“Sounds like fun to me.” He rubbed the small of her back, surveying the treeless expanse of bog and rock, and the heaving, swelling sea stretching endlessly beyond. “Why’d they bother?”
“They had to. If the Japanese took Alaska, they’d have been within bombing range of Boeing. Not to mention Russia. There’s only fifty-seven miles of water between the Alaskan and Russian coasts. It was a major Lend-Lease route, through Fairbanks and Nome.” She added, “Plus, the Japanese lost at Midway because they were attacking Dutch Harbor at the same time. It split their forces at a time when they were infinitely superior to us in the Pacific.”
“Divide and conquer.”
“Something like that.”
“You know a lot about it.”
“There’s a book, a good one, on the war in the Aleutians, written by a guy named Garfield. And…”
“And what?”
“And,” Kate said, a little embarrassed to discover she was proud of it, “my uncle was one of Castner’s Cutthroats.”
Jack looked blank. “One of what?”
“Castner’s Cutthroats. Also known as the Alaska Scouts.”
He drew back and looked down at her questioningly. “Don’t stop there. Were they some sort of troops, or what?”
Kate grinned. “More ‘or what,’ if you could believe my uncle. They were kind of like Special Forces, long on fighting ability and short on discipline, but you could expect that from the kind of men they were. Castner must have hit every bar in the bush signing them up. Old Sam said there were prospectors, homesteaders, doctors, hunters, trappers, fishermen. I think they even bagged an anthropologist or two, probably out of the University of Alaska.”
“They see any action?”
“They went ashore at Attu before the regular troops. It was in-your-face fighting every step of the way. There was even a banzai charge with bayonets, near the end, when the Japanese knew they were beat.” Kate shivered. “Messy. Oh, yeah, Old Sam could strip his sleeves and show his scars with the best of them.”
“Shock troops.”
“I guess.” Kate looked around again. “I wonder what happened to them.”
“Who, Castner’s Cutthroats?”
“No. The Anuans.”
The rock seat beneath him having been worn indisputably smooth by generations of buttocks before he had taken up residence, Jack was no longer disposed to argue over the existence of an Aleut settlement on Anua. “Maybe they were moved out during the war.”
“You said there was no record of a settlement on Anua,” she reminded him.
“Oh, yeah. Right.” He thought. “Didn’t I just read something in the papers about how Congress passed an act to compensate the Aleutian Aleuts for being uprooted from their homes during World War II?”
Kate nodded. “Yeah. In 1989. The survivors got sixteen bucks for every day they spent in the camps.”
“What did happen, back then? I never have heard the full story.”
Kate’s shoulders moved in a faint shrug. “It was war, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and invaded Attu and Kiska. The military authorities could pretty much do as they liked, so they bundled up every last Aleut from the Rat Islands north and settled them in villages in southcentral Alaska. After the war, almost none of them were resettled in their original villages, and the soldiers trashed what little housing was left standing. They’d burned or bulldozed most of it anyway, either to keep the Japs from using it or to make way for their own construction.”
“But it was war,” Jack pointed out.
“I know.”
“If things had gone the other way, they could have wound up prisoners of the Japanese.”
“Some of them did. Some Aleuts the Japanese took prisoner off Attu and Kiska. In Japan, they put them to work, and even paid them for it.” Kate smiled. “When they were repatriated, their biggest difficulty was in getting their Japanese paychecks cashed.”
“How come you know so much about this?”
A muscle cramped in her thigh and she grunted and shifted off him. He whimpered a little in protest but didn’t stop her. “Jack, I’m an Aleut.” She waited for that to register, but he looked blank. “I’m an Aleut living in an area historically inhabited by Athapascans, Eyaks and Tlingits.” His blank expression began to change to comprehension, and she nodded. “My family comes from around here somewhere. We were expatriated along with the rest of the Aleuts. We had relatives in Cordova, so we moved to the Park.”
“No wonder you took this job.”
She ducked her head, embarrassed again, this time to be discovered in a moment of racial sentimentality. “Yeah. I guess I just wanted to see what the old home place looked like.” She squinted up at the sun and added, “We’d better get a move on if we want to make it back to Dutch before dark.”
“I’ve got a tarp in the back of the plane,” he said, reaching for his pants.
“So?”
“So, we can tack it over that hole I made in the roof of the dugout.”
“Barabara.”
“Whatever.”
Her smile was reward enough for the thought, and realizing it, he knew he had it bad. In the air the following morning, when he banked the Cessna for a last look at the honeymoon suite in the hot springs, he was sure of it.
As they climbed another thousand feet, over the sound of the engine Kate said, “You think somebody got shot in the barabara!”
“Yup.”
“Maybe somebody who was hiding out from somebody else?”
“Yup.”
Kate was unable to keep herself from wondering which one. Alcala or Brown. The sexy ascetic or the teddy bear. Whose dried and darkened blood had it been that had spilled over the cardboard cases, had mingled with the gravy oozing from the broken cans and dripped down, to lose all color and identity until it became one with the dirt floor?
Could have been both, she realized. No reason why not. The mental picture of the two young men, spending the remaining minutes of their lives cowering between the cases of pork and beans and the rolls of toilet paper, was enough to keep her silent all the way back to Dutch.
Four
KATE OPENED THE DOOR into her stateroom and found a human pretzel in the middle of the floor. The pretzel shifted and there was a flash of bleached blond hair. “Andy? Is that you?” All the relaxed sense of well-being acquired over the last twenty-four hours abandoned her in a rush and she jumped forward, the heavy wooden door banging shut behind her.
“What?” In a single, sinuous twist, the human pretzel resolved itself into a long, lanky human with blond hair flopping into his thin, earnest face. “What’s wrong, Kate?”
Kate stared at him, her mouth open. “For a minute I thought—what the hell was that?”
Andy dropped forward, his forehead on his knees, his body folded forward like a cherry popover. “What was what?”
“What you were doing!” she roared, her voice a furious husk of sound. “What are you doing?”
He popped erect, looking bewildered. “It’s only yoga, Kate.”
“Yoga! Yoga?”
“Sure. You want me to teach you?”
“Yoga.” She pulled herself together. “I don’t think so. I am not partial to twisting myself into anything it doesn’t look like I could twist myself back out of unassisted.”
He rippled to his feet and ran an impersonal finger over her shoulder. “You’re strong and fairly supple.” He poked her deltoid muscle with a critical frown. “Probably wouldn’t be hard to get down a few of the more basic moves.”
“No,” Kate said, stepping out of range, “I don’t think so. Thank you all the same.”
Andy, sure that she was only waiting to be convinced, insisted, “Hatha yoga is the yoga of physical well-being. It helps you find harmony, and peace of mind, and true happiness. You’ll sleep better and sounder, your tensions will diminish—”
“The tension alone I get from rooming with you, nothing could diminish.”
“Plus y
our disposition will improve,” he observed.
Kate took a deep breath and managed a smile. “My disposition doesn’t need improving, thank you.”
He shook his head disapprovingly. “You’re so resistant, Kate. I’m going to have to do something about that.”
What scared her most was that he might succeed.
*
They left Dutch Harbor on the evening tide and were pulling pots in the Gulf of Alaska thirty-six hours later. The halogen lights mounted on the cabin illuminated the Avilda’s deck and nothing else; the fog was back with a vengeance, as if in retaliation for the one perfect day. The swells, too, were increasing, long, slow swells that came in from the southeast, each one higher than the last, making Ned Nordhoff shake his head and mutter into his beard. He climbed the ladder to the bridge and Kate saw him arguing vociferously with Harry Gault. A few minutes later he was back on deck, his face red beneath his beard and his voice curt.
The first pot they pulled had half a dozen Dungeness and a pollock inside it. “Garbage,” Ned growled, and hoisted the pot over to Andy and Kate. They opened the door, tossed the dungies and the gasping bottomfish over the side, re-baited the pot and tied the door shut again. Something about the pot bothered Kate but by then the next pot was aboard and routine took over.
The second pot came in, as empty as the first one of anything harvestable, and gloom settled in on deck. A crew share of nothing was nothing. Still they went through the motions, pulling, baiting and resetting. Kate wondered why the skipper didn’t tell them to stack the pots on deck, to set them somewhere else, because the tanner had obviously vacated this part of the ocean for greener sea bottoms elsewhere.
It wasn’t until the sixth pot in the string that the nagging feeling clicked over to recognition. “Hey,” she said, puzzled. She looked at the yellow ties holding the door of the pot closed. “Andy, you’re a southpaw, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“So your wrap on the door ties would go this way. Right?”
He stared for a moment. “I guess so.”
“Show me. Tie one.”
He reached for the twine, his fingers moving slowly and clumsily, making several false starts. “It’s harder to do when you’re thinking about it,” he apologized. Finished, he stepped back.
“Uh-huh,” Kate said. “See? Your hitches go the other way around. You didn’t tie these,” she elaborated when he looked mystified. “And look at the bait jar.”
“What about it?”
“I use a becket to hang our jars. That looks like some kind of granny knot.” She raised her voice. “Hey, Ned? Come here a minute, would you?”
There was a responding growl next to the pot launcher and Ned materialized out of the fog, which had thickened into a gray-green soup that swirled and eddied all around them. “What?” he asked sarcastically. “The kid making suggestive remarks about your ass?”
“What can he say except that it’s perfect?” she snapped back. “Look at this.”
“Look at what? I don’t see anything.”
Kate, holding on to her temper, said evenly, “Somebody’s been at these pots before us.” She showed him the ties and the bait jar.
“The shots are coming up tangled, too,” Seth said from behind Ned, “and the bridles don’t look right, either.”
Ned examined the knots, and they waited. An oath ripped out that singed the ears of his listeners and he turned to make for the bridge ladder. After a moment the Avilda’s engine settled into a low, neutral purr and Ned returned to the deck with the skipper at his heels.
Gault’s mouth worked soundlessly and his face slowly reddened as he looked at the door ties and the bait jar. The rest of the crew waited, Seth impassive, Andy nervous, Kate watchful.
Ned said something to Gault and was waved away with an abrupt movement. “It’s that fucking Johansen on the fucking Daisy Mae again,” the skipper spat. “This time I don’t take it lying down.” His grin was mirthless and malevolent when he added, “This time I know where the little prick’s pots are.”
“It’s not worth it,” Seth said, his voice as clear as it was unexpected. “We shouldn’t take chances, not with what else we’ve got going—” He looked over at the rest of the crew, hesitated and said, “It’s not worth the grief we’ll get from the owners if they ever find out about it.”
“I don’t give a damn what they say in Freetown!” Gault yelled. “I don’t grab my ankles every time Freetown says bend over! Secure the deck and rig for running!”
Gault returned to the bridge. Ned and Seth exchanged a long glance. Seth shrugged, and Ned growled, “You heard the man. Secure the deck.”
Andy looked bewildered. “What do we do with the pot? We need to dump out the garbage and bait it, right?”
“You got a hearing problem, Blondie?” the deck boss demanded. “The skipper said dump it.”
“But what about the rest of the string?”
“Dump it!”
They dumped it, the bait jar empty, the pot still holding three immature tanners, the fragile pink of their shells testifying to a recent molt. Almost before the water closed over the bridle, the Avilda was coming about in a 180-degree turn, and if the whining protest of the engine was any indication, the throttle was open all the way. Kate stood at the railing, face into the wind, and breathed deep of the salt air.
“Somebody robbed our pots, is that it?” Andy said, coming up behind her.
“That’s it,” she agreed.
“Somebody pulled them and picked the legal tanners and left the junk—the garbage,” he corrected himself, “for us.”
“Looks that way.”
“Who would do that?” he said, his voice shocked. “Who would steal from their fellow fishermen like that?”
Kate, amused and a trifle touched by his innocence, said, “Probably somebody on their way out to their own string stumbled across ours and got a little greedy. Although it sounds like the skipper knows exactly who did it, which means it’s happened before.”
“So what’s going on?” Andy asked her. “What’re we doing now? Are we going back to Dutch? Are we calling the cops?”
“I don’t know,” she said, although she had a pretty good idea. When the Anchorage District Attorney’s accounting department found bail money listed as an expense incurred in the investigation of this case, Kate hoped they found it in their hearts to pass it through.
The Avilda ran flat out and north-northeast, in six hours fetching up just south of the Islands of Four Mountains. There, they ran back and forth, quartering and subdividing the seas off Yunaska. The fog had thickened and Kate was glad, but then a buoy slid by the port rail, and she resigned herself. There just wasn’t going to be any getting out of this one.
Seth, moving more quickly than Kate had ever seen him move before, had a boat hook over the side and hooked on to the buoy before it passed out of reach. When it proved to be a buoy belonging to the Daisy Mae, the deck crew could hear Harry’s shriek of triumph right through the walls of the bridge.
When Seth pinched a section of the rope and started the winch to pull the pot, Kate knew enough to keep her mouth shut. Andy didn’t.
“Wait a minute,” he said, “those aren’t our buoys.” When Ned ignored him, he caught his arm. “Hey, Ned. I said we aren’t picking our own pots.”
“I heard you,” Ned grunted, shaking him off. “Sort that goddam crab, Blondie.”
Andy stared from Ned to Seth, and lastly to Kate, who was coiling the incoming line into a wet pile at her feet. He opened his mouth to say more. She gave her head a small, single shake. Her steady gaze held a clear, silent warning, and Andy, if naive, was not stupid. He shut his mouth and stepped forward to help pull the pot on board.
It was only the beginning. For five hours they picked pots that weren’t theirs. On the bridge Gault worked the spotlight, picking the next set of buoys out of the fog, while he watched the radar for approaching vessels. On deck, with a grin of pure enjoyment on his face an
d a knife in his hand, Ned slashed through the pot webbing. His face expressionless, Seth cut bait jars loose and pitched them over the side, and then cut the shots of line, once where it attached to the bridle of each pot and again below the buoys. They were good solid pots, one-and-a-quarter-inch mild steel, with zinc anodes to retard rusting. When the pot did go overboard, it was a seven-by-seven-by-three-foot 750-pound piece of junk. Even if it could be salvaged, it would have to almost entirely be remade before it was fishable again.
Kate, working silently and efficiently alongside the rest of the crew, was sickened, both at the display of spite and at the waste of equipment. She worried about Andy, who worked next to her mechanically, a strained look on his pale face. “You okay?” she asked him in a low voice. He nodded without replying and she had to be satisfied with that.
They pulled pots, they sorted crab, they slashed webbing, they cut line, they punctured buoys, until their backs ached and their heads hurt. They hurried for fear of discovery, and spoke only seldom, and then in whispers. What made it worse was that Johansen wasn’t on the crab at all and the pots coming up were mostly garbage. One had what Kate would have sworn was at least a thousand pounds of females in it, another only a couple of chicken halibut. If she’d known how hard thieving was, and how unrewarding, she might have made more of a protest in the beginning.
Straightening her back and groaning a little, she noticed that the sound of the Avilda’s, engine had changed. A loud whisper floated down from the catwalk in front of the bridge, and she looked up to see Harry Gault motioning to her.
“Got a boat coming up on us on the screen,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Tell Ned we’re taking off.”
They stripped the deck bare of any shred of the Daisy Mae’s gear, pitching it all over the side. In his haste Andy pitched over a couple of their own knives and a twenty-five-fathom shot of their own line, too. He gave Ned a fearful look.
Ned was feeling very pleased with life, and shrugged in response to Andy’s look. “No problem. Plenty more where they came from.”
The rumble of the diesel increased and Kate sent up a fervent hope that the old girl’s engine held together long enough for a clean getaway. Sound carried over water, and the other boat undoubtedly had its own radar. They had to know the Avilda was there, and if the pots belonged to them, they had to know what the Avilda had been up to. Kate just hoped they didn’t have a rifle.
Dead in the Water Page 7
