Exodus (35 page)

They saw the first iceberg fifteen minutes later; it wasn’t very big, not much more than a ten-foot-by-fifteen-foot sheet of ice floating on the surface of the sea. But Emily gave it a wide birth, memories of the movie
Titanic
rising once again to the surface.

An iceberg! It was all a little too surreal.

An hour later they spotted the family of polar bears. There were three of them—a mother and two cubs—sauntering along the shoreline, their white coats stained brown with mud as they dipped their heads to examine rock-pools or lifted their noses to the wind, sniffing inquisitively.

Emily slowed the boat and joined Rhiannon in gawking at the sight. Even Thor seemed excited, watching from the back of the boat, his paws resting on a shelf so he could get a better look. It would have been a beautiful sight even before the devastation of the red rain. Seeing this first hint that there was still hope that some life had escaped the rain’s effects, well, it was just magical.

“Look how big they are,” said Rhiannon. “I never thought they would be so big.” The kid was right; the adult had to weigh at least four hundred pounds.

When momma bear stopped and turned to face the boat, taking a couple of tentative steps out into the ocean toward them, Emily decided they might be hungrier than they looked and eased the throttle forward, quickly putting some distance between the bears and the boat as she accelerated east.

Jacob had told them to look for maps when they were on board the boat, and they had found a bunch of them stowed in a drawer. Emily had reassigned Rhiannon her old job as navigator and set her to work finding a map that showed their destination. Rhiannon had quickly found one labeled “McClure and Stockton Islands and Vicinity” and laid it out on the floor where she could get a good look at it.

Glancing down at the map from behind the wheel, Emily thought it didn’t look like any kind of map she had ever seen. It gave a detailed outline of the coastline, but the sea was filled with squiggly lines and numbers that she thought probably represented the depth of the sea in those locations.

Emily couldn’t afford to take her attention off piloting the boat, so she was relying on Rhiannon to accurately predict their position, which she seemed to be very good at. She had quickly ascertained their position after leaving Prudhoe Bay and was calling out landmarks before they even appeared.

“This is Foggy Island Bay,” she had announced at one point. “There’s going to be something called a shoal coming up.” A few minutes later they had passed the shoal, a collection of elongated sandbars that formed a natural harbor. “Now we need to keep heading east, toward…” She paused as she tried to pronounce the name of the upcoming landmark. “Tig…Tig…Var…Iak. Tigvariak Island!” Rhiannon picked up the map and folded it so it was small enough to carry, staggering over to Emily as the boat bucked and rolled.

“Here’s where we are.” She tapped a finger against the coastline. “And here’s Tigvariak Island.” Her finger traced an imaginary line to a largish island just off the coast of the mainland. “And then,” she continued, “we just have to head this way to get to Jacob’s island.” She unfolded the top of the map to reveal the group of islands collectively known as the Stocktons, sitting about six miles farther out to sea and northeast of the farthest tip of Tigvariak Island.

Jacob was on the largest of the islands: Pole Island, a scythe-shaped mass of land approximately four miles in length and a quarter-mile wide.

It took the little boat another two hours to reach Tigvariak Island, a desolate-looking lump of rock that looked to be nothing more than rolling tundra. As Emily steered the boat along the craggy west coast of the island, she felt her nerves begin to get the better of her. They were about to head out into open ocean, and soon after they would be miles from land, with no navigational equipment other than the large compass on the boat’s control panel. As long as she kept the boat heading in a northeast direction, there was little chance that they would miss the little cluster of islands, but the idea of being so far from land made her very uneasy.

She had come this far using Jacob’s advice to guide her, and he had not been wrong so far, she reminded herself. If he said she could do it, then she had better believe she could.

There were only a few miles of their journey left. And she’d be damned if she was going to turn back now.

The coast of Alaska was a distant shadow on the horizon behind them as the little boat continued to bounce and cleave its way
northeast through the swell of the Arctic Ocean. The farther away from land they moved, the more icebergs they saw in the water. While most of them were small clumps of floating white that bobbed harmlessly by, occasionally they would spot a larger sheet of ice that could easily put a hole in the hull of the boat. Emily had stationed Rhiannon up front with her; her younger eyes were better equipped to spot the dangerous bergs well before they got too close. Emily steered around them, hoping that these minor adjustments to their voyage would not throw them too far off from their original course.

The sea had become rougher, too. Huge swells lifted the boat, then dropped them down again, sending waves of water onto the deck outside their enclosed cabin. To the west Emily could see a bank of black clouds that descended from the sky down to sea level. It looked to be heading their way, and Emily hoped to God that they made it to shore before the storm caught up with them.

Rhiannon had spotted the storm, too, and she was in the process of explaining that she thought they were only a few miles offshore of Pole Island when a huge wave struck the boat, sending the prow almost vertical before dropping it again, slamming the hull into the ocean’s surface.

Emily screamed and clung on to the wheel as it suddenly seemed to gain a life all its own. Rhiannon and Thor both squealed in unison and slipped across the floor toward the back of the cabin. Rhiannon managed to grab the back of a chair and steady herself, but Thor collided with the rear wall and yelped in pain and fright.

“Hold on,” yelled Emily as another wave lifted them sideways, then deposited them unceremoniously down again with a thunderous splash. Thor skidded back toward the front of the cabin, his paws scrambling for grip but finding no purchase on the
plastic floor. He collided squarely with the back of Emily’s calves, buckling her knees and sending her toppling astern, her hands slipping off the metal of the boat’s wheel. She slid backward and collided with the bottom edge of a seat, yelling in pain as, even through the layers of cold-weather gear, the plastic cut painfully across her shoulders.

Rhiannon looked mortified. She clung to her chair like a life preserver as the boat bucked and thrashed, hitting wave after wave, the wheel spinning wildly back and forth.

“Tie yourself down,” Emily yelled to Rhiannon, pointing to the black safety belt that hung limply from the seat as she crawled her way back toward the captain’s chair. Rhiannon dragged herself into the seat and grabbed the safety belt, clicking it into place as she gripped the base of the chair with both hands as tightly as she could.

Emily reached out for the support that fixed the captain’s chair to the deck and grabbed it. She looked back toward the back of the cabin for Thor; he was scrambling toward her. She grabbed the big dog’s collar and heaved him toward her, sliding the terrified dog over the floor. When she was sure she had a firm grip, she pulled Thor up to her and then pushed him into the space between the seat support and the flat of the boat’s control console, jamming him in as best she could. When he was safe, she pulled herself to her feet and flung herself into the captain’s seat. She jammed her feet under Thor’s belly so he couldn’t move and quickly fastened her own seat belt into place. Then she grabbed the wheel and glanced at the compass; the boat was now heading west.

“Shit!” Emily turned the wheel, fighting the rogue waves as they tried to force the boat in the direction they wanted to take it. She thrust the throttle forward until it would go no farther. The
boat instantly swung around, the engines thrusting them up the front of another wave and through it this time, rather than over. She couldn’t see anything through the haze of water kicked up by the speeding boat as it sliced the ocean apart.

Emily glanced down at the control panel, located the switch she was looking for, and pushed it. The two large wipers began throwing the water off the glass windshield, and within seconds she could see clearly again.

Ahead of them, not more than a quarter mile away, appearing out of the spray like Avalon from the mist, was the shadowy outline of land.

Emily could see a fragile-looking wooden dock sticking out from a shale beach that sloped down to meet the crashing waves.

She fought the wheel and used what little strength she still had left to turn it until the prow of the boat was heading toward it. The waves were still roaring in fast and hard, smashing against the side of the boat, and she could feel the current trying to drag them away from the rapidly approaching beach. She was half-tempted to reduce the boat’s speed to the minimum needed to make headway and plant the boat, pointy end first, into the shale of the beach. It looked deep enough to slow them.

But Jacob had warned her that this boat was their only way to escape off the island when the time came. If she damaged it, there was no guarantee they had the tools or expertise to fix it. Or worse still, she might plant the boat in the shale and sink the damn thing, or it could even be swept out to sea, and them along with it, with no way to beach it.

No, she was going to have to try to bring it in alongside the jetty and secure it.

Here we go again, she thought as she eased the throttle down and tried to judge the best angle to reach the dock safely.

The boat pitched hard to the left, scraping the front side along the wooden dock, cracking a plank and sending the pieces flying through the air. Emily resisted the urge to turn the wheel all the way to the right, which would just send the back end crashing into the dock, too; this needed finesse.

The swell was not as strong this close to the shore, but the waves were hitting more frequently, so she needed to constantly adjust the boat’s attitude. She eased the throttle to just above the “stop” marker and angled the front of the boat slightly away from the side of the dock as the beach drew rapidly closer.

“Slow down, damn you,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Slow. The. Fuck. Down.”

Now she was just a passenger.

The boat gave a final lurch forward, then stopped, bobbing like a fishing float on the ocean’s surface, a few feet from the edge of the dock.

Close enough, she judged.

Emily unfastened her seat belt and ran to the back of the cabin. Flinging open the door, she grabbed the mooring rope from the deck and launched herself over the side of the boat before it could drift any farther away. She landed on the jetty and ran to the nearby mooring bollard, unreeling the rope behind her.

How the hell was she supposed to tie this thing off so it wouldn’t float away?

The cold wind beat against her and spray from the sea soaked her unprotected head with freezing water, sending stinging droplets of salt water into her eyes. If she stood there much longer she
was going to either freeze or get blown into the water and drown. Emily strained against the rope, pulling as hard as she could to get the boat closer to the shore. She looped the end of the rope around the metal bollard and then tied it off the only way she knew how, with a bow. It might look weird, but at least she knew it was a secure knot…and it added a little panache, too. A win-win situation if you asked her.