“Ah, what, the island’s name was Anua.”
“Got a map?”
Jack fished around in his daypack and tossed a folded piece of paper over to her. She flattened it on the bunk and found the little island halfway down the chain, ringed in a circle of black Marksalot she had no difficulty in identifying as Jack’s handiwork. Jack had always leaned toward black Marksalot for notes, arrows and marginal balloons on any piece of evidence that was write-onable, to the vocal disgust of the district attorneys who had then to introduce the evidence into the trial record. “What’s on it? On Anua, I mean?”
“An airstrip dating back to World War II, an active volcano. That’s about it. Pretty standard for an Aleutian island.”
Kate measured the air miles between Dutch Harbor and Anua, her brows puckered. “Mmm.”
He waited, but that was all she said. “Alcala and Brown left the Avilda at about four in the afternoon, in the skiff. They had a flashlight and a bunch of jerry cans.”
“That all?”
“Uh-huh.”
“No survival gear? No tent, no sleeping bags, not even matches?”
“According to Gault, they weren’t anticipating spending the night.”
“This was March?”
“Yeah.”
“In the Aleutians?”
“Yeah.”
Kate lay back down on the bunk. “Kind of gives new meaning to the word ‘dumb,’ don’t it. What happened?”
“What you might expect, and remember this was the first trip north for both of them.”
“First and last.”
“Yeah. Anyway, according to Gault, Skinner and Nordhoff the skiff made it into shore, and then it started snowing. The crew on the boat lost sight of the island and the skiff. It socked in overnight. The next morning there were two inches of snow on the ground and no sight of skiff or crew.”
“Did they go ashore to check?”
Jack shook his head. “No.”
“What?”
“No, they didn’t. They said they had no way to get there. The skiff was already ashore.”
Still disbelieving, Kate demanded, “I presume they had a life raft?”
“Two of them.” Jack grinned at her. “Gault says he didn’t want to use them, in case he ran into trouble later on.”
Kate stared at him. “And this is the good ship Lollipop you signed me onto? Thanks a whole bunch, Jack. So what happened next?”
“Gault called the Coast Guard.”
Something in his voice made Kate say sharply, “How soon?”
“From the Coast Guard logs it was noon the day of the disappearance before Gault got around to calling them.” He looked up with a bland expression. “He ran the Avilda up and down and around the island, looking for signs of life through the binoculars. When he couldn’t find any, he pulled the hook and set course for Dutch.”
Kate was speechless. Jack’s smile was bland. “It gets better. When the Coast Guard fired up a chopper and took a run out there, it seems that Gault had given them the wrong coordinates, so they searched the wrong part of the island.”
When Kate found her voice it was only for a very weak, “You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. The Coasties didn’t discover this until a couple of weeks later, when the operator who took the call compared notes with the pilot. So they went out again. Didn’t find anything that time, either.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nope.”
“Not even a jerry can? An oar? A hat or a glove? Nothing?”
“Nothing.” Jack refiled the list of boat names in the folder, just missing losing the entire mass on the floor.
“Why the hell hasn’t Gault been fired?” Kate demanded.
Jack smiled. “Because Captain Harry Gault had the forethought to marry a daughter of one of Alaska Ventures’ board of directors. Just last January, in fact.”
Kate folded her hands behind her head and stared at the ceiling. After a moment, she said thoughtfully, “How very strategic of him.”
“The guy is slick,” Jack admitted. “And of course, no one has been able to prove otherwise, Skinner and Nordhoff back Gault up, so no charges have been filed.”
“But.”
“But,” Jack agreed. “The board of Alaska Ventures is as nervous as a cat with two tails in a room full of rocking chairs.”
“Alcala and Brown have family?”
Jack bestowed an approving smile on her. “Yes, they do, and they want to know what happened, and they’re starting to get loud about it. Marine insurance is not exactly cheap or easy to come by, so the board of Alaska Ventures has begun a little discreet investigation of Harry Gault’s past.”
“And now the state’s getting into the act.”
“You and me, babe.”
She twisted her head to stare at him. “What’s this ‘you and me babe’ crap? I don’t see you out on the deck of the Avilda, soaking wet and freezing cold and up to your ass in tanner crab.” And puking your guts up over the rail every five minutes, she could have added, but didn’t.
Jack managed to look hurt. “You’re the one with the fishing experience.”
“Fishing for salmon in Prince William Sound and a couple of months fishing for king crab out of Kodiak isn’t quite the same thing as trying to drown myself in the Boring goddam Sea,” she retorted. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this. The Aleutians. In October. I must be out of my mind.”
“You never did answer me. About why you did come. I would have lost money betting you wouldn’t.”
“Why’d the bear go round the mountain?” She shrugged. “I’ve never been on the Peninsula, or seen the Aleutians. I could never afford the airfare.”
Unconvinced, Jack let it slide. “So. Tell me about the good ship Avilda and her happy crew.”
Kate looked back at the ceiling. “She’s a good ship, all right, or she would be if someone took the time to take care of her. She deserves a better crew than those assholes.”
“All of them are assholes?”
Kate thought back to her first day on board. Harry, his face congested with suppressed rage, had shouted at her. “Nordensen says I gotta hire you, okay. But I don’t like women, and I don’t like Injuns, and I especially don’t like Injun women on board my ship, they’re nothing but trouble. You stay out of the guys’ pants, you hear?” He’d shaken his fist in her face, practically frothing at the mouth. “You fuck one of us, you fuck us all, you understand? Any trouble between the guys over you and you’re off the goddam boat!” He’d leered at poor Andy, who had blushed beet red beneath his tan and hung his head.
Kate, unperturbed, had given Harry a cool nod. “I heard you the first time.”
In truth, she felt Harry had done her a favor with the blunt announcement. All or none? That was fine with Kate. Harry Gault wasn’t much of a sailor or a fisherman, but he understood the dynamics of a cramped and isolated workplace. So far, neither Ned nor Seth, nor Harry for that matter, had made any moves in her direction. There’d been a few leers and some crude remarks, but no pawing, and from her last fishing experience she knew how fortunate she was.
“They’re men,” she told Jack. “They’re fishermen. They’re crab fishermen. And they’re Alaskan crab fishermen. Of course they’re assholes.” She thought, and added, a trifle reluctantly, “Except maybe for Andy, my bunkie.”
Jack sat very still. “You’re bunking with a guy?”
Kate raised an eyebrow in his direction. “Don’t go all Neanderthal on me, Jack. He’s just a kid, and from California at that. The kind of guy who thinks the New Age arrived with the invention of the fast forward button on the VCR remote.”
The amusement in her voice when she spoke, warm and somewhat rueful, was not reassuring. “What about Skinner and Nordhoff?”
“Too soon to say, but they’re in tight with Gault,” Kate said. “They hardly talk to Andy or me outside of work.”
“And Gault?”
Kate gave a short, unamused
laugh. “For the health of every fisherman afloat on the Pacific Ocean, Harry Gault should shoulder an oar and walk inland until he finds someone who doesn’t know what it is and stay there for the rest of his life.”
“Umm,” Jack said, who had never considered poetry necessary, and who was more interested in the way Kate tucked her hair behind her left ear anyway. “What did you pull down, this trip?” he asked idly, gaze on that left ear.
“The usual crew share. Eight percent of the gross.”
“Which was?”
“Eighty-three hundred bucks.”
His eyes widened. “Wow. Eighty-three hundred? For eight days work?” He gave a respectful whistle. “Hell, that’s, what, that’s almost eleven hundred a day, isn’t it?” She nodded. “Wow,” he said again. “Marry me and support me in the style in which I intend to become accustomed.”
She stretched out her inconsiderable length in one long, lazy reach. She fluttered her eyelashes and patted the bunk. “Mmm, I don’t know. Let me review your application one more time.”
She didn’t have to ask him twice.
Three
THEY ROSE EARLY the next morning, hungry from no dinner the night before, and went looking for a restaurant. Over breakfast at the Unisea Restaurant, equally beguiled by the eggs Benedict and the view of the old submarine dock, Kate said impulsively, “Let’s fly out there.”
“Out where?” Jack said around a mouthful of Canadian bacon.
“Anua.” Kate waved a hand at the clear sky. “It’d be flying in the face of Providence not to take advantage of that, so let’s fly out there and take a look for ourselves. You have got Cecily with you, right? You’re supposed to be caribou hunting and sight-seeing, you must have brought her along.”
He swallowed. “How far is it?”
“If that map you gave me last night is accurate, I figure about a hundred and sixty miles from Dutch.”
“Hmm.” He studied the ceiling and chewed, figuring. “Shouldn’t take us more than an hour and twenty minutes, each way, and we’ll have fuel to spare, just in case. I suppose we could.”
“Please? I’d like to see for myself the place where whatever the hell it was happened, happened.”
He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “Let me check with Flight Service on the forecast. If the weather’s with us, we’ll do it.”
*
After breakfast Kate left Jack to check in with the Avilda. Nordhoff, Skinner and Gault were all off somewhere, leaving Andy on watch. “Hey, Kate!” he called across the boats between the Avilda and the boat slip. “And where were you last night, little girl?”
“None of your business,” she told him sweetly. “We still leaving tomorrow morning?”
He nodded. “If that part comes in. The skipper doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry.”
“Good,” Kate said, although she wondered why, after such a successful run, Harry Gault wasn’t hot to get hot on the crab again.
“Look what I got!” Andy said, delving into his coat pocket and producing a small object wrapped in butcher paper. He unfolded the paper with exquisite care and displayed the object therein with immense pride.
Kate looked and saw a small rectangular lump of what might have been ivory, carved into the very rough image of a fat, smiling little Buddha. “A billiken,” she said. “‘As a good luck bringer, I’m a honey, to bring good luck, just rub my tummy.’”
“Oh, you know the verse!” Andy said, disappointed. “This guy came by and asked me if I wanted to buy it. He didn’t want to sell it because it had been in his family for six generations, but he was broke and needed the airfare to get home. I didn’t want to buy it like that, a family antique and all, but what could I do? The guy said I’d be doing him a favor.”
With a superhuman effort Kate refrained from asking how much the guy had charged him for the figurine, and with still another superhuman effort did not tell Andy that billikens had not appeared on the Alaskan scene until the Klondike Gold Rush in 1899 brought the first Orientals into the Yukon and some sourdough thought up the billiken in Buddha’s image. She even managed to refrain from asking how someone could just “wander” by the fourth boat in a raft, and was justifiably proud of herself and her restraint.
“Isn’t Alaska just the greatest place?” Andy said, beaming. Fortunately it was a rhetorical question and Kate was not required to answer. “Oh, I almost forgot. Want your check?” He handed her a slip of paper.
“Well, since it’s here.” She examined the figures written on it, her mouth pulled into a wry expression. $8,300. Eighty-three hundred smackeroos. Eight thousand three hundred dollars in legal tender for all debts, public and private. No matter how many times she read it, it came out the same.
Yes indeed, Jack Morgan just might live after all. Folding the check carefully, she tucked it into her pocket and went down to her stateroom for a change of clothes.
Andy watched quizzically when she reemerged on deck and started back across the railing. “Where are you off to now?”
She flashed a grin at him. “Got a date.”
*
He cast his eyes heavenward. “Ask a stupid question.”
After extensive research and careful study of the resulting data, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has decreed that on average there are only eight days of sunshine per year in the Aleutian Islands. This day, midway through October, usually the first month of the storm season, was, incredibly, one of them. The storm that had blown the Avilda back to Dutch had blown out again, and on its heels was a high pressure system that stretched as high, wide and handsome as they could see in every direction. The view from five thousand feet up was spectacular.
“I don’t believe this,” Kate said over her headset.
“Don’t believe what?” Jack said. He barely cradled the yoke in one large fist, his feet relaxed on the pedals. There was no turbulence, and Cecily the Cessna sailed smoothly down the Aleutian sky for all the world like a Cadillac sailing down a freshly paved section of interstate.
“I don’t believe that, for one thing,” she said, pointing to Jack’s relaxed grip. “I don’t believe you’re steering this crate with one finger.”
His look was of mild surprise. “Why not?”
“This is October,” she replied. “This is the Aleutians. This kind of weather doesn’t happen in October in the Aleutians. From what I’ve heard and read, this kind of weather hardly ever happens here at all, during any time of the year. You should hear fishermen talking about the Aleutians when they’re back home. The winds alone, the williwaws—they call this place the Cradle of the Winds, did you know that? All my life, listening to those guys’ stories, I’ve thought this place was some kind of hellhole. But look at it,” she said with a sweep of her hand, her tone caught between astonishment and awe. “Just look at it.”
The islands strung out before them, as far as they could see, in a long, slow, southwesterly curve. The white peaks glowed against the deep blue of the sea, like a string of pearls draped across a shell of blue-tinted mother-of-pearl in a jeweler’s window. Each island had its own volcano, rising steeply to tickle at the belly of the sky, and most of them were smoking or steaming or both. The cones were smoothed over with termination dust, which began near the summit of each mountain in a heavy layer of frozen icing, thinning out to a scant layer of vanilla frosting nearer the shoreline. The snow did not so much soften the islands’ rugged outlines as it emphasized them. Beneath it, in dramatic shifts of shadow and sunlight, every island was a rough and tumble surge of magmatic rock, thrust violently up from the bowels of mother earth to plunge four and five and six thousand feet and more straight down into the sea. In those topographical entrails could be read the history of the planet.
“It’s like watching the earth being born,” Kate said softly. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Jack looked as satisfied as if he’d arranged for the Aleutians to be where they were, the day to be as clear as it was and for the
Avilda to break down just when it did, all to get Kate in the air at this place, at this time, in his company. For the next two hours they forgot they were on their way to the scene of the mysterious disappearance of two ship’s crewmen, and played at sight-seeing and rubber-necking in the best tradition of the American tourist. They flew low over a brief stretch of sand littered with the green glass balls Japanese fishermen use for net floats. They annoyed a herd of walrus sunbathing on another beach, until a bull in the crowd, a magnificent old beast with tusks two feet long, reared up and roared at them, daring them to come on down. Off the shore of still another island they found a stand of sea stacks, weird towers of rock sculpted by sand and wind and engulfed in flocks of gulls and cormorants, and as they banked for another look, Kate saw three bald eagles take wing. Hot springs steamed up from cupped valleys, the tall Aleutian rye grass clustering thick and still green around them.
Kate had a nagging feeling something was wrong, and took a moment to identify it. “No trees!”
“What?”
“There aren’t any trees!”
Jack looked over at her with a raised eyebrow. “Even I know there aren’t any trees in the Aleutians, Kate. And even I know why. The wind blows too hard.”
“I know, I know, I just—I’d forgotten.”
“There are trees in Unalaska, though.” He nodded at her look of incredulity. “But they were brought there. I was talking to a guy yesterday. There’s a stand of firs, planted by the Russians almost two hundred years ago. And it appears they are just now beginning to reproduce.”
He looked at her, waiting, and she said approvingly, “Very good. Jack. Where’d you stumble across all this local color?”
“Wasn’t a hell of a lot to do in Dutch Harbor, waiting for your boat to come in. I’d been sleeping in the back”—he jerked a thumb toward the back of the plane—”and she was parked off to one side of the strip, and you know how people who work around planes are. I shot the breeze with whoever felt like talking. Interesting place. Dutch, not the airstrip.”
“I haven’t had a chance to sightsee myself, yet. Maybe next time in, if we have any time on shore.”
Dead in the Water Page 5
