The commander acquired a faraway look. “Dead or alive, we have to find him. Obviously, there’s no way the five of us can cover the entire shoreline. We’ll have to ask the front office to put out feelers with local law enforcement. If somebody finds him washed up, we go in fast with our provisional federal IDs, claim jurisdiction. Then we get the body out of sight before anybody figures out what’s going on.”
“Okay. And if the guy is half fish and actually survived?”
“Then we track him down.”
“How?” asked the second in command.
“We put ourselves in his shoes. If you made it back to shore, what would you do? Would you go to the authorities?”
The subordinate thought about it. “Not a chance — not based on what we know.”
“Exactly.”
The crew-cut man frowned. “There’s something else we should consider.”
“What’s that?”
“What if someone saw him here, saw the two of them together? Our target might get blamed for the nurse’s death … at the very least he’d be a person of interest.”
The commander’s brow furrowed as he considered it. “True. Every law enforcement agency in the state would start looking for him. We can’t let that happen — far too much attention.” He looked around the room, contemplating how to handle it. “All right, so if he didn’t make it our hands are tied. We recover the body as fast as we can. But on the off chance that he did survive … it might be in our interest to help him avoid the authorities.”
“How?”
“By covering his tracks for him.” He explained what he wanted done.
“Okay. Then what?”
“Then we find him and provide some long overdue closure.”
“If he did survive, and if he could move, where do you think he’d go?”
The commander only looked at his protégé, implying he should answer his own question.
The crew-cut man thought it through, then said, “True. It’s the only place that makes sense.”
The explosion came forty minutes later. Manufactured by an artfully designed gas leak, closed windows, and a precisely governed ignition source, it could be heard miles away. Yet because there was still thunder in the distance, only one neighbor, an elderly woman who lived halfway to the main road, recognized the blast as something unnatural. When her 911 call was logged, at 12:07 A.M., a beleaguered dispatcher explained that due to the severe nor’easter, first responders were at a premium. Unless loss of life or severe injury was impending, or already proven, there was no one available to investigate a report of an explosion in a remote area. Someone would look into it tomorrow, the dispatcher promised. Possibly in the morning. Afternoon was more likely.
9
It was nine that evening when Lund tracked down PO3 William Simmons’ commander. Lieutenant Commander Reggie Walsh was nursing a beer at the Golden Anchor, the on-base sports bar. The bad news about the accident on Mount Barometer had already reached him by way of the wives’ network — in all branches of the service, there was no more lightning-paced intelligence organization.
“I’m sorry,” said Lund from the stool next to him. She already had a dark beer in hand thanks to a bartender with a quick wrist and an infallible memory.
“Me too, he was a good kid,” said Walsh. “Never gave me a lick of trouble.”
“How long has he been here in Kodiak?”
“A little over a year. Will was an aviation maintenance technician — worked mostly in the spares and expendables section, issuing and ordering parts.”
Lund inquired about the other young man who was involved, Simmons’ climbing partner, and Walsh had nothing bad to say about him. “They were just a couple of kids, indestructible and looking forward to life.” He explained that both young men seemed adventurous, constantly hiking and borrowing kayaks, and that Simmons had inquired about attending rescue swimmer training.
“I was going to recommend him too. He was friends with a couple of the ASTs on station, guys who’d been through the program. But now…” He took a long draw on his beer. “At least I won’t have to make the notification — had to do that once, and it’s lousy duty. Will wasn’t married, and his family hails from Georgia. I’ll make some phone calls tonight, find out who’s going to knock on the door. They need to have everything straight going in.”
Lund spun her mug by its handle. “So tell me something — were you around a few weeks back when we lost that helo?”
The lieutenant commander stiffened. “That investigation is hot and heavy right now, so I can’t say much about it. It was one of our birds, and the place has been crawling with investigators. I can tell you they looked at our maintenance records long and hard last week, but found no evidence of mechanical issues. That crew was trying to pull a guy out of a raft in twenty-foot seas with wind gusts over eighty knots. I guess that’s why the flyers get paid the big bucks.” He looked at her warily. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m not involved in the safety investigation. I was just wondering about the young man they brought back — the AST who almost survived. I’d heard he was flown out to Anchorage on one of our C-130s, but then today somebody told me he was airlifted out on a civilian Lear.”
Walsh seemed to stand down. “I wasn’t there, but one of my mechanics was doing an inspection that night. She told me a small jet came to pick him up.”
“Isn’t that strange?” she asked. “I mean, doesn’t the Coast Guard usually handle their own med-evacs?”
“Usually, yeah. But it’s not my end of the operation.”
Out of nowhere, a third voice entered the conversation. “You knew him, didn’t you, Shannon?”
Lund looked up and saw the bartender addressing her. She hadn’t been to the Golden Anchor in months, but the guy remembered her beer and her name — which put him two up on her. He was stout, in his mid-forties, obviously nosy and with a bear-trap memory. He’d probably make a good detective, she thought.
“You knew DeBolt,” he pressed. “I remember you being here with him once or twice.”
“Once,” she said. “It’s a small base.”
It had been six months ago, a strictly professional encounter in which Lund had tracked DeBolt here, finding him in the middle of a unit hail-and-farewell party. She’d needed to interview him regarding a rescue in which a trawler captain had been plucked from a rocky beach — even four hours after his boat had sunk, the man was stone drunk, so much so that he’d fallen out of the helo when they arrived back at Kodiak. Someone had decided to build criminal charges against the captain, although it hadn’t been Lund’s section. After filing her report, she’d never tracked the disposition of the case. But she definitely remembered DeBolt, with his sharp blue eyes and cool confidence. He was one of the elite: well trained, exceptionally fit, and, she was sure, very intelligent. His death was the kind of thing that frightened people in the service, in the sense that if it had happened to him, it could happen to anyone.
Lund tipped back the last of her beer, and regarded the two men in turn. “So tell me, do either of you gentlemen know where Simmons lived?”
Not surprisingly, it was the barman who said, “Apartment house just outside the gate. A lot of the enlisted guys end up there. Do you need to take a look at his place?”
“I probably should.”
“I can get you in.”
Lund raised an eyebrow. She looked at the cash register receipt on the bar in front of her and saw her server’s name printed near the top: Tom.
“It’s a small town,” said Tom the bartender. “My wife keeps the books for the guy who owns the building, does some sales work on the weekends. She has keys for all the units. I’ll tell her you’ll be by in the morning.”