Man on Ice Read online

  Humphrey Hawksley is a foreign correspondent for the BBC, a regular speaker and panellist at Intelligence Squared and the Royal Geographical Society, and many literary festivals. Hawksley’s writing has appeared in the Guardian, The Times, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune and Yale Global. Hawksley’s television documentaries include The Curse of Gold and Bitter Sweet, Aid Under Scrutiny, Old Man Atom and Danger: Democracy at Work.

  @hwhawksley

  humphreyhawksley.com

  Also by Humphrey Hawksley

  The Kat Polinski Series

  Security Breach

  Home Run

  Friends And Enemies

  The Future History Series

  Dragon Strike

  Dragon Fire

  The Third World War

  First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019

  by Black Thorn, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  This digital edition first published in 2019 by Black Thorn

  First published in 2018 by Severn House Publishers Ltd,

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY

  blackthornbooks.com

  Copyright © Humphrey Hawksley, 2018

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 494 6

  eISBN 978 1 78689 512 7

  CONTENTS

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Acknowledgments

  To all families and nations divided by politics

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE IN THE TWO DAYS BEFORE THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION ON JANUARY 20th

  ONE

  Little Diomede, Alaska, USA

  Thick mist hung over the frozen Bering Sea and inside the helicopter cabin a familiar voice broke through the static of Rake Ozenna’s headset. ‘We have an emergency evacuation,’ said his adoptive father, in a tone that was calm but edged with urgency. ‘How far out are you?’

  ‘On the ground in about five minutes, Henry,’ said the pilot.

  Rake’s fiancée unwrapped her arm from his shoulder and pressed the talk button on her headset cable. ‘This is Dr Carrie Walker,’ she said. ‘I’m with Rake Ozenna. I’m a trauma surgeon. What exactly is the patient’s condition?’

  A woman’s voice answered. ‘This is Joan, district nurse. Akna’s waters have broken.’

  Joan was Henry’s wife. Rake had told Carrie about them and his home island many times. Even so, he had been apprehensive about bringing her here and the past minute was proving him right. He tried to catch her eye, but she was concentrating, at work a hundred percent on her new patient. ‘Thank you, Joan,’ she said. ‘Do you know how many weeks into the pregnancy?’

  ‘We think thirty-five weeks.’

  ‘And how old is she?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  Carrie showed no reaction to the young age. She had seen far worse, so had Rake. She snapped open her bag to check her medicines. ‘Does she have a fever?’

  ‘A hundred and two.’

  ‘Thank you. Keep Akna comfortable—’

  The pilot cut in. ‘We’re three minutes out. Henry, I need you on the helipad. The wind is everywhere.’

  Carrie tapped her finger across packets of antibiotics and said confidently, ‘Reassure Akna that help is on the way. We’ll get her safely to hospital in Nome in a couple of hours.’

  Rake wasn’t so sure, but he stayed quiet. It depended on exactly where Akna was. It could take half an hour to get her stretchered safely down to the helipad. In January, this far north, the sun barely broke above the horizon. Its dim light merged with the moon and stars to create a glow of daytime winter darkness, and now it was coming up to midday, but it could have been midnight. The way clouds were scudding meant frozen fog could move in at any time.

  An hour earlier they had left Nome to fly over a flat white Alaskan emptiness until fog almost forced them to turn back. The pilot managed to climb above it and for a long time they could only see the top of a shimmering low cloud bank. When they descended again, two islands appeared, solid and dark, like guards keeping vigil on the ice-covered expanse. Rake pointed to the longer, flatter island on their left. ‘That’s Big Diomede,’ he said to Carrie, tapping the window. ‘They call it Ratmonova. See, along the top, Russian military observation posts.’

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Carrie looked in fascination and turned to see out the other side. ‘And you grew up over there?’

  The helicopter shook as the pilot turned them into the wind at a mid-point between the islands, exactly where Russia and America met. The international dateline ran along the sea border. A few meters to their west, and they would drift into another day and another country.

  As the smaller island on their right became more visible, Carrie hooked back her blonde hair and cupped her hand against the window. Light from outside the helicopter silhouetted her strong face, high cheekbones, and prominent jaw. An orange windsock on the helipad gave a splash of color against the grayness of the settlement, a pallid cluster of small buildings, dwarfed by the steep island hillside rising directly behind.

  Carrie’s home could not have been more different to his. She was half Estonian, half Russian, and was raised as a Brooklyn Catholic, from a family of successful doctors. He was a native Eskimo from the Diomede Islands, which lay at the very edge of American territory and where ‘family’ held a looser meaning. Her father was a top cardiologist, her mother a gynecologist, and Carrie became a trauma surgeon. Rake had no idea where his mother or father were, could barely remember their faces. He had been raised by Joan and Henry Ahkvaluk, his father’s cousins. As soon as Rake was old enough, he had joined the Alaska Army National Guard. From the lowest rank of private, he broke through to reach captain in the 207th Infantry Group based at Fort Richardson outside of Anchorage, better known as the elite unit of Eskimo Scouts, perfect for deployment to mountain winters in Afghanist
an, which was where a sensible girl from Brooklyn fell in love with a wild boy from the Diomedes, at least that was how they told it to friends. Carrie and Rake met over a car bomb in Kabul.

  It was more than ten years since Rake’s last visit to Little Diomede. Jumbled images came to him of this place he knew so well and wished he could understand. Since then there had been Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Iraq again, Afghanistan again. And now he had Carrie, who had settled him.

  Drab clapboard homes stood on layers of walkways, one above the other, up the steep slope. The helipad, a rough concrete square, jutted out from a coastline of huge boulders. To the left stood Rake’s old school, its green walls and snow-covered roof shimmering under clear moonlight. Three steel dinghy boats were pulled up on the iced shingle of a tiny bay. Rake spotted the one belonging to Henry. In front, half a dozen snowmobiles stood on the sea ice and further along was the old, abandoned one, that Rake had ridden the night a polar bear had threatened the village. In the wildlife magazines, polar bears were made to look majestic. Close up, they were dirty, dangerous, eating machines. Henry rode out on the snowmobile with his two surrogate sons, Rake and Don Ondola, and showed them how to track and kill the animal. That morning, the whole village had walked across the ice to carve off meat and store it for winter. Don got the hide because he was two years older. He had been like a brother to Rake. But now he had gone mad was serving time for murder, which was why the emergency radio call was so troubling. Akna was his daughter.

  Carrie knew some of this, but not all. Rake had told her about the hunting of walrus, seal, and polar bear; the isolation, the winter darkness, the summer light; how the Eskimos had lost their language because the school only taught in English; how men away hunting had asked friends to look after their wives in their own beds in a practice called wife-sharing which is why Eskimos weren’t so good at doing the mom, pop, and three kids nuclear-family thing; how missionaries had tried to change them but without much success, and had given up and were now gone from the island. That had made Carrie laugh.

  He told her about the sacred ancestral graves on the hillside and how he could read the weather by the way the birds flew around the island. Carrie loved all that, but she was no fool. She would figure out the whole picture for herself once they got there. He hadn’t reckoned on her starting even before they landed.

  From the helicopter window, he saw Henry step out from a hut next to the old wooden church on a higher walkway. It used to be Don’s house. Rake didn’t know who lived there now. Henry was more than sixty years old, but skilled with his boots on the ice, faster than many men half his age. He started down the walkway to meet them.

  The helicopter shuddered against a brutal surge of wind. She was a Bell 214ST, an old military transport warhorse, probably from Iraq, maybe even Vietnam. There were straps and buckles to lock in a stretcher, two if needs be. Carrie would insist on flying with Akna to Nome. She wouldn’t have it any other way, which meant Rake would go too, so ten minutes on the ground. They would come back tomorrow, weather permitting.

  Carrie tucked the ankles of her jeans into her heavy-duty hiking boots, then lifted her headset, pushed her hair under the hood of her green parka, and zipped it up to her chin in preparation for the freezing weather outside. She held her medical pack on her lap. She turned her engagement ring towards him, green and blue, jade and sapphire, from an old gem shop in Kabul. She smiled quickly at him, as the ring vanished into her red Gore-Tex glove.

  Rake pulled up his sleeve to remind her of the tattoo of his O-negative blood group on the inside of his right forearm. She had made him get it as a condition of her marrying him. He pulled his woolen hat over his ears and secured his green military Arctic warfare jacket as Carrie had hers. She was an inch taller than him, and would never let him forget it.

  Akna’s emergency was returning them to a familiar, professional place. Carrie was leading, Rake watching their backs, and, at that moment, a new unfamiliar voice came across the radio, nervous, tense. ‘This is Wales. Mike, are you out there? We’ve got a man through the ice. Anyone from Erickson?’

  Mike was the pilot, Erickson the helicopter company. Wales, twenty-five miles away, was the closest mainland settlement.

  ‘This is Mike. I’m landing at Little Diomede now. What’s happened?’

  A disjointed reply came with the ebb and flow of static. One of the elders of the settlement had been cutting through sea ice to catch crabs. The ice had broken, and he had fallen through. With climate change it was becoming impossible for even the most experienced to judge the thickness of the ice. Underneath, the water temperature wouldn’t be much above freezing, which meant hypothermia setting in fast. They had gotten him out in time. But now he had suffered a heart attack.

  ‘I’m twenty-five minutes out from you.’ Mike turned the aircraft side on and brought it in over the boats on the shingle until they were a few feet above the helipad.

  Carrie flashed a worried look. ‘Is a doctor there?’

  The skids settled on the frozen helipad. The engine noise dropped, the rotor blades slowing. Mike turned to speak directly to Carrie. ‘Yes, ma’am. They do have a doctor.’

  ‘Best if we stay here,’ said Rake. ‘Mike goes to Wales and comes back. It’ll be forty minutes’ round trip. It’ll take that time to get Akna down.’

  That was it. The triage. The call on which casualty got treated first. They had done it together a dozen times. They wouldn’t know about Akna’s condition until Carrie had examined her. Rake and Mike knew this environment. Carrie nodded her agreement.

  Henry pulled open the door, his weathered face clouded by his heavy breathing. Little in his craggy features had changed over the ten years. His marksman’s eyes were as sharp as ever and he didn’t look a day older. A gust of freezing air hit them, stinging their faces. Rake got down, wind roaring all around, and helped Carrie out.

  ‘Fog’s coming. We need to be quick,’ said Henry. He embraced Rake, and firmly gripped Carrie’s hand. He had raised a dozen children like Rake, their parents vanished or useless through drugs and drink. Rake and Henry were like father and son.

  As Mike took the helicopter up again, they crouched, shielding luggage from the down draught. The sound of the throbbing rotor blades faded, leaving a sudden quiet. Carrie took in the island’s desolation.

  ‘I’ll bring you both up,’ said Henry.

  Carrie hoisted her pack onto her back. ‘Are Akna’s parents with her?’ she asked.

  Without answering, Henry set off. That was enough to confirm to Rake what he had suspected. ‘They’re not,’ he said, taking Carrie’s arm to steady her on the slippery ground.

  ‘Can they find them?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘She’s a child. She’ll need her mom with her.’

  Rake wasn’t sure what to say. Akna’s father, Don Ondola, adopted son to Henry and adoptive brother and best friend to Rake, had murdered her mother in a drug-crazed rage. He was also the father of his daughter’s unborn child.

  TWO

  Little Diomede, Alaska, USA

  Carrie held her patient’s feverish hand. Soaked in sweat, Akna stared up at this stranger. She lay on sheets on a lumpy black sofa in a hut built into the hillside next to the Catholic church that had fallen derelict when the missionaries left. She had a rounded face with a dimple on her left cheek. Her skin was creased and dried from synthetic dope smuggled onto the island. Her eyes carried an emptiness Rake had seen so often when the human spirit just gives up. Akna had shaved her head halfway up the skull leaving a neat ridge of black hair on the top. She wore a red T-shirt, with a silver heart on the front. She was a kid, like millions of teenagers who experimented with fashion and hairstyles as they grew up. Somewhere, in what he saw, was the little girl whom Rake used to put on the slide in the school playground. Akna was five when he last saw her, laughing and full of excitement. She was about to give birth or die but it was as if neither one meant anything to her. Her waters had broke
n thirty-six hours earlier, but she had told no one and infection had brought her temperature dangerously high. Now she was barely conscious.

  ‘We need to sit you up, Akna, to change you,’ said Carrie softly. The room was warm and Carrie worked, jacket off, in a red denim shirt, sleeves rolled up and hair held back with a rubber band. In an adjoining room, Henry and three other men prepared a stretcher to carry Akna down.

  ‘A helicopter is taking you to Nome. You’ll be fine, Akna. Just fine,’ said Joan, laying a towel wet with sterilized cold water on Akna’s brow. She wore one-piece blue dungarees and was a thin sinewy woman, with short black hair and wide concentrating eyes.

  Rake’s phone lit with a message from the helicopter pilot.

  Nome then back you.

  That was bad. It should have been forty minutes. Now, Rake calculated an hour from Wales to Nome, fifteen minutes at the hospital, maybe another fifteen minutes for refueling, then an hour and a half back to Little Diomede. Maybe more. He touched Carrie’s shoulder. She followed him to the next room where Henry was. He spoke quietly. ‘Mike messaged me. There’ll be a delay.’

  ‘How long?’ asked Carrie.

  ‘A couple of hours at least.’

  ‘It’s too long, Rake. We need to get another helicopter.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  Carrie returned to Akna.

  ‘We’ll take her down to the school anyway,’ said Henry. ‘Get her close to the helipad.’

  The National Guard in Nome kept a Black Hawk on standby, and Rake punched in the number and spoke to a duty officer who said they were handling a civilian emergency call a hundred miles north where bad weather had come down. Rake dialed his military unit at the Elmendorf-Richardson base outside of Anchorage. ‘We might be able to lay our hands on a Black Hawk that’s coming out of service,’ said the sergeant who answered.

  ‘Use my name, Captain Raymond Ozenna, and put us top to the list, sergeant,’ instructed Rake, knowing that the chances of getting anything within a couple of hours was slim.