“Thanks,” Sara said, and went to stand next to the captain’s chair, feet spread to ride out the plunging motion of the ship. No one was taking a step without holding on to or leaning up against something.
He looked at her. “All assholes and elbows today, eh, XO?”
She was slightly shocked at the use of profanity, but recovered enough to say reproachfully, “I thought that was an aviator’s expression, sir, unbecoming a sailor.”
The corners of his mouth quirked. She saw it, and dared to smile. “I just hope we don’t get something else thrown at us today, XO.”
Ostlund touched his headset, listened, and spoke into the mike around his neck. “Captain, the helo has their man and is on its way to the St. Paul clinic.”
Everyone raised binoculars. The hull of the Chugiak Rose was by now the barest line appearing and reappearing on a violent green horizon, but the bright orange of the helicopter showed briefly as it sped toward the island, which also kept appearing and reappearing in the mist and the sleet. It was getting dark, too.
“Lieutenant Sams says the guy’s in a bad way. He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Best speed for the clinic,” the captain said, “all they’ve got.”
“Aye aye, sir. Lieutenant Sams wants to know if they should refuel when they get to the island and then go look for the Terra Dawns crew.”
The captain looked again at the southeastern horizon. It looked not just dark, Sara thought, but black with ill-tempered weather. “Tell them yes. Tell them to take a run right after they deliver the injured man to the clinic, see if they can get some idea of what direction the rafts are drifting.”
Probably onshore, Sara thought, as the wind was blowing from the southeast. It would depend on how far to the west off the coast of St. George they had foundered, though.
“After which they are to return to base, refuel again, and stand by. We’ll recover them when the weather eases up.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
They came abeam of the Lee Side, the inflatable bobbing between them, and pulled the bow around enough to give the small boat as much shelter as could be found in seas like these. Shortly afterward Hank Ryan was on the bridge, making his report to the captain. The ensign was not pleased. “They could have handled it themselves, sir. There were five of them and one of him.”
“He had a weapon, they said.”
“Yes, sir, but not a nine-millimeter automatic.”
“What was it, then?”
“A twenty-two pistol that hadn’t been cleaned in twenty years. If he’d tried to fire, it would have blown up in his hand. Always assuming he’d thought to load it first.”
“I thought that they said he was firing at them.”
Ryan shook his head. “They were mistaken, sir.”
“We sent ten men and a small boat in twelve-foot seas to go to the rescue of a ship’s crew held hostage at the point of an old, unloaded twenty-two pistol?”
“Yes, sir.”
There was a long, thoughtful silence on the bridge, which lasted through a complete swing of the pendulum, all the way to port, all the way to starboard.
“Maybe we could bill them,” Sara said.
Nobody laughed, but then Sara hadn’t been joking.
The door to the bridge opened and closed, and a seaman brought a slip of paper to Ops. He read it, and read it again. Sara, watching him, caught his eye. He held out the slip of paper. She read it. She, too, read it twice. She returned it to Ops and took an unobtrusive step back, she hoped far enough out of range.
Ops gave her a look of burning reproach, waited for the tilt of the deck to be right, and then stepped up to take Sara’s place next to the captain’s chair. “Captain, we’ve just received a message from District.”
The captain swiveled to give Ops a quizzical look. “Do not tell me what I don’t want to hear, Ops.”
“Sorry, sir. District says a Here on the last patrol found a fishing vessel over the line. They want us back up there.”
Captain Lowe was not a man given to public invective, but Sara, standing a little behind him, did notice his ears begin to redden. He slid to the deck and said curtly, “I’ll be in my cabin.”
“Aye aye, sir,” she said smartly.
The door closed behind him.
“Cap’n below,” Tommy said.
Ops looked at Sara. “Think he can talk them out of it?”
“Whoever talked District out of anything?” If Sara hated anything about the Coast Guard, it was that operational decisions were made on shore. The job was difficult enough without someone looking over your shoulder from Juneau.
It didn’t help to know that the fishing vessel in question would be long gone by the time they got there. It wasn’t like they wouldn’t have seen the Here and known what that meant.
Ops said tentatively, “He could always just say no.”
“He could,” Sara said, and left it at that.
Lowe wouldn’t, and they both knew it. “Get me a weather report for the Maritime Boundary Line,” she told Ops, and followed the captain below.
JANUARY
MARITIME BOUNDARY LINE
BY A MIRACLE THEY had picked up every single crew member of the Terra Dawn, close enough to St. George that the small boats were able to ferry them in and drop them off in St. George’s harbor. “It was one hell of a ride in, though,” Ryan told Sara.
It was the first time in the twelve months he’d been assigned to the Sojourner Truth that Sara had seen the young ensign look tired. “Hit the sack,” she told him. “You can write your report tomorrow. We’re underway for the line. Holiday routine until we get there.”
“Aye aye, XO.” He gave her a tired smile and stumbled below.
They plowed northwestward for the rest of the night. No aids-to-navigation malfunctions were reported, no fishermen fell overboard, and no skippers went apeshit, which marginally mollified the tone of the e-mails coming at them from District, and, more important, let the crew catch up on their sleep. FSO Kyla Aman worked a heroic fourteen-hour shift in the galley, producing, among other various and succulent things, peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, Rice Krispy treats frosted with a melted mixture of chocolate and butterscotch chips, and strawberry shortcake, dedicating mess cooks to carry trays of said bounty up to the bridge, the wardroom, and the engine room as well as putting out loaded trays in the crew’s mess. It was amazing how the aroma of baked goods lightened the crew’s mood.
They were coming up fast on the line, the seas having smoothed out between the last outgoing storm and the next one incoming, which, Ops had assured her with far too much insouciance, was breathing right down their necks. She made the mistake of asking him what the next storm looked like, and he replied, one eye on the door, “Well, XO, the last one they called a hurricane.”
“And this one?”
“Well, actually, this one they’re calling a hurricane, too.”
“Get away from me, Ops.”
“Getting away from you immediately, ma’am.”
But for now the seas had smoothed out to a moderate six feet and the Sojourner Truth was taking the swells easily. The horizon was lightening, and if Sara was not delirious, she thought she might even have seen a patch of blue, high up and far away, true, but there nevertheless.
They arrived on station after lunch. “Captain on the bridge,” Tommy said.
“XO,” Lowe said, climbing into his chair. “What’s our status?”
“We’re on the MBL at fifty-nine lat, almost dead on a hundred eighty degrees long, sir. We have traffic on the radar, fifteen processors, cruising the Russian side. None on our side, and none on visual.”
“Sir?” Tommy said from the radar screen.
“Go ahead, Tommy,” the captain said.
“We’ve got someone over the line.”
The captain swiveled around in his chair. “Say again?”
“We’ve got a ship over the line, and I mean way over the line, sir.” She manipulated t
he cursor ball and read down the column of numbers on the lower-left-hand side of the screen. “About two and a half miles over, sir, and not looking like she’s going to turn around anytime soon.”
Lowe looked at Sara. “They have to know we’re here.”
She shook her head. “Just our turn in the barrel, sir, I guess.”
“XO?” Tommy said.
“What?”
“There’s another ship out there, too. It’s closing on the first one.”
Sara’s eyes met the captain’s for a pregnant moment.
“Plot us a course to intercept,” Lowe said, the words barked. “Give me an ETA. Ops, get on the sat phone to District.”
Ops took the sat phone and retired to the deck aft of the wheelhouse in good order.
“XO, when we come up on them, I want you on the conn.”
“Aye aye, Captain,” Sara replied very correctly.
Ops came back into the bridge and presented himself to the captain, very nearly going into a brace. “I’m sorry, Captain, the sat phone is not connecting today.”
The captain vaulted out of his chair and said curtly, “I’ll try to raise District on e-mail.”
“Aye aye, sir.” She waited for the door to close behind him. “Captain’s below.” She pretended not to hear when someone gave a low whistle.
She walked over to stand behind Tommy at the radar. “Where are they, Tommy?” Tommy pointed. Sara looked up to the horizon. They were headed south by southwest, and they and the blips on the screen were now both well and truly inside the Doughnut Hole.
The Doughnut Hole was a roughly triangular area in the center of the Bering Sea, far enough away from the United States and Russian coastlines to form a no-man’s-ocean outside of any nation’s jurisdiction. It had been so overfished during the last century that it was now closed by international treaty to allow the native marine species, especially pollock, to repopulate. What the fishing vessel the Sojourner Truth was now in pursuit of thought they could pull out of the Doughnut Hole was a question only they could answer. Sara had a feeling that Captain Lowe, who had been tried pretty far on this patrol, was determined to have an answer.
An hour later one of the lookouts posted above called down a sighting. Out came the binoculars.
Sara braced her legs against the swell and peered forward. The rise and fall of the waves intermittently obscured the stern, but not for so long they couldn’t make out the name.
“I don’t fucking believe this,” Mark Edelen said.
“No gear in the water, though, ma’am,” Tommy said, eyes glued to binoculars.
“I’ll be with the captain, Chief,” Sara said.
The door to the captain’s cabin was closed. Sara rapped on it hard enough to make her knuckles sting. “It’s the XO, Captain.”
“Enter.” She opened the door and she stepped inside. “Close it, XO.”
She closed the door without comment. The captain was sitting at his desk, in front of his computer. He didn’t look happy, and Sara didn’t imagine that what she was about to tell him would make him any happier. “Captain-”
He jerked a thumb at the monitor. “Make ready to go to flight quarters, XO.”
“-the fishing vessel has been- What?”
“Go to flight quarters,” he said. “Make ready to bring our helo back on board.”
“Helo? I thought our helo was in St. Paul.”
“So did I.”
“Captain,” Sara said, and found herself momentarily and uncharacteristically at a loss for words. She tried again. “Captain, St. Paul is over three hundred nautical miles from here. They can’t make it that far on their fuel tanks.”
“Not without a good southeasterly,” he agreed. “They refueled midway.”
She thought quickly, and remembered the cutter they had passed the day before going in the opposite direction. “The Alex Haley?”
He nodded.
“They did, what, a hot refueling?”
“They did an in-flight refueling,” the captain said, “a little over the midway point.”
Sara wondered for how much longer Lieutenants Sams and Laird were going to be members in good standing of the United States Coast Guard. “Sir, far be it from me to leap to the defense of an aviator, but this just doesn’t sound like something either Lieutenant Sams or Lieutenant Laird would do. They’re both pretty cautious.”
“Not all that cautious, it would seem,” the captain said with dangerous calm.
“They’re going to be dragging by the time they get here,” Sara said, appalled at the notion of bringing the helo back on board with exhausted aviators at the controls.
“Yes,” the captain said, but he didn’t fool Sara. He was almost vibrating with worry. And rage.
All she could think to say was “Why?”
“Apparently they’ve got a VIP on board.”
She gave up trying to maintain any semblance of cool and said, “Who absolutely positively has to get here overnight.”
“That’s right.”
“Who? And for god’s sake, why?”
“They won’t say. They say the VIP will explain upon arrival.”
Sara tried to think of a reason so important to put a helo on the nose of forty-five-knot winds and fly three hundred miles, and failed. “Are they going to make it?”
“They’ve got something of a tailwind, so I’m told. That hurricane of NOAA’s is giving them a little push in our direction.”
“I just bet it is,” Sara said.
“And then the e-mail went out again before I could ask District what the-what they’re up to,” Captain Lowe said, gesturing toward the computer. “But not before I got us a letter of no objection.”
By which was meant, District was leaving the method of pursuit and interdiction of the fishing vessel they’d caught in the Doughnut Hole up to the discretion of the captain of the Sojourner Truth.
She opened her mouth and he waved her to silence. “I know, XO, we say we don’t shoot anybody over fish. But I’m tired of these guys stepping all over us. I want to throw a little scare into them. Let’s send them home with a story to tell about how crossing the line into U.S. territory is, to paraphrase that known felon, Martha Stewart, not a good thing.”
“You can shoot at these guys with my great good will, Captain,” she said cordially. “You can sink them and I might be so upset I’d have to make myself another cappuccino.”
He looked taken aback. “I beg your pardon, XO?”
She met his eyes. “It’s the Agafia, sir.”
JANUARY
THE MARITIME BOUNDARY LINE
ON BOARD THE USGG CUTTER SOJOURNER TRUTH
CAPTAIN LOWE RETURNED TO the bridge, Sara on his heels. “Flight quarters,” he said. Everyone stared.
“Flight quarters,” he repeated.
“We’re bringing our helo back on board,” Sara said when nobody moved.
Everyone stopped staring at the captain and started staring at her.
“Flight quarters,” she said patiently.
“But, XO, the Agafia,” Ops said. He even pointed at the outline of the ship nearing a threateningly black horizon that also seemed to be moving, only toward them instead of away. “We’re half a mile off and they’re still way inside the exclusion zone.”
“Flight quarters, Ops,” the captain said in a deceptively gentle voice. He even smiled.
“Aye aye, sir,” Ops said.
Hats were whipped off smartly and the news was piped to the crew. Shortly thereafter phones began to ring as various members of the deck crew called the bridge to see if they were serious. Assured that the bridge was, they began to assemble aft, not without a lot of nonverbal communication that indicated a certain lack of faith in the sanity of the entire command structure of the U.S. Coast Guard. Shortly thereafter the hangar was retracted, and as if that was the signal, the radio sparked into life, signaling the approach of the helo.
“Tallyho!” Mark Edelen said, pointing, and they all looked ea
st to see a bright orange speck against the now black clouds boiling up out of the south.
“Put our nose on the seagull’s ass, Chief,” Sara said.
“Aye aye, XO,” Chief Edelen said. “Helm, zero-seven-zero, all ahead full.”
“Zero-seven-zero, all ahead, aye, Chief.”
“XO,” the captain said.
“Sir?”
“Get aft. I want that VIP standing in my cabin talking fast thirty seconds after they hit the deck.”
“Aye aye, Captain,” Sara said.
She hit the portside hatch at not quite a run, registering by the wind on her cheek that the temperature had risen a couple of degrees since she’d last taken the air on deck, and slid down the ladder with her elbows on the railings.
“Hey, XO, you’re out on deck without your float coat,” said Seaman Rosenberg as she trotted past. She wanted to flip him off but it didn’t suit either her rank or his.
She hit the main deck and fetched up behind a cowling. The helo was running up on the stern about a hundred feet up. They throttled it way back and approached the hangar deck on tiptoe, nose down, tail up. The closer they got, the smaller the deck looked to Sara. The swell was increasing in height, pushed up by the approaching storm, and the stern bobbed and weaved like Muhammad Ali. Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.
The helo made it over the taffrail and hovered over the hangar deck.
It was ten feet from touchdown when the ship slammed down into the sea and the deck slid out from beneath it. The superstructure of the ship stopped shielding the helo from the wind and a good forty-knotter caught her upside the head. Whoever was driving wisely decided that discretion was the better part of valor and hit the throttle, roaring off to port, circling around, and coming up again on the stern.
Sara crouched down behind the cowling, the force of the wind threatening to pull her hair out by the roots, and worked at reswallowing her heart. The LSO was crouched against the exterior of the hangar. “You okay?” he yelled, or she supposed he did. She saw his lips moving, but she couldn’t hear him over the wind, the all ahead full the Sojourner Truth had going on. She gave him a thumbs-up, and then they both heard the second approach of the helo and he duck-walked forward to stand in front of the hangar and guide them in.
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