Angela returned to the storage room to find Ethan reclining against the wall beneath the porthole, reading Endurance.
He looked up when she entered the room. “Shackleton had a stowaway on his ship, too,” he said.
“Who are you?” Angela asked him.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Who are you?”
He looked startled. He closed the book and stood. “I told you. Ethan Downes.”
“How come there’s no one on this ship named Annie Miller?”
“I don’t know.”
“Somebody’s lying to me. And I want to know who it is.”
“It isn’t me. I’m telling the truth. She was a volunteer with CDA. She was planning to be on the crew of this ship. I swear.”
“Prove it.”
He paused before reaching into his pants pocket and removing a photograph. “I was wandering around the ship looking for her late last night, and I found this on a bulletin board.” He handed it to her—a picture of a pretty young woman standing on a pier next to the Tern, facing the camera, smiling. And Aeneas, standing next to her, his arm around her shoulders.
“That’s Annie,” he said.
And then Angela understood why Garrett had reacted the way he did: he was covering for Aeneas, and poorly. Ethan’s girlfriend must have been the victim of yet another love affair gone wrong—and, unlike Lauren, she hadn’t stuck around to complete her tour of duty.
Ethan was watching her. “Do you believe me now?”
Angela nodded and handed the photograph back to him. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but Annie’s not on this boat.”
Suddenly, the boat heaved; the floor pushed her forward and into him, and he caught her in both arms. She winced as they slid to the floor, as boxes tumbled onto them, as he leaned over her to shield her. When they both managed to right themselves, she turned away from the look on his face: a sinking disappointment that she was certain mirrored her own.
She stood and brushed off her clothing. “I better go see what happened,” she said.
When she emerged onto the open deck, the wind pushed her back against the ship. They were moving fast, dangerously so, and the icebergs appeared close enough to touch.
In the bridge, Lauren was behind the wheel. The tense, quiet faces of the others signaled something was wrong. Except for Aeneas, who was humming to himself, as if he were out for a Sunday drive.
“What’s going on?” Angela asked.
Aeneas turned. “Where have you been hiding yourself?”
“I’ve just been downstairs.”
“Come over here,” Aeneas said. First the first time since she boarded, she hesitated to join him at his side. She sensed a coarseness in his manner, something she hadn’t detected since Punta Verde, and she wondered again what she’d done, joining him here.
“You’ll enjoy seeing this,” he said, and she relented.
He kissed her on the forehead and handed her his binoculars. “Orcas. Eleven-o’clock.” He pointed, and Angela zoomed in on a pod of seven or eight whales. Yet her mind was not on them but on the man standing next to her, a man whose behaviors and mannerisms she was still cataloguing, still researching.
She’d learned that when he worked the bridge, he tugged at a lock of hair behind his left ear, leaving it sticking out oddly. That when he wasn’t working, he drank his whiskey in large gulps, holding it in his mouth, like mouthwash, for several moments before finally releasing the liquid down his throat. She learned that he talked in private, even in the small cramped quarters of their shared cabin, in the same bellowing voice he used as commander of the ship. And then there was the steady stream of Blow Pops, one of which he held in his hand right now. Long after the candy was consumed, after the flavor had gone out of the gum, he gnawed on the white stick. Like an enormous toothpick, it remained in his mouth for hours, until he suddenly noticed it, flicked it into the trash, and reached into his pocket for another. She knew so much about his behavior but so little about his motives, the machinations occurring beneath that thick head of longish, uncombed hair. And she was beginning to doubt she would ever know.
She remembered the long diagonal scar on his back, which he told her during their first night together was from a ship’s propeller. She believed him at the time—but times had changed. He was a man of heroic gestures, but he was also reckless: with the ship and, apparently, with the truth.
“What do you say, Lauren?” Aeneas said, looking over Angela’s shoulder. “Should we pull over and say hi?”
“I’ll drop you off, but I’m not slowing down,” Lauren said.
Aeneas erupted in laughter. “D. J., what’s the latest?”
“Less than two miles, and hauling ass.”
Angela handed back his binoculars and started for the door, but he pulled her back to him and hugged her from behind. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“I’m going below.” She tried to keep her voice down in the hopes that he would follow along. But Aeneas wasn’t a man of subtlety.
Before she could head downstairs, the door on the other side of the bridge swung open. A man fell inside and onto the floor, followed by Hedley. At first, Angela thought someone had passed out drunk.
“Look what I found,” Hedley said. “In the storage room.”
Angela couldn’t see behind the console, but she knew what was about to happen.
“Get on your feet,” Hedley commanded.
And then Ethan pulled himself up, looking sheepish and awkwardly underdressed in his crew t-shirt.
“Who the hell are you?” Aeneas bellowed.
“Ethan Downes.” Ethan’s voice trembled slightly, and Angela wondered if she was the only one who noticed. By now, she knew the rhythms of his voice and could tell by the way his eyes darted around the room that he was not as nervous as he may have appeared; he was simply looking for Annie.
Angela took Aeneas’s hand, as if to hold him back, but he wrenched it away and circled the console until he was eye to eye with Ethan. They were the same height, but still Aeneas seemed to tower over him.
“I’m just a stowaway,” Ethan sputtered.
“Just a stowaway?” Aeneas mimicked him. His anger made him cruel, Angela thought. “You expect me to believe that?”
“It’s true,” Angela said.
Aeneas turned to her. “You know him?”
“Yes. He’s harmless. He’s just looking for Annie Miller.” Angela could tell by the way people responded—a mix of silence and slack jaws—that she had touched a nerve. But what nerve exactly, she didn’t know.
Aeneas looked at Angela, then Ethan. “What do you want with Annie?”
“That’s between me and her,” Ethan said.
“You’re lucky I don’t throw you overboard right now.”
“I know. I saw how you treated those fishermen.”
“On second thought—” Aeneas stepped toward Ethan, and Angela stepped in between.
“Stop it!” She held out her arms and pushed them both backwards a step. “Aeneas, Ethan is only looking for Annie. He doesn’t mean any harm.”
“Don’t be so gullible, Angela,” Aeneas said. “He’s no stowaway. He’s a spy.”
“I’m not a spy. I’m looking for Annie. Truly.”
“I’ll be the judge of that. Where did you board our ship?”
“Puerto Madryn.”
“What were you doing there?”
“I was on a cruise ship. Emperor of the Seas.”
“That floating ghetto docked next to us?”
“Yes. I swear.”
Aeneas paused for a long moment, looking from Ethan to Angela and then back again. “Annie Miller is dead.”
Ethan stared back at him. “No. She can’t be.”
“She’s dead, son. That much I do know.” He looked at Angela again, and she knew, with a sick feeling, that he was serious.
“How could she be dead?” Ethan asked.
“She was run over by a fishing trawler four weeks ago up in the North Atlantic. I’m sorry.”
Angela felt her face go numb. Nobody said a word. Ethan stared at Aeneas, then looked out the window. “How?” he asked.
“How what?”
“How did she end up under a fishing trawler?”
“How do you think? She was a volunteer, like the rest of us. She placed her life on the line to protect sea life. She died with valor. She died doing exactly what she wanted to do.”
D. J. spoke up. “Less than a mile.”
Aeneas paused, and he seemed either confused or deep in thought. “Hedley, lock our stowaway here in the storage room.”
“Lock him?” Angela asked.
“It’s where he was hiding. What’s the difference?”
Hedley pulled Ethan outside, and Angela felt the urge to follow, but she was too confused now, doubting her loyalties, doubting herself. The only thing she knew to be true was her sudden anger toward Aeneas, which she tried to suppress to a whisper.
“You’re too hard on him,” she said.
“He’s a stowaway.”
“You were a stowaway once,” she reminded him. “And I took you in.”
“It’s different.”
“How?”
“He’s not the first. Five years ago we discovered an FBI agent working undercover. You remember the FBI, don’t you? Paid you a visit at Punta Verde, right? Care to speculate who else is on that ship behind us besides Argentineans?” He paused, then jerked his head toward the door through which Hedley had led Ethan back out. “So what else did you tell him?”
“Nothing. We talked about Annie. That’s it.”
“You tell him where we’re headed?”
“How could I? If you told me something once in a while, maybe I would be valuable to him. But, no, I didn’t tell him anything. Ethan’s not an undercover agent.”
“You may be right. But I can’t take that chance. I find it peculiar that we have a ship pursuing us at the same time we discover him. I hope there’s no connection. But the last unwelcome visitor on my ship nearly killed me.”
Right then, Angela was herself feeling unwelcome, and the ship, now churning wildly through the field of icebergs, was feeling more unstable by the minute. A bright orange immersion suit, thrust into her arms by a fast-moving crew member, confirmed that the situation was serious.
Aeneas looked at her and nodded. “Put it on,” he said. “In case we go down.”
“What about Ethan?”
“What about him?”
“If you want me to wear this, you’d better give him one. Even if he is a stowaway, he doesn’t deserve to drown.”
She let the silence build momentum, until he capitulated, called Hedley on the radio. He looked back at Angela and watched her step into the suit and zip it tight. She could tell by the engines, the high-pitched clanging of icebergs, that they had accelerated.
Angela moved to the left side of the bridge and looked out the side door. The other ship was now so close she could see the guns pointed at them, could read the worlds on the hull—AR Roca. Looking ahead, she noticed penguins porpoising out of the water, out of the path of the fast-approaching vessel. She felt her body freeze at the sight of them panicking. To a penguin, the Tern was as much a predator as a leopard seal, and the penguins reverted to their instinctual evasive maneuvers—leaping out of the water, changing direction randomly.
“Angela.”
She heard her name but did not look up, focused on the penguins perched on the ledges of icebergs. Adelies. Gentoos. Chinstraps.
“Angela!” She turned to see Aeneas staring at her impatiently. “You’re going to want to hold onto something,” he said.
Aeneas had taken the helm, and he began to swerve more closely between the icebergs. The doors on both sides of the bridge were hinged open so that Lauren, on the starboard wing deck, and D. J., and on the port deck, could see the outer edges of their ship.
“Does everybody have their survival gear on?” Aeneas said to nobody in particular. “Brace yourselves, people, here we go.”
“Four hundred yards,” D. J. said, looking back.
Ahead, they were approaching a narrow but towering iceberg, head-on. Angela watched Aeneas’s hands as they began to steer the ship ever so slightly off the direct path.
“How am I?” he called out.
“Three feet more,” shouted D. J.
“That’s too close,” Angela said. The iceberg had a flared base, on which a half dozen penguins had assembled themselves. They were raising their heads, flapping their wings, trying to intimidate the oncoming beast as best they knew how. With twenty yards to go, penguins began to abort, sliding down on their bellies—yet some remained, frozen by panic. Angela, heart pounding, looked at Aeneas and said sharply, “Watch the birds.”
He did not respond.
Angela cringed as the ship grazed the base of the iceberg, sending a loud thud echoing through the hull. So this is your plan, she thought, looking at Aeneas: turn the Antarctic Peninsula into one giant slalom course, cutting back and forth between the ten-story gates, hoping you don’t sink along the way, hoping your pursuer is not as fortunate.
Once clear of the iceberg, the Tern dropped speed and banked hard to the right. From the starboard window, Angela saw the iceberg awaken, leaning left and then right. The Argentine ship appeared, staying as far from the ten-story pendulum as it could without getting too close to the iceberg on the other side. But the iceberg did not topple. And when their pursuer cleared the gantlet, Angela heard curses on the bridge.
When she faced forward again, she saw another, taller iceberg looming ahead—with at least a hundred penguins standing on the steep terraces of its base. This time, she spoke loudly enough for the entire crew to hear.
“Watch the penguins!”
“Angela, I don’t have a choice,” Aeneas said.
“You’re going to crush them!”
“D. J., get me closer,” Aeneas said, eyes focused ahead.
“Half a foot!” D. J. yelled. “But no more.”
Penguins were clinging to the ice as the ship glanced hard against the glacier, sending Angela and the rest of the crew off their feet, a thunderous noise coming from below. Angela pulled herself up as they banked right again, glimpsing another unbalanced iceberg bobbing in the water, and the Argentine ship passed with ease. She felt the mood in the bridge turn grave.
But Aeneas did not seem to register the fear around him. He accelerated yet again, heading toward an iceberg shaped like the Matterhorn, rising more than six stories tall, with penguin residents along the waterline. This time, he lined up the ship to hit the iceberg on the port side, perhaps to give the starboard hull a much-needed break.
Angela had a direct view of the penguins, hopping up the edges of the ice instead of down, the poor creatures not understanding the intention of this mass of metal and noise. It would macerate them against the ice. She couldn’t stand by and watch any longer. As the ship bore down on the iceberg, Angela’s body swung into action almost before her mind registered what she was about to do. She grabbed the steering wheel, shoving Aeneas aside with a strength she didn’t know she had.
“Angela, stop!” Aeneas tried to pry her hands away, and she stood strong. But Aeneas was stronger, and with the boat’s next lurch, she fell to the floor. She held her ears tight; she did not want to hear the cries of the penguins.
* * *
After the boat had slowed, Angela stepped outside the bridge and carefully began her descent down the stairs, now coated with glistening white dust and shards of ice. When she reached the rear deck, she witnessed a terrain of boulder-sized chunks of ice, as if a giant snowman had just exploded.
Then she saw the penguin.
A young Adelie, most likely a male, no more than three years of age. It looked especially small to Angela because she was so accustomed to Magellanics; this breed was three inches shorter, on average. Black body and head, brilliant white chest, white rings around its eyes. The bird flapped its wings and was limping badly as it moved about, directionless and frantic.
Angela got on her knees and shuffled slowly toward him. He tried to back away but didn’t have anyplace to go. The penguin had no tag, which made him look somewhat naked in her eyes. She did not know where his colony was or when he was born. She knew nothing about him, only that he needed help. His feathers were coated with an oily substance that must have come from the deck. He had a dime-sized laceration above his right wing. There was no way he could survive in the water without being cleaned and mended.
She heard a noise and glanced up to see Lauren standing nearby. The look on Lauren’s face told her that no matter how she may have felt about Angela, animals came first. “How can I help?” Lauren asked.
“Get me something to hold him in,” Angela said. Lauren disappeared for a few moments, returning with a large plastic pail.
As Angela crept closer to the penguin, he turned and tried to run away, then fell over its bad left leg. Angela moved quickly and grabbed it firmly by its neck, its beak snapping wildly, and lifted it into the bucket.
She glanced over the rear deck at the immobilized Argentine ship, and for a moment she wished that it had succeeded in catching them, so there would be no more running, no more casualties. And so she could go home again.
She grabbed the pail by its metal handle and carried the frantically flapping penguin into the ship.