Where is the briefcase?
Slowly, cautiously, Okura steadied his body with his hands and sat up. Felt the car shift beneath him, unsteady, dangling from the deck. He groped in the darkness, but couldn’t find the case. Down here, he was blind.
There was a new noise, unfamiliar, from high above. An irregular banging against steel. Then, there were voices, and light. Okura could see them through the windshields, and the windows of the cars that hung above him, thin beams cutting through the dark. He couldn’t make out what the voices were saying.
“Robbie?” Okura struggled to sit up. “Help me. I’m down here.”
The lights swung around in the darkness, blocked by rows of cars. Okura remained obscured in darkness.
“Anyone down there?” someone called. “This is the Coast Guard. It’s time to go home.”
Okura watched the men’s beams, saw the light play off of their Coast Guard flight suits. Rescue jumpers, he realized. Survival technicians.
He said nothing.
The men ventured out onto Ishimaru’s platform. Peered over, and now their headlamps found Okura’s rope. Okura shifted farther into the shadows, felt the Nissan rock unsteadily beneath him. Tried not to breathe.
He’d been waiting for Robbie to return, help him retrieve the briefcase, and rescue him from the ship. But the Coast Guard’s arrival meant something had happened up there on the surface. And whatever it was, it was bad news for Okura.
As Okura watched, the techs rigged a harness and looped it over a pipe on the ceiling. One of the technicians climbed inside while the other stayed on the platform, gripping the rope and belaying his partner, slowly, through the rows of cars.
“Hello?” the first technician called. “Anyone down here?”
His light swept over the cars above Okura’s head. Shone through the windshield above Okura, paused for a split-second on something alien to this space, something shiny, and Okura felt his breath hitch.
The briefcase.
It lay wedged against a car tire, just above Okura, well within reach. He could retrieve it easily from his position. But the technician was still dropping closer to Okura, closer still. Okura didn’t move. Held his breath and stayed motionless until his muscles screamed from the effort. Finally, the technician was passing him, two or three cars away, and as he dropped farther, Okura let himself breathe, let himself shift, just a little.
Then, from above, the other technician’s voice, and another beam of light. “Hey, Tommy, over there. I think I see something.”
42
McKenna stared up at the Lion as two Coast Guard ASTs winched something large and black from the listing deck of the freighter to the HH-65 Dolphin helicopter hovering above the wreck.
“What do you make of it, skipper?” Ridley asked beside her.
McKenna frowned. “It doesn’t look good,” she said. “They were supposed to get that sailor off. I hope nobody got hurt.”
Through her binoculars, she studied the helicopter and the cargo on the end of the winch line. The object was long and shapeless, and the ASTs handled it awkwardly. McKenna watched it rise toward the open door of the helicopter, felt a sudden lurch of recognition.
The object was a body bag. Someone onboard the Lion was dead.
IN THE CARGO HOLD, Hiroki Okura gripped the briefcase to his chest and thanked the fates for his incredible luck.
He’d nearly given himself up when the technician had called out from above, thought he’d been spotted, that the game was over. But the technician’s light hadn’t found him; it had swung past, swung deeper into the hold, and Okura listened as the second tech descended to investigate.
“Anything?” the first tech called down. “Thought I saw something that looked human.”
A beat. Then: “Oh, it’s human all right. But I’d say we’re a little late for a rescue.”
For a moment, Okura was confused. Then he understood. Ishimaru. They’ve found Tomio’s body.
In an instant, Okura realized he’d just won the lottery. The Coast Guard would assume Ishimaru was the missing Japanese second officer. The only men who could correct them were already back in Japan.
This was a gift. Divine intervention. This was a fifty-million-dollar stroke of good luck.
Okura had lain in the dark. Listened to the techs discuss how to retrieve the stowaway’s body. Lay still and waited for the men to retreat and leave him alone with the briefcase.
43
McKenna maneuvered the Gale Force to the stern of the Pacific Lion. Dropped Al and Jason Parent on the big freighter’s slanted afterdeck to wrestle the Salvation’s towing gear off of the bollards. The line still dangled in the water, and McKenna was leery of fouling the Gale Force’s twin propellers. She idled away from the Lion as the Parents struggled with the gear.
As McKenna watched, Al climbed up the listing deck to the Salvation’s towing bridle and, using an acetylene torch, cut through the heavy chain and shoved it free of the bollard. The gear hit the water with a splash and disappeared instantly, sinking toward the sea floor some three thousand fathoms below.
Then Al Parent’s voice came over the radio. “Clear, skipper. We’re good to go.”
With Al and Jason on the radios, and Nelson Ridley at the winch, McKenna backed the Gale Force to the stern of the Lion again, guiding her tug with the rear-mounted controls at the back of her wheelhouse. Spike hopped up on the mantle beside her to assess the tug’s progress, the self-fashioned master and commander of the ship.
“Keep an eye on things, cat,” McKenna told him. “It’s all hands now.”
She petted the cat absently, and for once Spike tolerated the intrusion. McKenna reversed the tug to within a boat length of the Lion, watched as Ridley fired a messenger line across to Al and Jason. The two men were practically standing on the bollards to keep upright, the deck like a high, slippery wall, and they fought to maintain their balance as they hauled in the messenger line.
For an instant, McKenna thought of Al Parent singing songs to his grandson on the satellite phone, Jason Parent kissing Angel and little Ben good-bye on the dock. She watched her crew work, and thought of the body bag the Coast Guard had just pulled from the wreck. Then she pushed the thoughts from her mind. They would do her no good here, not now.
McKenna backed the tug as close as she could to the freighter, conscious of the tug’s proximity to the massive, multibladed propeller jutting out of the water just yards away. Al and Jason wrestled the messenger line around the bollards, and Jason heaved the line back to Nelson Ridley, who used the Gale Force’s own winch to haul the towing gear from the tug’s stern and across to the Lion.
It was a slow, painstaking job. Al and Jason kept the line as secure as they could as the heavy towing bridle fell off the stern of the Gale Force and was pulled across to the Lion. The bridle itself was heavy chain, designed to prevent the towing wire from chafing against the bollards during an open-ocean operation, and Jason and Al labored to maneuver it around the bollards and shackle it back to the line between the ship and the tug.