Man on Ice: Russia vs the USA - in Alaska

THIRTY-ONE

The first helicopter delivered casualties from the crash scene. Carrie flew in on the second one with Vitruk. Head down against driving snow, she walked quickly across to the base’s main building. Inside, icicles on her coat melted quickly against a blast of hot air from a wall heater just inside the door.

‘Why don’t you thank me for saving your life?’ Vitruk said, shaking with cold and anger as he took off his coat. Water dripped from his jacket sleeve and collar.

Carrie said nothing.

‘The Americans killed eleven of my men,’ said Vitruk. ‘Russia saved the lives of two Americans.’

‘You’ve said that before,’ said Carrie, pressing the skin of her face to check she had feeling everywhere. The skin exposed to cold was on her upper right jaw where her mask had ripped. Feeling was returning, which meant frostbite had not set in.

‘The baby is having the hydrocephalus operation now. Fuck you, Dr Walker. Fuck you and all your people.’

‘I need to treat the wounded,’ said Carrie dismissively. She was damned if she was going to rise to his rage.

‘We have our own doctors.’

A soldier came through the swing doors from the control room and handed Vitruk a piece of paper with a single line written on it. Vitruk pulled off his gloves. Melting snow and water pooled on the concrete floor. He spoke curtly, and the soldier went back inside. A heavy vibrating hum came from the apron outside, another helicopter taking off.

‘What do you know of Henry Ahkvaluk?’ asked Vitruk.

‘Nothing. I met him yesterday morning at the helipad.’ She lifted her medical bag onto a table and opened it. Everything was in place despite the crash.

‘What’s his relationship to the girl?’

‘Uncle or something. I don’t know.’

‘Why did he come over here?’

‘I wanted to come. Rake wouldn’t let me. Henry and Joan volunteered to accompany Akna.’

Two soldiers opened the control-room door. Vitruk walked in, instructing Carrie to follow. It was more crowded than before. Men were on edge, the light dimmer. Blue and green splayed from screens onto faces. She took in the television feeds — maps, anchors, the Fed building rubble, the Russian parliament, Little Diomede. She stepped through a short passageway of cold, then into the warmth of the field hospital.

Three beds were taken by soldiers. One was dead, his face covered with a sheet that wasn’t long enough to go over his boots. On the next, a nurse treated a man for a cut to the head and a gash on his right hand. He must have been the one who hit the ground to avoid the gunman. On the last bed, closest to the door, lay the one whose legs had been shot. He had curly dark hair and bit on a cotton pad against the pain, his young face contorted, eyes squeezed closed. He didn’t utter a sound.

On the other side of the hospital tent, a surgeon and nurse worked inside a sanitized area, screened off with translucent heavy-duty plastic. Little Iyaroak’s life must be hanging by a thread.

‘They’re finishing. The surgeon thinks it’s a success.’ Vitruk pointed to Joan Ahkvaluk, whom Carrie hadn’t noticed because she was obscured by the plastic screen on an upright chair against the wall. Vitruk’s expression was strained, his eyes immobile, fixed on Carrie. ‘Her husband has escaped. You need to speak to her.’

Carrie shivered at the thought of anyone being outside, alone and unprotected. Joan’s hands rested on her knees, her wrists handcuffed together, her eyes closed.

‘Joan, it’s Carrie.’

Joan looked up. Her face carried a confidence that Carrie rarely saw in a woman, total calm even though her husband would be in extreme danger.

‘I need to—’ Carrie began.

‘Don’t do their work.’ Joan lifted her arms to put a finger to her lips. ‘Henry has gone. That is all I know.’

‘I know,’ said Carrie. ‘But all this is out of our control.’

‘This is our land. It is in our control.’

Carrie squeezed her hand and walked back to Vitruk. ‘How did he get out?’

‘Our carelessness.’

‘She has no idea where he is.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘What is the point?’

Two soldiers lifted Joan from her seat and unlocked her cuffs.

‘We’re going out again,’ said Vitruk.

A dread of the dark, cold, and wind enveloped Carrie. Joan, a soldier each side, walked ahead, silent and composed. Water was still running down Carrie’s coat as she put it back on.

‘We won’t be long.’ Vitruk’s voice was empty, eyes dark with resolve.

A sub-zero wind tore across Carrie’s face as she stepped out. Her eyes streamed and she struggled to adjust her goggles. Six soldiers led them down a path beside the main building towards the shoreline. In less than a minute the wind died and there was clarity. A soft moon cast a grayish-white light over a landscape peppered with odd shapes. It was such a different one from the one Carrie had left not long ago. Without the wind, it was as if she could see for miles.

Some of the ice was smooth, polished, and reflecting light like globes. Other parts were jagged and black where dirty sea water had been thrown up by gusts and instantly frozen. The most dominant in front of her was a wall of ice about fifty meters from the shore. It must have been twelve-feet high and thirty-feet long. Rake had once explained how it would have built up over weeks from wind shear created by the island’s hills. A concrete pier jutted out towards it from the shore.

‘The Eskimo took advantage of our helicopter casualties,’ Vitruk shouted close to her right ear. ‘He offered help. We brought him out here. Fog hit and he escaped. The Eskimo woman will find him for us.’

A soldier unlocked Joan’s cuffs and pinned a GPS tracker to her coat. Another soldier walked out to the pier, laid down a white mat, then set a rifle on a bipod and adjusted its telescopic sight. Another did the same to the left of where they were. Two more snipers set up on the roof of the building behind them.

‘Mrs Ahkvaluk,’ said Vitruk. ‘You will walk out so your husband sees you. You will beckon him in. If he does not appear, one of my men will wound you, first in the arm, then in the leg. If he doesn’t come then, you will know he is not worthy to be your husband. We will collect you, and Dr Walker will treat your wounds. My men are skilled. You have nothing to fear except pain. Do you understand?’

‘You cannot do this!’ shouted Carrie.

‘Let him,’ said Joan. ‘He will not see me again.’

Vitruk signaled his men. Two took Joan’s arm and led her down the pier. She walked smoothly, her steps skillfully working the unevenness of the frozen surface. Seamlessly, the end of the pier became a boulder of ice. The soldiers let go her arms. Without looking back, Joan walked. Once she leant down, using her hands to lower herself from a rock. After that she kept going, looping to the left of the ice wall.

‘Henry Ahkvaluk knows the layout of this base,’ said Vitruk as they watched Joan’s figure get smaller and smaller. ‘I can’t afford to let him get to the other side.’

‘Then why bring him here?’ said Carrie. ‘Why bring any of us here?’

‘Take a look.’ Vitruk handed her his binoculars. They powerfully magnified Joan in an aura of black and green, defining her against the landscape.

‘Two o’clock to her right. Do you see?’

There was someone moving forward, right arm outstretched, breaking into a run. For sure it wasn’t Rake. He was too tall. It had to be Henry. Carrie remembered what Rake had said, that Joan and Henry were one of the few intact married couple on Little Diomede. Now, trying to meet on the ice, they were both running towards their own deaths.

‘Bring him in,’ she told Vitruk. ‘And watch over him properly this time. Do not shoot him.’

‘He’s too dangerous. He knows too much.’

‘Bullshit,’ screamed Carrie. A soldier grabbed her wrist and brought her left arm up hard behind her back, causing excruciating pain. The moon, low in the sky, cast a shadow from Joan, long and gray, that moved by her side. Bleak desolation stretched from horizon to horizon. There was none of Rake’s romance, only a terrifying deadness that killed those who challenged it.

Carrie wished Joan would vanish into one of the fog patches that floated around her. Instead, she stopped. She held up both hands like a traffic cop telling Henry to go back. Vitruk spoke to the closest sniper, lying a few yards from them. He gave orders in his radio.

‘No!’ yelled Carrie, her arms pinned to her side by a soldier.

Vitruk barked an order. Orange flames from an exploding cartridge leapt from the breach of the rifle.