He wasn’t so young anymore. He wasn’t so scared to get serious. And he’d never known anyone quite like McKenna Rhodes, no matter where he looked. He just didn’t have a clue how to tell her this stuff without messing up the, ahem, chain of command.
McKenna slept soundly. Harrington leaned over and switched off her headlamp. He pulled a sleeping bag over his shoulders, and settled in to wait.
The night passed, uneventful. Morning came. The last pump kept working, and the list continued to ease. By midmorning, the Lion was nearly at zero degrees.
Harrington had supervised the last hour of pumping. Monitored the water level on the fifth starboard-side ballast tank, one eye on the gauge, the other on his battered laptop. Then the skipper had woken up, sheepish, hadn’t said much. Headed topside to call the Coast Guard.
IT WAS TEN FORTY-THREE in the morning when McKenna heard the final pump shut off. She was standing on the starboard deck—on the deck now, not the wall—waiting for the Coast Guard to send Captain Geoffries over with a party to survey the Lion and pronounce her saved.
McKenna would wait for the Coast Guard and the shipping company to give her the final verdict, but from where she was standing, the job looked done. The Lion’s list was erased. She sat level now, steady in the water, a ship again. Her owners would get her engine repaired, offload her cargo of Nissans, and put her back to work, whereas last week they’d been ready to write her off as gone.
McKenna looked up and down the deck, from the bridge to the exhaust funnel. Saw the access hatch where she and Matt and Stacey and Ridley and Jason Parent and Court Harrington had entered the ship, where they’d muscled down their pumps and walked on the walls, where they’d curled up with sleeping bags and sandwiches and those paperback novels, where they’d cheated death to save the ship.
And now the ship was saved. The prize was theirs. The job was finished, save a few minor details. Court Harrington’s plan had worked, the crew had played their parts perfectly, and the big freighter was nearly as good as new. Soon, Gale Force Marine would be thirty million dollars richer.
And none of it would bring her father back to life.
McKenna knew she should be happy. Knew her crew would tell her she’d done the old man proud. Knew, by rights, she should be jumping for joy and grinning ear to ear and pricing out Corvettes on the Internet. But she couldn’t enjoy the moment, not completely.
She just really wished her dad had been here to see this.
81
The Gale Force set out from Inanudak Bay that evening, the Pacific Lion on a short leash behind it. It had taken Captain Geoffries and his crew most of the day to survey the Lion and verify she was ready to move. Taken the crew of the Gale Force a few hours more to move their hundred-pound salvage pumps up from the bowels of the ship. But now the pumps had been transferred back to the tug, the Coast Guard had signed off, and the Gale Force was moving.
McKenna settled into the skipper’s chair as the towline went taut behind the stern of her tug, and the big freighter followed behind, docile as a sleepy cow. It was about a hundred-mile run from Umnak to Dutch Harbor, all in the lee of the Aleutian Islands, and McKenna figured it would take a day or two, give or take, to get the Lion delivered.
She’d phoned Japan already, raised the Japanese Overseas Shipping Company, and told them when and where to expect their ship. According to Geoffries on the Munro, weather in Dutch was too foul for commercial flights, so the Japanese had chartered their own jet. They were due sometime within the next couple days.
The islands protected the Gale Force from the heavy winds on the North Pacific side, and the Bering Sea swell was behaving itself as well. Spike was curled up on the bench beside the captain’s chair, had even let McKenna pet him a couple of times. He hadn’t purred, mind, or even looked particularly pleased, but he didn’t claw at McKenna, or run away, and that was a start.
She watched the wheel for an hour or two, followed the Munro out of Inanudak Bay and up alongside the northwest side of Umnak Island. The crew—aside from Nelson Ridley and Matt Jonas, who were camping out on the Lion—was downstairs, doing the dishes, watching another movie, grabbing some well-deserved rest in their bunks, and McKenna knew she should feel exhausted herself, but she didn’t, not now that the job was almost done.
She checked the autopilot, plotted a course on the GPS. Turned on the satellite radio, some old Springsteen, her dad’s stuff. Crossed to the depth sounder and the pewter picture frame beside it, picked up the frame and brought her dad’s face into the low light from the GPS screen.
Her dad smiled back at her, that old flannel shirt and the stained baseball cap, kind eyes and beard going to gray, and even though McKenna knew it was stupid, she found herself waiting for him to come alive in that picture, say something, smile wider. Share in her success and everything she’d accomplished.
You did this, Daddy, she thought. Your crew and your boat, and everything that you taught me. You raised that ship from the dead.
It wasn’t enough, though. It was never enough. No crew, and no tug, would ever bring Riptide Rhodes back.
She stared at her dad’s picture until the tears blurred her vision, and she was crying for her dad, and for the Lion, and for everything else, and she kept staring at the photograph, waiting for a sign, for some indication that her dad was there with her, that he’d been there all along.
But there was nothing. A dark, empty wheelhouse, and a sleeping cat, and an old pewter frame, the picture inside going yellow with age.
And then there were footsteps on the wheelhouse stairs, heavy and uneven. McKenna turned quickly, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Found Court Harrington climbing into the house, a steaming cup of coffee in his hands.
“Stacey said you were going to be up all night. Figured you’d need coffee, so—” Then he must have seen the tears, because his eyes widened and he stepped back. “Whoa, sorry. Everything okay?”
McKenna wiped her face again. Felt herself go red. Turned away, furious with herself, put the picture away.
“Everything’s fine,” she told him. “Perfectly fine. You can just leave the coffee on the table, thanks.”
But Harrington didn’t move. “Are you crying, though?”
Bastard.
McKenna steadied her breathing. Still didn’t trust herself to look at Harrington, so she stared out into the night instead. “It’s nothing,” she said.
Harrington came closer. Picked up the picture and held it close to his eyes, squinted at it. “Your dad?”
She nodded.
“It’s like he’s here, isn’t it?” Harrington said. “Don’t you feel like he’s right here along with us?”
McKenna couldn’t answer that without risking more tears, so she shook her head.
“I do,” Harrington said. “I sure as heck do. I see him in every stroke of good luck we’ve had on this job, everything that’s gone right. And you’d better believe he was looking out for me when I had that fall. I could have been a goner.”
“He would still be here,” McKenna said, “if I’d made that turn quicker.”