Carlos Sánchez moves his boat through the pack, forcing the ice into a violent series of rifts and ridges. Caught in the ship’s lights, immediately ahead of him are two icebergs—one to starboard and the other to port. They jut up through the frozen landscape like static frozen eruptions, blasted off the Antarctic ice shelf.
The boat groans under the weight of nearly two hundred tonnes of toothfish, and countless kilograms of polar ice. The white mass is building on the rails, layer upon layer, threatening the ship in the same way cancerous bones threaten the stability of a human body.
Carlos watches as Eduardo straps his safety line to a rail and begins the hand-numbing job of smashing the metal bars clean. Seventeen crew work alongside the first mate on the flood-lit deck, creating small glassy avalanches that pound the painted metal of the deck. The wind has dropped to a mere thirty knots and the seas have been smothered by the pack. It’s a welcome reprieve and the men make the most of the relative calm, even if it is after midnight.
But Carlos can feel the squeeze of the ice beneath him, sucking the boat of speed and threatening to stop them, dead. At the next opportunity, he’ll try to break free. He flicks through his logbook. They’ve been running south of the Australian patrol for four days. He doubts Julia has even been told of the chase. Why wouldn’t Francisco and his department feign ignorance for as long as possible while the palms of officials are being greased with the money of stolen fish?
The master reads the chart and, with his finger, traces the dotted lines that indicate the likely extent of ice throughout the year, before fixing his gaze on the eerily lit pack in front of him. According to the map, it’s at its greatest reach and will soon recede. For now though, it’s starving them of precious fuel and erasing any advantage they have gained by heading so far south.
Carlos thinks of his crew: four Uruguayans, four Chileans, ten Spaniards, fifteen Peruvians and a Russian engineer, whom Eduardo first met during his time working the Bering Sea fishery three years ago. Normally, a vessel’s owner arranges its crew, but Eduardo had put in a good word for the engineer, telling Migiliaro that Dmitri was the best in the business. Carlos had appreciated the recommendation—at these latitudes, a good engineer is the difference between making it home, or not—but, on a personal level, he hasn’t yet warmed to the Russian, who strikes him as a law unto himself.
Carlos had warned the crew that the Pescador would venture into the high Antarctic if the pickings of toothfish elsewhere had been unfavourable, or if they’d been forced to flee a patrol boat. But the chances of being chased had always been slim. He has never known a boat to be pursued over such a distance. He tells himself that his decision to run south was sound. It has forced the Australians to break the hot pursuit, and now the Pescador can’t be charged under international law—not as he understands it. As he passes the starboard iceberg, he uses the searchlight and sees an opening in the pack only one hundred metres away, just before the next iceberg. He makes for it.
Carlos watches Eduardo brace himself against the deck rails as the Pescador turns, and notices his flapping jacket go still as the wind drops in the lee of the second berg. Even if Eduardo were not wearing the personalised wet-weather jacket, Carlos would be able to tell Eduardo apart from the other orange-hooded forms on deck. There’s something unique about the deliberate and relaxed manner in which he works, and the way he seems to move as one with the ocean.
This afternoon, just before nightfall, Eduardo had stopped to watch hundreds of birds launch themselves into the fertile waters at the edge of the ice. The feeding frenzy was of a scale he had never before witnessed, he later said. Eduardo reeled off the various species of birds, embellishing his sightings with facts about where they nest, how often they breed and how their populations are faring. Carlos is well aware that while other crewmen play cards or music or read magazines in their rare moments of recreation, Eduardo makes careful notes, sometimes well into the night, from his small on-board library of science books and magazine articles. In another life, the first mate’s love affair with the sea might have seen him graduate with a degree in marine biology, the master thinks as his friend leaves the deck and makes his way towards the wheelhouse.
Carlos again passes the searchlight over the seas, this time illuminating a pod of minke whales. Their shining backs, punctuated by tall, curved dorsal fins, drift out of the beam of artificial brilliance and deep into the night. Eduardo enters the cabin and drops his hammer on the floor. Shards of ice rain out from creases in his jacket, and pool on the fuzz of worn, blue carpet tiles. He throws back his waterproof hood and strips off a woollen balaclava, his face emerging like a sculpture from a mould. He has the perfect skin of a child it occurs to Carlos, as though the wind and salt water have worn away the layers and turned back time. His eyes are deep-set and dark; his only physical imperfection the slightly folded rim of his right ear. Eduardo jokes that it’s where his mother used to grasp him when he misbehaved as a child.
‘Must be time for me to thaw out,’ Eduardo offers, a shine in his eyes. ‘Now that we’re through the hard part.’
Carlos flashes a good-humoured smile and gives over the helm. He has always marvelled at Eduardo’s energy and resilience. The first mate endures conditions that would break a weaker man, and always comes up smiling and asking for more.
‘I’m getting that ice off first, though,’ Carlos says, pointing at the thick film encrusting the wheelhouse window. ‘Can’t have us heading to the South Pole! Or do you think that government boat would follow us there, too?’
Eduardo laughs. ‘Sorry, I should’ve cleared it off before I came in.’
Carlos waves away the apology, flips his jacket’s hood forward over his head, and does up the zipper. Only his dark eyes and heavy brow are visible as he leaves the wheelhouse, ice scraper in hand.
Outside, the horizontal barrage of stinging water slices at his face. It hurts to breathe. His chest tightens. Salt spray burns his eyes. He chips the ice away as fast as he can, hitting the back of the scraper carefully with the back of a wrench. Already a new thin film begins to form, and through it Carlos can see Eduardo’s eyes on the radar, an uncharacteristically troubled expression on his face.
When he has finished, Carlos can no longer feel his fingers. The water and the cold have somehow worked their way in through his gloves. He grips the rails of the narrow wheelhouse deck with ice-blunted hands and guides himself back to the door, lugging it open against the wind. He flicks back his wet hood. ‘I can’t remember what it’s like to be dry,’ he jokes, pulling at his clothes, which are heavy with frigid water. His eyebrows and forehead are crusted white with salt, adding decades to his appearance. He moves an already damp towel over his face.
Eduardo is still looking at the radar, which is crowded with the fluorescent blips of wave scatter and perhaps a dozen icebergs. It could be a stellar map of the southern skies.
‘You’re happy to be this far south?’ he asks Carlos.
‘Happy? No. But we need to get some distance behind us. Another day or so down here, just tracing the edge of the pack, and we’ll lose the patrol, if we haven’t already.’
‘You’d think so. They can’t be as stupid or as stubborn as us!’ Eduardo shakes his head, but doesn’t quite manage a laugh. ‘Mauritius is unlikely then?’
‘We might have to find another port. Africa maybe.’
‘Migiliaro won’t like it.’
‘What choice do we have?’
Carlos watches as Eduardo walks to the chart table, takes a sip of mate, and uses the gourd-shaped vessel containing the herbal tea to hold open the map. Using his finger, he draws a line from their current position to various alternate destinations: Mauritius, back home to Montevideo, or…Eduardo travels his finger up the west coast of Africa, and stops at Walvis Bay.
‘They normally turn a blind eye to unrecorded catches in Namibia,’ he says, looking up at Carlos.
Carlos tilts his head to the side, weighing up the risks and benefits of the proposition. ‘Maybe,’ he concedes. ‘Anyway, if you’re happy to take over, I’ll go and get some sleep.’ He shifts his attention out to sea. ‘While the weather holds.’
‘That’s why I’m here,’ Eduardo says, waving Carlos to the door. ‘Go and dream of that beautiful wife of yours.’
‘She’ll be worried sick.’ Carlos reaches out a gloved hand to touch the photograph of his wife. He circles his finger on her pregnant belly. ‘So will Virginia…’
‘Si,’ Eduardo looks away from the photograph and towards the ice. ‘But they’ll be happy with what we have in our pockets. Enough money to break free of the Migiliaros of the world.’
Carlos nods. ‘I hope that’s how it turns out.’
‘It’ll be okay. Trust me.’
‘Si, Capitán!’ Carlos jokes, making a mock salute with his hand on his forehead as he leaves the wheelhouse, glad to surrender control for a couple of hours.