Target Lock On Love

by M. L. Buchman

  He was not going to ask why twenty-six and not one number up or down. He’d learned not to ask Connie questions like that because she would always tell you why.

  He ignored the fish comment, and also Nikita’s sniper rifle tucked in a corner of the wheelhouse. One spray from a deck gun and the best sniper in the world couldn’t save them.

  Back on deck he spotted the patrol boat standing out from shore. It was heading straight for them. He tried to remember. Had they seen another fishing vessel in the area? He didn’t think so. The other southbound boat they’d passed had been standing out to sea, apparently to circle wide around this heavily patrolled no-entry zone.

  He’d need something to allay their suspicions. He needed…

  “Thanks, Connie,” he called back toward the wheelhouse. He didn’t pause to hear if she replied.

  “Get that net out,” he shouted. “Way out. Gloucester!”

  “Yo!” Patty moved fast.

  “Show me that you know what the hell you’ve been talking about. You have ten minutes to fill that net. I want to be knee-deep in fish in fifteen.”

  Even before he finished speaking, she had the net spilling overboard in a long slide that looked as liquid as the water it was plunging down into.

  “Altman, you keep your ass hidden.”

  “Some weapons would be handy now,” the tarp replied. Gods, he was becoming as unhinged as O’Donoghue.

  “Nope. Not a shot! If you’re wearing one, make sure it stays hidden.”

  “One?” The tarp scoffed.

  Mick ignored him.

  “C’mon, comrades. Get me some fish!” He joined Jason at the rail, watching the purseline wire to make sure it didn’t snag as the net continued to run out.

  It felt forever and a month before Patty shouted a hold on the net. Nikita eased down the brake on the net spool until it finally stopped spilling overboard.

  # # #

  Using hand signals, Patty guided Connie in a wide circle back to the leading edge of the net. There she gathered up the lead buoy and with it the other end of the purseline.

  Please God, let there be fish here.

  She and Nikita dragged it to the pursewinch and hit the winch hard. Thank God Connie had fixed it. She didn’t know what Mick’s urgency was, but there was no mistaking the tone of command he exercised so rarely. It was a new side of him, captain of the vessel and looked damn good on him.

  The winch roared to life dragging the two ends of the wire aboard and pulling together the bottom edges of the net so that this time the fish couldn’t sound downward and escape. With a groan from the old ship, the rings came aboard and the purse was closed.

  Patty leaned over the gunwale to stare down into the net. You wanted fish, Quinn, boy-oh-boy did I get you fish. The net teemed with Pacific salmon, in this season all Coho silvers with some smaller Arctic char mixed in.

  The Graynose had no vacuum for emptying the net. Brailing up fish in a smaller net was a slow process and Mick sounded like he was in a big hurry.

  Was it the Russian drone somewhere overhead? She’d been told not to look up, so she hadn’t. But why would a high-flying drone suddenly have him so on edge? That’s when she spotted it. On the water, a flash of light caught her attention—a boat. A big one was heading their way. It was the size of factory ship, come to collect their catch.

  It was gray, just like everything in Russia. Then she spotted the diagonal stripes of color on the sides—the white, blue, and red of the Russian flag. Russian Coast Guard. Instead of cranes to crossload fish, it had…deck guns.

  She didn’t know the plan yet, but if Mick said he needed the Graynose’s deck awash in fish, she’d give it to him.

  Instead of dipping the fish out of the big purse with a smaller net, she grabbed a boat hook and snagged the net as far out as she could. “Loop a line there,” she yanked it up for Jason.

  Mick and Nikita were doing the same thing on the other side.

  She met Mick at the main winch with the newly attached lines.

  “Let’s find out just how good Connie is. This trick can fry a winch that’s in factory-new condition, never mind an old workhorse like this one.” She slapped the lines in place and hit the winch throttle.

  The entire boat groaned under the load as the winch tried to haul the first third of the loaded net aboard.

  “Yank the fish out onto the deck, as fast as you can,” she shouted.

  Mick and the others rushed to the rail and began pulling twenty- and thirty-pound fish aboard by their tails. It was a race to unload the leading edge of the net fast enough that the overloaded net didn’t burn out the winch. Her muscles were soon burning from the workout. If they still had salmon like this in the Atlantic maybe she’d still be fishing there. The entire boat was shuddering, but the winch continued working.

  Connie idled the boat slowly backward, easing the pressure slightly. A dangerous maneuver that could run the prop right into the net and leave them adrift with a snarled prop and a destroyed net.

  Patty almost called her off, then she saw just how big the patrol boat was. It was deceptive. She’d thought it was smaller and closer, but it kept coming until it loomed large on the horizon.

  “Russian only now, comrades,” Mick called out. “Patty, keep your mouth shut. Connie too. Your accent is Muscovite, something I’d rather not have to explain.”

  Fine! Though she kept the thought to herself. She was going to learn Russian so fast, that she’d make Comrade Quinn’s head spin.

  “And don’t use the word comrade whatever you do.”

  So much for that. Though since she didn’t even know the Russian word for comrade, it wouldn’t make any difference. She went on with hauling fish aboard and keeping her mouth shut.

  The deck was already a snarl of tangled net and hazardous with a thick slippery layer of fish. They snagged the next section of the net and once again fed it into the winch. It moaned in agony, but it ground the net aboard. They all grabbed and dragged fish out of the net until they had to shake out their arms every now and then just to keep them functioning.

  A PA system blared out so loudly in Russian that she almost leapt out of her boots. While she’d been hustling, the patrol boat had pulled up alongside. It was twice the height and three times the length of the Graynose.

  And it was commanded by an idiot.

  Even as she had the thought, a rolling wave slipped under the fishing boat’s keel and tipped her steeply over to starboard. Her crane on that side, unused at the moment, scraped a long gash right through the Russian-flag paint colors down to bare metal. Impressively the crane held, but it gave Mick an excuse to start spewing out what Patty could only assume was loads of his Uncle’s invective.

  She couldn’t look away from Mick in that moment, as he stood on a wreck of a fishing boat chewing out the Russian Coast Guard in their own tongue.

  It sounded damned sexy and she couldn’t wait for her first private lesson.

  As she turned back to her work, she wondered what suka blyad meant. Mick made it sound very nasty.

  # # #

  “If you break my crane, you buy me brand new one, you bitch motherfucker!” Suka blyad was a fixture of Uncle Borya’s vocabulary that Aunt Verna had never been able to purge. Russians used it as casually as Patty O’Donoghue used shit.

  “What do you mean where’s Uri?” Mick hoped that was the guy who had rented the boat to the US military. “Do you see him here? Uri is sick. We are fishing for him. But his gear keeps breaking.” Mick kicked the brailing winch and blessed Patty for not using it even though Connie had fixed it, because he definitely needed something to kick.

  “Now go away, we’re busy.” He did his best to ignore the line of men at the ship’s railing, eight of them with rifles pointed down at him and his crew.

  “You are fishing in a military restricted zone,�
�� the PA roared. “This is a closed town. You are not permitted here.”

  “I am just an honest Russian trying to make a living. I am not some poacher,” which he knew was a huge problem throughout Kamchatka. “Now otva ‘li.” Of course there wasn’t a chance that the guy was going to fuck off, but Mick could always hope.

  He made a show of looking around the deck and then shouting, “Where’s that drunken son-of-a-bitch Luka?”

  Nikita hid a snort of laughter poorly and Jason didn’t understand. Patty was busy wrestling with a fish that was as big as she was—an out-of-season Chinook monster that had clearly fallen in with the wrong crowd to be swimming with silvers. Patty and the ninety-pound fish made a very cute image, but he’d have to think about cute later…after they’d gotten out of this alive.

  Nikita managed to remain deadpan as she pointed toward the rumpled tarp in the corner of the deck. Giving up her boss pretty easily. He’d have to remember to tease Altman about the loyalty of SEALs; again, hopefully later.

  He stalked over to the tarp. Along the way he grabbed two-feet of gorgeous silver salmon that had spent its last gasp. He yanked back the tarp exposing Altman curled up as if asleep. The scope he’d been using was stashed under a coil of rope.

  Mick slapped Altman’s shoulder hard with the salmon, thoroughly enjoying himself. “You useless drunk. Next time, I’m putting you in the net with the stupid fish. Go help.”

  Altman made a show of staggering to his feet. He mumbled something very guttural about how Mick would rather screw a fish than Patty, grinned wickedly, and shuffled over to help the others drag aboard the thrashing fish.

  “You must leave!”

  As Mick had hoped, the captain had gotten off the PA and now stood at the rail looking down at him from among his men.

  “Yeah, yeah. Once I have my fish on board.”

  “Now!” The captain shouted loudly enough to not need the PA.

  Mick cursed those of his people who had stopped working in order to pay attention to the shouting officer. It let him buy a moment.

  The captain didn’t look like an idiot, he would know that they couldn’t move the boat at the moment without simply cutting the net.

  Mick looked sidelong up at the man. His uniform was a working man’s outfit, not some Moscow-appointed popinjay—at least so Mick hoped.

  He made a show of looking down at the salmon still in his hand, and then as if just thinking of the idea, Mick laid it across his palms and held it out as a peace offering. Then he tossed it upward, flat, so that it paused in the air just within the captain’s reach.

  For a brief moment of hesitation, almost too long, the captain considered.

  Then he reached out and snagged the silver by the tail. He hefted it a few times, then grinned down at Mick.

  “Milen’kiy ryba.” Nice little fish.

  Mick looked at the squirming mass on the deck and spotted Patty’s monster. At least ninety pounds of brightly-silvered female Chinook.

  “Luka, make yourself useful,” Mick jabbed a finger toward the fish.

  Luke Altman grumbled, retrieved the wrong fish by about eighty pounds, holding up a tiny runt and giving Mick another chance to berate him. At Mick’s curse on his father’s family, Altman hefted the monster as if it weighed as little as the runt. Mick reminded himself not to ever tangle with the SEAL commander.

  One of the patrol boat’s crew quickly lowered a line.

  Mick cinched it around the fish’s tail and it was gone aboard the Russian craft in a moment.

  “Now get out of here, mu’dak!” The captain walked away from the rail with two seaman carrying his new fish behind him.

  “Asshole to you, too,” Mick said under his breath. He’d wager that the crew wouldn’t get a single taste of the bounty of salmon roe caviar that the Chinook had been carrying with her. He offered a one-finger salute to the captain’s back. By the crew’s smiles, he’d read the situation right.

  The patrol boat moved off, but didn’t return to shore, instead waiting within easy range of their deck guns.

  Mick spared one glance at the drone base they’d been scouting, still little more than a cluster of white specs in the far distance. They sure weren’t going to get any closer by sea.

  “Okay people. Let’s finish up and get the hell out of here.”

  # # #

  Once more they were all gathered in the back of the cold hangar as dusk rolled over the abandoned submarine base. As she and Mick walked up to the group, she leaned close and whispered.

  “Damn, Quinn. You were pretty magnificent out there,” Patty made it sound like a tease, but it was absolutely true.

  “Careful with those compliments, Gloucester. Might swell up my head.” Exactly what she’d figured he say.

  “The way you smell, I’m not real worried. But if I ever want a shining knight in stinky, slimy slicks, I’ve found my man.” And she had, which they still hadn’t talked about. Now was not the moment, so she chose a different topic.

  “Well, that exercise was useful as shit,” she addressed Altman as they arrived at the gathered group and sat in the circle of recovered chairs. “And now we all smell like fish. I stink so bad I can’t even make jokes about how Stenka-class patrol boats stink.” Patty tried not to think about it. It had been most of a decade since she’d wallowed in such a stench.

  They’d tossed every fish they could into the hold’s tanks. That one catch had taken two hours to load aboard and stow under the Stenka’s watchful eye. Whoever Uri was, he’d just gotten a hell of a bonus at no charge.

  “And the nearest goddamn shower is in Anchorage.”

  “I’m sure,” Commander Altman spoke up, “there’d be some Russian sailors glad to soap your back if you want to turn yourself in.”

  “Only person I’m interested in having do that stinks worse than I do.” Patty imagined Mick, soap, and a hot shower. That was a hell of a nice thought as she suppressed another shiver brought on by the plummeting temperature.

  Mick shrugged. “Ocean is only about a hundred yards that way. Always glad to scrub any part of you, O’Donoghue.”

  “That ocean is like a billionth of a degree above freezing solid. You’re psycho, Quinn.”

  He didn’t deny the charge as he turned to Altman. “So, was all this worth the trip down the coast?”

  “Absolutely! We confirmed the location of the drone base and that sea access was unlikely to be successful. Their active response verifies the importance of this location.”

  “I still smell like a fish,” Patty protested.

  “Fish are quieter,” Napier observed drily.

  “So…what? Am I as ugly as a salmon too?”

  Napier opened his mouth, then closed it to look at his wife when she rested a hand on his arm.

  “This is not an argument you will not win, n’est-ce pas?”

  It was a pity that Danielle was so nice; Patty could really get into tangling with someone at the moment.

  “While we were busy fishing, Sofia was not idle,” Nikita shifted the conversation before Patty could decide who to target next. She did notice that after a day on the water with her, Jason was sitting very close to the female SEAL. Setting your sights on a SEAL warrior? That takes guts. Go Jason.

  If Nikita was aware of Jason’s riveted attention, she didn’t show it. With her tablet and projector, she was now splashing images against the back of the hangar wall. The scarred and faded concrete made them a little tricky to see.

  It took a moment for Patty to get her head wrapped around the image, but once she was oriented to the sea and the white building they’d seen only as a bright spot on the horizon, she could make sense of it.

  The Russian drone base was a straightforward affair, not all that different from the sub base the Night Stalkers were now illegal squatters in. Again, a deep cove between protecting headla
nds, but at the airbase the headlands climbed as high ridges making a long, protected valley. Down the center of the valley was a paved runway surrounded by several small hangars, what appeared to be a machine shop building based on all of the materials stacked outside it, and a set of barracks almost as depressing as the ones here.

  At the inlet’s shore was a long dock and—

  “Is that the stinking Stenka-class patrol boat?”

  “Feel better now that you got that out of your system, Gloucester?”

  “Much,” she nudged her shoulder against Mick’s in what she hoped looked like a comradely gesture. How was she supposed to keep her hands off him when contact even through two parkas felt so electric?

  Altman rolled his eyes at her. Then he had Nikita lead them on a tour of the base’s image.

  Beside the Stenka was a smaller supply ship, about half unloaded. She zoomed the image in at various points of interest.

  At the machine shop she zoomed in so closely that Patty could see the color of some idiot’s hair. “Doesn’t he know he needs a hat in this kind of weather?”

  “This is still mild for Kamchatka,” Connie noted in one of her matter-of-fact tones. “The current temperature is thirty-seven degrees Fahrenheit, though it will fall into the low twenties tonight. Mid-winter here will settle solidly in the tens, with the occasional cold snap down to minus forty.”

  “Altman,” Patty turned to the SEAL commander, “you better get us out of here before it hits minus forty or my ass is going to be frozen to this chair.” She could see that she’d hit his teasing limit and decided she’d take her own advice and stop attacking the most dangerous man within several thousand miles. “How the hell did you get this image anyway, sir? Full base view with resolution down to that dude’s hair color is just crazy.”

  “The Avengers were just upgraded with Argus.”

  Patty looked around the table and saw everyone had the same reaction she did. It took her a moment to find a way to give voice to the sensation.