by Mark Ellis
“Captain Squier is coming ashore soon. I’ll try to have him speak to you.”
“It can’t wait that long. This could be a matter of life or death.”
The guardsman studied her, and Melissa asked if he had been on duty the night Lara Svenko died. This inferred connection had worked with everyone who’d booked passage with Lara. It worked again. The guardsman dialed his cell.
“I’ll see if I can get you through.”
After seconds, Captain Squier came on the line.
“Captain, Melissa Blythe here. I need to inform you that I eluded your bodyguard and followed a hunch, and it turned out to be a pretty bad idea. Barb Stamen, aka Trans Oceanic sauna technician Barbara Stafford, threw me overboard.”
“My God, you’re alive.”
“Captain, it is now clear that Barb Stamen, my assailant, murdered Lara Svenko. If she has survived, she must be considered armed and—”
The captain interrupted, calling her by her first name, “Melissa. Stamen died of a gunshot wound before the tsunami, and I’m certain you have much to tell me. I’m preparing to come ashore.”
Melissa heard voices competing for Rad’s attention in the background, as if the time left to act on something was growing short. A female voice at her elbow said, “Ma’am?” A guardswoman was proffering a brown bundle of clothing.
“I thought you’d appreciate something to put on.”
Sweat pants and shirt, and a pullover.
Just before sundown, the eastern sky became as frozen as the cleaved face of Hubbard Glacier, immobilized by some gripping thing.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Captain Squier’s footsteps echoed as he and his escort descended the Northstar’s deserted labyrinth headed to the emergency debarkation ladder. He’d decided that before giving the order to abandon ship, he would go ashore for his MacArthur moment.
The Chinooks had come and gone in succession, but the Coast Guard had suspended the airlift. Night had fallen, clear overhead, but what should have been a full moon western sunset was obscured by a moisture-laden warm front out over the Pacific. At the other end of the meteorological spectrum was the freak summer frigidity moving west over Canada. The glaze on the runways at Juneau International Airport had proved impervious to deicing attempts, and a news report confirmed that a family sedan had gone over an embankment on one of the capital’s mountain-hugging back streets, killing four. All available data suggested that whiteout conditions were imminent, and evacuation over water was less risky than choppers flying blind.
Thankfully, the evacuation had gone well up till now. The seriously injured had been airlifted first, followed by those with medical conditions and the extremely elderly. Last went the essential personages, elected officials and key party and media operatives, an hour gone now. Younger, able-bodied, and less-connected evacuees were taking launches to rescue boats that idled out beyond the risky shoals that had rent the Northstar’s hull. The temperature gauge on the ship’s teakwood console read 34 degrees and falling. Whatever devilish weather was in store would catch scores of Rad’s passengers on Haenke’s shore.
Rad’s footsteps reverberated less the farther down into the hull he and his sailors went. He shuddered to think of the potential loss of life had the ship sunk in deep water. He knew that though the liner could conceivably be refloated and made seaworthy, Trans Oceanic would never commit the millions it would take. In an economic environment where cruises were canceled and captains vied for work, the line would likely write this old mother ship off. Beyond economic considerations were the karmic implications most vacation seafarers would choose to avoid. The luxury cruise ship he’d commanded on eighteen Rainier Policy Institute cruises would forever be a reanimated reminder of the day Hubbard fell into the sea.
Rad also took the time to say a quiet hosanna for the fact that the love of his life was not on board. Nancy was an early riser, and there was no telling where she might have been at the time of crisis. She would likely not have been safely bedded down in the captain suite’s king size bed. No, she could have been waiting for the approaching sunrise along the rail on the side of the ship that had dipped precipitously and cost however many passengers their lives. Rad had grieved professionally for Lara Svenko, and felt awful now for Melissa Blythe, but he didn’t want to think about the possibility of Nancy having been injured, or, God forbid, lost in the disaster.
At the evac ladder, Rad was greeted by a deck supervisor whose navy-and-gold uniform seemed to have ridden the wave impeccably. Nearby, deck runners were preparing to lower four tents and four propane heaters into the launches. It was good disaster management that his marooned passengers saw and heard from their captain before they saw the tents.
“Launch is ready, sir.”
Rad descended the ladder and stepped into the inflatable, its vinyl redolent with leftover heat from the daylight hours. Onshore, spontaneous applause came up, the passengers having caught a glimpse of the captain in the amber light of a lantern. The clapping continued after the launch operator geared up the outboard and tacked across the muddied cove. For the first time since Vietnam, Rad sailed through waters that had been fatal to crew and passengers under his command. According to a tally kept by the indefatigable Lieutenant Beckman, there were 147 souls left to be rescued.
The inflatable scraped bottom and the guardsman on shore duty grabbed the thrown rope. All watched as Rad took his first steps onto the beach. The guardsman threw him a crisp salute, but the first face Rad recognized was Melissa Blythe’s.
Rather than wait for the people to form concentric circles around him in anticipation of a speech, Rad dove into the crowd, the kind of move that drives Secret Service agents protecting candidates crazy. There was much handshaking, respectful nodding, grins, and more salutes. After making rounds like a president after a State of the Union address, he found again the gray-pebbled square the guardsman had established as a beachhead.
Melissa sidled up to Captain Squier to whisper, “She almost killed me. I’m working with a fellow investigator, a Jeff Griffin. I need to—”
“Lieutenant Beckman is compiling a list,” Rad interrupted, not wanting to get sidetracked. “You’ll have to connect with him on that.”
Out on Disenchantment Bay, the lights of one rescue boat arced away toward Yakutat Station while another motored in to reconnoiter with a waiting inflatable. Rad prepared to do something else he hadn’t done since Vietnam: order the erection of large tents.
“I’m going to give it to you straight,” he told the people on the beach. “There’s a nasty cold front on the way, and we’re not going to get everyone off the island in time.” His passengers took this news as if hearing that Republicans would not retake the House in 2010.
“The ship is not safe,” Rad went on. “She is settled on a combination of sediment and submerged rocks, all of which may have been affected by the tsunami. There have also been
some fuel spills aboard, and also some sewage issues. The air quality on the ship has worsened as a result.”
Rad explained that he felt they were safer on shore and that soon they would see crewmembers laying out tents. “These tents will keep all of us safe. Our crew welcomes any able-bodied help you can offer.”
The tents were laid out like canvas exoskeletons on the beach. Scores of passengers formed around the edges at the direction of the crew, pulling and straightening like Lilliputians making a giant’s bed. Soon the stakes had penetrated the anchor rings into the packed mud, and the folds of the shelters that would shield them began to rise. By the time the second rescue boat made its half circle out of the cove, there were four field tents standing on the beach, each about the size of a suburban family room. Four commercial propane tanks were ignited, and their hot air puffed out the bone-white fabric of the tents.
Rad dialed through to Holdren, still at his post at the Northstar’s navigation console.
“How do we look?” Rad asked.
“Let me put it this way, sir. W
hat’s coming won’t do Briggs’s global warming crowd any good.”
“It’s not global warming,” Rad joked. “It’s climate change.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve seen some warm summers and sudden cold fronts in my time,” said Rad, “but never like this, extreme warmth and artic cold. What’s your take?”
“Every now and then, you’ll get a summer cold front in the Canadian interior, which moves west and produces wintry coastal conditions. But I agree, this combination is not typical.”
“So, it’s not climate change?”
Cocaptain Briggs, last man to ever helm the ship, came on the line. “With all respect sirs,
regarding climate change, you gentlemen are in denial.”
“When can we expect conditions to worsen?” asked Rad.
“Our warm front is stationary offshore,” said Holdren, “but we’re seeing precipitation from the southwest, and things could change very quickly. I recommend having everyone in the tents within the hour.”
From his scrabble of ground glacial stones on the island shore, Rad recommended to his Coast Guard liaison that each passenger be assigned a tent and receive a number in the evacuation order.
Rad dialed the bridge again: Briggs. “Abandon ship.”
Grant Sharpe made the short sail over the cove next, to more rounds of applause, followed by core command, Briggs, Holdren, and Beckman. Chief Collins had left Maria Centavos with a detail and joined the command cohort as they all stood with Rad at landfall on the wrecked cove. The Northstar was truly derelict now, with only a twinkling of her emergency lights strewn under the cosmos.
Rad waited a beat, ranging his eyes over the survivors. “Friends, Grant Sharpe asked to be on the last rescue craft to leave the island. I have denied his request.” Sharpe stood composed nearby. “In fact,” Rad continued, “I’ve ordered him out on the next boat. We need him back behind his silver microphone, telling the story of what happened here.”
Applause followed and Sharpe was last seen waving from an inflatable. A whisper of chilly wind muted the cheers and wolf whistles inspired by the talk star’s departure, sending the Northstar’s scuttled flag in the direction of Russia.
“We need you too, Captain Squier,” a woman’s voice yelled.
When it came, it was brutal—a numbing, interstellar freeze. Cold stars were still visible to the east. To the west, the distinct contours of the low gray pillow were being swallowed and obscured by something towering and undifferentiated out over the deep Pacific.
Melissa stood in the crowded tent, which smelled as if it had not been unfolded in years. The interior quickly grew humid and hot with human exhalations and an odor of fired propane gas. Some of the evacuees had become ill, and one hearty-looking Young Conservative woman fainted. Pure oxygen was available by dint of the tent commander, who would open the zippered flap briefly and allow two or three gulps to anyone who needed it. Melissa noticed that when the tent commander opened the flap to allow some fresh air in, what seemed like a gust of freeze-dried flakes came in and settled to the floor. Melissa got in line, and when her turn came, in the brief time she was at the flap her hair and the bridge of her nose was covered in flaky snow. Breathing deep to clear her mind from propane lethargy, she was shocked by how cold the outside air was, like dry ice poured down her throat.
For the next hour, each time the flap was pulled aside, a new fall of tiny snowflakes swirled and entered, fell, and melted into slush at the tent commander’s feet.
“Ladies and gentleman,” he said, “we have officially reached white-out conditions.”
As stifling and noxious as the air inside was, she realized how thankful they must be and how tenuous the thread might have been without this shelter. Chatter among her compatriots, on a few still-working cell phones and face-to-face in the amber light of the camp lanterns, wound down to a few hushed voices. A cup of strong coffee from a large brewer had stoked the talk, but now all metabolisms crashed into the resignation of waiting. The only sound was the turgid murmur of the inflatable outboards and the following assertion of the high-horsepower rescue boats. Word came over from Captain Squier’s tent that seventeen of thirty-seven passengers from the first tent had been successfully evacuated. Melissa had been assigned to tent number four and resigned herself to the knowledge that she would be one of the last off the island.
She soon realized that the simple act of going to the tree line for a call of nature would be a risky proposition. Most of the Coast Guard’s heavy winter clothing was in strict rotation for use in getting people out to the boats. It was now midnight, and though Melissa had held on, she knew she’d have to be the next in line to relieve herself.
“Request for a potty break, sir.”
Just then a ruckus of voices and plodding footsteps outside the tent broke the white-noise silence of the propane heaters. The tent flap zipped down, a more aggressive spate of snowflakes rushed in. Melissa could not quite get what the male voice outside was saying. The answer came when the tent commander turned to face those under his protection.
“The propane tank in tent three has failed,” he told them. “We’re gonna have to make some room.” He turned to Melissa. “OK, let’s get you suited up. Private Jenkins will escort you. Make it fast.” It took a full minute to get her into the down-filled winter pants, bulging coat, and gloves. A woolen ski mask left only her eyes exposed.
It was snowing heavily outside where her guardswoman escort waited. Ridges of icy snow had settled on the ground, on everything within the beam of the guardswoman’s flashlight. The forest beyond the beach was constricted by cold that she could feel even through the winter suit.
“The trick is to get your business done quickly,” said her guardswoman escort, indicating
a spot by a dislodged log with her broad-beamed flashlight. Melissa appreciated the advice. In the time it took her to complete her business, her butt was painfully chilled.
Back through the zipper flap, she saw that twenty additional shipmates had squeezed into the tent, like Seattle cubicle drones on an elevator.
“The heater sputtered and stopped,” Melissa heard a woman say, “and it wasn’t one minute later that tent was like the inside of a freezer.”
Then she saw him. Nose prominent, like something you’d see on Rushmore. A rounded comb of hair rose like an ash-blond wave. Her door-lock rescuer, the man who’s toned calves she’d scoped out on the stairway to her stateroom. It was deck runner Dan Waldenburg.
He recognized her the minute they got her out of the padded outerwear and worked his way over.
The attraction they’d flirted around seemed now as if it had happened a lifetime ago. Unspoken between them was a sense of quiet urgency. It seemed that the rupture of the Northstar’s hull had changed the dynamic between them, that the relationship of passenger to Trans Oceanic employee had gone down with the ship. Being stranded on the island had somehow altered his responsibility to the sunken liner, and hers to Charon Investigations. They’d been thrown together into a precarious shared fate. Melissa was possessed with a delicious sense that they had that significant thing in common, in terms of the future, in terms of everything.
After twenty minutes of conversation, Melissa’s impression was that Dan seemed both sane and strangely convinced that he was no longer sure about anything. She let him talk. He would be a good listener, she sensed, and soon would turn the tables, ask after her own life.
Her gentlemanly deck runner was a casualty of the economic collapse, laid off by a Boise-based mortgage servicer two weeks after Lehman Brothers fell. His father had made good in real estate during the Bush Boom and retired comfortably. Dan hadn’t wanted to ask his parents for help, and so when a friend emailed him about deck runner openings at Trans Oceanic, a position for which Dan was vastly overqualified, he applied and was accepted. His service on the Northstar, while paying him a comparative pittance, proved ultimately therapeutic after financial upheaval had ended his employment and turned hi
m upside-down on his own mortgage.
His divorce from high school homecoming queen Pamela was regrettable but not malicious. He’d settled into the divided life of a visitation father to his two sons. Shortly after the 2008 election, he was visited by an epiphany. President Obama had promised to fundamentally transform the nation, and the necessity of opposing that transformation rose imperatively from the ashes of quashed prospects and a separated family. He started attending town halls, city council and county board meetings, and the meetings of various groups of citizens who referred to themselves as patriots.
While they waited to be called to a launch, Melissa listened, sensing that she would soon be telling him about her Meltdown ordeal. Now she wanted it to be about his.
“You’re part of this Tea Party I keep hearing about,” she said.
“I guess you could say that.” He thought about it. “Yes, absolutely.”
The tent was quite warm, and Melissa thought about all the warm-blooded animals who’d
run with her from the tsunami, imagined them gone underground, into tree hollows, and under stones. Rescue boats cycled in the fast-freezing cove.
Her stranded shore-mates looked drawn and pasty, fogged by exhaustion and propane. There would be no sleeping now. Word came that shore command would be taking the first group from the fourth and final tent, her tent. Melissa realized that her time on the island would soon end, and her visceral interest in Dan would be jeopardized.
That’s when he said, “What about you, Sue?”
She was ready to tell him everything. “I must tell you, my name is Melissa.”
He took this revelation with a flicker of caution, and she knew he was wondering who exactly he had helped back into her stateroom.
