It was slim, stainless-steel, a few nicks and scratches on its sides. It looked like something from a spy movie, something totally out of place in the infirmary, hell, on this ship. It was undoubtedly what the stowaway had been guarding.
Harrington knew he should tell the skipper about what he’d found. She was the captain, after all, and whatever was inside the briefcase—it was locked, he discovered—was important enough to kill over.
This was the kind of thing the captain would want to know about.
But Harrington knew McKenna pretty well, and he knew she liked to play by the rules. He knew that if he gave her the briefcase, she would feel obliged to hand it over to the authorities. And he was curious. What would possess a man to hide out on a shipwreck for days—weeks—without telling anyone? What kind of secret could make someone so desperate? This was a mystery, and he wanted to solve it himself.
The Lion was a shipwreck, Harrington reasoned. By maritime law, everything aboard was the property of the Gale Force. It wouldn’t hurt to investigate the briefcase a little more.
So Harrington took the briefcase from the medicine locker, carried it out of the infirmary and back through the accommodations and out to the deck of the Lion. Stashed the briefcase with his sleeping bag and a couple of empty fuel canisters, and set off to find Captain Rhodes again.
This was probably a bad idea, but damn it, life was a gamble. And Harrington figured gambling was precisely why he was here.
80
By the middle of the next morning, the Pacific Lion had leveled out.
On Harrington’s instruction, the crew had killed the forward pump when the list hit fifteen percent, just before darkness fell. The skipper had sent Ridley back to the tug, kept Matt and Stacey on the first deck to babysit the last pump. She’d tried to send Harrington back, too.
“I’d rather stay, if it’s okay with you,” he said. “This is crunch time. I need to be here.”
The captain made to argue, then seemed to think better of it. “I guess you’re right. If anything’s going haywire, it’s happening tonight.”
“It’s not going haywire,” Harrington told her. She didn’t look convinced.
They’d found a platform in the access stairway on cargo deck seven, midway from the surface to the Jonases on deck one, close enough to the open air that the radios still picked up a little reception, and they could holler down to Matt and Stacey for status reports. They’d brought down their sleeping bags, some food, and the last of the Red Bull. Harrington had bundled his sleeping bag so the skipper wouldn’t notice the briefcase inside.
He needn’t have worried. The captain was spent. She’d wrapped herself up in her sleeping bag, made a cursory attempt at conversation, lay her head back on the wall of the stairwell, and passed out cold, finally asleep.
Harrington had watched her for a moment, studied her face as she slept. He’d missed her, he realized. More than he’d expected to. He’d pushed her away when she’d fallen for him, sure; he was young then. She’d surprised him. He wasn’t planning for commitment.
He wasn’t so young anymore. He wasn’t so scared to get serious. And he’d never known anyone quite like McKenna Rhodes, no matter where he looked. He just didn’t have a clue how to tell her this stuff without messing up the, ahem, chain of command.
McKenna slept soundly. Harrington leaned over and switched off her headlamp. He pulled a sleeping bag over his shoulders, and settled in to wait.
The night passed, uneventful. Morning came. The last pump kept working, and the list continued to ease. By midmorning, the Lion was nearly at zero degrees.
Harrington had supervised the last hour of pumping. Monitored the water level on the fifth starboard-side ballast tank, one eye on the gauge, the other on his battered laptop. Then the skipper had woken up, sheepish, hadn’t said much. Headed topside to call the Coast Guard.
* * *
• • •
IT WAS TEN FORTY-THREE in the morning when McKenna heard the final pump shut off. She was standing on the starboard deck—on the deck now, not the wall—waiting for the Coast Guard to send Captain Geoffries over with a party to survey the Lion and pronounce her saved.
McKenna would wait for the Coast Guard and the shipping company to give her the final verdict, but from where she was standing, the job looked done. The Lion’s list was erased. She sat level now, steady in the water, a ship again. Her owners would get her engine repaired, offload her cargo of Nissans, and put her back to work, whereas last week they’d been ready to write her off as gone.
McKenna looked up and down the deck, from the bridge to the exhaust funnel. Saw the access hatch where she and Matt and Stacey and Ridley and Jason Parent and Court Harrington had entered the ship, where they’d muscled down their pumps and walked on the walls, where they’d curled up with sleeping bags and sandwiches and those paperback novels, where they’d cheated death to save the ship.
And now the ship was saved. The prize was theirs. The job was finished, save a few minor details. Court Harrington’s plan had worked, the crew had played their parts perfectly, and the big freighter was nearly as good as new. Soon, Gale Force Marine would be thirty million dollars richer.
And none of it would bring her father back to life.
McKenna knew she should be happy. Knew her crew would tell her she’d done the old man proud. Knew, by rights, she should be jumping for joy and grinning ear to ear and pricing out Corvettes on the Internet. But she couldn’t enjoy the moment, not completely.
She just really wished her dad had been here to see this.
81
The Gale Force set out from Inanudak Bay that evening, the Pacific Lion on a short leash behind it. It had taken Captain Geoffries and his crew most of the day to survey the Lion and verify she was ready to move. Taken the crew of the Gale Force a few hours more to move their hundred-pound salvage pumps up from the bowels of the ship. But now the pumps had been transferred back to the tug, the Coast Guard had signed off, and the Gale Force was moving.
McKenna settled into the skipper’s chair as the towline went taut behind the stern of her tug, and the big freighter followed behind, docile as a sleepy cow. It was about a hundred-mile run from Umnak to Dutch Harbor, all in the lee of the Aleutian Islands, and McKenna figured it would take a day or two, give or take, to get the Lion delivered.
She’d phoned Japan already, raised the Japanese Overseas Shipping Company, and told them when and where to expect their ship. According to Geoffries on the Munro, weather in Dutch was too foul for commercial flights, so the Japanese had chartered their own jet. They were due sometime within the next couple days.
The islands protected the Gale Force from the heavy winds on the North Pacific side, and the Bering Sea swell was behaving itself as well. Spike was curled up on the bench beside the captain’s chair, had even let McKenna pet him a couple of times. He hadn’t purred, mind, or even looked particularly pleased, but he didn’t claw at McKenna, or run away, and that was a start.
She watched the wheel for an hour or two, followed the Munro out of Inanudak Bay and up alongside the northwest side of Umnak Island. The crew—aside from Nelson Ridley and Matt Jonas, who were camping out on the Lion—was downstairs, doing the dishes, watching another movie, grabbing some well-deserved rest in their bunks, and McKenna knew she should feel exhausted herself, but she didn’t, not now that the job was almost done.
She checked the autopilot, plotted a course on the GPS. Turned on the satellite radio, some old Springsteen, her dad’s stuff. Crossed to the depth sounder and the pewter picture frame beside it, picked up the frame and brought her dad’s face into the low light from the GPS screen.
Her dad smiled back at her, that old flannel shirt and the stained baseball cap, kind eyes and beard going to gray, and even though McKenna knew it was stupid, she found herself waiting for him to come alive in that picture, say something, smile wide
r. Share in her success and everything she’d accomplished.
You did this, Daddy, she thought. Your crew and your boat, and everything that you taught me. You raised that ship from the dead.
It wasn’t enough, though. It was never enough. No crew, and no tug, would ever bring Riptide Rhodes back.
She stared at her dad’s picture until the tears blurred her vision, and she was crying for her dad, and for the Lion, and for everything else, and she kept staring at the photograph, waiting for a sign, for some indication that her dad was there with her, that he’d been there all along.
But there was nothing. A dark, empty wheelhouse, and a sleeping cat, and an old pewter frame, the picture inside going yellow with age.
And then there were footsteps on the wheelhouse stairs, heavy and uneven. McKenna turned quickly, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Found Court Harrington climbing into the house, a steaming cup of coffee in his hands.
“Stacey said you were going to be up all night. Figured you’d need coffee, so—” Then he must have seen the tears, because his eyes widened and he stepped back. “Whoa, sorry. Everything okay?”
McKenna wiped her face again. Felt herself go red. Turned away, furious with herself, put the picture away.
“Everything’s fine,” she told him. “Perfectly fine. You can just leave the coffee on the table, thanks.”
But Harrington didn’t move. “Are you crying, though?”
Bastard.
McKenna steadied her breathing. Still didn’t trust herself to look at Harrington, so she stared out into the night instead. “It’s nothing,” she said.
Harrington came closer. Picked up the picture and held it close to his eyes, squinted at it. “Your dad?”
She nodded.
“It’s like he’s here, isn’t it?” Harrington said. “Don’t you feel like he’s right here along with us?”
McKenna couldn’t answer that without risking more tears, so she shook her head.
“I do,” Harrington said. “I sure as heck do. I see him in every stroke of good luck we’ve had on this job, everything that’s gone right. And you’d better believe he was looking out for me when I had that fall. I could have been a goner.”
“He would still be here,” McKenna said, “if I’d made that turn quicker.”
Harrington didn’t say anything for a while. “You saved my life. You know that, right? If you didn’t have your shit together, I would have died on that shipwreck.”
McKenna said nothing.
“But you know what? Even if I had died, it wouldn’t be your fault,” Harrington continued. “This is a dangerous job. People have accidents; people get hurt. Your dad knew that as well as anyone. You do what you can to mitigate the risk, but in the end your luck’s going to hold or it’s going to give out, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
McKenna studied the instrument panel, the engine gauges, the radar, and the dim GPS screen. Anything to keep from looking at Harrington. “I just miss him,” she said finally. “I miss him so much. This is all I ever wanted, but it’s so damn hard without him.”
“But he is here,” Harrington said. “Don’t you see? Everything you’ve done has his stamp on it. Every time I look at you, I see the daughter Riptide raised. And I see a damn fine salvage captain, to boot.”
McKenna laughed. Couldn’t help it. Turned to see Harrington looking at her with such an earnest expression that it only made her laugh harder.
“What?” Harrington held the straight face for another beat. Then he gave it up. “I guess that was pretty cheesy, huh?”
“I just feel like I should be paying you extra, making you play therapist to some raging bitch with daddy issues.”
Harrington’s smile grew. “You’re not such a bitch.”
“You weren’t saying that a couple days ago.”
“You got better,” he said, unfazed, and they smiled at each other until the moment stretched just a little too long, and then he straightened and nodded at the coffee in her hand.
“Anyway, there’s lots more where that came from,” he said. “Coffee, I mean. Plenty of Red Bull, too, if you need it.”
“I should be all right,” she said. “Thanks.”
He turned to go. “Well then, good night, Captain Rhodes.”
McKenna, she thought, but she didn’t want to confuse the guy, and maybe she was getting a little confused herself.
“Good night, Harrington,” she said, and then he was gone, and she stood up by the wheel, replaying the conversation, seeing those green eyes in her mind, and wishing like hell she knew some way to chase them.
82
There was a new buzz in the town of Dutch Harbor. Daishin Sato could sense it, feel the electricity in the air and in snippets of conversation. At the same time, he’d noticed an increase in traffic on the town’s little roads. Something was happening, and it related to the Pacific Lion.
Even Hannah seemed to feel the change. The Grand Aleutian’s desk clerk had been preoccupied all day, typing on her computer and talking on the phone, issuing instructions to the cleaning staff, and primping the brochure rack in the lobby.
Sato was interested. The search for Hiroki Okura had stalled. The Lion’s second officer was alive, Daishin was fairly certain of it. And he’d stolen away to the Lion aboard a local salvage boat, Hannah said. But the body the Coast Guard had removed from the Lion belonged to Tomio Ishimaru. That meant Okura was still out there, somewhere.
“What’s all the excitement?” Sato asked Hannah. “The whole town has changed.”
Hannah’s smile seemed to brighten her whole face. “It’s the shipwreck. That salvage team saved it. They’re towing it to Dutch as we speak.”
“Ah,” Sato said. “That’s big news.”
“You said it. There’s like seven executives from the shipping company coming in from Japan on a private plane. Booked up the whole top floor of the hotel.” She grinned. “I’m hoping they have to stay for a while. This could make our whole season!”
“With luck,” Sato said. Then he frowned. “But is this all that has the whole town so nervous? Everyone is talking about the Pacific Lion, at every store and restaurant. Are visits from the Japanese so rare?”
Hannah looked at him blankly. Then she laughed. “Oh,” she said. “Ha! I see what you did there. That’s funny.”
Sato smiled back. Tried to be patient, though a part of him would have liked to have strangled this happy, cheerful woman.
Polite. Conversational. Friendly.
His patience paid off. Hannah leaned in conspiratorially. “There is something else.”
“Yes?”
“I heard there was a gunfight on that ship,” she said. “Some stowaway was on board for some reason, and when the salvage crew found him, he tried to shoot one of them.”
Sato feigned surprise. “Goodness. I hope nobody was hurt.”
“I don’t think so. Not seriously, anyway.” Hannah shrugged. “They got the guy under control and off the ship, from what I heard.”
“And what will they do with him?”
“No idea,” she said. “But they brought him here, to the cop shop. He’s under arrest. As far as I know, they’re still debating who has jurisdiction.”
Sato nodded. “How exciting.”
“You’re telling me,” Hannah replied. “Gunfights and everything. This is like from a movie!”
83
Hiroki Okura sat in the little cell in the back of the Dutch Harbor Department of Public Safety’s police station, staring at the wall and wishing he’d never encountered Tomio Ishimaru in that smoky mah-jongg parlor.
His head hurt from where the salvage man had beaned him. He remembered trying to work up the nerve to shoot the young woman, remembered a glimpse of her partner before he’d knocked Okura to the deck. Then he’d woken up on the Coast Gua
rd cutter, and nobody would talk to him or look him in the eye.
They’d bandaged his head, refused him any painkillers, kept him under observation, took his belt and his shoelaces.
“Suicide watch,” someone said. “Have to make sure you don’t do anything crazy.”
At that point, Okura would have welcomed death. Certainly, he had no future to live for, not now. The Coast Guard crew had put him on a helicopter, flown him to Dutch Harbor, where a couple of members of the town’s small police force were waiting to take him to jail.
They’d fingerprinted him. Booked him. Refused him a shower, though he smelled absolutely foul after weeks on that ship. They’d locked him up in this cramped little cell, three walls of bars and a fourth of cinder block, a stainless-steel toilet in the middle.
“Debating whether to prosecute you here, or just send you home,” one of the policemen told Okura. “Seems you’ve caused something of an international incident.”
Excellent, Okura thought. So much for anonymity. At the best case, he would spend years of his life in prison. In the worst-case scenario?
Okura didn’t want to think about it. There would be plenty of time for that later. But just as he’d succeeded in chasing the thoughts from his mind, the door in the corridor was unlocked and swung open. And in walked a police officer, trailing that worst-case scenario in the flesh.
“Guess I have some good news,” the police officer told Okura. “Looks like your brother’s here to see you. Moral support, or whatever.”
He unlocked Okura’s cell door. Stepped aside so the man who called himself Okura’s brother could walk in, then locked the door behind.
“Ten minutes,” he said, and retreated to the outer door again, leaving Okura alone with the man.
* * *
• • •
THE MAN WAS YOUNG, in his mid-twenties, and thin. His eyes were dark, almost as black as his hair. He wore a black suit, a white shirt, a skinny black tie, and his hair was artfully mussed.
Gale Force Page 24
