Arctic Rising

“Sure.”

* * *

The old Honda light jet had been turned around and refueled. It sat under the protection of a wireframe hangar with sheet metal skin painted some shade of fuchsia. Yves followed Anika as she did the walk around of the small jet.

“What did you find?” he asked, as they both passed around a wingtip.

“I am sorry?” Anika kept walking toward the back of the craft.

“Back in the cargo hold. You got up on the railing. You put something in your pocket. Please tell me, what did you find?” Yves looked at her mildly.

Anika got up on her tiptoes to look at the small GE jets on the tail, their outlets stained with miles and miles of smoke. For a while the VLJs like this Honda had gotten their engines swapped out with engines from an outfit that used some biofuel, but they’d failed a few times, forcing emergency landings.

UNPG brass used the VLJs a lot, so a lot of them had had the engines swapped back to the originals. And it looked like this was one of them.

“Anika?” Yves asked.

She sighed. She didn’t want to give up her find and share it, but she had to. She reached inside her jacket. “Don’t let go of it. Whatever it is, it floats.”

Yves turned the globe over in his hands. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. I was going to find out. It sounded like you were all done back there. I thought maybe I could look a little harder.”

“Of course.” Yves sounded apologetic. He always sounded apologetic, Anika thought. He took his phone and held the small globe up in front of it.

After he’d captured a few seconds of video, he looked down at the globe. “I have to keep it. I apologize. My superiors, they see that we have these assholes in custody. They’re happy. Everything has been tied up, no? But all physical evidence, it has to be tagged and stored in the appropriate place. I cannot let you keep it.”

“I understand,” Anika said. She held up her phone and snapped several pictures of the globe before Yves could react. Better to ask forgiveness than permission here. “You both would have walked right by it and never known.”

“I should make you delete those,” Yves said.

“Try,” Anika told him.

Yves smiled. “Don’t think you can lead an investigation of your own. Let us do our jobs, Anika. Tell us anything you stumble across. We will, of course, send everything we can share to your commanding officer.”

“I promise you, I will not be causing you any trouble,” Anika lied. “I found it. I’m curious. You would be curious as well, yes?”

Yves smiled. “You have your picture. You’ve earned at least that and probably more. And I promise you, I will keep you notified about anything we learn.”

Right. Anika scratched her ear. “And once they’re behind bars, wherever they end up, how much time will you spend on seeing what else you can find out about them?”

“Well, that is the problem, Ms. Duncan. Ce qui est UNPG? I answer you this way: What we are is understaffed. We suffer with old equipment from ten different agencies from around the world who gift us their old castoffs. Every year the Pole, it gets warmer, and there are more people up here, and I get more busy each month, not less. But I will not forget you.”

Anika felt slightly guilty. “I’m sorry, Yves. It is a hard thing to stop thinking about.”

He shrugged. “Come. The rest of your life, it is waiting.”

She watched him climb into the jet.

The rest of his life, she thought, hadn’t fired a rocket at him lately. “Yves?”

He looked back down at her. “Yes?”

“When that boy fired the RPG at me, I reached for the rifle and returned fire. I did not even think about it. Do you know where I got those instincts from?”

“Not training for UNPG?” Yves guessed.

“I used to be one of those kids with a gun you talked about. I ran away from Lagos. I dreamed I would pilot an airship, like the adventurers in the movies. But before anyone would let me fly, I sat in an open door of a gondola with a very large chain gun. I was fifteen. My job for two years was to make sure bush fighters were scared of us. I made sure of it. I don’t run away from a fight, Yves.”

Yves spread his hands. “We already won the fight.”

No. This was just a small battle of a larger war; Anika felt it in her gut. Something was going on. And maybe it was stupid to pursue it. But she felt slighted. She’d walked away from the rough life of a security contractor. She’d been little more than a mercenary pilot for so long, and the UNPG had been a chance to head in a new direction. And this violence snapping at her, it offended her. She wanted to turn around and kill it until she was sure it was never going to reach into the orderly world she’d made for herself here.

Or, she wondered, maybe there was nowhere in the world you got to have that life, where you knew you were safe every morning when you woke up, and knew exactly what to expect. She’d lived that in Lagos, growing up. Then ran away from it all for excitement. And after a decade of excitement, she treasured her life here.

Maybe, just maybe, mulling over all this kept her from having to think about Tom. Or his wife.

She was going to have to go see Jenny at some point.

Anika wasn’t sure she could face her.

Not without feeling guilty that she was still alive, still talking to her loved ones.

Anika slipped the phone back in her pocket.

This was far from over.

9

It was midnight when she got home and changed out of her uniform blues. For a moment she stood in her underwear, considering her next move.

Go comfort Jenny?

No. She couldn’t face Jenny. Anika felt like she’d let her down. She couldn’t face that and keep herself held together right now.

Anika pulled on weathered jeans and a purple turtleneck, an old leather jacket, some gloves from the wicker basket near the door, and found her Oakleys.

She pulled the data backup out of the other jeans and slid it into her pocket. Now that she knew it was the only copy, she wasn’t letting it out of sight until she handed it over to Commander Claude.

She was still thinking about the fact that the Kosatka’s crew had claimed to be drug runners. It didn’t make sense, and it gnawed away at her. And, she thought, she did know someone who could help answer a few questions about drug running. She let her hair out of a tight bun. It sprung loose, a halo of comfortable brown kinks she was happy to see again.

It went against her nature to go ask someone for help. But she was sort of looking forward to this trip, she had to secretly admit.

If she could arrange transportation.

She walked next door and banged on the screen door. “Karl!”

She banged again, until Karl’s blond curls appeared at the window, and then at the crack of the door as it opened. He was wearing a towel around his waist, tufts of coarse, dark hair running up from his belly to his chest, covering a fairly fit physique. “Jesus, Anika, what?”

“I need to borrow your bike, if it is charged.”

Karl rubbed his eyes and looked up the road. “Oh, come on, Anika. You ran your damn car down again?”

Anika didn’t answer that, but cocked her head. Karl sighed and reached over to the hooks screwed into the wall by the door, then handed her the keys. The key fob was made of paracord, six feet of it woven into a five-inch