Borealis(6)

The rest of the crew began filing out onto the deck. Joe hurried over to Charlie, still clinging to a half-eaten ham sandwich. “What in the name of holy hell are you two doin’ out here?”

The trawler passed beneath the lee of a great conical of ice. The moon was wiped out, dousing the ship into darkness greater than a thousand midnights.

“There’s someone out here,” Charlie said. For whatever reason, he was still whispering. “There’s someone out on the ice.”

“What?” Joe cawed, incredulous. He perched himself along the rail and peered through the darkness at the looming iceberg. “Are you insane? And we’re too close to this thing.” Joe turned around and started waving his arms at the pilothouse. “Asshole’s gonna pull a Titanic!”

“We’re fine, we’re fine,” Charlie said, his breath coming in excited gasps now. He was staring through the dark, his eyes cutting through the undulating depths of the mountain of ice. The shadows appeared to be alive. If he looked at any particular place for too long, the landscape appeared to shift. He blinked and pressed the heels of his rubber gloves into his eye sockets.

Billy McEwan materialized beside Charlie. One of McEwan’s large white hands closed around Charlie’s left wrist. “The hell’s going on, Charlie?”

“I saw someone on the ice. A woman.”

“We can’t be cutting this close to the ice, man. You know that.” McEwan still had his wrist.

“Mike knows what he’s doing.” He yanked his wrist free and locked McEwan in a heavy stare. Billy McEwan stared back, his too-white face framed in a black, rubberized hood, the loose threads of his knitted cap spiraling down over his forehead. McEwan had spent a good chunk of his career as a pilot with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service out of Alaska until he got caught doing overflights for poachers in his private Cessna. As a deckhand, McEwan was a strong and silent worker…but Charlie always got the feeling that the man resented his current lot in life and thought of the rest of the crew as no better than a mob of uneducated roughnecks.

McEwan’s eyes pulled away, cutting out across the flank of ice. Charlie let his gaze linger just a bit longer, nothing more than a childish exercise in superiority of course, until he watched McEwan’s eyes widen and his lips purse. A waft of cloudy vapor rose from between McEwan’s lips and vaporized in the freezing air. Charlie swung back around and stared over the ice just as McEwan mumbled something unintelligible under his breath.

The figure reappeared down the opposite side of the ridge—just a black blur among a density of deep shadows.

“There’s someone out there,” Billy McEwan breathed.

“There!” Charlie yelled, waving again at Mike inside the pilothouse. He began pointing vigorously at the ridge. “There! There!”

The rest of the crew, including Dynamo Joe Darling, turned and stared at him as if he’d lost his mind.

Just then the trawler cleared the shadow of the icy spire and the three-quarter moon reappeared in the sky. Moonlight washed down the frozen slopes of the iceberg and spilled down to the frozen shores. The figure was illuminated coming down the ridge—white, glistening skin, athletic build, undeniably female. Smallish breasts capped in dark areolas were quite visible, as was the narrow thatch of dark pubic hair nestled between the V of her thighs.

“She’s f*cking naked,” McEwan uttered. The incredulity of his statement would have been a cause for good laughter had the situation not been so absurd.

The young woman—for Charlie already decided she was somewhere in her early twenties—whipped her head around at the sight of the boat just as Mike turned on the floodlights. The entire wall of ice lit up like a dance floor, the mysterious young woman suddenly at center stage. She had long, dark hair, wet and plastered down against her shoulders, her skin glowing in a freezing sheen of icy water. Eyes large and black, she stared directly at the trawler’s floodlights without wincing, frozen as if in spectacle without movement, her narrow little breasts quivering, her mouth opened in a partial snarl through which the vague gleam of teeth glowed.

Joe, Bryan Falmouth and Sammy Walper dashed to the portside in unison, causing the 200-foot trawler to list to one side. All of them speechless, the only sound that could be heard above the chugging of the trawler’s diesel engine was a commingling of raspy, exhausted breathing.

The young woman turned away from the floodlights, her hair whipping in a single frozen fantail from one shoulder to the other, and stared down the length of the ice floe. Then she turned back and stared at the men. By inches, the trawler crept closer to the edge of the ice floe. A second later, Mike cut the engine, and the ship, following a heavy growl, went silent.

The girl collapsed into the snow, seemingly unconscious.

“Jesus,” Joe gasped.

Charlie spun around and grabbed the coil of line that he’d nearly tripped over moments ago. He found the end and slipped it around his waist, tying a halfway decent lasso. Kicking out the length of line to relieve the tension, he was about to make sure the other end was firmly fastened to the hydraulic arm when Joe grabbed his shoulder and spun him around.

“The hell you doing, Charlie?”

“Going out there.”

Joe blinked twice, shaking his head. “You’ve lost your mind or something?”

“Not unless I’m the only guy who sees a naked girl lying facedown on the ice.”