'What about the Eagle? Arkady asked the question Susan had asked him.
Wipers were doing an effective job of smearing ice in arcs across the windshield. On the other hand, the ship was going nowhere, and there was nothing to see except blinding fog. At a squint, Arkady estimated visibility at a hundred metres.
'Be thankful you're on the right boat, Renko.'
'There's been no call?'
'Their radio is dead,' Marchuk said.
'Three different kinds of radio and backups, and they're all dead?'
'Maybe their mast is down. We know they iced up and that there was a lot of rolling. It's possible.'
'Send someone back.'
Marchuk felt his pockets for a pack, then leaned against the windshield counter and coughed, which was almost the same as having a cigarette. He cleared his throat. 'You know what I'm going to do when we get back? Take a rest cure. No drinking, no smoking. Go someplace near Sochi where they clean you out, steam you in sulphur and pack you in hot mud. I want to stay in that mud for at least six months until I stink like a Chinese egg; that's how you know you're cured. I'll come out pink as a babe. Then they can shoot me.' He glanced at the helmsman and then through the door to the navigation room, where the second mate was soberly working charts. The Polar Star was locked in ice but the ship had not stopped moving because, slowly and inexorably, the ice sheet itself moved. 'When you get this far north, curious things happen to equipment. There are illusions not just to our eyes. A radio signal goes up and bounces right back. The magnetism is so strong that radio-direction signals are absorbed. You don't have to go to outer space to find a black hole – it's right here.'
'Send someone back,' Arkady said again.
'I'm not allowed as long as the cable is not properly reeled in. If it's caught on something buoyant it could be right under the ice; perhaps it could even be seen.'
'Who is the captain of this ship, you or Hess?'
'Renko.' Marchuk flushed, started to bring his hands out of his pockets and stuffed them back in. 'Who is a second-class seaman who should be grateful he isn't chained to his bunk?'
Arkady stepped over to the radio. Though the Eagle was still two kilometres behind the Polar Star, the green dot on the scope was a blur.
'They're not sinking,' Marchuk said. 'They've just iced up, and ice doesn't give you an echo the way clean metal does. Hess says they're in good shape; their radios are in working order and they have a fix on his cable. You heard him say that we're the ones in trouble, not them.'
'And if they disappear from the screen completely, Hess will tell you the Eagle has turned into a submarine. Susan will be on the bridge in a second. How are you going to handle her and the rest of the Americans on board?'
'I'll give them a complete and frank analysis in the wardroom,' Marchuk said drily. 'The main thing is to keep them away from the stern until the cable is hauled in.'
Both factory ship and trawler were frozen into the sheet, bows to the southeast, aimed at the boats coming up from Seattle, though neither of the incoming craft showed on the screen no matter what range Arkady punched into the radar scan. He reset the scope at five kilometres to take the Eagle's bearing at three hundred degrees.
Marchuk whispered, 'If after another hour Comrade Hess has still not pulled in his cable, I will personally cut it and break out of the ice. That will take time because water this cold is dense and the cable will sink slowly. Then I can go back and rescue the Eagle. I promise you, I am not going to let other fishermen die. I'm like you; I want them out on open water,'
'No,' Arkady said, 'I like them right where they are.'
Marchuk turned his back to the thump of the wipers. Below him the bow lifted its deck, rust and green paint wearing its ghostly sheen of ice. Beyond the gunwale there was only white: no water, no sky, no distinction of horizon.
'I can't permit anyone to leave the ship,' Marchuk said. 'First, I am not allowed. Second, it would be useless. You've walked on frozen lakes?'
'Yes.'
'This is not the same. This is notLake Baikal. Ice from salt water is only half as strong as from fresh water, more like quicksand than cement. Take a look! In fog like this you can't see where you're going. In a hundred steps you'd lose your way. If a crazy man did go out on the ice, he should say goodbye to everyone first. No, not allowed.'
'Have you ever walked on the ice here?' Arkady asked.
Marchuk, the silhouette, bowed to memory. 'Yes.'
'What was it like?'
'It was' – the captain spread his hands – 'beautiful.'
From an emergency locker Arkady took a pair of lifevests and a flare gun. The vests were made of orange cotton over plastic foam briquettes, with pockets for missing emergency whistles, and straps that tied at the waist over his sweater. The gun was an ancient Nagant revolver, the cylinder and barrel replaced by the squat tube of a flare.
The trawl deck seemed clear. Crossing it, he noticed, too late, someone watching from the high vantage point of the crane cabin. Pavel was a shadow within the glass of the cabin, except where his face peered through a triangular crack. He didn't react, though. Not until Arkady was inside the aft house did he realize that with his hood up and the added bulk of the vests under his jacket he had, at least at a distance, disguised himself.
'Arkady, is that you?' Gury loitered in the corridor by the kitchen passing a hot pilmeni from hand to hand. Pasta flour covered the shoulders of his leather jacket like heavy dandruff.
Arkady was startled, but realized that it was the sheer normalcy of Gury and the cabbage vapours of the mess that had surprised him. With no fishing to occupy them, people could stay below, play dominoes or chess, watch films, catch naps. The Polar Star might be stopped for some unexplained reason, but reasons were rarely explained. They could feel the engines idling below; in the meantime, life went on.
'You've got to see this. The usual turd-shaped, meat-stuffed ravioli, but...' Gury bit, choked down half the pilmeni and displayed the remaining half.
'So?' Arkady asked.
Gury grinned and held the pilmeni even closer to Arkady's eyes, as if displaying a diamond ring. 'No meat. I don't mean the usual "no meat", with gristle or bone. I mean not within lightyears' distance of any mammalian life form. I mean fishmeal and gravy, Arkady.'
'I need your watch.'
Gury was nonplussed. 'You want to know what time it is?'
'No.' Arkady unbuckled the new safari watch on Gury's wrist 'I just want to borrow your watch.'
' "Borrow"? You know, of all the words in the Russian language, including "fuck" and "kill", "borrow" is probably the lowest. "Lease", "rent", "timeshare" – those are words we must learn.'
'I'm stealing your watch.' The compass built into the band was even notched to indicate degrees.
'You're an honest man.'
'You're going to report Olimpiada for adulterating our food?'
It took Gury a moment to get back on track. 'No, no. I was thinking when we get back to Vladivostok of maybe opening an enterprise, a restaurant. Olimpiada's a genius. With a partner like her I could make a fortune.'
'Good luck.' Arkady strapped on the watch.
'Thank you.' Gury pulled a face. 'What do you mean, "Good luck"?' He became more concerned as Arkady moved towards the trawl deck. 'Where are you going dressed like that? Will I get my watch back?'
Arkady took the walkway to the stern deck, consciously assuming the deliberate gait of a heavier man. He didn't glance back at the boat deck in case one of Karp's team was watching. The red ensign at the stern rail hung still with ice. Few footsteps had marred the shiny patina of the deck. At the well over the stern ramp stood a pair of long-suffering crewmen with the red armbands of public-order volunteers: Skiba and Slezko in sunglasses and rabbit-fur hats. When Arkady neared, they recognized him. As they started to block his way he waved them aside. It was a gesture he had seen enough in Moscow, a brusque gesture more with the hand than the arm, but sufficient to prompt the trained response,
to chase pedestrians away from speeding motorcades, send dogs racing around a perimeter, dismiss orderlies or disperse prisoners.
Slezko said, 'The captain ordered –'
'No one is allowed –' said Skiba.
Arkady took Skiba's sunglasses.
'Wait,' Slezko said. He handed Arkady his Marlboros.
'Comrades.' Arkady saluted them. 'Consider me a bad Communist.'
He went down the well. At the landing, the platform where the trawlmasters usually watched nets rise from the sea, the rope was frozen to the rail and he had to kick it free. He climbed over the rail and wrapped the rope around his sleeve. Going down the rope was not much different from sliding down an icicle. He landed on his heels, which at once went out from under him; letting go, he slid the rest of the way down the ramp and on to the ice.
High overhead, Skiba and Slezko crowded to the stern rail like a pair of stoats peeking over a cliff. On his feet again, Arkady took a bearing from the compass built into the band of Gury's watch. The ice was solid as stone. He started to walk.
He should have worn double underclothes, socks and felt boots. At least he had good gloves, a wool cap inside his hood and the two life preservers, which provided a surprising amount of insulation. The more he walked, the warmer he got.
And the less he cared. The glasses didn't so much shade the brilliant fog as define it so that he could appreciate the veils of white vapour shifting around him. He'd once had a similar sensation looking through the window of a plane flying through clouds. The ice was solid, white the way the sea ice is when the brine freezes out. Bright as a mirror, though he couldn't see his image, only an aerated haze frozen within the ice. When he looked back, the ship was fading into the fog. And out of context, Arkady thought. The Polar Star was no longer a ship in water so much as a grey wedge dropped from the sky.
Two kilometres at a brisk pace. Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour. How many people got to walk upon the sea?
Arkady wondered whether Zina had looked up from the waves at the looming grey flank of the ship. It was much easier for him; the water was flat, frozen, so much alabaster pavement. When he glanced back again, the Polar Star had disappeared.
He was still on a bearing of three hundred degrees, though the compass needle swung from side to side. This close to the magnetic pole the vertical pull was so strong that the needle's tip seemed to be jerked left and right by strings. There was nothing else to get a fix on – no feature on the horizon, no horizon at all, no seam between ice and fog. Every direction was the same, including up and down. Total whiteout.
First, Arkady wanted to check the wardrobes in the cabins, then storage Jockers and engine room. Zina had been stowed somewhere.
Marchuk was right about illusions. Arkady saw an old-fashioned black vinyl 78 record spinning by itself and without a sound in the middle of the ice. It was as if his mind had decided to fill in the white void with the first object it could grab from his memory. He checked the compass. Perhaps he had been going in a circle. That happened in fog. Some scientists said travellers wandered because one leg was stronger than the other; others even cited the Coriolis effect of the rotation of the earth, assuming that men had no more control over their direction than wind or water.
The record spun faster as he approached, then wobbled out of control; with his last steps, it trembled and dissolved into a rough circle of tar-black water edged by broken ice soaked red with blood.
Polar bears sometimes crashed through a seal's breathing hole just as the seal was coming up for air. The bears hunted two hundred or three hundred kilometres out on the sea ice. The sound of an ice breaker usually chased them away, but the Polar Star was at dead stop. Arkady hadn't heard the attack, so it couldn't have just happened. On the other hand, no blood or tracks led away from the hole. The bear had taken its kill straight down into the water and hadn't come back up yet, or had headed underwater for another hole. The ice looked as if it had exploded. From the amount of blood ringing the hole, perhaps the seal had exploded, too. Only a piece or two of ice bobbed in the water, evidence of currents still moving under the sheet.
Now, that would be an unexpected conclusion to an investigation, Arkady thought: being eaten by a bear. A first? Not in Russia. How surprised that seal must have been. He knew the feeling. He took another reading from the compass and set off again.
Ahead he heard the sharp sound of a crack. At first he thought it might be the bear erupting through the ice, then it occurred to him that perhaps the ice sheet was splitting. On open water, pulled by tides and currents, the sheet shifted, broke and realigned. He didn't feel in any particular danger. Water carried sound faster and farther than dry air. Fog didn't muffle sound; it amplified it. If there was a fissure, it was probably far in the distance.
He wished the needle of the compass would stop jumping. How many minutes had he been walking? Twenty by the watch. How was Japanese quality control? There was no sign of the Eagle, but looking back he could see, on the outer ring of visibility, something following him, a figure so gauzy it seemed an apparition.
A grey streak of ice started to sag under his feet; He moved laterally to whiter ice and picked up the bearing again. Ice tended to break on a southwest-northeast axis, the wrong way for his path. It kept him alert. The object behind him moved at a steady lope, like a bear, but it was upright and black.
By now Arkady knew he was lost. Either he had gone off at an angle, or else he had underestimated the distance to the Eagle. As the fog stirred it flowed from left to right. For the first time he noticed the sideways movement of what he'd thought was a stationary bank, which might have been leading him astray the entire time. The cloud also flowed forward, enveloping him. Behind him, within a hundred metres now, his pursuer had developed legs, arms, head and beard, Marchuk. Skiba and Slezko must have run directly from the stern to the captain, and it was perfectly characteristic of a Siberian like Marchuk to follow by himself. In a matter of steps Arkady was into the fog. Marchuk faded away.
The captain hadn't called out. What Arkady wanted now was to reach the Eagle before Marchuk caught up and ordered him back to the Polar Star. They could go on board the trawler together, as long as Arkady got to look around. It would be safer with Marchuk along, Arkady had to admit. Ridley and Coletti were working with Karp. Probably not Morgan, though a captain couldn't be entirely innocent of what happened on his own boat.
Although he was walking blindly in the fog, in his mind's eye Arkady saw his footprints leading straighter than an arrow across the ice to the Eagle. It had a rightness, a sense of the magnetic. Unless, of course, he'd already missed the trawler and was heading for the Arctic Circle.
The cracking sound came again, more distinctly this time. Not ice splitting: ice being hammered, impact followed by an echo like splintering glass. Arkady found himself turning his head in a searching motion as if he could trace the source of the noise. Sound could mislead in fog by seeming too close, and Arkady resisted the temptation to run because it would be easy to veer in the wrong direction. By now the fog itself rushed over him like surf trying to bear him away. Imagine, he thought, how much courage it took to swim even a few metres in water almost this cold. He had seen men fall off a trawler and almost instantly go into shock before they were rescued.
The hammering was suddenly loud. The Eagle emerged no more than ten metres away, thrust up and tilted by ice. Fog whipping over the boat made it appear as if it were speeding through heavy seas.
Breaking the way, the Polar Star had iced up from clean snow. On the fairway, the Eagle had iced up from salt spray, which froze in a grey ice that had accreted grotesquely like stalactites, then glazed as the temperature dropped. Ice seemed to cascade down the wheelhouse stairs and flood from the scuppers. Icicles hanging off the gunwales were rooted to the ice sheet. Coletti was outside the wheelhouse using a blowtorch to melt ice into sockets around the windows; the flame of the torch lit his sallow face. The light inside the bridge was as dim as a candle, but Arkady
could see a figure sitting in the captain's chair. Ridley was hammering ice off the rungs of the radio mast. At the top of the mast the dipoles had disappeared and the whip antennas were bent at ninety degrees. Ice hung from them like torn rigging; the best Morgan would hear from them was static. The fog shifted, obscuring the Eagle Again. They hadn't seen him at all. He began circling towards the stern.
How far ahead of Marchuk was he? Ten steps? Twenty? Sound would draw the captain, too. Arkady almost stepped on to the stern ramp before he saw it. A net was reeled on to the gantry overhead, strips of black and orange plastic turned into a dull shroud of ice. Fog was driven so hard over the boat that it left a ghostly wake, a dark tunnel at the end of which Marchuk was already visible. No matter, the captain wouldn't send him back now. It was all working out.
As the trailing figure separated more clearly from fog, Arkady saw that its beard was actually a sweater drawn up over the man's mouth. Karp pulled the sweater down as he neared. Better prepared than Arkady, he had dark glasses and Siberian felt boots. In one hand he held an axe.
For a moment Arkady considered his options. A dash right to the North Pole? The long run left to Hawaii?
The Eagle's ramp was low but slick and Arkady pulled himself up on his stomach. On deck, fish and crabs were dusted in ice. Icicles fringed the shelter deck. Riding the fog high on the radio mast, Ridley had reached the radar bar, which was frozen solid in a white cowl. The fisherman's long hair and beard were frosted from his breath. With the care of a jeweller, he started to tap the bar free. Arkady estimated the distance from ramp to wheelhouse at fifteen metres, but the most exposed were the first five metres to the shelter deck that ran along the side.
Karp was closing in. Carrying the axe like a spare wing, he seemed to glide across the ice.