At the rescue squad office. My uncle said to… crackle.”
Three minutes later I was talking to an adult, telling him who I was, telling him where to call, telling him, as I saw lights ahead, low, flickering, yellow streetlights, a curve of shore… Barrow, who we were.
He understood right away, and clicked off, and minutes dragged by as we closed on the shore. I had no idea if he had any luck reaching Washington. It seemed like hours ago when the Raptor fighter had flown past.
Maybe they’ve got the landline to Washington. Maybe they can reach the F22.
He was back. He was nervous. He told us to stay offshore and not land, “Because you might be contagious.”