Dana Stabenow - Dead in the Water

She woke up to realize it was coming up on dinnertime and her turn to cook. She straightened and stretched.

The gray-green gulf stretched out endlessly in every direction, a snowcapped peak with a faint plume rising from it floated in a ring of fog off the port beam, and Ned was emptying a pot on deck.

He was about to toss its contents over the side and she raised her voice. "Hold it, Ned."

"Nothing but garbage," Ned growled when she came up next to him.

Kate sorted through the pot's contents. "We've got four red kings-"

"Not in season."

"-a chicken halibut-"

"Which can't weigh fifteen pounds."

"-and a half-dozen Dungeness. Big ones, too," Kate said admiringly.

"What you want them for?" Ned asked suspiciously.

Kate gave him her sweetest smile. "I'm on dinner tonight."

She found the biggest cooking pot in the galley, filled it with water and set it on a burner turned on high, and went below to assemble the ingredients for the rest of the meal. The industrial-size refrigerator and freezer were located in a small room set down into the hull behind the hold and the engine room. She descended the ladder with reluctance. She hated the small, square, walk-in freezer in the storeroom. The door was so heavy, she was always afraid it would swing shut behind her, that the bar across the outside would fall into its bracket and she would be locked inside, left to spend eternity between the prime rib and the pork chops. The thought alone was enough to send a shudder down her spine, and she snatched up a can of lard and scuttled out of the freezer, kicking the door shut behind her with an explosive breath of relief.

An armful of salad makings out of the refrigerator and dinner was as good as done.

She busied herself in the galley as the Avilda beat to windward, and her crew that night sat down to a dinner of boiled king and Dungeness crab, halibut deep-fried in beer batter, a mountain of mashed potatoes and, for Andy, a tossed green salad. Ned, Seth and Harry took one look and fell into their seats. Pawing through the pile of cutlery Kate had stacked in the center of the table, each man found the pair of pliers that suited him best and began cracking crab with gusto. Mayonnaise mustachioed their mouths, melted butter ran down their chins, crab juice ran down their arms and soaked the newspapers Kate had spread on the floor, and the empty shells piled steadily higher in the emptied cooking pot she had placed in the center of the table for just that purpose.

When they were through, not a leg or a claw or a shoulder of crab was left, nor was a single piece of the halibut. Harry sat back and patted his belly, expressing his feelings with a loud, satisfied belch. This appeared to be the general consensus. "Jesus, that was good," Seth said, and even Ned nodded grudgingly. Overwhelmed by such enthusiastic, unqualified approval, Kate decided she could get to like these guys, given time. Say about a hundred years. She stretched. "Who cleans up?"

Three thumbs jerked at Andy. Kate grinned at his woebegone expression. "Think I'll turn in. Nighty-night."

"Me, too," Harry said, yawning. "Ned, you take the first watch; Seth, you take the second. Roust me out if there's trouble."

Kate hit the rack and fell instantly into a deep, dreamless sleep.

A thump on the door brought her wide awake. "What?" she croaked. There was another thump and she raised her voice. "What, dammit!"

Harry's voice was already receding down the hallway.

"Roll out. We're making ice."

She groped for her watch and saw that it was barely midnight. Her head fell back on the pillow with a thump.

"Oh, shit." An instant later she was up and yanking on her clothes. Andy's face peered down at her with a bewildered expression. "What's going on?"

"We're making ice."

"What's making ice?"

"Get up on deck and you'll see. And, Andy?" She met his eyes. "Put on all your clothes."

A collection of blunt instruments waited for them in the galley. Kate took a baseball bat and, since he looked confused, chose one of the smaller sledgehammers for Andy. "Can you lift that? Show me. Okay. Let's go."

He followed her, the words of protest dying in his throat when he saw what waited for them on deck.

The weather, predictably, had worsened while they slept. The Avilda labored sluggishly up and down the swells, crashing into waves twelve to twenty feet high.

That was nothing new, but the cold was.

The temperature had dropped as the weather worsened, and in the time it took the salt spray to fly through the air and hit the deck it had frozen into a multitude of tiny pellets that skipped and crackled across the deck, sounding like Rice Krispies after pouring the milk in.

The spray froze to everything it touched, to the deck itself, to the pots stacked on that deck, to the mast and boom, to the rigging attached to the mast and boom, to the superstructure of the Avilda's cabin. Every inch of the surface of the boat that was above water was encased in a sheet of ice. It was already inches thick on the bow and mast, and thickening rapidly everywhere else.

"Sweet Jesus H. Christ on a crutch," Andy said, his voice sounding awed even over the storm. It was the first time Kate had ever heard him swear. "We look like the fucking Flying Dutchman."

Kate cocked her head. It might be her imagination, but she thought she detected a hint of strain in the movement of the Avilda's hull; she seemed to wallow through the next swell, puffing and panting as she went.

Kate advanced to the boom across a terrifyingly icy deck, braced her feet against the raised lip of the hatch, raised the bat and brought it down as hard as she could.

Her feet slipped and she felt the strike reverberate back up her arms. Gritting her teeth, she struck again. A large chunk of ice cracked and fell to the deck. A swell passed beneath the hull, the deck slanted and the chunk of ice slid overboard. She slipped again and almost followed it. From the corner of her eye she saw Andy, openmouthed, look from her to Ned, who was hammering at the bow with a sledgehammer twice the size of the one he held, to Seth, who was perched precariously on the catwalk in front of the bridge, trying to beat the windows clear with a three-foot piece of rebar.

"Beat on it," she growled, and wound up for another swing.

"Beat on the ice?"

"Yes. Hammer at it. Break it off and throw it overboard."

"Why?"

The bat thumped into the mast again. "Because it's heavy. Because we don't have jack shit in the hold.

Because if we let the ice build up, we'll get top-heavy, and if we get too top-heavy it'll make the ship roll over and capsize, and if we capsize we'll go in the water, and if we go in the water, we won't have time enough to drown before the hypothermia sets in." Because the Bering Sea 's just looking for a reason to give Harry Gault what for, she thought. Kate had four years of college, a year's additional training in the most sophisticated police technology, and she'd worked five years in Anchorage, what passed for a city in Alaska. In spite of it all, her Aleut heritage, generations of living on and from the ocean, told her that the sea itself had risen up in outrage at Harry Gault's mean-spirited, spiteful, venemous revenge on Johansen and the Daisy Mae. She didn't think this, she would have laughed out loud if someone had told it to her, but she was convinced of it on some deep, instinctual, atavistic level. Agudar, Master Hunter, had called down the North Wind and called up the sea to punish them, to bring the forces of nature back into balance. "Beat on it, dammit!" she told Andy through clenched teeth. "Beat on it! Break it off!"

Her snarl snapped Andy out of his trance. He closed his mouth, raised his sledgehammer and advanced toward the fo'c'sle. Over the roar of the wind, Kate heard a crunching thud, a pause, another thud, another pause.