Оуэн Локканен - Gale Force

The crew mess was adjacent to the galley. It was a small cafeteria, the tables bolted to the floor, the benches loose and scattered. There was spilled food here, too, but no Ishimaru.

Suppose we’ll have to check the crew berths, Okura thought, but before he could tell Robbie, the Salvation sounded a blast on her horn from somewhere outside.

The deckhand emerged from another locker. “You hear that?”

“I heard it,” Okura said. “I need more time.”

“No more time. They blow the horn, we come running, remember? Get back down to the boat and try again tomorrow.”

Shit.

Okura looked at the deckhand, who shrugged. It is what it is.

“Tomorrow,” Okura said finally. “We come back early.”

The Gale Force made Dutch Harbor the next morning. Sailed up through Akutan Pass into the Bering Sea, around the top of Unalaska Island, into Unalaska Bay, and down toward the village.

Court Harrington joined McKenna in the wheelhouse as the Gale Force motored across the bay. “So this is Dutch Harbor,” he said.

“The one and only,” McKenna replied. “You never made it up here with my dad?”

“Not this far out. Most I know about this place, I learned from that fishing show, the crab guys. Kind of doesn’t seem real.”

It was a beautiful little town, and the mariner in McKenna was fascinated by the mix of traffic in the harbor, from deep-sea container ships to Coast Guard cutters to fish packers and freezer boats to trawlers and crabbers. Harrington pointed out the window at one of the boats. “Right there,” he said. “I definitely saw those guys on TV.”

“You want to motor on over there, see if they’ll give you a spot?”

The architect laughed. “I don’t think I’m cut out for it. It’s tough work on those crab boats. Hardest job in the world, they say.”

“Psh. They never worked on a salvage tug.”

“Settled, then. As soon as we save that Lion , I’m coming back to Dutch and ditching you for a crab boat. You can look for my ass on TV.”

McKenna throttled down, pointed the Gale Force at the fuel barge. “I’d better get your autograph now, then,” she told him. “Just in case.”

MCKENNA BROUGHT THE TUG into the fuel barge, nodded hello to the owner as Jason Parent and his dad secured the mooring lines.

“Gale Force,” the owner said, admiring the tug as he passed McKenna the fuel hose. “I remember this boat. Hell of a tug. Riptide Rhodes’s, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” McKenna replied. “My old man.”

“Your old man.” The owner squinted up at her, appraisingly. “Well, what brings you to Dutch, anyhow?”

McKenna shrugged. The law of the gold-rush mariner, whether fisherman or salvage speculator, was to keep one’s mouth shut, especially on the docks, where gossip was often the primary industry.

“Just come up to have a look around,” she told the owner. “The crew always wanted to meet those crab guys, and I figured maybe we’d run into somebody who could use our services.”

“Always a lot of guys needing help around here.” The owner gestured across the water. “Especially with Bill Carew and his gang out with those Commodore boys.”

McKenna felt her insides go a couple degrees colder. She followed the man’s eyes to some ramshackle barges tied up in the elbow of a long spit of land. “Commodore guys are in town?”

“You bet. You heard about that big car carrier that nearly flipped over the other day? No sooner had the Coast Guard rescued the crew than a couple of those Commodore guys were climbing off a plane, scrounging for somebody’s boat to take them out there.” He spit on the dock. “Dunno how they plan to actually save that wreck, but they’re the experts, I suppose.”

“They put a line on her?” McKenna asked.

“That’s what I heard from the Coast Guard.” The guy grinned up at her. “Pity your old man isn’t still around, huh? Tug like this, he could rack up a hell of a payday out there.”

“Yeah,” McKenna agreed, and she felt it like a punch in the gut. “A real pity, all right.”

Christer Magnusson could tell this job wouldn’t be easy.

Rescuing a ship was never a simple task, but in Magnusson’s experience, some salvage jobs came easier than others. A bulk freighter dead in the water and adrift in the open ocean with calm weather? Fairly straightforward. An oil tanker aground on a shoal in a storm, one hundred thousand tons of crude in the balance? A little more complicated. And this job, the Pacific Lion , definitely ranged closer to the latter.

She wasn’t filled up with oil, thank god; just Nissans. But the freighter would still make a mess if it landed on the rocks, a hundred nautical miles now to the north. Its bunker fuel alone would have a devastating impact on the Aleutians’ marine environment, would kill fish, birds, and mammals alike, coat the shore with black tar. Magnusson wanted to avoid that, and the bad publicity that would accompany such a spill. Anyway, if the Lion wrecked, he wouldn’t get paid.

Saving her, though, would be a challenge. He would need to get aboard, make sure she wasn’t taking on more water. Then he would have to figure out a way to reverse that list. And it was here that Christer Magnusson knew he was at a disadvantage.

There was one man—one person—in the northern hemisphere who Magnusson knew could save the Pacific Lion , and he wasn’t answering his phone. Magnusson had a fair idea as to why: Court Harrington had hired on with another operation somewhere. He was trying to save the ship for himself.

But which operation? Waverly’s best tug was out of commission. There were no other outfits on the coast that could handle the Lion . Hell, even this tug, the Salvation , would barely be up to the task. There was only one other name, Magnusson figured, that even remotely made sense.

Rhodes.

Gale Force .

Court Harrington had been close with Randall Rhodes. He’d spurned Magnusson’s entreaties to come work for Commodore time and again, even at the promise of better pay, steady work. If Harrington was allied with any tug, it was Riptide’s Gale Force .

But Riptide Rhodes was dead. And his daughter was towing barges. Could she really be making a run at the Lion ?

Magnusson supposed he would find out soon enough. Knew he had the edge on experience over McKenna Rhodes, even if she had Court Harrington. But he would need to work quickly, secure the Lion for Commodore. Arrest the wreck’s drift north toward landfall, secure it offshore, and set to work on that list, Harrington be damned. With any luck, the weather would hold long enough for Commodore HQ to find him another architect. And maybe a bigger boat.

Either way, it was time to get working.

Magnusson descended from the Salvation ’s wheelhouse, found the Japanese sailor, Okura, making coffee in the galley. Magnusson gathered the man’s search yesterday had not gone to plan, but that was hardly his problem.

“This tug will not be your taxi today,” he told Okura. “We came here for the Lion , and today we put a line on her.”

He turned on his heel before the sailor could answer. Climbed back up to the wheelhouse, a full day’s work looming ahead.

McKenna gathered the crew in the Gale Force ’s galley. Matt and Stacey, Nelson Ridley, Court Harrington, and the Parents. The only crew missing was Spike, and McKenna figured the ship’s cat wouldn’t exactly have any sympathy to contribute, anyway.