Arctic Rising (17 page)

“Okay,” Anika murmured.

Wait! What?

But she had already slipped under into grateful sleep, though with a frown still on her face.

*   *   *

The next morning Roo woke her up and put two plastic bags down on a foldout table in the corner of the room. One had milk and an assortment of tiny boxed cereals, as well as some plastic bowls.

As they ate a quick breakfast, Roo laid out the contents of the other plastic bag: clippers, hair straighteners, dyes, combs, twist ties.

“We need to change you look,” Roo said, crumpling his bowl up and putting it in a bag. “People looking for you. My advice: stand out, grab a bold look.”

“Bold?”

He smiled. “Most of the eyes on you will be computers using public-classified cameras. Change you hair, change you style.” He tugged on his dreadlocks.

“I wouldn’t know how.…”

“I do,” he said. “That and some glasses. Yes. And I have some combat makeup.”

“Combat makeup?”

“To confuse facial analysis software.”

Anika looked down at the remains of her cereal. “I thought getting locks took years.”

“Real natty dreads, yeah.” Roo stood up and swept everything back into a plastic bag. “But I can back-comb you hair into locks. I did it for my sister once.” He held out a hand.

Anika took it and followed him into the bathroom.

“I always wanted to look like Dakore Egbuson,” she said with a big smile.

“Who?” Roo started lining the lip of the tub with all the items in his bag.

“When I was eight or nine, she was one of the Queens of Nollywood. She was so beautiful. And she had locks. I wanted to have hair like that, but my father said no.”

But he did let her hang the poster in her room. Dakore’s brown eyes looked down at her every night, her warm brown figure in a curvy white cocktail dress.

“Little Anika’s first celebrity crush?” Roo asked from the edge of the bathtub. Anika smiled, remembering closing her eyes and imagining the tips of Dakore’s locks brushing against her shoulders, remembering the feel of her own fingers creeping down to her thighs, the back of her hands sliding against the sheets.

“Something like that,” Anika said, sitting down on the floor in front of him.

Roo began to section off her hair. She couldn’t see what he was doing from her position on the floor, but over the next hour, she could feel it.

After creating sections, he began twisting, rolling, and combing toward her scalp on each section, using twists to hold the lengths in place. Each lock also got waxed.

He worked quickly, efficiently, and with practiced hands.

Which made sense, she realized. He would have experience with his own locks.

When she stood and looked in the mirror, she had to smile. The locks came down right to the tops of her ears, longer than she thought she had the hair for.

After all this time pinning it back for the UNPG, she had to admit she liked it.

Roo held up four bottles of hair color. “Henna-based, it won’t fuck up you hair like the regular stuff. Got it from the hair place.”

Anika looked at the bottles, and then tapped the left-most one. “Purple,” she said.

*   *   *

Her professional UNPG look was long gone now. And it was about to get worse, she knew, because Roo had pulled out a small kit. “Face paint,” he said. “Facial recognition cameras can be fooled, if you willing to get a little … dramatic. We don’t know who here is hunting for you, and what resources they have, but better safe than sorry, yeah?”

Anika looked down at the makeup kit. “Okay,” she said hesitantly.

“To fool the cameras, we need to put a pattern on your face, a solid cover that distorts your cheekbones, nose, and eyes. Almost like what you see on a picture of a harlequin. Like you getting into carnival.” Roo held up the makeup, and then his phone. On it were several line drawings of faces with swooshing patterns crossing the eyes and cheeks. “Pick a color and a pattern you like.”

Anika sighed deeply and took the makeup and his phone, then turned to the mirror.

Using a green that complemented her new locks, she slowly covered the top left half of her face, then drew the solid patch of color down under her right eye.

“How does this look?” she finally asked, turning to face Roo.

He held up his phone and took a picture, then tapped around the screen. “I have a facial recognition program here, looks for pictures I take and tags them for me.” He smiled. “And you fooling it. We ready. Maybe even cutting it a bit close to late. We have to hurry.”

*   *   *

Chandra Gupta, a leather-faced helicopter pilot with piercing green eyes and a thick mustache, directed them to the back of the helicopter. “You’re late,” he told Roo. “I should have left without you.” Anika kept waiting for Chandra to ask about her, standing there with loudly colored hair and a wildly made-up face, but the old helicopter pilot didn’t even bat an eye.

There were no seats in the back, they perched on crates of medical supplies and boxes of fresh produce.

Chandra was an old Indian Air Force pilot. Once he was finished complaining to Roo about messing with his schedule, he kept on chatting to them as he got the helicopter ready to fly, flipping through a checklist.

He’d served in combat over Kashmir and Pakistan. “It’s better here,” he told them while flipping switches. “It’s just cold here. There, it was cold and really fucking high altitude. That flying, it was murderous, and in the hills, some separatist with a rocket launcher sitting on a rock at the same height or higher than you is just waiting for you to turn the corner. Miserable times. Miserable times.”

The helicopter rose from its pad, rising above the towers and stacks of Bent Horn, then tilting and swinging out over the sea.

Turbulence shook them around a bit, and Roo swore as a crate hit him in the back.

But then it smoothed, and the miles whipped by underneath.

“See that!” Chandra shouted over the cabin noise back at them. He jabbed a finger off in the distance as they banked. Three large U.S. Navy ships were pushing through the heavy seas at top speed. A carrier and two support ships. A destroyer or cruiser may have been on the distant horizon, Anika couldn’t quite make it out. Even this far away, she could see bow spray as the ships slammed against the large waves. It would have been dangerous down there in their stolen Coast Guard boat.

“Yeah?” she shouted forward.

“They are headed to join the U.S. Polar Fleet. They are beefing it up.”

“Why?”

Chandra shrugged. “Supposedly it is a joint fleet maneuver with the Europeans. I think they’re just trying to show everyone they still have the military edge, even in the Arctic.”

Roo looked out the window. He didn’t seem to believe Chandra’s theory, but he didn’t add anything to the conversation.

But he was very interested in the ships. He kept staring out of the window until they were past the wakes they left behind and banking into a new direction once more.

22

Chandra called them mist boats. They had been oil tankers at one point and then obviously rebuilt. Large helipads dominated their massive prows.

But that wasn’t the largest structural adjustment: each tanker had five massive funnels grafted onto the decks. These reached up like radio towers or small skyscrapers, using the decks of the tankers as firm ground.

Mist poured out of the tips of the funnels, slowly rising up into the heavily clouded sky.

Chandra flew them in low, low enough that Anika could see the churning whitecaps at the tip of each wave below them whipped into the air by the driving winds buffeting the copter.

There were three mist boats at anchor. Chandra gained altitude and flared the copter out in a motion that made Anika’s stomach lurch, and then they dropped onto the helipad of the lead mist boat.

The tanker rode the swells. Disconcerting, because it felt, to Anika, as if she were standing on the street of a large city that rose and fell with the waves. Something this large, with the deck and metal as far as she could see, with funnels stretching overhead like downtown buildings, and all of it dominating her field of vision, all this simply shouldn’t move underfoot.

A cheerful looking blond in a red windbreaker opened Chandra’s door with an accompanying gust of cold air and peered in. “Rough landing, Chandra!” He looked like he would be much more comfortable surfing off the California coast or backpacking through Oregon.

He looked back, saw Anika and Roo, and ran a hand self-consciously through his wind-harried hair. “Hey guys, I didn’t realize Chandra was ferrying anyone out.”

“I am not.” Their pilot pushed the blond aside and got out. “They’re on their way to Pleasure Island.” He heaved the side door out of the way.

“It’s awesome to see some new faces, even if for a few hours.” The blond stuck out a hand and helped Anika out, but left Roo on his own. “My name’s Martin Frobish. Everyone just calls me Bish.”

Bish had a handcart with him. He and Chandra started pulling the boxes out of the helicopter. After a second Roo and Anika got in the line and helped.

Then together they all manhandled the unruly cart along the nine hundred feet of deck.

They pushed it through watertight steel doors into the warm fluorescent lights and gray paint of the corridors. Bish led them to the large kitchen where Lars, a burly Scandinavian who looked every bit a descendant of the Vikings, ripped open the boxes with eagerness.

He held up a fresh clump of lettuce with something approaching reverence. “Finally, a fucking salad,” he growled.

Chandra pulled Bish aside as the Scandinivian began chopping lettuce and puttering around the boxes, grabbing fresh produce with a grin. “I need to barter for the extra fuel to get to Pleasure Island, and I’ll be landing back on my way.”

“Talk to Everson, he’ll fuel you up,” Bish said softly. Then even softer. “And I’ll buy your fuel for a trip back south on your return.”

“What is happening with you?” Chandra asked.

Bish chuckled and stole a slice of tomato while Lars had his back turned. “Any of you been following the news this morning?”

“No,” Anika said. After getting Anika disguised they’d abandoned the room to head straight over to the helicopter.

Lars had his head in the fridge. He slammed the door shut, shaking the wall. “We have been fucked.” He had a pair of beers in his hand, he threw one at Bish, who snagged it out of the air with ease and popped the top.

Both men, Anika realized, had been drinking heavily before she’d arrived. Lars had bloodshot eyes.

A heavy thunk, and a steady shaking rumbled through the floor.

“Shit, they’re opening the hold doors.” Bish’s head snapped around, facing the direction of the decks.

Lars dropped his beer on the floor. “Get the backup cameras. I want everything on!”

Bish grabbed Chandra’s shoulders. “I’ll need to join you guys on the trip out. Lars, too. But first, you’ll want to see what’s going down here, man.”

Lars thudded out of the kitchen, and Bish followed close behind. “Six months ago the
Hinum
was a thousand-foot-long floating offshore factory owned by a Chinese corporation, further up the Arctic Circle, all in strictly multinational waters. They were closer to the oil and were using it to make plastic toys. I guess it helped the margins to be right by the source, and then they could be shipped right to Alaska, or Northern Europe.”

“It was anchored near Thule,” Lars said, leading them down a set of stairs and through a quiet and empty common area.

“I’ve seen the floating factories,” Anika said. As it got harder and harder to find nations without protective labor laws, corporations got more creative.

“The company went bankrupt,” Bish said, ducking another low bulkhead. “The creditors were fighting over who owned the factory and who could get it towed to Chittagong and have it scrapped. Meanwhile, there’s this whole multinational workforce quartered on the ship. I’m getting e-mails and pictures from a friend who’s in the middle of writing a story about the floating factory. I mean, no regulations, labor laws, or oversight. Sounds like hell? But since they’re all trapped aboard, after a few really crazy protests and a few overzealous overseers go missing overboard, they’d built a life here.”

“They had greenhouses.” Lars led them into a small room with a single bare bunk and a gray blanket. Work boots lay scattered under the bunk, heavy coats on the hook behind the door. The desk had four cases stacked on it. Lars opened one of them to reveal padded foam and a two fist-sized cameras. He moved with practiced, precise haste as he opened another case and pulled out a tripod. “You wouldn’t believe the things they grew on the decks.”

“They had everything set up,” Bish said. “Hospitals, greenhouses on deck for fresh veggies, even a small pen with chickens for fresh eggs. These workers from Thailand, Vietnam, Russia, China, they’d built a whole world on this ship. Lars and I wanted to film it before it was all ripped out and scrapped. We flew out, and my story got even fucking better.”

Lars opened another case and pulled out a shoulder-stabilized camera rig.

Bish shut the cases for Lars, but he was waving his hands around as he got more animated. An inner intensity tumbled out with his words. “So these guys revolted when one of the creditors finally got a tug boat out here to commandeer the factory. They tooled up to build weapons and held everyone off, and they declared that the ship was owned by them. Turned it into a worker-owned and -run business. Everyone had a share. They started production up again.”

“They lasted two months.” Lars pointed them out of the cabin, and everyone backed out. “Then Gaia purchased the company’s debt.”

“So get this: Lars has cameras all over the place streaming back to our box at home, and I’m interviewing everyone I can get my hands on, when fucking paratroopers literally drop out of the fucking sky.” Bish paused for dramatic effect.

“For hire?” Anika asked.

“Edgewater, yah.” Lars was leading them down the corridor again, trotting along. The rumbling grew louder now as they got closer to the decks. “Everyone is thinking: hey, Gaia purchases the debt. They are the biggest green company in the world. They are nice people, yeah? Turns out, not so nice after all.”