As soon as I said it another nasty gust of wind hit me in the face. The storm that Noah had warned me about when he called to tell me about the well was finally here.
I untied the boat from the dock cleat and hopped inside moving to stand next to Noah.
“The winds are too high. Chopper won’t be safe.”
“What about the crew then? How will they get out here?”
“They’ll put an ice breaker on one of the boats. It’s not like it’s going to freeze solid right away. The breaker just moves all the ice chunks out of the boat’s path.”
He moved the boat away from the dock slowly. Not trying to barrel over the ice chunks but more push them out of his way.
“Maybe we should have stayed on the rig,” I said logically. “Waited the storm out there until the crew comes.”
He looked at me then, his expression hard. “Olivia, the crew is not going to be out here until the storm blows over. Definitely not tonight, maybe not tomorrow night, either. These Artic storms can go on for days.”
“So?”
“So? You want to spend a couple nights with me alone on that rig?”
I nearly gulped. That was a hard no.
“No, we need to get back to the shore. Now.”
“Like I said.”
Neither of us spoke as I watched him carefully maneuver the boat through the icy waters. And really, it wasn’t that far to go. Not even a half a mile.
Which made it really frustrating when we got stuck a quarter of mile away from shore.
3
Ark
To say this was a shit day did not do justice to the definition of shit days. I lost a productive well. I had to check my pride and call in Olivia for help. Now, because I didn’t trust myself to spend a night on the rig with her alone, I was looking at an ice cluster between here and the dock I knew I wasn’t going to be able to push through.
I turned the boat to the right where there was some open water and started out for one of the cluster of islands where I knew Zeke had a hideaway cabin. I had found it when I was using my down time to explore the area.
When I’d asked Zeke about it the one time, he said he liked to have places scattered around where he could get away from everything. Considering the man lived in Hope’s Point, Alaska, which was the very definition of getting away from everything, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. But it’s not like I was going to press Zeke on anything.
All I knew was that I had a clear path to the island and on that island was a cabin stocked well enough to sustain us for a few days.
A cabin. Fucking worse than if we’d stayed on the rig. I had been so laser focused on getting us out of there I hadn’t considered what might happen if we couldn’t make it to the mainland.
The wind and snow didn’t help either. Visibility was crap so I could only hope I was picking out the right inlet.
“Where are you going?” she asked. Actually shouted at me over the fury of the storm.
“We’re not going to make it,” I shouted back.
“I know. Are we turning back?”
I looked over my shoulder and surveyed the water around me. All I could see were chunks of floating ice. If I turned back now and we couldn’t make it to the rig, then we’d be hosed.
There was no way we could ride out this storm as exposed as we were on the boat. I was left with no option other than to pick the sure bet.
I pointed to the island right in front of us. The tricky part was going to be finding a strip of beach where I could ground us. As we got closer I checked over the sides of the boat trying to see if I could get a sense of how shallow the water was.
Slowly, I piloted the boat forward, eventually feeling the give of sand and gravel catch underneath until we were good and docked.
