Arctic Rising (5 page)

Maybe she thought she’d left some of that behind in the desert. Lagos was built up. Like any other city in the world, it was its own little country deep in the canyons of its skyscrapers and municipalities. Not what foreigners thought of when she said Nigeria when they asked where she’d been born.

But up north … Up north it was all still tenuous country in scattered places. Religious tension. Riots. Broken landscapes and desperate people.

Kids with weapons.

She’d been a city girl with Nollywood-inspired dreams of becoming a pilot. To fly out from the depths of city and noise and packed people outside in the heat.

And she’d flown into a part of Africa that she’d only ever seen in news reports or Western-made movies.

“If they were running drugs, then how come my scatter camera went off?” Anika asked, turning and leaning her back against the cold metal rail. “Are drugs radioactive now?”

Yves grinned briefly around the edge of his cigarette. “They are not. But, you know, it is good you asked.”

“Why is that?”

He took another long drag. “Your airship transmits flight data via satellite continuously. Your scatter camera logged nothing on this flight. I think maybe there was a mistake?” He looked meaningfully at her.

“The scatter camera went off. We went in for a closer look.”

“Maybe you heard the wrong alarm,” Yves suggested. “It’s been seven months since your last event. That’s a long time. Combine that with the trauma of the attack…”

Anika stared at him. “We went in closer and got further readings. There
was
something on that ship.”

Yves looked uncomfortable for the both of them. “Maybe something went wrong somewhere?” he suggested. “Bad data?”

“Maybe. I have a physical backup of the data at home. Pass that back to our superiors. When I get back I can prove this wasn’t just about drugs, and that they’re lying.” Anika rubbed her temples. This sort of mess was why she always made sure to cover herself. Her father had always warned her about bad equipment and bureaucracy. “I don’t want to talk about that anymore, Yves. What’s next?”

“Next?” Yves mulled the word over. “Next.” He folded his arms and looked out over the dark harbor water.

She followed his gaze, turning around to face the rail again. “The boat.”

Yves nodded. “
Kosatka,
yes. Understand, it is just routine, yes? But I like the poking around. There’s a dinghy waiting for us.”

“Routine?”

“We have the
bastards
who did this to you,” Yves said. “We have their confessions. You identified them.”

“And then that’s it.…” Anika said.

“That’s it,” Yves said.

Except it wasn’t. They were lying about being drug runners. And why lie about something bad unless you were covering something worse?

“Let me come with you,” Anika asked.

Yves moved his head back and forth, as if considering. “We just needed you to identify the crew. You are not needed for this part.”

“You need me to fly you back, though, right?” Anika said.

“You wouldn’t!” Yves protested.

“You leave me here on this ship to go out there, I’m headed for the airport,” Anika insisted. “After a day like this, do you think anyone would be willing to formally discipline me?”

*   *   *

The dinghy that took them out was a twenty-foot-long semirigid inflatable, a fiberglass flat-bottomed hull that sliced through the waves and that had inflated pontoons around the edge.

Anika bit her lip as they slowed down and approached the rusted-out bulk of the Russian ship.

It loomed, shoving everything else out of her mind, replacing it with the implacable metal bulk thundering, surging through the water at her.

She gasped and grabbed the rope running along the pontoons, sitting down and looking up the side of the giant wall.

“Coming up?” Anton pointed at the rope ladder dangling down from the rails up above. “Are you good?”

She waved him away. “Lost my footing. I’ll be right there.” Yves was already attacking the ropes, swarming his way aloft.

Anton nodded, and then awkwardly starting pulling himself up.

The fresh-faced seaman who’d piloted them over walked forward. He tied them to the ladder, and waved her up.

Anika leaned forward and touched the hull. Paint and metal flaked off and fluttered down into the space between the dinghy and the ship.

The dinghy slammed against the
Kosatka
. For a second Anika was worried about falling into the water, following the flakes she’d disturbed. But she got a hand on the ladder, and then a foot.

“Got a good grip?” the seaman asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I’m going to pull back a bit, so we don’t rip the sides apart on this hull. It’s rusty as hell, ma’am.” He gunned the outboard engine in reverse, the water boiling around the dinghy as he pulled away.

Nowhere to go but up. Anika scrambled until she reached the rail, then swung onto the deck.

Her boots hit the metal surface with a clang.

She was on the surface of the enemy, the ship that had tried to kill her.

8

Yves waved her down. “Coming into the belly of the beast,
Ms.
Duncan?”

The holds had been opened; the maw of the ship was wide open to the overhead sky. Light spilled into the cargo hold.

“They found her with the holds open,” Yves said. “The cranes had been working overtime. Dumping whatever it was they were carrying, yes? They ran for the harbor after that, didn’t even bother closing back up.”

They walked around, footsteps echoing loudly off the metal deck and empty hold back at them. Anton was videotaping the hold with his phone, narrating what they were seeing in a low mutter.

And what they were seeing was nothing but a dirty, dusty hold, with several piles of rusted chains scattered around.

Eventually Anton folded up the camera and slid it into his pocket. “That’s it,” he announced.

“That’s it,” Anika repeated.

“That’s it,” Yves confirmed.

They all stood at the bottom of the hold for a moment. Then, as if on a telepathic cue, Yves and Anton turned and started up the metal stairs together.

Anika followed. The echoes of their steps got higher and higher pitched as they got farther up.

Then she stopped.

A faint glimmer. In the corner of her eye.

Anika frowned. She climbed onto the rail, careful not to look down at how far she’d fall to the metal floor if she slipped. Then, balanced, with one leg on a lower rail for stability, she reached up for the faint glint, stretching until her stomach ached.

It was a fist-sized, transparent globe. And it was floating. Like a tiny balloon, it had drifted up into a nook in the ceiling along the side of the cargo hold.

Back on the stairs now, Anika shoved it inside her flight jacket. Anton and Yves considered their work done.

Maybe she could find something out.

She was more convinced now that the
Kosatka
had not been carrying drugs.

*   *   *

Back through the harbor, onto the streets of Resolute again. Fake igloo architecture for the tourists. Large blocks of city buildings, the square tyranny of super-fast construction the world over, only here, like in the tropics, they favored bold, bright colors. Purple façades and pink pastels fought back against the constant Arctic gray and the blear of the perpetual sun.

Anton drove. Anika sat in the back of the cramped car with the constantly fogging windows, looking out at the buildings.

Something dinged, indicating a message received. Yves glanced at a wristband that lit up, and then tapped it. “Your commander, Claude, he’ll be expecting that hardcopy when you get back to base,” he said.

“Sure.”

*   *   *

The old Honda light jet had been turned around and refueled. It sat under the protection of a wireframe hangar with sheet metal skin painted some shade of fuchsia. Yves followed Anika as she did the walk around of the small jet.

“What did you find?” he asked, as they both passed around a wingtip.

“I am sorry?” Anika kept walking toward the back of the craft.

“Back in the cargo hold. You got up on the railing. You put something in your pocket. Please tell me, what did you find?” Yves looked at her mildly.

Anika got up on her tiptoes to look at the small GE jets on the tail, their outlets stained with miles and miles of smoke. For a while the VLJs like this Honda had gotten their engines swapped out with engines from an outfit that used some biofuel, but they’d failed a few times, forcing emergency landings.

UNPG brass used the VLJs a lot, so a lot of them had had the engines swapped back to the originals. And it looked like this was one of them.

“Anika?” Yves asked.

She sighed. She didn’t want to give up her find and share it, but she had to. She reached inside her jacket. “Don’t let go of it. Whatever it is, it floats.”

Yves turned the globe over in his hands. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. I was going to find out. It sounded like you were all done back there. I thought maybe I could look a little harder.”

“Of course.” Yves sounded apologetic. He always sounded apologetic, Anika thought. He took his phone and held the small globe up in front of it.

After he’d captured a few seconds of video, he looked down at the globe. “I have to keep it. I apologize. My superiors, they see that we have these assholes in custody. They’re happy. Everything has been tied up, no? But all physical evidence, it has to be tagged and stored in the appropriate place. I cannot let you keep it.”

“I understand,” Anika said. She held up her phone and snapped several pictures of the globe before Yves could react. Better to ask forgiveness than permission here. “You both would have walked right by it and never known.”

“I should make you delete those,” Yves said.

“Try,” Anika told him.

Yves smiled. “Don’t think you can lead an investigation of your own. Let us do our jobs, Anika. Tell us anything you stumble across. We will, of course, send everything we can share to your commanding officer.”

“I promise you, I will not be causing you any trouble,” Anika lied. “I found it. I’m curious. You would be curious as well, yes?”

Yves smiled. “You have your picture. You’ve earned at least that and probably more. And I promise you, I will keep you notified about anything we learn.”

Right. Anika scratched her ear. “And once they’re behind bars, wherever they end up, how much time will you spend on seeing what else you can find out about them?”

“Well, that is the problem,
Ms.
Duncan.
Ce qui est
UNPG? I answer you this way: What we are is understaffed. We suffer with old equipment from ten different agencies from around the world who gift us their old castoffs. Every year the Pole, it gets warmer, and there are more people up here, and I get more busy each month, not less. But I will not forget you.”

Anika felt slightly guilty. “I’m sorry, Yves. It is a hard thing to stop thinking about.”

He shrugged. “Come. The rest of your life, it is waiting.”

She watched him climb into the jet.

The rest of his life, she thought, hadn’t fired a rocket at him lately. “Yves?”

He looked back down at her. “Yes?”

“When that boy fired the RPG at me, I reached for the rifle and returned fire. I did not even think about it. Do you know where I got those instincts from?”

“Not training for UNPG?” Yves guessed.

“I used to be one of those kids with a gun you talked about. I ran away from Lagos. I dreamed I would pilot an airship, like the adventurers in the movies. But before anyone would let me fly, I sat in an open door of a gondola with a very large chain gun. I was fifteen. My job for two years was to make sure bush fighters were scared of us. I made sure of it. I don’t run away from a fight, Yves.”

Yves spread his hands. “We already won the fight.”

No. This was just a small battle of a larger war; Anika felt it in her gut. Something was going on. And maybe it was stupid to pursue it. But she felt slighted. She’d walked away from the rough life of a security contractor. She’d been little more than a mercenary pilot for so long, and the UNPG had been a chance to head in a new direction. And this violence snapping at her, it offended her. She wanted to turn around and kill it until she was sure it was never going to reach into the orderly world she’d made for herself here.

Or, she wondered, maybe there was nowhere in the world you got to have that life, where you knew you were safe every morning when you woke up, and knew exactly what to expect. She’d lived that in Lagos, growing up. Then ran away from it all for excitement. And after a decade of excitement, she treasured her life here.

Maybe, just maybe, mulling over all this kept her from having to think about Tom. Or his wife.

She was going to have to go see Jenny at some point.

Anika wasn’t sure she could face her.

Not without feeling guilty that she was still alive, still talking to her loved ones.

Anika slipped the phone back in her pocket.

This was far from over.

9

It was midnight when she got home and changed out of her uniform blues. For a moment she stood in her underwear, considering her next move.

Go comfort Jenny?

No. She couldn’t face Jenny. Anika felt like she’d let her down. She couldn’t face that and keep herself held together right now.

Anika pulled on weathered jeans and a purple turtleneck, an old leather jacket, some gloves from the wicker basket near the door, and found her Oakleys.

She pulled the data backup out of the other jeans and slid it into her pocket. Now that she knew it was the only copy, she wasn’t letting it out of sight until she handed it over to Commander Claude.

She was still thinking about the fact that the
Kosatka
’s crew had claimed to be drug runners. It didn’t make sense, and it gnawed away at her. And, she thought, she did know someone who could help answer a few questions about drug running. She let her hair out of a tight bun. It sprung loose, a halo of comfortable brown kinks she was happy to see again.