“Good.”
The Salvation rolled into a swell with a sickening lurch. Magnusson checked the barometer at the back of the wheelhouse. “Weather’s going to kick up,” he said. “By tomorrow, the day after, you won’t want to go far in that skiff. Better get back to searching while you still have the chance.”
The salvage master throttled up the Salvation, glanced back through the aft windows at the Lion behind them. Overnight, the team had hooked up a towline to the stern of the freighter, managed to turn her into the wind. But the little tug’s engines were working hard, and as best as Okura could tell, the tug wasn’t doing much more than keeping the freighter in place.
Where are you, Tomio? he thought, studying the ship, contemplating the vast expanse of cargo area left to be searched, the rapidly building waves outside. Where have you taken that briefcase?
28
The seas were building.
McKenna lay awake in her bunk as the Gale Force plowed through the swell, the engines running full-out toward the Pacific Lion.
The good weather wasn’t going to last. McKenna had checked the long-range forecast before passing the watch over to Al Parent, and the forecast was grim: winds fifteen to twenty knots by the time they arrived at the Lion, growing to twenty-five to thirty within a couple of days. There was a gale coming, the growing seas the first indication of bad weather, the distant wind building the waves bigger and bigger, pushing them ahead of the storm.
As the weather got closer, the swell would keep rising, and the Lion would wallow and lose stability. It might take on more water and sink, or it might drift faster toward the rocky coast of the Aleutian chain. However you looked at it, the gale was bad news.
McKenna didn’t sleep much. She tossed and turned in her bunk, listening to the waves break over the bow, the pitch of the engines. The night passed slowly, the tug grinding along, and when the first light of dawn began to show through the portholes, the skipper forced herself to her feet, dressed and splashed water on her face, brewed a strong pot of coffee in the galley, and returned to the wheelhouse, where Al Parent sat in the skipper’s chair with the satellite phone to his ear, talking to home while he monitored the tug’s progress, the cat curled up asleep in his lap. It sounded like he was singing a lullaby.
Spike woke up as McKenna walked in. Stretched, yawned. Jumped down from Al’s lap and padded out of the wheelhouse, nary a look in the skipper’s direction.
Al watched the cat go, saw McKenna standing there. He stopped singing, and gave her a sheepish smile, quickly signed off the call.
“Little Ben isn’t sleeping too well,” he told her. “I thought if his mom put me on speaker…”
He trailed off, made a show of looking embarrassed, though McKenna suspected her first mate would be doting over his grandson until the day the kid drove off to college—and probably longer. She smiled and handed him a cup of coffee.
“Heck, we should put you on the hailer,” she told Al. “With that rock-a-bye baby, you’ll have us all zonked right out.”
Al laughed. “A little early, aren’t you?” he asked McKenna. “Still have a couple hours left on my watch.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said.
Al glanced at the autopilot, punched in a slight course correction. “Weather’s building.”
“That’s what kept me from my beauty rest. Couple days, it’ll be howling out there.”
“Tough to tow a boat in that kind of wind. That Lion’s big hull will turn into a sail, send her sliding all over on the end of our towline.”
“Assuming we can even right the thing. I don’t want to be clambering around inside that wreck, trying to get the pumps working in twenty-foot seas.”
Al nodded.
“Assuming we can even get a line on the thing,” McKenna added. “Convince Christer Magnusson his tug isn’t cut out for this work.”
Al snorted. “Bunch of pretenders. One look at us, skip, and Magnusson will scurry off with his tail between his legs.”
“Let’s hope so,” McKenna said.
The two sat in silence. Watched the light grow over the slate-gray sea, the never-ending procession of heavy, scudding waves, the rise and the crash of the hull though the peaks and troughs, the grind of the engines.
The night faded away. Morning passed. Al had the radio on the satellite channels, a country music station, all lonely husbands and runaway dogs, broken-down trucks and whiskey-bottle blues. It did nothing to help McKenna’s mood.
She crossed the wheelhouse, ready to flip the station to something a little more uplifting, some classic rock, maybe, when Al called over from the radar. “I got a hit”
McKenna forgot about the radio. Crossed back and peered over Al’s shoulder. The radar had picked up something dead ahead, thirty nautical miles or so, something large and uneven. As the Gale Force sailed closer, the radar slowly separated from one large hit into three smaller, distinct dots.
“That big one’s the Lion,” McKenna said. “The smaller one’s gotta be the Salvation.”
“And the third one?” Al asked.
McKenna scratched her head. “Coast Guard. Or another Commodore tug.”
“Gotta be the Coast Guard,” Al said. “We’d have heard if Magnusson had another tug here already.” He glanced at the autopilot, set the tug on course. “Twenty miles away now,” he told McKenna. “An hour or two, tops, we find out.”
AT FIRST, the stricken ship was just a smudge on the horizon, a formless mirage, visible only from the tops of the swells. As the Gale Force plowed closer, the smudge separated, and McKenna could see the Coast Guard cutter, stately and proud, and the Pacific Lion herself, a half-sunk bathtub toy on an enormous scale, ungainly and wallowing in an uneasy sea.
“Holy hell,” Al muttered. “What a wreck.”
The ship had been ugly to begin with. It boasted none of the classic lines of a traditional cargo vessel. Looked more like a brick than a ship, blocky and angular and top-heavy, an affront to any sailor’s sense of style and tradition.
Now, though, lying wounded in the water, it looked like disaster. The list was pronounced. The ship lay almost fully on its portside, the bulbous red chin of its bow almost parallel to the waves.
It’s incredible nobody died when that ship flipped, McKenna thought. Let’s hope we can save her and still say the same.
The Lion wallowed, waves breaking over her keel, but she looked more or less stable. Certainly, she didn’t appear to have taken on much water, at least not drastically. There was still time to save her—assuming the Salvation relinquished its claim.
McKenna could see the little boat, low and blue and grungy, in a tow position at the stern of the freighter. The towline stretched taut between the two vessels, and exhaust billowed from the smaller boat’s stack, but neither vessel was moving.
“What do they think they’re doing out here?” Al asked. “If they’re moving at all, it’s backwards.”
“Probably the best they can do,” McKenna replied. “Slow down the drift and hope to ride out the gale.”
A quarter mile or so off the Lion’s port quarter, the Coast Guard cutter silently stood guard. McKenna assumed the Coast Guard was aware of the situation, but if they had any concerns, they weren’t showing it.