Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

was a relatively fine thread. Not only were the boats at a distance, but they were moving up and down in relation to each other. If the ships separated too much, the line would snap from the pressure; too little and the net wouldn’t leave the trawler or would drop toward the bottom, where vertical drag could break the line and lose gear and fish worth one hundred thousand dollars in American money.
    “Coming in,” Susan said as the net slipped off the trawler’s deck. At once the weight of the bag made the
Polar Star
slow half a knot. The catcher boat veered off, while winches far back on the factory ship’s trawl deck started hauling the line in.
    Susan gave Arkady no more than a glance as he steppedto the rail beside her. He thought she must be wearing layers of sweaters and pants to appear so shapeless because her face was thin. She had brown eyes and the kind of concentration you see in a girl on a balance beam who doesn’t give a damn about the rest of the world.
    “Fifty meters,” she was saying in Russian.
    Gulls started to gather. It was always a mystery how there could be not a bird in sight, then suddenly by the tens they would appear, as if the fog were a magician’s cape.
    Behind its vanguard of buoys, the incoming net, its orange-and-black plastic hair glimmering wet, surged toward the
Polar Star
. Behind them a trawlmaster crossed the deck and ran down the stairs of the stairwell, taking his position on the landing over the ramp. The slim cable rose taut and dripping. Buoys bounced up the ramp. Dragged by its steel bridle, the bag surged out of the water and onto the ramp’s lower lip.
    “Ease off!” Susan ordered in Russian.
    The
Polar Star
slowed almost to the point of wallowing. There was a necessary caution to hauling in thirty tons of fish that lost buoyancy and doubled in weight as they left the water. Any more tension on the winch or forward motion to the ship and the line could part. On the other hand, a dead stop could force the bag into the propeller screws. Patiently the cable eased the bag half onto the ramp as the ship coasted at dead slow. There the bag paused as if exhausted, water pouring out, crabs and starfish dripping out.
    Susan asked Arkady, “You’re from the factory?”
    “Yes.”
    “The mystery man from the Lower Depths.”
    Slava pulled Arkady to the stairwell rail. “Don’t bother her now.”
    At the well they looked down at the trawlmaster as the ramp’s steel-mesh safety gate swung up and two men in hard hats, life jackets and lifelines around their waistsdragged heavy messenger cables down the ramp to the bag. The closer they came to the net, the more steeply the chute curved down to the water. A floodlight in the well showed where, at the belly of the waiting bag, the ramp dropped dead away.
    The lead man shouted, slipped and clung to his lifeline. It was a deckhand named Pavel; his eyes had gone white with fright.
    From the landing the trawlmaster encouraged him. “You look like a drunk on a dance floor. Maybe you’d like a pair of skates.”
    “Karp,” Slava said with admiration.
    Karp’s shoulders stretched his sweater. He turned his broad head up to them and grinned, displaying golden dental work. He and his team were taking an extra shift, another reason they were the favorites of the first mate. “Wait until we reach the ice sheet,” he yelled up. “Pavel will do some real skating on the ramp then.”
    Arkady remembered the half-mended net he had seen earlier on the trawl deck.
    “Did you cut Zina out?” he called down to Karp.
    “Yeah.” The gold left the smile. “So?”
    “Nothing.” It was simply interesting to Arkady that Karp Korobetz, that exemplar among the trawlmasters, had taken the chance of ruining expensive American mesh rather than pouring the fish out and waiting for her body to emerge.
    Below them, Pavel was struggling to untangle the bridle of the net so that his teammate could attach the G-hooks of the messenger cables and