Dana Stabenow - Blindfold Game

He wasn’t sure if it was the fourth day or the fifth day of the voyage when Jones pulled out the satellite phone and dialed a number. Chen watched through the forest of swaying hammocks as Jones spoke in Korean, a language Chen recognized but did not speak himself.

He watched Jones listen, speak a few more words, and hang up. He wondered why Smith and Jones hadn’t just brought walkie-talkies, which would have been cheaper and just as effective on five hundred fifty feet of ship, but Jones stowed the phone and raised his voice to speak to the men. “It is time. Arm yourselves.”

Almost before he finished speaking men began to roll out of hammocks and drop to the floor, indifferent to the muck they stepped in. Elbows were thrown in the rush to get to their gear but no one took it personally. They were all professionals, this wasn’t their first or even their tenth op, and there was the added bonus that to go to work they had first to get out of the container.

Chen was interested in seeing how Jones was going to accomplish that, and was impressed in spite of himself at Jones’s combination of imagination and finesse. He used four very small amounts of plastic explosive slapped to the four corners of the doors, with a remote detonator triggered while the men crouched behind the cargo lashed between them and the doors. The resulting explosions were four loud pops barely distinguishable from each other and completely drowned out by the noise of the ship’s engine and the rush and plunge of water against the hull. All four hinges were destroyed and the two doors, still locked and sealed, fell outward as one unit, the top edges landing on the next container over. The doors separated a little down the middle, twisting, but they had to kick the bottom half of the left door free before they could climb out and shinny down the two containers stacked below them to the deck.

It was tricky because the ship was experiencing a roll of about five degrees. The prevailing wind appeared to be coming out of the southeast, Chen guessed at around twenty-five to thirty knots, and it was cold enough that ice was beginning to form on the outsides of the forty-foot containers stacked three deep on the deck. He felt a sudden desire to get to the bridge immediately for a look at the barometer.

But this was Jones’s show; Chen was just the hired help. He called up the specs of the vessel in his head. She was an aging catcher-processor three hundred forty feet long, with a crew of a hundred twenty-five. They’d smuggled themselves on board in an empty container, one of a dozen that the ship’s crew was confidently expecting to fill with filets of Bering Sea pollock and Pacific cod.

Fifteen men going up against a hundred twenty-five might seem like bad odds, unless the fifteen were armed as well as Smith and Jones’s were. Chen checked the magazine of his AK-104, the smaller, lighter, faster version of that classic assault rifle that won the Vietnam War, and, as always, felt reassured. Thirty rounds in the hands of someone who knew where to put them were always capable of calming hysterical crowds.

“Let’s go,” Jones said, and they filed out behind him into a dark, dank hold that smelled of salt air, fish, and rust.

“IFS YOUR WIFE ONline one.”

“Thanks, Eve.” Kyle picked up the phone. “Hey, baby.”

“Hey. Just wanted to check in.”

“You all settled?”

“We’ve got rooms on the top floor overlooking the bay for one quarter the summer rate. One has a small kitchen, so we don’t have to eat out unless we want to.”

“How are the kids?”

“A little restless. I took them to the SeaLife Center today. There were a bunch of kids there from the local school, and I talked their teacher into taking Gloria and Eli along on the tour.”

“Lilah?”

“How much longer are we going to have to stay down here, Kyle?”

“A few days,” Kyle said.

“When are you coming down?”

He took a deep breath. “I’m not coming down, Lilah.”

“But you said-”

“I know what I said.”

“Kyle-”

“I can’t, Lilah. I have to stay here. I’m the head of the task force. If Hugh’s right, if something’s going to happen, I have to be here to work it.”

There was another silence. When she spoke again her anger was obvious. “When this is over, you and I are going to have a conversation.” He winced. “I know.”

IN SEWARD, LILAH HUNGup without saying goodbye and stood for a moment, staring unseeingly out at the wind-whipped surface of Resurrection Bay. Behind her, Gloria was reading Green Eggs and Ham to Eli, hitting hard on the last word in each line so her little brother would get that it was written in rhyme. He was making those deep, rich chuckles that only seem to come from five-year-olds.

If it hadn’t been for Gloria and Eli, Lilah would still be in Anchorage. She’d be at work, maybe involved in whatever it was that had Kyle so spooked. Here there was nothing to do but tick down one interminable hour after another.

“The hell with it.” She found the phone book, looked up a number, and dialed.

“Kenai Fjord Tours.”

“Hi. Do you guys do any boat rides at this time of year?”

ON BOARD THE SUNRISE WARRIOR

ARE WE THERE YET?“Vivienne Kincaid said. Dylan Doyle grabbed for a handhold when the Sunrise Warrior heeled to port as they ascended the weather side of the swell. ”We are there, Vivienne,“ he said with a faint hint of County Cork in his accent, ”but be damned if I know where there is.“

“Do my ears deceive me? You’ve finally found a stretch of water that has the North Sea beat?”

Doyle gave a snort of laughter. “It might be that I’m wishing I was on my way to Foinaven.” The ship rolled over to starboard and skidded down the opposite side of the swell into the trough. Heaving green seas gave way only to dense ice fog in every direction. Vivienne was hovering over the radar, attention fixed on targets.

“They’re icebergs,” a new voice said at her shoulder.

She looked around to see that Kevin had arrived on the bridge.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“It’s ice, and we’re drifting into it.”

“There are two echoes with the same course and doing the same eleven knots. Of course they are ships. Not to mention which, the last reports have the ice pack stuck at fifty-nine degrees.”

Kevin’s lips tightened. Doyle grinned at him, which didn’t help.

Footsteps sounded and Ernie Hart and Darryl Hickey tumbled into the room. Jack Lestenkof, Concetta Dalilak, and Evelyn Caudle were right behind them. They were dressed in orange jumpsuits, hard hats, and their Deep Sea Defender vests. “We got ‘em?” Jack said. “Vivienne? We got ’em?”

Vivienne looked at Doyle. “Full steam ahead.”

Everyone whooped except Kevin, although he looked less sullen than he had a moment before. Doyle worked the controls, and the engines responded with an eager roar. They closed to within half a mile of the closest echo, and the outline of another ship materialized out of the fog.

“And what to our wondering eyes should appear,” Vivienne said. She was tempted to stick her tongue out at Kevin, but resisted.

“Hello, Marinochka,” Doyle said.

“Oh, shit,” someone else said.

In one of those rapid Arctic shifts the weather had decided enough with the fog and the snow and the ceiling was rising rapidly, all the better to see the scene before them. Everything was still green and gray, sky, water, everything except for the rich red of the blood draining from the carcass of the little narwhal tangled in the long net the catcher-processor was at present winching in.