Arctic Rising Read online

  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.r />
  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.

  It went against her nature to go ask someone for help. But she was sort of looking forward to this trip, she had to secretly admit.

  If she could arrange transportation.

  She walked next door and banged on the screen door. “Karl!”

  She banged again, until Karl’s blond curls appeared at the window, and then at the crack of the door as it opened. He was wearing a towel around his waist, tufts of coarse, dark hair running up from his belly to his chest, covering a fairly fit physique. “Jesus, Anika, what?”

  “I need to borrow your bike, if it is charged.”

  Karl rubbed his eyes and looked up the road. “Oh, come on, Anika. You ran your damn car down again?”

  Anika didn’t answer that, but cocked her head. Karl sighed and reached over to the hooks screwed into the wall by the door, then handed her the keys. The key fob was made of paracord, six feet of it woven into a five-inch decorative plait. Useful. She kept telling herself she needed one. The bike’s “key” was actually just an RFID chip in a decorative logo casing that didn’t need to be inserted into the bike. As long as Anika had the keys within ten feet of the bike it would start up with a press of a button. “Make sure you plug it back in when you’re done,” he growled.

  “Thank you, Karl.”

  “Fuck off. It’s late,” he grumped. “I’m going back to bed.”

  “It’s not like I’ll get any sleep with you having a visitor over. These thin walls. Is it still Chief Evisham?”

  He closed the door. They had a good-natured sort of blackmail arrangement. She borrowed his bike and kept shut about fraternization.

  Though Anika was pretty sure he’d let her borrow the bike anyway.

  * * *

  The bike’s rear tire spat gravel as Anika wobbled her way out of the drive, and then she got her balance as the bike sped up. The wind snapped at her loose hair.

  Out past base housing she turned onto the paved Nanisivik highway. The bike’s motor whined as she gunned it, sucking juice for a sudden burst of speed that left a long strip of rubber down the fresh asphalt.

  At seventy miles an hour she eased back, letting the rhythm of the bike and the road’s dips canter underneath her. The whine fell away, leaving her with the just the sound of the constant hurricane of wind ripping at her.

  This felt good. She was releasing something buried deep inside.

  Now that she was off the gravel and on pavement her Oakleys finally connected wirelessly to her phone. A map appeared in her field of vision, showing her location and turn-by-turn directions.

/>   It was an hour’s ride, and a fun one. She wound her way around the bases of the peaks overlooking Nanisivik. She crossed over the valleys carved out by now-extinct glaciers in the mountainous hump of the semi-peninsular Nanisivik.

  A dip into a valley again, then slowly back up, and she was coming down toward an icy shoreline. Houses began to appear again, dotting the hills overlooking the sea.

  It was a spare landscape. Rock. Snow. Moss. What little green there was struggled to live in the cold, constant wind. It was as much a desert as any she’d seen in Africa.

  And it was all changing.

  Baffin Island was some eight hundred miles long. North of Quebec. West of Greenland. And eight hundred miles farther south on Baffin Island the older folks shook their heads when they talked about how things were. They had vegetable gardens, now. And farms! They only remembered ice.

  Greenland was growing more and more of its own food. And Canada’s grain lands, once in a thin band of land just above the border with America, now extended ever farther north, while First Nations villages relocated farther south as the ice their villages once sat on disappeared into an ever-warming Arctic Ocean.

  She gunned the bike along toward the core of Arctic Bay, where the neon lights flashed along with the dim, distant Northern Lights, barely visible in the ever-constant twilight.

  The Oakleys guided her through downtown and back to where the neon flashed the most garish. Now Anika knew she could take the glasses off, because all she had to do was follow the brightest lights and the noise to her destination.

  * * *

  The Greenhouse was jumping tonight. Superbikes and fast cars cluttered the street, and the bike racks were packed and looking like brightly colored metal shrubs.

  People spilled out onto the sidewalk, their breath puffing out in the cold air. Bright colored jackets, leathers, and look-at-me hairstyles. Someone inside had the bass jumping, and even on the street people were unconsciously tapping out beats with their toes or nodding their heads.