“You,” he said, “don’t tell me what to do. I insist on phoning Washington! Your men are jamming transmissions!”
My ex-wife once took me to the National Gallery in Washington to see a Botero painting exhibit. The artist had captured South American leading families as collections of pudgy childlike figures; innocent looking and dressed as dolls, bunched in groups, archbishops and admirals, presidents and little fat children. Botero used circles to depict privilege, greed, and inbred ignorance. Picasso chose parallelograms to show Spanish peasants in their sharp complexity. But an American artist, showing Andrew Sachs, would prefer long thin triangles, like a dowager’s dangling earring, a ropy geometry spanning generations of his DNA.
“What the fuck are you up to?” he hissed.
Clearly, breeding lapsed when it came to language. He did not wait for an answer. His finger was a rapid pendulum, his bobbing nose a divining rod assigning blame.
“A drill?” he snapped. “You canceled important research for a drill? I didn’t hear anything about that. Nobody at State knows about it. I checked on the way in.”
“It will only take a few days, sir,” I said, wondering how much force I could use with an Assistant Deputy Secretary of State.
“You will cancel it now. You will call your superiors and tell them that the exercise is off. Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because you have interrupted a crucial scientific mission that has immense strategic importance to the United States. The researchers who you cavalierly kicked off the ship were conducting bottom surveys, to be used by the State Department to apply this year for vast tracts of undersea territory under the Law of the Sea Treaty. Trillions of dollars are at stake. Stop the research, you set us back a year!”
“I’m going to have to ask you for your satellite phone while you’re on board,” I said. “We’ll arrange for you to take a copter back. Sorry. Orders,” I said, curious. Was the man’s rage too profound, I wondered, to represent mere professional ire?
His eyes mocked me. “Orders? What are you, a Nazi? Very well. I was specifically ordered, ordered by the Secretary, to stay on board throughout this… whatever you’re doing… get you off as soon as possible, and continue our work.”
“The chopper should be arriving soon,” I said. “You might want to make sure you’re packed.”
He sat back and his face changed as he saw that intimidation was not going to work with me. He was probably used to getting what he wanted whenever he said “the Secretary.” He’d probably grown up getting his way. But then the face grew shrewder, and I saw that I wasn’t going to get what I wanted either.
“The copter,” he said. “You’re going to drag me onto the copter, just kick me off the ship, is that it?”
I said nothing. I waited.
“Because if you do, I can’t wait to get back and tell my people, and my friends at the Washington Post, that the Marines have taken over our only working icebreaker, and brought body bags on board — yeah, I saw them when a crate busted during unloading. I was hiding — and we’re rushing north for some secret reason. Scientific equipment? A drill? Don’t make me laugh! What’s in the other boxes? What are you up to? Why are Marines dressed like civilians?”
“Part of the drill is to maintain secrecy.”
He smirked. “Well, I guess you won’t maintain it,” he said. “Especially if you send me ashore.”
The ship’s intercom came on with a crackle, and a voice announced that a helicopter was about to land. That would be my best friend arriving, I thought, with the submarine expert the director had sent. The question was, would the copter carry back to shore this angry load of human dynamite?
Assistant Deputy Secretary of State Sachs sat back with a prim look that made me want to arrest him, lock him in his cabin. But he was right. He was not under my orders. He had, in fact, been lead voice on the ship until a few hours ago. I was filled with curses inside. I wondered for a moment if the director knew he was on board, and had dumped him in my lap.
“You’re in big trouble,” he said, bent toward me over the desk. “I’ll tell the Secretary personally about you.”
“Thank you for your input,” I told him, and shrugged, making my decision. “I suppose it won’t hurt to have you along during the drill.”
Better to keep him close. At least he won’t be able to use his satellite phone with the jammers on. I’ll decide later if I’ll take away his unit when we turn ’em off.
He’d gotten part of what he wanted. His lips formed a smile but the rage remained in his eyes. He left and the door whispered closed, quiet as a man tiptoeing barefoot down a hall at 3 A.M., keeping secrets from others in the house.
Why is he so angry? I thought.
I needed to meet the submarine expert but first wanted to talk to the Wilmington’s medical officer, who would assist with victims, if anyone from the Montana was even still alive.
Next into the room was Lieutenant Janice Cullen, looking neat in her blue Coast Guard uniform, her auburn hair cut regulation short, neck length, her name in white script at the breast pocket. She wore black CG lace-up boots. Coast Guard Academy, her file had read. Originally from Brownsville, Texas; divorced, childless, ex-college gymnast; formerly posted to the Pacific Ocean, on drug interdiction cruises. There was one mention of an “anxiety episode” suffered when her cutter was caught off Panama in a hurricane. After that she’d transferred off.
She emanated fitness, but I also saw muscle tightness — tension — around her mouth. The face was round and cheeks cherubic, rosy, eyes light undersea blue. She wore small jade earrings, dots of color in the white lobes. A girlish package on the surface, if you didn’t look twice.
“You’ve done rescue drills before,” I said. “How many victims can you handle?”
Her voice was low, slightly hoarse, and I had a feeling she was one of those smokers out on deck during breaks. “Well, with more tourist ships coming through the Northwest Passage, we did a drill last year, mock sinking, a hundred and sixty victims. We set up the copter hangar with cots. A hundred and sixty is how many were on board when that cruise ship went down in Antarctica a couple years back,” she said.
“How did your drill work out?”
“Fine. This crew has excellent training in first aid, evacuating victims by Zodiac, sled, triage, keep ’em warm, get ’em on board. We’re who you want in an emergency. In that exercise, though, we had smooth water. Victims were airlifted to the hospital in Barrow. We’ve got enough food in the two freezers aboard to feed plenty of extra people. The crew ran scenarios with burns, smoke, frostbite, hypothermia.”
That sounded good, but she was chewing her lip. I also noticed chewed-down fingernails. She added, “But the drill postulated an accident closer to land, and, uh,” she said, turning slightly pale, “better weather.”
“You don’t like storms?”
“Hey? Seventy-foot waves? What’s not to like?”
I didn’t laugh. She said, realizing that her fear showed, “I was in some bad ones in the Pacific, but this one will be worse, the captain said.”
I agreed. “Things will get a lot worse.”
I had no idea how much worse.
FOUR