Fire and Ice

by Dana Stabenow

  “Shit,” Liam said, and poked and pointed at a big blue and white plane approaching from the sea.

  “Yeah, Fish and Game’s 206,” Wy said. “Don’t worry, they’ll stand off. They’re just here to keep us honest.”

  “How do they do that?” Liam said, watching the float plane with his own service’s insignia on the side climb to a higher altitude. The Fish and Wildlife Protection officers were state troopers, too. They went through the same training he did, but enforced the fish and game laws throughout the state, or tried to. Liam didn’t envy them that task; he’d rather disarm an axe murderer before trying to relieve a rabid sport fisherman of his illegally caught king salmon, any day.

  “They’ve got cameras with clocks in them bolted to the fuselage, and they’re aiming them at the boats below. They’ll know if we put our nets in the water one second before we should, or keep them there one second longer than we should.”

  “What happens if we do either of those things?”

  “Then Cecil could probably kiss his million-dollar boat goodbye.”

  “They’d confiscate it?”

  “You bet your ass. And, more important, we wouldn’t get paid.”

  “Three minutes to the opening.”

  “Cecil,” Wy said, “stay on course for another minute. Alex, stand to and prepare to drop your skiff where you are. Mike, you’ve got company, coming up hard astern.”

  Liam saw two more boats approaching. The second of the smaller boats in Wolfe’s miniflotilla broke off from the steadily increasing ball of herring and put itself in the way of the oncoming boats. Liam poked and pointed. “Goddammit,” Wy swore as the Cessna 172 insinuated itself into their circle. “It’s okay, we got ’em, we got ’em.” Barely audible over the headphones, Liam heard her say, “Please let us have them, please let us have them.”

  “Two minutes to the opening.”

  The two new boats broke ranks, one circling around Wolfe’s second gillnetter, or Mike, which Liam supposed was the skipper’s name. “Mike, stay on the first boat,” Wy ordered. “Cecil, you’ve got company.”

  The big boat was on the other side of the ball of herring. It looked twice as large and three times as powerful as the little gillnetter heading over to challenge it. Wolfe’s voice was elaborately casual. “What company? Oh, you mean that little itty-bitty skiff over there? I can hardly make him out, the little peckerhead’s so tiny.”

  “Cecil—”

  “One minute to the opening.”

  Cecil—by now Liam, too, was calling the boats by the names of their skippers—made a course correction and found itself directly in the path of the oncoming vessel. “Goddammit, Cecil, you’re on his portside, he has right-of-way!”

  “Is that a fact?” Wolfe sounded mildly surprised.

  Twenty minutes was going to be just long enough for a fisherman on his toes to scoop up as many herring as he could. “With a ball of herring this bunched together,” Wy said, her voice taut with excitement and anticipation and, yes, unabashed greed, “we’re going to beat the hell out of them!”

  Liam took this to mean that they were going to catch a lot of fish, as long as they could beat the other fishermen to them, and as long as—“Watch out!” he yelled, slapping the side of Wy’s head as the 172 nearly brushed their wing with a float—as long as they survived the experiment.

  “Miller, watch your goddamn six!” Wy roared.

  “Ten seconds to the opening,” the expressionless voice droned. “Eight seconds, seven seconds, six seconds, five, four, three, two, one, open; the herring season for the Riggins Bay District is open.”

  Suddenly Liam was too busy to be scared.

  Wy’s voice, excited but controlled, sounded continually in his ears. “All boats, drop your skiffs, now! Cecil, hard left rudder, hard left rudder!”

  “Wy, watch it, traffic, blue plane with floats ten o’clock descending!”

  “Alex, steady as you go, you got ’em, you got ’em!”

  “Wy, watch out, you’re coming up too fast on that red plane, back off, back off, back off!”

  “Mike, come left, come left, come left, don’t let him get around you!”

  “Wy, Cub at two o’clock, go left, go left, your other left, dammit!”

  Suddenly it seemed that the sky was filled with planes and the water with boats. Liam didn’t have time to wonder where they’d all come from; all he could do was point and poke and prod and slap and kick and yell, all as Wy watched the water and directed the boats.

  A hundred feet beneath the tight circle Wy had locked the Cub into, the fishing boats launched their skiffs. These weren’t dories with little 40-horsepower Evinrudes, but powerboats with 250- to 300-horsepower outboards that were on the step practically before their hulls hit the water.

  The way it worked was this. One end of the purse seine was fastened to the skiff, the other end to the boat. The idea was for the skiff to make a large circle around as many herring as possible and head back for the mother boat, which would then draw the bottom of the seine together, making a bag of the net. From there, they would use the boom to lift the net into the boat, or brail the fish into the hold one large scoop at a time, or deliver the fish to a waiting tender—Liam caught distant glimpses of three larger boats hanging around the perimeter of the action, but they weren’t about to run into him so he ignored them. “Watch it, that green plane—son of a bitch!”

  The green plane’s pilot misjudged his altitude and the 172’s speed and his gear glanced off the left wing of the 172 as it was coming up from behind. The 172’s wing dipped sharply water-ward, started to spin, and recovered, pulling up and banking right, out of the circle.

  Something wet running into his eyes blinded him for a moment. Liam wiped it away and discovered that sweat was pouring down his forehead in rivulets. In front of him Wy was oblivious, all her attention trained on the water below. “Yes! Okay, Cecil, close it up, close it up, close it up!”

  The expressionless voice came over the headphones. “Ten minutes remaining in the opening; I say again, ten minutes remaining in the Riggins Bay herring opener.”

  “Mike, you’ve got ten minutes to lose that jerk and set your net! Alex, hard right rudder, you got nothing but net if you close it up now! Cecil, you still got company off your stern, watch out he doesn’t foul your seine!”

  One of the two poaching gillnetters was still being fended off by Mike’s boat, every zig of the gillnetter being met by a zag from Mike’s. The boat tagging Cecil had dropped his skiff and was preparing to make a run for the fish.

  Liam saw water boil up from Wolfe’s stern, and the big seiner surged forward and ran right over the top of the other boat’s skiff. The man in it dove over the side at the last possible moment, the prop of the big seiner passing over the exact spot he’d been standing not three seconds before.

  “Jesus Christ,” Liam said in disbelief.

  “Nine minutes to closing; I say again, nine minutes to closing.”

  “Watch the sky, Campbell!” Wy snapped. “Close it up, Cecil, close it up, you’ve got nine minutes!”

  There were six or seven planes—or maybe twenty; Liam was never really sure—in the same tight circle, buzzing around the fishing scene like angry wasps, the 172 recovering enough to rejoin the group. It seemed as if every time he looked up he saw a pair of floats through the skylight. Every time he looked right, another plane filled up the window, someone in the backseat slapping the back of his pilot’s head. There was never a moment when it seemed to him that they were not in imminent danger of a midair collision. Here a pair of floats passed so closely by he could see water dripping from the rudders; there the face of another observer was so near he could see the strain and fear on it as plainly as he could feel his own. The sharp blur of a propeller reminded him of what had happened to the last person to fly observer for Wy, not a comforting thought. Liam’s poking and slapping became less tentative. Yelling and cursing seemed natural; in the space of twenty minutes, Liam was learn
ing a whole new vocabulary.

  There was as much or more chaos on the water below, where twenty-five boats battled for sea room and herring, with more competitors arriving every moment. In between his constant scanning of the sky and the equally constant poking and prodding of Wy he caught glimpses of a continual game of bump-and-run, of the gillnetter’s swamped but not sunken skiff, of a bulging purse seine black with fish—he hoped theirs, but for the life of him he couldn’t tell one boat from another—of a gillnetter with its prop fouled in its own seine, of another adrift with a dead engine, of a third—Liam blinked. If his eyes did not deceive him, there were three men on the deck beating the hell out of each other.

  The man who had dived off the swamped skiff had bobbed up to the surface and one of his crewmates on the gillnetter ran a boat hook out for him to grab on to and hauled him on board. From the brief glimpse Liam caught of him, he didn’t appear to be bleeding. Bleeding or not, Liam had personally witnessed a third-degree assault, a class C felony at least. They came around again in their circle and Liam caught a glimpse of the big seiner getting its catch on board—lowering the boat considerably in the water—then running its net out again.

  The dispassionate, disembodied voice came over the air once more. “Five minutes remaining in the opener; I say again, five minutes remaining.”

  Liam went back to watching the sky. Either everyone had slowed down or in the short space granted to him he had adjusted to the pace of the job. He felt like someone had switched him from 45 to 33 1/3. Everything took on a dreamy, slow-motion quality. There was plenty of time to spot traffic, forever to notify Wy, an eternity for her to find them safe passage. The loud jumble of excited voices over the earphone receded, and all he could hear was the sound of his own words, concise, deliberate, heavy with importance.

  Slap. “Cessna on floats at ten.”

  Poke. “We’re sneaking up on the red plane again; fall back, fall back, fall back.”

  Nudge. “Watch out, there comes that 172 again.”

  Point. “Trooper plane at two, trooper plane at two.”

  “One minute remaining in the opener; I say again, one minute remaining.”

  The Cub’s circles seemed to tighten, and Liam’s entire focus narrowed to five square miles of sea and air. Planes, boats, fish seemed to blur together; he heard his own voice speaking, saw his own hands moving, felt his own eyes roving back and forth, looking, watching, waiting.

  “—ten seconds to closing, eight seconds, seven seconds, six seconds, five, four, three, two, one … The herring opener for seiners for the Riggins Bay District is now closed; I say again, the herring opener for seiners for the Riggins Bay District is now closed.”

  Wy immediately straightened out the Cub, heading it away from the scene on a southwest course. “What’s it look like, Cecil?” There was no immediate answer, and she banked right and made a relaxed sweep north to look over the situation from what Wy considered a safe distance and from what Liam, returning slowly and reluctantly to real time and space, did not. He squinted at the sky as if he’d never seen it before. It had never seemed so blue. “Is it really over?”

  Wy was busy going into a tight circle and didn’t answer.

  Directly below, one of the big processors had come alongside Cecil’s fifty-two-footer. There was a widemouthed hose stuck into the bulging seine net, busily vacuuming up the herring penned there and sucking it into its own hold. The hose was transferred to Corseiner’s hold, where it sucked up everything there, too. Alex was next in line with a catch a third the size of Wolfe’s. Mike’s catch looked smallest of all, but then he’d been busy for much of the opener fending off the encroaching gillnetter, which Liam privately thought was a little greedy of him—surely in a ball that size there was more than enough herring to go around. He knew better than to voice this thought in present company, however.

  The other boats, the ones that had not fouled themselves in their own nets or had their sides stove in by someone else or whose engines had not failed them at the crucial moment—or whose crews had not mutinied—had done well, if not as well as the first three boats on the scene. Everybody had fish in their nets, including one tardy soul who failed to close up his purse in time. Over the radio for all the fleet to hear, he was commanded by the Fish and Wildlife officer in the air above to open his seine and let the fish go. It was one of the larger of the lesser catches, and it took a minute for the skipper to bring himself to do it.

  “I say again,” the Fish and Wildlife officer’s voice said sharply, “F/V Bonnie Doon, you have exceeded the time allowed to fish; open up your seine.”

  The Bonnie Doon opened up her seine, and the teeming mass of herring boiled out into open water.

  “Ouch,” Wy said. “There goes about forty-five grand, swimming away. Cecil, quit sitting on your thumb and tell me how we did!” There was no answer, and she cursed. “Hang on, Liam.”

  “Wy,” Liam said apprehensively. “What are you doing?”

  “Just hang on.”

  “Wy!”

  She waited for an opening and when it came, dived toward the big seiner, pulling up again at what Liam felt was the last possible moment. He was so terrified he couldn’t catch his breath, let alone scream. “Cecil, goddammit, what have we got?”

  It was with real gratitude that Liam heard the radio crackle into life. “Hold your goddamn horses, flygirl. We’re busy.”

  “Well, get the lead out, I want to know if I get new wings for my Cub!”

  The other planes were standing off, no doubt conversing impatiently with their own skippers. Wy flew a lazy eight pattern over the fishing ground and back around Dutch Girl Island for about ten minutes before Cecil came on again, while Liam indulged himself in fantasies of her slow and painful death, preferably at his hands. “Hold on to your drawers, fly-girl. Looks like we got about a hundred sixty tons between the three of us, maybe a little less.”

  “What’s the percentage?”

  Liam could hear the grin in Wolfe’s voice. “The Japs say it’s looking good—about fifteen.”

  Wy’s whoop was exuberant and deafening. The stick between Liam’s knees came back hard and the Cub went into a steep climb. “You buckled up, Liam?”

  “Wy? Wy, what the hell are you doing! Wy! WY! God-dammitohshitohshitohshiiiiiiiiit!”

  She took them up to 2,500 feet, and they were cruising at 125 miles per hour with all the air room in the world between them and the next plane over when she put the Cub into a shallow dive, building up speed until they hit 140 miles per hour. She pulled back on the stick and pushed in the throttle and whooped again as they sailed around in a picture-perfect loop.

  They regained level flight at precisely 142 miles per hour at 2,010 feet. “There,” Wy said, and turned to grin at Liam. “We done good, Campbell. Goddamn, but we done good!”

  Liam spoke between clenched teeth and meant every word. “I am going to kill you, Chouinard.”

  She laughed, the sound full of triumph. “Let’s fuel up and head for home, stud! We are rich!”

  Twelve

  Back in Newenham, Liam unfolded himself carefully from the little Cub and stood erect to blink in the sunlight. He felt strangely light-headed, elated, possibly even erring on the side of euphoric. He’d spotted herring and survived. You are feeling your immortality, he thought, and grinned involuntarily.

  “What?” Wy said, pausing in the act of tying down the plane.

  “I’m just feeling my immortality,” he said.

  She stared at him. “What?”

  He waved a hand. “Never mind. Where’s the Fish and Game tie-down?”

  Her gaze sharpened. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “She’s a fellow officer. Figured I should introduce myself.”

  “Oh. Okay. That way.” She pointed. “That’s their office, that little blue building between the Era hangar and Ye Olde Gift Shoppe.”

  The Fish and Wildlife Protection officer was unloading her cameras. Liam tapped her on the shoulder
and stuck out a hand. “Hi, I’m Liam Campbell.”

  She straightened and squinted at him. “Right, the new trooper, my opposite number. Charlene Taylor. I heard you were out there with us.”

  “You did? How? I didn’t know I was going myself until last night.”

  She grinned. “Never underestimate the power and scope of the Bush telegraph.” She raised a quizzical eyebrow. “I thought that was my job.”

  “It is,” he said, fervently enough to make her laugh. “It’s all yours. I ain’t doing that again never nohow not ever.”

  “I don’t blame you,” she said with a twinkle. “It does get a little hairy during herring.”

  She was about fifty, a stocky brunette with laugh lines radiating from the corners of her eyes and mouth. She didn’t look even the least little bit wound up, whereas Liam’s legs were still shaking from the effects of the loop and he could feel the strain and stress of the past hours humming through the very marrow of his bones. Adding insult to injury, her uniform shirt wasn’t even sweated through, the brown fabric holding its neat creases and sporting the requisite number of badges and patches and nameplates and insignia. Liam formed a silent resolve to have the blue shirt of his branch of their mutual service pressed and on before another day passed, if he had to force someone to get out their iron and ironing board at gunpoint.

  “What were you doing up there, anyway?” Taylor said, bending back over the camera.

  “Partly a favor to a friend, partly an ongoing murder investigation on Bob DeCreft.”

  She stood erect again, startled. “Bob DeCreft? I hadn’t heard that was murder, I thought he just walked into his own prop.”

  “Does that happen a lot?”

  “I wouldn’t say a lot,” the fish hawk said thoughtfully. “It happens. Not very often, but it does happen, even with old-timers who know better. Especially during breakup, when everyone’s working twenty-six hours out of the twenty-four to get ready for fishing season. What makes you think it was murder?”

  “His p-lead was cut.”

  She stared at him, shocked. “What?”