The Arctic Event

Chapter Eighteen

The USS Alex Haley

Randi Russell nudged a scarlet plastic disk an inch forward with a fingernail. “King me,” she said, staring across the game board with the focused intensity of a cougar preparing to pounce.

Muttering under his breath in Russian, Gregori Smyslov took a counter from his minimal pile of trophies and clapped it down where indicated.

“You’re in trouble, Gregori,” Valentina Metrace said, munching a chip from the bowl resting beside the tabletop battlefield.

“Draughts is a child’s game,” Smyslov said through gritted teeth. “A child’s game, and I am not in difficulty!”

“We call it checkers, Major.” Smith chuckled from where he sat beside Randi. “And yes, you are in trouble.”

“Even the great Morphy would find it impossible to concentrate with certain people incessantly crunching crackers in his ear!”

“They’re tortilla chips, to be precise,” Valentina said, enjoying another savory crunch. “But your real problem is, you’re trying to logic the game as you would chess. Checkers are more like fencing: a matter of finely-honed instinct.”

“Indeed.” Smyslov pounced, jumping one of Randi’s red checkers with a black. “I told you I was in no difficulty.”

The riposte was lethal, Randi’s freshly minted king clearing the board of black counters in a swift, final tic-tic-tic triple assault. “Best four out of six?” she queried with just the faintest hint of a smile.

Smyslov’s palm thumped into his forehead. “Shit, and for this I left Siberia!”

Smith grinned at the Russian. “Don’t feel too bad, Major; I’ve never beaten Randi at checkers, either. I don’t think it can be done. Now, who’s for bridge?”

Smyslov lifted his head and started to collect his dead soldiers. “Why not? Being tortured with hot irons can’t be worse than having one’s fingernails torn out.”

The ice cutter was four days out of Sitka. After rounding Point Barrow she was now driving hard for the northeast and the Queen Elizabeth Archipelago. Only a certain portion of those days could be filled with briefings and brainstorming sessions about what they might find on Wednesday Island. Many hours were left to kill, and as outsiders to the tight seaborne community aboard the Haley, Smith and his people had been thrown together on their own resources.

Smith was pleased with this mechanism. Team building was not purely an aspect of training and discipline. It was a matter of the components learning one other. How they thought. How they acted and reacted. Minutiae down to how they liked a cup of coffee. It all accumulated into a projection of how this individual might react in a given crisis. Precious information.

Fragment by fragment, he was expanding his mental files.

Randi Russell: She was one he had known before. He had a base to build on with her. She was solid, inevitably solid. But out on the edge of perception there was always that faint, frightening whiff of don’t-give-a-damn. Never about the mission, but only about herself.

Gregori Smyslov: Clearly a good soldier, but also a man thinking a great deal. And from the moods Smith caught on occasion, he wasn’t happy with his thoughts. The Russian was working toward a decision. What that decision might be was something for Smith to think about.

Valentina Metrace: She was something else to think about. Specifically, just what lurked inside the history professor’s vivacious, smoothly polished shell. There was some other entity in there. In his lengthening conversations with her he had caught only the slightest flavor of this alternate being. It wasn’t the slipping of a mask so much as the tracing of the camouflaged gun ports of a Q-ship. “Weapons expert” could mean any number of things.

Not that her overt personality wasn’t interesting in its own right.

The cabin’s overhead speaker clicked on. “Wardroom, this is the bridge. Pick up, please.”

Smith rose and crossed to the interphone beside the hatchway. “Wardroom here. This is Colonel Smith.”

“Colonel Smith, this is Captain Jorganson. You and your people might want to come on deck and have a look to port. We’re passing what you might call a local landmark.”

“Will do.” Smith returned the interphone to its cradle. The others looked up at him from their places at the mess table. “The captain suggests we have some sights to see, people.”

The wind on deck was piercing now, numbing exposed flesh in only a matter of seconds. Piercing also was the gunmetal blue of the sea and sky, the latter marred by only a few streaming wisps of cirrus cloud. It made a vivid contrast to the stark white castle shape drifting slowly past the cutter’s quarter, the bulk of the iceberg showing as a wavering green mass below the ocean’s surface. This was only the first outrider of the pack. To the north, off the bow, the horizon shimmered with a hazy metallic luster, what the arctic hands called “ice blink.”

Smith felt someone brush lightly against his elbow. Valentina Metrace was standing close by at his side, and he could feel her shiver. Dr. Trowbridge had emerged from the deckhouse as well and stood at the rail a few feet away, not speaking or looking at Smith and his team. Other members of the cutter’s crew were also coming topside, watching the passage of the pallid sea specter.

The first enemy was in sight. Soon the battle would begin.