She managed to keep the Cat rolling along on a heading of more or less due north, only occasionally having to adjust her course to avoid a building or vehicle that blocked her path. Once she hit something solid and immovable hidden beneath the snow, but the Cat’s tracks and suspension were up and over it before she even had time to react.
The wind still pummeled them, lashing great sheets of snow across the vehicle, but then it would pass them by and their limited but acceptable view of the world would return and they would continue on, edging ever closer to their destination. And it seemed to Emily that with each mile that passed, the ferocity of the wind dropped just a little, the snowfall becoming less and less impenetrable.
She wasn’t sure whether the ride to the coast took one hour or four—after the first few minutes the landscape all seemed to merge into one—but as she rounded the corner of a large yellow building, Emily saw the ocean about a quarter mile ahead of them.
They had made it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Emily was surprised at how still the Arctic Ocean was. It was more like a lake than any of the oceans she had ever seen in real life or on TV. Waves of dirty gray water lapped gently at the snow-covered shoreline, the only movement on an otherwise glasslike surface.
Prudhoe Bay was a horseshoe-shaped concavity about four miles across at its mouth. In the distance Emily could see a set of huge tanks jutting up above the horizon on the opposite side of the bay; ahead of her the bay curved away toward the distant horizon.
She brought the Cat to a halt at what she judged was a safe distance from the shoreline. It was impossible to judge exactly where the land ended and the sand or shale or whatever lay beneath the snow started.
Her view was substantially better than it had been when they first set out; the snow had seemed to almost fade to nothing as they’d neared the coast. Still, low clouds covered the sky from horizon to horizon, making it difficult to see much farther than a mile or so.
“It’s beautiful,” said Rhiannon.
Emily supposed it was, in its own way. Not exactly her first choice of where she would want to spend the rest of her life, but at least she had a life to look forward to, unlike the majority of humanity.
Her eyes followed the coast as it curved off to her right, then headed north. About a mile off from their location, Emily could see a spit of land jutting off from the coastline. A large blue building sat at the end of it, about five hundred feet out into the bay.
“I think that’s where we need to be,” she said to Rhiannon, pointing so the girl could see. “That’s the dock where Jacob said we would find the boat.”
The engine growled back into life as Emily accelerated the Cat toward the distant dock. A relatively clear access road appeared from the snow as they approached the point where the offshoot of land jutted out into the water. It extended up toward the blue building, so Emily turned the Cat onto it, relieved to be on a solid surface for the first time in almost seven hundred miles.
The building was made from huge sheets of corrugated steel with a large gap at the southern end, big enough for the Cat to easily drive through with room to spare. There didn’t appear to have ever been doors to the building, or if there had been, they were long gone. She parked the Cat in a space below a set of metal stairs that led up to a second-level office, reached by a gangway that ran around the perimeter of the building.
Rhiannon was out of the Cat before Emily could stop her. She’d jumped down to the ground and had run around to Emily’s side of the vehicle, closely followed by Thor, before Emily had even managed to open her own door.
“Careful,” Emily yelled, stooping to pick up the Mossberg. The smell of brine and ozone filled her lungs as she stepped off the track of the Cat onto the ground next to Rhiannon.
The seaward side of the building had a large section of its wall cut away, exposing the concrete floor to the sea. Emily assumed that was to allow boats to pull into the building and discharge their cargo and any passengers out of reach of the kind of storm she had just driven through.
There were two boats tied to mooring bollards. One looked like it was a tug boat or a fishing trawler. It bobbed up and down, pulling against the mooring, old automobile tires tied around the body of the boat banging against the concrete dock. There was no way in hell she was going to be able to pilot that thing.
The second boat, moored at the opposite end of the dock, was a lot smaller. Emily judged it to be about twenty or so feet in length; its shape reminded her of some of the fishing boats she would see out on the lakes back in Denison, Iowa, when she was growing up. It had an enclosed cabin, about the same size as the Sno-Cat, with several radio masts and what Emily took to maybe be a radar system of some kind. She wasn’t sure. At the back of the boat were two large outboard motors. Printed along the side of the hull in red were the words: UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA FAIRBANKS—CLIMATE RESEARCH.
That was the boat they were looking for.
“Stay away from the edge,” Emily warned as Rhiannon took a couple of inquisitive steps closer to the boat.
“Do you know how to drive this?” she asked, looking back over her shoulder at Emily as she ran her hands down the hull of the larger boat.
“You ‘pilot’ a boat,” Emily corrected her. “And I have absolutely no clue.”
Rhiannon handed Emily the last of the supplies from the pile they had made on the dockside. Emily stowed them in a back corner of the wheelhouse and on one of the six seats the boat sported.
The controls of the boat were similar to the Dodge Durango and the Sno-Cat only in that they all had a steering wheel. That was about where the similarity ended. There were several gauges and indicators on the control console that Emily figured had something to do with the speed, oil pressure, and wind direction. A black box with a dull LCD screen was perched just behind the steering wheel, and Emily again assumed that this was some kind of navigation instrument similar to a GPS, or maybe it was a sonar. She had no idea. There were no brake or accelerator pedals, just a handle to the right of the captain’s chair that she thought was probably the throttle for the two big engines at the back of the boat. Next to that was the slot for the ignition; the key had been helpfully sitting on the captain’s seat when they’d arrived. To the right of the ignition a large red button read: ENGINE START.
She had no idea what any of the gizmos or other dials actually did, nor did she think that she needed to. “You just need to start the engine and point it north along the coast,” Jacob had explained to her. “It’s a double hull, so it’s really stable. Just don’t hit anything, and you’ll be fine.” She hoped he was right, because she was sure that if she capsized them, they wouldn’t last more than two minutes in these frigid ice-strewn waters.
“Is that the last of it?” she asked.
Rhiannon nodded enthusiastically. “That’s it, Cap’n,” she said, in a pretty good impression of Johnny Depp’s character from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. She had been using the same accent and addressing Emily as Cap’n ever since they had started switching the supplies from the Cat to the boat. Rhia was dreadfully impressed with her own mimicry, apparently, because a fit of giggles always followed the sentence.
Emily didn’t mind; given the circumstances, it was good to hear the kid laughing. And it helped relieve the tension she felt about taking the boat out.
The SUV and Cat had been one thing: she knew where the brakes were and could always stop and just get out if the need arose. But this was something totally different. The closest she had ever come to a boat was watching a rerun of Titanic on TV. If something went wrong out there, she could end up drowning the both of them.