Dana Stabenow - Fire And Ice

Liam knew nothing about herring, but he knew just enough about salmon, Alaska's leading industry before the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay, to ask, "How much of that can you catch?"

"All the fleet, all together? Twenty-five thousand."

"Tons?"

"Tons."

Liam did some quick figuring. "Fifty thousand pounds. Doesn't seem like very much."

"I'd agree with you." She tossed him a quick, tight grin over one shoulder. "If we weren't getting fourteen hundred a ton."

"Fourteen hundred?" Liam's voice scaled up in disbelief. "Dollars? Fourteen hundred dollars per ton?" She nodded, and the dark blond braid bobbed with emphasis. "Jesus H. Christ on a crutch," he said, stunned.

"Best price we've ever had," she agreed. "We usually average around a thousand a ton, but I guess the Japanese are hungry for roe this spring."

Liam tried to do some more figuring, but too many zeros kept coming up on the ends of all the numbers. "How much in an average catch?"

"There is no average catch. You get what you can."

"Well, okay, how much do you want to catch?"

"All of it," she replied promptly. He heard a faint chuckle over the muffs. "But I'd settle for, oh, I don't know, two hundred tons." Suddenly wistful, she added, "Two hundred tons would be one hell of a haul."

"Two hundred for one boat?"

"Yes."

Liam blinked. Two hundred tons at $1,400 a ton was $280,000. "And you're spotting for how many boats?"

"Three."

"And you get fifteen percent of each boat's catch?"

"Yup."

Liam's heart sank. Fifteen percent of $280,000 was $42,000.

For that kind of money, Wy could buy herself a dozen kids, and a judge to give them to her.

Especially if she didn't have to share it.

"Uh, Wy?"

"What?"

"How much do I get for riding back here?"

Wy's voice was mocking, reminding him irresistibly of the tone that big bastard of a raven used whenever he was in Liam's vicinity. "Why, Liam, and here I thought you were suffering through this all for love of me. Hold on to your tonsils."

"What? Hey!"

They banked hard right and descended in a series of tight spirals that had Liam bracing both arms against the sides of the plane and praying for a quick, merciful end.

When he ventured to open his eyes again they were flying low and slow along the inner curve of the long beach, and Wy was cursing softly over his phones. "What's the matter?" he said, panicking again. "What's wrong?"

"This would be such a great business if it weren't for the goddamn fishermen," she said bitterly. "Look at that, I told that son of a bitch two barrels down and one barrel up with the gas pump on the standing barrel. Look down there-can you see any barrels standing up?"

Liam swallowed his gorge and leaned over to look out the window. The ground seemed to be moving by awfully fast to him, but he saw a dozen dumps of 55-gallon drums, from one to five barrels each. None of the barrels was standing upright.

"Well, hell," Wy said, and pulled the Cub around in a large left-hand circle and set it down neatly at the edge of the receding tide, about five minutes ahead of another Piper, a Tripacer this time, coming in right behind her. There were already three other planes on the beach ahead of them.

It wasn't the first beach landing Liam had made, but he had enough trouble with Anchorage International and two miles of paved tarmac stretching out in front of him; a slanted gravel beach was considerably harder on the nerves. Wy taxied to the nearest pile of drums and cut the engine. The Cub shuddered and the prop went from Liam's blurred lifeline to full stop. Wy folded the door out of the way and deplaned. "Come on, Campbell, let's top off the tanks."

"We haven't been in the air much over an hour," he said, climbing out gladly enough.

"With herring you top them off every chance you get," she informed him. "And the dentist didn't put a long-range tank on his plane." There was a pump and a wrench on the gravel next to the barrels. "Come on, help me roll this down." He joined her and they rolled one of the barrels to beneath the right wing and stood it on end. She went to work on the cap with the wrench.

"So," he said, feeding one end of the hose into the drum, "when do we know if or when we can go fishing?"

"Fish and Game said there might be an opening last night, not that there would be for sure. They'll be out here themselves already"-she nodded at the bay-"either on a boat or in a plane. Probably in a plane."

"Maybe the 206 taking off after us."

She nodded. "Maybe. Probably yesterday they got one of the fishermen to sample the herring, see if it's ripe."

"They trust what the fisherman tells them?" Liam said skeptically.

She gave him a tolerant look. "Why would he lie? He can't sell them green."

"Oh. Sure, that makes sense."

Wy fetched a stepladder from the back of the Cub and stood it beneath the wing.

She climbed the ladder, opened the tank, and fed the other hose in. "Pump," she said.

He pumped. The sun was up and playing hide-and-seek with the cumulus clouds scudding across the sky before a brisk wind. There was a light chop across the bay but nothing serious. From here the boats scattered across the water looked less like an armada and more like the residents of a small boat harbor, a forest of masts and booms on the horizon. "How do they test them?"

"What?"

"How do they test the herring?"

"Oh. They come up on a ball of them and dipnet some out. They break the fish open to look at the roe. When they're ripe, or just about to spawn, the eggs turn a little yellow."

"Yum," Liam said.

"Hey," she said, draining the last of the aviation gas out of the hose before closing the tank back up, "we don't have to eat 'em." She gave the cap a last twist, and grinned down at him. "We just have to help catch 'em and sell 'em."

He couldn't help grinning back. She stood at the top of the ladder, her face and form outlined against the blue sky, wisps escaping her braid to curl around her face, all the hidden lights in her dark blond hair glinting in the sun, her brown eyes alive with mischief. She looked so desirable to him that he knew a sudden wish to pull her off that ladder and tumble her onto the beach. His flesh rose at the very thought. Down, boy, he said to himself, and made a production out of removing the gas pump and closing up the drum. "So most of the herring goes to Japan?"

"Pretty much all of it." He heard her folding up the stepladder and replacing it in the back of the plane. "The Japanese like their seafood, bless them, and they consider herring roe to be a special delicacy."

"Hence the fourteen hundred dollars a ton."

"This year anyway," she said. "Last year it was only a thousand."

"Only," Liam muttered.

"Hey!"

They both turned to see a large man with a red face plowing toward them through the gravel. "What the hell do you think you're doing!"

"Gassing up our plane," Wy said mildly. "What's it to you?"

"That's my gas you're using!"

Wy looked from him to the fuel dump to the dozen other identical fuel dumps within eyesight along the beach. "How can you tell?"

"I told my guys to drop three barrels right about here, and a gas pump and a ladder with them!" The man seemed incapable of lowering his voice. The guy towered over her-towered over Liam, for that matter-and outweighed the two of them combined by at least fifty pounds. He had fists the size of rump roasts and shoulders like cinder blocks. He looked like the Incredible Hulk, and Liam didn't want to make him mad.

Neither did Wy. "Sorry," she said with an ingratiating smile, "we thought this was our dump. We told our guy to put ours here, too. And I brought our ladder with me." She pointed. "There's another three barrels right up the beach, with a ladder lying next to them."