Dead or Alive

“What do you suppose it costs?”

“Not a thing, if you have the right truck,” Vitaliy observed. “It doesn’t even have any warning stickers on it. Not about taking it anyway.”

“I wouldn’t want it under my pillow. That’s an atomic generator.”

“Is that so?” Vitaliy had never been briefed on how the generator operated.

“Yes. It has the triple-triangle sign on the right side. I’m not going near the damned thing,” Vanya announced,

“Hmph,” Vitaliy grunted from the chart table. Whatever it was, the charter party must have known, and they were close enough to it. How dangerous could it be, then? But he decided not to get overly close to it. Radioactive stuff. You couldn’t see or feel what it did. That’s what made it frightening. Well, if they wanted to play with it, it was up to them. He remembered the old Soviet Navy joke: How do you tell a Northern Fleet sailor? He glows in the dark. Certainly he’d heard all manner of stories about the men who’d been sent to serve on the atomic submarines. Miserable work, and as the crew of Kursk had discovered to their sorrow, they were still dangerous. No, what sort of mad-man goes to sea on a ship that’s supposed to sink? he asked himself. Plus a power plant that sent out invisible poisons. It took much to make him shudder, but this thought managed to do it. A diesel engine might not be as powerful, but it didn’t try to kill you just for walking by it. Well, fifteen meters away from that battery. It ought to be safe. His charter party was only five meters away, and they looked comfortable enough.

“What do you think, Vanya?” the owner asked.

“That battery thing? I’m not going to worry. Too much, at least.” His sleeping accommodations were aft and below the wheelhouse. Not an educated man, Vanya was clever enough with machines and their personalities.

Vitaliy looked at the steel bulkhead forward of the wheel. It was steel, after all, and seven or eight millimeters thick. Enough to stop a bullet. Surely that was enough to stop radiation, wasn’t it? Well, you couldn’t worry about everything.

It was just past sunset when they arrived in the harbor, where things were shutting down. At the big-ship quay a ro-ro ship was about half loaded with cargo boxes for the oil fields to the east, and the longshoremen were walking back to their homes in anticipation of finishing up loading the next day, and water-front bars were cleaning tables for the usual evening business. All in all, a normal sleepy evening for what was, mostly, a sleepy port. Vitaliy eased his boat into the dock, the one with a ramp for loading trucks and trailers onto boats such as his. The dock looked unattended, as was normal, the dockmaster doubtless on his way to one of the bars to drink his dinner.

“Days getting shorter, Captain,” Vanya observed, standing left of the wheel. In another few weeks, they’d hardly see the sun at all, and it would be their winter maintenance period, with nobody chartering their craft. Even the polar bears would be looking for dens in which to sleep out the bitter winter, while humans did much the same, helped along the way by vodka. And one lighthouse would be dark all through the winter, not that it mattered all that much.

“So we can sleep longer, eh, Vanya?”

Always a good way to spend your time, the deckhand thought.

The charter party was still in the well deck, standing by their truck. Not overly excited about getting back to port, Vitaliy saw. Well, they were businesslike, and that was fine with him. He had half his charter fee in his pocket, and the rest of the cash would join it soon enough, and maybe he would buy the GPS system to ease his navigation, if he could get a good deal for it. Yuriy Ivanov should have a goodly supply of the gadgets at his chandlery, and for a bottle of Starka, maybe he could get a decent bargain in what was still largely a barter economy.

“Stand by the engines, Vanya.”

“As you say, Comrade Captain,” the deckhand responded, heading aft and below.

He’d just beach his craft, Vitaliy decided. The ramp was concrete covered with dirt, and his boat was made for that sort of thing. He carefully lined up and moved it at three or four knots, just about right. The light was fading, but not that fast.

“Stand by,” he said over the intercom.

“Standing by,” Vanya replied the same way.

Vitaliy’s left hand found the throttle but didn’t move it quite yet. Thirty meters, approach gently, he told himself. Twenty meters. His peripheral vision showed only a fishing boat, sitting idle alongside, with nobody in sight. Just about… now.

It was an awful noise, the sort to set a man’s teeth on edge, and his steel bottom grated on the ramp, but soon enough the noise stopped, and Vitaliy chopped the throttles back to zero/ idle. And the trip and charter were complete.

“Finished with engines, Vanya.”

“Yes, Comrade Captain. Shutting down.” And the rumble stopped.

Vitaliy pulled the wheelhouse ramp-release handle, and the bow ramp fell slowly to the dock. With that done, he walked down to the well deck. The charter party walked to him.

“Thank you, Captain,” their leader said with a smile. He spoke in English, which was accented, though Vitaliy didn’t really notice.

“All is satisfactory?”

“Yes,” the foreigner answered. He spoke in another language to one of his friends, but Vitaliy didn’t understand it. It wasn’t English and wasn’t Russian. It’s hard to identify a language you don’t speak yourself, and as the old joke went, it was Greek to the captain. One party member got into the truck and started it up, then backed it ashore, its cargo dangling from the A-frame crane on the flatbed. In the diminishing light, the triple-triangle radiation-warning label was unusually bright, which was probably intentional. A moment later another truck appeared on the dock, and the former Army truck backed to it. Another member of the charter party activated the crane controls, lifting, then lowering the cargo into the second truck’s cargo area. Whoever these people were, they were reasonably efficient. One must have used a cell phone to call ahead, Vitaliy speculated.

“So here is your money,” the leader said, handing over an envelope.

Vitaliy took it, opened it, and counted off the bills. Two thousand euros, not a bad compensation for what had been a simple enough job. And enough to buy the GPS system, plus some Starka, and a hundred for Vanya, of course.

“Thank you,” Vitaliy said politely, taking his hand. “If you need me again, you know how to contact me.”

“I may come by tomorrow, say, about ten in the morning?”

“We’ll be here,” Vitaliy promised. They’d have to start painting the deckhouse, and tomorrow was as good a day as any other.

“Then I will see you,” the leader promised. Then they shook hands, and he walked ashore.

Onshore, he talked to a companion, speaking now in his native language. “Tomorrow at ten,” he told his most senior subordinate.

“And if the port is busy?”

“We’ll just do it inside,” he explained.

“What time do we meet the plane?”

“Tomorrow at noon.”

“Excellent.”

They showed up just before ten a.m., Vitaliy saw. With the rest of his money, he hoped. Drove a different car this day. A Japanese one. They were taking Russia over. Too many of his countrymen still disliked German hardware, a lingering attitude that probably came less from history than from the war movies that the Russian film industry turned out like cigarette packs.

He was wearing a parka, loose enough for a sweater underneath, and he walked up to the boat with a smile. So, yes, maybe he did have a bonus for him. People usually smiled before giving money over.

“Good morning, Captain,” he called, coming into the wheelhouse. He looked around. Not much activity to be seen, except over at the big-ship pier, where they were on-loading cargo boxes, half a kilometer away. “Where is your mate?”