Destroyer 124: By Eminent Domain

By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Chapter 1

Sometimes, if he scrunched up his eyes tight enough and concentrated really, really hard, he could almost taste the warm apple pie. Other times it was roast pork, hot from the oven and spitting delicious, mouthwatering fat. This day, the last day of the rest of Brian Turski's young life, it was freshly baked chocolatechip cookies.

In his mind's eye, they were baked to perfection. Not cooked so much that they were brittle. Just soft enough that when they were broken in two, the chocolate formed drooping, gooey threads between the two halves.

He took a deep breath, savoring the remembered aroma.

The smell that flooded his nostrils was that of diesel exhaust and commingled human body odors. And the cold.

Here, cold was a living thing-assaulting all the senses at once. You could see it, taste it, smell it. On a still night, when the snow fell, you could hear it. Each flake hit like frozen thunder. Mostly, though, you could feel it. Seeping through boots and gloves. Leeching deep into bone.

It was the cold Brian had to deal with every day. His wife's cooking-including her trademark chocolate-chip cookies-was a million miles away.

Brian opened his eyes. He was in the back of a truck. Fifteen other men were arranged on two benches around him. They were bouncing along a rutted rural road.

"Your wife's cooking again, huh?" grunted the man beside him. Like Brian, he was tall and thin, his strong arms hidden beneath his heavy parka.

Brian nodded glumly.

"Why do you torture yourself?" his seatmate asked.

More than once, each one of the men in that truck had asked himself the same question. The answer they invariably gave was that it put food on the table and a roof over the heads of their families. For eight months each year, they trudged out into rural Alaska during the long, dark months of winter for the same reason the surgeon went to the hospital or the baker went to the bakery. It was their job.