Dana Stabenow - Blindfold Game

By the time she got to the armory the rest of the team had donned their orange and black Mustang dry suits, Kevlar vests, helmets, life jackets, helmets, and sidearms. She jerked her chin at the rack of shotguns and said to Chief Petty Officer Marvin Katelnikof, “Break out the shotguns.”

He complied without comment. Katelnikof, a balding veteran with twenty-nine years in, had earned his cutterman’s pin before Sara had graduated from high school. Not a lot surprised him. She accepted a shotgun and headed below to the fantail where the rest of the BTMs were mustering, followed by Katelnikof, who was their designated Russian translator on board. The two Zodiacs had already been lowered into the water with their three-man crews and were now circling back to pick up the boarding teams.

Ryan saw her coming. “You’re stylin‘, XO. Something about Kevlar that really does it for you.” He nodded at the shotguns. “The old man must really be pissed off this time.”

“The Agafias over the line just south of here.”

Ryan whistled low and long. “Man, they’ve just got to push it, don’t they? You’d think they would have learned after the last time.”

Sara scanned the horizon. “Yeah, where’s the Russian Federal Border Service when you really need them?”

Ryan followed her eyes and stiffened. “Hey-”

“I see them,” Sara said, and keyed the mike clipped to her shoulder. “Captain Lowe, XO. I’m seeing a couple of other vessels approaching our location at speed.”

“We have them in sight, XO. There are three vessels, identified as the Nikolai Bulganin, the Nadeshda, and the Professor Zaitsev.”

“So, okay, this is new,” Ryan said. He cocked an eye at Sara. “Do we go?”

“Captain, do we go?”

There was a momentary pause. The wind bit into her in spite of the dry suit, and her face was already damp with salt spray. “Go, XO,” the captain said.

“Yep,” Ryan said, “seriously pissed.” He grinned and climbed over the side to scamper down the rope ladder and drop solidly into the small boat. The rest of the first boarding team followed. “Rrrrrraaaaamming speeeeeeeeeeeed!” Ryan yelled at the coxswain in a passable Animal House imitation. The Zodiac roared away and the second pulled up neatly behind it and Sara led the second team down.

Petty Officer Duane Mathis hated not to be first in line for anything and roared after the first boat. The hull thudded over the top of the chop in a bone-jarring but exhilarating ride. Sara looked over at the coxswain and he was leaning forward, teeth bared as if he wanted to take a bite out of the wind. Mathis was from San Francisco, she remembered, and he’d grown up off the coast of Peru on the deck of his father’s tuna boat. He and Sara had swapped a lot of lies about fishing over this patrol, although it seemed to Sara that the only difference between fishing off Peru and fishing off the Aleutian Islands was the temperature and the species of bycatch.

They stood off as Lowe goosed the Sojourner Truth to overtake the Pheodora, giving the Russian just enough sea room to slow down and no more. If you’re the captain of an oceangoing vessel in the middle of the Bering Sea, ninety miles from the nearest land and that land not under the flag of your own nation, there are worse things than having a two-hundred-and-eighty-four-foot Coast Guard cutter bearing down on your port side with no indication of slowing down before impact, but not many. When the distance between the two closed to two hundred yards the Pheodoras skipper caved and pulled back on the throttle. A moment later a rope ladder was tossed over the lee side.

Sara was first on deck. The conditions of the processor were about what she’d expected, the deck slimy with guts and gurry, lines loose from gunnel to gunnel, and anything with a moving part so long overdue for an overhaul that it all probably ought to have been junked. Ten feet away the deck sported a jagged hole, which disappeared into darkness and whose edge had yet to be cordoned off and flagged.

Seaworthiness had two entirely different meanings on either side of the Maritime Boundary Line. Sara revised severely downward her estimate of how much the Pheodora might fetch at auction. They might just possibly be able to sell her for scrap.

“XO?” her radio said.

She keyed the mike clipped to her shoulder. “Code one,” she said in a mild voice. She didn’t like anything about this situation, but as yet the boarding team had not been threatened, not counting the imminent peril everyone stood in of breaking an ankle tripping over crap scattered across the deck.

“Code one, roger that,” the captain said. “Keep me advised.”

She clicked the mike twice in reply. A man in a bulky sweater and stained pants stepped forward. In heavily accented English he said, “Vasily Protopopov. I am master of vessel.” It came out “wessel” and behind Sara there was a snicker, followed by the flat slap of a hand on someone’s helmet.

Ryan stepped forward. “Captain Protopopov, I am Ensign Henry Ryan of the United States Coast Guard. You have been stopped because you were fishing over the Maritime Boundary Line in American waters.”

Protopopov let his eyes slide past Ryan to Sara. He gave her a long, leisurely once-over. Sara, crammed into her dry suit like chopped pork into a sausage skin, girded about with Kevlar like a medieval knight in his armor and feeling almost that seductive, felt like laughing in his face. Instead, she remained silent, keeping her expression calm and nonconfrontational. Protopopov waited just long enough to make his rudeness clear, and then shifted his attention to CPO Katelnikof, standing at Sara’s elbow holding the shotgun she’d handed off to him in the Zodiac. “No gear in waters,” he told Katelnikof.

Chief Katelnikof, a salty old fart and the last man to agree that women on board ship were a good thing, was already stiff with outrage at Protopopov’s insolence to his executive officer. This blatant untruth did not soften his attitude. He dropped the shotgun from shoulder arms to cradle it in deceptively casual hands, the barrel now pointing at the deck between himself and the Russian captain.

Sara looked aft and saw that Protopopov was correct; the Pheodora’s gear had been reeled on board.

The captain’s voice came over her radio. “XO? Status?”

She keyed the mike. “Code two, Captain.”

The codes were the captain and the executive officer’s way of assessing a boarding situation. Code one was standard operations, no threat. Code three was get us the hell of here. Sara didn’t see any weapons other than their own, but it was a big ship, the crew was obviously hostile, and there were too many windows and doors looking out on the foredeck in which someone with a weapon could be stationed.

Lowe’s voice was full of grim purpose when he responded. “Stand by, XO, and we’ll fix that for you.”

Sara clicked her mike twice in response. Ryan looked at Sara. He was the boarding team officer and the person to whom Protopopov should be addressing his remarks, but the Russian captain had good instincts for spotting a superior officer. Not to mention which, it was the first time since Ryan had rotated on board that she’d come along on a boarding. She jerked her chin and he turned to face Protopopov.

“Captain,” Ryan said, “we have you, with your gear in the water, on videotape, a good mile to the east of the line. As this seems to becoming something of a habit with your vessel, I’m afraid we are left with no option but to seize your ship and your catch and to place you and your crew under arrest.”

Protopopov looked at the boarding teams, both now fully assembled on the deck of his vessel. They each had nine-millimeter sidearms strapped to their waists, and half of them carried shotguns. He raised his head and opened his mouth. His eyes looked past Sara and his sullen expression lightened.