Blindfold Game

by Dana Stabenow

  “Understood,” she said. “How long before someone comes looking for us?”

  “In this weather?” He shook his head. “The Hercs will be patrolling, but we aren’t exactly keeping to the last route we filed with District before the e-mail went out, and right after that the comm got shot out. And we’re the only cutter in the Bering Sea at present. The Alex Hale/M be back in Kodiak by now. They’ll be looking for us, though.”

  She nodded. “District hasn’t heard from us in a while, and they’ve probably got red flags up all over the place. Ops, you remember that freighter we saw up on the line? The one we all figured was lost?”

  He blinked behind his glasses. “Yes,” he said, although it was obvious that he was remembering the incident as if it had happened years ago instead of days ago.

  Sara didn’t blame him. If she’d had the luxury she would have felt like that herself. “What was its name, do you remember?”

  He thought. “Star of Wonder? Star of Night?”

  “That’s star of wonder, star of light, Ops,” Sparks said.

  Ops snapped his fingers. “The Star of Bali. Sorry, XO, I must be a little out of it.”

  “What was it’s last port of call?”

  “Petropavlovsk.”

  Sara looked at Hugh.

  “Petropavlovsk,” he said, “was where Noortman’s partner, Fang, and his employers planned to board the ship Noortman found for them. It was also where the Agafia was sent for repairs and maintenance in November.”

  The silence was heavy and long. At the end of it Sara said, “You think there were two ships.”

  He nodded. “And one was a decoy.”

  “The Agafia.”

  “Yes, whose activities were designed to draw your attention away from the Star of Bali. Where was the Star of Bali headed?” he said to Ops.

  “Seward.”

  Hugh looked at Sara. “Seward’s only a hundred miles from Anchorage and that’s road miles, not as the crow flies. The range on the mobile missile launcher Peter sold them is-”

  “Two hundred miles, I remember,” Sara said. “Which means they don’t have to get to the dock to launch.”

  He hadn’t thought of that, but she was right. The terrorists could launch as soon as they were within range, which meant while they were still well out at sea.

  “We’ve got to find them, Sara. Now.”

  JANUARY

  BERING SEA

  WHEN DID WE PASS her?“‘

  “On the eighth, XO.”

  “Six days. Damn, damn, damn.”

  “What?” Hugh said.

  “She’s slow but she’s not that slow,” Sara said.

  Hugh and Sara and Ops and Tommy and the chief were hunched over the chart table, staring at the Transas screen as Sara right-clicked and dragged and dropped them all the way up the Aleutian Chain and back down again.

  “You said they wouldn’t want to draw attention, right, Hugh?” Sara said. “My vote is for Unimak Pass. It’s like the intersection of Main Street and First Avenue for the North Pacific maritime freight fleet. All the freighters on the great circle route between Asia and North America run for the lee of the Aleutian Islands. Most of them transit Unimak Pass. If the Star of Bali is trying to maintain a low profile, that’s the way she’d go.”

  Hugh looked for flaws in her argument and found none. “Then that’s the way we should go.”

  “Yes, well, XO, there’s another problem.”

  “Of course there is,” Sara said. “Serve it up, Ops.”

  “We got weather coming straight at us.”

  Sara sighed. “Ops, I though you said we had a problem.” The ship lurched but everyone was already hanging on to something. “It’s just another storm.”

  Ops shook his head. “This one’s worse, XO. The last Bering Sea offshore forecast we got before our comm got shot to hell was for sixteen hundred yesterday. Today we’re looking at a thirty-knot wind, eighteen-foot seas, rain and snow and freezing spray.”

  “And?”

  “Tonight the wind will be south to southeast, forty to forty-five knots, seas eighteen to twenty-one feet. And did I mention the rain and snow and freezing spray?”

  Sara looked at him.

  He spread his hands. “Sorry, captain.”

  There was a strained silence on the bridge, broken only by the faint whistling of wind as it forced its way between Plexiglas and bulkhead.

  “The captain’s dead, Ops,” Sara said.

  “Cap-XO-ma’am, I-”

  “And I don’t accept your apology for the weather. There is absolutely no excuse for it, and I’ll expect you to do better in the future.”

  There were a few smiles, lightening the tension. “Besides,” Sara said, “there’s no choice here. We’ve got to go after the Star of Bali, and we’ve got to go now.”

  “Try out the old girl’s sea legs,” the chief said.

  Sara gave him an approving smile, which brought an answering grin, both witnessed by Hugh. There was a degree of intimacy there that raised his hackles.

  “Tommy,” Sara said, unheeding, “plot us a course for Unimak Pass, best speed.”

  “Aye aye, XO.”

  They stood away from the plot table to let Tommy crunch numbers on the computer.

  “It’s almost six hundred miles and she’s got a six-day start on us, XO,” Chief Edelen said. He looked at Hugh. “And this gentleman has already proved to us that he’s just guessing here.”

  Hugh met the chief’s eyes, saw how they shifted to Sara’s oblivious face, looked back at the chief, identified the expression there all too easily, and couldn’t find it in himself to kick a man while he was down. “That’s right, I am. But I’m thinking the Agafia offered herself up as bait for a reason. She fired on us, don’t forget.”

  “Not likely,” the chief said with some sarcasm. “XO, why not just commandeer us the first freighter or tanker we see? They’ll have all the sat comm we need.”

  Sara hooked a thumb at the storm. “Always supposing we find one in this slop, all we’ve got for ship-to-ship communications are the handhelds and the emergency radios from the life rafts. What’s the range, line of sight?”

  He was silent.

  “Right,” she said, “so we launch and row over. Probably won’t lose more than half the boarding team.”

  “Then let’s make a run for Dutch Harbor and yell for help from there.”

  “We could do that,” Sara said. “And the Star of Bali could get close enough to shore to launch her weapon.”

  “If she has a weapon.”

  “If she does,” Sara said.

  There was a heavy silence. Hugh broke it. “I’m starving. When’s chow?”

  She glanced up at the digital clock on the wall, forgetting that it had been shattered in the strafing. Ops followed her gaze and looked at his watch. “Lunch should be served in the wardroom shortly, XO.”

  Sara felt suddenly and unutterably tired. “Can you find your own way there?” she said to Hugh.

  “Sure, but what about you?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  He followed her out the door and down the ladder. They both heard “Captain’s below” but neither chose to acknowledge it. “You should eat, Sara.”

  When she didn’t answer, he said to her back, “They’re looking to you to lead them into battle and to get them home after. Hungry has never been your best mood. Eat.”

  That expressive back stiffened, relaxed again, and her shoulders slumped a little. “All right.”

  Again she deflected hints that she should sit at the head of the table, in the captain’s chair. Hugh sat next to her. Seaman Wooster began serving steak and potatoes. FSO Aman was pumping up everyone’s red blood cells. Sara was pretty sure the day’s menu had called for macaroni and cheese.

  Hugh piled her plate high and she ate. She even thought it was pretty good, although later on she couldn’t for the life of her remember what she had put into her mouth. Hugh seemed pleased, and afterwa
rd he let her go to bed, which was all she wanted. She fell into her bunk fully clothed and sank into a deep, dark, dreamless sleep.

  Hugh stood in the doorway and watched the face of his dream girl, the cap she hadn’t bothered to remove a little awry, mouth slightly open, maybe even drooling a little into her pillow. He stepped inside her stateroom long enough to ease her shoes from her feet and to cover her with her sleeping bag. Why the sleeping bag? he wondered, and then remembered how much she hated to make the bed.

  It was a very utilitarian shoebox of a room, desk and shelves on one side, two bunks on the other, but he would have known it was Sara’s room on sight. She had always had the ability to transform any living space into something uniquely her own, from her room when she was a kid in Seldovia, to the tent on the hill in back of her house the three of them had shared as a secret hideaway, to her dorm room in college, to the skanky-Kyle was right about that-apartments that had been all they could afford when they were together, and now here. Her clothes were neatly folded, there was a poster of Jimmy Buffett on one wall, and her walkaround coffee mug was a giveaway from the Kodiak public radio station.

  And the top bunk was, of course, filled with books. Books to do with the sea and sailors, naturally. Hugh was pretty certain that Sara owned a copy of every sea story ever written. She kept a fair representation on board, he saw now, one of the Hornblowers, one of the Aubrey-Maturins, a history of the Coast Guard, a biography of Frank Worsley, Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember, a book on knot tying, and a collection of sea shanties. Between How to Build a Wooden Boat and a one-volume collection of biographies of woman pirates he found Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz. He pulled it down and thumbed through it, to find that she had done her usual thorough job of reading, with massive amounts of underlining, highlighting, dog-earing, and marginal notations.

  “XO? Oh. Excuse me, Mr. Rincon.”

  Hugh replaced the book and stepped into the passageway, closing Sara’s door firmly behind him. “Yes?” he said to Ops.

  Ops looked uncertain. “I need to speak to the XO about something.”

  “Listen, Ops-What is your name anyway? No one has called you anything but Ops in my hearing since I came on board.”

  Diverted, Ops smiled. “Yeah, Coastie custom. We call each other by our job title instead of our name. Ops. XO. Supply. EO. Like that. Probably due to the continuous rotation of crew. Easier than learning everyone’s names.”

  “So what is your name?”

  “Oh. Clifford Skulstad. Cliff.”

  Hugh stuck out a hand. “Pleased to meet you, Cliff. I’m Hugh Rincon.”

  Ops took Hugh’s hand and felt himself being steered firmly away from the XO’s cabin. He looked back over his shoulder at her door and said, “But I have to talk to the XO about-”

  “Tell me something, Cliff,” Hugh said. “Who’s third in command on board the Sojourner Truth?”

  Ops looked startled. “Uh, I am.”

  “I thought so. Your commanding officer needs some sleep if she’s going to be worth a shit when we catch up to the Star of Bali. Why don’t you see if you can’t handle any problems that come up over the next six or eight hours?”

  Ops looked horrified. “What if there is an emergency?”

  “If there is an emergency,” Hugh said gravely, “I think she would expect you to wake her up. However,” he added, “just for today, why don’t you set the gold standard for emergencies a little higher than usual?”

  He smiled again when he said it, but Ops had the uncanny feeling he was speaking not to a pleasant man with an engaging manner, but a very alert Doberman with very sharp teeth. “Good idea,” he said. “I’ll just take care of any problems myself.”

  “Excellent,” Hugh said. “Here’s your first. Where do I sleep?”

  JANUARY

  THE BERING SEA

  ON BOARD THE STAR OF BALI

  SOME ROMANTIC WITH A severe case of myopia had named her the Star of Bali. Five hundred fifty feet in length, steel hull, single screw, best speed in ideal circumstances eleven knots. In less than ideal circumstances she could probably make seven or eight, and in a storm such as this Fang hoped she would have enough power to keep her stern to the storm. Built in Italy in 1973, she was old for a cargo ship and the reason she was a tramp steamer now. At her age it was all she was fit for, that or hauling molasses, traditionally the last job of the elderly cargo vessel before she was retired to the scrap yard.

  Ten miles short of Unimak Pass, something went wrong with the engine. Their best speed was cut in half, with a nasty front squeezing through the narrow gap between Unimak Island and the Krenitzin Islands at fifty knots an hour, pushing them relentlessly back in the direction from which they had come.

  They knew this because Smith was watching their progress on a handheld GPS. Before that, he’d been talking a lot on the satellite phone. Then calls had suddenly ceased. He gave no explanation as to why, but he looked cold with fury.

  Fang was just cold.

  He looked around the container in the half-light provided by the gas lanterns. Most of the men looked numb with discomfort. They’d stopped playing mah-jongg when the ship began pitching so heavily that the tiles would no longer stay on the board. Mostly they just stayed in their hammocks now, rolling out only to pee. Fang had to force them to eat.

  They were well trained and disciplined and they had been ready to hold out until the time came. Now the schedule was delayed and they would have to remain in their hammocks for however long it took the ship’s crew to fix the problem and get the ship back on course. Fang didn’t like some of the looks he was getting, and halfway to seasick himself he didn’t like the extra effort he had to put into keeping them in line. It didn’t help when they could listen in on the crew’s shouted conversations on deck. They were speaking Tagalog, of which none of Fang’s men knew more than a few words, but it wasn’t hard to identify the trace of panic.

  The draft through the soft top was constant and bitter cold. Ice was forming on the insides of the container and the outsides of their sleeping bags. The irregular thudding sounds they heard from the deck, thuds followed by crunches and splintering cracks, was outside their experience and therefore more cause for alarm. It had started two days before, had continued almost without stop, and was interfering with everyone’s sleep. Because of the continual activity on deck, they hadn’t been able to reconnoiter to discover what the sounds were.

  The problem was that when something went wrong here there was nowhere to go and no one to ask for help, even if they could have without fear of immediate arrest and imprisonment. If they had been in Singapore Strait there were a hundred little bays and inlets and islands they could hide in, living off the coastal fishermen in their tiny villages until the problem was fixed.

  Fang wanted to go back to those tiny villages, to the Malacca Strait, to the South China Sea. He wanted to seek out that plump little woman upon whom he would father many sons, he wanted that snug little house in a Shanghai suburb. He had decided on a house instead of an apartment because it was his intention to take up gardening, exotic flowers in incandescent colors to brighten the view as he looked through the windows. And his children-he would father only sons, naturally, but a tiny daughter would not be unwelcome, someone he could spoil, because of course his sons would be raised to be hardworking and self-sufficient, just like their father.

  Something intruded on this rosy picture of his future life. For a moment he couldn’t identify it, and then his head jerked up. The dull rumble of the freighter’s engine had changed. It was running very roughly, missing beats, almost clacking out its distress.

  Smith noticed. “What is it?”

  Fang held up his hand, palm out. “Can’t you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  At that moment the freighter’s engine coughed, spluttered, and died.

  JANUARY

  ON BOARD THE SOJOURNER TRUTH

  “YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE LET me sleep so long, Ops,” Sara said. />
  “No, ma’am,” Ops said, not looking at Hugh.

  Truth was, Sara felt immeasurably more alert after four unbroken hours of sleep. She’d been wakened by the pipe telling the crew that dinner was being served in the galley and had been made very aware that it was well past time to pee. She staggered down the hall to the head, and when she got up again, she looked down and saw that blood had dried all down the front of her uniform. Captain Lowe’s blood.

  The deck lurched beneath her feet and she thought she was going to throw up. Instead she went back to her room for clean clothes and returned to the head, where she took a long, hot shower, bracing herself against the rolling of the ship so she could stay beneath the showerhead. At least the terrorists hadn’t taken out the hot-water heater.

  Half an hour later, wearing clean clothes, she felt like a new woman. “Did I miss dinner?” she said, surveying the empty serving dishes on the wardroom dining table, the half-empty dining plates before each officer. Looked like country-fried steak. Her mouth watered.

  “Wooster!”

  Wooster’s pale face peered out of the wardroom pantry. “Yes, sir?”

  “The XO needs food,” Ops said. “Go down to the crew’s mess and go through the serving line for her, will you? A little of everything.”

  “Coming right up, sir.” Wooster vanished.

  “Ops,” she said, “you’re sitting in my chair.”

  He met her eyes and said evenly, “No, ma’am. I’m not.”

  The only empty chair was the captain’s chair at the head of the table. Her eyes traveled around the table and she saw nothing on any face but expectation, acceptance, and approval.