Slezko said, 'You won't be safe until you do.'

'My advice', Arkady said, 'is to watch out for your own necks.'

In the dark Skiba mournfully agreed. 'In times, like these nothing is safe.'

On the bridge, the oncoming snow was lit by bow and wheelhouse lamps so that the eye could follow flakes individually, one or two out of the millions flowing out of the dark and over and around a windshield that had been hosed down with steam and wore its own frozen sheen. Wipers rhythmically brushed snow aside, but ice was already encroaching again from the corners.

Inside, the overhead lamp was dim. The radar and echo-sounder scopes cast green haloes. The gyro-compass floated in ball of light. Marchuk was at the wheel; Hess stood at the windshield. Neither man seemed surprised to see Arkady on the bridge.

'Comrade Jonah,' the captain said softly.

There was no helmsman and no one was in the navigation room. The engine telegraph was set between 'Dead Slow' and 'Dead Stop'.

'Why are we slowing?' Arkady asked.

The captain had a pained smile. As he tapped out a cigarette he looked like a man contemplating life from the last step of a guillotine. Hess, caught in the moving shadow of a wiper, looked like he was only one step behind.

'I should have left you where you were,' Marchuk told Arkady. 'You'd disappeared on the slime line, in the belly of the whale. We must have been insane to pluck you out.'

'Are we stopping?' Arkady asked.

'We have a slight problem,' Hess conceded. 'There are problems beside you.'

The light from outside was pale and cold, but the fleet electrical engineer appeared to Arkady to be especially white, as if all the sun lamps on earth had been wasted on him.

'Your cable?' Arkady suggested.

'I told you,' Hess reminded Marchuk. 'He found my station today.'

'Well, your station is a pearl in an oyster, so a man of Renko's abilities was bound to find it. One more reason why I should have left him where he was.' The captain let a reflective plume of smoke escape. To Arkady he said, 'I told him the bottom we were going over was too grabby and too shallow, but he put the cable out anyway.'

'A hydrophone cable is designed not to snag,' Hess said. 'It's deployed from submarines all the time.'

'And now something's tangled in the cable,' Marchuk said. 'Maybe part of a crab pot, maybe a walrus head. Tusks dragging on the ocean floor. We can't reel the cable in and the tension on it is too great for us to go any faster.'

'Whatever it is will come loose eventually,' said Hess.

'In the meantime,' Marchuk said, 'we must proceed ahead delicately even while we're making way through ice and a Force 7 wind. The captains in the Navy must be magicians.' When he inhaled, his eyes reflected the ember. 'Excuse me, I forgot: in the Navy they are deployed from submarines, not from factory ships in the ice.'

The Polar Star trembled and heaved a little in the swell hidden below the sheet. Arkady was no engineer, but he knew that in order to break ice a ship, no matter how big, needed a certain amount of momentum. Too slow at too low a gear and the diesels would sooner or later burn out. 'How good a captain is Morgan?' he asked.

Marchuk said, 'We'll find out. A boat like the Eagle should be in view of a coconut palm and looking for shrimp, nowhere near ice. Now the waves are picking up in the fairway, and his bow and deck aren't high enough. He shouldn't head into the wind, but he has to stay behind us or get iced in. He's already iced up and getting top-heavy.'

Something occurred to Arkady. The quiet. A bridge always had one radio tuned to the distress frequency. Marchuk followed Arkady's eyes to the single-sideband. The captain left the wheel to turn up the sound, like pins dropping, of heavy static.

'Morgan hasn't sent an emergency call yet,' said Hess.

'He hasn't sent any call,' Marchuk said.

Arkady asked, 'Why don't you raise him?' Off Sakhalin, boats always talked each other through heavy weather.

'He doesn't respond,' Marchuk said. 'One of his antennas might be down.'

Hess said, 'Morgan can tell by our speed that something is wrong, and he probably knows that the cable is played out. A piece of the cable is what he's after. We're the ones in trouble, not him. This weather is perfect for him.'

On the radar screens the fairway carved by the Polar Star was a narrow line of green dots, sea returning the radar's signal. In the middle of the lane, about five hundred metres back, was the blip that was the Eagle; the rest of the screen was a blank. Arkady punched in a 50-k scale. Still there was nothing but the Eagle. Boats were supposed to be coming from Seattle, but the weather would be delaying them.

'Morgan has a radar, too,' Hess said. 'And a directional echo-sounder. If something is caught on the cable he will detect it. This is probably the opportunity he's been waiting for.'

Marchuk said, 'If he's lost a radio mast, then he's lost his radar, too.'

'The autopilot turned the wheel a notch, minding its job.

'Captain,' Hess said, 'I can understand your sympathy for another fisherman. Would that Morgan was, but he's not. George Morgan is their Anton Hess. When I see him I recognize myself. He will be silent and he will stay close to see if we make a mistake, such as picking up speed. Whatever is caught on the cable could lift it to the surface right beside the Eagle!

'What if the cable breaks?' Arkady asked.

'It won't break if we stay at this speed,' said Hess.

'What if it does?' Marchuk asked.

'It won't,' Hess said.

What was Hess's musical instrument? The cello. Hess reminded Arkady of a cellist trying to play as his strings popped one by one.

Hess repeated, 'It won't, but even if it did break, the cable has negative buoyancy; it would sink. The only problem would be returning to Vladivostok and the Pacific Fleet after losing a hydrophone cable. Our voyage has been disastrous enough, Captain. We don't need any more disgraces.'

'Why doesn't Morgan answer our calls?' Marchuk demanded.

'I've told you why. Except for the radio, the Eagle is proceeding normally. Everything else is in your imagination.' Hess lost patience. 'I'm going below; perhaps I can wind in the cable a little.' He paused in front of Arkady. 'Explain to the captain that Zina Patiashvili didn't go to the stern rail every time the Eagle was close to throw kisses. It turns out that she got plenty of them from my own radioman. If Zina were here now, I'd kill her myself.'

The fleet electrical engineer left by the flying bridge. Before the door slammed shut, snow spun in the dark, then died.

'It is humorous,' Marchuk said. 'After all that time in dry dock putting in the cable and it's the only thing that breaks down.'

The captain leaned against the counter. He laid his hand affectionately on a compass repeater, opened its hood, closed it.

'I keep thinking things will change, Renko, that life can be honest and direct, that there's good and dignity in anyone who's willing to work hard. Not that people are perfect, not that I'm perfect. But good. Am I an idiot? Tell me, when we get to Vladivostok will you tell them about me and Zina?'

'No. But they'll take pictures of the officers and crew to the restaurant where she worked and the people there will recognize you.'

'So I'm dead either way.'

No, I'm dead either way, Arkady thought. Karp and his deck team will hunt until they find me. Marchuk was caught in the more significant drama of a trailing cable. How could he explain why Karp wanted to attack him if there was no evidence left of smuggling? At best he'd sound like a madman; more likely, he'd hang himself for Volovoi and the Aleut.

'You know how this ship was delivered?' Marchuk asked. 'You know the condition in which any ship is delivered from the boatyard?'

'Like new?'

'Better than new. The Polar Star was built in a Polish yard. When it was handed over it was handed over complete, with everything: tableware, linens, curtains, lights, everything so you could go to sea right away. But they never got to sea right away. The KGB comes on board. People from the Ministry come on board. They take the new tableware and replace it with old, take the linens and curtains and replace bright lights with bulbs you could go blind by. Exactly as if they were robbing a house. Rip out the good plumbing and replace it with lead. Even mattresses and doorknobs. Replace good with shit. Then they give it to Soviet fishermen and say, "Comrades, go to sea!" This was a pretty ship, a good ship.'

Marchuk bowled his head, dropped the butt of his cigarette on the deck and stepped on it. 'So, Renko, now you know why the ship is moving so slowly. Was there anything else?'

'No.'

The captain stared at the bright, blinded windshield. 'Too bad about us and the Eagle,' he said. 'The joint venture is good thing. The other way leads back to the cave, doesn't it?'

Chapter Twenty-eight.

Arkady went through the bridgehouse corridor without knowing where he was heading. He couldn't simply go to his cabin and wait. The dance wouldn't be safe. This was the sort of prison situation that an urku like Karp excelled at. The lights would go out and when they came on again he'd be gone, headed down the ramp in a weighted sack. Or he'd be found in an empty bunker, paint can by his side, an obvious victim of sniffing fumes. Moral lessons would be drawn.

'We never finished our game,' Susan said.

Arkady took a step back to her open door. He'd passed it without noticing because her cabin was dark.

'Don't be afraid,' she said. She turned on the overhead lights long enough for him to see disconnected wires hanging from the radio and the base of the desk lamp. She .sat on the lower bunk, her hair damp and dishevelled as if she had just stepped out of a shower. Her feet were bare and she was dressed in jeans and a loose denim shirt. Her brown eyes seemed to have gone black. In her hand was a glass filled to the brim. The cabin smelled of Scotch. She turned the light off with the bunk switch. 'Close the door,' she said.

'I thought you never closed the door when Soviet men came to call.'

'There's always a first time. Soviet ships never have unscheduled dances, but I hear you're having one right now. That's where all my boys have gone, so it's a night of firsts.'

Arkady closed the door and groped to sit where he'd seen a chair by the bunk. She turned on her bunk lamp, a 20-watt bulb not much brighter than a waning candle.

'For example, I said to myself that I would fuck the first man who walked by my door. Then, Renko, you walked by and I changed my mind. The Eagle's in trouble, isn't it?'

'I have it on good authority that the snow will stop.'

'They lost radio contact an hour ago.'

'We still have them on radar. They're not far behind us.'

'So?'

'So their radio antenna is probably iced up. You know that happens up here.'

Susan put a glass in his hand and poured from a bottle so that the Scotch swelled over the brim. 'Remember,' she said. 'First one to spill gets hit.'

Arkady frowned. 'The Norwegian game again?'

'Yes. They don't call them roundheads for nothing.'

'Is there an American version?'

'You get shot,' Susan said.

'Ah, a short version. I have a different idea. Why not the first one to spill tells the truth?'

'That's the Soviet version?'

'I wish I could say so.'

'No,' Susan said, 'you can have anything but the truth.'

'In that case,' Arkady said and sipped, 'I'll cheat.'

Susan matched him with a swallow. She was well ahead of him, though she didn't seem drunk. The bunk light provided more corona than illumination. Her eyes were shadowed but not softened.

'You haven't been writing any suicide notes, have you?' she asked.

Arkady set his drink on the floor so he could get out a cigarette.

'Light one for me,' she said.

'It's an art in itself, suicide notes.' Arkady lit two Belomors off a match and put one in her hand. Her fingers were smooth, not rough and scarred from cleaning cold fish.

'You speak as an expert?'

'A student. Suicide notes are a branch of literature too often ignored. There's the pensive suicide note, the bitter note, the guilt-ridden note, rarely the comic note because there's always some sense of formality. Usually the writer signs his or her name, or else signs off in some fashion: "I love you," "It's better this way," "Consider me a good Communist." '

'Zina didn't.'

'And the note is generally left where it will be found at the same time as the body. Or found when someone is discovered missing.'

'Zina didn't do that, either.'

'And always, because this is the writer's last testament, she doesn't mind using a whole piece of paper. Not a scrap, not half a page from a notebook - not for the last letter of her life. Which reminds me, how is your writing going?' Arkady looked at Susan's typewriter and books.

'I'm blocked. I thought a ship would be the perfect place to write, but . . . ' She stared at the bulkhead as if peering at some faraway, fading memory. 'Too many people, too little space. No, that's not fair. Soviet writers write in communal apartments all the time, don't they? I have this cabin to myself. But it's like finally having a chance to listen to your very own seashell and there's no sound at all.'

'On the Polar Star I think it would be hard to hear a seashell.'

'True. You know, you're strange, Renko, you're very strange. Remember that poem, the one - '

' "Tell me how men kiss you/Tell me how you kiss"?'

'That's the one. Remember the last line?' she asked, and recited, 'Oh I see, his game is that he knows Intimately, ardently.

There's nothing from me he wants, So I have nothing to refuse.'

That's you. Of all the men on this ship, you're the only one who wants nothing at all.'

'That's not true,' Arkady said. He wanted to stay alive, he thought. He wanted to get through the night.