Blindfold Game

by Dana Stabenow

  She worked where she slept, in the forwardmost stateroom in officer country, a step and a stairway from another set of stairs leading to the comm deck and the captain’s cabin, which was located directly beneath the bridge. XOs, mercifully, slept alone. She used the upper bunk in her room as a rotating library, but every privilege comes with a price. A stateroom to herself meant that under way there was no getting away from the job. There were two telephones in her stateroom, one of which was Velcroed to the head of her bunk.

  As it should be, she told herself. Suck it up, Lange, and stop feeling sorry for yourself.

  There was a knock at the door and she looked up. “Sparks? What’s up?”

  Sparks was the petty officer on duty in communications. He handed her an e-mail and made best speed in the other direction. She read it. “Sparks! Get back here!”

  He returned, reluctantly. She read it again, letting him wait. She even read it a third time, hoping against hope that the letters would form new words. They didn’t. “I am ordering you to tell me that this is a joke.”

  He looked as apologetic as his naturally mischievous face was capable of. “It’s not a joke, XO. I confirmed, and you know how they are, they’ve already held a press conference from the bridge of their ship. I e-mailed my wife and had her check CNN. It’s already aired. They’re en route, all right. They may even beat us back to the line.”

  “You’re fired,” Sara said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sparks said, and added hopefully, “Maybe the Russians will sink ‘em.”

  “I wish. Thanks, Sparks.”

  Correctly reading this statement as his dismissal, he returned to his duty station. Sara relieved her feelings with an uncharacteristic burst of profanity that earned an admiring glance from a passing seaman, and called the captain. “Captain, we’ve just received a heads-up from District. The Greenpeace vessel Sunrise Warrior is en route to the Maritime Boundary Line.”

  There followed a long silence. “What is their purpose on the MBL?” the captain said.

  “According to Sparks, whose wife watched the press conference on CNN, they are protesting the overfishing of the North Pacific Ocean, which they say is causing the precipitous drop in the Steller’s sea lion population in the Bering Sea, the sea otter population in the Aleutian Islands, and the salmon runs in Bristol Bay.”

  There was another long silence while they both thought about the last time they’d had dealings with the Sunrise Warrior. Six months before, Greenpeace had been protesting the taking of bowhead whales in the Arctic Ocean by the Inupiat people who lived there. Television footage had been involved, featuring bloodied whale carcasses being winched to shore and one memorable scene when one of the catch was revealed to be female and pregnant. Sara wasn’t sure the sight of the dead baby whale rolling out of its dead mother’s abdomen had faded from the public consciousness six months later. She knew for a fact that the footage of the Sojourner Truth getting in front of the Sunrise Warrior so the Sunrise Warrior couldn’t get in between the whales and the exploding harpoon heads had not. They were still getting indignant letters from whale lovers all over the world.

  At last the captain said, “Thanks, XO.”

  He was right. There wasn’t much else to be said. At least this time nothing as beloved-or as photogenic-as whales was involved. She hoped. “You’re welcome, captain.”

  She hung up and sat staring at the screen of her computer, trying to summon up enough energy to move.

  Truth was, she was tired. This was the Sojourner Truth’s second patrol in four months, the first one lasting fifty days and this one scheduled for fifty-one, with barely enough time in port between patrols for a crewman to father a child and then out to sea again. They were short two cutters on the Bering Sea, and the remaining fleet had to pick up the slack.

  But she knew that it was as much loneliness and depression as it was fatigue. Her mind started backsliding toward that hotel room in Anchorage three months before. Just the memory made her breath come faster.

  There wasn’t anything she didn’t love about sleeping with Hugh Rincon. They’d barely waited for the elevator doors to close before they were on each other, and she didn’t know now if anyone had been waiting to get on when the doors opened again on his floor or if there had been maids or other hotel staff who had watched them stagger from wall to wall down the hall, see Sara climbing up Hugh’s body and wrapping her legs around his waist. His tie was twisted around to the side and his shirt was missing two buttons by the time she got her key out, and by then he had his hand up her skirt and she had a very difficult time focusing on the lock.

  And then they were inside the room and he had shoved her up against the door and gone down on his knees and his mouth was there and, oh, she couldn’t get her legs open far enough, couldn’t press his face to her hard enough, couldn’t scream loud enough when she came. He got back to his feet and tossed her up into his arms for the three steps to the bed, threw her down, and fell on her before she had a chance to protest. Not that she tried. He didn’t bother undressing, just moved his clothes enough out of the way before he was on her and in her, and that was when he stopped, bracing himself on his arms, looking down into her face with fierce eyes. “Sara,” he said, his voice a husk of sound. “Sara.”

  “Move,” she said, arching up, clawing frantically at his back, and he laughed, deep and low and triumphant.

  He hadn’t slept much that night, and hadn’t let her sleep, either. He was proving to her how much she had missed him, and she knew it, and she didn’t care. He wanted everything she had to give him and he took it without hesitation or apology, tender only when it suited him, rough and urgent when it did not.

  She had reveled in it. She’d never understood other people talking about how the sex had become routine in their marriages. There couldn’t be anything better than married sex, with each knowing exactly what button to push when, that one move that would-

  “XO?”

  Her eyes snapped open to see Ensign Hank Ryan looking in her open door with a quizzical expression on his face. By sheer willpower she forced the color from her face. “What’s up, Hank?” she said.

  “You look tired, XO,” he said. “The cap’n still pissed?”

  She sat up and said briskly, “Captain Lowe doesn’t dwell, Ensign. It’s done, it’s over, and we’re moving on. What’s up?”

  A member of that generation raised by baby boomers, he had no problem serving under a woman and moreover thought Sara was a damn fine officer, and if he also thought she was hotter than a stick of dynamite he was able to hide his admiration beneath a suitably professional veneer. He accepted the implied rebuke without flinching. He had some crew requests for training to discuss, and when he left she turned to her computer to check her e-mail. Hugh’s name in the in-box was like a siren going off. She swore out loud, earning a quizzical look from BMOW Meridian, passing by on the bosun’s mate of the watch’s duty round.

  She swore again, silently this time, resisting the urge to close the door to her cabin, and turned away from the computer and her in-box and the e-mail that seemed to glow in the dark.

  That night in October was the first time they’d seen each other in over a year, since the big fight when she was offered the XO position on “I thought you wanted to join the Peace Corps!”

  He looked at her, still with that saintly patience that made her want to rip his head from his shoulders and hand it to him, and said, “Sure. Someday. When I’m older. When we’re both older.”

  “When we’re retired and too old to be of any use elsewhere,” she freely translated.

  They’d managed to battle their way back from that precipice to maintain an uneasy peace in a marriage that was conducted in at best rare and admittedly joyous fragments of time when they were both in the same town at the same time and at worst with long stretches of separation endured with at least the appearance of compliance.

  Until she’d been offered the XO position on the Sojourner Truth, when it had
been Hugh’s turn to stage a meltdown. “We don’t spend enough time apart already, now you’ve got to go to sea again?”

  “You could move to Kodiak,” she said, her turn to be patient, if not precisely saintlike.

  “And what the hell am I supposed to do in goddamn Kodiak, Alaska, while I’m waiting for you to get back into port? Learn to speak grizzly?”

  This time, the fight had ended with her packing her bags and moving into bachelor quarters on base until her orders came through. She hadn’t called him before she left, either, maybe the one thing she felt guilty about.

  Well. She shied away from thinking about how she’d crept out of that hotel room in Anchorage while Hugh was still asleep. Make that two things.

  But still, it wasn’t like Hugh didn’t know whom he had married. They’d been friends since birth, coconspirators since they were five, and lovers since they were seventeen. During all that time she had never made a secret of her intention to follow a life at sea.

  She tried to imagine that life without Hugh and couldn’t, but truth be told, that was essentially the life she was living.

  There were other maritime jobs, even other Coastie jobs she could have taken and been home for dinner every night, but none of them had either the sense of mission or the freedom of action she craved. With the advent of satellite communications it was true that much of the autonomy of a ship at sea had leached back to the District HQs, but she still dreamed of the day when she would command her own two-sixty-four. It was a dream she had had since her father sat her on his lap in the wheelhouse of the Melanie L, and placed her five-year-old hands on the wheel. Sara could have paid her way to the college of her choice with ease, but nothing but the Coast Guard Academy would do. She wanted ships, and in some atavistic throwback to a more barbaric time, she wanted an armed ship. She had been raised by a commercial fisherman in a commercial fishing town and there had never been any question what service she wanted.

  She’d been lucky in being born American. She’d been lucky in that her father had had friends in the Coast Guard. She’d been even luckier to have been born smart enough and competitive enough and right-brained enough to merit a place in the academy.

  She only wished she could apply those same qualities to her personal life.

  For the first time she allowed herself to say the word out loud: “Divorce.”

  She hated the sound of it. For one thing, it signified failure. For Sara Lange, failure was not an option in any endeavor.

  Even more important was the sense of being not quite complete without him in her life. With Hugh, she never had to explain herself. He always understood what she meant rather than what she said. He was the only person, come to think of it, who understood her relationship with her mother. She wasn’t sure she understood it herself, but somehow Hugh got it.

  Was it only geography that kept them from making it work? No. He worked for a government agency she despised in principle and in practice. She worked for a government service that replaced its personnel around the country and around the world in two- and three-year rotations.

  She said the word out loud again. “Divorce.”

  It sounded just as bad as it had the first time, and she was therefore relieved when the quick rap sounded at her door. “XO?”

  “Yes?” she said.

  The phone rang at the same time Cliff Skulstad stuck his head in with something perilously close to a grin on his face. “We’ve got an incursion.”

  She unhooked the bungee cord that kept her chair from sliding away from her desk with the roll of the ship and was on her way to the bridge before the last word was out of his mouth, with not even a backward look at the screen of her computer and the unopened letter in her in-box.

  THE BRIDGE WAS SILENT but for the whisper of static coming out of the radio and the sound of two hundred and eighty-four feet of metal hull slicing through a two-foot chop. There was a very slight long swell beneath the chop, not enough to slow them down and certainly not enough to cause more than the most imperceptible roll in a vessel with a fifty-foot beam and a three-thousand-ton displacement. The Sojourner Truth was a great ride, even in the Bering Sea, also known as the Birthplace of Winds, where boxcar lows beginning in Kamchatka regularly turned it into a roller coaster for every ship within five hundred miles.

  A swift glance at the captain’s expression told Sara that this was one of the times when he was going to compensate for his lack of height with a serious display of attitude. The helmsman, who looked as if he’d lied about his age to get into the Coast Guard, and not that long ago, either, appeared to be oblivious to the scowling visage glowering out of the captain’s chair, but Sara noticed that his knuckles were white on the small brass wheel. She met his eyes briefly, and winked.

  Seaman Eugene Razo eased off on his grip. He felt better with the XO on the bridge. They all did. It reflected no doubts about their commanding officer’s abilities, it was just that Captain Lowe had a very low tolerance for ineptitude and while Seaman Razo was among the fortunate who had escaped the recent conflagration in Dutch Harbor, he had a lively sense of self-preservation and serious plans for his future that didn’t include official reprimands in his personnel file. He had selected the Attu loran station as his first duty station so he’d have top priority for his next assignment, which meant he could select a ship out of his hometown of Kodiak with a fair chance of getting it. It was his firm intention to run through every black, orange, and white hull in the Kodiak fleet for the next sixteen years, until he retired at full pay to take over his father’s halibut charter business in Larsen Bay. He was engaged to his high school sweetheart, at present studying for her teaching degree at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She would graduate this year and they would be married out of her father’s house in Chiniak in June.

  He stole a sideways glance at Lieutenant Commander Lange, standing with her shoulders squared, her hands clasped lightly in the small of her back, swaying slightly with the roll of the ship. She was taller than he was, he guessed right around five eight, with a lush figure that the baggy fleece uniform did absolutely nothing to hide. It was generally agreed among the enlisted men that Lange was the officer they’d most like to be marooned on a loran station with, but mostly they thought of her as a good officer, smart without being arrogant, friendly without playing favorites, and a good leader without descending into tyranny. She was also, they all knew, targeted for promotion. She’d have her own two-eighty sooner or later. Razo wouldn’t mind serving under her when that happened, so long as her ship was stationed in Kodiak.

  Sara, unaware of the Eugene Razo Seal of Approval she’d just been awarded, saw Razo’s hands relax and faced forward again to watch the bow cleave white water against a gray sky. The old man was a good sailor, but he lacked anything approaching a recognizable social skill. Of course, that was why God made executive officers. She grinned to herself and bent a weather eye forward.

  There was a ten-knot wind blowing out of the southeast, whipping the surface of the water into a froth of stiff white peaks. She raised binoculars to search the horizon. Still nothing. She consulted the display hanging from the overhead, with the Sojourner Truth in the middle of the screen and a series of dots in the upper-left-hand section of the screen moving in an elongated circular route the eastern edge of which defined the Maritime Boundary Line.

  There were a lot of dots. She counted eleven, each of them representing a Russian seafood processor with one- and two-mile-long nets dragging the bottom of the ocean trailing behind, some of which played mother ship to smaller vessels with their own nets out.

  One of the dots was way over the line, with another dot coming up fast behind her from the south.

  “Where’s our target, Tommy?” the captain said.

  “They should be in sight at any moment, Captain,” Tommy Penn replied.

  “Good.” The heavy beat of all four Caterpillar generators and both propellers pushed the Sojourner Truth along at fifteen-point-two knots, better
than anything any of the rust buckets ahead of them could do. Sara had cause to know. It had become almost a habit to head out on patrol and arrive just in time to see the Russian fish processor Pheodora slide over the line from American waters to Russian.

  It happened once and if you were charitable you might think it was a mistake, that the man on watch wasn’t paying attention to his GPS, and okay, you’d let the incursion ride this time. It was not the Coast Guard’s job to interfere with fishers going about the lawful business of making a living.

  A second incursion, you could allow for wind and tide and swell and chop to shove the boat off course. Even a third time, you could make allowances for equipment breaking down. But crew carelessness, bad weather, and instrument failure did not explain five incursions. There wasn’t any excuse, really; the Russians had established a 1.5-mile buffer zone on their side of the line in which no vessels were supposed to fish, specifically to limit the incursions that precipitated incidents like this one.

  All five times the Pheodora‘s skipper had been cagey enough to keep the ship within three hundred yards of the line, so that if a Coast Guard C-130 Hercules on patrol or a helo launched from a cutter appeared on the horizon, one kick to the rudder put the vessel’s bow back over. Given the conservative nature of American interdiction on the MBL, that was enough to cause the Coast Guard to back off.

  This, however, was the Pheodora‘s sixth incursion in two patrols in one calendar year, and this time she’d been caught two miles into American territorial waters. Her gear was out, although the pilot of the Coast Guard Here who had first spotted her had informed them that she was pulling it in fast. The Sojourner Truth had launched her helo immediately and the Here had handed off hot pursuit and continued on its patrol.

  Captain Lowe was a prudent man nearing retirement, not known as a cowboy, but it was obvious to all of them that he had had just about enough. The last time they’d threatened a boarding. This time, Sara was pretty sure, they would be boarding the Theodora, arresting the crew, confiscating the catch, and taking command of the vessel to bring it into Dutch Harbor and turn it over to the federal authorities. Where, Sara very much hoped, it would be sold at auction to the highest bidder and the resulting monies invested in some worthy government agency, like, say, the U.S. Coast Guard.