A Death on The Horizon

by Mark Ellis

  The known death toll from the tsunami was mounting. Family and friends of over two hundred individuals had contacted authorities, worried about loved ones who’d set off with plans to sail the bay in recreational and fishing boats or camp in the surrounding forests. Twenty-eight unfortunate souls had been accounted for, washed up on the shoreline across from the glacier. An early report indicated that loss of life on the Trans Oceanic luxury liner Northstar might potentially be high, with untold numbers of passengers swamped and drowned, killed by the shifting of heavy objects, or taken in gruesome, uncharacteristic killer whale attacks. There were scores of injuries aboard the ship, from scrapes and bruises to critical bone breaks and burns. A piping-hot cauldron of tomato soup had tipped in the kitchen of the Victoria Station restaurant and splashed over a server.

  Despite the worrisome aspect of his tardy relief officer, Russo was proud of the Guard’s response. Within fifteen minutes of the event, a search-and-rescue mission was underway. Two Chinooks reached the stricken Northstar within twenty minutes of its stump-pounding landfall at Haenke Island. Disenchantment Bay was swiftly closed to all non-rescue craft.

  Live clips of the disaster area ran across the news showing the newly burnished face of the glacier as well as the ship, clawed, muddied, and sunk, saved by the fourteen-foot depth of the island cove. Governor Palin had issued an official statement offering condolences and assurances that everything that could be done was being done.

  The Limp Bizkit ringtone startled Russo. He’d made the choice of “Nookie” based on the preferences of a simmering Asian woman who’d given him a month long erotic thrill ride and then vanished into the arms of a Canadian backpacker.

  “Still holding the fort, eh?” Sergeant Eric Sussman said through the phone.

  “No sign of Corporal Yanez,” replied Russo, “he’s usually like clockwork.”

  What’d you think of Palin’s statement?”

  “Maybe she’ll decide to stay now,” Russo postulated. “Un-resign, realize how much Alaska needs her.”

  “I hope not,” quipped Eric. “I want her on the campaign trail. She’s exactly the candidate I want Republicans to run in 2012.”

  “Careful what you wish for, dude.” After a pause, Russo asked, “Anything new on your end?”

  “Well, I don’t know whether you’ve heard, but Flanagan says that they’re thinking that if it hadn’t been for Haenke, the Northstar would have certainly rolled. That little chunk of rock was lucky for a lot of people.”

  “What about this deep freeze on the way, Mr. Global Warming?”

  “I’ll try to explain it one more time,” said Eric. “Climate change can manifest itself in many different ways. But yes, I’ll bet you dinner at Yukon Pete’s. There’s a whiteout in our not-too-distant future.”

  Russo hung up imagining a giant blizzard, with helicopters grounded, rescue boats tethered hard to their docks, and stranded passengers huddled on Haenke Island. Every chopper was in the air, along with a flotilla of sea rescue craft, but there were hundreds of people yet to evacuate.

  Russo stuck two corn dogs in the station microwave. Sitting with the dogs, a jar of mustard, and a can of Dr Pepper, he watched as Fox News broke with a story from its Anchorage correspondent. In the midst of the natural disaster, there was yet another murder mystery playing out on the Rainier Policy Institute cruise. Sources had confirmed that a woman suspected in the 2008 death of reporter Lara Svenko had been shot and killed. It had been revealed that a private investigator assigned to the Svenko case had gone missing prior to the tsunami.

  Back on television, another alert. Russo glued his eyes to the infobabe. “Fox News has confirmed that conservative talk show host Grant Sharpe has survived the ship’s deadly plow across Disenchantment Bay. Sharpe has released a statement saying that while he was shaken up and thrown to the deck, he is fine, and that his prayers go out to his fellow passengers and anyone touched by the disaster.”

  Russo turned to his computer and clicked on the Coast Guard weather center. Haines was reporting subzero temperatures.

  “Nookie” again, but this time he was too tired to jump. Eric, his voice sadly professional: “Listen, you may want to get comfortable.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Corporal Yanez was out salmon fishing with his brother on Disenchantment Bay this morning, and the missus hasn’t heard from him, which she says is unusual.”

  “Jeez. A thought for old Yanez,” Russo said. “He’s a good man. Keep me posted.”

  Fox reran Palin’s Hubbard press conference and then broadcast a brief recap of the Svenko case, with screenshots of Svenko and her demonic-looking lover, Barb Stamen.

  It was noon on the day of the disaster, and Lieutenant Beckman had been pressing Rad to make some kind of appearance. Rad intrinsically understood that his best show now was a no-show. Only when he had done everything within in his power to ensure the safety of the surviving passengers and crew would he take time for the benefit of appearances. Rad had ordered that the Northstar be abandoned forthwith. The ship had righted herself after the wave broke, and then she sunk hard on her wobbly hull. Given the unstable topography beneath the lagoon, she could conceivably capsize to either port or starboard.

  Food and water from the stores were already moving shoreward over the muddied lagoon created by the tsunami. After disembarking by way of emergency ladders over the lowest rail amidships, his passengers would begin taking inflatable launches to shore.

  Trans Oceanic had issued an order against using the ship’s helipad, a hedge against some disastrous tipping point. With no place on Haenke for the choppers to land, all humans deemed critical enough for air rescue would go up into the bellies of the whirlybirds in safety cages. The rest would wait for the rescue boats.

  There was a brisk knock on the bridge access door. Holdren rose from his console and opened it. After brief consultation with the person, he turned and said, “Captain, do you have a second?”

  In the corridor, Rad saw two medical officers. It was Alvin Alderson who lay strapped on the stretcher, his eyes closed as if fast asleep. Rad knelt down beside Arbor Glen’s ace linksman. “What happened?”

  “We’re not sure, sir. We found him on the main deck, his left shoulder badly bruised. He’s under sedation. We don’t think this is life-threatening.”

  Rad bent in closer and said his friend’s name. There was a flicker of Alvin’s eyelids, and then they opened. “Rad,” he said, speaking the word thickly, as if through a mouthful of gauze. “I forgot to duck.” It was like him to quote Reagan. Then he slumped back, drugged against the pain.

  Rad turned back to a medical officer. “How does it look for getting him out?”

  “Can’t say for sure, sir. They’re treating it like triage.”

  Rad stood up. “Carry on.”

  A big chopper hovered over the cove, lowering a rescue cage containing two orange-suited guardsmen. The acute cases, the injured, the coronaries would get a quick ride to Anchorage. The rest of the passengers, those who’d come away the least physically scathed, stood on the beach drinking bottled water and waiting for the inflatable launches that would take them twelve at a time out to a revolving flotilla of rescue craft.

  If the Northstar tipped seaward, the sludge-anchored hull would drag the port side down into orca-infested waters. If she fell shoreward, the impact could kill or injure anyone still onboard or on the spit of tsunami-tossed beach. Rad ordered that all evacuees be moved out of the shadow of the ship.

  There’d been a few obstinate high rollers, their country-club wives reluctant to leave wall mirrors and mixed drinks. But now, as a metallic sun began arcing down, one by one these last holdouts appeared at the open rail to take the steel ladder down to a waiting launch. Debarkations of nonessential crew were next, deck runners, janitors, cooks, waitresses, and masseuses. They were accustomed to the bobbing rafts by virtue of their Trans Oceanic training.

  Lieutenant Beckman phoned Captain Squier with his calculat
ions on the evac operation. “At the present rate, the last helicopter will depart at nightfall, approximately 2230 hours. They know that visibility could drop precipitately with this approaching cold front and won’t take any airborne chances. The Coast Guard will continue rescue boat operations, subject to change due to conditions affecting navigability on the bay.”

  “They’re being understandably cautious,” Rad said to his bridgemates. There was no blame for an act of God, but if lives were unnecessarily lost now, the human element would answer for it.

  A growing pink-white stain was metastasizing on Holdren’s infrared Doppler. It was going to get very cold soon, too soon for some of the Rainier Policy Institute passengers. The precarious Northstar hull would offer no haven. According to Beckman’s numbers and Holdren’s forecast, they would not get everyone off the island in time.

  Rad left Holdren’s screen and looked out the starboard window. The four large tents and

  propane heaters that Trans Oceanic provisioned on each of its fleet of ships were coming up from storage, soon to be ferried to the beach and pitched.

  “Look,” said Briggs.

  Rad and his command watched as Maria Centavos, her curls gone lank, was led out in handcuffs to the rail and then briefly uncuffed by Security Chief Collins for her climb down the steel ladder. Collins re-cuffed his prisoner, and like conjoined souls in a Van Eyck painting, officer and suspect found seats in the launch.

  Rad’s cell rang—Beckman again. “Mr. Sharpe would like a word with you.”

  The radio star came on the line. “May I request permission to address the troops when I go ashore, sir?”

  Rad hesitated. There was something very large and affecting about a man walking off the water. Here was the General Douglas MacArthur moment—the going ashore, captain, leader, politician. It was Rad’s first calculated political decision.

  “I can’t authorize that right now, Grant.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sharpe said.

  “But I think your voice might be a comfort to the troops.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why don’t you say a few words from the port rail? We’ll get you a megaphone.”

  Rad knew that Sharpe knew: the captain was saving this coming ashore moment for himself. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  Another Chinook was hovering. A handful of older Republicans wearing expressions of functional shock went up with the orange-suited cage men. On the shore, crewmembers lifted unluckier souls in body bags off an inflatable and placed them on a rocky bank down from where the rescue operation was ongoing.

  Beckman rang again. “Debarking of all but essential personnel is complete.”

  Unlike on every other balmy day of the cruise, the afternoon temperature was falling. Briggs blamed the unseasonable heat on planetary climate change, and Holdren insisted they had enjoyed nothing more than a freak hot spell in the ageless history of climate. But whatever changes were or were not occurring on the planet, over Hubbard Glacier it was as if a haze had been created by frozen molecules suspended in the advancing air. Rad knew what that light meant. Disenchantment Bay had gotten its name from such light, the cold that stopped all boats and locked Haenke Island in permafrost. Crack-a-light bulb cold, shut-down-a-lung cold, and freeze-your-piss-before-it-hits-the-ground cold.

  It had taken Melissa the better part of an hour to descend the tsunami-roiled slope of the island. Standing nearly naked on a low outcrop, she saw the devastated ship. She moved down into the last copse of fir between her and the island shore. Another body, another woman, lodged in the landward side of a fallen tree. Unlike the averted visages of the souls she’d encountered deeper in the forest, this face stared out with the wetted terror of entrapment, her last breath unable to outlive backwash of the tsunami.

  Melissa stopped at the threshold of the beach. A ripple of applause and a few oddly constrained whoops filtered through the treetops—but they weren’t a response to her appearance. Whoever shared the island with her was listening to an amplified voice offering as yet undecipherable sentences. Moving out into the filtered sunlight, she realized that the voice belonged to the man who’d ensured she didn’t miss the boat the day the Northstar sailed.

  She listened to the comforting voice of Grant Sharpe as she walked from the edge of the forest. “You people have made me proud,” the radio star was saying. “The whole world is taking note of this catastrophe, and our response to it.”

  Melissa could see the hues of clothing now, jackets, slacks, scarves, sweatpants, and O’Reilly Factor baseball caps. She spotted the flagship colors of Trans Oceanic crew uniforms as well, here and there amid the beach-bound crowd. The Northstar’s sunken profile was woefully evident at sea level. Melissa wondered if she would ever sail again.

  Sharpe was giving his talk from a rail on the port side of the ship. “The crew here,” he continued in a voice duty-bound and windless, “have been nothing short of heroic, and I can tell you that their actions have saved lives. Help has arrived, as you can see by these rescue choppers and magnificent Coast Guard vessels. Everything is on a prioritized timetable, and the safest and most efficient rescue operation is under way.”

  Melissa took a step from soaked duff to sodden mud.

  She’d boarded the Northstar fearing a faltering career and Meltdown-bereft existence. She’d worried for true intimacy with a man in her life, but after years of meaningless relationships had no idea what a man like that would look like or be like. Lost in the turbulence and self-obsessed upheavals of youth, she’d let the world get away from her. Returning from what might easily have been a watery grave like the one that took Lara Svenko’s life, returning to her fellow Northstar passengers and closest thing she had to a tribe, she knew that she had outgrown her Cape Lookout and Port Rachel selves overnight.

  The first to spot her was a teenage boy on the outermost fringe of the crowd. He had tied around his waist what was probably the warmest coat he could ever imagine needing on a summer cruise. Seeing Melissa seemed proof to him of human miracles. Another man noticed her, then a couple. Her salt-washed body was as free of self-consciousness as a rock sculpted by waves. She smiled once fully out of the shade of the forest, and fully in the light. People formed a circle around her, untrusting of that smile, as if a survivor from some different disaster had walked into camp.

  Grant Sharpe’s reassuring voice ceased, and over the beach came the thudding rotors of another helicopter. The talk star’s rapt audience, men and women who could not help but stare at Melissa’s white skin and flesh-colored undergarments, began breaking ranks and joining the growing pod around her. The teen who’d first seen her offered the coat tied around his waist, a Columbia Sportswear–type thing with a fleecy, plaid lining and water-resistant shell of turtle green. It was the first human contact since Barb Stamen’s uplifting arms had tipped the scale of balance against her. When she spoke, Melissa’s voice sounded as crusty as the old crow who’d sounded her to salvation.

  “My name is Melissa Blythe. I’m an investigator with Charon Investigations. I must see Captain Squier.”

  The chopper had hoisted another cage full of elders and was now whumping away. Melissa realized by the bowed heads that Sharpe had lifted his megaphone again and asked for a moment of silence for those lost. She joined them, praying as best she could remember how, filled with the kind of awe and thankfulness she imagined would please any higher power.

  A pathway to the beachhead opened for Melissa. Passengers, some she recognized, looked up from their cell phones, their faces expressing combinations of whispered anxiety and stiff upper lips. She remembered her iPhone, now likely sucked into the depths of the bay. The coat at her shoulders and her muddied legs marked her survival as singular. Every other soul in her tangled, washed-over condition had been found dead.

  At the cove shoreline, a Coast Guard officer was supervising the ship-to-shore launches. Melissa sensed a competent urgency in his thousand-yard stares into the horizon. The officer’s cell rang, and
while he answered in hushed tones, Melissa wondered who she might wish to call if her iPhone were not irrevocably lost. Her mother Janine, who had no idea she was on this voyage, Shauna, and Mr. Scrimshaw—that was pretty much it. There was no single man who she could call to tell that she was still alive, and that she loved him. No lover to share her sense of rebirth.

  It was enough to feel it in her waterlogged spirit and soul. You don’t live through this and not change, not grow, even though the world you inhabit is as daunting and scary as ever. Despite the barren emotional waters left in the wake of her survival, Melissa had become intimately acquainted with true passion, at least as intimate as anyone can be with a person for whom life has flickered out. Melissa didn’t believe in anything Lara Svenko believed in, except perhaps in the superiority of the food onboard the Northstar. But cheating the death this unfortunate woman had not avoided had inspired Melissa’s evolving dream of attaining the most important thing that Lara had once known, once loved and lost.

  People who did what she did—the investigators who sought justice, closure, restoration, redemption, and truth in the affairs of the human condition—mattered. Whatever the ultimate outcome of her assignment to solve the sad case of Lara Svenko, she would fight for her job as a private investigator.

  She’d aspire as well to another of Lara’s abiding passions, to find someone to share her life with, a man, back home in Seattle.

  There was a frigid gust off the water. It clasped around her bare legs with an insinuation

  of death by exposure. Another death to cheat before she found her way home. Melissa wondered if it came from the dead-eyed light over the glacier.

  “I’m Melissa Blythe,” she told the distracted Coast Guard officer, “and it is imperative that I see the captain.”

  He blinked under his brimmed cap. He’d felt the cold too and knew more than he was saying. Another chopper thudded around the island’s northwest cape, hovered over the damaged ship.