Nightwatch (+ audio)

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Sea Level
77°10’50” N / 67°42’ 23” E
20 km north of Severny Island, Russia
Arctic Ocean

Captain Yú Ling never saw the missiles that struck his ship, though they hit in broad daylight at 0300 hours local time.
An hour before, Ling had woken at 0200 during the depths of the soft twilight that served as night this far above the Arctic Circle. He often shrugged on a parka to stand out here on the bridge wing of his ship to observe his first voyage through the Arctic Ocean. The complete lack of true night made sleep feel almost irrelevant.
Worries drove him from his bed as well. This maiden voyage of a new ship through the Arctic without an icebreaker escort would become a highlight upon his record as a sea captain. All of his previous journeys had taken the forty-eight-day southern route past Southeast Asia, India, and up through the Suez Canal. Never before had such a large container ship sailed unescorted through this nineteen-day Northeast Passage from Shanghai through the Bering Sea to pass over Russia to Europe. A full month faster. Knowing it for fact made it no less amazing.
Ling could only shake his head at the modern wonders. To travel Beijing to Rotterdam so quickly was unimaginable until only the last few years. And now the melting Arctic ice was making it a reality. The new Polar Silk Road would let China sell more to the hungry maw of Europe faster and with much lower transit costs than ever before.
He much preferred the peace here in the high Arctic. The waterways along southeast Asia and up through the Suez were clogged with constant traffic. Even the vast stretches of the Indian Ocean were hazardous as hundreds of massive cargo and oil ships jostled for the most fuel-efficient route. Here they traveled these waters alone, except for the occasional Russian oil tanker or fishing boat.
The September air was so fresh and crisp, matching a cold winter day in Beijing, a few degrees below freezing but none of the throat-catching pollution. It made him daydream of soft snowfalls. He could almost pretend he heard the crackle and smelled the smoke of long-ago wood fires.
Standing out on the bridge wing of the Lucky Progress, he could see the far white horizon of the pack ice to starboard as little more than a thin white stripe between the dark blue of the ocean and the deep blue of the sky. They were in a land and time of no true night, but the aurora danced in brilliant greens and smooth pinks. They faded with the slow rising twilight and disappeared, though it would be hours before the sun crested the ocean’s surface.
His wife’s photographs of their vacations by the sea always looked the same. They must have a thousand pictures of a stripe of sand, a stretch of ocean, and a sky of blue. She could never explain in a way he could understand how each wove a unique image, but the thought of her taking such photos made him smile in this barren place. She certainly still looked fine in her sleek black one-piece. She rarely went in the water now except with their grandchild, even then rarely past her own knees, though the girl at six was as fine a swimmer as her grandmother had been.
Someday they would have unrestricted bandwidth from anywhere in the world. For now Ling took a photo with his phone to send to her the next time he was in port. The curiously dark sea, the distant white line of ice pack, the crisp blue of the morning sky.
He leaned out to look down the twenty-story steel cliff of his container ship’s side. Waves less than a meter high and no free ice at all—they’d left that behind twenty-one hours and eight hundred kilometers ago in the Vilkitsky Strait. His ship—with the strengthened hull to brush through the occasional patches of new ice at speed—had worked flawlessly. Here lay nothing but clear water to the distant horizon.

Initial Publication: January 31, 2023
Print Pages: 370
Audio length: 9:17
Narrator: Read by Author

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