His name was Thorvald Weir, and he was a very good sea captain, but the chase was almost over and he was losing, and he knew, with a sinking feeling, that by midnight he’d probably be dead; leaving a widow in Seattle, two babies without a thirty-year-old father, a family burial plot with no body in it, just a headstone marking the mystery of his disappearance, and any evidence; floating wood bits, oil slicks, bits of blown-up movie cameras and tripods, shot to pieces by the Bolshevik gunship closing from behind.
I never should have taken the money from the War Department, he thought, fighting the twenty-foot chop, pointing his “fishing trawler,” Anna, north, watching for rocks or floating timber that could smash the bow. The black volcanic beaches of Russia slid by on the left, sixteen miles off, and the ragged cliffs of Alaska were twenty-eight miles to the right, and the cold zone was dead ahead, the frigid Arctic seas of ice and storms. The sun was out at 11:45 P.M., a low-hanging orb spotlighting the Anna, allowing the Red bastards to push closer, with their deadly deck gun. The Anna did eleven knots; the ship behind had to be moving at thirteen.
A few more minutes and they would be within range.
Thor crossed himself, coughed from a bad summer cold the crew shared, knew that in another few minutes, if no miracle occurred, all men aboard would be turned into food for the birds, orcas, Pacific cod.
It was August 1918 and the world had turned upside down: war in Europe, kings overthrown, nations ended, millions of soldiers dead, their corpses hanging on barbed wire in France, men succumbing to mustard gas and bullets, sepsis, poison gas, flu, newfangled weapons like lumbering tanks, and airplanes that actually dropped bombs from the clouds, and on top of all that, American troops were in Russia, Thor knew, battling the godless Reds. President Woodrow Wilson had sent doughboys out of Michigan, big strapping boys off the Ford auto lines and family farms, sent ’em away from the killing trenches of Europe, and seven thousand Michiganders fought with the White Russian army against Lenin’s hordes in the forests of the west, as another three thousand God-fearing Americans guarded the rail lines along the Pacific Coast against the fanatics who had overthrown the Czar, pulled Russia out of the Great War, made peace with the German Kaiser, and sought to turn the rest of the world into a cemetery for decent folk.
I had to say yes, Thor muttered to himself.
He was a patriot and a veteran of the Spanish War, where he’d fought with the great Teddy Roosevelt, charged up old San Juan Hill with the Rough Riders, greatest day of his life. So when the men in suits, the men from Washington, had told him that a seemingly innocuous “quickie trip in and out of Russia” would help the national effort, how could he say no?
He’d lied to his wife about the destination… Edison’s making a silent movie about Eskimos, he said… and the five-man film crew from Fort Riley, Kansas, had stomped aboard and shot plenty of film, all right, in coves and in caves and on islands, until twelve hours ago, when, as they idled on the Russian side in a seemingly isolated bay, a forty-degree, foggy day, about ten thousand walrus on a black beach ahead, pink and fat and stinking of salt and excrement, suddenly the peaceful part was over. The prow of a Bolshie gunship had jutted from a cloudbank — an armor-plated 237-footer — and the first shell had missed them, splashed into the cove and echoed in the fir forest that thickened the curved black shore, and even as Thor hit the throttle and spun the wheel, he’d seen the enemy, angry men wearing a ragtag collection of uniforms… sailors in red caps, civilian troops in red scarves, factory workers and even a gigantic barking dog beneath a huge handmade flapping hammer and sickle flag half obscured by coal dust clouds, men yelling foreign words as the two ships plowed through the walruses, churning them up, turning the sea red.
Thor had not understood the words, but he understood the tone.
Stop or we will kill you.
Stop and we’ll kill you anyway.
I should have never allowed the film crew aboard. They never explained what they were doing with their secret maps, cameras, sure, but also rifles, wooden boxes, nets.
Going ashore. Disappearing into the forests.
Shoulda… woulda…
Now he was in a race. A miracle. That’s what they needed. A bay or estuary to escape into. An accident aboard the gunship; a spark in the ammunition room. A prop smashing into a gigantic log. An angel swooping down to confuse the Bolsheviks. A collision between the pursuers and an undersea boulder tearing a hole in their hull.
Thor handed the wheel to his first mate and went on deck for a better view. The Army men stood in a group on the fantail, camera and tripod idle, watching the big ship draw closer. They had Springfield rifles in their hands, and one man held a .44 sidearm, as if those pathetic weapons would be of use against artillery shells.
Still they were brave, and the ship behind them — far north of any Russian town of note — was bigger every time he checked, single stacked, spewing smoke, an old Imperial Russian Navy boat seized by the revolutionaries, its 130 mm deck gun capable of firing five shots a minute.
A boom sounded behind him. A high-pitched whistling announced the shell coming, a speck growing impossibly bigger. It was going to hit but instead sent up a tower of water off the fantail, close enough to splash the men on the ship.
Then Thor’s heart started racing because he’d spotted a chance. Maybe the miracle was happening, maybe Saint Christopher had heard him. The cloudbank a half mile ahead was low and thick and hugged the sea, gray as death, a roiling curtain.
He headed for it, asked Saint Christopher to hide them. He promised that he’d be a better father, a minder-of-his-own-business, if the great Christopher would mislead those godless bastards behind.
A geyser erupted ahead.
The cloudbank growing closer.
The next explosion came fifteen yards away, rocking them so much that the screws lifted out of the water, screaming and spinning before they bit back into the sea.
One man on the fantail fired uselessly at the big ship.
The air getting shockingly, instantly colder.
The mist reaching out with tentacle-like arms, coated them with a smell like wet earth. They slid into its clammy folds. The temperature plunged even further.
The ship behind them was actually gone now, at least for a minute, as they seemed to cross some kind of boundary between the upper Pacific seas and what lay in the great High North.
The Bolshies gone. The air almost liquid.
Had the miracle happened?
The little Anna stabilized, and Thorvald zigzagged north and prayed the fog would hide them, and it did, at least for a while, and finally after ninety minutes the mist thinned and they emerged from the cloudbank.
Five men stood in the pilothouse, two crew, three cameramen, one coughing because he had not brought a heavy coat, thinking it was summer, and he was shivering, all of them peering ahead like Columbus’s sailors gasping at the New World, wondering what sight would meet their eyes with the fog gone.
And now they saw it, and stiffened.