Okura picked up one of these, a framed picture of his sister and her husband, their young daughter. The girl was three now, and he could count the number of times he’d seen her on one hand, so long had he been out at sea. She was a beautiful little girl, intelligent and inquisitive, and her parents were kind and loving. Okura studied the picture and wondered what his sister would think, if she knew what he’d done.
Robbie coughed from the doorway. “I don’t see any briefcase,” he said. “How about that twenty-five grand?”
Okura looked up from the picture. “Just give me one minute,” he said. “I didn’t expect I’d be back here.”
“It’s your money,” Robbie said. “You want to spend it on memory lane, be my guest. But my boss is going to want to get paid.”
Okura glanced down at the picture again. His sister was smiling, as happy as Okura could ever remember seeing her. Her husband was a hardworking man, a lawyer. His life must have been stressful, but he was smiling, too, his arm around Okura’s sister, his hand mussing his daughter’s hair. They were a happy family.
Robbie sighed, his impatience obvious. Okura set the picture aside. Climbed over to his desk and withdrew his passport and the twenty-five thousand dollars he’d hidden away.
THEY MADE THEIR WAY to Ishimaru’s hiding space, the storage locker aft of the ship. The stowaway wasn’t there, hadn’t returned, and the briefcase was still absent, too.
Damn it, Okura thought. Why couldn’t this be easy?
Ishimaru could have been anywhere on board the ship by now, if he was even still there. Okura hoped the stowaway had at least had the sense to remain on the accommodations deck; the prospect of venturing farther below, to the cargo holds, was a nightmarish proposition.
So Okura and the deckhand searched every stateroom for the stowaway, inch by painstaking inch. There were two guest staterooms, the captain’s suite, the first officer’s suite, and Okura’s. Beyond that, more staterooms, and the general crew quarters.
Okura searched the third officer’s quarters and the cadet’s modest suite and found nothing. Continued aft and found two more doors: to starboard, the deckhand’s berths. To port, the galley and the crew mess.
“Which do we check first?” Robbie asked.
Okura considered. “The galley.” Perhaps Ishimaru got hungry.
But the galley showed no sign of the stowaway. It was a long, low kitchen, stainless-steel islands and cooking areas, a walk-in refrigerator and a similar freezer. The meat had gone bad; the stench inside the freezer was horrific. Robbie gave it a sweep with his headlamp and slammed the door shut again.
“Dang it,” he said, gagging. “I don’t even know why I did that.”
The galley floor was covered in foodstuffs: sauces and stale breads and broken eggs. The galley was a 24-7 operation, and even in the middle of the night, someone would have been working, setting out food for the midnight watch. The food was spilled everywhere, but there were no telltale footprints in the flour, nothing obviously stolen from the dry-goods locker. If Ishimaru was still aboard the ship, he hadn’t made it to the galley.
The crew mess was adjacent to the galley. It was a small cafeteria, the tables bolted to the floor, the benches loose and scattered. There was spilled food here, too, but no Ishimaru.
Suppose we’ll have to check the crew berths, Okura thought, but before he could tell Robbie, the Salvation sounded a blast on her horn from somewhere outside.
The deckhand emerged from another locker. “You hear that?”
“I heard it,” Okura said. “I need more time.”
“No more time. They blow the horn, we come running, remember? Get back down to the boat and try again tomorrow.”
Shit.
Okura looked at the deckhand, who shrugged. It is what it is.
“Tomorrow,” Okura said finally. “We come back early.”
22
The Gale Force made Dutch Harbor the next morning. Sailed up through Akutan Pass into the Bering Sea, around the top of Unalaska Island, into Unalaska Bay, and down toward the village.
Court Harrington joined McKenna in the wheelhouse as the Gale Force motored across the bay. “So this is Dutch Harbor,” he said.
“The one and only,” McKenna replied. “You never made it up here with my dad?”
“Not this far out. Most I know about this place, I learned from that fishing show, the crab guys. Kind of doesn’t seem real.”
It was a beautiful little town, and the mariner in McKenna was fascinated by the mix of traffic in the harbor, from deep-sea container ships to Coast Guard cutters to fish packers and freezer boats to trawlers and crabbers. Harrington pointed out the window at one of the boats. “Right there,” he said. “I definitely saw those guys on TV.”
“You want to motor on over there, see if they’ll give you a spot?”
The architect laughed. “I don’t think I’m cut out for it. It’s tough work on those crab boats. Hardest job in the world, they say.”
“Psh. They never worked on a salvage tug.”
“Settled, then. As soon as we save that Lion, I’m coming back to Dutch and ditching you for a crab boat. You can look for my ass on TV.”
McKenna throttled down, pointed the Gale Force at the fuel barge. “I’d better get your autograph now, then,” she told him. “Just in case.”
MCKENNA BROUGHT THE TUG into the fuel barge, nodded hello to the owner as Jason Parent and his dad secured the mooring lines.
“Gale Force,” the owner said, admiring the tug as he passed McKenna the fuel hose. “I remember this boat. Hell of a tug. Riptide Rhodes’s, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” McKenna replied. “My old man.”
“Your old man.” The owner squinted up at her, appraisingly. “Well, what brings you to Dutch, anyhow?”
McKenna shrugged. The law of the gold-rush mariner, whether fisherman or salvage speculator, was to keep one’s mouth shut, especially on the docks, where gossip was often the primary industry.
“Just come up to have a look around,” she told the owner. “The crew always wanted to meet those crab guys, and I figured maybe we’d run into somebody who could use our services.”
“Always a lot of guys needing help around here.” The owner gestured across the water. “Especially with Bill Carew and his gang out with those Commodore boys.”
McKenna felt her insides go a couple degrees colder. She followed the man’s eyes to some ramshackle barges tied up in the elbow of a long spit of land. “Commodore guys are in town?”
“You bet. You heard about that big car carrier that nearly flipped over the other day? No sooner had the Coast Guard rescued the crew than a couple of those Commodore guys were climbing off a plane, scrounging for somebody’s boat to take them out there.” He spit on the dock. “Dunno how they plan to actually save that wreck, but they’re the experts, I suppose.”
“They put a line on her?” McKenna asked.
“That’s what I heard from the Coast Guard.” The guy grinned up at her. “Pity your old man isn’t still around, huh? Tug like this, he could rack up a hell of a payday out there.”
“Yeah,” McKenna agreed, and she felt it like a punch in the gut. “A real pity, all right.”