Close Reach (10 page)

This was
La Araña
’s secret anchorage, a guarded keep marked as off limits on every chart of every ship in the Southern Ocean. They motored slowly across the smooth water of the inner crater, and Kelly watched the ripples that moved across the black, glassy surface.
La Araña
wasn’t the source of these ripples. They were from deep under the island itself.

In a moment, the engines dropped to a loping idle, and Kelly heard the anchor’s splash followed by the clank and bang as the chain paid out. Then the engines revved into reverse, and the ship strained against the anchor, setting it. After another moment of idling, the engines cut out. In the new stillness she could hear the lap of small waves on loose gravel; from farther away came the din of petrels at their roosts. The boat drifted around on its anchor until Kelly saw
Arcturus
and
Palida.

On the shore, two hundred yards away, she saw the remnants of an old whaling station. The houses and sheds and oil tanks hadn’t been anchored below the permafrost. The island was ejecting them slowly from its ground, and each structure sat at odd angles to the earth. The broken ground was venting yellowish smoke in places between the buildings. Kelly counted five clapboard buildings, a couple of complete ruins, and half a dozen rusted tanks. A fuming, sulfurous ghost town.

The cabin door banged open.

She cradled Lena’s head to her chest and turned to face the two men as they stepped out.

* * *

For an hour, Kelly and Lena watched the men unload gear from the boat. Two men motored out from the beach in a Zodiac and scrambled over
La Araña
’s side, so that there were four of them.
They set up a boom to lower cargo from the deck to the Zodiac, and then they began shuttling crates and boxes ashore. The crates overflowed with scientific equipment and communications gear: seismometers and ice core sampling rigs, SSB radios and portable satellite Internet dishes. Other boxes held enough canned goods and frozen meats to feed fifty men through a dark winter.

Maybe
La Araña
had been raiding research stations along the Antarctic coastline, moving past the ice floes like a latter-day Viking longboat, killing the researchers and leaving with anything that wasn’t welded down.

The men had taken off their balaclavas and their foul weather gear. Three of them were in their late forties or early fifties. Streaks of gray salted their thinning brown hair; their skin was like beaten saddle leather. But the one who drove the Zodiac back and forth from the beach was young. Barely past high school. None of the men walked with a limp, and so she assumed that the man she’d sliced with her boarding pike was the man bringing
Freefall
to the island.

“You’re right,” Kelly whispered to Lena. “There’s five of them. Four here, and the fifth’s on
Freefall.
He’ll have a bad wound on his ankle. Maybe it’ll be infected.”

Lena didn’t answer, but Kelly didn’t need her to. She was just thinking aloud, looking for an edge.

“The two who were already here, one of them must’ve brought
Arcturus.
The other brought the research boat.”

Kelly studied their faces whenever they walked past. She wanted to know them, wanted to have the shapes of their faces and the run of their scars cut into her mind. She needed to know for sure how many people she was dealing with.

And she needed to name them.

Her first semester in medical school, she’d learned quickly that when you were falling into something new and needed to get a handle on it right away, you had to name everything. Names gave you a purchase and a familiarity. A handhold to pull yourself up.

She picked names quickly while watching them. A man stopped by the side of the cage, turning away from her as he knelt to repack an overflowing crate. Though his face was hidden and had been hidden by a balaclava the first time she’d seen him, Kelly knew him by his smell. He was the man who’d come out with a fish gaff, who’d hauled Lena out of the trap.

Sour Breath
, she thought.
That’s him, from now on.

Then there was Scarface: a rough cut of a man with an old knife wound twisting on his cheek like a piece of gristle. The man using a boom to lower crates to the Zodiac became Big Hands. And in the Zodiac, of course, was the Kid. The only one missing was the man whose ankle she’d sliced, the man bringing
Freefall
back to the island.

The Gimp
, she thought. She hoped that the knife had been dirty, that the wound was turning black.

As the men worked, they spoke in quick bursts of Spanish. It was too fast and too casual for Kelly to understand. Listening to it was like watching men toss a football back and forth in a game with no rules. She put her lips against Lena’s ear and whispered.

“You understand any of it?”

She turned her head and let Lena whisper back.

“They’re arguing. Like about who will do a run or make a delivery or something.”

“Anything about us?”

Lena shook her head.

Big Hands walked past, headed to the bow with a knife. A minute later Kelly heard a splash in the calm water. She knew what it was and was trying to think how to tell Lena. But before she found any words, Jim’s body drifted into their view. He was facedown and frozen. His ankles were still tied, and the length of rope was tangled about his waist like an umbilical cord. The deep gashes in his back had turned black, and his skin was a mottled patchwork of blue and white, traced with the deep purple of veins.

“It’s Jim, isn’t it? Oh, God, it’s Jim.”

Kelly nodded and held on to the girl.

When Lena began to scream, Kelly tightened her grip and tried to hush her, but she wouldn’t be stopped. Her screams broke out across the calm water and echoed back from the encircling rock and ice ramparts of the crater. The men stopped their tasks and watched her.

Lena shrieked herself mute and collapsed against Kelly with hoarse sobs. The storm petrels began answering with their own startled cries. They took to the air from their roosts and flew in a cloud from their cliff-top nests and didn’t settle again for five minutes.

Jim’s body drifted away from the boat and finally sank from view beneath the dark water at the same time the birds finally quieted. Then there was just the lap of small waves on the beach and the low tremor from beneath them that was more a feeling than a sound. The men went back to their work, and it wasn’t until much later that they finally moved Kelly and Lena ashore in their cage. The four men carried the trap like pallbearers into one of the abandoned buildings, dropping it onto the rubble-strewn dirt floor.

Ten minutes later, Sour Breath and Scarface returned, carrying Dean by his armpits and ankles. They dropped him, bleeding and broken, and left. Dean was still in his exposure suit, but it was ripped below his shins. They might have broken both of his legs. His shins looked shattered and foreshortened beneath the bloodied orange fabric of the suit. Dean turned his head and met Kelly’s eyes with his red-rimmed stare. His lips were crimson with blood.

“Dean.”

“Did they hurt you?” he asked.

“I—oh, God.”

She couldn’t talk because she was crying, and then Lena and Dean were crying, too. Dean moved his left arm and was able to get his index finger within a few inches of the trap. Kelly reached her fingers through the chain link barrier and put them atop Dean’s. They sat like that, Kelly holding Dean’s fingers and cradling the shivering and crying Lena. But there wasn’t much comfort to give and not very long to give it before the men came back.

Two of them came up from the gravel beach and entered the abandoned work building through a pair of jammed-open sliding doors. They had cleaned up and changed out of their sea clothes and into fresh-looking wool sweaters and heavy khaki pants. The Kid looked no older than twenty; he hadn’t shaved in a few days, yet he had only the thinnest hint of a mustache on his upper lip and his cheeks were tan and bare. Scarface was in his late forties or fifties, and his face was so wind-chapped and leathered that the scar must have been deep to show at all. Kelly paid more attention to him, because he was hard and cruel looking. He was also carrying a coil of stiff hemp rope on his shoulder and was coming straight at Dean.

There was no hesitance in the way he moved, but there was no eagerness, either. His face was like something carved from a piece of dark hardwood. Fixed and blank. He wasn’t new to this at all.

The Kid hung back with his hands in his pockets while Scarface knelt by Dean and roughly turned him onto his stomach. He pulled Dean’s arms behind his back and tied his wrists together with one end of the rope.

“Please don’t hurt him,” Kelly said, looking at the Kid. “Please.”

The Kid shrugged and then said something in Spanish.

“Whatever you want, I’ll give you. Bank accounts, all of it.”

The kid looked at the older man and repeated the same word in Spanish.

“Vamanos.”

“No, please, wait!”

Scarface got to his feet, coiling the rope again as he came up. Kelly heard his knees pop as he stood. His hand movements were slow and deliberate, pulling the rope with his left and holding the new loops in his right. Time was blowing apart; seconds shattered, and their broken pieces cut into her and burned like shrapnel. She saw everything, but it was scattered. Like a loose stack of photographs spread across the floor. Here was the roof of the building, supported by wooden trusses, like an old horse barn. Here was Dean, trying to get his face out of the rubble-strewn floor. He was too weak to lift his head, but his hands were balled tightly into fists. Here was the man tossing the rope up and across one of the overhead beams and catching it on the other side before it hit the ground. He looked at the Kid, and here was the Kid nodding back at him, one dip of his chin.

Time slammed back together. She’d been screaming the whole time, a pure animal
scream, but now she bent it back into a word.

“No!”

Kelly’s hands were in the chain link trap, shaking it. The blanket fell off her shoulders so that she was naked before men who’d probably already had her and would have her again whenever they were through with Dean. Or maybe at the same time—maybe they’d drag her and Lena out of the trap and rape them both on the ground beneath Dean’s kicking feet while he hung from the ceiling.

She shook the trap, reopening the cuts on her fingers.

“Jesus Christ, please!”

The Kid made a hand signal to the older man, and the man started to haul on the rope.

Dean’s wrists rose off his back, his arms straightening as they took the first of the tension. The man yanked up another foot of rope, and now Dean’s chest came off the ground. His head hung low, brushing the rocks and bits of rusted metal strewn across the floor. Behind his back, his bound arms were pointed straight up at the rafters. Dean let out a soft moan as the man raised him another foot. Now only his knees touched the ground.

Dean was strong. He had big shoulders and a broad chest. But she knew no one was built to take what they were doing to him. When they hauled him all the way off the ground with his hands tied behind his back, the muscles wouldn’t matter. The weight of his body would rip his arms out of their shoulder sockets, and if they left him long enough, the muscles would start to tear.

The Kid came over and squatted on his haunches in front of Kelly. She backed away from him and found the blanket to cover herself. Lena was holding on to her from behind, squeezing tightly.

“Dean already gave us your bank account numbers, the web access codes for your stock portfolio, all that. So you could tell us again, you know, if it makes you feel better. But it wouldn’t do us any good, because we’ve already got all that,” the Kid said in perfectly accented American English.

Kelly just looked at him. She found Lena’s hand and held on to it. She knew she needed to stay with this, to play whatever game he was playing. If she fainted or fell into shock, it would be over. So she squeezed Lena’s hand and drew what little she could from the girl’s warmth and made herself look at the Kid’s eyes and not at the sight of her husband being slowly wrenched apart beyond the Kid’s shoulder.

“By the way, my name’s David. You can call me that if you want. Or Dave. Either’s cool.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, David.”

“You’re surprised. It’s the accent? My grandfather, the Colonel, wanted me to get a good
education. Like the best. Because, you know, we had to keep our stature. A family like ours. So I went to the Deerfield Academy—hey, I mean, we were practically neighbors, you and Dean and I—and I was supposed to start at Princeton. But then universal jurisdiction got out of hand, and the amnesties fell apart, and they started rounding up guys like Iturriaga. So that fucked everything up, and we had to disappear with all the other DINA families.”

Kelly had no idea what he was talking about. Behind him, Scarface had hoisted Dean all the way to his feet. Because his legs were broken, he couldn’t support himself. He was hanging from his arms, which had twisted back until they were pointed nearly straight above his head.