Polar Star (30 page)

Karp was faster, and his stroke should have sliced Arkady from the navel up, but the dead Volovoi finally lost equilibrium and slumped sideways in front of Arkady. The knife thudded into the first mate, and for a moment, leaning forward, his blade embedded in the wrong target, Karp was vulnerable from heart to neck. Arkady hesitated. Then it was too late. Karp kicked the bed over, trapping him against the wall. Trying to rise, Arkady lost his knife.

Karp lifted him up from behind the cot and tossed him over Mike’s body into the smaller room. The trawlmaster paused to liberate his knife from Volovoi before following. Arkady could barely budge the generator, but he did manage to heave the gasoline can. Expecting it, Karp ducked until the can had flown by before he stepped over Mike.

There was a chimelike ring of glass breaking. The sound must have come before Karp entered the room, but afterward Arkady remembered the man’s surprise backlit by a white glare, as if the sun had suddenly risen behind him. The explosion of the kerosene lamp and gas can was followed by a whoosh of spilled epoxy igniting. As gasoline spread, the scattered books caught fire, the tangled sheet of the cot, the corner of the bench. Karp jabbed at Arkady, but halfheartedly, in a disconcerted
way. There was a second explosion as the full bucket of epoxy blew and a flame shot to the ceiling. Thick brown, acrid fumes spread up the walls.

“Even better,” Karp said. He waved the knife one last time and ran back through the burning room; he looked like a demon retreating from hell. After opening the bunker door he stopped to give Arkady a last glance, his eyes lit by the flames. Then he darted out and the door shut.

The baidarka ignited, its ribs black in the boat’s translucent skin, which sweated burning beads of epoxy. Already the ceiling was concealed by poisonous smoke that rolled forward like a storm cloud. Arkady stood over Mike. A remarkable scene, he thought. Storm, fire, the Aleut stretched out toward his burning boat, Volovoi on his upended funeral pyre, one sleeve covered in flame. He thought of a phrase he had once read in a French guidebook: “worth a visit.” Sometimes the mind did that in a panic, going off on its own last-minute trips. There were two choices: burn in one room or choke to death in the other.

His hand over his mouth, Arkady darted through the burning room and flung himself against the door. It gave; it wasn’t padlocked, only blocked by Karp on the outside. The same as the fishhold. Simple ideas were the best. Flames marched toward Arkady’s feet. He bent beneath the smoke, wheezing between coughs. It wouldn’t take five minutes, ten at the most; then Karp could open the door wide and check his success.

Arkady shot the door’s inside bolt. He had once known a pathologist who had claimed that Renko’s greatest talent lay not in escaping disastrous situations but only in complicating them. Holding his breath, he waded back through the fire and focused on a barrel that he rescued and carried into the second room. Inside the barrel was trash, Mike’s collection of loose netting. With a fisherman’s eye, he picked the longest strip of nylon mesh. Illuminated by the flames at the door, the water in the
corner had become a golden pond, and he could just see the broken flanges, two rusting tips of iron, under the closed hatch. He set the barrel upside down in the water and stood on it. On his toes he could just swing the strip of mesh high enough to reach. The hatch was not airtight, and by now smoke was lapping into the room, creeping along the ceiling, following the draft to where Arkady balanced. As he hooked a flange, the barrel tipped over and rolled away. While he climbed the net, he heard bottles breaking amid the growing, surflike sound of fire. He pushed open the hatch. Smoke rushed up, as if trying to drag him back, but by then he was outside and over the earthworks, rolling over mist-slicked grass and falling back toward the sea.

21
The first sign of the ice sheet was a few broken pieces of ice as slick and white as marble floating on black water, and though the
Polar Star
with its company of four catcher boats moved easily into a north wind, there was a general sense of heightened apprehension and isolation. Belowdecks was the new sound of ice scraping the waterline. On deck the crew leaned back to study the gear that surmounted the bridge house and gantries: the slowly turning bars, the interlocked rings, the star-shaped whip and line antennas that provided radar, VHF, shortwave, radio and satellite direction. The sense of a distant reality was increasingly important as scattered ice turned to an endless maze of ice rafts, circular and smooth. More and more the trawlers fell in line behind the
Polar Star
, especially the
Eagle
, built for the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, not for the Bering Sea.

By evening the wind had increased, as if sliding faster over ice than over water, and brought a fine rain that froze on the windshield of the bridge. Through the night, crewmen hosed ice off the
Polar Star
’s decks with water
from the boilers. The trawlers, even more vulnerable to the destabilizing weight of ice, did the same, and so they moved as a steaming parade through the dark.

The
Alaska Miss
, its screws dented by a floe, turned back at dawn. The others stayed because the fish were there. In the morning light the boats found that the ice had melded into one solid sheet. Ahead lay a white and featureless shell under a blue arch; in the
Polar Star
’s wake stretched a fairway of carbon-black water into which the trawlers, spaced a mile apart, dipped their nets. For some reason groundfish, particularly sole, chose the ocean floor just inside the ice sheet to mass practically in tiers. Nets thirty and forty tons heavy rose from the water, fish and mesh and plastic chafing hair immediately covered in dazzling crystals of ice, so it appeared that the trawlers were literally hauling gems from the sea. In a way it was true. The Americans were getting rich and the Soviets were doubling their daily plan.

All the same, the
Polar Star
’s flag hung at half-mast. The voyage’s entire quota had been dedicated to the memory of Fedor Volovoi. Messages of sympathy were sent to the dead man’s family; messages of support were received from fleet headquarters in Vladivostok and the company offices in Seattle. The Party cell had nominated a gloomy Slava Bukovsky to carry out the duties of political officer. Volovoi would be riding home in the No. 2 food store in a plastic bag next to the one containing Zina Patiashvili, who had been transferred; all the space in the fishhold would be needed. It was whispered on board that the first mate’s throat was more than simply charred. In his capacity as trade union representative charged with writing death forms, Slava denied the rumors, but with all his new duties, the third mate seemed to be more afflicted with depression than inspired by opportunity. Arkady himself ached after the beating from Karp, but no worse than if he had fallen down a very long staircase.

On the slime line a half-ton of yellowfin sole poured
like a quickening flood down the chute every ten minutes to be gutted, cleaned and trimmed. The fish were so laced with ice that Obidin, Malzeva, Mer, and the others were numb from fingers to shoulders. Over the sound of the saws and the incessant murmuring of cheerful tunes from the radio came the thumping of ice along the hull. The ice-breaking bow of the
Polar Star
had been designed to ride up and crash through ice a meter thick. Still, the hull protested. The whole bulkhead would shudder, and individual plates bowed in and out like drums.

As she steered fish through the saw Natasha again and again raised a questioning look at Arkady, but he was listening to the progress of the ship, to the ice resisting and then exploding under the bow, a sound like the earth splitting.

Marchuk looked as if he had been climbing mountains. Fog, never far away, had returned as a mist that froze on the windshield of the bridge, so the captain had gone out on the flying bridge. His greatcoat, boots, open-finger gloves and captain’s cap were lined in every fold with ice, and his beard had the shimmer of rime. As he stood now behind his desk, water began to pool on the floor. By the evidence of his red ears it was plain that Marchuk had not traded his cap for the flapped woolen cap of lesser men. Anton Hess had not been out on deck; still, he was padded with two sweaters and the same sort of gloves as Marchuk’s. A Soviet ship is overheated—the glory of a Russian home is heat—but nothing stayed warm on the ice sheet. Under his forehead and wild hair, Hess’s eyes were hollowed by exhaustion. Two strong men, yet each seemed uncertain, even frightened. For the first time in their lives they were sailing without a watchdog of the Party—worse, with a dead watchdog in the freezer.

Standing on the carpet next to Arkady, but not with him, as far as he could suggest by expression, was Slava
Bukovsky. It was the same group that had assembled in the captain’s cabin before, with one obvious exception.

“I apologize for not meeting when we raised anchor,” Marchuk said. “Matters were unclear. Also, my attention is taken with the radio whenever we approach ice. Americans are not used to ice, so I have to hold their hands. Now, Comrade Bukovsky, I have read your report, but the others might like to hear it.”

Slava took the opportunity to move forward, a step farther away from Arkady. “My report is based on the American report. I have it here.”

As soon as Slava opened his briefcase his papers escaped onto the carpet. It occurred to Arkady that if Marchuk had a tail it would be twitching.

The third mate found the paper he wanted. He read, “The competent authorities in Dutch Harbor—”

“Who are the competent authorities?” Hess interrupted.

“The local fire chief. He said it appeared to be an accidental fire,” Slava went on. “The native called Mikhail Krukov had been warned many times about the danger of using volatile materials in the construction of his boats, and there was evidence of a kerosene lamp, of gasoline and of alcohol. The accident occurred in a concrete construction dating back to the war, a bunker without sufficient ventilation and without safeguards for the generator that Krukov used. Apparently the natives have taken over a number of abandoned military structures without permission. Krukov was well known locally as some sort of boatbuilder. The Americans assume that he was showing one to Volovoi, that the two men shared a bottle and that in that closed space there was somehow an accident that broke a kerosene lamp, igniting toxic materials, which, in turn, exploded. Fedor Volovoi, apparently, was killed immediately by flying glass. The native, it seems, died of burns and inhalation.”

“Mikhail Krukov?” Marchuk raised his eyebrows. “A Russian name?”

“He was called Mike,” Slava said.

“They were drunk?” Hess asked. “Is that what the competent authorities suggest?”

“Like our own, their natives are known to be abusers of alcohol,” Slava said.

Marchuk smiled like a man who had heard a joke on the way to the gallows. He turned the smile toward Arkady. “Volovoi didn’t drink and he hated boats. But that’s the report; that’s what I’m supposed to tell Vladivostok. Somehow I have the feeling that you have something you could add.”

The ship trembled as it hit a larger ice floe. Arkady waited until the grinding slid past. “No,” he said.

“Nothing?” Marchuk asked. “I think of you as such a reliable source of surprises.”

Arkady shrugged. As an afterthought he asked Slava, “Who found the bodies?”

“Karp.”

“Karp Korobetz, a trawlmaster,” the captain explained to Hess. “He was searching for Volovoi in the company of an engineer from the
Eagle
.”

“Ridley,” Slava said. “He showed Karp the way to the bunker.”

“What time did they discover the bodies?” Arkady asked.

“About ten,” Slava said. “They had to break the door in.”

“You hear that?” Marchuk underlined the words for Arkady. “They had to
break in
. It was locked from the inside. That’s the touch I like.”

“Karp and Ridley entered the bunker?” Arkady asked Slava. “They looked around?”