Arctic Drift (Dirk Pitt 20)

Then he promptly ordered the flag run up the mast.

With the maple leaf rippling overhead in a stiff westerly breeze, the Narwhal drew alongside the Korean freighter and matched lurches in the wallowing sea. Together they sailed through the short night and into a bleak gray dawn. On the bridge, Pitt kept a tense vigil with Stenseth, spelling the helmsman while Giordino appeared every hour with mugs of strong coffee. Holding the research ship in the freighter’s shadow through the turbulent waters proved to be a taxing job. Though the freighter was a hundred feet longer than the Narwhal, the distance between the two vessels made for a narrower shadow path. Dahlgren’s computer program proved to be a godsend, and Stenseth happily agreed to increase his beer debt with each hour they advanced undetected.

When the vessels reached due north of Bathurst, the men on the bridge froze when a call suddenly came over the radio.

“All stations, this is Coast Guard Bathurst calling vessel at position 70.8590 North, 128.4082 West. Please identify yourself and your destination.”

Nobody breathed until the Korean ship responded with its name and destination, Kugluktuk. After the Coast Guard acknowledged the freighter, the men fell silent again, praying there would be no second radio call. Five minutes passed, then ten, and still the radio remained silent. When twenty minutes slipped by without a call, the crew began to relax. They sailed for three more hours glued to the side of the freighter before passing well clear of the radar station without detection. When the Narwhal reached a bend in the Amundsen Gulf that put Bathurst out of the line of sight, the captain increased speed to twenty knots and zipped past the lumbering freighter.

The Korean ship’s captain studied the turquoise ship with the maple leaf flag fluttering overhead as it steamed by. Training his binoculars on the Narwhal ’s bridge, he was surprised to see the crew laughin

g and waving in his direction. The captain simply shrugged his shoulders in confusion. “Too long in the Arctic,” he muttered to himself, then resumed plotting his course to Kugluktuk.

“Well done, Captain,” Pitt said.

“I guess there’s no turning back now,” Stenseth replied.

“What’s our ETA to King William Island?” Giordino asked.

“We’ve just over four hundred miles to go, or about twenty-two hours through these seas, assuming the lousy weather hangs with us. And we don’t encounter any picketboats.”

“That’s the least of your problems, Captain,” Pitt said.

Stenseth gave him a questioned look. “It is?” he asked.

“Yes,” Pitt replied with a grin, “for I would like to know where in the Arctic you plan on locating two cases of Lone Star beer.”

52

KUGLUKTUK, FORMERLY CALLED COPPERMINE after an adjacent river, is a small trading town built on the banks of Coronation Gulf. Situated on the northern coast of Canada’s Nunavut province, it is one of just a handful of populated havens lying north of the Arctic Circle.

It was the deepwater port offerings that attracted Mitchell Goyette to Kugluktuk. Kugluktuk represented the closest port facility to the Athabasca oil sand fields in Alberta, and Goyette invested heavily in order to stage a terminus for exporting his unrefined bitumen. Cheaply acquiring a little-used rail line from Athabasca to Yellowknife, he financed the expansion of the line north to Kugluktuk. With special snow-clearing locomotives leading the way, a long string of tank cars transported twenty-five thousand barrels of bitumen on every trip. The valuable heavy oil was then off-loaded onto Goyette’s mammoth barges and sent across the Pacific to China, where a tidy profit awaited.

With the next railroad shipment several days away, Goyette’s Athabasca Shipping Company rail terminus sat ghostly quiet. The icebreaker Otok sat at the dock, an empty barge tied to its stern. Two more of the massive barges were moored out in the bay, riding high above their waterlines. Only the rhythmic pumping of a fuel line filling the icebreaker’s tanks with diesel fuel gave an indication that the boat and dock were not completely deserted.

No such illusions were evident inside the ship, where an engaged crew made advance preparations for departing port. Seated inside the ship’s wardroom, Clay Zak twirled a glass of bourbon over crushed ice as he examined a large chart of the Royal Geographical Society Islands. Sitting across from Zak was the Otok’s captain, a puffy-faced man with gray hair cut close to the scalp.

“We’ll be refueled shortly,” the captain said in a heavy voice.

“I have no desire to spend any more of my life in Kugluktuk than necessary,” Zak replied. “We leave at daybreak. It looks to be about six hundred kilometers to the Royal Geographical Society Islands,” he said, looking up from the chart.

The skipper nodded. “Ice reports are clear all the way to King William Island and beyond, and this is a fast ship. We’ll be there easily in about a day’s sail.”

Zak took a sip of his bourbon. His hastily arranged trip to the Arctic had been undertaken without a detailed plan, which made him uncomfortable. But there was little to go wrong. He would drop a team of Goyette’s geologists on the north coast of the main island to search for the ruthenium mine, while he examined the Mid-America mining operations in the south. If necessary, he would put Mid-America out of business with the aid of an armed team of security specialists he had brought aboard, along with enough explosives to detonate half the island.

A door to the wardroom suddenly burst open, and a man in black fatigues and parka walked hurriedly over to Zak. He had an assault rifle strapped to his shoulder and carried a bulky pair of night vision binoculars in one hand.

“Sir, two rubber boats approached from the bay and tied up at the dock just astern of the barge. I counted seven men in total,” he said, slightly out of breath.

Zak glanced from the man’s binoculars to a bulkhead clock, which read half past midnight.

“Were they armed?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. They moved past the loading facility and onto the adjacent public dock before I lost sight of them.”

“They’re after the Polar Dawn,” the captain said excitedly. “They must be Americans.”

The Polar Dawn was docked only a few hundred feet away. Zak had noticed a throng of locals crowding around the American cutter when he had first arrived in Kugluktuk. He walked down and had a look for himself at the captured vessel. It was teeming with Mounties and Navy guards. There was no way that seven men would be able to retake the ship.