Dana Stabenow - Blindfold Game

“And you think Anchorage might be a target?”

The disbelief in his voice was plain to read. “You never have?”

Joe shrugged. “I heard what your buddy Hugh said last October, same as everyone else, Kyle, but come on. Anchorage?”

“You got family in Alaska, Joe?”

“No,” Joe said. “I’m divorced, no kids, parents live in Michigan along with about a billion other relatives. All of whom are among the reasons why I moved to Alaska.”

“I do have family here,” Kyle said. “And in Seldovia, and a lot of friends in Anchorage.”

“I get that, Kyle, but it’s not like we wouldn’t notice if someone sailed a destroyer up the inlet and parked it at the dock.”

“It doesn’t have to be a warship; all it has to be is a cargo ship with the wrong cargo on board. Bombs aren’t as big as they used to be. Have you watched the news from Iraq lately?”

Joe wasn’t convinced. “Still,” he said.

Many Alaskans shared this odd sense of invulnerability. Partly it was an inferiority complex, in that most Americans, informed by weather maps on the television news, thought Alaska was a small island off the coast of southern California. Partly it was location, twenty-seven hundred miles northwest of and an hour behind Seattle, a place where the polls were still open when the loser in a presidential election was giving his concession speech. Ninety percent of it was owned by the federal government in the form of national forests and parks and wildlife refuges. It was also a bank of raw materials, timber, fish, and minerals upon which the nation could draw when needed and when such a draw was justified by the current price of the commodity. There were only six hundred thousand people in the state and it returned only three electoral votes. As a result Alaskans were defensive and pugnacious in their attitude toward the rest of the nation. “We don’t give a damn how they do it Outside,” a local bumper sticker said.

But they did. They were acutely aware of their unimportance in the national scheme of things, and Joe was no different than any other Alaskan. It made it difficult for Kyle to mount a convincing argument that a terrorist could consider Alaska a target worthy of his attentions.

Joe looked at his watch. “If that’s all, I’ve got to be somewhere.”

And Joe, evidently, remained unconvinced. Kyle, carrying the image of Lilah and the kids headed down the Seward Highway at the back of his mind, yielded to Joe’s skepticism, at least for the moment. “Blonde, brunette, or redhead?”

Joe grinned. “Want me to ask her if she’s got a friend?”

“I’ll have you know I’m a happily married man.”

Joe held his hands up, palms out. “Just asking. You never felt the urge?

Kyle thought of Eve and said virtuously, “Never.”

“Yeah,” Joe said, “right.”

HUGH HELD ON TOthe back of the pilot’s seat, peering through the port-side window at lower Kachemak Bay passing beneath their left wing. “I was born in Seldovia,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the droning of the engines.

“That a fact,” the pilot said incuriously.

Nobody else in the five-person flight crew seemed interested, either, so Hugh retreated to the padded bench that ran across the rear of the flight deck. From there he caught only the merest flash of white glacial rivers between ragged tips of mountains that formed the southeastern edge of the bay he had once called home. That was home to them all.

They’d been only children, he, Kyle, and Sara, one of the many reasons they had banded together almost from birth and by far the least important. Their fathers were fishermen, their mothers a housewife, the city librarian, and a nurse, respectively. Their fathers had fished king crab in the heyday of king crab, from the late sixties, when Lowell Wakefield’s at first idiotic and then visionary idea of creating a market for a brand-new gourmet shellfish came to fruition. All three men, owners and operators of their own crabbers, had done very well indeed, right up until the crash of the king crab stocks in the Bering Sea in the early eighties, and by then they’d made their pile. They were sorry, of course, for the failure of the local canneries around Kachemak Bay, exacerbated and accelerated by the urban renewal following the 1964 Great Alaskan Earthquake. Hugh knew for a fact that the city library would have been out of business were it not for the generous financial support of his father, but those who no longer have to worry about the rent money tend to tune out the woes of their neighbors.

That was something else that set Hugh, Sara, and Kyle apart, and the proximate cause of friction between the three of them and their classmates, the children of those less-fortunate? hardworking? adroit in their political affiliations? pick one-than their parents had been. School in Seldovia was not joy unconfined. Hugh remembered Sara’s tenth birthday party. The sight of Sara, struggling to hold back tears, surrounded by balloons and games and little paper bags full of candies and toys for prizes for guests who never came was one of the more vivid memories of that time.

When his father didn’t have him out on the boat beating ice, anyway. Hugh hated everything about fishing, the endless hours, the numbing cold, the constant heaving of the deck. He suffered from chronic seasickness, which didn’t endear him to his father. No one had ever been happier than Hugh when the king crab stocks crashed at pretty much the very moment he graduated from high school; it meant he wasn’t going to have to carry on the family business at the helm of the Mae R. He went to college instead, in search of a warmer, drier job.

His gift for languages had brought him to his present employment. He’d been recruited right out of Harvard, received his master’s in Russian studies from Georgetown and his doctorate in Asian studies from Princeton while on the job. His mother lost no opportunity to brag about his admission to Harvard, but she bored everyone first in Seldovia and then in Wailea over her son’s graduation from Princeton.

He’d never felt all that Ivy League. He’d spent his childhood in Seldovia chafing beneath the need to get out and see with his own eyes that the rest of the world was really there. He had wanted an education that would get him a job that had him traveling all over that world.

His face stretched into a grim smile. Be careful what you wish for.

They landed in Dutch Harbor two hours after the Sojourner Truth departed the dock. Hugh swore a lot as the flight crew waited him out placidly. When he ran out of breath he turned to the pilot. “Anything you need in St. Paul?”

The pilot regarded him for a moment with a meditative expression. “No, but they may need something from Dutch.”

“Like today’s paper,” the copilot chimed in. He didn’t care where Hugh was going so long as it got him more hours in his logbook.

Hugh looked at the pilot, who was not immune to the siren song of more hours, either. He looked from Hugh to the copilot and said, “Let’s top off the tanks.”

EAST OF AGATTU, IN THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS

THE INSIDE OF THEcontainer smelled like a prison sewer. In spite of the deliberately reduced diet, both chemical toilets were ready to overflow. The floor was slippery with vomit, piss, and shit, and last night Jones had given the order for the stove to be disconnected for fear that the open flame might actually ignite the air. Pirates, mercenaries, and terrorists alike had been reduced to a state of speechless misery.

The cold air whistling in through the cracks and the air holes and the flapping canvas roof was the only thing that made the journey endurable. Chen Ming, Fang’s second in command and suffering from the cold even more than his boss, stayed in his hammock, cocooned inside his sleeping bag with only his nose exposed. Jones was not forthcoming with information, but with the degree of roll they were experiencing Chen was sure they were on the deck of their freighter, which meant they were probably on an older vessel, possibly a tramp freighter.