Arctic Rising (16 page)

At that point Roo wasn’t worrying about the patrol boat, but trying to get the weather loaded up on the small GPS unit to see what they were facing next.

*   *   *

It was a bad situation to be wearing nothing but clothes usually fit for walking about Baffin Island while in an open boat at sea north of the Passage. In the just-slightly-above freezing temperature of the summer, and the salt-spray soak she’d gotten during their full speed sprint, she knew hypothermia was a real risk.

Roo, his face caked with salt, and looking tired and older, was shivering as he piloted them along at quarter throttle.

Anika stood up.

“What are you doing?” Roo asked.

“Locker.”

She walked to the back bench of the boat and forced it open. She found what she was looking for: a first-aid kit. And underneath, three tightly folded thermal blankets.

Roo nodded gratefully as she wrapped one around his shoulders, and then one around herself. “We will keep the other one in the locker, dry,” she said.

Still shivering, Roo huddled into his blanket. “If we can get to Cameron Island, we’ll be okay.”

“What’s there?”

“Bent Horn refinery. There are derricks all over the place out here, but Bent Horn is the closest hub. The refinery is the heart of it, but it’s a corporate town, three thousand people. We’d be able to refit and restart and not attract too much attention if we lucky.”

“Why do you say ‘if we can get there’? Is it the weather?”

“Lotta ice between here and there.”

*   *   *

The weather quieted into a still, chilly silence. The water turned to glass. The blankets did their trick, warming them up, and Anika relaxed.

“Were they after just me?” Anika asked. “Or you as well?” She’d gotten him into a lot of trouble. Hopefully they, whoever ‘they’ were, thought that Roo was just someone she was using, and not a true accomplice.

“Just you,” Roo said. “I think a lot of people are convinced that you know something about a heavy situation in the Arctic.”

“The nuke?” There it was again.

“Yes, that had come up.” Roo looked to his side at her. “You know anything about it? Vy says you a pilot. A clean one. You all mixed up in this?”

“I am pretty sure I spotted it on a freighter during my last flight, and I wasn’t supposed to.” She wrapped the blanket even tighter, and then summarized the entire nightmare: getting shot down, Tom’s death. The bomb.

And now Coast Guard ships trying to pick her up and take her God only knew where.

“A man tried to kill me on the road, too. Before I went to the commander. I strangled him to death.” She looked over at him. “I think … it’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever done to another human. It took so long. But it was him or me. I didn’t have a choice.”

Roo nodded. He didn’t say anything for a long time as they idled past table-sized chunks of floating ice.

“The worst thing I ever did to another human was marry her,” he said.

“Jesus! Roo!” She half laughed. But when she looked over at him, she saw his clenched jaw and realized he hadn’t been making a joke.

The sound of the water slapping gently against the hull faded as he whispered, “It was a big contract, to get inside a corporation. I used one of the largest shareholders, a widow, who was on vacation in Saba. Spent a year becoming a part of this person’s world, family, influences. A lot of people, they come down to the islands looking for excitement, to cut loose. But she wouldn’t let go, and I couldn’t stop going down this path. It had momentum, like a cart down a hill.”

“So you married her…”

“The company spent tens of millions buying politicians off, allowing them to force spice prices down with government subsidies and support. They were going to devastate the island economies as a side effect, and we had to figure out how to get in so we could stay a step ahead. I made half a million for the mission. Cheaper than the islands trying to outbuy the company’s pet American, Canadian, and European politicians.” He shrugged. “But when it ended, it was like I cut her puppet strings—her world shattered, she slumped away.”

They motored on, mulling over the tempest of their personal landscapes for a while. It was better than focusing on the cold.

“The nuclear weapon thing,” Roo said. “Before, you were a pilot. You paid attention to basic politics, your command structure, your job. But you’ve stepped onto a different field now.

“Back in the day of the colonialists, they called it the Great Game. Nation-backed spies crossing the world to pay this group or that, get this person to fight that person, while they stayed in the shadows. Nation’s shadows playing for territory, economics, and more. Nowadays, anyone can play. Non-state actors, corporations, activist groups. Everything’s in play. You down the rabbit hole that lies under the real world, unseen by the good people focusing on they daily bread.”

“I know it exists,” Anika said. “But a nuke?”

“The Arctic Circle is the big spoils.” Roo turned them a bit to pass around a small chunk of ice. “A lot of the Great Game is focused here now. Canada claims most of the Arctic islands here north of it. The U.S. claims ocean out past Alaska.”

“And Northern Europe and Russia, yes. Then China, India, and Brazil pushed hard for the Circle to be international waters, so it’s all up in the air. I do work for the UNPG.”

“Yeah. And the basin is full of gas and natural resources, all easier and easier to get at now that the ice all but gone. Greenland is a natural resources superpower, a few hundred thousand Inuit made rich by nationalized returns of their claims. Canada exploiting these islands hard. And where oil is plenty, intrigue comes with it. Basic history. Middle East, Nigeria, South America … when it’s outside their borders, the other big nations play hard for control of it.” He tapped the console. “Plastic has to be made. It covers the modern world. Motors need to be lubricated. Most nations still move from point to point with oil.”

“And the nuke?” Anika still couldn’t figure out how it played into all this.

“Well, someone has one. Which means someone probably wants to use it. And a lot of people want to know why. And many of them want to stop it. That’s what the Caribbean network is hearing. Most likely, whoever backing this is someone who wants oil prices to rise. That could be anyone: Middle East, Nigeria, South America, solar power manufacturers, green fanatics.”

“Greens?”

“Five major bomb detonations on oil rigs in the Circle in six years, using little boats just like this one with GPS autopilots and a few cameras for navigation. Any more, they get a lot of funding from Saudi princes; every event raises the price of oil.”

Anika thought about that. The real people who had tried to kill her could be someone who was trying to edge out a better trade on the oil futures market.

Where the hell was this mission of revenge taking her? And was there even going to be someone she could hunt down for what had happened?

Down the rabbit hole, Roo had said.

He wasn’t half kidding.

21

The Bent Horn refinery dominated the southern tip of Cameron Island. Stacks belched fire and smoke, pipes clustered and ran from bell-shaped building to building, and the docks harbored massive oil tankers with extra-thick ice-breaking prows. It was an industrial, post-apocalyptic sprawl of brutal architecture made more forbidding by the gray low hills of the island and the Arctic tundra, lit by the perpetual gray day and the sudden lightning-like orange bursts of fire from the stack tops.

To the back of the refinery, rusting derricks slumped over—remnants of the original drilling operation on the island from the 1970s, abandoned just before the turn of the century.

Company dorms, brightly colored but square-block apartment buildings, loomed around the edge of the refinery. Beyond it, another hundred or so buildings crept up the side of a hill, the nascent form of a town springing up around the economic activity of the refinery as year-round workers pulled in family and then all the other needs of a large group of humanity: bars, eateries, stores, recreation, infrastructure.

Roo guided them around the shadows of barges and tugs toward the docks. No one paid much attention to them, as several other dinghies moved around the harbor to get people to and from anchored ships that couldn’t fit. There was no reason for anyone to assume they came out of the ocean, as Roo had initially come around the coast to the harbor.

By the time they tied up, the wind had started to howl and rain pelted the artificial harbor. They hurried toward a bright green dormitory building.

Anika browsed a company store attached to the dorm, soaking in the warmth and calm, while Roo disappeared. “Going to find an ATM for some cash from one of my backup accounts, and seeing if we can get transport to Pleasure Island,” he told her tersely.

He came back an hour later reequipped with a phone he’d purchased off someone, two large Arctic peacoats, hats, gloves, and a thick wad of cash.

Anika stole a few bills from him to buy three chocolate bars she’d been eyeing and a large hot chocolate. They sat at a small plastic table in the corner of the store. It was quiet, in between shifts, though a handful of men in overalls sat in the other corner downing coffee and bitching about one of their managers.

“There’s a helicopter pilot taking supplies out to a couple of mist boats near that area,” Roo said. “One of the crew is a journalist with money who has fresh stuff flown in once a month. If we agree to help unload, and we pay for his refueling there, he’ll get us to Pleasure Island.”

Rain sleeted against the window, howling away outside, as she sipped and let the warmth spread through her.

“I think,” Roo said, “we’re okay. For tonight. We should stay inside as much as we can, come out in between shifts.”

He’d found a room. It was filled with gear: heavy boots, warm clothing. Posters of naked airbrushed women holding impossible poses and hungry expressions hung from the wall, tacked into place. A perfectly clean, empty, white fridge.

They were in a quiet cocoon of temporary safety. A stillness after a storm of danger and activity that felt far away.

Roo sat down on the couch and unlaced his shoes. He paused, thinking about something. He stopped. “So … you’re Vy’s girl, right?”

Anika sat on the bed. She would have taken the couch, it was a friendly thing to do. But Roo had done it first, and she was all but drooling at the thought of sinking in between the covers and getting warm and rested. “I don’t know. It’s complicated. We got interrupted, and we barely know each other.”

“So you like girls?”

Anika sighed. In Africa, she’d been a monk outside the city. Conversations like this caused her to tense up. Suddenly Roo wasn’t a compatriot, but a possible problem. “Yes. I like women,” she said. It was a flat statement.

“You ever try it with a man?” Roo asked.

Anika sighed. “Have you?”

Roo continued unlacing his shoes. “No. But if you never…”

“Roo, would you like to take a hot throbbing cock between your lips?”

“No.”

“Neither would I. I didn’t wake up one day and decide I hated men and liked women. I see a woman, I like what I see. I want to be with that. Not the other. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember.”

“Okay.” He lay down on the couch and propped his feet up on the end.

If he hadn’t grabbed the couch first, she’d have considered it a bad pass at her. But he was aware that Vy and she had something.

If it was curiosity, she felt that was
somewhat
forgivable. She’d downgrade it to merely annoying. She owed Roo her life. He could ask annoying questions.

But to be honest, right now, she just really wanted to disappear into this bed and not hold some deep, intimate discussion about the nature of sexual orientation. She was too fucking tired for it.

“Do your parents know?” he asked.

“Roo, do you really want to talk about this right here? Now?” She pulled the covers back, and threw the topmost blanket at him.

Nestled inside, she stripped down to an undershirt and leaned back against the pillows. The bed smelled of someone else: sweat, oil, grime, dirt. But it didn’t matter. It was warm and soft.

Right then, the howling wind of the Arctic, the cold ocean, the people trying to kill her: they were all things outside this little warren of a room.

“Back in the islands, it ain’t the mainland. Not very accepted, you know? Most people don’t come out, and I never felt like I could just ask questions. Other than Violet, no one ever spoke to me as a friend where I could just … ask.”

Her eyes were closed, sleep creeping up on her. “No, my parents don’t know. My father, he is a very traditional Lagos man. He was raised fire-and-brimstone style. He used to watch these Nollywood movies made by the megachurches about the dangers of witches and the devil and so on.”

“Megachurches make Nollywood movies? Serious?”

“Some, yeah. A lot of money in there. Big productions. They even send missionaries to Western Europe and the U.S. to knock on doors.” She yawned deeply and thoroughly.

“And what about your mother?” Roo asked.

Anika snorted. “She probably wouldn’t care. But I haven’t talked to her since I was a child.”

Roo sat up. “You split with her?”

“She split with us. She was a Nollywood actress. Not a lot of white women from England around Lagos aspired to be Nollywood stars back then; she stood out. She was in high demand. She mistook that for something else, and then left to try her luck in America. Then Vancouver.”

“And you haven’t talked to her since then?”

“No.”

“That’s sad,” Roo said.

“She has never, ever tried to contact me,” Anika said. After all, it was just as easy the other way. “Now leave me to sleep, Roo. Please.”

“Okay,” he said. “Just one thing.”

“Yes.”

“Be good to Violet. She been through a lot. She’s a good friend.”

Okay, Roo, she thought. But I didn’t ask her to do all this. She chose to.

“Tomorrow we have to think about changing your appearance,” Roo said through a large yawn.