But dry-land therapy hadn’t really worked out. McKenna had known since she was a girl that she’d inherited her dad’s sailor’s blood, and even if he was gone, she couldn’t just turn her back on what made her a Rhodes. There was no job onshore that appealed to her, no life she liked better than being out at sea.
Finally, she’d compromised. She wasn’t cut out for the gold rush, the kind of salvage job that had been the end of her father. But she couldn’t just let the old man’s name die out, not without putting up a fight. A good boat like the Gale Force could do more than just salvage.
She didn’t have enough work to call back the salvage divers, Matt and Stacey, and the less said about Court Harrington, her dad’s wunderkind naval architect, the better. McKenna mostly kept to contract work—barge tows and the like—from Alaska to Mexico and anywhere in between. It was hardly the glamorous life the old man had in mind, but the tug was still earning, and that had to count for something.
So, together with Nelson Ridley, her dad’s indefatigable engineer, and a skeleton crew, McKenna had spent the three years since her father’s death working her butt off, bidding on towing contracts, trying to convince herself she was doing the old man proud.
But the tug business was what you’d politely call a boys’ club, and contracts weren’t easy to come by. More than a few potential clients had bailed once they’d heard her voice on the phone. She’d debated getting Ridley, with his thick Irish brogue, to make the calls for her.
She was going to have to do something, anyway. Three years of slim margins and deferred maintenance took tolls, and Gale Force Marine was maxed out, overextended, leveraged to the hilt. And now McKenna found herself down in the engine room, well after midnight, trying to figure out how to scrape up enough cash to get the tug back to sea.
THE TROUBLE HAD STARTED midway through the last job, a log tow gone haywire off Cape Disappointment at the mouth of the Columbia River, winds gusting to fifty, seas thirty feet. There’d been no way to cross the Columbia Bar to shelter, not in that weather, so they’d jogged offshore in the brunt of it, waiting for the weather to break and hoping they weren’t losing too many logs off that barge in the meantime.
Of course, even in fine weather, the Columbia Bar was no joke, and when you were dragging a three-hundred-foot barge and bucking six knots of river current, it could get downright hairy. Especially if your starboard turbocharger decided to crap out at the same time you were staring down an outbound oil tanker.
Not that it was the tug’s fault. Randall Rhodes had known what he was getting into when he’d purchased the Gale Force, which was to say a twenty-year-old boat with a lot of big seas under her keel, a couple of decent engines with too many hours on them, good bones beneath her, and a reputation up and down the coast as one heck of a deep-sea tug.
She’d had to be, for what the old man had in mind for her. Spent every last dollar—and a million of the bank’s—on the tug, traded the barge pulls for the treasure hunt, bringing ships back from the dead for seven-figure scores, minimum.
It had worked pretty well, until one night it didn’t. And now the old man was gone, and McKenna kept slogging, trying to do the guy proud.
HER PHONE WAS RINGING, somewhere. McKenna wiped the grease off her hands and checked the caller ID. Her engineer—her dad’s engineer—Nelson Ridley, a stubborn son of a bitch who loved the Gale Force so much it blinded him to the writing on the wall. Ridley could have bailed out about the same time McKenna should have, found a gig with one of the big outfits on the coast, Commodore Towing or Westerly Marine, something good paying, steady hours, reliable boats. But he stuck around, poured as much sweat equity—and almost as much cash—as McKenna into the operation, and McKenna had about given up trying to talk him out of sticking around.
She answered the phone. “Ridley.”
“I’ve got something here, boss.” The engineer’s voice sounded too excited for the middle of the night. “Something pretty darn interesting.”
“You should be sleeping,” McKenna replied. “Or you should be down here helping me fix this turbo.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Ridley said. “I watched a movie with the wife, another ridiculous romance, and then she fell asleep and I didn’t. And, boy, are you going to be glad, lass.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“It’s better if I tell you in person,” Ridley said. “I’m coming your way.”
3
Hiroki Okura had had just enough time to send out a Mayday before the captain ordered the crew to abandon ship.
The captain was still wearing his dressing gown. He clung precipitously to the chart table at the rear of the bridge, looking more like a bewildered old man than the master of a fifty-thousand-ton cargo vessel. But his voice was strong, and the meaning clear: Time to go.
The Pacific Lion lay at a sixty-degree angle, the portside all but completely submerged. The ship’s bridge ran the width of the ship, and from the portside entrance, Okura could look out the window and see green water just a few feet below. The ship shuddered with every swell, threatening to topple. The crew would have to launch a lifeboat in the frigid Alaskan waters—and the starboard boats were too far from the water. They would have to take their chances and hope the portside of the ship didn’t collapse on top of them.
The rest of the ship’s twenty-six-man crew was already assembled at the forward portside lifeboat. One seaman wore nothing but a towel; none of the others had had time for survival suits. If they couldn’t make it to a lifeboat, they would die in the water within minutes.
Okura muttered a quick prayer. Then he crawled his way aft to assist with the launching of the boat.
The lifeboat was fully enclosed and watertight, equipped with food and water and a GPS beacon. There were four of these boats on the Pacific Lion, and each had enough room and supplies for the entire crew. One by one, the crew climbed aboard as the sea continued to rock the freighter, threatening to push the ship over and kill them all.
But the Lion didn’t capsize. Within minutes, the lifeboat was loaded and ready to be lowered into the ocean, just a few feet below the deck railing. Okura counted the crew and found every man present—all but one.
Tomio Ishimaru. The accountant, and the briefcase. Damn it.
Okura stepped back from the rail and signaled the third officer, who waited at the hatch. “Go. Call the Coast Guard. I’ll make my own way off the ship.”
The third officer stared. Called after Okura as he turned away from the lifeboat, clambering back toward the bridge and the interior of the ship. Whatever the man was saying, Okura couldn’t make it out. The wind was too strong, and the ship’s stance too precarious.
4
“She’s called the Pacific Lion,” Ridley told McKenna. “Six-hundred-and-fifty-foot roll-on/roll-off car carrier out of Yokohama. She screwed something up swapping ballast and nearly capsized at the territorial limit, a couple hundred miles southwest of Dutch Harbor, Alaska.”