He’d seemed angry, and then, in turn, thoughtful, and sad.
“All right, Joe. For you. I’ll leave the punishment out of it. But we need to stop that story.”
Eight dead Marines, I thought now. Fuck the story. Who cared about a story? I cared about the truth.
I killed eight good U.S. Marines.
Thirty seconds later came a knock on the conference room door and I said, “Come!” I composed myself. I’d given DeBlieu a list of people I needed to see immediately, whose participation would be vital to the mission. They were waiting in the wardroom, and would be escorted here one by one by a Marine, who would keep anyone else away.
I always prefer personal meetings — even brief ones — to give me a sense of people I must work with. Later would come group strategy sessions. Now I wanted a close-up look.
“I’m Marietta Cristobel,” the woman in the doorway said.
The nation’s foremost Arctic sea ice expert — “ice forecaster” — was plump and fortyish, with curly black hair streaked with gray, brushed to her shoulders. The eyes were black, skin a tea color, clothing loose but warm looking: corduroy painter’s pants over Eastern Mountain lace-up boots, red and black checkered flannel shirt, fleece zip-up vest with an outer pocket showing the tip of a thin cigar.
This woman’s ability to pick open routes through hundreds of miles of sea ice could determine the success or failure of the rescue. We sat beneath the map of the Arctic Ocean, blue at the fringes, white showing the permanent ice cap, a jagged presence at the top of Earth.
Marietta’s name was on every report I’d read on the plane — Naval, Coast Guard, scientific task force — dealing with future military ops in the Arctic. She worked for NOAA. Mother of two. Home in Miami. Her parents had fled Cuba under Castro, when she was four. Husband a professor of biology at Florida International. I asked, “How did a Cuban get interested in ice?”
“We like it in rum and Cokes,” she said, and smiled. It was probably a standard answer to a question the Stanford graduate got all the time.
“How bad will the ice be ahead?”
She leaned back, easygoing but thoughtful. “Colonel, used to be, twelve years ago, we’d be in ice now in August/September, but within a couple hours we’ll start seeing bergy bits, little pieces of white. Later, growlers, bigger ones. Then slush and pancake ice, a glaze over the surface, then light first-year ice. The big pack won’t come for a day.”
“The captain says that can damage the ship.”
“Even an icebreaker can be holed if it hits too hard, or at the wrong angle. Or we can be trapped in heavy ice. This ship carries a six-month supply of food if that happens.”
“I’d prefer to avoid that,” I said.
“Me, too. My daughter’s sixteenth birthday is in a month.” She grinned. “I plan to be there.”
I liked her. “Tell me how you forecast ice conditions.”
Marietta slid an electronic tablet across the table. She worked with the National Ice Center in Suitland, Maryland. “Normally, with satellite pictures. But you’ve shut down communication,” she said. “I lost contact forty minutes ago. I can’t see anymore.”
I envisioned my Marines — first thing they’d done — placing a portable terrestrial jammer on the high point on the ship, the aloft conn, a closed-in nest above the bridge. The jammer was effective at a range of two miles, at least on all known frequencies.
On Marietta’s tablet, I read: NO RECEPTION.
“If you want forecasts, I need access,” she said.
“I’ll give you ten minutes once in a while, then we close it up again. What’s the minimum amount of time you need to pick up information?”
She sat back, considering. “Well, with the storm, we may get nothing even when it’s on, but give me ten minutes every two hours, and hope that’s when cloud cover lets us see.” She shook her head. “You couldn’t have picked a worse time for a drill.”
“Ten minutes then, at staggered intervals.”
“Thanks. But even if it works, we’ll learn the extent of the ice, but not thickness, and thickness,” she said, “is what’s dangerous. I have a drone on board which we can fly in wind below twenty miles per hour. It’ll show open routes. But winds lower than that?” She laughed. “Don’t hold your breath. It’s worsening up there.
“Also, about this rescue drill,” she added. “I’m curious, how did you pick the spot where we’re going?”
“We’re heading for a buoy dropped by plane,” I lied.
“You know that it will drift with the ice, and won’t be where you dropped it, right?”
“The buoy has a radio beacon on it. At a certain point, we should pick up the signal,” I said. This was true; there was an emergency transmitter on the Montana. Normally it was good at long distances, but in a storm, who could tell?
I added, “Dr. Cristobel, please keep the sat channel access arrangement a secret between you and me.”
She nodded. She’d been at enough Naval war games to know variations. “No problem. By the way, if you really want an ice expert, talk to Clinton Toovik.”
“Who is Clinton Toovik?”
“Our Iñupiat Eskimo observer. The North Slope puts a marine mammal watcher aboard every cruise. Clinton’s a whale hunter. He reports back to the community on animal conditions, and truth is, he’s more the ice expert than me. He can tell from watching clouds what kind of ice is ahead. Mist, whale movements, wind, currents, even light reflection, to him they’re clues.”
“Where is Clinton?”
“He hardly ever sleeps,” she said. “He’s usually up on the bridge, watching and writing in a little book. The Iñupiats have a hundred words for ice. The National Weather Service only four. To Clinton, it’s alive, like some kind of animal,” she said as a loud argument began in the corridor outside, and a man shouted, “I don’t care what your orders are. I demand to see him instantly!”
Marietta recognized the voice and rolled her eyes. She said, “Those Iñupiat words don’t just describe conditions. They describe safety. One word means ice you can walk on, another is ice you better walk on fast, a third is ice that looks safe but isn’t. It will turn on you, trick you.”
The man in the corridor yelled, “Do you know who I am?”
“That’s our friend from the State Department,” Marietta said, standing, giving me a look of sympathy. “Oz the great and powerful. Assistant Deputy Secretary Andrew Sachs.”
She let herself out. I called out for the Marine to send the shouter in, and a thin, red-faced man stormed through the open door.
Andrew Sachs was supposed to have gone home with the scientists. I’d vetted him, crossed his name off the passenger list. Clearly, he’d had other ideas, found a way to stay here, hidden, and had now come out.
“I don’t take orders from you. Do you have the slightest idea of how much trouble you’re in?” Sachs demanded, refusing a seat.
“You were supposed to go ashore on the copter,” I said.
He was tall and thin, balding off both sides of the front slope of his forehead, dressed in thicker versions of the Arctic clothing Marietta had worn, heavy fleece vest, cords, lace-up Merrell boots, but in his case everything was new, while hers were comfortably worn. He wore a blue Coast Guard Wilmington cap, the kind that the captain presents to VIPs. His watch was thin and gold, the waving hands fragile white, the angular face purple with rage. The surprisingly deep voice combined the nasal consonants of old New England breeding: Groton to Yale — with the in-your-face attitude of a Bruce Willis character. The cheekbones were sharp; granite specks floated in the iron-colored eyes like mines. A small swath of boyish chestnut hair flipped over the otherwise balding high forehead. I judged him an unhealthy forty.