Dana Stabenow - Dead in the Water

"Shouldn't take us more than an hour and twenty minutes, each way, and we'll have fuel to spare, just in case.

I suppose we could."

"Please? I'd like to see for myself the place where whatever the hell it was happened, happened."

He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. "Let me check with Flight Service on the forecast. If the weather's with LIS, we'll do it."

After breakfast Kate left Jack to check in with the Avilda.

Nordhoff, Skinner and Gault were all off somewhere, leaving Andy on watch. "Hey, Kate!" he called across the boats between the Avilda and the boat slip. "And where were you last night, little girl?'

"None of your business," she told him sweetly. "We still leaving tomorrow morning?"

He nodded. "If that part comes in. The skipper doesn't seem to be in much of a hurry."

"Good," Kate said, although she wondered why, after such a successful run, Harry Gault wasn't hot to get hot on the crab again.

"Look what I got!" Andy said, delving into his coat pocket and producing a small object wrapped in butcher paper. He unfolded the paper with exquisite care and displayed the object therein with immense pride.

Kate looked and saw a small rectangular lump of what might have been ivory, carved into the very rough image of a fat, smiling little Buddha. "A billiken," she said.

" 'As a good luck bringer, I'm a honey, to bring good luck, just rub my tummy.' "

"Oh, you know the verse!" Andy said, disappointed.

"This guy came by and asked me if I wanted to buy it. He didn't want to sell it because it had been in his family for six generations, but he was broke and needed the airfare to get home. I didn't want to buy it like that, a family antique and all, but what could I do? The guy said I'd be doing him a favor."

With a superhuman effort Kate refrained from asking how much the guy had charged him for the figurine, and with still another superhuman effort did not tell Andy that billikens had not appeared on the Alaskan scene until the Klondike Gold Rush in 1899 brought the first Orientals into the Yukon and some sourdough thought up the billiken in Buddha's image. She even managed to refrain from asking how someone could just "wander" by the fourth boat in a raft, and was justifiably proud of herself and her restraint.

"Isn't Alaska just the greatest place?" Andy said, beaming. Fortunately it was a rhetorical question and Kate was not required to answer. "Oh, I almost forgot.

Want your check?" He handed her a slip of paper.

"Well, since it's here." She examined the figures written on it, her mouth pulled into a wry expression. $8,300.

Eighty-three hundred smackeroos. Eight thousand three hundred dollars in legal tender for all debts, public and private. No matter how many times she read it, it came out the same.

Yes indeed, Jack Morgan just might live after all.

Folding the check carefully, she tucked it into her pocket and went down to her stateroom for a change of clothes.

Andy watched quizzically when she reemerged on deck and started back across the railing. "Where are you off to now?"

She flashed a grin at him. "Got a date."

He cast his eyes heavenward. "Ask a stupid question."

After extensive research and careful study of the resulting data, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has decreed that on average there are only eight days of sunshine per year in the Aleutian Islands. This day, midway through October, usually the first month of the storm season, was, incredibly, one of them. The storm that had blown the Avilda back to Dutch had blown out again, and on its heels was a high pressure system that stretched as high, wide and handsome as they could see in every direction. The view from five thousand feet up was spectacular.

"I don't believe this," Kate said over her headset.

"Don't believe what?" Jack said. He barely cradled the yoke in one large fist, his feet relaxed on the pedals.

There was no turbulence, and Cecily the Cessna sailed smoothly down the Aleutian sky for all the world like a Cadillac sailing down a freshly paved section of interstate.

"I don't believe that, for one thing," she said, pointing to Jack's relaxed grip. "I don't believe you're steering this crate with one finger."

His look was of mild surprise. "Why not?"

"This is October," she replied. "This is the Aleutians.

This kind of weather doesn't happen in October in the Aleutians. From what I've heard and read, this kind of weather hardly ever happens here at all, during any time of the year. You should hear fishermen talking about the Aleutians when they're back home. The winds alone, the williwaws-they call this place the Cradle of the Winds, did you know that? All my life, listening to those guys' stories, I've thought this place was some kind of hellhole. But look at it," she said with a sweep of her hand, her tone caught between astonishment and awe. "Just look at it."

The islands strung out before them, as far as they could see, in a long, slow, southwesterly curve. The white peaks glowed against the deep blue of the sea, like a string of pearls draped across a shell of blue-tinted mother-of-pearl in a jeweler's window. Each island had its own volcano, rising steeply to tickle at the belly of the sky, and most of them were smoking or steaming or both. The cones were smoothed over with termination dust, which began near the summit of each mountain in a heavy layer of frozen icing, thinning out to a scant layer of vanilla frosting nearer the shoreline. The snow did not so much soften the islands' rugged outlines as it emphasized them. Beneath it, in dramatic shifts of shadow and sunlight, every island was a rough and tumble surge of magmatic rock, thrust violently up from the bowels of mother earth to plunge four and five and six thousand feet and more straight down into the sea.

In those topographical entrails could be read the history of the planet.

"It's like watching the earth being born," Kate said softly. "I've never seen anything like it."

Jack looked as satisfied as if he'd arranged for the Aleutians to be where they were, the day to be as clear as it was and for the Avilda to break down just when it did, all to get Kate in the air at this place, at this time, in his company. For the next two hours they forgot they were on their way to the scene of the mysterious disappearance of two ship's crewmen, and played at sight-seeing and rubber-necking in the best tradition of the American tourist. They flew low over a brief stretch of sand littered with the green glass balls Japanese fishermen use for net floats. They annoyed a herd of walrus sunbathing on another beach, until a bull in the crowd, a magnificent old beast with tusks two feet long, reared up and roared at them, daring them to come on down. Off the shore of still another island they found a stand of sea stacks, weird towers of rock sculpted by sand and wind and engulfed in flocks of gulls and cormorants, and as they banked for another look, Kate saw three bald eagles take wing. Hot springs steamed up from cupped valleys, the tall Aleutian rye grass clustering thick and still green around them.

Kate had a nagging feeling something was wrong, and took a moment to identify it. "No trees!"

"What?"

"There aren't any trees!

Jack looked over at her with a raised eyebrow. "Even I know there aren't any trees in the Aleutians, Kate. And even I know why. The wind blows too hard."

"I know, I know, I just-I'd forgotten."

"There are trees in Unalaska, though." He nodded at her look of incredulity. "But they were brought there.

I was talking to a guy yesterday. There's a stand of firs, planted by the Russians almost two hundred years ago. And it appears they are just now beginning to reproduce."

He looked at her, waiting, and she said approvingly,

"Very good, Jack. Where'd you stumble across all this local color?"