Soon enough. McKenna marked her position on the GPS screen. Less than seventy nautical miles south of the Aleutian Islands, and the weather building, but the Gale Force was finally on scene.
It was time to flex some Rhodes muscle.
29
Christer Magnusson was in the Salvation’s galley, pouring a fresh cup of coffee, when the radio crackled in the wheelhouse.
“Salvation, Salvation, this is the Gale Force. Are you on here, Christer?”
A woman’s voice. McKenna Rhodes. Shit.
Magnusson crossed to the galley porthole, peered out, and saw nothing but ocean. He hurried through the house to the bulkhead door and the afterdeck, walked out under the mammoth A-frame crane, and peered back across the stern, beyond the hulk of the Lion.
For a moment, he saw nothing but gray swells and whitecaps, the turbulence of the building sea. Then the Salvation rose on a wave, and Magnusson spied the tug a half mile or so off of the starboard quarter.
“Helvete.”
It was the Gale Force, all right—big and brawny as always, and as pretty as the days Randall Rhodes had run her, a fresh coat of paint on her red-and-white superstructure, her hull black as coal. Magnusson had spent many trips racing that tug to a wounded freighter, and more than a handful shaking his fist at her stern from the Titan. She still looked good, Magnusson had to admit. She looked like a tug that could save the Lion.
But could the Rhodes girl?
McKenna Rhodes was an enigma to Magnusson. He’d spoken to her rarely, on those brief occasions when the Gale Force and the Titan found themselves in the same harbor and he’d dropped by Riptide’s galley for a cup of coffee with his rival.
She’d been quiet during those meetings, as far as Magnusson could remember. But she’d sure kept her eyes on him, studied him while he talked, as if she were committing every word to memory. He’d liked her, as much as he liked anyone on Riptide’s boat: she carried herself like crew, not like Riptide’s daughter, and by any account, she worked hard. Certainly, she had guts, sailing the old man’s tug all the way here on a gamble.
Magnusson hurried back inside the Salvation, up into the wheelhouse, where Riptide’s daughter was still trying to raise him on the radio.
“Salvation, Salvation, I know you’re out there,” McKenna was saying. “This is McKenna Rhodes on the Gale Force. How do you read?”
Magnusson glanced back at the tug again, through the rear windows. Then he picked up the radio. “Gale Force, this is Salvation.” He forced a smile, kept his voice nonchalant. “Fancy meeting you all the way out here, McKenna. How are you?”
But McKenna Rhodes wasn’t having any small talk. “What are you up to, Christer? You know damn well you can’t save that ship with that old boat you’re running.”
Magnusson spit into his ramen cup. “We have a line on her, and we’re holding our own. If you came out here thinking you’d push me off this wreck, I’m sorry, but you wasted a trip.”
“Unless you’re hiding about five thousand horsepower, the wind will give you all the pushing you can handle,” McKenna answered. “Weather’s building, and I have a team here who can get that ship upright. I suggest you stand down and let us do our jobs.”
Magnusson pursed his lips. McKenna had her dad’s audacity, that was for certain. And she probably had Court Harrington on board, too. But she was still in second place, and Magnusson wasn’t about to back down.
“Sorry, McKenna,” he replied. “We signed an Open Form with the owners, and we’re salvaging this ship. We’ll keep you in mind if we require assistance. Over and out.”
He hung up the radio. Then he picked up the sat phone. Dialed in to Commodore home base, waited on the connection.
Pick up, damn it, he thought, studying the Salvation’s lack of progress on the GPS screen. I need another boat, and an architect, now.
30
Okura led Robbie down the Lion’s central hallway again. The waves outside were bigger now, the wind stronger. Okura winced every time the ship swayed, with every groan from the hull and the shifting cargo below.
They had covered every inch of the accommodations deck. Every stateroom, every hallway, every locker. No sign of Tomio Ishimaru. No sign of his briefcase. If the stowaway was still on board, he was in the engine room somewhere, or in the cargo holds.
Or he’d washed overboard.
But Okura wasn’t ready to consider that possibility. He couldn’t afford to lose faith, not yet. He led Robbie down the hall to a stairway amidships. Pushed the bulkhead door and it swung open, revealing the dark, cockeyed stairway beyond. The stairs descended into the gloom of the cargo holds. At this angle, there was no way to follow them but with ropes.
“These stairs go all the way to the last cargo hold, deck four,” Okura told Robbie. “There are nine cargo decks in all. Five thousand cars.”
Nine decks. Each deck six hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide. Miles upon miles of ground to cover, all of it dark and deadly. Okura watched Robbie rig up a climbing line. Tested the strength of the knot and hesitated at the edge of the bulkhead, his headlamp beam reflecting against the carnival funhouse angles of the listing stairway beyond.
Fifty million dollars. Okura took the rope in his hands and stepped off into the darkness, began to lower himself deeper into the Lion.
OKURA WAS HALFWAY TO the first cargo deck—deck twelve—when Robbie called down from the hallway above.
“Just heard the horn,” the deckhand reported. “My radio’s crapping out in here. I gotta get back to the surface.”
“We can’t turn around yet,” Okura replied. “We haven’t even started our search.”
“Skipper sounds the horn, I gotta jump to it,” Robbie said. “I’ll be right back.”
Okura listened to the deckhand picking his way down the passage, leaving him alone in the stairwell. He steadied his breathing. Gripped the rope tighter and pushed off from the wall. The darkness seemed almost alive beneath him, all drips and moans and swirling shadows rising up to meet him as he made his descent.
Robbie returned just after Okura had reached the bulkhead at deck twelve. “Bad news,” the deckhand called down, his headlamp piercing the gloom from above. “Urgent. There’s a salvage tug just showed up outside, the Gale Force, from Seattle. They’re trying to bump us off the tow, and Bill says they have the boat that could do it.”
Okura looked around the landing. The hatch to the cargo hold hung open on the wall opposite, now nearly vertical with the slant of the ship. This struck Okura as unusual; the door was supposed to be locked and secured while the ship was at sea. This was an aberration.
“I might have found something,” Okura called up the stairway. “I want to continue the search.”
“Not today,” Robbie said. “Look, we’ll keep poking around this damn ship as soon as we can, but right now I need to get topside and see what my boss wants us to do.”
Okura pushed open the hatch wider and peered inside. The light from his headlamp was dim and abbreviated, but what it illuminated was astonishing: row upon row of cars, all hanging at the same awkward impossible angle, suspended in space by a system of high-strength straps, ropes, and chains. They swayed almost as one with the motion of the swell, the whole fragile mess a chorus of straining material and groaning steel every time a wave hit. The cars hung in place, and they stretched to the end of Okura’s light and beyond, an obstacle course, a death trap, hanging by the proverbial thread.