Blindfold Game

by Dana Stabenow

  A shadow came up beside them and belatedly he became aware of the sound of an engine. Something hit the side of the raft.

  “Hey,” someone shouted, “grab the line!”

  He looked up to see a row of faces peering down at him from the side of a small cruise ship.

  He blinked at one of them. “Lilah?”

  A FISHING BOAT SKIPPERED by a crusty old fart was the first to arrive off the Sojourner Truth’s bow. He’d never seen anything like it in all his born days, nosireebob. Oh, it was a woman commander? That went a long way toward explaining things. Our tax dollars at work. Sure, he’d let someone board to use the radio. The deck crew jury-rigged a bosun’s chair and Ops slid down in it to the fishing boat and disappeared into the old fart’s cabin.

  After the first flurry of orders, Sara subsided into her chair on the bridge and watched numbly as the crew went about the tasks of making the ship as secure as possible and to alert command to their present location. Any minute now she expected to see a fleet of aircraft coming over the horizon like the leading edge of an invading army. She ought to go below, inspect the damage, check on the injured.

  Hugh was gone. No matter how many times she repeated the words she could not quite believe them. Hugh was gone, and she was alone. No more shared suffering through required parental visits home to Seldovia. No more fights over who had to move where when one of them got transferred. No more quickies in hotel rooms.

  No more Hugh. How could she still be breathing? How could she still be here, when he was not?

  She became aware of the tears running down her face and of Mark Edelen standing nearby, looking helpless and not a little frightened. “XO-”

  “Let her alone.” Tommy’s voice was almost unrecognizable, rough and loud. “Just let her alone, Chief.”

  So they did, leaving her bent over in the captain’s chair, tears dripping off her chin and into her lap. After a while she stopped seeing them as they moved around her, stopped hearing their voices when they spoke.

  Sometime later she felt a tap on her shoulder. She looked up to see Ops standing in front of her with a concerned look on his face. His mouth moved, but she couldn’t make out the words. She shook her head tiredly and put up her palm to fend him off.

  He wouldn’t go. She knew a tiny spark of anger, immediately quenched by grief.

  “Come with me, ma’am,” he said, and put a hand beneath her elbow to assist her out of the chair.

  “What-” she started to say.

  “Please come with me, ma’am,” he said with unaccustomed firmness, and such was her state of mind that it was easier to follow him off the bridge and down the outside stairs to the main deck.

  He led her to the bow. There were a half dozen small boats clustered around them by now, fishing boats and a couple of skiffs. A small cruise ship had a line to what was left of the cutter’s bow, its foredeck all but obscured by a crowd of paying passengers gaping at a sight that for sure hadn’t been on the itinerary.

  Ops said something.

  Sara could not make it out. “What?”

  Ops took her firmly by the shoulders and turned her in the direction of the cruise ship. He pointed over her shoulder so that she had no choice but to follow the direction of his finger.

  She couldn’t see what Ops thought was so important. There must have been fifty people on board the little cruise ship. Who went for a boat ride for fun in January?

  And then she saw his face staring up at her, wet hair matted on his brow, eyes intent on hers, a smile of such joy breaking across his face.

  The next thing she knew she was balanced on the gunnel and reaching for the rope mooring the cruise ship to the Sojourner Truth. She grabbed the line with both hands without a thought to seeing if it was on belay and launched herself from the cutter, swinging into space over the water.

  There were alarmed shouts from both ships. She ignored them, wrapping her ankles around the line and going down hand over hand so fast that later she found rope burns on her palms.

  She hit the deck of the little cruise ship and before she had regained her balance she was in his arms.

  EPILOGUE

  MARCH

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  EVERYONE WAS THERE, FROM the secretary of state to all of the Joint Chiefs, even though no one was ever going to be allowed to admit to attending.

  “How many killed?” said the representative from the Senate Armed Services Committee.

  They looked at the Coast Guard captain, a nondescript man of middle age with a carefully cultivated air of dullness. “Seven killed. Thirteen wounded. Those are just our own casualties, you understand. There are ninety-seven crew members on the Agafia and eighteen on the Star of Bali yet to be accounted for.”

  “Who is handling the interrogation of the surviving terrorists?”

  The FBI agent said, “That’s us, sir. It’s slow going but we’re getting some good stuff from the hired hands. I think we’ll have a pretty solid report for you soon.”

  “What about the missile?”

  “The wreckage has been recovered.”

  “And the payload?”

  “The payload was dispersed upon impact and detonation.”

  “Dispersed where?” This question came a little more sharply.

  The FBI agent looked at the Coast Guard captain, who looked at the mad scientist on his right. His hair looked more Donald Trump than Albert Einstein and he wasn’t really mad, but when your job was primarily providing worst-case scenarios it helped if the people to whom you were delivering them thought so. “Impact was about twelve miles south of Seward, in Spoon Glacier, at an elevation of about twelve hundred feet. There was a steady onshore wind of fifteen to twenty knots. The cesium-137 was dispersed across the northern half of Resurrection Bay. We estimate that the fallout would disperse most heavily on the maximum security prison on the east side of the bay, but that the wind was blowing strongly enough that some of it would have reached the town. However, not in such quantities as to prove an immediate hazard to the health of anyone living there.”

  For those who were listening for it, the stress on the word “immediate” was readily apparent. No one commented on it, though.

  “So that’s good news, then,” the president’s man said. “Nothing that can’t be explained as a conventional missile. No reason to tell anyone otherwise.” He looked around the table for opposition to this eminently sensible viewpoint and of course found none.

  The mad scientist made a noncommital noise. His report had gone in days before, and the president’s man knew full well that it would be years before the effects of the fallout would be known. The cesium had dispersed over a wide area covered with snow and ice that would melt into streams and rivers and flow eventually to the bay and the sound. In the meantime, the Centers for Disease Control would maintain a quiet watch through local clinics to monitor the health of the community, in particular the incidence of cancer.

  “Very well,” the president’s man said with satisfaction, “our line will be that a terrorist attempt to attack the homeland was unsuccessful due to the diligence of our own counterterrorism forces, who had the operation under continuous surveillance from the moment of its inception. When the terrorists were discovered, they fired off the missile prematurely in the hope of doing random damage. Due to the vigilance and skill of the United States Coast Guard”-he inclined his head toward the Coast Guard captain-“no such damage was suffered.” He shrugged. “There was no serious threat to the public at any time.” He cocked an eyebrow. No one contradicted him, but the air force general was displaying less enthusiasm than he liked to see. “General? Something you wanted to share with the rest of the group?”

  The air force general raised his head. “Why Anchorage? There are half a dozen ports on the West Coast with military bases to target and far more people to kill, and therefore that much bigger a message to send. Why Anchorage?”

  “We weren’t looking for them to attack Anchorage for precisely those r
easons,” the man from the CIA said. “I think it’s fair to say they took that into account in their planning of the attack.” He shrugged. “And besides. It’s Anchorage. What’s more, it’s Alaska. Most Americans think Alaska floats off the southwest coast of California, right next to Hawaii, with occasional appearances on the Discovery Channel.”

  There was a rich chuckle all around at this witticism. When it died down, the man from the White House looked at the man from the CIA. “And the motivation behind this attack?”

  The agent shook his head. “Not what you would have expected, sir, not at all. For one thing, the Ja brothers seem to have acted independently.”

  There was instant and vocal skepticism, and the CIA agent had to raise his voice to be heard. “That’s what la Bae-ho is claiming, sir, and so far his story hangs together.”

  “They were al-Qaida trained,” said the army general. “Bin Laden’s got his own fleet of ships. Didn’t you say you couldn’t trace the owner of this freighter?”

  The CIA man met the general’s contemptuous look with a bland expression. “Ja Bae-ho makes a very convincing case that this was a personal mission, General.”

  “Then where did they get the money to finance this operation?”

  “We don’t know yet, sir. We have some leads, which we are tracing now, and-”

  The general glared. “Yeah, well, I know, and I don’t need to trace any so-called leads and neither does anyone else in this room with half a brain.” His tone made it clear that he was excluding the CIA’s man from that number.

  “Ladies, gentlemen,” the representative from the White House said, and everyone shut up. “This was too close. We must take steps to see that it never happens again.”

  “Sir-” the Coast Guard representative said.

  “Stir up your service, Captain. Come up with some recommendations for the defense of the coastline and our ports that we can put into effect immediately. What almost happened here is deeply disturbing to every thinking member of this committee. Thank you all for coming.”

  The audience was at an end. The crowd dispersed. The representative from the White House lingered to talk to the Coast Guard captain who had given the briefing. The captain concentrated on gathering up the handouts, perhaps two of which had been looked at by the attendees.

  “Imagine,” the man from the White House said, chewing reflectively on the earpiece of his reading glasses, “they almost pulled it off, they almost sailed that puppy right into an American port and set off a dirty bomb that if detonated would have taken out nearly three hundred thousand people and rendered a strategic air force base and an entire city uninhabitable for years to come.”

  The captain closed his briefcase.

  “This is going to happen again, isn’t it, Captain.”

  It wasn’t really a question, but the Coast Guard captain answered it anyway. “Yes, sir, it is.”

  CAPTAIN LOWE WAS BURIED with full military honors in his hometown of Valentine, Nebraska, his wife, son, and two daughters present. His wife was presented with the flag that had draped his coffin and she accepted it, dry-eyed, as her daughters wept quietly and her son stared straight ahead with a stony face.

  HELMSMAN EUGENE RAZO WAS buried with much more fanfare and ten times the family members present in his hometown of Kodiak. His fiancee’s family hosted a memorial potlatch that is still remembered for its cornucopia of food and the amount and quality of the gifts given those who attended. His parents started a scholarship fund in his name at the held indefinitely without bail or representation. His uncle died later that year, but he never knew it.

  THE BODIES OF TERRORISTS, mercenaries, and ship’s crew floated ashore in Resurrection Bay for months following the incident. Ja Yong-Bae’s body was not among them.

  The younger Noortman’s leg healed, although he would walk with a slight limp for the rest of his life. He remained in Hong Kong doing contract work for various organizations, some legal, some not. A year after the events recorded here he was recruited by a Russian mafia don who wanted to expand his empire into maritime shipping. He never did track down the true owners of the Agafia.

  PETER WOLF NEVER RETURNED to Odessa. There was a Pedro Lobo who surfaced in Rio de Janeiro a year later. He was joined by a ravishing young Russian woman who lavished affection on him and then disappeared with a substantial portion of his more liquid assets, including a handful of uncut diamonds from the wall safe, the combination of which he had been so unwise as to give her. He took it well. “At least she left me enough to live on,” he said, and was soon seen in the clubs with another, even more ravishing girl from the Philippines.

  No evidence was ever found to connect the Ja brothers to the bombing of his office.

  WHEN LAST HEARD FROM, Arlene Harte was in Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska, writing a column about the annual migration of the Western Arctic caribou herd. Knight-Ridder has made an offer for a syndicated column, and she is considering it.

  IN MAY ENSIGN HANK Ryan was promoted to lieutenant and given command of a one-hundred-ten-footer out of Pensacola, Florida. Ensign Robert Ostlund took early retirement with a medical disability. Ensign Reese was promoted to lieutenant, junior grade. Seamen Delgado and Lewis were promoted to petty officers. Chief Mark Edelen put in for retirement and invested in a marina in Corpus Christi.

  FIVE YEARS LATER, LILAH Chase was diagnosed with a virulent case of pancreatic cancer. She died two weeks later, in great pain. Shortly thereafter Eli Chase was diagnosed with leukemia. He survived.

  JULY

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  “IT REALLY IS OVAl,” Sara said, looking around her.

  “Ye-ees,” the flunky said. “The president will be right with you, Commander, Admiral.”

  “Thank you,” Sara said politely. She seemed incapable of being anything but these days. She limped forward with the aid of a cane. It turned out she had cracked her right fibula when the Sojourner Truth went aground on Fox Island, and in the press of business hadn’t noticed. It was taking a tiresomely long time to heal.

  Admiral Elwood “Woodie” Long, commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard and no fool, gave her a penetrating look, and held his peace.

  Sure enough, a few minutes later the president walked in and exchanged handshakes and backslaps with Admiral Long, who then introduced Sara. Sara accepted the president’s hand and stared at the face usually seen at the top of the hour on CNN and pretended to listen to his words of praise with a pleasant, attentive expression.

  She became aware of silence and realized that the president had stopped speaking. “Thank you very much, sir,” she said gravely, and looked at the admiral, waiting for the signal to go.

  “I mean it, Commander,” the president said, who seemed like a nice man, only very insistent on getting and keeping her attention. He smiled. “I heard you backed your cutter onto the beach. Is that true?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, still polite. “We lost the bow when we rammed the freighter. It was the only way.”

  His smile widened. “An inspired solution.” He sighed, his smile fading. “I wish we could acknowledge your heroism, Commander, and that of your crew, but we feel at the present time that it would be most unwise to allow this story to be told. Later, perhaps, when the country is less unsettled…”

  “I quite understand, sir,” Sara said, looking at the admiral again.

  “Anything we can do, Commander,” the president said, “say the word.”

  Sara smiled her bright, shiny smile and took the offer for what it was, a politeness, a courtesy, meaningless.

  And then, halfway through the door, she turned. “Mr. President?”

  He looked up from his desk, around which more flunkies had begun to gather like moths to a flame. “Yes, Commander?”

  “There is something you could do for me.”

  The admiral put his hand on Sara’s elbow. She shook it off.

  The president missed these cues and smiled at them both. He really would like to do something for her. Yes, a
nice man. “What’s that, Commander?”

  “Fire your CIA director,” Sara said. “He’s too dumb to live.”

  In the car, the admiral said heavily, “You just kissed your two-eighty goodbye, Commander.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sara said.

  “I’ll do what I can, but…”

  “Yes, sir.”

  AUGUST

  LONDON

  THE BRITISH AIRWAYS 747 taxied up to the gate at Heathrow, and passengers, weary from five hours of sitting with their knees jammed up against the seatback in front of them, began to disembark, stumbling a little from sheer exhaustion.

  Sara went through immigration, where the officer raised his eyebrows when he saw her Coast Guard identification. “A sailor, are you?” he said as he stamped her passport and handed it back to her.

  “I was,” she said.

  She got her luggage and walked unmolested through customs. At the arrivals gate, she paused, looking around. She had been told that she would be met.

  “Hi, Sara.”

  She turned. “Hugh.” She felt a glad rush, and put her face up to be kissed. He looked like she felt, older and by some indefinable measure less idealistic, as if he had lost his innocence.

  He, too, was leaning on a cane. “Look,” he said, holding it up. “Matching outfits.”

  “I thought you were in D.C. lobbying for a transfer to the U.S. embassy in London,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m meeting my wife. I told your office I’d pick you up.” He looked at her epaulets and whistled. “A full commander now, I see. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ve got a taxi. I bribed a security guard to let it wait for us out front. This way.” He gestured with his cane. “So,” he said, “the nation’s representative to the International Maritime Organization. That’s pretty impressive.”

  “I wanted a ship,” she said.