by Mark Ellis
The lights were on in and around the One World Pool, but its waters stood calm, gently banking with the swell of the ship. Melissa crossed over to starboard, knowing exactly where to find Centavos, a staff quarters section just a flight of stairs down from the Sunglass Hut. She’d bought an inexpensive pair two days into the voyage to protect her eyes from the glare off the reflective surfaces of the ship.
Moving down the starboard rail, she saw that a man was coming toward her from the stern of the ship. At first, she thought that Officer Thompson had worked his way around and picked up her trail, but as the figure drew near, she realized this man was too slender to be her bulky escort, and besides, she made out the pipes and cuffs of a Trans Oceanic uniform. It was deck runner Dan Waldenburg, coasting along handsomely as if this night out of Juneau was just another night on the job.
He recognized her, and a big smile opened in the moonlight. “Well, Ms. Ross,” he said.
Melissa wondered if Dan was now part of the alerted eyes and ears of the ship’s company.
“Do they ever give you any time off?” she joked.
He laughed. “Actually, I just got off. I’m heading to the Victoria Station.”
A long moment, in which Melissa wondered if he might ask her to join him. No, he was too much the gentleman and would probably consider it tacky to hit on the passengers. But he did give her a searching look that had not been in evidence the night he had gotten her back in her stateroom.
“How’s that new lock working?” he asked.
“Fine, thank you.”
“Just out for a walk?”
“Me?” Melissa bought time. With Maria Centavos’s possible revelations in such near proximity, she did not want him to join her now. She didn’t want to slam the door, either.
“Yes, busy day, just one time around and I’m going to bed.”
Again that searching look, and it seemed to Melissa that Dan was gauging something about her that men gauge as a prelude to interest.
“I’ll say goodnight then,” he said, and with a final, perplexed half smile, he headed forward before disappearing into one of the countless corridors that reach staircases that rise to the uppermost decks.
There was something between them, but in a Meltdown environment where waiting very often meant ending, it would have to wait.
Three stories above her, the lights on the bridge were partially occluded by the fog. Melissa imagined a skeleton crew keeping watch over the vital organs of the trolling ship. The sunglass shop was dark, its myriad styles peeking out with no reflection, like the submerged eyes of the Andrea Doria disaster victims in Scrimshaw’s painting.
Cigarette smoke was suddenly acrid in her nostrils.
Melissa wheeled around, moving her right hand toward her holstered weapon. Nothing.
Then she saw, from a small lifeboat suspended over her, steady smoky puffs rising and trailing spectrally into the damp and unseen sky.
Captain Squier turned from his reading in the captain’s suite and called the bridge for a status report. First Officer Tom Forester, third in command under Briggs, was on duty.
“A strong southeastern current has come up,” Forester told him. “Right down the middle of the channel.”
“Go ahead and come underway into Disenchantment Bay at five knots,” ordered Squier. “Maybe we’ll luck out and get a picturesque dawn at Hubbard.”
The lifeboat above Melissa rocked, and like an ocean-crossing vampire, Stamen came above the gunwale. She wore her sauna tech uniform, no makeup, and her dyed black hair was tightened back against her skull as if slicked by a gale. She seemed a creature wholly of this darkest of all dark nights. Melissa pulled her Glock out of its shoulder holster and leveled it at the internet harpy. Gunpoint, her first time ever.
“You can walk away from this, Barb.”
There were to be no evil incantations, no warning expression of triumph, nothing to frighten or paralyze like a trapdoor spider stuns its prey. She simply flicked her cigarette butt over Melissa’s head and then charged. Melissa fully intended a kill shot when she pulled the trigger, but the Northstar’s deck shifted as the trolling ocean liner suddenly picked up speed. Melissa was tilted off her feet momentarily as the handgun fired. In a matter of seconds, her assailant’s claws fell around her torso, pushing her with wiry, enraged strength toward the rail.
Melissa dug her feet into the skid-resistant deck top and fumbled to raise her weapon again, but there was no give in Stamen’s bear hug. Tobacco reeked from her thin lips, and bleach wafted from her blouse. And blood too—Melissa could smell it. A sharp pain from the rail jarred her vital organs, sapping her in the face of the crazed, methodical woman. Even to scream would take strength she needed. She was only now gathering the adrenaline she would need to save her own life.
But Stamen was grasping her upper legs and lifting with all the strength her damnable soul contained. The top rail was excruciating against Melissa’s back again, and now her feet were flailing. Her Glock hit the deck with a double thump. Finally able to free one hand, Melissa tried to grasp something, some part of the ship that could save her.
In the wiry strength, the chlorine odor and fetid breath of tobacco, the manic exertion of limbs, the sensual hate, lived Stamen’s vindictive, sociopathic passion for death.
Melissa finally screamed.
She’d muff this high dive: a bad start and a worse finish. Near the ship’s stern it was not so far down, a survivable fall.
Alvin Alderson stood on a quarterdeck outside the Kodiak Terrace with a Rainier Policy Institute think-tanker. They had both just lit cigars, and Alderson had theorized about “all the oil that lay out in the north continent, right under our noses.”
“Shame about Palin,” replied Alderson’s like-minded companion. “I fear our arctic reserves will be untouchable for the foreseeable future.”
Both men swayed slightly as the ship’s engines noticeably notched up and the ship moved more purposely upon the water.
“Hey, old Rad has us moving again,” said Alderson. “I wonder if this god-awful fog is lifting.”
Both men heard gunfire, a single shot, a scream, and then a splash.
“What the hell was that?” cursed Alderson.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was only by the grace of God that Melissa landed feet first. Tumbling “cattywumpus,” her father would say, she had been lucky. Had she belly-flopped or gone head first, the fall might have broken limbs, or knocked her unconscious. But she was awake when the freezing water enveloped her body like incendiary ice. Down she sank, into a submerged universe that changed every concept of place she’d ever known.
Treading water after surfacing, she saw that the ship was moving past her quickly, its navy hull like the unstoppable Melville whale. She remembered the Northstar’s massive power plant shifting gears moments before she’d fired her weapon. Within seconds those turbine-driven propellers would sweep past. As her teeth began chattering spasmodically, she reached quickly into her pantsuit pocket to reach her waterlogged iPhone. But she realized that even if it still worked, and even if she wasn’t dragged down by the turbine undertow and fatally shredded by the propellers, hypothermia would come quickly. Even if she screamed again and someone heard her, it would take time to inform the bridge, time to come about and deploy the apparatus of rescue.
The Blythe family’s veneration of President Ronald Reagan had inspired her to excel as a swimmer in high school. There’d been an Olympic-size swimming pool at Cape Lookout, and she was a regular in the pool at her condo, but the truth was that she had let herself go since the Meltdown.
Melissa stuck the iPhone in her teeth and bit down hard, an attempt to both save the device and stop her convulsive chattering. With hard strokes, she thrust herself perpendicular to the ship and the final-sounding approach of its turbulent wake. She did not quite make it. An ever-widening V-shaped wave rolled out from the bounding hull, trapping and pushing her like a river rapid pushes a forest leaf. After so
me time of her fighting for strokes, the rippling wave churned more gently as she gulped for air through teeth clamped hard on her phone. Dormant swim muscles remembered strokes, and she begin kicking. To follow the wake of the ship seemed her only hope, but the Northstar was far enough away now to be visible in its entirety, a ghostly mother receding. Her necklace of lights grew dim quickly in the deep fog, and soon all was darkness. Melissa paddled in blackness, fought back panic, and stayed afloat on the memories of organs and limbs that remained buoyant.
Through the grip of what she feared would be unconsciousness, an avian voice called from out of the black soup. Not the wheeling cry of gull or tern but the unmistakable caw of a stationary bird. Either death itself was calling or Melissa had warm-blooded company.
Her benumbed feet scraped bottom in the blackness. Muddy glop sucked at her walking shoes. Unbelievably on her feet, she waded out onto the sodden mud, tripping over what could only have been driftwood. The bird, some species of crow or raven, waited till she toppled forward to the ground and resumed its calling with one questioning cackle above her.
One star appeared overhead, bright through the passage of fog, and then three, and then six stars. Light enough to dimly illuminate a shoreline as deserted as any on earth. Pallid mud and a bank of pine from which some feathered beast raised his ruckus.
Melissa dropped the iPhone from her teeth into her hands, but it did not respond, nothing.
She remembered seeing an island on Trans Oceanic’s colorful map of Disenchantment Bay. Just across from Hubbard Glacier, the island had a name, but this she had not committed to memory. All was opaque across the water, so her eyes came back around to the trees that hovered like watchful stick men a short distance from the shore.
Her first thought was that she wanted to believe the island was safe. The forests that circled the bay and stretched into the inner continent would be full of night hunters—she was thinking mountain lions or a Jack London–esque pack of wolves. An island the size of the one on the cruise map would theoretically only sustain the smallest of mammalian life if any—and birds, like the one that had cawed and fallen silent.
Her teeth had stopped their migraine chatter, but a shiver chilled her through. The idea struck her to remove her suit coat and pants and wring them out. She did, kneeling in only underclothes like a Stone Age squaw pounding skins on rocks. It was better without the wet clothes, as the air had thankfully no more bite than Seattle in April.
By her best reckoning of time, she knew it must be nearing one in the morning. She’d left her stateroom at ten minutes to midnight and ditched Officer Thompson a half hour later. Remembering the scent of blood mixed with chlorine on her assailant’s breast, she indulged the possibility that Stamen had taken her expended hollow-point bullet.
Would they find Stamen in a pool of blood by the Sunglass Hut?
More sky was opening. The pinecones and needles fairly bristled in the starlight. Out over the water, the fog was lifting too. She could see small whitecaps as far out as the place where she thought she had gone overboard. Suddenly clawing at her throat was the need for something she’d taken for granted from the Northstar’s pewter faucets. Thirst—she was terribly thirsty. All the briny water that surrounded her savior atoll would only make it worse.
After Rad finally fell asleep with his book on his chest, Alvin Alderson knocked at the captain’s suite door.
“I know from gunfire, and I heard gunfire,” said a fired-up Alderson. “I’m guessing some kind of automatic pistol. After that, a scream.”
Rad’s golf buddy was credible; regular army, Korea.
“OK, Alvin, it’s not like this is out of the blue.” Unfortunately, we’ve got some drama on the cruise again this year. Sit tight and I’ll clue you in.”
Rad called Security Chief Collins and asked Alderson to repeat his story, after which Collins lifted his cell and dispatched two guards to the area from which the possible gunplay had originated. Sensing a probable connection between Alderson’s report and Melissa Blythe’s theory about Barbara Stafford, Rad made the decision to divulge all that was suspected of the sauna tech to his security chief, taking his best friend into confidence as well.
“The left-wing media were licking their chops to paint Svenko’s death as a wingnut murder,” Alderson remarked, as if his distrust of same-sex attraction was confirmed. “Now you’re telling me it was her girlfriend.”
While Alderson and Collins sat absorbing the new information, Rad walked to his picture window to survey the shrouded leagues of Disenchantment Bay.
“A real shame if the worst is true,” he continued. “I liked Sue Ross, um, I mean Blythe.”
Chief Collins’s cell chimed, and he put the call on speaker. It was Officer Jim Davis, who’d been promoted after Officer Thompson had phoned in admitting that he’d lost Sue Ross in the Victoria Station restrooms. “Sir, we’ve got blood smears on the aft rail, across from the Sunglass Hut.”
Collins left, leaving the Arbor Glen compatriots alone.
“What’s your next move, Big Rad?”
In answer, Rad dialed Cocaptain Briggs on the bridge. His order was to come about and retrace the ship’s wake. “We may have a woman, possibly two women, overboard.”
Briggs, who had been second in command the night they’d searched for Svenko, allowed himself to breathe deeply and say, “Unbelievable.”
“We’ll try to keep it unobtrusive, but I want every deck runner out there looking.”
Rad and his neighbor sat for a long moment. The clock was sneaking up on 2:00 a.m.
“Don’t you think it might be time for a general alert?” nudged Alderson. “You’d have every conservative eye looking for this reporter and the killer lesbo.”
“I’d rather have them in their rooms right now,” said Rad.
Stan Hundtruk sat quietly in his stateroom just above the renewed pulsation of the ship’s diesel turbines. Because there was a patented Hundtruk strategy for Trans Oceanic’s future economic accountability already outlined on his stateroom laptop, the priority had suddenly become to secure the most propitious outcome possible for his party and his president in a matter of secondary importance: the death of Lara Svenko.
Hundtruk’s outline, a game plan he knew his superiors would summarily approve, was the implementation of a full-frontal audit of Trans Oceanic’s last seven years, as far back as the feds could go unless fraud could be proven. The intimations he’d thrown around with Chief Collins about personnel changes and upended hierarchies were not facetious. After the company had undergone the highest level of government review and delivered unto the reviewers a tax-penalty-interest sum calculated to resonate with the public, the burrowing of an oversight bureaucracy deep into the corporation would begin. Federal consultants would divide the cast of players into those deemed re-educable, like Chief Collins, and those like Rad Squier, who were shaping up as considerable opponents of the new order. With Barack Obama occupying the Oval Office, there was time, a minimum of a bit less than three years now. That would be time enough to complete the promised transformation, the overdue redistribution of wealth, and a gloriously permanent Democrat majority. He couldn’t resist a smile at the thought of Reagan’s line about the scariest words in the English language: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.
The problem now was that a new Svenko case history was closing in on its final moments, with an impolitic lesbian looming as the pivotal figure. Not only were the Republicans not responsible for Svenko’s death but one of their own lapsed Republicans was however many steps ahead of him on the trail of justice. Such a buzz-worthy narrative would sap life out of what his superiors hoped would be the real story.
There was another problem. After agreeing to secretly facilitate Hundtruk’s entry into the ship’s command chain loop, Security Chief Collins had stopped taking his calls. Instincts borne of clandestine decades in service to the government suggested that something was happening as the wee hours approached.
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sp; He had to get to Stamen first. He’d intercepted Blythe’s email call to Scrimshaw for guidance and answered back with the imprimatur of the Charon boss for her to sit tight. But Hundtruk couldn’t rely on her doing so. For the first time since the ship had departed Seattle he opened the leather case that held his service firearm, a Colt .45 police revolver with hollow-point bullets. He loaded the chambers, holstered the big gun under his left arm, and then came out of his stateroom into the deserted corridor. Reaching the deck at the end of a white enameled staircase, he saw that the foggy stew on Disenchantment Bay was opening to the stratosphere, dawn brewing in the southeastern sky.
Moving just swiftly enough to avoid the impression of haste, Hundtruk moved toward Melissa Blythe’s stateroom, down three flights from the main deck amidships. If he encountered security, or even Collins, the play would be that nothing was amiss. Reaching the staircase, he saw that getting to Blythe was to be no cakewalk. The corridor leading to her stateroom was under guard. He walked up to the officer nearest him, nametag: Jim Davis.
“I’d hoped to visit Sue Ross, from the Lewis & Clark Pioneer Log,” Hundtruk said.
“Sorry, sir, I can’t authorize that right now.”
“Whatever is going on?”
“Sorry, sir, my direct order is to keep this corridor clear, no one goes in or out.”
Back on the starboard rail, Hundtruk saw the peaks of immense mountains and the ice-sheet slopes, gray-pink like the underbellies of salmon. As the ship made slow progress toward what he reckoned was the still-shrouded Hubbard Glacier, the dark hat of an island rose from the clearing bay.
Haenke Island, he remembered reading in the cruise literature, named for a nineteenth-century botanist and naturalist.
