The radio operator wished them luck, and signed off. Overhead, the big Hercules waggled its wings. Magnusson hung up the headset. “There,” he said. “The ship is ours.”
21
The Lion was a mountain up close. Carew guided the Salvation around the Lion’s keel. There was a swell building, and the underside of the wreck was awash with breaking waves. Okura stood on the Salvation’s bridge wing and stared up and watched. Apart from the sound of the surf, the ship was eerily quiet.
Carew circled the Salvation around the stern of the freighter, where its massive propeller hung half submerged in the icy water, the flat slab of rudder sitting useless, hard-over to port.
There was an access walkway on the stern of the ship, and an opening just above where the name PACIFIC LION was painted in big white letters against the blue hull. At its lowest point, the walkway was maybe ten feet from the surface of the water, but it angled up so sharply that it might as well have been a wall.
Good thing we have rope, Okura thought. This is going to require some agility.
Carew idled the Salvation around to the portside of the ship, the weather deck at the top of the superstructure now just a few feet from the water. Okura could see the whole of the accommodations house, the plain, low boxes above the white hull that served as home and working space for the crew. The aft lifeboat remained in place, hanging from its stanchions near the giant exhaust funnel at the stern.
So Ishimaru hadn’t stolen away. Not in a boat, anyway.
The bridge appeared empty as well. No sign of life anywhere. If the stowaway was still aboard, he’d had a lonely time at sea.
When the Salvation had completed its circumnavigation of the wreck, Okura turned and walked off of the bridge wing and into the wheelhouse, where Magnusson was on the satellite phone. He hung up as Okura entered.
“The shipowners have faxed an agreement to the Commodore headquarters,” he told the men. “No cure, no pay. If we don’t salvage this ship, we don’t earn a dime.”
He stared out at the Lion, silent. The rest of the men followed his gaze. Finally, Magnusson squared his shoulders. “First things first,” he said, fixing his eyes on Okura. “We’d better get you on board to retrieve your lost item—and our fee.”
MAGNUSSON AND CAREW DECIDED that the best way aboard the Lion was from the portside weather deck, the same way that Okura and his shipmates had evacuated the vessel days earlier.
“Best best way on board is with a helicopter,” Magnusson told Okura. “We wait until the Munro shows up and they’ll put you down nice and easy at the top of the starboard rail. You can drop in and search how you please.”
“No Coast Guard,” Okura told the salvage master. “They can’t know that I’m out here.”
Magnusson smirked, like he’d anticipated that response. “No helicopter, then.” He nodded to Carew, who sidled the Salvation alongside the Lion’s empty lifeboat station on the portside, forward deck. The freighter was just a few feet away from the salvage boat now. It loomed high above the Salvation, skewed at its impossible angle. It looked seconds away from crashing down on them all.
Carew ducked his head out the wheelhouse window, called back instructions to Robbie, who stood at the starboard rail with a pike pole.
“Grab a tie-up line,” Magnusson told Okura. “Make it fast to something when the deckhand grabs the rail.”
The Salvation inched closer to the Lion, its bow thruster grumbling and churning up water, the propeller doing the same at the stern. Robbie stretched with the pike pole, hooked it around the freighter’s side railing, and used it to guide the Salvation closer, until the railing nearly touched the smaller ship’s bulwarks. Okura looped his rope around the railing, tied it off.
Robbie hoisted himself up and onto the freighter, two more coils of rope on his shoulder, a duffel bag in his free hand. He steadied himself, reached for Okura’s hand, and pulled him aboard.
“You have three hours,” Magnusson called up to them. “If the weather gets dire or the situation changes, we’ll sound the horn. When you hear the horn, you return to this vessel immediately, understand?”
The tug motored away from the wreck, headed toward the stern. Okura listened as the sound of the engines died away. Then he turned to where Robbie waited.
Fifty million dollars.
“Right,” Robbie said from beside him. “How about we go find your twenty-five thousand, before we do anything else?”
THE DECK WAS SLICK AND BARE, and the Lion groaned and wallowed as the sea battered against it. Okura followed Robbie along the railing to the bridge, conscious of the roiling sea beneath the grate of the rail.
Robbie reached the bridge, pushed a door open. It fell in and hung there, suspended by gravity. Okura followed the deckhand inside.
The bridge was dark. Its width spanned the ship, save for a couple of abbreviated wings on either side. Okura looked around, took in the shadowy instruments, the chart tables, the cupboards with books and coffee cups and creamers scattered on the floor. Everything looked familiar, but at the same time so alien. The last time he’d been here, he’d caused a disaster.
It was cold inside the bridge. Robbie reached into his duffel bag and switched on a headlamp. Passed it to Okura and produced another for himself. Then he reached up to a chart table and pulled himself skyward, toward the aft bulkhead door in the middle of the bridge.
Okura followed, sweating a little from the exertion, and they reached the bulkhead door and carefully negotiated the long, angled corridor. The thin light from the bridge windows disappeared quickly. The howl of the wind quieted, as did the drone of the Coast Guard rescue plane overhead. The only sound Okura could hear was the occasional groan of the five thousand Nissans still lashed down in the cargo hold.
“What are you looking for, anyway?” Robbie asked as they made their way aft toward Okura’s stateroom.
Okura glanced back at him. Said nothing.
“Just so I know what I’m looking for,” the deckhand explained. “Like, is it big, is it small, what is it?”
“It’s a briefcase,” Okura told him. “Silver.”
“A briefcase.” Robbie went silent for a moment, waiting, no doubt, for Okura to elaborate. He didn’t. “Okay,” the deckhand said finally. “A briefcase it is.”
A briefcase. And the man who owned it.
But Okura kept his mouth shut about Ishimaru.
THEY REACHED A BULKHEAD door about thirty feet down from the bridge. Okura stopped. “The officers’ staterooms are beyond.”
He hesitated there as Robbie watched him. He didn’t want to return to his stateroom, he realized. He would have liked to forget he ever lived here, ever worked here. He would have liked to forget, period.
He opened the bulkhead to another hallway, a line of doors on either side. Climbed into the hallway and across to his stateroom door, pushed it open. It smelled musty inside, like a forgotten room in an old house. the porthole was dim; it looked up at the gray, featureless sky, the sun obscured by thick clouds. Okura’s belongings were pretty much as he’d left them, though anything loose had fallen onto the floor—the paperback novel he’d been trying to read, the photographs he’d arranged on his desk.