by John Yunker
Aeneas reached into his jacket, removed a flask, and handed it to him. Robert took a long drink. “I never told anyone that,” he said.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” Aeneas said. “I am not one to judge. I am the son of a fisherman, grew up working the coasts of Alaska. My father once said I had two options in life—the military or the sea. And when I said none of the above, he punched me in the face. He didn’t believe in the belt—he was a hands-on parent. I’m a pacifist compared to him. But I used longlines once. I understand fishermen. They live in the past because the past tells them where the fish are. They are a tragic lot. They take from the sea, but what do they give back? The Greeks made offerings to the gods. But not my old man. He looked at the sea like an ATM with no limit. He took to crab fishing late in life when the salmon stocks dropped, got caught up in a line and was pulled overboard. And I got his boat. So in the end, he gave back to the ocean. That counts for something.”
Aeneas tucked the flask back into his jacket. “Enough about me. The purpose of my impromptu visit was to tell you that we are heading for Antarctica in December for our inaugural battle with the Japanese. There’s a spot open for you, if you’re up for more abuse.”
“Why me?”
“Why not you, Jake? You have other plans?”
“No.”
“Perhaps this is your purpose in life, to join us. To fight for those whose instincts alone cannot save them. To make reparations.”
“Is Noa going?”
“Is Noa going?” Aeneas laughed. “Why do you think I invited you?” He got up and stumbled his way back across the deck and up the stairs to the bridge.
Robert debated whether to share the news with Noa but decided that he had to, in case Aeneas mentioned it. He told her the next evening, when they were alone having a smoke on the top deck. She lit up with a smile he’d never seen before.
“Think about it,” she said. “Bipolar sex.”
Right then, he wanted to become Jake for good. To accept the invitation because Robert could not accept it. Because Robert was about to arrest a member of Aeneas’s crew. Because he was a member of the FBI and had now developed a detailed breakdown of the organization and how it functioned—not to mention that he was not a vegan and was never much of an environmentalist.
So why was he so happy? Because he’d been accepted into the group? Was he really contemplating joining them? The last time he’d felt this way was the day he got accepted into the Bureau. Yet acceptance by the CDA seemed more significant because of the odds stacked against these people; because most of them were there as volunteers, sacrificing jobs and relationships; and because of Noa.
She lit another cigarette using her Zippo lighter, with its peace symbol inscribed on the front. In part to change the subject away from the future, Robert reached over and took it from her hand, then held it up. “That’s an odd location for a peace sign,” he said.
“Because fire isn’t peaceful? That’s what everyone says. But fire can lead to peace. It clears away the old growth and man’s mistakes.”
“Like what?”
“Mink farms, for example,” she said.
He looked at her. “What do you mean, mink farms?”
“You know, the places where they pen up innocent—”
“I know what it is,” he interrupted. “I meant—are you saying that you actually set fire to a mink farm?”
She nodded and leaned in. “You have to swear not to tell anyone. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Robert said.
“You sure? You look like you saw a ghost.”
“I’m just a little surprised. I wouldn’t have pictured you doing such a thing.”
“That’s that whole point, silly. If Tommy had torched the place, he’d be serving time right about now. He just looks guilty. But not me.”
He listened as she recounted the Idaho burnings in great detail. She made it look as if a man had done the damage, by creating a fake alias for the guy on the Web, a guy who posted angry messages in all the right places, sure to confuse the law. The only flaw she made was in posting to Web sites that were popular among the CDA members. She didn’t notice it. No human would have noticed the connection, but pattern-matching software did notice it. A machine had made the connection, and Robert was sent to make the arrest because machines could not do that, not yet.
Duty now required him to function like that machine, to do as he’d been programmed. To arrest Noa, a.k.a. Darwin; to contact the Bureau, to turn the ship around and get on with his life.
But he was not a machine. And he was in love with Noa.
Maybe he would not arrest her. He would return home from a failed mission, hardly the first in the history of the Bureau. Maybe his career would stall; he would be transferred to some desk job that everyone feared. Hell, maybe he’d even be promoted.
Or maybe he would quit and run away with Noa. He could marry her, right now on the ship, have Aeneas make it official. Husband/wife privileges would protect her from the stand. His colleagues would forgive him for losing his head over a woman.
This was the outcome he dreamed of when he went to sleep that night, Noa in his arms, the constant hum of the engine lulling them to sleep.
Ethan
After seven days at sea, Ethan was no longer exploring the Emperor of the Seas but pacing it. Annie had not boarded in San Diego, as he’d hoped. Yet he stayed on the cruise ship as it made its slow passage down the Chilean side of Patagonia and through the Strait of Magellan. With every new port came renewed hope that she might join him. Perhaps she’d missed the boat back in San Diego and had planned to meet him in another location. Or perhaps she’d gotten a job on the CDA boat—which allowed him to believe that he might see her along the way. He’d been spending a lot of time on the CDA web site and had learned that Ushuaia was a port of call for all vessels heading to Antarctica. It was a place where an anti-whaling boat like the Arctic Tern could pull up next to a cruise ship like the Emperor of the Seas.
A part of him knew that the odds of either scenario coming true were incalculable. But another part reminded himself that random things happened every day. That he and Annie being matched up in the first place was one of those random things.
After pacing the upper deck until well after dark, he returned to his cabin. He’d left the sliding balcony door open, and the room was freezing. He walked outside and blinked into the darkness. Whitecaps reflected the moon, and the ocean looked like static on a black TV screen. Ethan closed his eyes and rested his head on his arms, and he could see her again, sleeping next to him. Her tiny shoulders. The light tufts of hair on the back of her neck.
He opened his laptop and checked his email again. He scanned the subject lines, the email addresses, but she had not written back. Perhaps she wanted to surprise him or, more likely, the CDA boat had no Internet access. Eventually, however, she would be in port and would find her way to an Internet café. She would write to him and apologize for not being there, for all the money he spent on the cruise, for the cruise-issue parka he’d mailed to her last available address. But his efforts were not in vain, she would say. She would greet him when he returned, and they would give it one more try.
Robert
On that last day on the Eminence, high in the Arctic Sea, Robert awoke alone in bed to voices outside his porthole. At first he thought he was dreaming. Then, as he emerged further from sleep, he thought the boat had docked somewhere and the noises were from the pier. Then he realized that this was not possible, that the boat will still moving, and when he stood and looked out the porthole he saw that the boat had pulled alongside a fishing trawler. Two men stood on the deck, their rifles pointed at the Eminence. At their feet were hooked fish and the coils of longline they were apparently in the process of reeling back in. Aeneas had interrupted their work, and the fishermen clearly were not happy.
As Robert
turned away from the porthole, he heard a gunshot.
Quickly he reached under the bed and extracted the handgun he’d kept hidden in his bag. He ran upstairs in his bare feet, gun held behind his back. He exited on the opposite side of the deck and made his way carefully around to where he would have a clean view. One of the fishermen had already boarded the Eminence, and the CDA crew were scattered about the deck on their stomachs, arms behind their heads. The fisherman waved his shotgun above their heads. He was yelling something in Russian to the other, who was still on the bridge of the fishing boat.
Robert had to decide what to do, and fast. He could remain undercover and take his position facedown on the deck. Or he could take the Russians down, blow his cover, and risk something else entirely.
Just then he caught sight of Noa, facedown near the gun-waving man’s feet. She looked up at him, and he knew what he had to do. He turned the corner quickly, gun extended.
“FBI,” he said, loudly enough for the fisherman to hear, not that he would understand.
The man smirked and without hesitation swung his rifle to aim at Robert. But Robert was already in position to shoot, and he had ample time to pull the trigger before the fisherman had a chance.
Robert fired three shots, watching as blood from the fisherman’s head spattered onto the crew members spread out below. Robert turned the gun toward the man on the other ship, but he’d already dropped his rifle and had started the engine. Robert held his gun on him, letting him pull away. It had all happened in less than a minute.
When Robert turned back, the crew were on their knees, looking up at him. Despite the fact that he’d announced he was FBI, he was tempted to make up some story about being a drug dealer or former cop—any excuse to explain away the gun, to go back undercover. But he was tired of lying, and none of it would have mattered.
“I’m an FBI agent,” he said. “My name’s Robert Porter.”
Noa approached, spots of the fisherman’s blood dotting her neck and shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly, but she continued past him and into the ship.
Robert scanned the faces of the crew, wondering whether he needed to fear them now. He saw Aeneas standing at one side of the bridge, looking down on him.
“Everyone just stay where you are,” Robert said, trying to keep his voice from trembling. “I’m not here for you.”
“Of course not,” Aeneas said. “You’re here for the camaraderie. The sea air. And let’s not forget the romance.”
Robert raised his gun at Aeneas, then lowered it. He tucked the gun into his pants and retreated into the ship.
He found Noa in their cabin, where she had turned his bag upside down and was shaking it frantically.
“What are you looking for?”
“Aeneas wanted me to search your bag when you came on board. I didn’t. I told him I did, but I didn’t. I vouched for you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Was fucking me part of your mission, Jake? Or should I call you Robert?”
“No, of course not. My mission—I was sent here to arrest Darwin.”
“Congratulations, Robert. You got your man.” She held out her arms, wrists up. He grabbed them and raised her right wrist to his lips and kissed the infinity sign.
“I won’t arrest you,” he said. “I can’t. I’m going to call Washington and tell them to get Russia on the horn because I just killed one of their citizens. That’s it.”
“Are you going to arrest Aeneas?”
“No.”
She stared at him, and he could tell she didn’t believe a word. “How can I trust you?” she said.
“Because I’m quitting. This is my last assignment. I’ll follow you wherever you want to go.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’d follow me anywhere?”
“Anywhere.”
He reached out and hugged her, hoping for a similar embrace. But she stood immobile in his arms. He didn’t know how to act or what to say, now that his personas had collided, now that Robert and Jake were one. And he didn’t know how to explain his actions to either of his two bosses, Gordon or Aeneas. Either way he had failed.
“Let me clean up the mess upstairs, okay?” He pulled away and looked at her, hoping to get a response from her eyes. Even anger would have been a start. “Then we can talk. We’ll figure everything out.”
But Noa kept staring out the window, and finally Robert had to go upstairs. On the deck, he found Aeneas standing over the body.
“I’m sorry this had to happen,” Robert said.
“Are you?” Aeneas asked. “Someone is going to take the fall for this, and something tells me it won’t be you.”
“Just tell your crew to remain calm. I’m not going to hurt anyone unless they give me a reason to.”
As Robert went through the fisherman’s pockets looking for identification, he heard an engine come to life off the port side of the ship. He walked to the railing, and as he looked down, a Zodiac sprinted away from the ship with Noa at the helm. He shouted her name into the wind. She looked back at him just long enough for him to know exactly what she was doing. He said he’d follow her anywhere, and he knew that’s what she was betting on—luring him off of this ship, away from Aeneas and their mission. They were alike that way, and she, too, had a mess to clean up.
Robert heard footsteps behind and he spun around, reaching again for his gun. Aeneas froze. “Where is she headed?” he asked, and Aeneas didn’t answer. “Where?”
“By the looks of it, north.”
Robert pointed his gun at Aeneas. “Tell her to turn around.”
“With what? She isn’t wearing a radio.”
Robert glanced back at Noa, looking for the black nylon strap that would indicate she wore a radio. He couldn’t see it, but he wasn’t about to believe Aeneas. In the end, he knew he couldn’t let her go. But he wasn’t about to let Aeneas go either. Then he remembered the helicopter.
He held his gun on Aeneas until he was strapped into the passenger side, then he fired up the propellers, keeping his gun on his left jacket pocket. He couldn’t trust Aeneas, but he also knew that Aeneas couldn’t fly this contraption on his own.
Once they were airborne, he relaxed. Aeneas would mind his manners, and having Aeneas with him guaranteed that the ship would be waiting when he returned. With a brief glance down, he saw the crew scrambling to get the boat moving again, to follow as best they could.
Heading north, he kept Aeneas busy with the radio, making him call Noa, despite Aeneas’s insistence that she had no way of responding. “Keep in touch with the ship so they stay close,” he added.
Robert stayed close to the water, mindful of the minivan-sized icebergs that dotted the surface. In the distance he could see the ice blink, a crystal-white shadow in the sky reflecting the ice below it. Soon he began to see the mush of undulating ice that edged the polar cap. He began to run parallel to the ice line, looking for a point of entry.
“There’s a trail,” Aeneas said, pointing.
Robert circled around what could have been an opening through the slush cut by Noa’s boat. He could see that she wouldn’t get far. The sharp chunks of ice would inevitably puncture each of the Zodiac’s six inflatable sections.
“Do you see her?”
“Not through this fog,” Aeneas said. “Can you get any lower?”
The cloud layer had merged with the ice, forcing Robert to decelerate and stay as close to the ice as possible while still trying to avoid any spiked bergs. By then Noa’s trail had sealed back up, and the slush turned to whiter chunks—solid ice.
“I’ll double back.”
“I see something,” Aeneas said. “Circle around.”
Robert banked, and Aeneas pointed below at what appeared to be the Zodiac, pinned sideways between two chunks of ice.
“See her?”
>
“No.”
“I’ll expand circles,” Robert said.
“Wait, I see her.”
Then Robert saw her, too, waving at them. Her red parka glistened with water, not a good sign. Robert began descending.
He looked for a stable place to land but saw nothing wide enough. Perhaps she could grab his strut and climb in. Looking down through the floor window of the helicopter, Robert descended over her—her hair flying everywhere, face ascendant and bright.
“Stop! You’re shredding the ice.”
Robert glanced down. Noa was no longer looking up at them but down at the ice crumbling under her feet. Robert ascended as quickly as possible and began to scout out a solid place to land. But with each second he slipped further away, until he lost sight of her completely. He spotted a wide slice of ice and dropped down hard; he could feel the ice bobbing under them.
“I’ll get her,” Aeneas said, stepping out.
“Not without me.”
“If this ice begins to give, who’s going to save the helicopter?”
Aeneas was right, and Robert reluctantly let him go alone, disappearing into the mist. Robert stepped out and circled around the helicopter, making sure the struts weren’t perforating the ice. He leaned in to check the fuel gauge; they had just enough to make it back to the ship, assuming Aeneas returned with Noa within the next few minutes.
