Humphrey Hawksley - Man on Ice - Russia vs the USA - in Alaska

The helicopter shuddered against a brutal surge of wind. She was a Bell 214ST, an old military transport warhorse, probably from Iraq, maybe even Vietnam. There were straps and buckles to lock in a stretcher, two if needs be. Carrie would insist on flying with Akna to Nome. She wouldn’t have it any other way, which meant Rake would go too, so ten minutes on the ground. They would come back tomorrow, weather permitting.

Carrie tucked the ankles of her jeans into her heavy-duty hiking boots, then lifted her headset, pushed her hair under the hood of her green parka, and zipped it up to her chin in preparation for the freezing weather outside. She held her medical pack on her lap. She turned her engagement ring towards him, green and blue, jade and sapphire, from an old gem shop in Kabul. She smiled quickly at him, as the ring vanished into her red Gore-Tex glove.

Rake pulled up his sleeve to remind her of the tattoo of his O-negative blood group on the inside of his right forearm. She had made him get it as a condition of her marrying him. He pulled his woolen hat over his ears and secured his green military Arctic warfare jacket as Carrie had hers. She was an inch taller than him, and would never let him forget it.

Akna’s emergency was returning them to a familiar, professional place. Carrie was leading, Rake watching their backs, and, at that moment, a new unfamiliar voice came across the radio, nervous, tense. ‘This is Wales. Mike, are you out there? We’ve got a man through the ice. Anyone from Erickson?’

Mike was the pilot, Erickson the helicopter company. Wales, twenty-five miles away, was the closest mainland settlement.

‘This is Mike. I’m landing at Little Diomede now. What’s happened?’

A disjointed reply came with the ebb and flow of static. One of the elders of the settlement had been cutting through sea ice to catch crabs. The ice had broken, and he had fallen through. With climate change it was becoming impossible for even the most experienced to judge the thickness of the ice. Underneath, the water temperature wouldn’t be much above freezing, which meant hypothermia setting in fast. They had gotten him out in time. But now he had suffered a heart attack.

‘I’m twenty-five minutes out from you.’ Mike turned the aircraft side on and brought it in over the boats on the shingle until they were a few feet above the helipad.

Carrie flashed a worried look. ‘Is a doctor there?’

The skids settled on the frozen helipad. The engine noise dropped, the rotor blades slowing. Mike turned to speak directly to Carrie. ‘Yes, ma’am. They do have a doctor.’

‘Best if we stay here,’ said Rake. ‘Mike goes to Wales and comes back. It’ll be forty minutes’ round trip. It’ll take that time to get Akna down.’

That was it. The triage. The call on which casualty got treated first. They had done it together a dozen times. They wouldn’t know about Akna’s condition until Carrie had examined her. Rake and Mike knew this environment. Carrie nodded her agreement.

Henry pulled open the door, his weathered face clouded by his heavy breathing. Little in his craggy features had changed over the ten years. His marksman’s eyes were as sharp as ever and he didn’t look a day older. A gust of freezing air hit them, stinging their faces. Rake got down, wind roaring all around, and helped Carrie out.

‘Fog’s coming. We need to be quick,’ said Henry. He embraced Rake, and firmly gripped Carrie’s hand. He had raised a dozen children like Rake, their parents vanished or useless through drugs and drink. Rake and Henry were like father and son.

As Mike took the helicopter up again, they crouched, shielding luggage from the down draught. The sound of the throbbing rotor blades faded, leaving a sudden quiet. Carrie took in the island’s desolation.

‘I’ll bring you both up,’ said Henry.

Carrie hoisted her pack onto her back. ‘Are Akna’s parents with her?’ she asked.

Without answering, Henry set off. That was enough to confirm to Rake what he had suspected. ‘They’re not,’ he said, taking Carrie’s arm to steady her on the slippery ground.

‘Can they find them?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘She’s a child. She’ll need her mom with her.’

Rake wasn’t sure what to say. Akna’s father, Don Ondola, adopted son to Henry and adoptive brother and best friend to Rake, had murdered her mother in a drug-crazed rage. He was also the father of his daughter’s unborn child.

Little Diomede, Alaska, USA

Carrie held her patient’s feverish hand. Soaked in sweat, Akna stared up at this stranger. She lay on sheets on a lumpy black sofa in a hut built into the hillside next to the Catholic church that had fallen derelict when the missionaries left. She had a rounded face with a dimple on her left cheek. Her skin was creased and dried from synthetic dope smuggled onto the island. Her eyes carried an emptiness Rake had seen so often when the human spirit just gives up. Akna had shaved her head halfway up the skull leaving a neat ridge of black hair on the top. She wore a red T-shirt, with a silver heart on the front. She was a kid, like millions of teenagers who experimented with fashion and hairstyles as they grew up. Somewhere, in what he saw, was the little girl whom Rake used to put on the slide in the school playground. Akna was five when he last saw her, laughing and full of excitement. She was about to give birth or die but it was as if neither one meant anything to her. Her waters had broken thirty-six hours earlier, but she had told no one and infection had brought her temperature dangerously high. Now she was barely conscious.

‘We need to sit you up, Akna, to change you,’ said Carrie softly. The room was warm and Carrie worked, jacket off, in a red denim shirt, sleeves rolled up and hair held back with a rubber band. In an adjoining room, Henry and three other men prepared a stretcher to carry Akna down.

‘A helicopter is taking you to Nome. You’ll be fine, Akna. Just fine,’ said Joan, laying a towel wet with sterilized cold water on Akna’s brow. She wore one-piece blue dungarees and was a thin sinewy woman, with short black hair and wide concentrating eyes.

Rake’s phone lit with a message from the helicopter pilot.

Nome then back you.

That was bad. It should have been forty minutes. Now, Rake calculated an hour from Wales to Nome, fifteen minutes at the hospital, maybe another fifteen minutes for refueling, then an hour and a half back to Little Diomede. Maybe more. He touched Carrie’s shoulder. She followed him to the next room where Henry was. He spoke quietly. ‘Mike messaged me. There’ll be a delay.’

‘How long?’ asked Carrie.

‘A couple of hours at least.’

‘It’s too long, Rake. We need to get another helicopter.’

‘I’ll try.’

Carrie returned to Akna.

‘We’ll take her down to the school anyway,’ said Henry. ‘Get her close to the helipad.’

The National Guard in Nome kept a Black Hawk on standby, and Rake punched in the number and spoke to a duty officer who said they were handling a civilian emergency call a hundred miles north where bad weather had come down. Rake dialed his military unit at the Elmendorf-Richardson base outside of Anchorage. ‘We might be able to lay our hands on a Black Hawk that’s coming out of service,’ said the sergeant who answered.

‘Use my name, Captain Raymond Ozenna, and put us top to the list, sergeant,’ instructed Rake, knowing that the chances of getting anything within a couple of hours was slim.

‘Understood, sir.’

The hut shook as a wind gusted through the east side of the island. Rake pulled back a torn curtain and pushed open an ice-covered window to gauge the weather. The way clouds scudded across the property, snow was coming. A couple of hours and Little Diomede could be wrapped in fog or howling blizzard. Henry was right. Temperatures and conditions could change in minutes