Оуэн Локканен - Gale Force

Lately, though, he’d had to shut down the computer, leave it in the kitchen if he wanted to sleep. It was torture otherwise, watching the ships pass, each one a potential million-dollar award, and none of them remotely accessible, not for twenty more days at the earliest.

This was the danger with the salvage profession. Heck, it was the danger with any life lived at sea. Sooner or later, you’d find yourself stuck on dry land for a spell of time, and if you hadn’t planned for it—well, it was a prison sentence.

Magnusson was forty-six years old, descended from a long line of blue-water sailors and merchant mariners. He’d crossed the ocean on cargo ships and ocean liners more times than he could count, had been working the sea since before he could drive a car; he’d simply never had time to build out the normal, onshore, storybook life.

And so he found himself in this vast, empty condo, no wife for company, no children or even a dog, just a laptop computer, a list of transient vessels, and a gnawing impatience he feared might just drive him mad.

ON MOST DAYS, the Commodore database looked like a slow-speed video game, an air-traffic control screen on the water. But today, up near the Aleutian Islands, Magnusson saw a hazard alert flashing.

Cargo vessel Pacific Lion involved in deep-water incident, the alert read when Magnusson clicked to open it. Crew evacuated to Dutch Harbor. One survivor still missing.

Magnusson muttered an oath. Stared at the map on the screen, the little dot where the Lion was last reported, the vast expanse of blue around it. Dutch Harbor, Alaska, sat in the middle of the Aleutian Islands, closer to Russia than to any meaningful part of America, literally in the middle of nowhere.

And the Pacific Lion , a 650-foot cargo vessel, was in trouble up there.

WITHIN TEN MINUTES, Magnusson had Commodore headquarters on the phone.

“Nobody’s really sure how it’s going to play out,” he was hearing from a man in the home office named Mueller, a vice president of something, a bottom-line, corner-office, dry-land kind of guy. “Crew abandoned her, expecting the ship would sink, but she hasn’t yet. Just lying there on her side, drifting into American waters.”

Magnusson walked back through his unlived-in condo to the windows. Stared out at the water.

“The vessel,” he said to Mueller. “Is there any sign that sinking is imminent?”

Mueller didn’t answer right away. Magnusson could hear him typing something. “No,” the vice president said finally. “According to the Coast Guard, it looks pretty stable.”

“And the weather?”

“The weather.” Another pause. “Decent for the foreseeable future. It was rocky last night, but it calmed down some this morning. Looks like there’s a window, anyway, before the wind starts to blow again.”

“And the Waverly boat is unavailable.”

“Right.”

“So who is going to salvage the ship?”

Mueller let out a long breath. “No idea,” he said. “Damn it, Christer, if the Titan wasn’t still laid up, we could save that old hulk and make the company a pile.”

This, obviously, was the worst-case scenario. A freighter in trouble, a potentially lucrative payday, and, someone else would win the award.

This, Magnusson figured, must be what it felt like to be stuck in prison, watching some other man marry your bride.

But Magnusson hadn’t built a career on the water by doing what he was told. And he hadn’t turned his Titan into the envy of the Pacific Coast salvage fleet by backing down from an obstacle, be it wind, weather, wave, or lack of proper equipment.

“We can still save the ship,” Magnusson said, and he knew immediately that he was finished with dry-land living.

“What? The way that ship’s drifting, it either sinks or makes landfall long before the Titan ’s even back in the water. It’s impossible.”

“So I don’t use the Titan ,” Magnusson said. “Get me a couple good crew and a flight to Dutch Harbor immediately.”

The master could sense the vice president’s confusion on the other end of the line. “Christer, I don’t—”

Magnusson ignored him. He’d been doing this for too long to let a chance like the Lion slip away. “And a boat,” he told Mueller. “Find me the best boat in Alaska, right away.”

McKenna spent the morning running errands around town. Came back to the docks with the bed of her old Ford full of food and assorted provisions. Nearly ten in the morning, and the first of the crew had arrived—Matt and Stacey Jonas, the divers.

They were an interesting couple. Matt was tall and lean, his skin tanned and leathery. Stacey was just as tanned, but nowhere near as weathered; she was three years Matt’s junior, but it could just as well have been a decade. The Jonases had been happily married for as long as McKenna had known them, so she tended to think of them as a unit, but despite their mutual love of all things adventuresome—hang gliding, cave diving, BASE jumping, and the like—the two shared markedly different pasts.

Matt was an Ohioan by birth, a rust belt refugee who’d always wanted to see the ocean, and who’d thus found himself migrating to San Diego after dropping out of college. There, he’d met Stacey, a California girl through and through, a surfer girl and all-around thrill seeker.

According to Gale Force lore, the Jonases’ first date had been a skydive—at Stacey’s suggestion.

“She got me up into that plane and opened the door,” Matt liked to say, “and then she winked at me and told me if I wanted a second date, I’d better jump fast. And then she was gone.”

He’d jumped, of course, and when he’d touched down, he found himself not only with a new girlfriend, but with a taste for adventure, to boot.

“And the rest,” Stacey would add, raising her glass for a toast, “is history.”

The Jonases had been running dive charters in Baja since the Gale Force quit the big salvage stuff after Randall Rhodes’s death, but they’d jumped at the Lion job, no questions asked, as soon as McKenna had called them.

“Love it,” Stacey told her when she’d explained the score. “We’re in.”

McKenna laughed a little. “You want to check with Matt before you sign on? This is a big change from sand and snorkels.”

“Matt’s down for whatever,” Stacey replied. “He’s as sick of babysitting rich guys as I am. This sounds like an adventure.” She went away, came back. “Matt’s already got the plane gassed. We’re wheels-up in a couple hours. See you on the dock!”

Now they’d arrived, and watching them cross the tug’s afterdeck to greet her, McKenna was struck by a sudden sense of sadness, an acute reminder of loss. Her dad had hooked up with Matt and Stacey early on. Found them in a dockside bar in Monterey, hired them, and leaned on them for years. They were competent and fearless, willing to dive anywhere, and when diving wasn’t on the menu, they’d do just about anything else Randall asked of them—from welding, to climbing, to heavy-equipment operation. Matt had even earned his pilot’s license, and the two traveled private, flying to gigs and new adventures in their personal Cirrus SR22 propeller plane.

Matt and Stacey had made plenty of money with Randall, but beyond that, they’d all bonded with one another, grown close as family—heck, they were family to McKenna, and she’d missed them nearly as much as she missed her own father.

Avoiding Matt and Stacey’s eyes, McKenna hugged them both, tried to push her dad from her mind. She caught Matt and Stacey swapping a glance behind her as she helped them stow their kit bags in their stateroom in the tug’s fo’c’sle, but ignored it. Sooner we’re at sea and working, the better .