Polar Star (33 page)

“It’s undeniable.”

“You see how much more constructively Comrade Mer spent his time on shore, instead of getting disgustingly drunk and falling in the water.”

“Kolya, I bow to your scientific zeal.” Arkady noticed that his cabin mate’s spiral notebook, with its gray crocodile-textured binding, was the kind sold in the ship’s store, the same as Zina’s. “May I?” He flipped through the pages. On each Kolya had noted a different plant by common name, Latin name, when and where picked.

“Were you alone when you fell in?” Natasha asked.

“It’s less embarrassing that way.”

“Susan wasn’t with you?”

“No one.”

“You could have been hurt.” Kolya was upset. “A little tipsy, in the water, at night.”

“I was wondering,” Natasha said to Arkady, “what you plan to do when we return to Vladivostok. When he was alive, Comrade Volovoi suggested that you might have difficulties with the Guard. Positive statements from your co-workers, from Party members, might be helpful. Then you might want to go elsewhere. There are some very nice hydroelectric projects starting on the Yenisei. Arctic bonuses, a month’s vacation anywhere. With your abilities, you’d learn how to run a crane in no time.”

“Thanks, I’ll consider that.”

“How many former investigators from Moscow can say they built a dam?” she asked.

“Not many.”

“We could keep a cow. I mean,
you
could keep a cow if you wanted. Anyone who wanted to keep a cow could keep a cow. In a private plot. Or a pig. Or even chickens, though you have to have someplace warm for fowl in the wintertime.”

“Cow? Chickens?” Arkady shook his head. What was this about?

“The Yenisei is interesting,” Kolya said.

“It’s
very
interesting,” Natasha emphasized. “Beautiful taiga of pines and larches. Deer and grouse.”

“Edible snails,” Kolya said.

“But you’d have a cow if you wanted. Room for a motorcycle too. Picnics on the riverbank. A whole town full of young people, children. You—”

“Did Zina know anything about ships?” Arkady interrupted. “Did she understand terminology, what different parts of a ship are called?”

Natasha couldn’t believe her ears. “Zina? Again?”

“What would she mean by ‘fishhold’?”

“She’s dead. That’s all over.”

“The hold or anything near to it?” Arkady asked.

“Zina knew nothing about ships, nothing about her work, nothing except her own self-interest, and she’s dead,” Natasha said. “Why this fascination? When she was alive you cared nothing about her. It was one thing when the captain ordered you to carry out an investigation. Now your interest is morbid, negative and disgusting.”

Arkady pulled on his boots. “You could be right,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Arkasha, I shouldn’t have said any of that. Please.”

“Don’t apologize for being honest.” Arkady reached for his jacket.

“I hate the sea,” Natasha said bitterly. “I should have gone to Moscow. I could have gotten work in a mill and looked for a husband there.”

“The mills are sweatshops,” Arkady said, “and you’d have lived in a dorm with a curtain between your bed and the next. It’s too cramped; you’d hate it there. A big flower deserves a lot of space.”

“True.” She liked that.

Belowdecks in the bow it sounded as if the
Polar Star
weren’t so much breaking ice as plowing through an unseen landscape, overturning houses and trees, unearthing boulders. Arkady wouldn’t have been surprised to see beds or branches puncture the rusty skin of steel. What did the rats think? They had left land generations before. Did this din evoke memories and odd dreams in rodent sleep?

Zina had said “fishhold,” but what she must have meant was the chain locker next to the hold. The lowest and most forward point of the ship, the locker was an angular catchall space usually stuffed with hawsers and chains, a dark corner that might be visited twice on a voyage by a scrupulous bosun. Only a recessed peephole in the watertight hatch suggested that this door might be different from any other. Before he could knock, the hatch
opened with a pop of air, like a bottle. As soon as he stepped in and the hatch closed behind him, he felt his eardrums compress.

A red overhead bulb revealed Anton Hess sitting in a swivel chair. In the light, his towering hair looked askew. He had turned from three monitors that were tapped into the bridge’s echo sounder; on the screens three green seas flowed over three orange sea floors; he looked like a magician hovering over vats of fluorescent color. Stacked on one side were two loran monitors with luminous cross hairs that marked latitude and longitude on glowing charts that matched the paper plotters Arkady had seen on the
Eagle
and that far outstripped anything on Marchuk’s bridge. On the other side was a blank oscilloscope and what looked like a sound engineer’s acoustical mixer, complete with headset. Above this was a screen showing in gray halftones the passage between the locker and the fishhold, where Arkady had been standing a moment before. There was a small mainframe computer and racks of other equipment he couldn’t make out clearly in the red haze, though all the gear, plus chair and cot, were crammed into an area not much larger than a closet. For a submariner, it must be just like home.

“I’m surprised it took you this long to find me,” Hess said.

“Me, too.”

“Sit.” Hess indicated the cot. “Welcome to our little station. I’m afraid there’s no smoking allowed because the air circulation is nonexistent, but it’s like the paratroops: you pack your own parachute. I designed it, so I have no one else to blame.”

One reason the space was so snug, Arkady realized, was the heavy soundproofing on every surface; there was even a false deck over insulation that muffled the grinding of ice and steel plate. As his eyes adjusted he saw another reason: built into the deck where the bulkheads met was a white hemisphere a full meter across. The
dome seemed to be the lid of something much larger built into the bottom of the ship itself.

“Amazing,” Arkady said.

“No, it’s pathetic. It’s a desperate resort to redress the unfairness of geography and the burden of history. Every major Soviet port faces a choke point or is icebound six months of the year. Leaving Vladivostok, our fleet has to pass through either the Kuril or the Korea Strait. In a war we probably wouldn’t get a single surface ship out. Thank God for submarines.”

On the three screens Arkady watched an orange tracery mounting like a wave, the signals of groundfish rising to feed. Why fish enjoyed foul weather no one knew. Hess held out something glittering to Arkady: a flask, brandy at body temperature.

“Underwater we’re equal?”

“Ignoring the fact that they carry twice as many warheads. And that they can keep sixty percent of their missile boats on patrol while we can barely manage fifteen percent. Also that their boats are quieter, faster and dive deeper. But this is where irony comes in, Renko. I know you appreciate irony as much as I do. The only place where our submarines can safely hide is under the Arctic ice, and the only way the Americans can come after us from the Pacific is across the Bering Sea and through the Bering Strait. For once
we
choke
them
.”

Host and guest drank to geography. As Arkady sat back the cot squeaked and he thought of Zina on the same blanket. There hadn’t been any lectures then. “So you have a quota of fish too, in a sense,” he said.

“Not to catch, just to hear. You know that the
Polar Star
was in dry dock.”

“I did wonder what work was done. No one has noticed any improvements that have to do with fishing.”

“Extra ears.” Hess nodded toward the white dome set into the deck. “It’s called a towed array sonar. This is a passive system, a cable with hydrophones that plays out
from an electric winch in that pod. On submarines we mount the pod over the stern. On the
Polar Star
we’ve mounted it near the bow to avoid getting it tangled in an American net.”

“And you pull in the cable before a net is brought on,” Arkady said. That was why Nikolai had time to dally with Zina, because a bag of fish was coming in.

“It’s not a very effective system for deep water, but this is a shallow sea. Submarines, even theirs, hate shallow water. They race for the strait, and the faster they go, the louder they are and we hear them. Every boat sounds different.” Hess swiveled toward a rack with a computer, monitor and a file of soft disks. “Here we have the signatures of five hundred submarines, theirs and ours. By matching, we sort out their routes and missions. Of course, we could do the same on one of our submarines or hydrographic boats, but they hide their subs from those. The
Polar Star
is only a factory ship in the middle of the Bering Sea.”

Arkady remembered the map in the cabin of the fleet electrical engineer. “One of fifty Soviet factory ships along their coast?”

“Exactly. This is the prototype.”

“It seems rather sophisticated.”

“No,” Hess said. “Let me tell you what is sophisticated in terms of electronic intelligence gathering. The Americans place nuclear-powered monitors off the Siberian coast. Those containers hold six tons of reconnaissance equipment and a supply of plutonium so they can transmit indefinitely right under our noses. Their submarines go into Murmansk harbor and place hydrophones right on our submarines. They like coming out with trophies. Of course, if they could get hold of our cable it would be displayed in Washington with one of those news events they do so well, as if they had never seen a can on a string before.”

“That’s what your cable is, a can on a string?”

“Microphones on a three-hundred-meter string, essentially.” Hess granted himself half a smile. “The software is interesting; it was originally programmed in California to track whales.”

“Do you ever mistake a boat for a whale?”

“No.” Hess’s fingers reached out and touched the round screen of the oscilloscope as if it were a crystal ball. There was a handcrafted quality to it, as there often was to the high technology produced by the Ministry for Electrical Apparatus. “Whales and dolphins sound like beacons in deep space. You can hear some whales for close to one thousand kilometers—deep bass notes with the long waves of low frequencies. Then there are the other sounds of fish, of seals pursuing the fish, of walrus digging up the floor with their tusks. Altogether it’s like the sound of an orchestra constantly warming up. Then you hear a certain hiss that shouldn’t be there.”

“You’re a musician?” Arkady asked.

“When I was a boy I thought the cello would be my career.”

Arkady looked at the monitors and the repeated image of orange fish rising in an electric-green sea. The white dome had clamps; it was removable; if the winch had to be serviced, what else could Hess do, send down a diver?

“Why do you think I had you taken off the slime line?” Hess continued. “I heard something suspicious: that this dead girl, Zina Patiashvili, went to the stern every time the
Eagle
delivered a net. To wave at a native boy? Let’s not be silly. The only possible answer is that she was signaling Captain Morgan whether we had played the cable out or not.”

“Is it visible?”

“Not during tests, but she must have seen something besides Morgan’s net.”

“They say Morgan is a good fisherman.”

“George Morgan has fished the Gulf of Thailand, off Guantánamo and Grenada. He should know how to fish.
That’s why I supported an investigation. Better to dig up the truth, to shake a traitor out of the tree sooner rather than later. But, Renko, I must tell you that too many bodies have been hitting the ground. First the girl, then Volovoi and the American? And you snake in and out, in and out of all this.”

“I can find out about Zina.”

“And our roasted first mate? No, we’ll leave it to Vladivostok; there are too many questions now—including, how are you involved?”

“Someone’s trying to kill me.”

“That’s not good enough. Zina-Susan-Morgan, that’s the chain I want. Fit into that and you justify my interest. The rest is none of my concern.”

“You don’t care what happened to Zina.”

“By itself, of course not.”

“Would you be interested in evidence of smuggling?”

Hess laughed in horror. “My God, no. That’s an invitation to the KGB to stick its nose into the affairs of intelligence. Renko, try to lift your eyes above petty crime. Give me something real.”

“Like what?”

“Susan. I watched you in Dutch Harbor. Renko, you must be irresistibly charming in a wounded sort of way. She’s attracted. Get closer. Serve your country and yourself. Find something on her and Morgan and I’ll order an off-loader just for you.”

“Incriminating notes, secret codes?”

“We’ll rewire her cabin or we can put a transmitter on you.”

“We can do it any number of different ways.”

“Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

“Well, no, I don’t think so,” Arkady said after consideration. “Actually I came for something else.”

“What did you come for?”

Arkady stood for a better view of the corners of the
locker. “I just wanted to see if Zina’s body was stowed here.”

“And?”

The light was dim, but the space was close. “No,” Arkady decided.

The two men looked at each other, Hess with the saddened expression of a man who has sung confidences and aspirations to a deaf ear.

“Petty crime is my passion,” Arkady apologized.

The hatch popped open.

“Wait,” Hess said as Arkady started to go. The little man searched in a drawer and came out with a shiny object. This time it was Arkady’s knife. He handed it over. “Property of the state, right? Good luck.”

Arkady glanced back on the way out. Under the black-and-white screen, Anton Hess was an exhausted man. The colored screens seemed inappropriately gay, tuned into some happier wavelength. Behind their glow the dome nesting in the insulated floor resembled the tip of a vulnerable egg that the fleet electrical engineer was shepherding around the world.