Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith

Author:Martin Cruz Smith [Smith, Martin Cruz]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307809780
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-13T23:00:00+00:00

II.

EARTH

17 Dutch Harbor was surrounded by a green ring of cliffs covered by thick subarctic grasses. There were no trees, nothing bigger than a bush, but as the wind moved over the grass the effect was magical, as if the hills were a wave.

The island was actually called Unalaska, and on one side of the bay there was an Aleut village by that name, a beachside line of cottages that led to a white wooden Russian Orthodox church. The town of Dutch Harbor, however, was out of Arkady’s sight, past a tank farm and beyond the breakwater that protected a loading dock with slag heaps of rusting trawl doors and rotting snow, and gas pumps and rows of the half-ton cages called crab pots. Beyond lay a pier of catcher boats and one large ship that had become a dockbound cannery with a fence of pilings around its hull. Behind all this, the hills of Unalaska rose rapidly to volcanic peaks edged in black stone and snow.

It was odd, Arkady thought, how the eye became starved for color. The clouds were broken, so that sun-spots moved around the bay. Off the lower cliffs, puffins dropped like rocks to the water. Eagles lifted from the higher cliffs and soared to inspect the Polar Star; they were enormous birds, bear-brown with imperious white heads. It was like being at the top of the world.

The Americans had already gone ashore in the pilot boat. Soo-san was going home in a gift fishing jacket decorated with souvenir pins. On her way off the ship she’d distributed farewell kisses with the generosity of someone leaving jail. On the pilot boat as it came out had been a new head rep carrying a suitcase with one hundred thousand dollars in it, the Polar Star’s port-call foreign currency. The entire crew had waited while the bills were counted and re-counted in the captain’s cabin.

Now, after four months’ fishing, Arkady’s co-workers were lined along the starboard rail and moving down the steps of the gangway to a lifeboat that would bear them and their allotted American dollars to the port they had dreamed of all this time. Not that they showed it. A Soviet seaman dressed for special occasions did not necessarily shave. He did shine his shoes, slick his hair back and wear his sports jacket even if the sleeves were too short. He also wore his most unimpressed face, not only for Volovoi’s sake but for his own, so that his anticipation showed only as a wary narrowing of the eyes.

With exceptions. Under the brim of a squat peasant’s cap, Obidin’s gaze was fixed on the church across the water. Kolya Mer had stuffed his coat with cardboard pots; he eyed the hills like Darwin approaching the Galapagoan shore. Women wore their nicest cotton dresses under the usual layers of sweaters and rabbit-fur coats. They had their grim tourist faces too, until they looked at one another and broke into nervous giggles, then waved up at Natasha, who stood on the boat deck with Arkady.

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