by Mark Ellis
“I’m a private investigator, and I hope you’ll trust me, but that’s all I can say right now.”
Dan nodded affirmatively, as if nothing under the sun, or lack of sun, could surprise him anymore. There was activity at the flap, the first stirrings of movement and escape. The guardsman turned. “Those who came over to us from tent three please prepare to go out to the inflatable.”
Dan and Melissa looked into each other’s eyes.
“Can I see you after all this?” he said gallantly.
“Yes, I’d like that.”
He pulled a folded navy-blue-and-gold-bordered slip of paper out of his coat pocket, immediately recognizable as a piece of Northstar stationery. With a pen that had survived the catastrophe, he wrote his home telephone number and an email address on it.
“If we get separated,” he said.
She would not have time to tell her story. That was fine, because while the story had a beginning and middle, there were unanswerable questions about what would come next. It had taken a crisis of confidence in her life and career for Melissa to know that she wanted to answer those questions with someone like Dan Waldenburg in her life.
Captain Squier and his command stepped one by one into the tent, like aliens from a frozen planet in their padded winter suits. It struck Melissa that there were no snowflakes on their shoulders and hoods. As they climbed out of the winter gear, it relieved Melissa to see the captain so intent and focused on the rescue effort.
“Wait,” she told Dan before sidling through waiting bodies to the captain. “Sir, a friend and I would like to request that we ship out together.”
Rad looked over to where his deck runner stood. Melissa imagined that he couldn’t help but smile, for all her troubles and the trail she’d blazed in search of justice.
“Request granted. You and Waldenburg will go out with me on the last boat.”
Through the last predawn hour they waited, with Captain Squier, Cocaptain Briggs, Navigator Holdren, Lieutenant Beckman, and a handful of junior officers who were getting the education of a lifetime.
The ship’s navigator held an iPhone, and made an announcement. “Folks, it is clearing over the bay.”
Around five in the morning, Beckman called everybody to his portable communications unit and turned up the volume. It was Grant Sharpe, a live broadcast. Only hours after leaving Haenke Island, the man who was second only to Rush Limbaugh in conservative talk radio was back behind his microphone.
“My dear friends, by now you know the details, and let me tell you, I lived it,” Sharpe intoned. “I lived it in the company of conservative men and women that today I could not be prouder of. If the people on the Rainier Policy Institute cruise reflect the heart and soul of the Republican Party, and I think they do, the outcomes in 2010 and 2012 are going to shatter all expectations.”
Dan and Melissa talked right up to the time the order came to report to the inflatable. He recalled close friends who had become statistics in the market collapse, how some had not yet adjusted, and how one friend committed suicide after watching his net worth plummet.
“We’ve seen our share of those,” Melissa said.
“I’ve been hogging the conversation, haven’t I?” he said.
“Not at all. I mean, it’s OK.”
“After my divorce and layoff, Trans Oceanic was as good a place as any to land,” Dan told Melissa.
“I’m glad you landed here,” smiled Melissa, happy to send the right signal.
He mentioned the off-rack sweatpants she wore and asked if she’d been working out when the tsunami wave came.
“Oh, no, these aren’t my clothes,” she blurted. “It’s a long story.”
A blue-green aura emanated through the chalk curtain of the tent: dawn.
Padded again into down-filled coat and pants, holding Dan’s gloved hand in hers, Melissa watched while the tent commander dropped the big zipper.
Stepping out of the propane cave, her eyebrows crimped; light stabbed at her unprotected retinas. The celestial clarity of Disenchantment Bay overwhelmed her sense of sight. While she and Dan had talked through the darkest hours of the morning, blinding arctic sunshine had triumphed over the gray pillow. Though a hard snow covered everything except the deep blue and choppy waters of the bay, you could see for miles in every direction. Her breath through the ski mask was like dense smoke. Already a translucent sheet was forming on the surface of the cove, trapping the Northstar’s hull in the kind of icy grip that had caused nineteenth-century seafarers to turn hard to port. Dan exhaled frost through his mask as he followed; they all did, like Everest-scaling mountaineers transported to the shoreline of a frozen planet.
Captain Squier shared a salute with the shore guard. When Melissa glanced back at Dan, his cheekbones outlined against the ski mask, she felt a naughty tingle, as if he were suddenly an eroticized promise that would be fulfilled as soon as they could be alone together.
In two trips, the inflatable shuttled the final evacuees out to a rescue craft reminiscent of JFK’s PT-109. First to go were Melissa, Dan, and the junior officers. The pair’s hand-holding became more of a leaning hug as they putted over the icing water, looking past the ship to the scrubbed face of Hubbard.
As they arrived beside the rescue boat, Melissa returned the grin of a young sailor, tanned from summery ports of call and adventures in salvation. His squared-off crew cut affirmed that in the face of disaster, no matter what regime controlled the levers of power, America ran like a good old clock. The evacuees were moved quickly into seats below-deck. Captain Squier and his command group came aboard a few minutes later, and soon the last survivors of what the media were calling the Northstar Disaster were seated in the boat.
A different sailor—older, serious, and subdued—brought down Styrofoam cups of
coffee. “This may not be as good as you’re used to,” he said, “but I guarantee it will wake you up.”
The rescue boat began a slow swinging motion, angling away from the island. When the
windows swung around, Melissa’s eyes sought out the gash of the open slope where she’d hiked to drink those precious drops of what now lay on everything as far as her adjusting eyes could see. All trace of the tsunami’s breaking wave was erased by what the gray pillow had dropped in its doomed confrontation with the cold.
A woman’s voice came over the intercom. “This is Captain Linda Lopez in command of the USCG rescue craft Miss Kitty. We’ll arrive at Yakutat Station in approximately thirty minutes. Good to have you aboard.”
As they gained speed, Melissa’s stomach grew twitchy. She wasn’t sure how much of it was motion, how much was the coffee, and how much of it was Dan.
The tanned sailor who’d first assisted them onto the rescue boat came below and pointed toward the west windows. “Look,” he said.
The Pacific Ocean was filled with gray pillows, but there was nothing restful about them. Above each dome of moisture, great anvils had formed.
Dan spoke softly in Melissa’s ear, “Amazing.”
She turned from the window and looked into his eyes.
Chapter Thirty
Swells and dips, floating sense memories, the weightlessness of lovemaking after a long time at sea. Shades of unbalance too, free fall. This, Rad ascribed to the tsunami, now almost a full week into history.
Arbor Glen was quiet, just the trace whir of Arbor Glen Parkway’s stream of all-night trucks over rain-washed pavement. He and Nancy always kept a window open, summer or winter. Nancy sighed, turned away from him. Ten days in Palm Springs with Rebecca, Tom, and the boys had put a golden tan on her the way even the sunniest Evergreen State summer could never do. Seeing lights on in the house when he arrived home, more than just the porch light they always burned while away, filled him with wonderment at the lasting of a good marriage. She had come out before he could get the Escalade’s door open. Their embrace was always meaningful, but at that moment it meant the touch and cling of a commitment that would last a lifeti
me.
“Another bad one, darling, I’m so sorry,” she’d said.
They’d made love each night since his return. Things had settled down the fourth, and even more tonight, and then they’d slept, and he had awakened to the faraway freeway rush.
In the Timberland Center office, William Ward had shaken Rad’s hand warmly and dismissed his worries about the IRS audit with a wave. Four letters had come from the Feds with various requests while Rad was on the Rainier cruise. “You’re as clean as Mike Huckabee’s police record,” the financial planner said, apparently forgetting that he’d already used the line. Glued to Fox News the day of the Hubbard calving, Ward had worried that he might end up producing his client’s financial records at a posthumous audit.
On his first Friday home, Rad had paid an afternoon visit to Alvin Alderson. Darcy had shown him back to where his friend sat recovering in a chaise lounge in the glass-walled patio, watching live golf on the fairway and the Golf Channel simultaneously. His right arm was cast in plaster to the shoulder.
They talked about the catastrophe, the casualties. Eighty-nine souls had perished on Disenchantment Bay, fifty-two of them aboard the Northstar. One was a Democrat operative, Stan Hundtruk; undercover as Jeff Griffin, a private investigator ostensibly on the trail of the Svenko story. It had come out in subsequent reports that the unlucky apparatchik had actually been sent directly from President Obama’s insider team to report back to his redistributionist bosses on the operations of Trans Oceanic’s flagship.
Most of the rest were sports fishermen or campers, including a Coast Guard corporal, out fishing before his swing shift at Yakutat Station. Alderson’s doctor had estimated he would be off the links for the better part of three months. “I may never get the old swing back,” he lamented.
Rad’s thoughts returned to the woman laying beside him, and as if in answer, Nancy turned toward him again and sleepily snuggled closer. The wet parkway was suddenly as quiet as the surrounding forest, not a solitary nightrider’s rubbery soles afoot.
Rad’s post-disaster debriefing had been a two-stage affair. Coast Guard interrogators interviewed him upon arrival at Yakutat Station, wanting the captain’s testimony while everything was fresh in his mind. Part two came later that afternoon, a Trans Oceanic conference call, steered by CEO Admiral Richard Blaisedale, who offered commendations all around and covered what was and was not appropriate for media consumption. After he’d had a few hours sleep on a station bunk, they choppered him down to catch a Seattle-bound flight out of Juneau.
That very morning, his fifth morning home, a trio of Republican Party officials had come in a limousine from Tacoma. After picking up the tab for a steak-and-eggs breakfast at Timberland Steak House, they’d sounded him out. Sarah Palin’s resignation was discussed, and of course the fated cruise, but the emissaries wanted to focus on the 2010 race for the state legislature. The 7th District included the working-/middle-class town of Port Rachel, Sloughson, a rowdy, blue-collar, nearly ghost timber town; and gated, upscale Arbor Glen.
The incumbent representative, Rory “Placeholder” Blumenstein, had held his position on Obama’s coattails. “This guy can be had,” Alderson had gruffed from the chaise lounge on his patio. “He rides a bike to work, for Christ’s sake.”
Rad allowed himself to appear open about his future with the GOP recruiters while citing the need for further meetings with Trans Oceanic and a conversation with Nancy. He could not yet tell from her ambivalent airs whether she wanted a full-time husband golfing on the fairway or a candidate captain ready to embark upon his next adventure. Rad figured she’d go along whatever he decided, as the perfect retirement companion or lovely and devoted wife for a new-minted politician.
In the days after he arrived home, there was some conspiracy talk about the possibility of the Northstar Disaster being the result of a terrorist attack. Theories floated about how Islamic extremists could have detonated explosives in the crevasses of Hubbard expressly for the purpose of destroying the ship. No credible voices joined this choir. Rad knew in his gut that though terrorists both foreign and domestic were indeed plotting violent acts, the sciences of physics and climatology told a plausible story of unnaturally warm temperatures and a cleanly sheared glacial face.
Rad was more worried about the short memory of his fellow citizens. There had been a period of relative calm on the terror front in the years since Saddam Hussein was hanged on December 30, 2006. At least stateside, concerns about homeland security were taking second place to what could be done to save the economy. A financial Meltdown while Republicans still held power had lost the presidency for the political party Rad always considered the best possible stewards of the American economy. Truths about why the collapse occurred—and there was preponderant evidence that Democrat social justice housing policies were partially to blame—got lost in the recessionary fallout and subsequent ascension of Barack Obama.
Just weeks before the Northstar sailed, the Obama cabinet had announced a policy decision to stop using the phrase War on Terror. Rad worried that as bad as the Great Recession turned out to be, they might all look back on the Meltdown times as being comparatively better than what the jihadists had in store.
Climate change alarmists benefited mightily in the wake of the Northstar Disaster. After a series of empirical defeats at the hands of change contradicters succeeded in casting doubt on their anthropogenic theories, Grant Sharpe’s environmental extremists needed new proof. Only the most ideologically radical activists drew symbolic parallels between the calving and the presence of the GOP in Disenchantment Bay. The savviest stuck with talk about fossil fuels, ozone depletion, and endangered polar bears.
The debate soon devolved into the entrenched default positions of either side, with the climate alarmist convinced the calving was due to a warming planet, and the deniers throwing out the reliable debunking device about how for the alarmists, all climate activity, cooling, warming, snow, drought, were proof positive of their theory.
Marine biologists credibly weighed in about the orca attacks that had occurred around the Northstar hull after the tsunami. Pods of the marine predators could hound and drown a gigantic humpback whale, but typically would ignore human swimmers. The biologists, most staying out of the climate change argument, posited that unseasonably warm temperatures over several summer cycles had accelerated the loss of sea ice, making huge differences in the amount of open water available for the whales to hunt their prey. Normally, there would have been few if any of the creatures in Disenchantment Bay in midsummer. When the tsunami flushed a number of them into the Haenke cove, they panicked and lashed out at whatever shared the roiled water with them.
The hue and cry over climate change endured, but nobody substantively challenged the orca’s increased range and unseasonal migration north.
President Obama released a brief statement in acknowledgment of the losses sustained in the disaster, including a passing reference to the fate of the Northstar. In a stroke of public relations luck, it turns out one of his classmates at Harvard had been third in command of the ship’s engine room, so the commander in chief was able to parlay a personal reference into his remarks about greenhouse gases, green energy, and the wisdom of strict regulations on oil pipelines on domestic soil.
Mario Centavos had finally revealed the reason for her delay in seeking treatment for her friend Barb Stamen. Centavos had begged Stamen to let her seek help. “Barb wanted to hang on. She thought I could get her off the ship. I don’t think she knew how badly she was wounded,” Centavos told the court that was charging her with felony harboring and conspiracy to impede an investigation. She had left Stamen behind the utility room wall and gone to her room, where, she claimed, she was just about to call security when Chief Collins knocked on her door.
Stamen’s body was retrieved from the half-sunk ship, and she was buried in her hometown of Puyallup, Washington. The media covered the funeral, which included a clutch of well-dressed family members who looked
as if they’d expected this all along and an assortment of freaky friends, including the appalling Hailey Dusk, sporting a new look: chemo-bald with a tattooed crown of thorns.
The distant parkway traffic outside Rad’s Arbor Glen window had become a steady white noise, early birds headed to aeronautic jobs outside Seattle. Nancy sighed again and her eyes opened. “Are you awake?” she murmured.
“Yes.”
“What?” she asked.
“I was just thanking God.”
She brought her body full upon him, the scent of her clean sweat turned to powder. Soon they slept again.
He dreamed he was in the Escalade, driving east to I-5 on the Arbor Glen Parkway through intermittent showers. After reaching the busy interstate, he saw the majestic Olympic Range breaking through rain forest clouds under a gray pillow. A helmeted man was bicycling along the freeway, pedaling toward the state capital as tractor-trailer rigs and plumber’s flatbeds awash with grease roared by.
Rad had a sudden impulse to pull over and rescue the cyclist from himself. But the asphalt basin leading to the seat of government would not allow for anything but a trajectory driven north.
Late summer was Viktor Svenko’s least favorite season in New York City. The metropolis wheels slowed in anticipation of the quickening fall. People went about their business vainly unaware that events in the future were gathering against them on the moving streets. It had been like that in the weeks before the World Trade Center fell.
Viktor took a seat in his battered recliner. That afternoon, he had noticed a fresh batch of Imbroglios dropped at the newsstand where he bought his copy of Chayka. He had never read the left-wing political magazine, only the clips Lara had occasionally sent, but a sidebar on the cover of the latest issue featured his daughter’s name, and he picked up a copy and took it home. Flipping on his reading light, he found a brief article about Lara, a skimming recap of the case, and a few words lamenting her loss. In that final paragraph, the magazine was able to convey the sense that Lara was a fallen soldier in the war against social injustice.
