"Smith, Martin Cruz - Polar Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Martin Cruz)

POLAR STAR

BY

Martin Cruz Smith



for Em



Acknowledgments

I thank Captain Boris Nadein and the crew of the Sulak; Captain Mike Hastings and the crew of the Oceanic; Sharon Gordon, Dennis McLaughlin and William Turner for their hospitality in the Bering Sea. Valuable assistance was also provided by Martin Arnold, Kathy Blumberg, Captain D. J. (Jack) Branning, Knox Burger, Dr Gerald Freedman, Beatrice Golden, Professor Robert Hughes, Captain James Robinson and Kitty Sprague.

Most of all I owe Alex Levin and Captain Vladil Lysenko for their patience.

There is a Soviet factory ship named the Polar Star. Neither it nor the Sulak is the Polar Star of this book, which is fiction.

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Part One



WATER


Chapter One

Like a beast, the net came steaming up the ramp and into the sodium lamps of the trawl deck. Like a gleaming pelt, mats of red, blue, orange strips covered the mesh: plastic 'chafing hair' designed to ease the net's way over the rocks of the sea bottom. Like rank breath, the exhaнlation of the sea's cold enveloped the hair in a halo of its own colours, brilliant in the weepy night.

Water hissed from the net's plastic hair onto the wooden boards that provided footing on the deck. Smaller fish, smelts and herring, fell free. Starfish dropнped like stones. Uprooted crabs, even dead, landed on tiptoe. Overhead, gulls and shearwaters hovered at the outer glow of the lamps. As the wind shifted the birds broke into a swirl of white wings.

Usually the net was tipped and disgorged headfirst into the forward chutes to begin with, then ass-end into the rear. Either end could be opened by releasing the knot of a 'zipper', a nylon cord braided through the mesh. Though the men stood by with shovels ready for work, the trawlmaster waved them off and stepped into the water raining from the net's plastic 'hair' and stared straight up, removing his helmet the better to see. The coloured strips dipped like running paint. He reached and spread the 'hair' from the mesh, then looked into the dark to find the other, smaller light riding the ocean swells, but already fog hid the catcherboat the net had come from. From his belt the trawlmaster took a double-edged knife, reached through the dripping plastic hair and sawed the belly of the net down and across. Fish began dropping by ones and twos. He gave the knife a last furious tug and stepped back quickly.

Out of the net and into the light spilled a flood of silver pollock, a whole school which had been caught en masse and dredged up like bright coins. There were thick, bruised-looking bullheads; overlapping waves of flatfish, blood-red on the eyed side, pale on the blind side; sculpin with heads like dragons; cod, some bloated like balloons by their air bladders, some exploded into soft tissue and pink slime; coral crabs as hairy as tarantulas. The bounty of the night-time sea.

And a girl. She slid loose-limbed like a swimmer as the fish poured from the net. On the deck she rolled lazily, arms awry, against a mound of sole, a bare foot tangled in crabs. A young woman, not a girl. Her hair was short and her blouse and jeans were sodden and twisted, heavy with water and sand, unprepared for any return to the world of air. The trawlmaster lifted a strand of hair that had wrapped itself across her eyes, revealing the open surprise in them, as if the ship's lamplit fog were golden clouds, as if she had risen in a boat sailing towards heaven itself.
Chapter Two

Originally when it came down the rails in Gdansk, the Polar Star's four superstructures had been a dazzling white and the gantries and booms a candy yellow. The decks were clean silver chains wound round the winches; the facing on the deckhouses was stylishly raked. In fact the Polar Star had looked like a ship.

Twenty years of saltwater had repainted it with rust. The top decks had accumulated wooden planks, full barнrels of lubricating oil and empty barrels for fish oil, the refuse of piled nets and floats. From the black stack with its red Soviet band drifted the dark smoke of a diesel in poor condition. Now, seen from a distance with a good view of the hull battered by unloading side trawlers in bad weather, the Polar Star resembled not so much a factory ship as a combination factory-and-junkyard cast into the sea and making improbable headway through the waves.