Dead in the Water

by Dana Stabenow

  “With any luck, we’ll find out what happened to those two yo-yos and you won’t have to go out again.” He peered through the windshield, squinting against the sun, and consulted a map unfolded on his lap. “That should be Anua, dead ahead.”

  Kate craned her neck for her first look at the little island. It had two mountains, one three thousand feet high and smoking, the other half its height and serene beneath a layer of snow. Between the two lay a valley, its surface barely above sea level, narrow and as flat as an ironing board. “I can see why they put a base here during the war,” Kate observed.

  “It’s a natural site,” Jack agreed, “and the island is right on the air route between Dutch and Adak. Good place for an emergency landing. Look, over there, south side of the island, west side of the beach. Yeah. That’s where Gault says the two guys went ashore.” He put the plane into a steep dive and they flew up and then down the long, curving beach.

  “There’s the strip,” Kate said, pointing inland.

  “So it is, and it looks in fair shape, too.” All the same, Jack flew down the runway three times, gear five feet off the deck, checking for rocks and bumps and holes. When he was satisfied he circled again, lowered the flaps and sideslipped down to a perfect three-point landing.

  Kate hid a smile and said mildly, “Show-off.” If possible, Jack’s expression became even more smug, and she added, “Too bad you can’t do that at Merrill Field in Anchorage.”

  He laughed. “Too many people there. I can only do it right when nobody’s watching.” He cut the engine and in the sudden silence added, “This strip’s in good shape. Not much snow, but what there is, is packed down. No big ruts, either. Curious. For an abandoned strip.”

  “Maybe hunters use it.”

  He shook his head. “Fishermen, maybe. Island’s too small to support anything worth packing out.”

  The Cessna had rolled out to a stop twenty feet from a tumbledown assortment of shacks, most of them minus their roof and some missing a wall or two. Kicking through the debris, they found nothing of interest beyond a tattered, water-soaked cover of Life magazine featuring Betty Grable’s legs, and a half-buried metal tank with a pump handle mounted on the outside. Jack tried the pump and to their surprise it worked smoothly. A few cranks and fluid gushed out of the spout, to melt and puddle in the snow on the ground. The smell of gasoline struck sharply at their nostrils.

  “Av gas,” Jack said.

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s green,” he said, pointing to the puddle beneath the spout. “Aviation gas is green. Plain old gas gas, like you put in your car, is clear.”

  “Oh. Right.” Kate stared at the widening puddle, her eyebrows drawing together.

  “Besides,” Jack was saying, “what else kind of gas would you expect to find right next to an airstrip? I wonder how long it’s been sitting here? Twenty, thirty years, you think? Might have been here since the war.” Catching sight of her puzzled expression, he said, “What?”

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly, still staring at the puddle of green gas. “There’s something about av gas I remember from when I was a kid, but…” She shook her head and smiled at him. “At two o’clock this morning I’ll probably sit bolt upright in bed and shout it out.”

  “Not if you’re in the sack with me, you won’t,” he told her.

  “Whatever you say.” She grinned at him. “Come on. Let’s walk down to the beach.”

  It was Jack who found it, or rather fell through the roof of it. He’d been wandering behind her, through the tall rye grass poking up through the thin layer of crusted snow, enjoying the sun and the salt breeze and the sound of the surf, when the previously solid ground beneath his feet gave way and suddenly he was sliding through the turf and into an empty space beneath.

  “Hey,” he said. The turf engulfed his legs and started up his butt to nibble at his waist and he raised his voice. “Hey? Hey! Hey, Kate! Kate! Help! Help!”

  He kicked out with his legs, trying to find purchase, something to brace himself against, and immediately slid in up to his chest. His hands scrabbled around and grasped at the grass, anything to keep him from sliding even farther into what his naturally strong sense of optimism assured him was probably a bubbling pit of volcanic lava. If it came to that, he suffered from a lifelong case of acrophobia, and would have preferred a pit of lava to an empty, endless abyss.

  Kate’s head appeared, ending this morbid speculation, and peered down at him through the rye grass with interest. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “What the hell does it look like, I’m falling into the center of the earth here! Get me out!”

  She looked at him, pursing her lips, displaying less concern than he considered the situation warranted. “I wonder—” Abruptly, her head vanished again from sight.

  He panicked, just a little, no more than he considered absolutely necessary. “Wait! Where the hell you going? Kate!”

  “Relax,” he heard her say. He waited, unrelaxed, sweating beneath his jacket and clutching at some very insubstantial stalks of grass. An overactive imagination conjured up a chasm beneath his dangling legs, a bottomless chasm into which he would fall and keep falling—

  Something grabbed hold of his right foot and gave a vigorous tug. “Hey!” he yelled.

  “Relax,” Kate said again, laughter in her voice, which seemed now to be coming from beneath him. “It’s only me. The floor’s about two feet beneath you. Let go and slide on down.”

  He hesitated. “Are you sure?”

  “Would I lie to you?”

  Her voice sounded entirely too innocent to suit him, but he trusted her enough to let go of the grass, one stalk at a time. Nothing happened. He raised his arms and wriggled a little. His shoulders caught in the hole for a moment, before the edges of the hole disintegrated and he slipped through in a rain of soil and grass.

  Almost at once his feet hit solid ground. Staggering, he caught his balance and found himself in a small room, square, twelve feet on a side. The walls had been dug into the surface of the island and, looking up, through the dim light coming through the hole he’d made he could see that the builders had roofed the room over in turf and let the grass do the rest.

  “People have been here,” Kate said positively, standing next to him.

  “Well, of course people have been here, Kate, even I can tell that this is a man-made structure.”

  “No, I mean recently,” she told him. He followed her pointing finger and saw a half-dozen cases of Van Camp’s Pork and Beans stacked next to a virtual tower of Costco’s twenty-four-roll packages of ScotTissue Premium two-ply Bathroom Tissue.

  He walked over to take a closer look. “All the essentials of life.” He raised his head and stared around. “The Coasties never said anything about this place. I don’t remember reading about it in any of the reports on the search missions. They must have missed it completely.”

  “I don’t know how,” Kate said, “all you have to do is fall through the roof.”

  Jack ignored her. “Alcala and Brown must have missed it, too. Too bad. They could have holed up here for days.” One of the boxes was open, and grinning a little, he pulled out a can and held it up. “Dinner might have gotten a little monotonous, but hell.” The can slipped and he almost dropped it. Something cool and gooey ran over his fingers. “What the hell?”

  Even with the new skylight in the roof there wasn’t enough light in the little room to see what he was talking about. “What’s wrong?” she said, peering into the dim corner in which he was standing.

  A booted foot crunched on sand, and she recoiled when a disembodied hand thrust a can of pork and beans in her face. “Yuk,” she said, wrinkling her nose at the smell. “Somebody leave the rest of his supper behind?”

  “I don’t think so.” Brushing by her, Jack stooped to go through the door. His voice was grim, and Kate followed him outside.

  The light confirmed what his fingertips had felt. The can was punctured, a
hole the size of a .38 caliber bullet entering under the V in Van and exiting just above the bottom seam.

  Jack regarded the hole meditatively. “Think whoever put this stuff here used it for target practice?”

  Without answering, Kate ducked back inside the dugout. Together they hauled out everything inside. As they removed each box, Jack marked it with his omnipresent black Marksalot, and they re-stacked them outside in the same position they had been in inside. The contents of the perforated cans had spilled out over the cases and dried to a sticky dark brown that looked like old blood. “Some of it might be old blood,” Jack observed. The outward facing surface common to three of the boxes, the three messiest ones, looked crumpled, as if a heavy weight had slammed into them where they were stacked against the dugout’s wall.

  Jack stood looking at the cardboard boxes, hands in his pockets. “What we got here is two choices,” he said at last.

  “And they are?”

  “Either somebody was really and I mean really tired of pork and beans.”

  “Or?” Their eyes met. Her mouth compressed into a thin line. “You got a can opener in the plane?”

  They opened every case and then every can with a hole in it. They found a dozen such cans and, rattling around in the sixth box they opened, one lone slug. Jack held up the misshapen piece of metal and said, “This could be anything from a .22 to a .357.” Nevertheless, he stored it carefully away in a Ziploc bag. Into another Ziploc he scraped some of the dried brown fluid from the front of one of the boxes. He’d brought a flashlight back with the can opener and they examined the floor of the dugout, without result. Jack bagged some samples of the dirt anyway. He made several drawings of the scene, and when he was through they repacked the cans in their cases and loaded them into the back of the Cessna. The toilet paper, which had survived the armed assault relatively unscathed—“Naturally,” Jack said, “the slug would have been in a lot better shape if it had impacted the asswipe”—was stacked back where they’d found it.

  The little room, dark and dank and smelling of mildew, had begun to close in around Kate and she was glad to leave it. The air outside felt fresh and clean and she pulled it into her lungs in big, cleansing breaths.

  The dugout stood on the south slope of a tiny rise that fell away to the beach. Jack stood with his back to the water, looking at the structure, impressed by its air of having grown there. The rye grass grew tall and thick and right up to the walls and over the roof, and even now, in winter, from three, even two steps away, the door was invisible. He could see how the Coasties had missed it. Of course, they hadn’t been looking with murder in mind. “Who built this place? And why?”

  “You said this island has a natural strategic location,” Kate reminded him, pulling the door closed, noting as she did that it was made of meticulously assembled planks in which no nail had been placed without careful thought and attention. “You think the Aleuts wouldn’t have noticed that, too?”

  He was skeptical. “You think there was a village here at one time? You think this place has been here that long?”

  “Why not? It’s built in the old way. Those dirt walls have been there so long they feel like concrete. Look at this door. Those planks are salvage, and old salvage at that. See? Hand-planed. And these nails? Those weren’t mass-produced. Some whaler broke up offshore a hundred years ago and whoever lived here made doors out of the wreck. And that hole you fell through.”

  “What about it?”

  “Before the Russians introduced doors, the Aleuts built these barabaras with the doors in the roof.” She looked around. “I bet if we looked, we’d find the ruins of others.”

  “There are no records of a village on Anua, Kate. There’s no mark on the map for archaeological ruins. This is probably just some seal hunter’s cabin.”

  She shook her head. “The beach is long, wide and relatively level. There aren’t that many good beaches in the Aleutians. Mostly it’s just one steep slide from mountaintop to ocean bottom. That makes this a natural site”—she gave him a brief smile—“for landing kayaks.”

  They walked the ten feet to where the rye grass left off and the beach began. Over a mile in length, Kate estimated, with a jumbled rock formation on one end and cliffs on the other. A creek burbled seaward, cutting a shallow bed through the center of the beach down to the waterline. There, the surf pounded viciously at the gravel, and the ebb and flow of the swells coming in from the southeast alternately revealed and swallowed up a half-dozen reefs within the curve of the land, staggered one after the other, jagged and threatening. “Yeah,” Jack said dryly, “real inviting place to beach a boat.”

  “They would have found a way in,” Kate said, positive. “And it would have been a tremendous natural defense against attack.”

  “What are you looking at?”

  Her eyes were squinted against the sun. “Right there, I—yes! I think it is!” she cried, pointing, and took off running.

  “Oh, Christ,” Jack said, and took off after her.

  He caught up with her where the towers of rock broke the furious surf into white sheets of spray some hundred feet away. Not near far enough away, in his humble opinion, and he was about to say so when he saw that she was stripping out of her clothes. His heartbeat, which had started to slow down at no sign of a mad marksman with a mad on for Van Camp’s Pork and Beans, began once again to speed up. “What in the hell are you doing, Shugak?”

  “Look,” she said, pointing in front of them.

  “What?” He cast about wildly for some reason for Kate to be stripping down to the buff, on an Aleutian Island, between the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea, in the middle of October.

  They were standing at the edge of a tumble of rock that stretched between beach and the rock towers. The surf pounded at the towers in what Jack considered to be determined and ominous fashion. Some amphibious mammal, probably one with very large and very sharp teeth, was barking in large numbers somewhere beyond those rock towers. Gulls screamed and dived in the blue sky above. Kate gave an exasperated sigh at his confused expression and pointed again. “Right in front of you, idiot.”

  His gaze dropped. Directly in front of the toes of his boots, on the tumble of rock between them and the ominous surf, there was a series of shallow pools in the dips and hollows between the rocks. One of the larger pools began at their feet, stretched out some twelve feet across and looked to be some three to four feet deep. He gave the still, green surface a suspicious look. “Tidal pools?” he said. “So what?”

  “Not tidal pools, hot springs!” Kate said impatiently. “See the steam! Can’t you smell the sulfur?” She shucked out of panties and bra and waded in. “I knew it!” she said, feeling her way with her feet. “The bottom is almost smooth and—yes,” she said, bending over and feeling beneath the surface with her hands, “I can feel where they leveled out a place to sit.” She turned and lowered herself into the water. It came up almost to her chin, and she let loose with a long, voluptuous sigh. “Not too hot, not too cold, just exactly, perfectly right.”

  Her spirits rose with her body temperature, and the ghosts she had felt pressing about her as she worked in the dugout dissolved in the wisps of steam that rose from the water’s surface. She looked at Jack, one corner of her mouth curling. The challenge was implicit. He gritted his teeth and bent over to unlace his boots. She watched with enjoyment, and went so far as to hum the tune to “The Stripper” when he got to his belt. He had a terrible time with the buttons on his jeans.

  When he lowered himself into the water next to her Jack was amazed to discover that this wasn’t some perfidious Shugak practical joke after all. The water was hot, but not too hot. It bubbled up around him in a natural Jacuzzi and sizzled right through his skin into his bones. “Oh, yeah,” he said, relaxing with a long, satisfied groan. Curious, he tasted the water. “It’s not very salty,” he said in surprise.

  “It’s probably a mixture,” she said, leaning back and closing her eyes. “Salt from the spr
ay, fresh from underground.”

  He looked over and admired the way her body shone up at him through the water. It was a perfect body in his eyes, compact, well muscled, just the right balance of lean to soft, lithe in motion and at rest. Her face was broad across the cheekbones, softening to a small, stubborn chin that held up a wide, determined mouth. Her hazel eyes tilted up at the sides with the hint of an epicanthic fold. Even the twisted scar that stretched across her throat almost from ear to ear looked right today, a badge of honor, an emblem of courage. A warning, too. Anyone who had a scar like that and was still around to wear it was not someone you wanted to mess with.

  She opened her eyes and caught him admiring, and after that they didn’t talk for a while.

  “Nice day,” Jack said, in an inadequate expression of postcoital bliss.

  “Enjoy it.” Kate replied, her face nuzzled into his neck. “It’ll get worse.”

  The lover in him didn’t move a muscle. The pilot looked nervously over her head to the southeast for signs of an incoming weather front, and found only the merest wisps of cloud low on the horizon. “How do you know?”

  “Because in the Aleutians the one rule is, if the weather is good, it’ll get bad. And if it’s bad, it’ll get worse. During the war, the air force lost two times the amount of casualties and five times the amount of planes to weather and mechanical trouble due to weather than they did in combat.” She mustered up enough energy to point. “See the end of the runway?”

  He didn’t bother to turn his head. “Sure.”

  “You’re lucky. It was more than the World War II pilots could see. They didn’t have radar at first and the weather’d be so bad the pilot waiting for takeoff would have to radio to the guy taking off in front of him to find out if he’d left the ground or not, before he could make his try.” She raised her head and looked at him. “And then, once they were in the air, assuming of course they did make it into the air, they were flying on naval charts based on a Russian survey made in 1864. Assuming of course they could see anything once they got into the air.”