Gale Force

by Owen Laukkanen

  The captain nodded again. Stole a glance around Nakadate’s office, at the two young men standing wordless by the only exit. “Y-yes,” he said, stammering a little, his voice dry. “It was fine.”

  “I’m sorry to bring you here so unexpectedly,” Nakadate told him, “but there’s an urgent matter that I believe you can assist me with.” He gestured to a chair. “Please, sit.”

  The captain sat. He had reason to be frightened, of course. Confused, at the very least. The two young men standing behind the captain had intercepted him on his regular early-morning jog, spirited him away in a waiting Mercedes-Benz, and driven him here, to a skyscraper in downtown Yokohama, a lavish corner office amid the clouds—and an audience with Katsuo Nakadate himself. The captain had been angry when he’d been brought into the office. That anger had changed to fear when he’d seen Nakadate, recognizing him from the newspapers, placing his face.

  “What do you want from me?” the captain asked. “I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m a good man. I’m not a—not a gangster.”

  Nakadate smiled inwardly. He didn’t consider himself cruel by nature, but there was always some humor in observing the contortions people put themselves through to avoid causing him offense—as if the head of the Inagawa-kai syndicate would be so petty as to kill a man over an ill-chosen word. Regardless . . .

  He opened a folder on the desk in front of him. Flipped through until he’d found the photograph he was looking for. Removed it, and slid it across the desk.

  “Your family, Captain Ise,” he said. “Your beautiful wife, and two little boys.”

  The captain went pale as he studied the picture. It was recent: taken the previous morning, in front of the boys’ school. A crude gesture, yes, but a point to be made.

  The captain pushed the picture away. “This isn’t necessary,” he said. “Whatever you want to know, I’ll tell you as much as I can. Please—tell me what this is about?”

  “Very well.” Nakadate found another photograph, a single man this time, removed it. “Have you seen this man before?”

  The captain looked. Squinted. “No, I haven’t. Who—”

  “That man is named Tomio Ishimaru. Until recently, he was a valued member of my staff of accountants. Until shortly before your ship sailed, in fact.”

  Ise started to respond. Nakadate cut him off with the wave of his hand.

  “The day of your departure, Captain Ise, Tomio Ishimaru murdered three of his colleagues and escaped with something very valuable to me.”

  One more picture from the file folder. Nakadate held it out to the captain. The captain glanced at it, then looked away quickly.

  “We’ve managed to trace Ishimaru to the docks,” Nakadate continued. “The man in the picture you’re holding is—was—a customs agent. After some encouragement, he admitted to us that he’d accepted a bribe from Ishimaru in exchange for access to a ship. Your ship, Captain Ise.”

  Ise glanced at the photograph again. Looked like he might be physically ill. “I don’t know— I don’t have anything to do with this,” he said. “Please—you—this has nothing to do with me.”

  “Someone allowed Tomio Ishimaru on board your ship, Captain. We’ve obtained security footage of a sailor meeting him at the gangway. Unfortunately, it’s too dark to make out the sailor’s face. But we know Ishimaru had help. And I need you to tell me who it was.”

  Ise said nothing.

  “Captain?”

  “I told you,” Ise said, “I have no idea. I couldn’t be on the docks at the time you suggest. I was on the bridge with the harbor pilot. He can verify this.”

  Nakadate leaned back in his chair. Turned slightly to gaze out the tall windows at the city and the harbor beyond. “Someone helped the smuggler,” he said. “One of your men, Captain.”

  Ise still didn’t respond. Stared down at the picture, the customs agent’s ruined face. Nakadate gave him a moment, a long one. Then he looked past the captain to the young men by the door. Nodded to the older of the two, a man named Daishin Sato, who stepped forward, cracking his knuckles.

  Ise caught the gesture, the meaning. Sat straight in his chair. “Okura,” he said, realization dawning on his face. “Hiroki Okura, my second officer. He was on the bridge when the ship capsized. He refused to leave the wreck with the rest of us. The Coast Guard was forced to send a helicopter back to find him.”

  Nakadate made a note. “And did they find him?”

  “They found him, and they brought him back to Dutch Harbor with the rest of us. But . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “He escaped,” Ise said. “He disappeared from the community center in Dutch Harbor. Nobody could find him. He didn’t come home with the rest of the crew.”

  Nakadate sat forward, tented his fingers. “Where could he have gone, Captain?”

  “Nobody knows. The town was very small. But Okura simply disappeared.”

  “Did he carry a briefcase, the last time you saw him?”

  Ise didn’t have to think long. “No. None of us carried anything. I would have remembered.”

  Nakadate studied Ise some more. The captain waited, emboldened enough now to return his gaze briefly before looking away.

  “We are most appreciative of your help, Captain Ise,” Nakadate said finally. “My secretary will be happy to call you a taxi. Please, have a pleasant afternoon. and if you think of anything else I should know . . .”

  “I will contact you,” Ise said quickly. “I swear it.”

  Nakadate gathered the photographs, returned them to the file folder. Stood, and motioned to Sato to open the door.

  “See that you do,” he said. “Good day, Captain.”

  54

  McKenna sat in the skipper’s chair in the wheelhouse of the Gale Force, monitoring the tug’s progress toward the Aleutian Islands. Night had finally fallen, the crew in their bunks or watching a movie in the galley.

  It was good to be back on the tug. The wheelhouse was warm and quiet, the coffee fresh, the deck and the walls resting at the proper angles—the storm-tossed seas notwithstanding. Even Spike seemed marginally friendlier. The cat slept on the bench beside the skipper’s chair, closer to McKenna than his usual spot on the dash. Probably had more to do with the wave action than McKenna, but the skipper figured she’d take any victory she could get.

  The Pacific Lion was under tow. The tug was making good time, running with the seas behind her, and her engines had held up thus far. She and the crew had deployed a sea anchor from the Lion’s bow—a massive, radio-deployed, high-tech parachute that Randall Rhodes had ordered custom-built for situations like this. The anchor would stabilize the Lion in a following sea, keep her parallel to the waves instead of turning broadside, prevent her from surfing down on the Gale Force as the waves passed beneath her.

  With luck, the Gale Force would make Samalga Pass for tomorrow morning’s slack tide, bring the wreck through without incident. By evening, McKenna hoped to have found a nice, quiet spot behind one of the Aleutian Islands to shelter from the storm.

  And then what?

  The Coast Guard had updated McKenna on Court Harrington’s status. The architect had been airlifted to Dutch Harbor, and there were discussions about flying him on to Anchorage. Nobody on the other end of the radio had sounded anything better than cautiously optimistic, but Harrington was going to survive, anyway. He might or might not come back to the job, but in the short term, the crew of the Gale Force was going to have to work on saving the Lion without him.

  McKenna mulled her options. Nelson Ridley was holding on to Harrington’s laptop, and Stacey Jonas had salvaged his notebook after the fall. McKenna and her crew had access to all of the fluid levels on the Lion, as well as the model Harrington was planning to use to right the ship. How hard could it be to plug in the numbers?

  Very hard, as it turned out.

  “Clearly
, there’s a technique to this we just aren’t getting,” Ridley told McKenna after they’d sunk the virtual Pacific Lion nine or ten times. “No wonder the other outfits all wanted Court on their team. This is like building a spaceship.”

  “We still have the stern tanks to measure,” McKenna said. “Maybe once we get the fluid levels locked in, we’ll be able to make sense of this thing.”

  “You want to take a gamble on that? You and me, with thirty million dollars riding on it?”

  The answer was no. McKenna imagined towing the Lion to a sheltered harbor somewhere, imagined the days of pumping and clambering around the ship. Imagined watching the damn thing roll over and capsize because she’d messed up the pumping algorithm, watching the whole operation sink to the bottom of the Bering Sea, taking the Gale Force’s big payday—and a few more of her crew—down with her.

  “We can’t do this ourselves, McKenna,” Ridley said. “We need to assume Court isn’t coming back and prepare accordingly.”

  McKenna didn’t answer. Reached out, petted Spike. The cat purred, arched into her touch, spent about a minute in total bliss. Then he opened his eyes, saw McKenna, stiffened, stood, and leaped from the mantel.

  McKenna watched him pad out of the wheelhouse. Looked back through the rear windows at the twin towlines stretching back off the stern, toward the lights of the Lion. With any luck, the Lion’s watertight doors were holding, keeping her afloat. God willing, they would make it through the pass.

  And then?

  McKenna straightened. “I know, Nelson,” she said. “I’m working on it.”

  * * *

  • • •

  AT A QUARTER AFTER TEN the next morning, McKenna found herself staring out from the wheelhouse as the Gale Force approached the mouth of the Samalga Pass, waiting on the tide to turn.

  The pass was a desolate, primeval place: to the east lay Umnak Island, seventy miles long and mountainous, shrouded in fog. To the west were the volcanic Islands of Four Mountains, an uninhabited cluster of barren, forbidding rock. The nearest island, Chuginadak, climbed a mile into the fog. Its volcano lay quiet today, but according to Tom Geoffries on the Munro, it was named after an Aleut fire goddess and known to be restless.

  It wasn’t the volcano that had McKenna preoccupied this morning, but the pass at its base. Fifteen miles wide, Samalga cut through the Aleutian Islands from the North Pacific to the Bering Sea, and the tides could be wicked. The ocean floor climbed from six hundred fathoms at the mouth of the pass to eighty in the middle, and there were shallow patches and seamounts where it reached as high as thirteen fathoms, less than eighty feet below the surface. As the tug and her tow arrived, with a gale force wind and the tide running opposite, the mouth of the pass was a turbulent mess, a standing swell with steep, twenty-foot waves; a chaotic, boat-swallowing pit.

  The Munro joined the Gale Force outside the pass. McKenna could see that Captain Geoffries was taking care to steer well clear of the shallow water, keeping alongside the Gale Force and the Lion in seven hundred fathoms of water, more than three-quarters of a mile. The gale continued to blow, and the seas were agitated, but the deep water was peace compared to the hell at the mouth of the pass.

  McKenna surveyed the roiling water through her field glasses. Then she picked up the intraship telephone and called Ridley down in the engine room. The engineer answered. “Coney Island Pizza.”

  “How’s it looking down there?” McKenna asked him. “We going to have enough oomph to make it through this thing?”

  “We’re gravy, skipper,” Ridley replied. “I’ve been watching the engines all night. No problems whatsoever.”

  “How’s that turbocharger on the starboard main? Not going to crap out again, right?”

  “Compression is fine. These engines are rock solid. Nothing to worry about.”

  “If you could see what I’m seeing,” McKenna said, “you’d be worried, too.”

  “Nah. We’re going to drag this thing through, easy-peasy. You find us a new whiz kid, yet?”

  “Not yet. I’ll keep trying once we’re through that pass.” She ended the call. Put down the phone and looked out through the windows at the volcano in the distance, the churning water, the long, dark mass of Umnak Island to the east. Had no idea how she was going to scare up a replacement for Court Harrington, but this wasn’t the time or the place to be trying, anyway.

  Once the Gale Force entered the pass, McKenna would have to maintain enough speed to keep water past her rudders or she would lose her ability to steer the tug, and the Lion behind her. The tide would take hold and propel them forward like an amusement park ride, and the Gale Force would need every ounce of power she could muster. If the turbos crapped out, or the engines gave way, the tug and the massive freighter behind her would be driven straight onto the rocks.

  The radio came to life. “Gale Force, this is Captain Geoffries. This tide is about to turn. How are things looking on your end?”

  McKenna glanced back through the aft windows to the stern, and close behind, the listing hulk of the Lion. Al and Jason Parent had shortened the towline in preparation for the pass, closing the gap behind tug and tow. It would increase McKenna’s ability to control the freighter, but would also give her less time to react in case something went wrong. Still, it was the only way to maneuver the Lion in such close quarters.

  “We’re ready to rock and roll here,” McKenna told Geoffries.

  “Excellent. We’ll let you lead and tuck in behind your tow, keep an eye on things from the rear. That work for you?”

  “Sounds perfect to me, Captain.”

  “Just make sure you give a wide berth to that fire goddess on your portside. There are shoals south of the island where the tide rips something fierce. It’ll drag that ship away from you if you don’t watch it.”

  “I saw that on the charts,” McKenna said, “and I can sure see it now out my wheelhouse windows. We’ll stick to the middle of the channel.”

  She signed off and hung up the handset. The tide was slackening outside, and the standing waves at the entrance to the pass were diminishing. Soon after the slack, the tide would reverse, and the North Pacific would rush north between the islands into the Bering Sea, carrying the Gale Force and her tow along like a piece of driftwood in the current.

  A piece of driftwood with nearly ten thousand horses under the hood, McKenna thought. Assuming those engines hold.

  McKenna surveyed the pass one more time. The grim, unforgiving shores on either side of the water. The Lion would wreck if the tug’s engines failed. She would wreck if the towlines parted. But she would also wreck if she stayed out here; it was only a matter of time. The only way to save that ship was through the pass, so, damn it, it was time to get moving.

  55

  Hiroki Okura ventured forward to the bridge of the Pacific Lion and found himself in Armageddon.

  The ocean around the freighter was a savage. It leaped at the ship, clawed at the hull, dropped away and reared back to leap again. A following sea, monster rollers lurking behind the Lion, catching up, overtaking, lifting the freighter high and then plunging her down again, daylight all but gone in the bottom of the troughs, the view panoramic from the wave tops. And everything tilted, twisted sideways, dark and cold.

  The view was unsettling. Now and then a wave broke, sending white water over the portside railing and toward the bridge windows. A rogue wave could do worse, Okura knew; smash open the windows and knock him from his chart-table perch, even flood the vents that led down to the cargo hold. There was nothing to do but hope that didn’t happen. No way to react until the sea threw the first punch.

  The salvage crew was moving the ship. Okura had pieced together the rest of their plan as soon as he’d seen the islands off to starboard. Those would be the Aleutian Islands, the only landmasses for hundreds, even thousands, of miles. And with the wind and the waves coming from
astern, there’d be no reason to drag the ship closer to landfall, unless . . .

  The salvage crew intended to drag the stricken freighter through the island chain and out to the other side, use the land as a wind block to continue their work. Okura couldn’t see anything dead ahead of the Lion, with the towlines being rigged to the stern, but he hoped the pass was large and the tug was stout. This was no weather, no place, to be fooling around.

  Since he’d spied on the salvage crew, he’d been hiding out in the crew quarters, sleeping in his makeshift bunk, venturing down into the galley to raid more of the stores when he could stomach the nauseating smell, and fiddling with the lock on the briefcase, trying to crack the combination.

  But he had made this excursion to the bridge as the salvage crew tugged the Lion north. He’d determined to rest up on the ship, regain his strength, wait for the salvage crew to reduce the ship’s list and bring her closer to land before he attempted to make his escape. The salvage crew had no idea he was on board. They didn’t know about the briefcase, the stolen bonds. Okura was confident he could elude them and make his retreat from the Lion in secret.

  But it never hurt to have a little insurance.

  So Okura had braved the maddening, bucking-wave action and the narrow skewed hallways, and he’d ventured forward to the bridge, where he stood, transfixed by the storm, until he remembered why he’d come.

  He turned his back on the storm. Found the locker at the rear of the bridge, the small safe inside. A couple of feet in length, the same in width and depth, a combination dial on the door.

  Okura hadn’t been given the combination. Captain Ise guarded that information jealously. But Ise was getting old, and his memory was fading. Okura had found the combination stored in the captain’s stateroom, a Post-it note stuck to the desk.

  Now Okura held himself steady with one hand as he worked the dial with the other, the crash of the sea and the ship’s maddening list making even this simple task difficult. It took time, maybe ten minutes, but finally Okura dialed to the last number, tried the handle, heard the lock disengage. He swung the safe open and peered inside.