Restless in the Grave

by Dana Stabenow

  It appeared that she had not forgotten it.

  And just how the fuck am I supposed to get you off this fucking boat again? she thought at Mutt.

  Mutt gave a disdainful, albeit muted sneeze in reply.

  The sooner she got what she came for, the sooner they’d be off this rusty bucket and away.

  She took a cautious step toward the hold and a very loud car horn honked several times what felt like right behind her. When she got her heart back under control, she looked through the pilings of two docks to make out the hull of the Coast Guard cutter. A truck moving very fast ran out on the dock and behind the cutter’s superstructure so she couldn’t see what was going on. Somebody late for duty. She took a deep breath to steady her nerves and moved out of the shadow of the house once more.

  A movable ladder set over the lip of the hatch led down into the hold and Kate made for it, Mutt padding behind. The ladder was cold and slimy and it was dark when she stepped off at the bottom. Her boots splashed in something. She was fumbling for her trusty penlight when she heard another heavy thump, followed by a scrabble of claws. She swore beneath her breath and cupped the end of the penlight before she turned it on.

  It silhouetted Mutt like a movie star in a spotlight. She was standing on top of a twenty-foot freight container bolted to the back wall of the hold. It was set back beneath the edge of the deck and Kate couldn’t imagine how Mutt had contorted her body to jump from the deck to the container.

  She panned the light around. There was nothing else in the hold except an inch of water in the bilge, glittering iridescently in the penlight from all the oil that had been spilled over the years. The scent of twenty years’-worth of hauling fish and crab from fishing grounds to dock was strong enough to make her eyes water.

  The door to the container was on the left end, and she made for it, hampered by the ribs of the steel hull, which interrupted anything like smooth progress. The third time she tripped she saved herself from falling only by catching the corner of the container.

  There was a thump followed almost immediately by another and a third with a splash. A second later a cold nose pushed at her hand and she jumped and nearly slipped and nearly fell again. She brought the penlight around to look at her dog. “I just hope you’re proud of yourself!” she said in a furious whisper. “How the hell do you think we’re going to get you out of here?”

  Mutt raised an unimpressed eyebrow.

  Kate grabbed back everything she wanted to say at the decibel level she wanted to say it at and sloshed around to the door of the container. It was bolted but, as her karma seemed to be running lately, unlocked. It was a long bolt and a little rusty, like probably every other metal thing at this lat and long, and the hinges gave a long and, to Kate’s stressed sensibilities, nerve-racking protest when she opened the door.

  She shone the penlight around the inside. The pallet of rubber totes was lashed down in the back.

  At least something was going right with this little B&E. She stepped inside and heard the ticky-tack of Mutt’s toenails behind her.

  She put the penlight in her mouth and had the knife out of her pocket and the blade extended three steps away. Loosening the lines, she got one of the totes free and ran the blade around the top beneath the lid. Duct tape, an Alaskan staple that stood up to almost anything, nevertheless bowed even its head to naked steel. Kate pulled the lid off the tote and stood staring down at what the penlight revealed.

  Behind her Mutt let loose with a growl that could have been heard in Newenham. With no conscious thought, Kate spun on her heel and launched herself at the door. She and Mutt crashed into it together, just as it slammed shut on them both.

  They tumbled to the floor. On the other side, above their heads, the bolt slid home with a malevolence that felt distinctly final.

  In the same moment, the deck shook beneath their feet, followed by a low rumbling roar and a bubbling of water from the stern. Someone had started the trawler’s engine.

  “Well, shit,” Kate said.

  There was a shout from on deck, too muffled to understand, but Kate heard some non-Mutt thuds that she was pretty sure were lines hitting the deck, probably after they’d been let loose of the dock. They were casting off.

  She pushed herself to her feet and shoved at the door. It moved enough to open a crack, which in itself only revealed the darkness inside the hold.

  Mutt gave an interrogatory whine.

  “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself,” Kate said severely, “letting them get the drop on us like that?”

  “Wuff,” Mutt said, which Kate correctly interpreted to mean, You should talk.

  On the other hand, her suspicions as to at least one of Finn Grant’s extracurricular activities with Eagle Air had been proven correct, and that was always gratifying.

  The penlight showed her the way back to the tote. She put the lid back on it and sat down to think things over.

  She was locked in a container in the hold of a freezer trawler in Adak. Unless she was mistaken, the freezer trawler was getting ready to get under way, destination unknown. And no one knew where she was.

  Probably time to rectify that last while she was still in range of a cell tower. She pulled out her phone. Three whole bars. “Wow,” she said, “better than downtown Anchorage,” and hit the speed dial. Jim answered on the first ring. “It’s me,” Kate said.

  “Hey,” Jim said.

  “What are you up to?”

  “I’m at the post, just got back from Ahtna,” Jim said. “Had to convince Judge Bobby that Art Beaver deserves time.”

  “And did you?”

  “Of course,” he said. “You know she’s always had a little thing for me.”

  “Yeah,” Kate said, “me and Kenny Hazen have talked about that.”

  He laughed, and she imagined him sitting at his desk, his feet up and that shark’s grin on his face. God, he was an attractive man, smart, funny, good at his job. He read, he liked rock and roll, he was an exciting lover, and even a good cook. Looked like he was in Alaska to stay, something always iffy if someone hadn’t been born in the country. There had to be a flaw, and she kept looking for it, assiduously, because no one package could be that right for her. It frightened her a little, how much she liked him. How much she enjoyed just talking to him on the phone.

  And he didn’t remind her a bit of Gabe McGuire.

  Above, there was some more shouting and hurried footsteps.

  “What’s with all the noise?” he said.

  “Why I’m calling,” she said.

  A smile in his voice. “Another Dumpster dive?”

  “Actually,” Kate said, “kind of a funny story.”

  “Another chest freezer?”

  “Try a container.”

  Jim’s momentary silence was less alarmed than long-suffering. “You mean like a freight container?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re inside a freight container.”

  “Yes. One of the small ones, one of the twenty-footers, I’d say.”

  Jim let out a long, controlled breath. “The dimensions are so important.”

  “I thought so.”

  “Are you in Newenham, Kate?”

  “That’s where the funny comes in,” Kate said. “I’m in Adak. Well. I am for the moment.”

  “Adak?” Jim said. “As in, on the island of Adak?”

  “Yes.”

  “Adak on the Aleutian Chain?”

  “Yes,” Kate said.

  Hoping this time might get him a different answer, he said, “As in closer to Russia than the U.S.?”

  “Da,” Kate said.

  Another brief silence. “Failing to find the funny here, Kate.”

  “I haven’t got to the best part yet,” she said. “You haven’t asked me where the container is.”

  “Okay,” he said, pretty patiently, she thought. “Where is it?”

  “In the hold of a freezer trawler,” she said.

  Silence from the phone, while
the engine revved, hydraulic gears clunked beneath the deck, and the hull swayed. “Which is just now pulling away from the dock.”

  Another silence. “Really,” Jim said at last. “Where’s it going?”

  “No idea,” she said.

  “So,” he said, “thinking this might be the time for me to activate my 911 reflex.”

  “Reluctantly,” Kate said, “I agree.”

  “Is Mutt with you?”

  Kate looked down at the 140-pound half wolf–half husky pressed against her leg. “She insisted.”

  “Well, thank god for that. Okay, I’ll—”

  She felt Mutt shift beneath her hand a moment before she heard the sound of an amplified voice. “Wait,” she said, coming to her feet. She took the phone from her ear.

  “Russian fishing vessel Alexei Kosygin, this is the United States Coast Guard. Return to the dock, I say again, return to the dock immediately and prepare to be boarded.”

  “The cavalry might have arrived,” Kate said into the phone. “I’ll call you back.” She hung up on a protesting squawk.

  A few minutes later she staggered against the distinctive bump of hull against piling. The engine shut down. Ten minutes later she heard voices in the hold. “Hey!” she shouted, banging on the door. “Hey, let me out!” Mutt added her voice to Kate’s, and after a moment’s stunned silence a scurry of footsteps approached the container. The bolt drew back and the doors swung open, each door attended by a Coastie with his sidearm drawn, behind which there was an entire Coast Guard boarding team with their weapons out. They all had very powerful flashlights, all of them trained in a single stream of blinding light on her and Mutt standing there, hands and teeth in plain sight.

  “Hi, guys,” she said, blinking. “Take me to your leader?”

  Twenty-six

  JANUARY 21

  Adak

  On cutter Munro, the boarding team handed her over to their commander with a distinct air of relief. The Coastie captain was six-foot-six, his executive officer was six-foot-four, and Kate was five-foot-nothing. It was like standing between a couple of Sitka spruces. Further, they were clad in smart, clean uniforms and she most definitely was not. There was also the little problem of her trespassing on private property, not to mention what she had been apprehended in the same container with. She couldn’t help but feel a little outnumbered.

  Fortunately, Mutt made up in charm for what Kate lacked in height, and it wasn’t long before both officers had unbent enough to make friends with the dog. This allowed the third man in the room, who was dressed in civilian clothes, to produce his credentials.

  Kate looked at them and sighed. “Why didn’t you just board the ship before it cast off?”

  “Because I only just got here,” said Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent James G. Mason, with an apologetic look at the two Coastie officers. Kate remembered the arrival of the honking truck just before she had gone below on the freezer trawler. “I wasn’t on the ground here in Adak until an hour ago. I called from the airport, and the boarding team was suiting up when the bridge officer told the captain he’d just seen someone—” He looked at Mutt and his lips quirked. “—accompanied by a very large canine, board the Kosygin in a, ah, surreptitious manner.”

  Couldn’t have been all that awful goddamn sneaky, Kate thought.

  Reading her mind, Mason said, “They were watching the ship with, ah, night vision goggles, I believe.”

  “That makes me feel only marginally better,” Kate said, “but thanks.”

  “I’d called ahead, so Captain Lloyd—” He nodded in the captain’s direction. “—knew not to allow the Kosygin to leave port. So when the Kosygin started to, ah, make steam, Captain Lloyd launched the first boarding team on one of the OTHs to, ah, crowd them from the water side, and when they got the lines back on the pilings, the second boarding team hit them from the dock.”

  “There did seem to be an awful lot of them,” Kate said.

  “Lucky for you,” the executive officer said.

  “No question,” she said, “you’ve definitely got the grateful thanks of the taxpayer tonight.” She would have tried out her best smile to soften them up but something told her this was going to be a tough room.

  “So,” Mason said, still in that diffident manner that must have seduced an awful lot of witnesses into spilling their guts, “would you mind telling me, ah, exactly what you were doing on board?”

  The answer was such a cliché, but only because it was true. “I’m a private investigator,” she said. “I’m looking into what may not have been an accidental death. In the course of my investigation, some, ah, other facts came to light.” She tried not to grin.

  The four of them, and of course Mutt, were sitting in the captain’s cabin, a nicely appointed suite with a bedroom, a bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and a living room with a couch and a pair of easy chairs grouped around a coffee table. Kate thought of the galley on the Freya, which was where most of its social life took place, and which consisted of cooking facilities opposite a long-rimmed table bolted to the deck in front of a long, hard bench. There was roughly a light-year’s-worth of difference in comfort, and Kate gave a fleeting thought to her career choices at the age of eighteen.

  But only a fleeting one. Mason cocked his head and raised his eyebrows invitingly. The agent looked to be in his mid-thirties, fit and slender, with dark hair razor-cut short in a style that wasn’t far off Kate’s own. He had a deep tan and his skin looked chapped, as if he’d recently been spending a lot of time outdoors in the sun and wind. He wore chinos and a button-down oxford shirt so neatly pressed, you knew he had just taken off his tie. Rimless glasses slid continuously down a long, thin nose, and he kept pushing them up again in a disarming habit that made him look like a nervous schoolboy. Disarming, Kate thought, as well as misleading. There was a sharpness about the gray eyes behind the glasses that told her Special Agent Mason didn’t miss much. “Why don’t we start with you telling me what you’re doing here?” she said.

  The two Coasties looked scandalized that a mere civilian would gainsay a special agent of the FBI, but Mason was more adaptable. “I belong to a task force that has been investigating an arms dealer who is shipping American arms stolen from armories across the nation, which are then smuggled into hot spots in Asia for resale to insurgents, guerrillas and terrorist groups.” His mouth tightened. “Many of whom then turn them upon American troops stationed in the area.”

  He shifted in his seat and looked suddenly much older, the light picking out lines around eyes and mouth that Kate hadn’t seen at first. “Over the last twelve to eighteen months, we’ve seen an increase in M203 grenade launchers, which are a modification of the M4 carbine. The M203’s ammunition is what you might call versatile—tear gas, armor-piercing, fragmentation, buckshot, you name it, it can shoot it. They call it Barbie for men.”

  She didn’t laugh. She didn’t even smile. It seemed he didn’t expect her to. At any rate, he continued to speak in the same slow, sober voice. “Quite apart from furnishing the enemy with reliable, accurate arms of the best manufacture and quality, you can imagine the kind of effect that has on some poor grunt whose ride home gets shot up with a weapon manufactured two states over from where he was born.”

  “Wouldn’t do my morale any good,” the captain said.

  “Or the crew’s,” the exec said.

  Something tickled at the back of Kate’s mind. “What are you doing in Adak, Alaska?”

  “I’ve been working out of Afghanistan,” he said, “trying to trace the arms back along the route they were smuggled out by. There are other agents from all of the three-letter agencies working the case from this end. So far without much luck.”

  “Again, Adak,” Kate said.

  “I—it’s a long story you don’t need to hear, so I won’t go into it,” Mason said. “But a tip from an informant led to Petropavlovsk. In Russia?”

  “Yes, on the Kamchatka Peninsula,” Kate said what what she cons
idered saintlike patience. “And?”

  “And in Petropavlovsk another informant told us about a fishing trawler named the Alexei Kosygin”—Mason worked his eyebrows a little at the name—“which had been observed to be unloading more than fish when it made port. Said informant talked his way on board with a couple of bottles of vodka and got a look at the log. The Kosygin’s last ports of call before leaving the Bering Sea were always either Adak, Alaska, or Dutch Harbor, Alaska.”

  “It was my understanding that most Bering Sea fishing vessels stop in one place or the other to and from their home port to the fishing grounds, yes,” Kate said.

  Mason smiled. “You make a good devil’s advocate, Ms. Saracoff. However, it’s fair to say that the arms in the hold of the Alexei Kosygin were not honestly come by and were not going honestly anywhere, either. I’m sure their serial numbers, when they are traced, will bear that out.”

  Kate wondered if she was going to be able to get off the island before Mason’s people used what she was sure were the excellent communications equipment on Munro to tell him her name wasn’t Saracoff, which wouldn’t lend her story any credibility. She wondered if Munro had a brig.

  Mutt sprawled on the floor, happily gnawing on the jawbone of an ass that the captain had caused to materialize from the galley.

  Kate didn’t think the brig would have to be big enough for two.

  Mason, whose interrogation skills included allowing a silence to draw out until it begged to be filled, merely waited, unmoving, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, large hands dangling between them, watching her with an unblinking gaze from behind his rimless glasses.

  “Those were M4s in the totes?” she said.

  His gaze sharpened. “Yes. You recognized them?”

  “Not by name,” she said, “but I’ve seen two others like them in private possession in the past week.” Chances were Mason’s search for serial numbers would also find matches on the weapons she’d seen racked at Finn Grant’s house and at Eagle Air. “It may be,” she said, “that your arms smuggler and my maybe not accident victim are one and the same.”