Come on, come on, come on.
Matt Jonas lowered the board from the top of the access stairs. It was long and unwieldy, and it banged and crashed against the walls of the stairway as it dropped. McKenna wondered how the hell they would get Court out without hurting him any further.
The AST laid out the board. With McKenna’s help, he got Harrington situated. The architect still hadn’t regained consciousness. He was breathing, but barely.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” the AST told McKenna. “You’re going to climb back up to that hatch, and you and your partners are going to haul this guy up. I’m going to climb up alongside him, steady the board, make sure he doesn’t crash into these walls too hard. Then we’ll do it again up the second set of stairs.”
“Roger that,” McKenna said, reaching for the rope. She looked back at Harrington. “Just be careful, okay?”
The AST didn’t look up from the medevac board. “I’ll look out for him,” he said. “You get going.”
McKENNA CLIMBED AS FAST as she could. Tried to cover the ground without clipping herself in, but then another wave hit and knocked her sideways, nearly knocked her clean off the line. She closed her eyes, saw Harrington falling, heard the thud as the architect hit the deck. Opened her eyes and reached for her carabiner and clipped herself in all the way to the top.
Stacey was with Matt at the top of the stairs. She stood back as Matt and McKenna began to pull Harrington skyward. The whiz kid wasn’t so heavy, not with two people hauling him, and somehow this struck McKenna where it hurt.
The most important member of the team, and you couldn’t lay off him. God help you if he’s dead because of you.
Slowly, Matt and McKenna hoisted the medevac board to the access hatch while the AST climbed beside. Harrington’s eyes were still closed when he came through the hatchway. Stacey stifled a gasp, her hand to her throat.
The AST paused at the bulkhead. “One more time,” he told McKenna and Matt. “You got enough left in the tank?”
“If they don’t, I do,” Stacey told him. But her husband was already following McKenna up the line.
The wind howled outside as McKenna reached the surface. The helicopter hovered overhead, buffeted by the gale. The sky was the same dull gray, the clouds hanging low, the wind whipping more froth off the water.
Ridley helped McKenna to her feet. Took the rope and helped her and Matt pull Harrington to the surface.
The job seemed to take hours. The wind attacked in force. McKenna heaved on the line and tried to fight the feeling that the whole job had just gone to hell.
Finally, Harrington was on deck. The AST climbed after him, signaled to the crew of the Dolphin to lower the hauling wire. It took the flight mechanic a couple of tries with the wind. The wire flew everywhere, landing thirty feet away. McKenna and Matt ran to it, dragged it back to the AST and Harrington, helped the AST clip the medevac board to the guy wire, and watched as the mechanic winched Harrington skyward.
The AST was next to go. McKenna gripped his arm. “How bad is it?”
“We’ll give him the best we’ve got, ma’am,” the AST replied, avoiding her eyes. “If our guys can fix him, they will.”
51
Hiroki Okura peered out through a porthole at the salvage crew clustered on the starboard wall of the accommodations house. Listened to the drone of the Coast Guard helicopter as it climbed high in the air and flew away, out of sight. They’d taken someone with them, an injured man. Something had gone wrong.
It was serious, judging by the expressions on the faces of the crew members left behind. They stared up at the gray sky after the helicopter, faces flushed red from the bitter wind, eyes as dark as the water below. For a long time, nobody moved. They seemed to be waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
They were an interesting assortment, the salvage crew. Two women, and that alone was a rarity, this far out at sea. Stranger still, the younger of the women appeared to be in charge. She was in her thirties, Okura decided. He wondered how she’d managed to find herself aboard this wreck.
It didn’t matter. The salvage crew hadn’t noticed Okura, and that was perfectly fine with him.
He’d survived the perilous climb up the long string of Nissans, little by little, inch by inch, wave by thundering wave. He’d rested at the bulkhead where he’d killed Ishimaru, exhausted and weak from hunger. It hadn’t just been the money that had spurred him to keep moving, but also the knowledge that if he died here, he would die no better than Ishimaru—a failure, alone, in this cold, hellish pit.
So he’d climbed. Found the rope he’d left behind and lifted himself up the stairwell, clutching the briefcase and walking up walls, taking breaths where he could find flat ground, somewhere to set his feet. His muscles burned from exertion. Still, he pulled himself skyward, fought gravity and the storm and his own failing strength.
He didn’t know how long he’d climbed, but it could have been hours. Finally, when he’d nearly had enough, the darkness changed, almost imperceptible, yawned open in front of him, and he could suddenly see forms again, walls, the silhouette of his hands, the briefcase. The air became marginally fresher, cooler. The sound of the storm became louder. And he’d felt the knot where the rope tied off to a handrail, and then he knew he’d won.
Okura had collapsed in the hallway, the central spine of the Lion. Dragged himself and the briefcase behind to the galley, the food stores, and laid waste. Much of the ship’s food had gone bad; the galley reeked of overripe fruit and meat gone to rot, but Okura was too hungry to care. In the dim light from two salt-encrusted portholes, he’d eaten everything he could find, most of it stale: the cookies left out for the overnight watch, a whole box of rice crackers, chocolate. He’d found a can opener and drank chicken soup, cold, ate a whole tin of peaches, then a tin of pears.
With his strength mostly restored, he’d climbed his way back out of the galley and into the nearest stateroom, pulled the bedding and pillows from the bed and made a nest in a crook of the listing wall. He lay down and wrapped himself in the soft, letting the storm lull him into a well-deserved sleep.
NOW HE WAS AWAKE.
He’d heard the helicopter approach, listened as it settled into a hover above the ship. He’d pushed the blankets away and climbed up the stateroom to a porthole facing down the weather deck aft. Looked out just in time to watch the Coast Guard technician disappear down a hatchway, fifty feet away.
A man stood balanced on the wall nearby, a big man, older, a considerable mustache. He’d waited, his brow furrowed, occasionally walking to the hatchway and peering down into the abyss. Once or twice, he’d glanced back at where the stateroom jutted out from the accommodations superstructure, and for one brief, terrifying instant, Okura thought he’d been seen. But the man didn’t investigate, just looked up at the helicopter and then back down the hole, waiting on the Coast Guard technician’s return.
The man hadn’t been aboard the Salvation. None of this crew had been; they weren’t Christer Magnusson’s people. The Commodore team had carried themselves with a swagger, a certain confidence. They’d dressed alike, looked alike, didn’t speak much.
This crew was different. They didn’t have Magnusson’s cocksure demeanor, for one thing, but there was something else, too: these people were familiar, the way they interacted. The way their eyes met, how they seemed to communicate without needing words.