“Yes, that had come up.” Roo looked to his side at her. “You know anything about it? Vy says you a pilot. A clean one. You all mixed up in this?”
“I am pretty sure I spotted it on a freighter during my last flight, and I wasn’t supposed to.” She wrapped the blanket even tighter, and then summarized the entire nightmare: getting shot down, Tom’s death. The bomb.
And now Coast Guard ships trying to pick her up and take her God only knew where.
“A man tried to kill me on the road, too. Before I went to the commander. I strangled him to death.” She looked over at him. “I think … it’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever done to another human. It took so long. But it was him or me. I didn’t have a choice.”
Roo nodded. He didn’t say anything for a long time as they idled past table-sized chunks of floating ice.
“The worst thing I ever did to another human was marry her,” he said.
“Jesus! Roo!” She half laughed. But when she looked over at him, she saw his clenched jaw and realized he hadn’t been making a joke.
The sound of the water slapping gently against the hull faded as he whispered, “It was a big contract, to get inside a corporation. I used one of the largest shareholders, a widow, who was on vacation in Saba. Spent a year becoming a part of this person’s world, family, influences. A lot of people, they come down to the islands looking for excitement, to cut loose. But she wouldn’t let go, and I couldn’t stop going down this path. It had momentum, like a cart down a hill.”
“So you married her…”
“The company spent tens of millions buying politicians off, allowing them to force spice prices down with government subsidies and support. They were going to devastate the island economies as a side effect, and we had to figure out how to get in so we could stay a step ahead. I made half a million for the mission. Cheaper than the islands trying to outbuy the company’s pet American, Canadian, and European politicians.” He shrugged. “But when it ended, it was like I cut her puppet strings—her world shattered, she slumped away.”
They motored on, mulling over the tempest of their personal landscapes for a while. It was better than focusing on the cold.
“The nuclear weapon thing,” Roo said. “Before, you were a pilot. You paid attention to basic politics, your command structure, your job. But you’ve stepped onto a different field now.
“Back in the day of the colonialists, they called it the Great Game. Nation-backed spies crossing the world to pay this group or that, get this person to fight that person, while they stayed in the shadows. Nation’s shadows playing for territory, economics, and more. Nowadays, anyone can play. Non-state actors, corporations, activist groups. Everything’s in play. You down the rabbit hole that lies under the real world, unseen by the good people focusing on they daily bread.”
“I know it exists,” Anika said. “But a nuke?”
“The Arctic Circle is the big spoils.” Roo turned them a bit to pass around a small chunk of ice. “A lot of the Great Game is focused here now. Canada claims most of the Arctic islands here north of it. The U.S. claims ocean out past Alaska.”
“And Northern Europe and Russia, yes. Then China, India, and Brazil pushed hard for the Circle to be international waters, so it’s all up in the air. I do work for the UNPG.”
“Yeah. And the basin is full of gas and natural resources, all easier and easier to get at now that the ice all but gone. Greenland is a natural resources superpower, a few hundred thousand Inuit made rich by nationalized returns of their claims. Canada exploiting these islands hard. And where oil is plenty, intrigue comes with it. Basic history. Middle East, Nigeria, South America … when it’s outside their borders, the other big nations play hard for control of it.” He tapped the console. “Plastic has to be made. It covers the modern world. Motors need to be lubricated. Most nations still move from point to point with oil.”
“And the nuke?” Anika still couldn’t figure out how it played into all this.
“Well, someone has one. Which means someone probably wants to use it. And a lot of people want to know why. And many of them want to stop it. That’s what the Caribbean network is hearing. Most likely, whoever backing this is someone who wants oil prices to rise. That could be anyone: Middle East, Nigeria, South America, solar power manufacturers, green fanatics.”
“Greens?”
“Five major bomb detonations on oil rigs in the Circle in six years, using little boats just like this one with GPS autopilots and a few cameras for navigation. Any more, they get a lot of funding from Saudi princes; every event raises the price of oil.”
Anika thought about that. The real people who had tried to kill her could be someone who was trying to edge out a better trade on the oil futures market.
Where the hell was this mission of revenge taking her? And was there even going to be someone she could hunt down for what had happened?
Down the rabbit hole, Roo had said.
He wasn’t half kidding.
21
The Bent Horn refinery dominated the southern tip of Cameron Island. Stacks belched fire and smoke, pipes clustered and ran from bell-shaped building to building, and the docks harbored massive oil tankers with extra-thick ice-breaking prows. It was an industrial, post-apocalyptic sprawl of brutal architecture made more forbidding by the gray low hills of the island and the Arctic tundra, lit by the perpetual gray day and the sudden lightning-like orange bursts of fire from the stack tops.
To the back of the refinery, rusting derricks slumped over—remnants of the original drilling operation on the island from the 1970s, abandoned just before the turn of the century.
Company dorms, brightly colored but square-block apartment buildings, loomed around the edge of the refinery. Beyond it, another hundred or so buildings crept up the side of a hill, the nascent form of a town springing up around the economic activity of the refinery as year-round workers pulled in family and then all the other needs of a large group of humanity: bars, eateries, stores, recreation, infrastructure.
Roo guided them around the shadows of barges and tugs toward the docks. No one paid much attention to them, as several other dinghies moved around the harbor to get people to and from anchored ships that couldn’t fit. There was no reason for anyone to assume they came out of the ocean, as Roo had initially come around the coast to the harbor.
By the time they tied up, the wind had started to howl and rain pelted the artificial harbor. They hurried toward a bright green dormitory building.
Anika browsed a company store attached to the dorm, soaking in the warmth and calm, while Roo disappeared. “Going to find an ATM for some cash from one of my backup accounts, and seeing if we can get transport to Pleasure Island,” he told her tersely.
He came back an hour later reequipped with a phone he’d purchased off someone, two large Arctic peacoats, hats, gloves, and a thick wad of cash.
Anika stole a few bills from him to buy three chocolate bars she’d been eyeing and a large hot chocolate. They sat at a small plastic table in the corner of the store. It was quiet, in between shifts, though a handful of men in overalls sat in the other corner downing coffee and bitching about one of their managers.
“There’s a helicopter pilot taking supplies out to a couple of mist boats near that area,” Roo said. “One of the crew is a journalist with money who has fresh stuff flown in once a month. If we agree to help unload, and we pay for his refueling there, he’ll get us to Pleasure Island.”
Rain sleeted against the window, howling away outside, as she sipped and let the warmth spread through her.
“I think,” Roo said, “we’re okay. For tonight. We should stay inside as much as we can, come out in between shifts.”
He’d found a room. It was filled with gear: heavy boots, warm clothing. Posters of naked airbrushed women holding impossible poses and hungry expressions hung from the wall, tacked into place. A perfectly clean, empty, white fridge.
