Dana Stabenow - Blindfold Game

“Yes, sir.”

There was a long, thoughtful silence on the bridge, which lasted through a complete swing of the pendulum, all the way to port, all the way to starboard.

“Maybe we could bill them,” Sara said.

Nobody laughed, but then Sara hadn’t been joking.

The door to the bridge opened and closed, and a seaman brought a slip of paper to Ops. He read it, and read it again. Sara, watching him, caught his eye. He held out the slip of paper. She read it. She, too, read it twice. She returned it to Ops and took an unobtrusive step back, she hoped far enough out of range.

Ops gave her a look of burning reproach, waited for the tilt of the deck to be right, and then stepped up to take Sara’s place next to the captain’s chair. “Captain, we’ve just received a message from District.”

The captain swiveled to give Ops a quizzical look. “Do not tell me what I don’t want to hear, Ops.”

“Sorry, sir. District says a Here on the last patrol found a fishing vessel over the line. They want us back up there.”

Captain Lowe was not a man given to public invective, but Sara, standing a little behind him, did notice his ears begin to redden. He slid to the deck and said curtly, “I’ll be in my cabin.”

“Aye aye, sir,” she said smartly.

The door closed behind him.

“Cap’n below,” Tommy said.

Ops looked at Sara. “Think he can talk them out of it?”

“Whoever talked District out of anything?” If Sara hated anything about the Coast Guard, it was that operational decisions were made on shore. The job was difficult enough without someone looking over your shoulder from Juneau.

It didn’t help to know that the fishing vessel in question would be long gone by the time they got there. It wasn’t like they wouldn’t have seen the Here and known what that meant.

Ops said tentatively, “He could always just say no.”

“He could,” Sara said, and left it at that.

Lowe wouldn’t, and they both knew it. “Get me a weather report for the Maritime Boundary Line,” she told Ops, and followed the captain below.

BY A MIRACLE THEY had picked up every single crew member of the Terra Dawn, close enough to St. George that the small boats were able to ferry them in and drop them off in St. George’s harbor. “It was one hell of a ride in, though,” Ryan told Sara.

It was the first time in the twelve months he’d been assigned to the Sojourner Truth that Sara had seen the young ensign look tired. “Hit the sack,” she told him. “You can write your report tomorrow. We’re underway for the line. Holiday routine until we get there.”

“Aye aye, XO.” He gave her a tired smile and stumbled below.

They plowed northwestward for the rest of the night. No aids-to-navigation malfunctions were reported, no fishermen fell overboard, and no skippers went apeshit, which marginally mollified the tone of the e-mails coming at them from District, and, more important, let the crew catch up on their sleep. FSO Kyla Aman worked a heroic fourteen-hour shift in the galley, producing, among other various and succulent things, peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, Rice Krispy treats frosted with a melted mixture of chocolate and butterscotch chips, and strawberry shortcake, dedicating mess cooks to carry trays of said bounty up to the bridge, the wardroom, and the engine room as well as putting out loaded trays in the crew’s mess. It was amazing how the aroma of baked goods lightened the crew’s mood.

They were coming up fast on the line, the seas having smoothed out between the last outgoing storm and the next one incoming, which, Ops had assured her with far too much insouciance, was breathing right down their necks. She made the mistake of asking him what the next storm looked like, and he replied, one eye on the door, “Well, XO, the last one they called a hurricane.”

“And this one?”

“Well, actually, this one they’re calling a hurricane, too.”

“Get away from me, Ops.”

“Getting away from you immediately, ma’am.”

But for now the seas had smoothed out to a moderate six feet and the Sojourner Truth was taking the swells easily. The horizon was lightening, and if Sara was not delirious, she thought she might even have seen a patch of blue, high up and far away, true, but there nevertheless.

They arrived on station after lunch. “Captain on the bridge,” Tommy said.

“XO,” Lowe said, climbing into his chair. “What’s our status?”

“We’re on the MBL at fifty-nine lat, almost dead on a hundred eighty degrees long, sir. We have traffic on the radar, fifteen processors, cruising the Russian side. None on our side, and none on visual.”

“Sir?” Tommy said from the radar screen.

“Go ahead, Tommy,” the captain said.

“We’ve got someone over the line.”

The captain swiveled around in his chair. “Say again?”

“We’ve got a ship over the line, and I mean way over the line, sir.” She manipulated the cursor ball and read down the column of numbers on the lower-left-hand side of the screen. “About two and a half miles over, sir, and not looking like she’s going to turn around anytime soon.”

Lowe looked at Sara. “They have to know we’re here.”

She shook her head. “Just our turn in the barrel, sir, I guess.”

“XO?” Tommy said.

“What?”

“There’s another ship out there, too. It’s closing on the first one.”

Sara’s eyes met the captain’s for a pregnant moment.

“Plot us a course to intercept,” Lowe said, the words barked. “Give me an ETA. Ops, get on the sat phone to District.”

Ops took the sat phone and retired to the deck aft of the wheelhouse in good order.

“XO, when we come up on them, I want you on the conn.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” Sara replied very correctly.

Ops came back into the bridge and presented himself to the captain, very nearly going into a brace. “I’m sorry, Captain, the sat phone is not connecting today.”

The captain vaulted out of his chair and said curtly, “I’ll try to raise District on e-mail.”

“Aye aye, sir.” She waited for the door to close behind him. “Captain’s below.” She pretended not to hear when someone gave a low whistle.

She walked over to stand behind Tommy at the radar. “Where are they, Tommy?” Tommy pointed. Sara looked up to the horizon. They were headed south by southwest, and they and the blips on the screen were now both well and truly inside the Doughnut Hole.

The Doughnut Hole was a roughly triangular area in the center of the Bering Sea, far enough away from the United States and Russian coastlines to form a no-man’s-ocean outside of any nation’s jurisdiction. It had been so overfished during the last century that it was now closed by international treaty to allow the native marine species, especially pollock, to repopulate. What the fishing vessel the Sojourner Truth was now in pursuit of thought they could pull out of the Doughnut Hole was a question only they could answer. Sara had a feeling that Captain Lowe, who had been tried pretty far on this patrol, was determined to have an answer.

An hour later one of the lookouts posted above called down a sighting. Out came the binoculars.

Sara braced her legs against the swell and peered forward. The rise and fall of the waves intermittently obscured the stern, but not for so long they couldn’t make out the name.

“I don’t fucking believe this,” Mark Edelen said.

“No gear in the water, though, ma’am,” Tommy said, eyes glued to binoculars.

“I’ll be with the captain, Chief,” Sara said.

The door to the captain’s cabin was closed. Sara rapped on it hard enough to make her knuckles sting. “It’s the XO, Captain.”