“How long have your girls been on board the ship?” Ryan asked.
“Three months, give or take a couple weeks,” Harlan replied. “The plan was to leave them there for three months. They got ways of keeping themselves from getting pregnant too easy. Six months, they would have learned a lot of things. Then this quake hit and set this iceberg loose. The tribes, we all saw it coming. Just figured we had more time.”
“How many Russians do you think there are?” Ryan asked.
“Able and willing to fight us?”
“Yeah.”
“Twenty, maybe as many as forty.”
Ryan looked at J.B., turning the numbers around in his head. “What do you think?”
“If Harlan’s people join in,” the Armorer said, “it puts us closer to even. We wait until dark, give them time to bed down, mebbe it’ll get a little easier if we can put a boarding party onto the ship and reduce the numbers before all hell breaks loose.”
Ryan nodded, then looked around at the rest of the group, waiting.
Everyone was in favor of throwing their lot in with the Inuit and taking the Russian ship. “We don’t really have a choice if we want to get off this iceberg, lover,” Krysty said.
In the distance another cannon burst of cracking ice sounded. The glacier shivered, the ground actually seeming to bob beneath their feet.
“Wow!” Harlan exclaimed. “That was a big one.”
Ryan turned back to the chief. “Let’s go take a look at that ship.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Russian frigate,” J.B. said. “Probably the Krivak-class type II. The Ills had helicopter additions. And the US came out with the four-inch blasters aft that you see covered over by the tarp.”
Ryan scanned the big ship from stem to stern with his field glasses. He noted some movement on her decks. Evidently Captain Vitkin had gotten disturbed about his search-and-capture team’s failure to reappear and had put out extra guards.
Ice climbed more than halfway up the sides of the big ship. There were also places that looked like they had been cleared of ice that threatened to climb up on the decks. As Ryan shifted his field glasses to the frigate’s prow, he saw a four-man crew working on roped scaffolding with axs and sledges to break the ice free there. Rust had settled into the ship like rad cancer, starting to eat holes through the plate steel. In places, cut metal had been riveted over what Ryan had to assume were holes that went all the way through.
“Been cannibalizing their own ship to hold the outer hull together,” J.B. said. “You take a close look at the plates that have been placed, you can see where a welding torch has cut through them.”
Ryan nodded. He had noticed the same thing.
As had the dead Russians they had left behind at the firefight, the sailors aboard the ship wore uniforms. They also carried blasters.
Tarps covered the big blasters on the deck, drawing Ryan’s attention.
“Got cannon and heavy machine blasters on the decks,” he said.
The Armorer nodded. “Saw them. With those tarps over them, you have to think they’re taking care of them for a reason.”
“Harlan,” Ryan called.
“Yeah,” the Inuit chief responded.
“The deck blasters work?”
“Blasters?”
“Guns.”
“They did twelve years ago or thereabouts,” Harlan answered. “That was the last time anybody tried to take the ship by force. Those heavy-cal machine guns chewed up every warrior caught out in the open.”
“They attack by day or night?”
“By night. Are you kidding?”
“And the Russians turned them back?” J.B. asked.
“They got goggles that let them see at night,” Harlan replied.
“And you hoped to pull off a night time attack against them?” Ryan said.
“Yeah. Seven years ago, the Russians got a virus that killed off a lot of them. I know about it because some of the tribes they traded with were offered guns in exchange for cures.”
“Did they give them a cure?” Ryan asked. “No. Everybody hoped the Russians would die down to a handful. It would be easier to take the ship. But they brought up every evil-tasting concoction that the Inuit tribes could think up for nearly five months. Nobody ever passes up a chance to get guns from those people.”