Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith

relieve the weight on the buoy line. It was one thing for a cable to snap and fly wildly on an open deck; in the close tunnel of the ramp, a broken cable would be a whip in a barrel.
    “Were you at the dance?” Arkady called down to Karp.
    “No,” Karp yelled. “Hey, Renko, you never answered my question. What did they nail you for?”
    Arkady detected the faint imprint of a Moscow accent.
    Susan turned around. “Is there a problem?”
    Pavel fell again, this time to midway down the net before his lifeline saved him. A wave flowed up the ramp and lifted the net so that it rolled indolently over the fisherman. Arkady had seen men die like this before. The weight of the bag wouldn’t let the lungs breathe, and half the time the bag was in the water. Pavel’s teammate shouted and pulled on the rope, but with Pavel beneath twenty tons of fish and net the line didn’t budge. Yells didn’t help. As another wave broke over the bag it rolled some more, like a walrus crushing a pup. Receding, the wave tried to suck the bag back to the sea, and the lifeline broke.
    Karp jumped down from the landing onto the net—what was another hundred kilos compared to tons? With the next wave, he was up to his waist in freezing water, holding on to the net with one hand and with the other dragging Pavel from a kelplike mass of plastic chafing hair. Karp was laughing. As Pavel sputtered and climbed onto the back of the bag, the trawlmaster pulled himself up to the bridle and helped connect the G-hooks. It was all over in a second. What struck Arkady was that Karp had never hesitated; he had moved with such speed that saving another man’s life seemed less an act of courage than a gymnast’s spin around a bar.
    The catcher boat swung back into the
Polar Star
’s wake, waiting for the call on the net’s catch—so many tons, so much sole, crabs, mud. Gulls hovered at the mouth of the ramp, watching for any fish slipping through the net.
    “Someone from the slime line is the last thing we need here now,” Susan told Slava. “Take him to my cabin.”
    As soon as the G-hooks snapped shut, Karp and his deckhands moved quickly up the ramp, hauling themselves in step by step on one lifeline. The net began stirring behind them. The
Polar Star
had a Trip Plan, a quotaof fifty thousand tons of fish. So many frozen fillets, so much fish meal, so much liver oil for a nation starved for protein to build the muscles that were building Communism. Say 10 percent was lost on board to freezer burn, 10 percent spoiled on shore, 10 percent was split between the port manager and the fleet director, 10 percent was spilled on unpaved roads to villages where there might or might not be a working refrigerator to save the last well-traveled fillets. No wonder the net rushed eagerly to the trawl deck.
    Slava led Arkady forward past the trawl deck and midships by the white hangar of the machinists’ shop. “Can you believe her accent? It’s so good,” he said. “Susan is a fantastic woman. That she can speak so much better than that Uzbek girl—what’s her name?”
    “Dynka.”
    “Dynka, right. No one speaks Russian anymore.”
    True. Upwardly mobile Russians in particular spoke the increasingly popular “Politburo Ukrainian.” Ever since Khrushchev, the Ukrainian-born leaders of the country had spoken in crude, halting Russian, substituting w’s for v’s, until sooner or later everyone in the Kremlin, whether from Samarkand or Siberia, started sounding like a son of Kiev.
    “Say your name,” Arkady asked.
    “Slawa.” Slava eyed Arkady suspiciously. “I don’t know what it is, but you always seem to be getting at something.”
    On the dark seam where fog met the horizon was the glow of another catcher boat working a trawl.
    Arkady asked, “How many boats do we have with us?”
    “We usually have a fleet of four: the
Alaska Miss
, the
Merry Jane
, the
Aurora
and the
Eagle
.”
    “They were all at the dance?”
    “No. The
Alaska Miss
had a