“Yeah.” Court laughed. “Then we just have to climb up nine more decks and back down again.”
He climbed to the next loop. Unclipped himself. Pulled the carabiner up and fumbled with it, couldn’t clip in. Dropped it. It dangled from his harness. “Crap.”
McKenna reached through the hatch. “Forget it. I’ll pull you up.”
But Harrington was still fumbling with the carabiner. He picked it up, snapped it open. Then the wave hit.
It must have been another monster. It jarred the Lion sideways, so hard that McKenna thought for an instant that the ship must have been sinking. The steel shuddered and groaned. The cars shifted on their mounts in the cargo hold. McKenna steadied herself, caught her balance, just in time to see Harrington lose his grip on the rope.
The architect’s eyes went wide. He opened his mouth but didn’t scream, locking his gaze on McKenna as he fell, dropping fifteen feet and then pinwheeling off a wall or a staircase or something, hurtling down out of sight, his headlamp like a strobe against the steel walls. A moment later, McKenna heard the thud as the architect hit bottom.
“Court!” McKenna was on the rope in an instant. Hollered up at Matt to call the Coast Guard as she dropped through the hatch and down toward Harrington, moving too fast to bother clipping herself in. She hollered Court’s name as she dropped, was vaguely aware of Matt scrambling up the other rope to the surface, nearly lost her grip as another wave hit—not as hard but hard enough—held on tight and kept going, down, down, into the darkness.
Harrington lay on his back at the base of the stairs, his body bent at an impossible angle. McKenna dropped off the rope next to him, her heart pounding. “Court,” she said, kneeling beside the architect. “Come on, Court. Talk to me.”
Harrington stared up at the ceiling, his eyes unfocused.
“Court. Where are you, buddy?”
Harrington blinked slowly. “Randall?” he said. “Shit . . . that hurt.”
Then he was out, unconscious. McKenna felt for a pulse. It was there, but it was weak, and Harrington sure wasn’t talking.
“Get me some help,” she called up through the ship. “Damn it, I need some help down here, now!”
50
The Coast Guard’s Dolphin arrived on scene after twenty long minutes. The AST took another twenty minutes to make his way down the access stairway to where McKenna waited with Harrington.
The architect hadn’t opened his eyes. McKenna checked his pulse again; it was weak, but it was there. The way Court’s vision swam as he’d looked at her, though, McKenna figured it was decent odds he had a head injury. Broken bones, definitely. Figured it was a coin flip whether he ever walked again.
The AST touched down beside McKenna. “Guess you guys got the same wave we did. Had to be thirty feet, easy.”
McKenna said nothing. The AST looked Harrington over. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Sit tight. I’m going to get the medevac board down here.”
It was another twenty minutes before the board arrived. One hour since the fall now. McKenna could feel the minutes slipping away, just as fast as they’d passed with her dad in the water.
Come on, come on, come on.
Matt Jonas lowered the board from the top of the access stairs. It was long and unwieldy, and it banged and crashed against the walls of the stairway as it dropped. McKenna wondered how the hell they would get Court out without hurting him any further.
The AST laid out the board. With McKenna’s help, he got Harrington situated. The architect still hadn’t regained consciousness. He was breathing, but barely.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” the AST told McKenna. “You’re going to climb back up to that hatch, and you and your partners are going to haul this guy up. I’m going to climb up alongside him, steady the board, make sure he doesn’t crash into these walls too hard. Then we’ll do it again up the second set of stairs.”
“Roger that,” McKenna said, reaching for the rope. She looked back at Harrington. “Just be careful, okay?”
The AST didn’t look up from the medevac board. “I’ll look out for him,” he said. “You get going.”
* * *
• • •
McKENNA CLIMBED AS FAST as she could. Tried to cover the ground without clipping herself in, but then another wave hit and knocked her sideways, nearly knocked her clean off the line. She closed her eyes, saw Harrington falling, heard the thud as the architect hit the deck. Opened her eyes and reached for her carabiner and clipped herself in all the way to the top.
Stacey was with Matt at the top of the stairs. She stood back as Matt and McKenna began to pull Harrington skyward. The whiz kid wasn’t so heavy, not with two people hauling him, and somehow this struck McKenna where it hurt.
The most important member of the team, and you couldn’t lay off him. God help you if he’s dead because of you.
Slowly, Matt and McKenna hoisted the medevac board to the access hatch while the AST climbed beside. Harrington’s eyes were still closed when he came through the hatchway. Stacey stifled a gasp, her hand to her throat.
The AST paused at the bulkhead. “One more time,” he told McKenna and Matt. “You got enough left in the tank?”
“If they don’t, I do,” Stacey told him. But her husband was already following McKenna up the line.
The wind howled outside as McKenna reached the surface. The helicopter hovered overhead, buffeted by the gale. The sky was the same dull gray, the clouds hanging low, the wind whipping more froth off the water.
Ridley helped McKenna to her feet. Took the rope and helped her and Matt pull Harrington to the surface.
The job seemed to take hours. The wind attacked in force. McKenna heaved on the line and tried to fight the feeling that the whole job had just gone to hell.
Finally, Harrington was on deck. The AST climbed after him, signaled to the crew of the Dolphin to lower the hauling wire. It took the flight mechanic a couple of tries with the wind. The wire flew everywhere, landing thirty feet away. McKenna and Matt ran to it, dragged it back to the AST and Harrington, helped the AST clip the medevac board to the guy wire, and watched as the mechanic winched Harrington skyward.
The AST was next to go. McKenna gripped his arm. “How bad is it?”
“We’ll give him the best we’ve got, ma’am,” the AST replied, avoiding her eyes. “If our guys can fix him, they will.”
51
Hiroki Okura peered out through a porthole at the salvage crew clustered on the starboard wall of the accommodations house. Listened to the drone of the Coast Guard helicopter as it climbed high in the air and flew away, out of sight. They’d taken someone with them, an injured man. Something had gone wrong.
It was serious, judging by the expressions on the faces of the crew members left behind. They stared up at the gray sky after the helicopter, faces flushed red from the bitter wind, eyes as dark as the water below. For a long time, nobody moved. They seemed to be waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
They were an interesting assortment, the salvage crew. Two women, and that alone was a rarity, this far out at sea. Stranger still, the younger of the women appeared to be in charge. She was in her thirties, Okura decided. He wondered how she’d managed to find herself aboard this wreck.
It didn’t matter. The salvage crew hadn’t noticed Okura, and that was perfectly fine with him.
He’d survived the perilous climb up the long string of Nissans, little by little, inch by inch, wave by thundering wave. He’d rested at the bulkhead where he’d killed Ishimaru, exhausted and weak from hunger. It hadn’t just been the money that had spurred him to keep moving, but also the knowledge that if he died here, he would die no better than Ishimaru—a failure, alone, in this cold, hellish pit.
So he’d climbed. Found the rope he’d left behind and lifted himself up the stairwell, clutching the briefcase and walking up
walls, taking breaths where he could find flat ground, somewhere to set his feet. His muscles burned from exertion. Still, he pulled himself skyward, fought gravity and the storm and his own failing strength.
He didn’t know how long he’d climbed, but it could have been hours. Finally, when he’d nearly had enough, the darkness changed, almost imperceptible, yawned open in front of him, and he could suddenly see forms again, walls, the silhouette of his hands, the briefcase. The air became marginally fresher, cooler. The sound of the storm became louder. And he’d felt the knot where the rope tied off to a handrail, and then he knew he’d won.
Okura had collapsed in the hallway, the central spine of the Lion. Dragged himself and the briefcase behind to the galley, the food stores, and laid waste. Much of the ship’s food had gone bad; the galley reeked of overripe fruit and meat gone to rot, but Okura was too hungry to care. In the dim light from two salt-encrusted portholes, he’d eaten everything he could find, most of it stale: the cookies left out for the overnight watch, a whole box of rice crackers, chocolate. He’d found a can opener and drank chicken soup, cold, ate a whole tin of peaches, then a tin of pears.
With his strength mostly restored, he’d climbed his way back out of the galley and into the nearest stateroom, pulled the bedding and pillows from the bed and made a nest in a crook of the listing wall. He lay down and wrapped himself in the soft, letting the storm lull him into a well-deserved sleep.
* * *
• • •
NOW HE WAS AWAKE.
He’d heard the helicopter approach, listened as it settled into a hover above the ship. He’d pushed the blankets away and climbed up the stateroom to a porthole facing down the weather deck aft. Looked out just in time to watch the Coast Guard technician disappear down a hatchway, fifty feet away.
A man stood balanced on the wall nearby, a big man, older, a considerable mustache. He’d waited, his brow furrowed, occasionally walking to the hatchway and peering down into the abyss. Once or twice, he’d glanced back at where the stateroom jutted out from the accommodations superstructure, and for one brief, terrifying instant, Okura thought he’d been seen. But the man didn’t investigate, just looked up at the helicopter and then back down the hole, waiting on the Coast Guard technician’s return.
The man hadn’t been aboard the Salvation. None of this crew had been; they weren’t Christer Magnusson’s people. The Commodore team had carried themselves with a swagger, a certain confidence. They’d dressed alike, looked alike, didn’t speak much.
This crew was different. They didn’t have Magnusson’s cocksure demeanor, for one thing, but there was something else, too: these people were familiar, the way they interacted. The way their eyes met, how they seemed to communicate without needing words.
This wasn’t the Salvation’s people, no. This crew looked more like a family. But they were a family who had lost one of their own, and now they stood, impossibly small against the scale of the ship, with the vast, colorless sky above, looking up at where the helicopter had disappeared and waiting on their leader to make the first move.
Okura peered up at them through the porthole. Hoped that whoever the injured man was, his injury wouldn’t jeopardize this crew’s ability to bring the Lion to harbor. The second officer had fifty million American dollars riding on their success. His survival depended on it.
52
McKenna surveyed the Lion’s unsteady deck. The wind roared. The waves battered the ship. The gale surrounded her. It was hellish, and Court Harrington was gone.
Stacey Jonas reached the top of the stairway. Matt hurried over to help her out of the hole. Nelson Ridley stayed put. Watched McKenna.
The ship shuddered constantly, threatening to knock McKenna and her crew off their feet. Just descending into the engine room would be a hell of a job, and even if McKenna could gather the fluid levels for the rest of the tanks, she’d be damned if she could figure out Harrington’s computer.
Sometimes the ship just keeps going, the whiz kid had said. The ship tips all the way over onto her starboard side. And then she sinks.
McKenna shivered. There was no way she would try to right the Lion without Harrington. And right now Harrington was clinging to life in the back of a Coast Guard helicopter.
“We can’t just wait around for him, skipper,” Ridley said, reading her mind. “They’re talking forty-five-knot winds in the next couple of days. We stick around here, we might lose the tow. We gotta make something happen, and fast.”
McKenna knew he was right. Knew they were already testing their luck, knew it couldn’t hold forever.
And it hasn’t. Down one crew member. How many more to go?
“We can put another line on this wreck,” Ridley said. “Tow her out away from land, as far as we can get her. Buck into the storm and hope she doesn’t sink on us.”
“We won’t make much progress,” McKenna replied. “Not in this wind. Not with this tow. If the weather gets as bad as they’re saying, it could drive this ship onto the rocks, no matter what we try to do. We just don’t have the power to hold her steady forever.”
McKenna leaned against the starboard deck. Stared up at the sky, the clouds racing by overhead. Tried to picture her charts in her head, the Aleutian Islands to the north.
“There’s a pass,” she told Ridley. “Between the Aleutians. I saw it on the map. We put that second line on the ship, ride the flood tide right through to the Bering Sea. Take shelter in the lee of the islands.”
“Be a hell of a job to drag this wreck through. Just turning her in the right direction will be a chore. And then getting her there in a following sea—”
“It’s our only play, Nelson. It will be calmer on the other side. We can anchor up and wait for Court to recover. Buy us some time.”
Ridley’s brow furrowed. He didn’t say anything.
“Thirty million dollars,” McKenna said. “If our boat sinks, our money sinks, too.”
“Fine.” Ridley’s eyes darkened. “But what if the kid doesn’t make it?”
McKenna looked at him.
“You saw the kid. It was bad, skipper,” Ridley said. “What if he doesn’t come back?”
McKenna saw Harrington’s face, the look in his eye as he fell. Saw his broken body at the bottom of the stairway. The grim look in the AST’s eyes as he maneuvered Harrington skyward.
You did this. You lost another one.
Ridley cleared his throat. “Skipper?”
McKenna shook her head clear. “We cross that bridge when we come to it. First, let’s get this ship through the pass.”
* * *
• • •
ABOUT AN HOUR LATER, McKenna dropped from the Munro’s backup Agusta helicopter onto the afterdeck of the Gale Force. The Dolphin was gone, airlifting Court Harrington back to Dutch Harbor.
The architect’s prognosis was not great. “He’s surviving, Captain,” the Munro’s radio operator had informed McKenna. “He’s still unconscious, last we heard, and it looks like he’s bleeding internally. The doc managed to get him stabilized, but that’s about the best I can tell you.”
“How bad could it get?” McKenna asked. “Worst-case scenario. Do you know?”
A pause. “I’m sorry, Captain. I can’t say.”
“You can’t say? Or you don’t know?”
“I don’t know, Captain. I’m sorry.”
McKenna stared out at the gale through her tug’s wheelhouse windows. “We’re taking the ship through the Samalga Pass,” she told the radio operator. “It’s too miserable to work out here. We’re going to tow her across to the Bering Sea side.”
Another long pause, this one stretching for miles. “Uh, stand by, Gale Force.”
McKenna stood by. Waited for twenty minutes, and when the radio came to life again, it was Tom Geoffries, commander of the Munro.
“Captain Rhodes, I’ve
talked to my superiors in Kodiak, and there’s no way I can let you through that pass. Not in this weather. Not a single tug.”
“The weather’s only getting worse,” McKenna told him. “Short of opening the seacocks and scuttling the ship, there’s not much my crew can do in these conditions. If you want the ship saved, this is our only option.”
Geoffries was silent. “Let me make a call, Captain,” he said at last.
McKenna stood by again. In the back of her mind, a little voice whispered something, reminded her of the Gale Force’s troublesome starboard turbo, that hair-raising encounter with the oil tanker in the Columbia River.
She pushed the thought from her mind as Geoffries hailed back over the radio. “We have Kodiak on board,” he told McKenna. “You can have the pass, Captain Rhodes, but if you screw up—” A beat. “If you screw up, Captain, it’s both of our asses. Understand?”
“Roger that, sir,” McKenna replied. “We’ll make it work.”
Ridley fixed that engine, she thought as she replaced the radio. She’s bulletproof. No way she conks out again.
She looked around—the pounding, incessant swell, the wind howling through the Gale Force’s stay wires.
She’d better not conk out, she thought, or we’ll have a heck of a lot more to worry about than a lost paycheck.
53
YOKOHAMA
The man standing on the opposite side of Katsuo Nakadate’s desk was, by every account, highly regarded in his industry, and extremely well accomplished. He was a man accustomed to receiving respect, a man not used to deferring to others. But as Nakadate studied the master of the Pacific Lion, he didn’t see an alpha male in command of his situation. Rather, he saw a frightened little boy.
“You know who I am,” Nakadate said, and the captain swallowed and nodded. “Good. Then we can dispense with the formalities. Did you have a pleasant flight home?”
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