A Death on The Horizon

by Mark Ellis

  The bridge tipped, and they all reacted by grabbing whatever solid thing was at hand. Like a second hand sweeping to the end of play, the hull swung ninety degrees in a carnival suck of bad momentum that forced them sideways over the water.

  The various consoles were zapping useless digital displays. As Rad leaned in and tried to clamber to the main console, a tortured glance out the funhouse tilt of the bridge observation window revealed a forest-green mass—Haenke Island—at the end of an unyielding trajectory.

  Democratic Special Ops Stan Hundtruk walked along the hall of empty hot tub rooms at the Siletz Springs Sauna Center, a place of bubbles, gurgles, and heat. Everybody was waiting for sunrise over Hubbard Glacier, but he had returned with his thoughts the scene of his interventionist triumph. This place of recent death breathed like a living organ.

  At that moment the waterproof carpet beneath his feet went into a vertiginous climb.

  It seemed as if the Northstar had come onto some high seas, odd, given their position in the bay. After a brief climb upward, the floor jerked sharply to port. Hundtruk heard the turbines whine as if they’d lost purchase in the water. Stumbling against a corridor wall, he grabbed at a doorjamb to prevent himself from falling.

  He’d been thinking that there was no way to write him out of the Svenko script now. No matter how Fox News and conservative talk spun the lesbian drama afflicting the 2009 Rainier Policy Institute cruise, they could not excise one significant detail—the federal man had gotten to Barb Stamen first.

  As grim as it all was, with Stamen dead and Blythe’s fate subject to statistically unfavorable odds, Hundtruk had laughed to himself in the humid corridor. For all Grant Sharpe’s blather about the incompetence of government, it was old Hundtruk in the end.

  Looking into the hot tub room where he’d first laid eyes on the ribald woman at the heart of the Svenko murder, he smiled again. He was ready to become part of the visible. There would surely be a place at the policymaking tables in Chicago and DC, on the Kodiak Terrace, maybe even on the Northstar’s bridge. New guidelines and approaches were needed to respond to the exigencies of power. The professional left was clamoring from the bowels of officialdom, expecting their loyalty to be repaid, their work toward one-party government rewarded. Who better than a man like Stan Hundtruk to set the perfect example? To unleash these young hounds of social justice on the heels of trickle-down Meltdown capitalism that had destroyed everything in the name of avarice and fraud.

  Before going up to join his fellow passengers to enjoy the revealed sun, he’d seen that they’d slapped a big lock on the utility room where Maria Centavos had secreted her mortally wounded lover behind a fiberboard wall. Stamen was dead, but according to the trauma team, still warm. Had Centavos not allowed her to lie in shock for three hours after taking a bullet in the upper left collarbone, they might have saved Stamen’s life. Only Centavos knew her reason for not rushing to the ship’s top-flight urgent care clinic, and she had clammed up.

  Reveling in the thrill of the hunt, Hundtruk recalled the look on Chief Collins’s face when he bustled into the redolent utility room to find him standing over the fresh-dead wastrel. Hundtruk had been cool, as he’d stood coolly over innumerable crime scenes and bodies before. You didn’t get to his level without proving you had the stomach for it. If he and the redeemable chief of security ever sat down for a drink when this was over, the one-word summation Hundtruk would offer about his role in the Svenko denouement would be: gut.

  At that moment, with that thought, the floor had come out from under him. He’d stumbled on the tilted floor, and just after he found purchase on the jamb, the door of the hot tub room slammed shut, trapping Hundtruk’s fingers. Now, in excruciating pain, he reached for the knob and released his hand. He stepped on his own shoes in an attempt to find balance, feeling wet warmth at his feet. Looking down the corridor, he saw that the hot tubs were spilling over like bowls of broth on a clumsy server’s tray.

  The movement of the ship—a rapid surge absent any sense of mechanical control—had created an ungodly V-shaped slant in the corridor floor. Within seconds the warm water was up over the tops of his shoes. He tried to step forward, tripped on something submerged, and fell face-first, soaking himself. By the time he’d floundered back onto his feet, the familiar heated water had risen to his ankles.

  The lights dimmed but did not go out. He thought: terrorists, the bastards have struck here.

  He needed some kind of handhold. Directly above his head, a glass display case was bolted to the sloping wall. Reaching for his .45 caliber, he smashed the glass with the gun butt. Lunging clumsily, he caught the frame and was able to pull himself up even as drips of his blood dropped like cloudy paprika in the chlorinated water. From his hanging grasp on the display case, he could see the sauna center lobby and its tipped water feature pouring out its contents.

  If he could wade to the ragged faux-rock face of the feature, the amidships staircase was only a few feet beyond.

  From deep beneath him came a shriek, a ghastly screech of contact. There was a slick slippage, his right hand slipping away from the frame. Blood dripped down his arms and into the water like the murky flotsam of a shark’s dream.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Captain Squier had never felt so helpless. The tsunami generated by the fallen face of Hubbard pitched the Northstar sideways like a water bottle over one of Arbor Glen’s duck ponds. Shipbuilders could not design for such stressors now gripping the ship’s viscera of steel and air. His bridgemates were as helpless as he, hanging onto consoles like Star Trek bridgemates after a Klingon phaser hit.

  Looming out the madly tilted observation window was Haenke Island, moving closer each second. Closer, until the islet’s placid forest filled the plate glass entirely. It was inevitable that the wave would drive them into a small cove on the Hubbard-facing shoreline. The life of every soul onboard was out of his hands.

  “Prepare for impact!” Squier yelled, for the sixth time in his career.

  In the Vietnam War’s final days, he had covered with heavy armaments the exodus of American personnel from various coastal evacuation points. Gathered up in the panicked retreat were US-aligned elites whose alternate fate was to fall into the hands of an advancing Viet Cong army. He’d seen boats swamped and dragged under by grasping arms and hair-pulling hands. He’d ordered fire on antiquated enemy craft and watched it disintegrate like a thatched hut. His patrol boats had taken hits from the Soviet tanks the NVA sometimes got their hands on, and he had seen his own men felled from terminal concussions, burned, tortured, and left for dead after bad-luck reconnaissance missions. Nature also contributed to Squier’s professional weatherization. Lightning strikes and icebergs and storms that tilted troop transports full of vomiting men almost as much as the Northstar tilted now. He had seen postmortem photos of Lara Svenko, her face salt-swollen and washed of all expression.

  There had always been some move to make, some menu of options out of the navy’s manual. Now Rad was as devoid of options as the imprisoned Maria Centavos, likely clutching the sink of her cell and wondering about divine intervention.

  There was a scraping sound from the hull bottom. The scraping echoed over the open intercom, as if the ship’s voice had shrieked in agony. When it came, the impact was not as cataclysmic as the captain had feared. The water had risen so high so suddenly in the cove that the hard beach was now fathoms below them. The blow of landfall was cushioned by flexible pine tops that wavered like sea grass. Leaving the Northstar foundered in the blasted cove, the tsunami rolled on to crest somewhere up in the forest.

  For an eternity of milliseconds, time stopped. And then, like a cosmic inhalation, the wave sucked back down into the remorseless depths. The Northstar was not destined to follow. She was breeched at some fatal place below the waterline and, for all the power of the receding tide, was sinking faster than the backflow of water could suck her out. As Captain Squier’s bridgemates held fast, the ship righted herself, wa
vering back and forth like a pennyweight bath toy, until her com tower pointed straight into a robin’s-egg morning sky. What followed was like a bad elevator ride, a sea-tomb bottoming.

  The shallow cove saved them, gripping at the hull bottom, allowing a slow sink into the prehistoric sediment that sucked like gray quicksand. Not everyone had survived. Rad plainly saw human bodies in the churn of the wave’s landfall, bobbing beside broken treetops and then carried out into the bay.

  “Briggs?” yelled Rad.

  “Negative, sir, we have no power.”

  Rad dialed Lieutenant Beckman. “Yes, sir,” affirmed the rattled com officer. “Communications operational. I’ve already sent a distress call.”

  “Put me on all channels.”

  After a moment: “This is your captain speaking. We have been struck by a large tsunami, likely caused by a significant calving of Hubbard Glacier. We have sent a Mayday with our location, and help is on the way. Our crew and staff are fully prepared to provide immediate emergency assistance.”

  His announcement had not yet fully echoed to silence when the bridge shuddered, as if gut-kicked by a seismic temblor awakening in the rocky core of the island.

  “Tsunami just hit the northeastern shore of Disenchantment Bay,” Navigator Holdren said, his eyes glazed by the monitor’s light.

  The water from the hot tubs sloshing well above his black stockings and his soaked feet slip-sliding along the floor now creased into a nasty V-shape, Hundtruk found the sides of the sauna center wall and lunged up out of the bloodied water to regain his handhold on the display case. With the underbelly of the Northstar screaming its last, he clung there, his hands cut and bleeding. There was an employee roster, a letter of welcome from the center director, and a photograph of one particular staffer. Staring him in the face was the woman he had found dead, victim of her own passions and devices. Employee of the Month, Barbara Stafford, and her epitaph: It is my pleasure to serve you.

  From beneath him came increased gnashing, gigantically muted and tactile in the charged water. There was a sickening, twisting sensation and a renewed slosh of tepid water.

  Hundtruk tried to walk the crease, one foot before the other, but the patent-leather soles of his shoes skidded, and he only succeeded in achieving another belly flop. He got back on his feet and attempted to wade again, his destination the staircase just beyond the rocky face of the imitation rainforest waterfall. His chlorine-stung eyes cleared long enough to see a perfect fiberglass re-creation of a natural handhold a few steps away. Staying on his feet as the ship slowed and stopped spinning, he grabbed, sucked back a vaporous breath, and clung to the faux granite like a rock climber caught in a flash flood.

  Something crested with a planetary washing sound and then flowed back. Hundtruk envisioned a retreating breaker obliterating a tide pool and leaving behind a deadwood log. The V-shaped gutter became a rectangular corridor again. He felt an unmistakable downward sensation.

  There was an ominous flutter beneath him, as if all the jets in a mammoth whirlpool bath had activated at once—but cold, ice cold. The freezing water rose quickly, and in moments Hundtruk was inches from the white steel ceiling of the corridor, near a light, the warmth of which Hundtruk felt as the last warm thing in his life.

  He kicked sluggishly in the numbing tide. Something bumped against his cheek. His eyes wide, Hundtruk saw that it was a natural sponge, an embalmed sea creature that had met its own desiccated grave in service to humans. He gulped at the last pocket of air, but his breaths were shallow. His mind raced, but on some level, his body accepted the unthinkable.

  In classified meetings, where only the innermost lore of operations history was shared, it would be Stan Hundtruk they’d toast, from Juneau to the Oval Office. Fate deigned that he would be remembered as a member of the invisible life pulse that made the shadows of the

  Democratic Party.

  Distantly, reverberatingly, he imagined he heard human voices. The light bulb near his face flickered and then winked out, pitching Siletz Center and its sunken tubs into blackness.

  Melissa rested her back almost comfortably against the soft dirt of the hollow where she’d fallen after running from the tsunami. She lay listening to the nothingness at the top of the island— not even the cawing of a sympathetic bird. The luck of snow on high ground had saved her from parched thirst and the irresistible suck of the wave. She wondered how many of her chances had been used up since she’d boarded the Northstar, last seen careening sidelong toward her other savior, the island. The silence was broken by a terrestrial thud that shook the firs to their roots, carried with hollow resonance from some unseen coast.

  Her pantsuit washed away but her suede shoes thankfully still mud-caked to her feet, she noticed the sun felt warm on her skin. Around her, as if in some Disney animation, the forest was alive with silent creatures that had joined her frenzied clamber up the slope. She began to pick her way down, back through the trees, some staunch against the passage of time, others fallen and reclaimed by the forest. Mosses and spores, ferns and lichen were her carpet, a flora the likes of which she couldn’t remember ever seeing on her walks in the Cascade Highlands outside Seattle. She thought of Darwin as she gained confidence in her footing on the slope, his Galápagos life forms that existed only there. There was strangeness about any island that made it seem a separate universe.

  It was hard to guess how far down she’d have to go before reaching the clearing. She had run blindly as the wave approached and was now favoring her bruised knees with careful steps.

  Something massive loomed ahead through the trees. At first, she gasped, hand to heart, thinking it was the Northstar’s hull that blocked the filtered morning light. Into focus came a wall of uprooted shrubs, needles, cones, twisted limbs and branches—everything that can be churned up from a forest floor. Growing up in Port Rachel, she had seen how loggers would bulldoze the by-products of their efforts into uprooted piles as high as haystacks. But this was no pile. It was as if an army of bulldozers had pushed everything not held fast by rock and soil up the slope and deposited it like scrim at the edges of a summer pond.

  She would have to climb the wall to reach shore.

  Her first attempt was unsuccessful, a dead-end of deceptively insecure limbs. Another ascent was like negotiating a jungle gym with sharpened twigs and unsure fulcrums for the feet. Pine boughs compressed and twisted provided no safe foothold. A broken leg now might exhaust any chances fate had left to give her. The climb steepened, and her breath was hot on a secure limb.

  Finally, the top of the detritus wall, and now she could see the upslope of the clearing where she had drunk snow and stripped to her skivvies. The grasses were swept, the soil swirled and eddied back in tidal motifs. Going down the other side of the wall was more difficult; she lost her footing and swung around a fallen trunk, rashly abrading her armpit. It burned like fire, but she hung on, found another toehold. There was a fish pinioned at the bottom, still alive, looking up at her with one fishy eye.

  Down and down over combed grasses with hidden stones. Muddied soil sucked her heels as she made for shore. Entering the band of forest, she stumbled onto a body.

  A man, a Trans Oceanic uniform, his face mercifully covered in tangled duff. She thought about Dan Waldenburg, but the sad form was different from his. Down farther was another body, a woman in the kind of red-and-white running suit the Young Republicans wore to gym workouts each morning. Her face, too, was buried under a veil of pine needles. A few feet farther, Melissa thought she might be hallucinating when at her feet appeared a Northstar life preserver, white as confection amid the disturbed colorlessness of the flood’s wake. Picking her way down, smelling the odd mix of salt and stripped pine bark, she came out on a high promontory.

  The Northstar lay sunken in a ripped-out cove. There were deep scrapes on the starboard hull that disappeared into the cove shallows. Melissa noticed people on the decks, huddled in small groups. She breathed to herself and was about to start down t
he trail to shore when she heard a woman scream from the waters under the ship’s bow.

  Another scream, this one male, wrenched in a different pitch. Melissa saw the dorsal fins, the splashes. She had read that orcas rarely attack humans, but she remembered how the whale killers occasionally freaked out in captivity, and wondered, as the black tails surfaced and turned, if they were freaking out now.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  There’d been two hours left on Corporal Russo’s shift at the time of Hubbard’s catastrophic calving. Two hours and fifteen minutes later, his relief officer, Corporal Yanez, had not shown up. Nor was the usually punctual corporal picking up his cell phone. Russo’s duty was to remain at his post, and the news coming into the Yakutat Bay Coast Guard station was not getting better.

  The seven-year corpsman had seen how bad weather events often compounded themselves to create more danger for those trapped with the consequences. Mega tonnages of ice had fallen into Disenchantment Bay. Overflights had confirmed that the schism had occurred approximately 330 feet inland and was one mile in length. The break-off was substantial enough that its reverberations had registered on regional Richter scales. Now, complicating matters for those caught up in the disaster, the Coast Guard and other first responders, was the fact that a significant arctic front was moving swiftly overland southwest toward the coast. The temperature in Whitehorse had dropped from 49 Fahrenheit to -6 in the last four hours.

  When this unseasonable cold snap hit the moistened air of the Yakutat region, any relief effort would devolve quickly.