10
FOR TWO HOURS, standing on the flying bridge, LePere headed the Anne Marie south by southeast at a steady eighteen knots. The lake was calm, the passage smooth. He made for the Apostle Islands, which lay on the water in the distance like blue whales sunning. To the Anishinaabe people, many of the islands were sacred, homes of manidoog, spirits of the lake. To John LePere, they were gravestones marking the place where Billy and twenty-seven other good men had died.
Wesley Bridger snoozed in the cockpit on the stern deck. He wore sunglasses and had put on an old canvas hat for protection against the sun. LePere worried a little about Bridger. The man had been drunk on whiskey the night before. For a dive as deep as the one they would make that day, it was best to abstain from drinking alcohol for a good thirty-six hours beforehand. But Bridger knew that. He’d been the instructor who certified LePere.
Wesley Bridger was the closest thing John LePere had to a friend, and LePere owed him in a lot of ways. The man had come into his life the summer before. Their first connection was a mutual fondness for boilermakers.
LePere had been sitting in the casino bar after he’d completed his shift. He was on his second boilermaker when Bridger took the stool next to him.
“Hey, bartender, drinks for everybody, on me,” he called.
The bartender had paused in wiping a glass and looked unimpressed. “Everybody’s him,” he said, indicating LePere.
“Then give him what he wants.”
“Boilermaker,” the bartender said without bothering to ask LePere.
“Give me the same.” He stuck out his hand. “Name’s Bridger-Wes Bridger. And I just won me twenty thousand dollars.”
LePere shook his hand but not with enthusiasm. A free drink was good; conversation wasn’t. Bridger did all the talking. How he’d just hit town. Killing time now. Loved to gamble; did okay. Did LePere know any friendly women.
By the fourth boilermaker, LePere found his own tongue had slipped its rein. Before the evening was out, he’d told Bridger his life story, the whole tragic tale of the sinking of the Alfred M. Teasdale.
A couple of nights later, Bridger plopped on the stool beside him again. “Hey, Chief, what’s shaking?” He slapped down an old copy of a magazine called The Great Lakes Journal, a slick publication with lots of photographs, and he turned to a page that showed a photo of LePere, younger by ten years, standing at the wheel of a Grand Banks trawler. The title of the article was “My Brother’s Seeker.” It was about how John Sailor LePere sailed Lake Superior in his spare time trying to locate the wreck of the Teasdale, hoping to find his brother’s body in that coffin of a ship, hoping to give Billy a decent burial.
“You really thought your brother’s body might still be there?”
LePere slowly spun his whiskey glass. “Doesn’t matter what I thought. I gave it up.”
“In favor of booze?”
“I just want to forget it, okay.”
“But you can’t, can you, Chief? Still have nightmares, I’ll bet. Can’t hold a job or maintain a relationship. Am I right?”
LePere tossed down a shot of Wild Turkey and followed it with a long draw on a chaser of Leinenkugel.
“Ever heard of PTSD, Chief?”
“What is that? Something makes your car run better?”
“Post-traumatic stress disorder. A lot of Vietnam vets suffer from it. But I understand it can happen as a result of almost any traumatic event. Like watching your brother and your shipmates drown.”
“So my nightmares have a name. Big deal.”
“Chief, why do you figure that boat went down?”
“Forget it.”
“You think it went down just because it was an old bucket, right? Maybe missing a few rivets. A tragic accident just waiting to happen. Maybe that’s what the shipping company bastards wanted you to think. You and the insurance company.”
LePere had his beer glass almost to his lips, but he stopped and looked straight at Wesley Bridger. “I gotta go.” He put his beer down and started to slide off the stool.
“What if it was murder, Chief? Cold-blooded, well-planned murder.”
LePere’s chest suddenly felt constricted and for a moment he couldn’t breathe. He swung back and leaned on the bar.
“‘Nother boilermaker here,” Bridger called to the bartender.
The glasses came; LePere didn’t touch his drink. His mouth was dry, but he wasn’t thirsty.
“Let me tell you a story,” Bridger began. “My third year as a SEAL, I got tapped for an assignment. Me and two others. Top-secret stuff. We meet with these intelligence people and the deal is this: There’s a freighter preparing to depart Singapore, flying the Libyan flag. She’s loaded with phosphates or something, but that ain’t all, because these intelligence guys want to make certain she doesn’t reach Qaddafi. They can’t do anything officially because they don’t want to cause an international incident. So what they propose we do is go under that freighter and attach a line of explosives across the hull. They want us to rig the charges with remote electronic detonation capability. They figure to shadow that freighter, and when it hits high seas, detonate the explosives. They want to make a perforated line across the hull. They’re hoping the stress on the vessel will make it break apart, like tearing a sheet of creased paper, and it will go down looking as if it had all been a tragic accident. I’m thinking these guys are fucking nuts, but they got rank, right? So we do it. Get the explosives and detonators in place, then we all follow that fucking freighter in a little boat of our own. Three days out, we hit rough weather. Encounter eighteen-foot waves. Guy who’s in charge of this operation gives the order. One by one, the charges go off. We’re monitoring their radio broadcasts, and we’re holding our breath, wondering if they’re aware of the explosions. But, hell, you been in gales. You know how noisy it is inside a ship that’s being hammered by rough seas. And each charge by itself is nothing big. Anyway, they don’t say jack about it over the airwaves. The ship, she don’t seem to show any effects. Just keeps right on moving. Everybody’s getting nervous, except the dude who planned the whole thing. He’s telling us all to be patient. And sure enough, about twelve hours later, just as the storm’s starting to let up, that big-ass freighter folds in half and goes to the bottom in a couple miles of ocean. Nothing in the final transmissions says anything about sabotage. It looks like a terrible accident caused by structural flaws and the fury of Mother Nature. Fucking ingenious.”
During the whole story, LePere had been staring at his hands, which were gripping the top of the bar. “You’re saying somebody sank the Teasdale?”
“I’m only saying it’s been done before because I did it. And just think for a minute, Chief. That old scow was due to be scrapped. How much does the Fitzgerald Shipping Company get for a few hundred tons of scrap metal versus insurance on an ore carrier fully loaded? The difference is probably enough to tempt anybody to commit murder. I’d bet my left nut on it.”
That evening, LePere had stumbled from the bar in a daze not due to the boilermakers. He spent a sleepless night reliving the sinking of the Teasdale, dredging up every detail, examining it with bitter care. He thought about the boom that awakened him, that had made the ship pitch so that he’d been thrown from his bunk. He thought about Pete Swanson, the coal passer they’d picked up in Detroit, a man he’d never worked with before, a man whose dying words were “I blew it.” LePere had always thought Swanson was simply delirious. But maybe there was more to it. Maybe he was trying to make a confession before he died, before he went to hell for his treachery. By the time a dingy morning light crept through his bedroom window, LePere had decided.