To my agent, Barbara Poelle, thanks for the trust and support, and the laughs. I don’t know how someone so brilliant can also be so funny. To Marisa Vigilante, my editor, whose ability to see through the mist sharpened the leading edges of this novel more than I can say. To Alison Masciovecchio and Dana Kaye, my in-house and outside publicists, who do the hard work of turning unknown writers into the known. To Evan Camfield and the copy editors at Random House, who put up with my penchant for inventing new words and strange new uses of punctuation. To the sales and promotion staff at Random House—without you guys pushing hard every day, all the writing in the world would get us nowhere.
And finally to the readers, who put up their hard-earned cash, trusting that we will entertain them and sweep them away for the four hundred or so pages of each book. Thanks for the faith. I will do all I can to never let you down.
PROLOGUE
Bering Sea, November 2012
The fifty-foot trawler Orlovsky Star pushed on through frigid Arctic waters and a lingering fog that seemed to have no end. The sea was unusually calm and the wind nonexistent, but with the outside temperature dipping to fifteen degrees Fahrenheit and the water holding just above the freezing point, the conditions were anything but benign.
Alexander Petrov stood at the wheel inside the darkened pilothouse, a grim air surrounding him. His weathered face, shaved head, and clenched jaw all suggested a burden his broad shoulders were struggling to carry. He stared into the darkness ahead of the boat, listening to the thrum of the engine and the occasional muted thump of ice banging against the hull.
So far the ice had been thin: small, free-floating chunks that his boat could slide through at half speed. But the pack ice formed quickly at this time of year, spreading south like a plague, and just an hour before there had been no ice at all.
Guiding the boat on feel as much as sight, Petrov considered the danger: If the ship didn’t reach warmer waters soon, they’d be trapped and the thin hull ground into metal filings long before any rescuer could reach them.
Then again, perhaps they deserved such a fate for what they were attempting to do.
As another impact reverberated through the cabin, a voice spoke from behind him. “It’s getting thicker. We need to make better speed.”
Petrov glanced into the recesses of the darkened pilothouse. A heavyset man gazed back at him. This was Vasili, a Russian of mixed European and Asian descent and the broker of their unholy deal, the keeper of their unusual human cargo.
Despite the cold, Petrov could see a thin sheen of perspiration on Vasili’s upper lip. If Petrov was right, Vasili’s mind was reeling in a battle between greed and fear, between the possibilities of life-altering wealth just days away and a horrible death in the crushing embrace of the ice.
“What are you really worried about, Vasili?”
“That we’re lost,” he said bluntly, glancing at an exposed circuit board and what had been their navigation system.
The GPS receiver had shorted out eight hours before, the screen flashing and the casing catching fire in a shower of sparks. Petrov had examined it briefly but saw that it was clearly beyond repair. For an hour he’d used the stars to guide them, but the fog had thickened and he’d been forced to rely on the vessel’s compass.
“I was a fisherman before I joined the navy. I learned to navigate at the hands of my father,” Petrov assured him. “I know what I’m doing,”
Vasili stepped closer to him. “The crew is worried,” he whispered. “They say our journey is cursed.”
“Cursed?”
“Orcas followed us down the channel,” Vasili explained. “And we’ve seen sharks every morning. Far too many for such northern waters.”
That had seemed odd, Petrov thought, as if the predators of the sea were shadowing them, waiting for a meal to be delivered into their hungry bellies. But he hoped it was mere coincidence.
“It’s almost dawn,” Petrov said, changing the subject. “We’ll have a few hours of light, nothing more, but it should be enough. The fog will lift and we’ll make better time.”
Petrov’s statement was designed to ease Vasili’s fears, but even as he spoke, they found another mass of ice and a grinding resonance traveled down the starboard side. From the sound alone, they could tell it was thicker and heavier than those they had hit before.