Man on Ice: Russia vs the USA - in Alaska

TWO

Carrie held her patient’s feverish hand. Soaked in sweat, Akna stared up at this stranger. She lay on sheets on a lumpy black sofa in a hut built into the hillside next to the Catholic church that had fallen derelict when the missionaries left. She had a rounded face with a dimple on her left cheek. Her skin was creased and dried from synthetic dope smuggled onto the island. Her eyes carried an emptiness Rake had seen so often when the human spirit just gives up. Akna had shaved her head halfway up the skull leaving a neat ridge of black hair on the top. She wore a red T-shirt, with a silver heart on the front. She was a kid, like millions of teenagers who experimented with fashion and hairstyles as they grew up. Somewhere, in what he saw, was the little girl whom Rake used to put on the slide in the school playground. Akna was five when he last saw her, laughing and full of excitement. She was about to give birth or die but it was as if neither one meant anything to her. Her waters had broken thirty-six hours earlier, but she had told no one and infection had brought her temperature dangerously high. Now she was barely conscious.

‘We need to sit you up, Akna, to change you,’ said Carrie softly. The room was warm and Carrie worked, jacket off, in a red denim shirt, sleeves rolled up and hair held back with a rubber band. In an adjoining room, Henry and three other men prepared a stretcher to carry Akna down.

‘A helicopter is taking you to Nome. You’ll be fine, Akna. Just fine,’ said Joan, laying a towel wet with sterilized cold water on Akna’s brow. She wore one-piece blue dungarees and was a thin sinewy woman, with short black hair and wide concentrating eyes.

Rake’s phone lit with a message from the helicopter pilot.

Nome then back you.

That was bad. It should have been forty minutes. Now, Rake calculated an hour from Wales to Nome, fifteen minutes at the hospital, maybe another fifteen minutes for refueling, then an hour and a half back to Little Diomede. Maybe more. He touched Carrie’s shoulder. She followed him to the next room where Henry was. He spoke quietly. ‘Mike messaged me. There’ll be a delay.’

‘How long?’ asked Carrie.

‘A couple of hours at least.’

‘It’s too long, Rake. We need to get another helicopter.’

‘I’ll try.’

Carrie returned to Akna.

‘We’ll take her down to the school anyway,’ said Henry. ‘Get her close to the helipad.’

The National Guard in Nome kept a Black Hawk on standby, and Rake punched in the number and spoke to a duty officer who said they were handling a civilian emergency call a hundred miles north where bad weather had come down. Rake dialed his military unit at the Elmendorf-Richardson base outside of Anchorage. ‘We might be able to lay our hands on a Black Hawk that’s coming out of service,’ said the sergeant who answered.

‘Use my name, Captain Raymond Ozenna, and put us top to the list, sergeant,’ instructed Rake, knowing that the chances of getting anything within a couple of hours was slim.

‘Understood, sir.’

The hut shook as a wind gusted through the east side of the island. Rake pulled back a torn curtain and pushed open an ice-covered window to gauge the weather. The way clouds scudded across the property, snow was coming. A couple of hours and Little Diomede could be wrapped in fog or howling blizzard. Henry was right. Temperatures and conditions could change in minutes

‘They’ll get back to me about a helicopter,’ he told Carrie. ‘We need to get Akna down to the school.’

‘We can’t move her, Rake.’ said Carrie. ‘She could die.’

‘We have to risk it, Dr Walker.’ Joan wrung out a towel and soaked it in fresh warm water. ‘If she worsens here we can’t even get her to the helipad.’

‘There are signs of internal hemorrhage.’

‘Henry and the men will take her. He’s done this before.’

Akna’s eyes rolled; she was close to going into shock. ‘Akna, are you there?’ Carrie whispered, saying anything to keep the girl conscious. ‘Stay with us, Akna. Tell me the name of your favorite song?’

Akna didn’t respond.

Carrie checked the small front-room and kitchen. Dirty plates lay around and there was a smell of drains and rotting food. She rolled in her lips, glanced at Rake, and moved her gaze quickly away. He had seen that look before, in a mess of a house in Kabul. But then they had shared their astonishment at the muddle and filth. This was different because it was part of the man she was about to marry.

Rake’s phone lit. Sorry. Fog.

‘Mike can’t make it from Nome back until the fog lifts.’ He kept his tone measured, but a thousand bits of anger tumbled through his mind. Why was there no helicopter? Why had this happened to Akna? Why was this Carrie’s first encounter with his island? However much you love a person some things are best left unseen.

‘Snow will be in by then,’ said Henry with a look of genuine alarm.

‘How long?’ Carrie, like Rake, was keeping her frustration in check.

‘Impossible to say.’

‘We have to get her to hospital, Rake. We need to make it happen.’

Sometimes weather and technical problems cut Little Diomede off for weeks on end. The islanders were meant to get flights every Monday and Wednesday. It rarely happened like that. Rake called back the desk sergeant at Elmendorf-Richardson and heard how they were already doing a medical emergency evacuation up at the Goose Creek Correctional Center, the big prison, and there were a couple of others that placed Akna’s pregnancy way down the list of priorities.

Carrie read Rake’s stressed expression. ‘Let me talk to them.’

They stepped out of Akna’s earshot. Rake put the call on open speaker. ‘This is Dr Carrie Walker, sergeant—’

‘Captain Ozenna has briefed me, ma’am.’

‘I’m the doctor. You need to understand — if you do not airlift this teenager to hospital now, she will die.’

This was exactly the Dr Carrie Walker whom Rake had first laid eyes on outside Kabul airport when clearing the area after a suicide bombing. She had insisted on staying with a young soldier lying half out of a mangled and charred vehicle. Flames licked around the bodywork. It was only a matter of minutes before they would reach the fuel tank. An old minivan close by might be a second bomb. Anyone among the gathering crowd could have had a gun or grenade. Rake was no doctor, but knew that someone who had had both legs torn off in an explosion in Afghanistan had the slimmest chance of survival. If any. Period.

‘Ma’am, you need to leave.’

‘Take his arm,’ she instructed.

‘Ma’am. Leave. NOW!’

‘I’m a doctor and this is my patient. Help me!’

Sirens filled the air. Gunshots erupted as police moved people away. This attack wasn’t over. Everyone apart from Carrie, it seemed, expected something else to go down. Straight away he saw stubborn determination, the most difficult for a soldier to handle. But with her blonde hair tied back, and wearing a white medical smock, she made herself a ripe target for killing or kidnap. There was no time for debate. He slung his M-16 carbine behind his back, lifted her onto his shoulders, and ran towards the airport gate. She yelled, but she didn’t fight back.

The fuel tank blew, sending flames and metal shards into the air. Seconds later, the minivan went up in a much bigger explosion that sent a fireball down the road, engulfing people and market stalls. He ran into the airport compound until the heat faded and he felt winter cold on his face again. He lowered her to the ground. He expected her to be grateful or angry, but she was neither. She told him later that she thought she was being kidnapped and that he was an Afghan because of his Asiatic features.

‘Are you OK, ma’am?’

She checked herself, quickly, professionally, patting herself down, running her hands up and down her arms and legs, testing vision, touching her nose, her ears, all in less than ten seconds. ‘I’m fine. Your men?’

At least one was dead, John Tikaani, a twenty-year-old private from Nome, the one Carrie had been trying to save. ‘We have casualties.’

As he turned to go, she saw that Rake’s sleeve was torn and soaked with blood where something had ripped through.

‘Wait.’ She started cleaning it up. ‘You need to get this treated.’

‘Next time, when a soldier says go, you need to go,’ he said gently.

‘I won’t. Not while a patient is alive.’

She had said she fell for him because he made her feel safe without suffocating her. Carrie was neither an easy nor a settled person, and out there amid the heat and bombs, you didn’t go for a man because of the cut of his suit or because he made you laugh. She admitted she never really understood Rake, but he satisfied her longing for the unusual because he came from a remote Alaskan island that sounded contradictory, stark and romantic like a poem, and because Rake himself was smart and rough.

After their first night together, she told him he was not like any previous lover, mostly doctors who knew the human body too well to enjoy it. Rake had not been over-eager to please nor selfishly fast. He was unrefined. He hadn’t read manuals and worked from instinct. He was generous, but knew what he wanted. Carrie said she had never had sex like it before. It might have been the best ever; impossible to say because it was so different.

One evening, when things had quietened, they had dinner and he found she spoke fairly good Russian, much better than the Russian he had learned with the Eskimo Scouts. He asked where she was from.

‘Brooklyn, to be quick,’ she answered, but with her eyes wide open, alive with mischief.

‘And if you want to be slower?’ he said. ‘If the person asking is curious?’

‘Like you?’

‘Could be.’

‘And if I liked them?’ She kept her expression straight, her eyes still dancing.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m half Estonian, half Russian. My parents married as young medics at the huge Soviet submarine base in Estonia. They were Soviet citizens. That collapsed, and those historical hatreds erupted. The Estonians hated the Russians as occupiers worse than the Nazis. The marriage became strained and they saved it by moving to work in a private hospital in Calcutta, India, where I was born and raised until I was eight. I saw my first corpse when I was five. And my first firefight when I was seven. We were out in the countryside when an insurgent gang attacked. I learned to do bandages and morphine injections. My mother said she had never seen a steadier hand with a syringe. It should have repelled me. But it didn’t, and that was when I knew I wanted to be a trauma doctor and that’s why I stick with my patient until they are dead or safe.’

‘So that’s why you did what you did back at the airport.’

She stopped playing him with her eyes. ‘That’s what I am, Rake. I work for an international hospital group which has sent me to Malaysia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It’s based in Brooklyn, where I have an apartment next door to my younger sister. She’s a doctor too, except she doesn’t remember much about India, so she’s not like me and by this stage I would expect most people to say this is all too much information.’

‘I would say not enough.’

‘I’ve never told anyone like this before, all at once, like in a stream of consciousness.’

He laughed, and that made her laugh, a kind of belly laugh that lifted the coiled tension of months in Afghanistan.

‘So where are you from?’ she asked.

‘That’s what they say as soon as you step into an army camp,’ he said.

‘What do you tell them?’

‘Alaska.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Or if I want a game, I tell them China or Korea. A lot of people don’t like Eskimos.’

‘I thought Eskimo was a derogatory term.’

He explained that Eskimos were Alaskan and Russian, Inuit were from Canada and Greenland. It was about language, tribe, disputed history, and they were all family. Then just a few minutes after the laughter and he was telling her this, his phone had rung. Seconds later, hers rang too. Another bomb. Familiar territory.

Rake listened as Carrie, in her medical-crisis voice, challenged every reason the duty sergeant gave for not sending a helicopter for Akna.

‘There’s weather all over the state, Dr Walker,’ he said. ‘We will get to you as fast as possible.’

‘When?’

‘You need to allow twelve hours.’

Carrie no longer held back her exasperation. ‘In twelve hours, you’ll be airlifting out a corpse.’

‘Your patient is fortunate that she has you with her.’

‘She is dying.’

‘You have my word, ma’am. We’ll be as fast as we can.’

‘Make it faster.’

Henry brought in the stretcher and laid it by the sofa. He and Joan quietly prepared for the journey down to the school.

They waited until the wind dropped. Rake opened the door to check. The island glimmered in pale daylight. A line of low-lying fog spread across the shoreline. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

‘Akna. Can you hear me? Look at me, Akna,’ Carrie said.

‘What’s happening?’ Akna hadn’t spoken before. Pain creased across her face.

‘Your baby is coming early. We’re taking you to the school to wait for the helicopter.’

Akna grimaced. They wrapped her in woolen blankets, lifted her onto the stretcher, laid a seal skin on top and then another blanket. Henry made sure her face was covered, no skin exposed, and secured a rubber tube to her mouth for breathing. The temperature outside was minus 15 Celsius with a wind ferocity to double that. If they made a mistake, Akna could die on the short journey to the school. Henry and the three other men carried her.

Carrie took the rear, her medical pack slung over her shoulder. Joan walked alongside Akna. Rake led.

At the end of the walkway, he took them down steps past an old military observation post, abandoned by the National Guard nearly thirty years earlier. There had been no government presence on the island since. Step by treacherous step, he guided them past the front doors of homes marked by drying seal skins, tied meat, and the skulls of walrus and polar bears.

Rake kicked a fallen ice block off the next walkway, testing the surface underneath, and brought them off the hillside to rocky ground wide enough for Carrie to join Joan and check on the patient. On one side was a shop called the Native Store and on the other an old wooden building that housed a laundry and a clinic where Henry got the stretcher from.

Rake crossed the small playground, testing the safest way through the red swing and the yellow and blue slide and on to the ramp to the school, the sturdiest building in the village, warm, with stocks of food and hot water.

Wild birds flew out of the hillside and Rake caught their smell in the air. They swept back and forth, shadowing through the dim daylight, but seemingly going nowhere. They had distinct styles of flight to mark the weather. Henry had taught him how they flew one way as the hunting season approached and another during the summer weeks of the midnight sun. They had a way of flight with fog, early snowfalls, full moons, and the seasons. Now they were different again. This was how they flew when a helicopter was approaching. You saw the birds long before you heard the engine.

The birds went into a frenzy. Then he heard an engine.

‘There’s a chopper,’ he said, wedging open the door for Akna to be carried into the school. But how? Maybe one of the private companies had taken the risk, maybe not from Nome, but from Wales or Teller, the closer mainland settlements.

Carrie’s eyes brightened. ‘Well done, Rake!’ She looked around. ‘Where?’

‘From the north. See the birds?’

‘Amazing. You can tell from them.’ She followed her patient into the warmth inside to get her ready.

A balcony wrapped around the school. Rake ran onto it, checking his phone on the way. There was no message from Nome or Anchorage, no missed calls. To the south and north, he saw nothing. He looked back up the hillside. Nothing.

The noise became louder. Then, straight ahead, he worked out what was happening. The helicopter had been impossible to detect with the naked eye because it was camouflaged against the dark ridge of Big Diomede. Now it rose up — a Russian two-engine 38, lit like a beacon with the Red Cross of a medical aircraft illuminated clearly on its sides.

It took a second for him to absorb what was before him. What he was seeing was unbelievable. But it was there, real and close.

Navigating the icy rocks on the pathway, he ran down to the unlit helipad to guide the aircraft in. He prayed that fog and wind would keep away. He held up his flashlight with both hands, flashing the traditional SOS Morse Code emergency signal. The helicopter snapped on a search lamp that caught him full in the face. He turned against the imminent down-draught of the rotor blades, looking back towards Russia.

His tongue suddenly dried in his mouth as he sifted through what was happening. Rapidly, he processed what he saw and it didn’t make sense. It was an incredible sight, a terrifying one, and he had no idea what it meant.

Spread right across the ridgeline, seven more helicopters ascended from behind the larger island. He recognized three as troop carriers and four as new Russian attack helicopters, two on each flank, flying low and heading straight for his island.