With a final clunk and shudder, the slab came to a stop. Anika was already belted into a seat in front of the windshield and control center. Roo pulled out the hook holding them at the top of the ramp and they started sliding down.
One of the crew burst out of the back of the pilothouse deck with a submachine gun. He was pulling it up to aim.
Roo hit the seat next to her and braced. “Now
Roo started the motors up and jammed the throttle forward, turning them off to the right.
Gunfire barked out; shots slapped the water in front of them, and then right near the wooden transom of the dinghy. Anika heard wood splinter.
They roared off perpendicular to the patrol boat, engine screaming. Anika could see the compass whirl around, and then settle in. They were headed north.
“Shit,” Roo said, just barely audible over the noise of the engine.
“What?”
He pointed back. A bullet had clipped the transom and ripped open one of the fuel tanks and then left a hole in the fiberglass hull.
“We’re lucky we didn’t blow up,” Anika said, swallowing.
“Losing gas though,” Roo pointed out.
He was right. Seawater sloshed in through the bullet hole, mixed with gas pouring out of the hole, and then both were draining out of the back of the boat through one of two one-way valves in the transom to allow water to channel out of the boat. They wouldn’t sink, the pontoons around the rigid hull they stood in would stop that.
But they were certainly losing gas.
The Coast Guard ship turned, rolling wildly, to chase them.
Anika crab-walked back, bracing herself against the painful bucking of the dinghy as it hit random waves. Gassy water sloshed around her ankles as she looked around for something to plug the hole.
Nothing.
The plastic tank was hooked up to the engine by black rubber hoses. Anika unstrapped the gas tank and pushed it up onto its side so that the bullet hole was up higher than the level of the remaining gas inside, maybe a third, and then strapped it back in place.
She struggled back forward.
Roo glanced back and nodded in approval at her handiwork.
“What does that do to our escape plan?” she asked.
“We’re still working on the first part here,” he grunted. He waved back at the Coast Guard vessel, which broke the crest of a large wave in a burst of spray as it gunned its engines.
20
Roo never let up on the throttles. Even when the light boat would hit the crest of a wave wrong and leap up, the tip high in the air and threatening to flip them, he kept it all out.
The Canadian Coast Guard ship remained on their tail and Roo struggled to read the GPS as they bounced around.
“Melville Island’s closer by,” Roo finally announced. “Since we lost most of that half tank of gas, we need to change our plan. We getting close to the east side of it and to Byam Martin. We head north instead of south to Victoria like we planned.”
“And?”
“We can bust free from this patrol ship in fifty miles, yeah? There’re a bunch of islands and tight channels off Bathurst. There are some places we can get help around here. If we shake that ship.”
The swells faded. The boat was battering itself over the top of a heavy chop, engines screaming and props cavitating as they burst into the air every few seconds and hit water again.
After a half mile, even that smoothed out.
They had a half-mile lead on the patrol boat, and hitting the smooth water first gave them an even greater lead. And … the patrol boat was slowing.
The swells started up again, though, as Roo carved eastward. As the morning brightened and the grim ocean-pounding race continued, Anika began to just stare bleakly at the ocean directly ahead, anticipating each pounding leap into the air.
It took three hours to reach the coast of Bathurst.
Roo plunged them in between islands, inlets, rocks, and ice. The farther north into these clusters of islands the more ice hung to the edges of the islands, and choked into the channels between them. They were well north of the Northwest Passage here.
Here clumps of ice floated free, the size of small houses or boats. And Roo flew between them, weaving in and out, while a mile behind, the patrol boat finally came to a slow idle.
“Those hulls aren’t built for the level of ice that builds up around the islands north of the Passage,” Roo said, slowing down as well. “South of it is very much ice free, other than the occasional glacier chunks that fall off an island. So these small patrol ships are cheap to build. He’s going to have to call this off.”
They had a two-mile lead on the ship as they hooked around the north end of Alexander Island a couple hours later and saw it slowly turning back.
At that point Roo wasn’t worrying about the patrol boat, but trying to get the weather loaded up on the small GPS unit to see what they were facing next.
It was a bad situation to be wearing nothing but clothes usually fit for walking about Baffin Island while in an open boat at sea north of the Passage. In the just-slightly-above freezing temperature of the summer, and the salt-spray soak she’d gotten during their full speed sprint, she knew hypothermia was a real risk.
Roo, his face caked with salt, and looking tired and older, was shivering as he piloted them along at quarter throttle.
Anika stood up.
“What are you doing?” Roo asked.
“Locker.”
She walked to the back bench of the boat and forced it open. She found what she was looking for: a first-aid kit. And underneath, three tightly folded thermal blankets.
Roo nodded gratefully as she wrapped one around his shoulders, and then one around herself. “We will keep the other one in the locker, dry,” she said.
Still shivering, Roo huddled into his blanket. “If we can get to Cameron Island, we’ll be okay.”
“What’s there?”
“Bent Horn refinery. There are derricks all over the place out here, but Bent Horn is the closest hub. The refinery is the heart of it, but it’s a corporate town, three thousand people. We’d be able to refit and restart and not attract too much attention if we lucky.”
“Why do you say ‘if we can get there’? Is it the weather?”
“Lotta ice between here and there.”
The weather quieted into a still, chilly silence. The water turned to glass. The blankets did their trick, warming them up, and Anika relaxed.
“Were they after just me?” Anika asked. “Or you as well?” She’d gotten him into a lot of trouble. Hopefully they, whoever ‘they’ were, thought that Roo was just someone she was using, and not a true accomplice.
“Just you,” Roo said. “I think a lot of people are convinced that you know something about a heavy situation in the Arctic.”
“The nuke?” There it was again.
