“Understood, Arctic Wind, stand by,” Sara said, and turned.
USCG Captain David Josephus Lowe was a short, stern-faced man who made up for his lack of height with a determinedly erect carriage. A strict, by-the-book disciplinarian redeemed by an equally rigid sense of fairness and an elusive sense of humor, his command was nothing if not restful. So long as the crew did their jobs when and where he told them to and did them well while they were at it he had no complaint. If they didn’t, he had no difficulty in saying so and, if the problem proved to be repetitive, in meting out swift and sure punishment at mast. There was comfort in knowing always exactly and precisely what was expected of you, and security in knowing the rest of the crew knew it, too. Sara had served in far worse commands.
“XO,” Captain Lowe said, settling into the armchair bolted to a metal pole to the right of the bridge console. He always sat a little forward, the crew speculated, so his legs wouldn’t stick straight out like a little kid’s in a high chair.
“Captain,” she said, facing him and going unconsciously into a brace that mimicked PO Barnette’s, shoulders squared, feet spread for balance, hands clasped at the small of her back. “We’ve got a longliner fishing pacific cod approximately forty miles north-northeast of our present location.”
The door to the bridge opened and she looked over the captain’s shoulder to see Doc Jewell enter the bridge. She waited until he was standing next to her to continue. “They’ve got a crew member with a three-inch J-hook in his eye. Their skipper says he’s got the hook stabilized with gauze and tape.”
“Is he conscious?” Doc said.
“Yes, and his skipper says he’s mobile, which I guess means he can walk.”
“Can he climb into a basket?”
“The skipper also says he’s not set up for a hoist by helo.”
“Why not?”
“He says he’s got wires and… stuff all over the deck.”
The captain looked at Doc. “You feel comfortable taking an EMT over in a small boat and bringing the guy back here?”
Even in the dim light of the bridge Sara could see that Doc was less than thrilled at the prospect. “Even with the hook stabilized, Captain, we’d have to get him down the side of his ship and up the side of ours. And then the action in the boat coming over. A hook in the eye…” Doc shook his head. “I don’t like the odds of getting him on board without doing more damage.”
“How long is the longliner?” a new voice said, and Sara turned to see the two aviators standing behind her.
“A hundred and seventy feet,” she replied.
The aviators exchanged a look. “In a hundred and seventy feet,” Lieutenant Laird said, “we can hoist from somewhere.”
Lieutenant Sams nodded.
The longliner skipper was not happy. “I’m not set up for a hoist,” he repeated, his apprehension coming through loud and clear. “I’ve got two masts and a guy wire running from the bow to both masts to the stern, and trash and crap all over the deck.”
“How long will it take us to get into range for the small boat?” the captain said.
“Two and a half hours, sir,” Tommy said.
“Devil’s advocate, Captain?” Sara said. “If we slow down to come onto a flight course to launch the helo and they can’t get the guy off, it’ll take that much longer for us to go get him by small boat.”
Harry Sams’s lower lip pushed out into something perilously close to a pout, and Roger Laird opened his mouth, but before either aviator could start whining the captain called it. “Let’s try it by helo first, night vision goggles.”
Doc looked immensely relieved. “Agreed,” he said.
“Aye aye, Captain,” the aviators said in unison and then left the bridge in a hurry, like they were afraid the captain might change his mind.
The operations officer showed up, in gym shorts, sweaty and out of breath. “I’m sorry, Captain, I was working out, I didn’t hear the pipe.”
The captain jerked his chin at Sara, who said, “We’ve got a hundred-and-seventy-foot longliner forty miles off our starboard bow. He’s got a deckhand with a three-inch J-hook in his eye.”
Ops, Clifford Skulstad, a slim, intense lieutenant in his late twenties, whistled. “That’s gotta smart,” he said. “The aviators tell me we’re trying an NVG hoist?”
“Roger that,” Sara said, and Ops went to the nav station to coax the sat phone into operation, which he alone on board seemed to be able to do.
“Flight quarters,” the captain said, and everyone on what was now a very crowded bridge pulled off their caps and stuffed them into their belts or hung them on bulkheads or wedged them behind handrails. Ensign Hank Ryan, the helo communications officer, donned mike and earphones and started turning things on. As the closed-circuit television overhead warmed up, they saw the hangar telescoping back and the helmeted and vested hangar deck crew scurrying around. On the sat phone Ops called Anchorage to arrange a Life Flight to meet the helo in Dutch Harbor, and then got the name of the ship’s agent and called her, too.
“I relieve you, Chief,” Sara told Mark.
“XO’s got the conn,” he said, followed by a chorus of ayes acknowledging the handover.
“Helm, steer three-four-zero, all ahead full,” Sara said.
“Three-four-zero, all ahead, aye,” Charlie said.
Sara took up station in front of the control console and watched the bow pull to port. The Sojourner Truth was a joy to handle, quick to respond, a Cadillac of a ride. There wasn’t five knots of a prevailing breeze, and most of the wind now coming across the port bow was created by their own forward motion. There was no pitch and no roll to speak of. Conditions could not be better for a helo launch. If it was daylight, they would, in Coastie vernacular, be riding the seagull’s ass. “Maintain course and speed,” she said.
“Maintaining course and speed, aye,” the helm responded, and everyone turned to watch the television screen as the helo was rolled out onto the hangar deck, its rotors unfolded, and the flight crew climbed in. The rotors began to turn, slowly at first, accelerating into a blur.
“Black out the ship,” the captain said, and everything except for the nav screens was turned off, including the running lights, because any light no matter how small could white out the night vision goggles. It wasn’t exactly legal but it was an acceptable alternative to crashing the helo.
“Go for launch, Captain?” Ryan said.
“Go,” the captain said. Ryan spoke into the microphone and almost instantaneously the whine of the helo ratcheted up to where it drowned out the Sojourner’s engines. A dark shape rose into the air off their stern, nosed into the wind, and roared past their port bow.
“Secure from flight quarters,” the captain said, and everyone put their caps back on.
“Resume course zero-three-zero, all ahead full,” Sara said.
“Zero-three-zero, all ahead full,” the helm replied.
Everyone strained their eyes at the distant masthead light on the northeastern horizon. Sara couldn’t get the image of the fisherman with the three-inch J-hook in his eye out of her mind, and she knew she wasn’t alone.
Five minutes later Laird’s voice crackled over the radio. “Longliner Arctic Wind, this is Coast Guard Rescue six five two seven.”
“Coast Guard, Arctic Wind, go ahead.” The skipper sounded unenthusiastic but resigned.
“Yeah, Arctic Wind, Coast Guard, could we get you to turn out some of your lights? We’re operating with night vision goggles and light kinda gets in the way.”
“Roger that, Coast Guard.” There was about five more very long minutes’ worth of conversation as the helo and the longliner identified which lights should be turned out.
“Yeah, Arctic Wind, Coast Guard, that’ll do it. We’d like to hoist from the portside stern area, I say again, portside stern. Can you get your guy out there?”
“Roger that, Coast Guard.”
Sara peered through the forward windows, trying by divine
telepathy to follow what was going on on board the longliner. After a moment a smaller light came on next to the brighter masthead light off their starboard bow and lifted up and away. “They’re off,” she said.
Laird’s voice came over the radio. “Cutter Sojourner Truth, Coast Guard helo six five two seven, we’re off and en route for St. Paul. Our compliments to the deck crew, they were flawless.”
“Roger that, six five two seven,” Ops said. “Cutter out.”
“Helo out. See you tomorrow morning.”
No one cheered out loud but there was a communal exhalation of breath. Ensign Robert Ostlund, the landing signals officer, entered the bridge. “Everything by the book and then some, Captain. The deck crew performed just about perfect.”
“Coast Guard cutter Sojourner Truth, longliner Arctic Wind.” If the guy had been anything but a Bering Sea fisherman he might have been crying, he sounded so relieved. “Thank you. That was amazing, I didn’t know you guys could do that.”
“All part of the service, Arctic Wind,” Ops said. “Cutter Sojourner Truth out.” He clicked the marine radio back up to channel 16 and said over his shoulder, “Let’s see if he remembers that the next time we board him.”
“Well done, all,” the captain said. “XO, pipe the news to the crew. Wait, belay that last,” he added. “Let them sleep. And holiday routine tomorrow until noon.”
“Aye aye, Captain,” Sara said. She’d have to revise the plan of the day, but the flight deck crew, some of whom were also boarding team and fire team members, would work better with the extra rest.
Within sixty seconds the bridge was empty of everyone except Sara, Chief Edelen, PO Barnette, Tommy Penn, and Seaman Razo. In all, the SAR case had taken about ninety minutes from the time the first call came in from the Arctic Wind to the last communication from the helo.
Mark grinned at Sara. “Coast Guard,” he said.
NOVEMBER,
HONG KONG
NOORTMAN CHOSE HONG KONG as his base of operations for the new commission, partly for its location and partly because anything could be had there for a price. Also, he was a little lazy and he liked the idea of working from home.
Maritime freight was his specialty: his vocation and his avocation. He’d spent much of his childhood on the docks and the marinas of Singapore, watching as the cargoes of the world’s nations were off-loaded from the gigantic maw of one ship’s hold to be freighted to another dock and deposited in the hold of a different ship bound for another port. Fruit from New Zealand. Vegetables from Chile. Beef from Argentina and lamb from Australia. Computer chips from Japan, waybills beautifully inscribed with Japanese characters that looked more like art than a cargo manifest. From Thailand, beds and dressers and tables and chairs made of teak, from the United States entire ships full of Ford Escorts, from Canada wood products from raw timber to wood pulp to newsprint. From China textiles and toys, from Jamaica sugar, from Sierra Leone cocoa.
He would scribble down the cargoes he saw each day on a notepad and at home look up the countries of origin and destination in his father’s atlas, a tome so large that as a boy he was barely able to lift it down from its shelf. Its pages were filled with colorful illustrations of the world’s great mountains and canyons and rivers and deserts, and maps topographical, agricultural, and political. He mooned over the oceans and the coastlines of continents and fell headlong in love with the perfect natural harbors created by islets and inlets and peninsulas, places like Sydney and San Francisco and Seattle.
Not so surprising, certainly not from a boy born to a nation made up of fifty-nine islands, with only two percent of its land arable and a less than amicable neighbor across its only border. It followed that the lifeblood of that nation would be carried by ships, and that much of that nation’s industry would be concerned with ships and the sea.
Apart from inclination and familiarity, there were personal reasons as well. He was following in his father’s footsteps, a respected man on the Singaporean waterfront. The elder Noortman was a Netherlander who had gone to sea when he was sixteen and fetched up on the shore of the South China Sea, there to meet and marry a less than beautiful but very well connected Singaporean woman whose father had retired from twenty years at sea to a post with the Board of Customs in Singapore, and who brought his new son-in-law into what he regarded as the family firm almost immediately, which would have been impossible otherwise for a white man with no connections.
Noortman’s father rose slowly but steadily in rank, achieving a local reputation for ability and an international reputation for probity, by which was meant that he stole no more than what was generally recognized as a reasonable percentage of the worth of the goods that passed beneath his mark. Neither did he flaunt his extracurricular earnings in a vulgar display of wealth, which he well knew would provoke envy and suspicion, because he was already laboring under the handicap of his white skin. He maintained a modest if well-appointed home in the Or-:hard suburb for his wife, son, and two daughters, who were sent to pubic school, and the son on to the National University of Singapore.
Young Noortman graduated in the middle of his class, although he could have achieved high honors were it not for the admonishments of his father, whose own credo was never to draw any more attention to oneself than absolutely necessary. The younger Noortman’s degree was in business administration, but his real education took place on the docks, working nights and weekends for the Board of Customs, learning the arcane language of international shipping, no little facilitated by his flair for languages. This polyglot state had been inculcated almost from birth, as his father decreed that the family would speak Chinese on Mondays and Tuesdays, Dutch on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and English on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Noortman expanded his international vocabulary in school, studying French first, which introduced him to the Romance languages, and then Russian and Japanese, to the point that one day an instructor wondered out loud why he was majoring in business instead of in languages. He invited the young man out for dinner at a first-class restaurant run by an expatriate Filipino chef. There followed further discussion of Noortman’s tendency toward the multilingual, what he might do professionally with such an agile tongue, and seduction. Noortman thoroughly enjoyed both the chicken adobo and the sex.
From his instructor, an Israeli who had found the continual state of war on his nation’s borders to be aesthetically distasteful and had emigrated the day after he was of age, Noortman gained, among other things, a working knowledge of two more languages, Hebrew and Arabic. The instructor was moved to say, “There is a real future in government for a young man with your talents.”
Noortman, to whom double-entry bookkeeping did not come naturally, reported this to his father that evening-his father had decreed that he would pursue his studies from home, not from a room in a dormitory on campus-with the admittedly faint hope that he might be allowed to take his future into his own hands. The elder Noortman had replied calmly, “There is a real future in the customs service as well.”
Resentfully, Noortman went back to school and continued to wrestle with interest rates and amortization and debentures. When he graduated he made a second bid for freedom, requesting permission to pursue a master’s degree in languages. This, too, was denied, and his resentment, festering beneath a dutiful facade, grew into a bitter anger. Still dependent on his father’s largesse, he accepted an offer of employment in the customs service. If he was not quite under the direct supervision of the elder Noortman, then he was close enough for his father to critique his job performance every evening after dinner. Which he did, with a devastating eye for every tiny error and a dispassionate manner of speaking that was withering in the extreme. The younger Noortman endured these critiques with outward calm, but he was already looking for a way out.
By this time his clothes occupied half the closet and drawer space in the Israeli instructor’s home. He told his father the instructor was continuing to tutor him in languages, which was technically the
truth. The elder Noortman, in the magisterial way that his son had come to detest, decided this was acceptable. Freighters, containerships, bulk carriers, tankers, military vessels of every size and shape, cruise ships, they all docked at Singapore, and they carried multinational crews. Many languages could greatly enhance one’s future in the customs service.
One day, a year into full-time employment in the family business, he was told by his father that he had located a suitable bride for his son, a well-connected young woman whose father was a relation of the Goh family, a scion of which currently occupied the prime minister’s office. The Goh family’s reservations over allying themselves with a half-breed had been overcome by the general respect with which the elder Noortman was regarded by people who mattered. The matter was fully explained to the younger Noortman, who walked out of his father’s study that evening with the sound of a cell door slamming in his ears.
The following week, a wiry Chinese man in his late thirties had appeared in the customs office. He asked for Noortman in Mandarin.
“I am Noortman,” the young man replied, in that same language.
The Chinese looked at him with an indifferent gaze. “Not you.”
At that moment his father appeared and shepherded the Chinese into his office and closed the door behind them. They were in there for quite some time, and when the Chinese left the elder Noortman escorted him to the door and all the way out to his car, an honor usually accorded only to high government officials on fact-finding missions.
“Who is the Chinese man you spoke to today?” Noortman asked his father over dinner that evening.
His father returned an impassive stare. “He is nothing and no one to you. Do not speak of him again.”
The next day the younger Noortman noticed a great deal of activity on and around a freighter moored three docks down from the office. When he went to take a closer look, he was waved off by a man with an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder and no uniform.
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