He reached down and felt his right calf. There was definitely damage of some kind, but for now adrenaline overrode the pain. He drifted around a bend and the shoreline was barely visible. The cabin lights disappeared. Had it been five minutes? Ten? Would the attackers organize a search up and down the beach? How far would he have to drift to get clear? Soon, he knew, it wouldn’t matter. The cold would kill him just as surely.
A rogue breaker caught him in the face, and he sucked down a lungful of the frigid brine. He coughed and spewed, and sensed he was moving faster than ever. Then, in an awful moment, he lost sight of shore. DeBolt spun his head left and right. He pulled himself up in the water, yet saw nothing but black sea and foam. He had no moon or stars for reference, the storm blotting out the sky.
Safety lay to the west. But which way is west?
The question looped in his head, again and again.
Which way is west?
And then suddenly, incredibly, an answer arrived. It displayed clearly amid the blackness, like some divine vision — a tiny compass rose and arrow. West was on his left shoulder. Could it be true? Or was he hallucinating, his mind playing tricks due to the cold?
Apparition or not, it was all he had. Without understanding, without caring how or why the answer had come, DeBolt used the last of his energy to pull in that direction. His arms lost any sense of a rhythmic stroke, more clutching at the water than a means of propulsion. Time lost all meaning, and there was only one thing … Stay up, keep moving! The waves began to lift him, and it was all he could do to keep his head above water, keep his lungs charged with buoyant air. Finally, salvation — in a bolt of lightning, he caught a glimpse of the shoreline. It gave him a reference, a thread of hope.
His feet touched sand and he was elated, then a tremendous breaker threw him into a cartwheel and his head struck the bottom. Tumbling and churning, he fought back to the surface and gasped when he got there, sucking in as much water as air. He glimpsed the shadowed outline of the beach. There was no sign of his attackers, although at this point it hardly mattered — he would go wherever the sea threw him.
The muscles in his arms burned, and his good leg began to cramp. He tumbled beneath another breaker, and the water became shallow. Under his knees he felt a change in the bottom, not sand or bedrock, but a field of loose stone — the foreshore shelf that existed on every beach. DeBolt half rolled, half crawled the last yards, merciless waves pushing him on like a wayward piece of driftwood. With his knees on the rocks he coughed up seawater, and dragged himself higher up the slope. He only relaxed when his hands found the trunk of the first tree.
He leaned against it and searched the night. There was no sign of the assault team. Assault team. It was the only name that fit. In that moment, as he lay frozen and spent, a disquieting notion came to DeBolt’s cold-soaked mind — whoever they were, they had not come here tonight with the aim of killing a nurse.
They had come to kill him.
7
That the mountain rises out of the sea into one of the bleakest climates on earth ought to instill caution. That it is called Mount Barometer is all but an omen. Unfortunately, some people never listen.
Shannon Lund climbed the rise carefully, having left the proper hiking trail a hundred yards back to reach the burnt-orange marker flag. The November ice was ahead of schedule, taking root in the gullies and fusing with last night’s snow, and causing her to slip repeatedly on the steep gravel slope. Farther up the mountain, white predominated. In a few more weeks there would be little else.
Lund wished she had a good pair of climbing boots. The ones she’d been issued had met their end last March after an unusually punishing Alaskan winter. She had applied for a replacement pair, but probably wouldn’t see them until next spring. That was the thing about being a civilian employee of the Coast Guard, particularly in times of tight budgets — your requests always went to the bottom of the pile, beneath those of active-duty members who did the “real” work.
She grabbed a thick branch and hauled herself up the last incline, ending at a stone landing of sorts. She decided then and there that the climb would replace her thirty-minute treadmill session tonight. It was a good excuse — at least better than most she came up with. An exhausted Lund plodded the last few steps to reach the scene, a twenty-foot patch of level rock and brown grass, all of it dusted with an inch of fresh powder. Two familiar figures were waiting. Frank Detorie was one of two full-time detectives with the Kodiak police, Matt Doran an EMT with the local fire department. Both were young and fit, seasoned climbers who preferred duty like this to being cooped up in an office. Lund herself might have seen it that way a few years ago.
“You okay?” Detorie asked.
Lund was panting as if she’d run a marathon, which she’d done once a long time ago. “Yeah, I’m good.” She was only thirty-one, but had gotten out of shape — far enough that she no longer pretended to be able to keep up. She reached into her parka for a pack of cigarettes, and lit up without offering to share. Both men were lean, outdoorsy types, and presumably not inclined to tobacco.
“Okay, what do we have?”
The men led to a stand of brush that shouldered to a sheer granite face where the mountain again went vertical. Nestled tight against the rock wall was the crumpled body of a man. His legs were bent at dreadful angles, and he was wearing a plastic helmet that had split open like an egg. A climbing rope had landed mockingly in loose loops over his torso, like the string of a dropped yo-yo.
Detorie said, “His name is William Simmons. We got a cell call a few hours ago from his climbing partner.” The policeman pointed up the mountain. “They were four, maybe five hundred feet up. Had some gear, but didn’t know how to use it — I could tell right away from the partner’s description of what happened.”
Doran pointed upward. “I climbed part of the way up. Found his ice ax and a bunch of skid marks.”
“You sure he’s a Coastie?” Lund asked. This was the reason she’d been called in — she was one of two employees of the Coast Guard Investigative Service, Air Station Kodiak detachment.
Detorie handed over the mort’s wallet. Lund flipped it open to find his military ID front and center. Petty Officer Third Class William Simmons. She tried to correlate the picture on the ID to the face inside the crushed helmet. It wasn’t pretty, but probably a match.
“Where’s the other guy?”
“He was Coast Guard too, pretty broken up,” said Doran. “Simmons had climbed up higher, but the guy didn’t want to go along — said it looked too dangerous.”
“Best call of the day.”
“My partner took him down to the station. We told him he’d have to talk to you later. It all looks pretty straightforward, but we’re taking plenty of pictures.”
“The ax and the marks?”
“Done.”
“The spot where it all went wrong?”
“I haven’t been that high yet,” said Detorie, “but I might get there today … assuming the weather holds.” They all looked up at a darkening sky.
“Has anybody informed his commander?”
“I figured that’d be up to you.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Lund turned and looked out over the city. It had been a murky day, even by the dubious standards of November in the Aleutians, and late afternoon was gripping the landscape hard as gunmetal clouds rolled in from the sea. Dusk would go on for hours, drowsy and restless in equal parts — a land suffering from insomnia. Having been raised in the Arizona desert, Lund was accustomed to extremes, and so she embraced Kodiak in spite of its severity. Or perhaps because of it. Seven years ago, mired in a sinking relationship with a naval officer in San Diego, she’d jumped at a temporary posting to Kodiak to cover for another CGIS civilian who’d gone on maternity leave. The mother had ended up having three kids, one after the other. Lund was still here.