Stranded (8 page)

“God damn it, Noah,” Brewster shouted. “What do you want? I have bigger problems than you right now.” He craned his neck forward as if being two inches closer could help his eyes penetrate the haze. Noah circled around and glanced at the display in front of the Old Man. The order transmission to the engines was “dead slow ahead.” Almost a stop, but the propellers were still moving, even if the ship wasn't. Brewster dug his fingertips into his forehead and let out a long exhalation. Ignoring Noah, he said, “Boucher! What did you see?”

The bosun stepped up to the console, but Noah interrupted him before he had a chance to reply. “He didn't see a damn thing.
I,
on the other hand, got a real close look. We're beset.”

Brewster stared at him with a puzzled expression. Noah cast a glance over his shoulder at the deckboss who said, “That's what he says, but—”

“I told
you
to go have a look over the stern, Serge. Noah's not allowed anywhere near the cargo deck.”

“I know. I mean, he wasn't,” Boucher stammered. “I thought it'd be better to lower someone down over the side and get a good, close look. I ran into him and—”

“He volunteered me as bait to go trawling.” Boucher shot him a withering look, but Noah wasn't intimidated. His fury at being dropped on the ice gave him a taste of reckless courage. He might pay for showing spine later, but in the moment, showing meekness or even deference was only going to get all of them in even deeper trouble. He could stand up to Brewster or they could all freeze to death when Brewster burned out the backup engine controls trying to keep forward motion in solid ice.

The Old Man looked Noah up and down. “You don't look like you been swimming to me.”

“That's what I'm telling you. He dropped me all the way down and I'm bone dry.” As if to emphasize his state, Noah pulled his watch cap off, revealing damp hair plastered to his forehead. He was soaking with perspiration from his excitement and coming out of the cold into the well-warmed bridge, but his gear was dry. He hadn't been swimming in anything but adrenaline and sweat. Brewster raised his eyebrows, silently asking his deckboss for confirmation. Boucher shrugged.

“And?”

“I said, we're beset.”

“Bullshit! Boucher, what did—”

“Don't ask him,” Noah protested, stepping in front of the bosun. “
I
went over the side.
I
walked around on the consolidated ice pack that's holding us fast. I know what I'm talking about.”

Shaking his head at the absurdity of what Noah was saying, Brewster said, “You're fulla shit. We can't be beset; I haven't seen anything on the radar. Hell, I would have seen ice blink out there.” He pointed at the white, blank window.

“Yeah? You think you can see the reflection of an ice field ahead when you can't even see the sun?”

Brewster set the throttle to stop, and stood. “Mr. Mickle, take the conn. Keep the engines on standby. I'm going to have a look.” Mickle hustled to climb into the seat before the Old Man could change his mind and sit back down. Brewster stomped toward the door, pushing past Noah with an elbow. Noah caught his arm and held.

“Do we even have radar? Communications are down. Do we have
any
instruments or have you been navigating by reading tea leaves?”

The Old Man stood as still as a stuffed bear in a hunter's lodge, looming above a room full of men who knew he looked fierce but couldn't really touch them. “What would your days of experience in the Arctic tell you to do?”

“Keep the engines on standby,” Noah said. “Put Nevins on restoring the communications array and, when he gets them back online, call for an icebreaker to come clear the way.”

“They're all down at once, genius,” Boucher said. “It means it ain't mechanical.”

“What is it then?”

Brewster pointed out the window. “It's that shit out there.”

Boucher nodded like a kid taking glee in his younger brother being cussed out for something he'd done.

“What? The fog?” Noah said, working to stay focused. He tried to imagine what could cause all the tech on board to go on the blink at once. It wasn't a simple magnetic compass distortion. That wouldn't take down everything. That wouldn't cause hallucinations.

He'd read an article about the Russians dumping old nuclear submarines—complete with their reactors—in the Arctic as late as 1993. What if one of them had broken open, leaking nuclear radiation into the sea? Would it mess with their systems? Would it mess with the men?

He banished the thought as science fiction. Even if they'd somehow steered right into ground zero of some underwater dump site, if it was having these kinds of effects, someone else would have known about it by now. Wouldn't they? Unless the
Arctic Promise
was the first.

“You think it's some kind of signal distortion that's messing with everything?” he said.

“That's the only thing that makes sense. If navigation and communications are both out, it's not a problem with the ship. It's gotta be environmental. We have to get out of this fog if we want to restore systems. And we sure as hell don't want to be sitting here if anything else goes down. We lose the engines and the heating system, they'll be chipping our remains out of a block of ice. Unless you know somewhere on board to build a fire.”

Noah opened his mouth to respond but his words caught in his throat when Brewster's eyes darted to the side. It looked like he wanted to jerk his head around to follow whatever it was but forced himself not to. Noah tried to see what it was he was looking at, but there was nothing there. Just Sean Mickle looking pale … like he'd seen a ghost as well. Only Boucher looked unaffected by the specter. He looked too ornery to be spooked.

“Come with me,” the Old Man barked. He grabbed his coat and hat off the peg beside the door and shoved through. Noah watched Brewster disappear into the mist, with Boucher trotting behind like a pet not wanting to be left out. Noah lingered, letting the door slam behind them, and looked to Mickle for support. The second officer shrugged and said, “I suppose I should thank you for getting him to give up the conn. Although at this point, I don't think I'm any better equipped to be behind the wheel than the Old Man.” He pivoted the chair around and ran a hand down his face. “How are you feeling?”

“Me? I'm good, I guess. Hanging in there anyway. My headache's gone. The rest of me feels like shit after being dropped on the ice, but at least my head's stopped hurting.”

Mickle laughed weakly. “Keep hanging in, because whatever has gotten its hooks in me and the rest of the crew is bad.” He let his mouth hang open as if he wanted to add to his confession but couldn't bring himself to issue another utterance. Noah hadn't known the second officer long, but he didn't seem like the kind of man who complained without good reason or who even let on that he wasn't feeling a hundred percent. He was the kind of stoic sailor his grandfather had been. Mickle wiped at his nose with the back of a finger. It came away red. The man rubbed at the blood with a thumb until his skin was a slightly ruddier shade of pale, but said nothing about it, as if it wasn't anything Noah should feel concerned about.

“Martin told me he's seeing … things. Movement in his peripheral vision.”

Mickle's eyes widened for a second before his face settled back into its normal inscrutability. “He's not the only one,” he said.

The door behind the men slammed open and Boucher stood pointing at Noah. “You think the Old Man was kidding, Cabot? Move your ass!”

The second officer nodded, silently suggesting they'd talk about it later.

“Hang in there, Doc.” Noah marched out of the room, brushing past Boucher, who stood like a prison guard leading him to the gladiator yard. The bosun slammed the door as soon as Noah's heel cleared the opening and shoved past, waving a hand for Noah to follow.

Boucher led him to the aft end of the cargo deck where Brewster stood waiting. While they'd battled the ice buildup during the storm, there was still considerable ice on the deck and gunwales. Not so much that the ship was in danger, but enough that they had to step carefully to avoid falling or sliding into or under something solid. The trio climbed the ladder onto the catwalk. Brewster leaned out over the side and tried to see. Although it was a shorter distance to the surface than over by the lifeboats, the swirling mist still obscured everything below. It might have been twenty feet to the surface or twenty thousand. Noah couldn't tell. None of them, experienced seamen all, had seen a fog this thick last this long.

“Listen,” Noah said. He nodded his head toward the void. “You hear it?”

Brewster shrugged. “What?”

“Exactly. You don't hear anything because it's frozen solid all around us.”

“You walked on it? Did you make it all the way around? Are you sure the ice closed up behind us?”

He shook his head. “I was off the starboard bow. I got a look from there to maybe amidships. But the ice was compact. I didn't even see cracking or breakup beside the hull. It's like we've been sitting still in it for days. And it looks thick, too. Like second-year ice.”

“Second-year ice. Impossible!” Brewster said. “You read that in one of your books?”

“There,” Boucher shouted, pointing. He grabbed Brewster's sleeve and tugged. The Old Man leaned back over the side and squinted. Like the day before, a short gust of wind peeled back the fog and showed them a glimpse of what it hid. A field of mottled white and cold purple reached to the ship, drifts of snow blowing over the surface. The mist closed in again. The Old Man straightened up, shoving his bare hands in his pockets. The wind pinked his skin and made him blink his watering eyes, but Brewster didn't seem affected by the cold otherwise. He didn't hunch his shoulders, or shiver, standing like there was merely a touch of chill in the air, like the brisk crispness right before a light snowfall.

“I told you, it's consolidated and we aren't breaking through it. We aren't going anywhere without help. We have to call for an icebreaker.”

Brewster slowly shook his head and exhaled through his nose. His breath hung in the air like words frozen before they could be heard, his plan to free the ship taken by the cold before blowing away to disappear in the mist. Shoving Noah out of the way with a stiff arm, Brewster climbed down from the catwalk and stalked off toward the superstructure. Noah followed behind, skidding and slipping on the same ice that didn't seem to affect the Old Man. He called after him, “So what now?”

Brewster spun around. “We can't wait here for someone to come riding up and rescue us. If that ice plate shifts it could capsize us or puncture the hull. I'm not going to sit around and do nothing!”

“I'm not telling you to do nothing, William. Let Martin work on the radio. If he can't get it—”

“Enough! The only say you have on board my god damned ship is ‘aye sir.' You understand?”

“Aye sir.”

Brewster grabbed the handset from the bulkhead beside the door and pressed the switch for the public address system. He glared while speakers throughout the ship crackled and beeped alerting them to his coming message. “This is the ship's master,” he said. “All available hands assemble in the mess room immediately. Repeat, all hands to the mess.” He hung up and turned to glower at Noah. “You're going to be our icebreaker.”

Noah tried to imagine what Brewster could mean by that. “I thought I was relieved of duty.”

“You're reinstated. Now get your ass to the mess room.”

 

10

Slightly over half of the ship's crew assembled at the dining tables in the mess room. Most of the men on watch—excluding Mickle at the helm and Boucher, trailing in Brewster's wake somewhere—had come. Fewer than half of those off duty were accounted for, however. None of them looked like they wanted to be out of bed, let alone awaiting orders.

Noah took a stool at the far end of the room near a couple of guys who were slightly warmer toward him than his other shipmates. Jack Freeman and Kevin Lawless were a couple of deathrock musicians from Seattle who funded their summers playing punk covers in dingy little clubs by working supply vessels in the winter. Noah had met them the day before shipping out. They laughed a lot and talked about preferring to work hung over. “Why waste feeling good on a
job
?” Kevin had said, only half joking. Noah was certain they'd be out on the cargo deck in skinny jeans and Chuck Taylors if the deckboss didn't force them into cold weather gear. Both men were gregarious storytellers, but today they were reserved and quiet. Jack held his hands beside his eyes like blinders. Kevin rested his head on his folded arms atop the table. Both were paler than usual.

Opposite them were a trio of deckhands, Henry Gutierrez, Theo Mesires, and Andrew Puck, sitting in a tight triangle. Noah had worked with them in the past. Henry was a lifer who seemed to actually enjoy the work, not just the money, and Theo was his protégé. The two of them racked up more OT than seemed possible in a twenty-four-hour day. Noah assumed they accumulated their extra hours through a combination of greed and speed. Theo looked like he might be popping pills; he vibrated at a different frequency than any other human Noah had ever met. He wasn't sure about Henry. The guy's engine just always seemed to be in the red. Andrew, by contrast, looked like death. If he didn't occasionally shift on his stool, Noah would have thought the other two had propped his corpse up as a joke.

Brewster stomped into the mess with the bosun bringing up the rear. Boucher normally had to duck his head to pass through the doorways. Today he remained stooped, and walked through without having to bow lower. The Old Man hesitated at the head of the room, counting the men assembled. Leaning over, he whispered something to Boucher. The deckboss shrugged and pointed toward the assembly with a look-at-them gesture before slumping against the far wall. Brewster stood up straight and announced his plan.