But she was too exhausted, too paralyzed with cold and despair, even to try to save herself.
She stared in terror down the beach as, shoulders heaving and eyes blazing orange in the dusk, the pack of black wolves galloped toward her across the rocks and sand.
THE BERING STRAITS
PRESENT DAY
The waters off the northern coast of Alaska were bad enough in summer, when the sun was shining around the clock and you could at least see the ice floes coming at you, but now—in late November, with a squall blowing in—they were about the worst place on Earth to be.
Especially in a crab-catching tub like the Neptune II.
Harley Vane, the skipper, knew he’d be lucky just to keep the ship in one piece. He’d been fishing in the Bering Sea for almost twenty years, and both the crabbing and the storms had gotten worse the whole time. The crabbing he could figure out; his boat, and a dozen others, kept returning to the same spots, depleting the population and never giving it enough time to replenish itself. All the skippers knew they were committing a slow form of suicide, but nobody was going to be the first to stop.
And then there was the weather. The currents were getting stronger and more unpredictable all the time, the winds higher, the ice more broken up and difficult to avoid. He knew that all that global warming stuff was a load of crap—hadn’t the snowfall last year been the highest in five years?—but something was definitely afoot. As he sat in the wheelhouse, steering the boat through a turbulent sea of fifteen-foot swells and hunks of glacier the size of cars, he had to buckle himself into his raised seat to keep from falling over. The rolling and pitching of the boat were so bad he considered reaching for the hand mike and calling the deckhands inside, but the Neptune’s catch so far had been bad—the last string of pots had averaged less than a hundred crabs each—and until their tanks were full, the boat would have to stay at sea. Back on shore, there were bills to pay, so he had to keep slinging the pots, no matter what.
“You want some coffee?” Lucas said, coming up from below with an extra mug in his hand. He was still wearing his yellow anorak, streaming with icy water.
“Christ almighty,” Harley said, taking the coffee, “you’re soaking the place.”
“Yeah, well, it’s wet out there,” Lucas said. “You oughta try it some time.”
“I tried it plenty,” Harley said. He’d worked the decks since he was eleven years old, back when his dad had owned the first Neptune and his older brother had been able to throw the hook and snag the buoys. And he remembered his father sitting on a stool just like this, ruling the wheelhouse and looking out through the row of rectangular windows at the main deck of the boat. The view hadn’t changed much, with its ice-coated mast, its iron crane, its big gray buckets for sorting the catch. Once that boat had gone down, Harley and his brother, Charlie, had invested in this one. But unlike the original, the Neptune II featured a double bank of white spotlights above the bridge. At this time of year, when the sun came out for no more than a few hours at midday, the lights threw a white but ghostly glow over the deck. Sometimes, to Harley, it was like watching a black-and-white movie down there.
Now, from his perch, where he was surrounded by his video and computer screens—another innovation that his dad had resisted—he could see the four crewmen on deck throwing the lines, hauling in the pots with the crabs still clinging to the steel mesh, and then emptying the catch into the buckets and onto the conveyor belt to the hold. An enormous wave—at least a twenty-five-footer—suddenly rose up, like a balloon inflating, and broke over the bow of the boat. The icy spray splashed all the way up to the windows of the wheelhouse.
“It’s getting too dangerous out there,” Lucas said, clinging to the back of the other stool. “We’re gonna get hit by a rogue wave bigger than that one, and somebody’s going overboard.”
“I just hope it’s Farrell, that lazy son of a bitch.”
Lucas took a sip of his coffee and kept his counsel.
Harley checked the screens. On one, he had a sonar reading that showed him what lay beneath his own rolling hull; right now, it was thirty fathoms of frigid black water, with an underwater sea mount rising half that high. On the others, he had his navigation and radar data, giving him his position and speed and direction. Glancing at the screens now, he knew what Lucas was about to say.
“You do know, don’t you, that you’re going to run right into the rock pile off St. Peter’s Island if you don’t change course soon?”
“You think I’m blind?”