Okura said nothing.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for, but I know it must be valuable,” Magnusson continued. “And I won’t lie to the Coast Guard forever, not for ten thousand dollars. So whatever you’re looking for, if you intend to use this ship as a base of operations, you’ll be handing twenty-five percent over to me.”
Twenty-five percent. More than twelve million dollars. The idea made Okura feel faintly sick. But what choice did he have?
He nodded.
“Good.”
The Salvation rolled into a swell with a sickening lurch. Magnusson checked the barometer at the back of the wheelhouse. “Weather’s going to kick up,” he said. “By tomorrow, the day after, you won’t want to go far in that skiff. Better get back to searching while you still have the chance.”
The salvage master throttled up the Salvation, glanced back through the aft windows at the Lion behind them. Overnight, the team had hooked up a towline to the stern of the freighter, managed to turn her into the wind. But the little tug’s engines were working hard, and as best as Okura could tell, the tug wasn’t doing much more than keeping the freighter in place.
Where are you, Tomio? he thought, studying the ship, contemplating the vast expanse of cargo area left to be searched, the rapidly building waves outside. Where have you taken that briefcase?
28
The seas were building.
McKenna lay awake in her bunk as the Gale Force plowed through the swell, the engines running full-out toward the Pacific Lion.
The good weather wasn’t going to last. McKenna had checked the long-range forecast before passing the watch over to Al Parent, and the forecast was grim: winds fifteen to twenty knots by the time they arrived at the Lion, growing to twenty-five to thirty within a couple of days. There was a gale coming, the growing seas the first indication of bad weather, the distant wind building the waves bigger and bigger, pushing them ahead of the storm.
As the weather got closer, the swell would keep rising, and the Lion would wallow and lose stability. It might take on more water and sink, or it might drift faster toward the rocky coast of the Aleutian chain. However you looked at it, the gale was bad news.
McKenna didn’t sleep much. She tossed and turned in her bunk, listening to the waves break over the bow, the pitch of the engines. The night passed slowly, the tug grinding along, and when the first light of dawn began to show through the portholes, the skipper forced herself to her feet, dressed and splashed water on her face, brewed a strong pot of coffee in the galley, and returned to the wheelhouse, where Al Parent sat in the skipper’s chair with the satellite phone to his ear, talking to home while he monitored the tug’s progress, the cat curled up asleep in his lap. It sounded like he was singing a lullaby.
Spike woke up as McKenna walked in. Stretched, yawned. Jumped down from Al’s lap and padded out of the wheelhouse, nary a look in the skipper’s direction.
Al watched the cat go, saw McKenna standing there. He stopped singing, and gave her a sheepish smile, quickly signed off the call.
“Little Ben isn’t sleeping too well,” he told her. “I thought if his mom put me on speaker . . .”
He trailed off, made a show of looking embarrassed, though McKenna suspected her first mate would be doting over his grandson until the day the kid drove off to college—and probably longer. She smiled and handed him a cup of coffee.
“Heck, we should put you on the hailer,” she told Al. “With that rock-a-bye baby, you’ll have us all zonked right out.”
Al laughed. “A little early, aren’t you?” he asked McKenna. “Still have a couple hours left on my watch.”
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said.
Al glanced at the autopilot, punched in a slight course correction. “Weather’s building.”
“That’s what kept me from my beauty rest. Couple days, it’ll be howling out there.”
“Tough to tow a boat in that kind of wind. That Lion’s big hull will turn into a sail, send her sliding all over on the end of our towline.”
“Assuming we can even right the thing. I don’t want to be clambering around inside that wreck, trying to get the pumps working in twenty-foot seas.”
Al nodded.
“Assuming we can even get a line on the thing,” McKenna added. “Convince Christer Magnusson his tug isn’t cut out for this work.”
Al snorted. “Bunch of pretenders. One look at us, skip, and Magnusson will scurry off with his tail between his legs.”
“Let’s hope so,” McKenna said.
The two sat in silence. Watched the light grow over the slate-gray sea, the never-ending procession of heavy, scudding waves, the rise and the crash of the hull though the peaks and troughs, the grind of the engines.
The night faded away. Morning passed. Al had the radio on the satellite channels, a country music station, all lonely husbands and runaway dogs, broken-down trucks and whiskey-bottle blues. It did nothing to help McKenna’s mood.
She crossed the wheelhouse, ready to flip the station to something a little more uplifting, some classic rock, maybe, when Al called over from the radar. “I got a hit”
McKenna forgot about the radio. Crossed back and peered over Al’s shoulder. The radar had picked up something dead ahead, thirty nautical miles or so, something large and uneven. As the Gale Force sailed closer, the radar slowly separated from one large hit into three smaller, distinct dots.
“That big one’s the Lion,” McKenna said. “The smaller one’s gotta be the Salvation.”
“And the third one?” Al asked.
McKenna scratched her head. “Coast Guard. Or another Commodore tug.”
“Gotta be the Coast Guard,” Al said. “We’d have heard if Magnusson had another tug here already.” He glanced at the autopilot, set the tug on course. “Twenty miles away now,” he told McKenna. “An hour or two, tops, we find out.”
* * *
• • •
AT FIRST, the stricken ship was just a smudge on the horizon, a formless mirage, visible only from the tops of the swells. As the Gale Force plowed closer, the smudge separated, and McKenna could see the Coast Guard cutter, stately and proud, and the Pacific Lion herself, a half-sunk bathtub toy on an enormous scale, ungainly and wallowing in an uneasy sea.
“Holy hell,” Al muttered. “What a wreck.”
The ship had been ugly to begin with. It boasted none of the classic lines of a traditional cargo vessel. Looked more like a brick than a ship, blocky and angular and top-heavy, an affront to any sailor’s sense of style and tradition.
Now, though, lying wounded in the water, it looked like disaster. The list was pronounced. The ship lay almost fully on its portside, the bulbous red chin of its bow almost parallel to the waves.
It’s incredible nobody died when that ship flipped, McKenna thought. Let’s hope we can save her and still say the same.
The Lion wallowed, waves breaking over her keel, but she looked more or less stable. Certainly, she didn’t appear to have taken on much water, at least not drastically. There was still time to save her—assuming the Salvation relinquished its claim.
McKenna could see the little boat, low and blue and grungy, in a tow position at the stern of the freighter. The towline stretched taut between the two vessels, and exhaust billowed from the smaller boat’s stack, but neither vessel was moving.
“What do they think they’re doing out here?” Al asked. “If they’re moving at all, it’s backwards.”
“Probably the best they can do,” McKenna replied. “Slow down the drift and hope to ride out the gale.”
A quarter mile or so off the Lion’s port quarter, the Coast Guard cutter silently stood guard. McKenna assumed the Coast Guard was aware of the situation, but if they had any concerns, they weren’t showing it.
Soon enough. McKenna marked her position on the GPS scr
een. Less than seventy nautical miles south of the Aleutian Islands, and the weather building, but the Gale Force was finally on scene.
It was time to flex some Rhodes muscle.
29
Christer Magnusson was in the Salvation’s galley, pouring a fresh cup of coffee, when the radio crackled in the wheelhouse.
“Salvation, Salvation, this is the Gale Force. Are you on here, Christer?”
A woman’s voice. McKenna Rhodes. Shit.
Magnusson crossed to the galley porthole, peered out, and saw nothing but ocean. He hurried through the house to the bulkhead door and the afterdeck, walked out under the mammoth A-frame crane, and peered back across the stern, beyond the hulk of the Lion.
For a moment, he saw nothing but gray swells and whitecaps, the turbulence of the building sea. Then the Salvation rose on a wave, and Magnusson spied the tug a half mile or so off of the starboard quarter.
“Helvete.”
It was the Gale Force, all right—big and brawny as always, and as pretty as the days Randall Rhodes had run her, a fresh coat of paint on her red-and-white superstructure, her hull black as coal. Magnusson had spent many trips racing that tug to a wounded freighter, and more than a handful shaking his fist at her stern from the Titan. She still looked good, Magnusson had to admit. She looked like a tug that could save the Lion.
But could the Rhodes girl?
McKenna Rhodes was an enigma to Magnusson. He’d spoken to her rarely, on those brief occasions when the Gale Force and the Titan found themselves in the same harbor and he’d dropped by Riptide’s galley for a cup of coffee with his rival.
She’d been quiet during those meetings, as far as Magnusson could remember. But she’d sure kept her eyes on him, studied him while he talked, as if she were committing every word to memory. He’d liked her, as much as he liked anyone on Riptide’s boat: she carried herself like crew, not like Riptide’s daughter, and by any account, she worked hard. Certainly, she had guts, sailing the old man’s tug all the way here on a gamble.
Magnusson hurried back inside the Salvation, up into the wheelhouse, where Riptide’s daughter was still trying to raise him on the radio.
“Salvation, Salvation, I know you’re out there,” McKenna was saying. “This is McKenna Rhodes on the Gale Force. How do you read?”
Magnusson glanced back at the tug again, through the rear windows. Then he picked up the radio. “Gale Force, this is Salvation.” He forced a smile, kept his voice nonchalant. “Fancy meeting you all the way out here, McKenna. How are you?”
But McKenna Rhodes wasn’t having any small talk. “What are you up to, Christer? You know damn well you can’t save that ship with that old boat you’re running.”
Magnusson spit into his ramen cup. “We have a line on her, and we’re holding our own. If you came out here thinking you’d push me off this wreck, I’m sorry, but you wasted a trip.”
“Unless you’re hiding about five thousand horsepower, the wind will give you all the pushing you can handle,” McKenna answered. “Weather’s building, and I have a team here who can get that ship upright. I suggest you stand down and let us do our jobs.”
Magnusson pursed his lips. McKenna had her dad’s audacity, that was for certain. And she probably had Court Harrington on board, too. But she was still in second place, and Magnusson wasn’t about to back down.
“Sorry, McKenna,” he replied. “We signed an Open Form with the owners, and we’re salvaging this ship. We’ll keep you in mind if we require assistance. Over and out.”
He hung up the radio. Then he picked up the sat phone. Dialed in to Commodore home base, waited on the connection.
Pick up, damn it, he thought, studying the Salvation’s lack of progress on the GPS screen. I need another boat, and an architect, now.
30
Okura led Robbie down the Lion’s central hallway again. The waves outside were bigger now, the wind stronger. Okura winced every time the ship swayed, with every groan from the hull and the shifting cargo below.
They had covered every inch of the accommodations deck. Every stateroom, every hallway, every locker. No sign of Tomio Ishimaru. No sign of his briefcase. If the stowaway was still on board, he was in the engine room somewhere, or in the cargo holds.
Or he’d washed overboard.
But Okura wasn’t ready to consider that possibility. He couldn’t afford to lose faith, not yet. He led Robbie down the hall to a stairway amidships. Pushed the bulkhead door and it swung open, revealing the dark, cockeyed stairway beyond. The stairs descended into the gloom of the cargo holds. At this angle, there was no way to follow them but with ropes.
“These stairs go all the way to the last cargo hold, deck four,” Okura told Robbie. “There are nine cargo decks in all. Five thousand cars.”
Nine decks. Each deck six hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide. Miles upon miles of ground to cover, all of it dark and deadly. Okura watched Robbie rig up a climbing line. Tested the strength of the knot and hesitated at the edge of the bulkhead, his headlamp beam reflecting against the carnival funhouse angles of the listing stairway beyond.
Fifty million dollars. Okura took the rope in his hands and stepped off into the darkness, began to lower himself deeper into the Lion.
* * *
• • •
OKURA WAS HALFWAY TO the first cargo deck—deck twelve—when Robbie called down from the hallway above.
“Just heard the horn,” the deckhand reported. “My radio’s crapping out in here. I gotta get back to the surface.”
“We can’t turn around yet,” Okura replied. “We haven’t even started our search.”
“Skipper sounds the horn, I gotta jump to it,” Robbie said. “I’ll be right back.”
Okura listened to the deckhand picking his way down the passage, leaving him alone in the stairwell. He steadied his breathing. Gripped the rope tighter and pushed off from the wall. The darkness seemed almost alive beneath him, all drips and moans and swirling shadows rising up to meet him as he made his descent.
Robbie returned just after Okura had reached the bulkhead at deck twelve. “Bad news,” the deckhand called down, his headlamp piercing the gloom from above. “Urgent. There’s a salvage tug just showed up outside, the Gale Force, from Seattle. They’re trying to bump us off the tow, and Bill says they have the boat that could do it.”
Okura looked around the landing. The hatch to the cargo hold hung open on the wall opposite, now nearly vertical with the slant of the ship. This struck Okura as unusual; the door was supposed to be locked and secured while the ship was at sea. This was an aberration.
“I might have found something,” Okura called up the stairway. “I want to continue the search.”
“Not today,” Robbie said. “Look, we’ll keep poking around this damn ship as soon as we can, but right now I need to get topside and see what my boss wants us to do.”
Okura pushed open the hatch wider and peered inside. The light from his headlamp was dim and abbreviated, but what it illuminated was astonishing: row upon row of cars, all hanging at the same awkward impossible angle, suspended in space by a system of high-strength straps, ropes, and chains. They swayed almost as one with the motion of the swell, the whole fragile mess a chorus of straining material and groaning steel every time a wave hit. The cars hung in place, and they stretched to the end of Okura’s light and beyond, an obstacle course, a death trap, hanging by the proverbial thread.
“There is a storm coming,” Okura called. “We need to keep looking while the weather still allows it.”
“Look, if the other tug bumps us off the tow, they’ll kick you off this ship with the rest of us.” Robbie paused. “I’m heading back. You can stay, or you can go.”
Okura steadied himself at the bulkhead and searched in his bag for another length of rope. He had plenty of fresh water in the bag, a supply of energy bars. �
��Very well,” he said. “I’m staying.”
He gritted his teeth and swung across the bulkhead, listening to the echoes from above as Robbie made his retreat to the surface. He tied his line to a beam above the doorway, and let it fall down the deck between a long row of cars. Reached out, prepared to lower himself into the hold, to continue his search. Then he glanced to his left, inside the bulkhead door, and stopped and stared.
There was a structural pillar beside the door, climbing from the bottom of the ship to the top. The way the ship listed, the pillar made a sort of cradle, just as the wall and the floor of the passageways above did the same.
In this particular cradle, though, was a pile of darkness that Okura assumed were just rags. Then the darkness moved, mumbled something, and Okura looked closer, saw the bruised and battered face, the parched lips, the limbs hanging at awkward angles.
This was a human being, wounded and starved. This was Tomio Ishimaru.
31
Tomio Ishimaru blinked in the bright light, and wondered if he was dead at last. He’d been in this black purgatory for almost as long as he could remember, blind and shivering, his whole world the inhuman groans from the depths around him. The memory of what he’d done devouring his conscience.
Naoko. Saburo. Akio. His colleagues. His friends. They’d believed it was a joke when he’d first pulled the gun, the pistol Hiroki Okura had obtained for him from god knew where. He’d wished he’d been joking. He’d been shaking so hard, so nervous.
He remembered the look on Saburo’s face when he’d first pulled the trigger. Couldn’t escape the memory, no matter how long he languished here. Akio had shouted in anger. Naoko had begged for his life.
Ishimaru hadn’t been able to look at him, not at the end.
He’d stolen the briefcase. Fifty million dollars, just as he’d told Okura. And Okura had delivered him from Yokohama, just as he’d promised. But there was no escaping what he’d done, not here on this ship, and not anywhere else.
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