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

It was a fantasy far better than men put together. These women believed they were sailing the seas with all the ordinary intrigues of a women's apartment, as if you couldn't step outside into the wide sea and simply disappear. During the ten months that Arkady had spent on board, he was feeling more and more that the ocean was a void, a vacuum into which people could be drawn at any moment. They should hang on to their bunks, and hold on for their lives if they stepped on deck.

When Slava and Arkady reached the deck, they found Vainu jackknifed over the rail, his lab coat smeared with blood and slime. The axe lay at his feet. He held up two fingers.

'... more,' he blurted and turned his face back into the wind.

A void or a well of too much life. Take your pick.
Chapter Five

Arkady happily followed Slava towards the stern. He could almost breathe in the view: a lone figure at the rail, a catcherboat in the middle distance, black sea folding into grey fog. It was a change from claustroнphobia.

'Look around, Slava said. 'You're supposed to be an expert.'

'Right.' Arkady stopped on command and turned, not that there was much to see: winches and cleats lit by three lamps that even at midday glowed like poisonous moons. In the middle of the deck was an open stairwell that led to a landing directly over the stern ramp. Stern ramps were a feature of modern trawling: the Polar Star's ramp began at the waterline and tunnelled up to the trawl deck on the other side of the aft house. All he could see of the ramp was the part below the well, and all he could see of the trawl deck were the tops of the booms and gantries beyond the smoke stack. Around the stack were oil barrels, spare cables and hawsers. On the boat deck, lifeboats hung on davits. On one side was emergency gear: fire axes, a pike, gaff and spade, as if fire could be fought like foreign troops.

'Well?' Slava demanded. 'According to the girl this is where Zina was headed. Like someone in a fairytale.'

He stopped in mid-stride and whispered to Arkady, 'Susan.'

'Soo-san?' Arkady asked. There was a name that lent itself to Russian pronunciation.

'Shh!' Slava blushed.

The figure at the rail wore a hooded canvas jacket, shapeless pants and gumboots. Arkady had always avoided the Americans. They rarely came down to the factory, and above deck he felt he was watched, that he was expected to try to make contact with them, that he would compromise them, if not himself.

'She's taking a net.' Slava stopped Arkady at a respectнful distance.

Susan Hightower's back was to them as she talked into a hand-held radio. It sounded as if she were alternately answering the Eagle in English and giving instructions to the bridge of the Polar Star in Russian. The catcherboat approached, putting its shoulder to the waves. A rattling came from below. Arkady looked down the well to see a cable of scarred red and white buoys spill down the grooved, rust-brown slope of the ramp. 'If she's working,' he said, 'we can talk to the other Americans.'

'She's the head representative. As a courtesy, we must speak to her first,' Slava insisted.

Courtesy? Here they were shivering and ignored, but Slava was in the throes of social embarrassment.

On the water, the cable straightened as it played out twenty-five, fifty, a hundred metres, each buoy riding its own crest. As the line spread to its full length, the American boat approached on the port side and kept pace.

'This is very interesting,' Slava announced heartily.

'Yes.' Arkady turned his back to the wind. At this longitude there was no land between the North and South Poles and breezes built quickly.

'You know how in our Soviet fleet we come so close to transfer fish,' Slava went on. 'There are battered hulls Ц'

'Battered hulls are a signature of the Soviet fleet,' Arkady agreed.

'This system that the Americans taught us, the "no-contact" system, is cleaner, but it is more intricate and demands more skill.'

'Like sex between spiders,' Susan said without turning her head.

Arkady admired the technique demanded. From the American trawler a fisherman with a strong arm threw a gaff over the trailing line. Another fisherman ran the line along the gunwale to the stern, where a full net of fish covered the trawler's narrow deck. 'They're connectнing,' Susan told the radio in Russian.