Blindfold Game

by Dana Stabenow

  Hugh strode down the hallway with a scowl so severe that the mail boy took an unintended detour through Records and got thoroughly lost in the wilds of the Castro files.

  Marie looked up. “So, it went well.”

  He blew by her into his own office and tossed the envelope containing the Odessa report, Arlene’s report, and the photographs on the desk. It skidded across the surface until it hit his in basket, which was filled with six other reports of potential threats in the Far East, none of which were being taken anywhere near as seriously as Hugh knew they should be.

  Hugh’s problem was that the Far East just wasn’t fashionable. No one seemed to take North Korea seriously, or not as seriously as they did Pickacountry, Middle East. Indonesia, maybe a little more so because of its large Muslim population, but there the terrorists were mostly blowing up Australians, and they’d taken as big a hit from the Christmas tsunami as everyone else so they weren’t exactly at the top of their form. In Pattaya Beach, the casualties had been so evenly divided between East and West that the bull’s-eye effect hadn’t really registered with any one nation. India and Pakistan were sitting down like the lion with the lamb and actually talking to one another for the first time since World War II, in fact all the Indian Ocean nations were, another effect of the tsunami.

  No, his nation’s security and defense forces were focusing almost exclusively on the Middle East, and the hell of it was he couldn’t say they were wrong. But, like Arlene Harte, he was uneasy. If she was right about the two Koreans setting the bomb in Pattaya Beach, they hadn’t taken credit for it. Why not? By definition a terrorist’s mission was to draw attention to his cause. Why, then, would these two men just walk away without so much as a phone call claiming credit for so many deaths, so much destruction, for the successful terrorizing of a heretofore peaceful resort, dedicated to the innocent pleasures of the leisure classes of many nations?

  The only rational answer Hugh could find to that question was that these particular terrorists were practicing, warming up for the big event. He thought of the photographs taken at the scene of the bombing, of the lists of the dead, of the descriptions of the wounds of those who had survived. He thought of the soccer ball, which, from what the investigators could discover, had been drop-kicked onto the dance floor with some brand-new timing device they were still piecing together. The prospect of what the people who had thought up the soccer ball were dreaming up next gave him nightmares.

  He hoped the director was right and that there was no need to panic. He hoped it, but he didn’t believe it.

  He rubbed his eyes and the first thing he focused on when he dropped his hands was the soapstone bear, a smooth, greenish brown image of a sitting bear playing with his own toes. He and Sara had gone out to the Alaska Native hospital in Anchorage that year, looking for gifts for their mothers. An old Yupik man was there with a cardboard box full of soapstone carvings. Hugh had fallen in love with this one on sight, and Sara had bought it for him behind his back and had given it to him that Christmas. It had sat on whatever desk was his from Harvard to Langley and all points in between.

  He looked at the bear and he saw Sara, dark blond hair forever bundled into a ponytail, laughing blue eyes, tall enough to kiss without leaning over. They’d been born the same year in the same village, fought all the way through grade school, and fallen in love in high school, never to fall out of it again.

  Or so it had seemed then. He wondered if there was anything that he had given her that she had turned into a talisman. He tried to remember the gifts he had given her over the years, and couldn’t.

  He could smell her on the clothes he’d been wearing in Anchorage two nights before. The clothes she had nearly ripped off him in that overheated little hotel room. Their meeting had been a gift of fate, her testifying in a court case, his delivering an intelligence briefing to Kyle’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Fate, and Kyle’s propensity for matchmaking.

  It gave him some small comfort that no matter how far apart they were geographically, or how many months it had been since they’d seen each other, or how far their marriage had drifted into harm’s way, she had missed him every bit as much as he had missed her.

  He heard Kyle’s voice again, frighteningly matter-of-fact. You’ll always have me. Question is, will you always have Sara?

  He shook his head almost angrily and turned to his computer. He scanned in the photo of Fang, Noortman, and the two Koreans and sent it attached to e-mails to Bob Dunno in Odessa, as well as agents in the field in Switzerland, Brazil, and Bermuda to show to Pyotr Volk, alias Peter Wolf, if he ever surfaced, and ask him if these were his two customers. Since they were also two of the more likely suspects to have blown up his building, Hugh thought there was at least a fifty-fifty chance Peter might be willing to identify them.

  After that he picked up the phone. When it was answered on the other end, he said, “Arlene? Hugh. How well do you know Hong Kong?”

  OCTOBER 22,

  SLIME BANKS, NORTH OF THE ALASKA PENINSULA

  ON BOARD THE USCG CUTTER SOJOURNER TRUTH

  I SAY WE USE him to troll for orcas.“ ”That’s a little harsh, Petty Officer, don’t you think?“ Sara said, trying not to laugh.

  “Already tasked anyway,” Chief Mark Edelen said from the conn.

  “Tasked how?” PO Barnette said, raising one skeptical eyebrow. Or so Sara assumed, as it was 11:00 p.m. of a Bering Sea winter’s night and there was nothing blacker this side of hell. The bridge had red filters taped over the navigation and radar and fathometer screens, dimming their readouts and allowing everyone’s eyes to adjust to see out the windows. Except for Orion looming large on their starboard bow, there wasn’t a lot to see, and wouldn’t have been much beyond an endless green ocean even if it were daylight.

  But even in the dark Barnette sounded skeptical, and also thwarted. Seaman Rosenberg, an eighteen-year-old typically twirpish adolescent fresh out of boot camp, had managed in only fifteen days underway to step all over the senior crewman’s toes.

  There was a smile in the chief’s voice when he replied. “They duct-taped his bunk shut, poked a hole in it, and sprayed it full of Right Guard.”

  “Ouch,” Sara said. “Why?”

  “Because he hasn’t had a shower since he got on board,” PO Barnette said, “and when you’re sleeping forty-two to a room it can get kind of rank. Plus he’s been puking his guts up ever since we left the dock. You can smell him coming a deck away.” A brief pause. “Ma’am.”

  The smile in the chief’s voice was wider this time. “They also stuffed all his clothes into his duffle and filled it with Scrubbing Bubbles Basin Tub and Tile Cleaner.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. Well, you know.”

  “No. What?”

  “It’s a disinfectant.”

  Sara couldn’t help it, she let loose of the laugh that had been building inside for the last five minutes. She pulled herself together and cleared her throat. “I mean, this must stop, immediately.”

  They knew her, and they laughed. PO Barnette’s ire was soothed, even if his hand had not been the one to mete out justice, and he returned to his brace at the conn, feet flat against the deck as if they’d been spot-welded there, hands clasped at the small of his back, leaning forward into the pitch of the ship. Salty, that was PO Barnette, eighteen years in. He never lost his balance, not even in the heaviest seas, as opposed to Sara, who had long ago perfected a complicated polka slash tango with the ship on any seas over three feet. It was effective; it had been years since the sudden lurch of a hull had tossed her into a bulkhead, but still she envied PO Barnette’s tranquil stolidity.

  The bosun’s mate, Thomasina Penn, went back to the plot table to continue work on their route, but it was perfunctory as they were running box ops, hiding from a hurricane-force low in the lee of St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs. Running box ops meant steering a course confined within a box drawn on the radar screen that out of sheer boredom on occasion
resembled the initials of the officer on watch. The S for Sara was fun, the L in Lange less so.

  Mark Edelen’s initials were more challenging, resulting in a call to the bridge earlier that evening from the captain requesting the conn to straighten out their course so his dominoes wouldn’t keep sliding off the wardroom table. It was the threat of being drafted into playing dominoes that had caused Sara to retreat to the bridge in the first place.

  As executive officer, she was exempt from watch rotation, but truth to tell, she missed it. She missed the heave and roll of the sea at night, more pronounced on the bridge thirty-six feet up from the waterline than it was in her stateroom two decks below. She missed the occasional glimpses of white as the bow sliced through the ocean. On clear nights it was horizon to horizon stars, crowding one another in three hundred and sixty degrees of sheer glory.

  Nights like tonight. On nights like tonight, it was as if they were sailing straight off the edge of the earth and into the cosmos. Nights when the moon came up or the aurora came out verged on the paranormal.

  On the night watch voices were muted, lights were softer to the eye, and the seas seemed somehow less severe no matter the height of the wave or the length between swells. At night, things were a little less formal and a little more friendly. Sara loved her job and she loved the Coast Guard, but executive officer was just another description for captain’s hatchet man. It could get pretty lonely, especially since she was the only female officer. Being one of only eleven women in a crew of a hundred didn’t help.

  Promotion to executive officer was not anything an ambitious officer in the United States Coast Guard refused, not if she were in her right mind, but as XO her days with filled with administrative minutiae and a lamentable lack of action. Logistics made the boat go, she understood that, but instead of driving the boat-or standing watch-her days were spent in two-hour meetings over ways to dispose of the trash accumulated during a fifty-one-day patrol on a ship with ten officers and ninety enlisted men and women on board. It wasn’t that she wanted to be an ensign again, but she wished, not for the first time, that she were on a smaller ship with fewer officers, where once in a while she might get to lead a boarding.

  And where she didn’t have so many memories eight hundred miles off their starboard bow. She pulled her hat down to hide her expression, forgetting that it was black as the pit on the bridge, raised one foot to the ledge that ran around the radar console, and wedged herself in the narrow space between it and the control console. She put an elbow on her raised knee and her chin in her hand.

  “Can’t sleep?” the chief said in a low voice.

  “Dominoes,” Sara said.

  He laughed. He had a marvelous laugh, which pretty much matched the rest of him. He was smart, funny, and good at his job, and if that wasn’t enough, he was handsome, too, with the most beautiful brown eyes Sara had ever seen. That wasn’t all that was beautiful about him, either. Their first full day underway she’d gone below to work out in the ship’s gym and found the chief there before her, dressed in T-shirt and shorts, far less clothing than she was accustomed to seeing him in. She’d been unable to meet his eyes for a good twenty-four hours afterward for fear that he would know exactly what she was thinking. Aside from the fact that she was an officer and he was an enlisted man, that they were underway on two hundred and eight-two feet of ship that seemed to shrink with every day of patrol that passed, and that the last thing the crew needed was to have its nose rubbed in what the Coast Guard officially referred to as an “inappropriate romantic relationship,” they were both married to other people.

  Even if Sara was feeling less and less married as time went on. “Got any plans for Dutch?” she said at random. She didn’t need to be thinking about Hugh.

  They were headed for Dutch Harbor the next day, their first port call of the patrol. “Seafood buffet at the Grand Aleutian,” Mark said. “Hike up the mountain beforehand to earn it.”

  “No joy ride on the helo?”

  The helicopter pilots took crew members for rides in port, racking up hours in the air and making friends with the crew as a bonus. “Nah,” Mark said, with the disdain only a career sailor could display toward an aviator. “I’ve been. Figured I’d let some of the newbies have a shot. You?”

  “District is flying in for a briefing.”

  Mark’s teeth flashed. “Oh yeah, I remember you and the captain talking about that the other day. What was it Winston Churchill said? Some thing about democracy being the worst system of government ever invented, except for all the others? Didn’t mention bureaucracy, did he.”

  And he could read. Sara hardened her heart to this suddenly even more attractive man and did not reply. Instead, she thought about what she always thought about, her next duty assignment, and if she could finagle another tour in Alaska, or at the very least on the West Coast. She was terrified that she would be assigned to command in D.C. again, and was equally determined to foil, thwart, or otherwise avert that misguided effort on the part of her commanding officers if at all possible.

  She’d been amazing lucky so far. The Sojourner Truth was her fifth boat in ten years, if you counted her summer on the Eagle, the Coast Guard’s tall ship, and she did. She would have her cutterman’s pin before the year was out, denoting seven years’ sea duty, which included two years’ command of a one-ten white hull out of Eureka, California. The time in D.C. had probably been essential in getting her the one-ten, she admitted, if only reluctantly and if only to herself, but shore duty was not what she had signed on for with the U.S. Coast Guard, and she made sure that every commanding officer she served under knew it. She’d been lucky in them, too, but then she worked hard at fostering the good opinion of her COs. When she had gotten the Sojourner Truth, she had showed up for duty a week early and spent that time learning every nook and cranny of the ex-navy salvage tug from bilge to crow’s nest and pestering the then first officer for every detail of his two years on board. When she had drained him dry, she started in on the engineer officer.

  Blond hair, blue eyes, and long legs tended to engender thoughts other than her competency as a serving officer in the “always ready” service, but it helped that she deliberately desexed herself for each patrol, wearing her uniform a size too large, with a T-shirt and leggings beneath, no makeup, no jewelry, no perfume, no scented soaps or body lotions. Her hair she kept just long enough to wear in a ponytail, drawn through the band of the uniform baseball cap, which never left her head except at flight quarters, meals, and asleep in her bunk. She showered, she washed her clothes regularly, she was clean and neat-if only to keep herself from the unfortunate Seaman Rosenberg’s fate-but that was the most effort she made for her personal appearance under way.

  “For crissake, Sara,” Hugh had said the first time he’d seen her in what she called her underway ensemble, “where are your breasts?” He’d pulled out the neck of the dark blue polar fleece jacket to check that they were still there, and that had been the end of that conversation.

  She drew in a sharp breath. It had been a while since Hugh Rincon had managed to creep into her thoughts unawares, and now there he was again, the second time in five minutes. She wondered how he was, what he was doing, whether he was still in Anchorage or back at his desk in Langley, gathering gossip in the service of his country.

  It was with heartfelt relief that she heard the marine band crackle into life. The voice was male and on the ragged edge of panic. “Coast Guard, Coast Guard, this is the fishing vessel Arctic Wind, emergency, emergency, Coast Guard, Coast Guard, this is the fishing vessel Arctic Wind, over.”

  In a photo finish Sara beat both Mark and Tommy to the microphone mounted over the plot table. “Fishing vessel Arctic Wind, this is the Coast Guard cutter Sojourner Truth, go up to two-two-alpha.”

  “Up to two-two-alpha, roger.”

  She reached up and clicked the frequency knob on the radio to twenty-two-alpha, aware of an attentiveness on the bridge that had not been there a moment before.
“Arctic Wind, this is cutter Sojourner Truth, how copy?”

  The voice came back with distinct relief. “Five-by, Sojourner, good to know you guys are out there.”

  “Good to hear, Arctic Wind, what’s the problem?”

  “Sojourner, I’ve got a deckhand with three-inch J-hook in his eye.”

  “Chief, call the captain,” Sara said to Mark. “Tommy, pipe Doc and the aviators to the bridge.” She keyed the mike. “Arctic Wind, roger that, you’ve got a deckhand with a three-inch J-hook in his eye. Is he conscious?”

  “He’s conscious and he’s mobile, Sojourner. It’s still got the bale attached. I’ve got the hook stabilized with a bunch of tape and gauze, but I don’t know where the barb is. I don’t want to mess with it any more than that.”

  “Don’t touch it!” Tommy said involuntarily. Sara keyed the mike and said, “Roger that, Arctic Wind, what’s your lat and long?”

  She turned to watch Tommy punch the numbers into the radar as the longliner skipper read them off. The screen readjusted itself and the bosun’s mate ran the cursor over a small glowing green X on the screen. “A little over forty miles north-northeast of our present position, XO.”

  “Come about to zero-three-zero, all ahead full,” she told the helmsman.

  “Zero-three-zero all ahead full, aye,” Seaman Eugene Razo replied. A moment later she felt the vibration in the deck increase as the cutter leaped forward in pursuit of her top speed, fifteen-point-four knots.

  “Arctic Wind, this is the Sojourner Truth. We’re on our way. We’ll either be sending a boat over or doing a hoist with our helicopter. We’ll let you know which so you can make ready.”

  She waited. They all waited. At last the Arctic Wind came back on, her skipper sounding very tightly wound. “Sojourner, I’m not set up for a hoist by helicopter. I’ve got wires and crap all over the deck.”

  She heard the door open behind her and heard Mark say, “Captain on the bridge.”