James Axler – Way of the Wolf

“But he captured your people?” Ryan said.

Harlan grinned. “Sure. We let him.”

“Why?” Krysty asked.

“Vitkin has guns,” Harlan said. “With the ice breaking up the way it has, hunting and fishing areas among the Inuit are getting more tense. Man who has the most guns is going to get to hunt and fish. Everybody else is going to starve. Me, I intend to have a bigger tribe.”

“And do what?” Ryan asked.

“Mebbe go south,” Harlan said.

“Lot of ocean to cover.”

“Vikings did it,” the chief said confidently, “in really small boats.”

“Then why let Vitkin capture your people?” Dean asked. “Seems stupe.”

Ryan gave his son a glance, letting Dean know he had said more than was necessary.

Dean nodded.

“Actually it’s a pretty smart thing to do,” Harlan said. “Vitkin’s numbers aboard the ship have gotten low. They’re having a lot of stillborn lately because their gene pool is so messed up. But the Russian sailors are lazy. They get our women on the ship, they have sex with them, hope they turn up pregnant and use them as slaves to cook and clean.”

“You sent those girls into that?” Doc asked in an incredulous voice.

“That’s cruel,” Mildred said.

Harlan looked defensive, as if afraid he were going to lose the goodwill of his new friends. “I asked for volunteers. I had four girls who said they would go. No pressure from me. Sex is sex. Enjoyed sex a time or two with a couple of them myself. You’ve got to have something to do when it’s too cold to go out and do anything else. Hated to see them go.”

Ryan didn’t like the idea, but he saw the logic in it.

“And they were trading off a few months of discomfort against a training that would make them valuable,” Harlan went on.

“As maids and gaudy sluts?” Mildred asked.

“I don’t know about gaudy sluts,” Harlan said.

“A girl who sells sex for money,” Mildred elaborated.

“No.” Harlan waved the accusation away.

“Cooking and cleaning aren’t the only things the girls get trained on. Vitkin also puts them to work making reloads for their weapons and doing some repair work on the guns.” His eyes widened. “Do you know how much those girls will be in demand when they get away from the Russians?”

“Why hasn’t anyone ever done it before?” Ryan asked.

Harlan swiveled his gaze to the one-eyed man. “Hell, they have. You think I thought of this all on my own? A lot of Inuit tribes who have chiefs like me have thought of this. I bet there’s nine tribes I know of right now who’ve benefited from their girls getting on the Russian ship, then escaping and bringing back the knowledge they learned. This is just business. Why do you think the Russians try to hang on to their own gene pool so long? They have sex the second and third generations because the kids generally won’t try to escape the ship. Soon as they’re born and up and around, the Russians kill the mother. Or the mother escapes and leaves them there because it’s too hard to escape carrying a baby.”

“But the more the Inuit learn from the Russians,” Mildred said, “the less reason they have to go back.”

Harlan smiled and nodded like a teacher who had just gotten the correct answer to a difficult question from the brightest of his students. “Exactly. Got a tribe who sent a few girls in to learn the hydroponics procedure the Russians developed on the ship, got two girls back, which is a pretty good return. That was twenty years ago. Now they’re set up in a ville on a coastline where they can reach the dirt, put in some of the seeds the Russians got from gutting the birds in the area and raise a few vegetables that hadn’t been seen in this area before. Other tribes work themselves to death finding things to trade them.”

“The Russians had a hydroponics farm set up on the ship?” J.B. asked.

“No,” Harlan answered. “They set one up after they found out how trapped they were.”

“A goodly number of the sailors for the Russians at the time,” Doc put in, “were men taken from the collective farms. They were conscripted by the government to learn the navy after learning how to farm in bleak conditions sometimes not too unlike what we’re seeing here. It makes sense that some of the crew would be able to put a hydroponics farm together.”