The seas continued to batter the Lion. The men fought the towing gear, and fought to remain upright, and even McKenna, in the wheelhouse, was exhausted by the time the bridle was secured and the towline in place.
This ain’t your everyday barge tow, girl.
She crossed back to the front of the wheelhouse, checked her GPS. Waited on Al and Jason to return to the tug, and began to swing both the Gale Force and the Lion into the wind again, to steady things out a little bit. According to her GPS, the Lion was now less than forty nautical miles from the Fox Islands in the Aleutian chain, drifting steadily. Job one was complete; the Gale Force had the Lion. Job two involved getting the ship upright again, and that came with a ticking clock.
Behind McKenna, Spike leaped down from the mantle. Padded across to the stairs, and paused to look back at the skipper. The cat yowled once, his pessimism obvious, before disappearing down the stairway and out of sight.
Show a little team spirit, cat, McKenna thought, watching him go. We could use it.
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, McKenna stood on the afterdeck of the Gale Force as the Coast Guard’s HH-65 Dolphin hovered above, lowering down a steel basket to the waiting crew. Nelson Ridley captured the basket and held it steady as Stacey Jonas, outfitted in full climbing gear, stepped aboard, grinning like a kid at the front gates of Disney World. This was what she’d been waiting for, the adrenaline bit, the whole appeal of the job. McKenna figured even the payoff was just a bonus to her diver.
The Dolphin winched Stacey up, then Matt, then Nelson Ridley. McKenna stepped forward, only to be beaten to the basket by Court Harrington, laptop in tow.
McKenna grabbed him by the shoulder. “No way,” she told him. “You’re too valuable to risk on that ship.”
“Bull,” Harrington replied. “You need me on board. You’re not going to get radio reception inside the hull of that ship. I need to be with you when you take the fluid measurements.”
“And what if you get hurt?”
“What if you get hurt? Or Matt or Stacey?”
“Difference is, I can find another diver,” McKenna replied. “Or Al can run the boat. Nobody can work that computer like you.”
Harrington grinned. “Then listen to me,” he said. “I need to be on board to do my job, McKenna. Are you going to let me do it, or what?”
She looked up at the helicopter. “Damn it, Court. Fine.”
He smiled wider. “Knew you’d see it my way,” he said, and climbed in.
As the basket inched skyward, Harrington kept his computer open in his lap, checking numbers, seemingly unconcerned by the heavy gusts of wind that buffeted him, thirty feet above the tug. McKenna watched, wondered why she’d capitulated—if she’d capitulated. Wondered if Court even knew she was captain.
She shook the thought away. Focus on the job.
“Keep an eye on things while we’re gone,” she told Al Parent as the basket descended again. “We could be gone for a while.”
“Fair enough.” Parent grinned. “I won’t have the boy cook you dinner, then.”
“Better wait for my word on that. But I might call you up for a lullaby.” McKenna climbed into the basket and flashed the thumbs-up to the flight mechanic, who started the winch and began to lift the basket from the deck.
McKenna gripped the side of the basket as it rose. She’d never been very good with heights, and dangling in a flimsy shopping cart in a gale wasn’t exactly going to help with that. The tug grew smaller and smaller beneath her. Al Parent returned to the wheelhouse, and McKenna almost envied the relief skipper, who would spend the next day or two in the captain’s chair, feet up, the ship’s cat in his lap and a paperback novel in his hands, his only worry being to keep the tug’s bow to the sea and the Lion’s drift arrested.
You wanted to chase the big scores. It’s going to get much harder yet.
SAFELY ABOARD THE DOLPHIN, Harrington nudged McKenna as the helicopter climbed. Pointed out the window at the Pacific Lion, the freighter’s portside weather deck only a few feet above the water. Every time the swell hit, the ship dipped and rolled, and the portside railings dropped toward the sea.
Harrington pointed at a series of vents just below the railing. “I’ve been looking over the design of the ship,” he told McKenna, hollering over the roar of the helicopter. “Those vents are for the cargo hold, to keep car exhaust from building while they’re loading. They go all the way down to deck four, the first cargo hold.”
McKenna followed his eyes. Got the point quickly. The way the seas rocked the freighter, those vents were dipping into the water, allowing more leakage into the holds. If the seas got any bigger, those waves could flood the vents, starting a chain reaction that could sink the Lion within hours. And the seas were forecast to get bigger, much bigger.
“Not good,” McKenna told Harrington. “How do we fix that?”
Court studied his laptop. “Depends on how much water’s already on board. I might be able to lessen the list a little bit just by pumping out some of the cargo hold. But we’re going to have to hurry.”
“Yeah,” McKenna hollered back. “No shit.”
44
The helicopter dropped McKenna and her crew on the Lion’s starboard weather deck, high above the water—or more accurately, onto the wall of the accommodations house on the starboard side of the ship. From there, the Gale Force team descended to the cargo holds through an access hatch amidships and a long, dark, tilting stairwell. Ridley remained topside.
The rest of the crew had tied off lines and dropped them into the abyss, then tied loops in the lines to create hand- and footholds to aid the descent. They all wore climbing harnesses and bright headlamps, and they clipped their harnesses into the loops in the ropes as they descended.
Safety first.
It was quieter inside the ship, out of the wind, though the swell swayed the ropes every time a wave hit. McKenna made sure she stayed clipped in at all times. It was a long way to fall if she made a mistake.
There were nine cargo decks on the Lion, decks four through twelve. McKenna and the team headed straight to the bottom. It was a long climb down, damp and cold, with the crew’s rhythmic breathing as they dropped, the rush of the wind past the postage-stamp patch of daylight above, the crash of the ocean, and the maddening tilt of the stairs, a nine-story drop in the dark.
Finally, McKenna reached bottom, a dark, geometric mishmash of shapes and angles, a watertight bulkhead door mounted on a wall that was now a floor. Beyond it lay the first cargo hold.
There was another watertight door, too, in what had been the floor. It led deeper into the ship, to the decks and passageways beneath the cargo holds. The crew would need to access those areas to check fluid levels in the fuel and water tanks, but for now McKenna had her eyes on a deckload of Nissans.
Matt and Stacey Jonas touched down shortly after McKenna, then Court Harrington behind them. The Jonases were breathing heavily, flushed with exertion. Court nudged Stacey. “Long way from Baja, huh?”