Dead in the Water

by Dana Stabenow

“Did you know,” Seth said.

  Kate, full of buttered popcorn and relief, said lazily, “What?”

  “Did you know that the last shot fired in the Civil War was fired around these parts?”

  “What,” Kate said, “you mean around these here Aleutian parts?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No way,” she said.

  “Come on,” Andy said.

  “Bullshit,” Harry agreed.

  “It’s true. The summer of 1865, the Confederate Navy ship Shenandoah blew almost forty Union ships out of the Bering Sea. Whalers, merchant vessels, anything flying the wrong flag. On June 26 Waddell—he was the skipper—took six whalers off St. Lawrence Island alone. Two days later he took eleven more in the Bering Strait. See, the Confederacy was trying to hit the Yankees in the wallet.”

  “Wait a minute,” Kate said, who wasn’t a John Wayne fan for nothing, “Lee surrendered in April.”

  “The Shenandoah was umpteen thousand miles from home in April,” Seth said, “and they couldn’t afford a satellite dish. They didn’t know. What’s more, they were never caught. When a British ship told them the war was over, Waddell sailed her all the way around the Horn and back to England, where he surrendered to the American ambassador.”

  “Wow!” Andy said, eyes shining. “So the last shot of the Civil War was fired off the coast of Alaska! That’s great! Isn’t that great, Kate?”

  Still suspicious, Kate said, “How come I’ve never heard of this before?”

  “Why, I don’t know, Kate,” Seth said, so mildly it was impossible to suspect him of malice. “Could it be that you don’t know everything after all?”

  “I never said I did,” Kate said, hurt, and made an instantaneous resolve upon next setting foot on shore to find the nearest history of the Civil War and look it up.

  The credits for Gandhi rolled. Seth yawned and mumbled something about a long day. Harry was right behind him. Kate, who liked Ben Kingsley almost as much as she liked John Wayne, and who had no TV or VCR in her little cabin in the middle of a million square acres of federal park and so didn’t get to see movies unless she was visiting Bobby, stayed put. She would have stayed put for Debbie Does Dallas.

  When the door closed behind Harry she waited a few moments before saying in a low voice, “Andy? Thanks.”

  He flushed up to the roots of his hair. Trying for nonchalance, his voice squeaked, and he flushed again. He cleared his throat and said gruffly, “Forget it.” He picked up the remote and pretended to fiddle with the tracking. “You ever going to tell me what you were doing on that island? Or what they were doing there?”

  “Sometime.”

  “But not now?”

  She shook her head. “Andy?” He looked at her and sobered at her expression. “This is my last trip on the Avilda. It should be yours, too.”

  “I haven’t found another berth yet, I—”

  “I’ll help you find one,” she said. “Let’s get off the Avilda while we can still walk off. Okay?”

  The color left his face, leaving it pale beneath his fading tan. “Okay.”

  They settled back to watch the movie. When it was over, Andy said on a long sigh, “Now there’s a man who is on the road to Enlightenment.”

  Kate hid a grin. “No need to reinforce his prana, I guess.”

  “No, Kate,” Andy said earnestly, “everyone has to do that. ‘You must perform thy allotted work, for action is superior to inaction.’ Like Jesus, Gandhi preached love of your fellow man, and he performed his allotted work so well that his legacy was a free India.”

  “And look how well things turned out there,” Kate told him. “Pakistan and India are at each other’s throats, they’re starving in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka is in the middle of a civil war and every two or three years the Muslims murder a hundred or so Hindus, or the other way around. Some legacy, all right.”

  “‘Always perform the work that has to be done without attachment,’” Andy quoted solemnly, “‘for man attains the Supreme by performing work without attachment.’”

  “Is there anything you don’t believe in?” she demanded, exasperated. “There’s got to be some crackpot religion you’ve overlooked. Zoroastrianism? The Cathars? Have you accidentally let a recruiter for the Rosicrucian Fellowship pass you by?”

  “‘The ignorant man who is without faith and of a doubting nature perishes.’” And the little prick had the nerve to grin at her.

  Nine

  THE NEXT DAY was as balmy as it got in the Aleutians. It wasn’t raining, snowing or sleeting, the omnipresent bank of fog stayed low on the southeastern horizon, and there were enough breaks in the clouds overhead for the sun to peep through occasionally with at least the illusion of warmth and cheer. A strong, regular swell caused the deck of the Avilda to lift and fall rhythmically beneath their feet but there was no breaking spray, and except where their hands got wet on the lines they worked dry for the first time in anyone’s memory. Kate found that she was actually enjoying herself.

  She was hanging a bait jar when she heard Andy cry out. She wormed her head and shoulders out of the pot and stood. “What?”

  His eyes blazing with excitement, he pointed to port. “Look! Look at them all!”

  It was a pod of killer whales, cresting and blowing, their backs gleaming black and white in the erratic sun.

  “For a minute I thought they were sharks,” Andy said.

  There was awe in his voice and Kate smiled to herself.

  “Why are they called killer whales?”

  “Because they do.”

  “What, kill? I thought whales only ate krill.”

  Kate’s hands paused as she looked over at him. “And what do you know about krill?”

  “Hey, I went to college.” He was tying door ties with a deftness that had not been present a month, even two weeks before. “For one semester, anyway. I took a class in marine biology when I knew I was coming to Alaska.”

  “And you didn’t learn about killer whales?”

  “Well, I kind of… left… before we got to killer whales.” He gave her an engaging grin. “So. What do killer whales kill?”

  “Actually, they aren’t whales, they’re the largest dolphin. And they eat just about anything they can fit into their mouths,” Kate replied, loading bait jars. Even the smell of dead herring wasn’t as bad this morning. “Seals, mostly, but any kind of fish, squid, penguins, sea lions. Even other whales.” She screwed down the lid on one jar. “They’ve even been known to attack boats.”

  “Wow,” Andy breathed. “You mean like Moby Dick?”

  Kate nodded, and he stared at the retreating backs of the orcas, upright fins slicing through the water. “They’re probably hunting now,” Kate added. “They hunt in pods.” Olga’s chant flashed through her mind. “When the killer whales come to a bay with a village, someone dies in that bay.” A whisper of unease crept up her spine. She shrugged it off and said to Andy, “Did I ever tell you I used to sing high sea chanteys?”

  He was unable to repress an expression of alarm. “No.”

  “Well, I did.” She whacked vigorously at a block of frozen herring. “There was a song the whalers used to sing on their way south.” And for the first time in two years she raised her voice in song. It was harsh, grating across the wound in her throat and coming out low and raspy, but it seemed somehow appropriate to the place and the day and the killer whales frolicking with lethal intent off their port bow.

  “’Tis a damn tough life full of toil and strife

  We whalemen undergo

  And we don’t give a damn when the gale is done

  How hard the winds did blow.”

  She grinned at Andy, who looked like he was falling in love.

  “Now we’re homeward bound ’tis a grand old sound

  On a good ship taut and free,

  And we won’t give a damn when we drink our rum

  With the girls of old Maui.”

  She handed Seth a full bait jar so he could hang
it in the pot about to go over the side. He took it and didn’t immediately turn to hang it, but stood for a moment, looking down at her. Her smile faded. “What’s the matter?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing,” he said, and turned back to the shot of line he was coiling.

  She stared at his back, puzzled. The expression in his eyes had seemed somehow regretful. She shrugged and went back to the bait table to cut more herring and fill more jars.

  “Rolling down to old Maui, my boys,

  Rolling down to old Maui

  Now we’re homeward bound from the Arctic round

  Rolling down to old Maui.”

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this good. Her last trip on the Avilda, and no matter what Jack said it was going to be her last trip, was going to be a piece of cake. As soon as they nailed the shark in Dutch, he’d put them on to the men in the Navaho, and when they finished singing, the truth of what had happened to Alcala and Brown would be known at last. Harry Gault had no real idea there was a cuckoo in his nest, and all Kate had to do was help set and pull pots and make money and count the knots home. She hoped Jack had remembered to make her a reservation on the plane. The flights north were always jammed and she wanted to be on the first one that left after her tippy toe hit dirt at Dutch. She missed Mutt and her cabin and her homestead and the Park, though it didn’t look like she was going to miss the first snow after all.

  “How soft the breeze from the island trees

  Now the ice is far astern

  And them native maids in them tropical glades

  Is awaiting our return.”

  She was able to dismiss Harry catching her coming out of his cabin at two in the morning; he hadn’t so much as raised an eyebrow in her direction, or referred to it in any way. He had likewise ignored her reference to his two previous crewmen’s disappearance, probably having decided she’d heard the story over a bar in Dutch. He hadn’t picked up on the shark’s reference to Jack, and Andy, bless his heart, had covered for the wet survival suit.

  “Even now their big black eyes look out

  Hoping some fine day to see—

  Our baggy sails running ’fore the gales

  Rolling down to old Maui.”

  She leaned head and shoulders inside a crab pot balanced delicately on the pot launcher, and began to hang the bait jar. Through the metal mesh stretched between the steel frames, she saw Ned raise his right hand, as if to wave toward the bridge. His left hand moved to the launching lever.

  The engine changed pitch, the Avilda made a sudden jerk to port and the platform of the pot launcher shifted. The pot tilted precariously, overbalanced and fell into the water.

  It wasn’t until Kate inhaled water and exhaled bubbles that she realized she had fallen with it.

  Her first thought was how strange it was that her mind never stopped thinking, that she remained unpanicked, that she could assess her situation so coolly, ticking off items one at a time.

  She realized she was overboard.

  She realized she was inside a crab pot.

  She realized it was no accident, and dismissed the knowledge as something to be dealt with later.

  She spared one brief, bitter thought for the cocksure arrogance that led her to believe she was safe. No, safe wasn’t the right word. She had thought herself invulnerable. That, too, was something better dealt with later.

  Meanwhile, she and the pot were sinking together, down, down, down, heading straight down through the cold, green waters of the Gulf of Alaska, water that grew ever darker as they descended toward the ocean bottom three hundred feet below.

  Kate realized the killers had had no time to tie the door shut before dumping the pot. It had happened so fast, she still had the strap of the jar hanger in one hand. Instinctively, she used it to brace herself and kicked at the door. It didn’t move. She kicked again. It remained closed, perhaps the force of their descent causing the water to keep it closed, perhaps the water blunting the force of her kicks.

  The pressure of all that water bearing down on her pitifully fragile self was building in her ears.

  It would kill her.

  If hypothermia didn’t get her first.

  If she didn’t drown before that.

  She kicked again, and still that damn door wouldn’t budge, and suddenly she was overwhelmed with an energizing, revitalizing fury and she kicked again and again and again. She would not be disposed of like an inconvenience, Harry Gault and Seth Skinner and Ned Nordhoff would not be permitted to go their way as if nothing had happened, business as usual, she would get out of this pot, she would fight her way to the surface, she would flay all three of them alive and shove them over the side in a crab pot and see how they liked it.

  She kicked again and her foot hit nothing. The fury cleared from her eyes and she saw that the door to the crab pot was open, forced by the water all the way open and back against the side of the pot. Without hesitation she grabbed mesh to the open end and, because the pot had tumbled and was descending door side down, pulled herself around the bottom and up the other side, virtually climbing around the outside of the pot.

  When she reached the top she hesitated for a millisecond. As rapidly as it was descending toward the ocean bottom, as much as the pressure was building in her ears, as numb as her hands and feet were becoming, still the pot was the only solid object in her world at that moment, and it took a conscious effort to let go and strike for the surface.

  She did it, though, following the long trail of bubbles up, upward, ever upward, stroking vigorously with arms that felt like lead, kicking steadily with legs that felt like spaghetti. Her lungs began to burn from lack of oxygen. Was she still going up? Had she become disoriented and lost her sense of direction? Was she already drowned and didn’t know it? The temptation to inhale, to gulp in great breaths of air, was so tempting that she opened her mouth to do just that when she saw a dark shape above her.

  It was the hull of the Avilda, and with a burst of adrenaline she reached out for it with every numb sinew of her body. As it came nearer some detached corner of her mind noticed that the keel had enough kelp growing from it to qualify as a sea otter habitat. It must have slowed the Avilda’s cruising speed by at least five knots. But then, what could you expect from a skipper whose creed was “Use it up, throw it out and buy a new one”?

  The thought of Harry Gault, laughing at how he’d tricked her, triumphant in his successful disposal of what was surely nothing more than a temporary annoyance, less in importance than a rock he would stub his toe on, cleared Kate’s head at once. She was close enough to where she could see the surface through the water now, could even make out the clouds in the sky. She made for the side of the boat, hoping to attract Andy’s attention, but the side kept retreating in front of her. Her lungs bursting and her ears popping, she made for the surface, breaking out of the sea’s cold embrace into air that felt even colder.

  Gasping for breath, coughing water out of her lungs, she shook water from her eyes and looked up.

  Just in time to see the stern of the Avilda swing toward her, the water boiling out from beneath its stern. Instinct took over and she sucked in and dived straight down as far and as fast as she could.

  Even at that, the churning propellor tickled one booted foot. Another stroke and she was beyond it, just barely.

  A flood of incredulous wrath filled her entire body, driving out cold, cramp and lack of air, although later she wondered why incredulous. Harry Gault had seen her surface. Harry Gault had seen her, had realized she had fought her way out of the pot and back to the surface, and had swung the stern of the Avilda around to try to catch her in the propellor and finish the job once and for all.

  Furiously calm, letting the air stored in her lungs out one minuscule bubble at a time, she let herself drift for a moment, studying the movement of the hull above her. She could see it quite clearly, and the propellor, as well as the rudder, and she waited, sure of Harry’s next move. When the rudder shifted
to starboard she struck for the port side of the vessel and broke surface just as the aft cabin was slipping by. Something wet and slimy trailed across her cheek and with a reflexive motion she reached up to claw it away.

  It was the lady’s line.

  The lady’s line, the line Ned threw over the side when they were done fishing and ready to head for home. The thought that he had felt confident enough that the day’s business was done to throw the line overboard banished the fear that her hands might be too numb to grip, and she forced her fingers around the rope.

  On her peripheral vision she thought she saw the flash of a triangular fin, a white patch on a shiny black back, and for the first time she was truly afraid. That fear was enough to propel her up the rope, hand over hand, breaking the surface, bringing her feet down against the hull, walking up it, braced back against the pull of the lady’s line. She caught at the railing with one hand, dropped the line and grabbed with the other. Scrabbling with her toes, she threw a leg over the railing and pulled herself up and over it, to collapse on the deck and lie there soaked and shaking in a puddle of seawater.

  Never had air tasted sweeter, never had the deck of the Avilda felt firmer, never had she felt so alive. Life was good.

  “When killer whales come to a bay with a village, someone dies in that village,” she muttered, half hysterically. “But not this time, Auntie. Not today. Not me.”

  Yes, life was good. If she wanted it to stay that way she had to move. She rolled over and came to her knees and banged at the sides of her head, shaking water from her ears. Raised voices came to her from the foredeck, and crouching, her back pressed up against the cabin, she inched her way forward. Where the side of the cabin began to curve into the front, she stopped to listen.

  “That’s all you’re going to do?” she heard Andy say, his young voice agonized. “We’ve got to look for her. We’ve got to at least try!”

  “Forget it, kid,” Ned’s voice growled back. “She’s gone. There’s no buoy we can hook on to. That pot wasn’t attached to a shot yet anyway.”

  “Seth?”