Оуэн Локканен - Gale Force

Al snorted. “Bunch of pretenders. One look at us, skip, and Magnusson will scurry off with his tail between his legs.”

“Let’s hope so,” McKenna said.

The two sat in silence. Watched the light grow over the slate-gray sea, the never-ending procession of heavy, scudding waves, the rise and the crash of the hull though the peaks and troughs, the grind of the engines.

The night faded away. Morning passed. Al had the radio on the satellite channels, a country music station, all lonely husbands and runaway dogs, broken-down trucks and whiskey-bottle blues. It did nothing to help McKenna’s mood.

She crossed the wheelhouse, ready to flip the station to something a little more uplifting, some classic rock, maybe, when Al called over from the radar. “I got a hit”

McKenna forgot about the radio. Crossed back and peered over Al’s shoulder. The radar had picked up something dead ahead, thirty nautical miles or so, something large and uneven. As the Gale Force sailed closer, the radar slowly separated from one large hit into three smaller, distinct dots.

“That big one’s the Lion ,” McKenna said. “The smaller one’s gotta be the Salvation .”

“And the third one?” Al asked.

McKenna scratched her head. “Coast Guard. Or another Commodore tug.”

“Gotta be the Coast Guard,” Al said. “We’d have heard if Magnusson had another tug here already.” He glanced at the autopilot, set the tug on course. “Twenty miles away now,” he told McKenna. “An hour or two, tops, we find out.”

AT FIRST, the stricken ship was just a smudge on the horizon, a formless mirage, visible only from the tops of the swells. As the Gale Force plowed closer, the smudge separated, and McKenna could see the Coast Guard cutter, stately and proud, and the Pacific Lion herself, a half-sunk bathtub toy on an enormous scale, ungainly and wallowing in an uneasy sea.

“Holy hell,” Al muttered. “What a wreck.”

The ship had been ugly to begin with. It boasted none of the classic lines of a traditional cargo vessel. Looked more like a brick than a ship, blocky and angular and top-heavy, an affront to any sailor’s sense of style and tradition.

Now, though, lying wounded in the water, it looked like disaster. The list was pronounced. The ship lay almost fully on its portside, the bulbous red chin of its bow almost parallel to the waves.

It’s incredible nobody died when that ship flipped, McKenna thought. Let’s hope we can save her and still say the same.

The Lion wallowed, waves breaking over her keel, but she looked more or less stable. Certainly, she didn’t appear to have taken on much water, at least not drastically. There was still time to save her—assuming the Salvation relinquished its claim.

McKenna could see the little boat, low and blue and grungy, in a tow position at the stern of the freighter. The towline stretched taut between the two vessels, and exhaust billowed from the smaller boat’s stack, but neither vessel was moving.

“What do they think they’re doing out here?” Al asked. “If they’re moving at all, it’s backwards.”

“Probably the best they can do,” McKenna replied. “Slow down the drift and hope to ride out the gale.”

A quarter mile or so off the Lion ’s port quarter, the Coast Guard cutter silently stood guard. McKenna assumed the Coast Guard was aware of the situation, but if they had any concerns, they weren’t showing it.

Soon enough. McKenna marked her position on the GPS screen. Less than seventy nautical miles south of the Aleutian Islands, and the weather building, but the Gale Force was finally on scene.

It was time to flex some Rhodes muscle.

Christer Magnusson was in the Salvation ’s galley, pouring a fresh cup of coffee, when the radio crackled in the wheelhouse.

“ Salvation, Salvation , this is the Gale Force . Are you on here, Christer?”

A woman’s voice. McKenna Rhodes. Shit.

Magnusson crossed to the galley porthole, peered out, and saw nothing but ocean. He hurried through the house to the bulkhead door and the afterdeck, walked out under the mammoth A-frame crane, and peered back across the stern, beyond the hulk of the Lion .

For a moment, he saw nothing but gray swells and whitecaps, the turbulence of the building sea. Then the Salvation rose on a wave, and Magnusson spied the tug a half mile or so off of the starboard quarter.

“Helvete.”

It was the Gale Force , all right—big and brawny as always, and as pretty as the days Randall Rhodes had run her, a fresh coat of paint on her red-and-white superstructure, her hull black as coal. Magnusson had spent many trips racing that tug to a wounded freighter, and more than a handful shaking his fist at her stern from the Titan . She still looked good, Magnusson had to admit. She looked like a tug that could save the Lion .

But could the Rhodes girl?

McKenna Rhodes was an enigma to Magnusson. He’d spoken to her rarely, on those brief occasions when the Gale Force and the Titan found themselves in the same harbor and he’d dropped by Riptide’s galley for a cup of coffee with his rival.

She’d been quiet during those meetings, as far as Magnusson could remember. But she’d sure kept her eyes on him, studied him while he talked, as if she were committing every word to memory. He’d liked her, as much as he liked anyone on Riptide’s boat: she carried herself like crew, not like Riptide’s daughter, and by any account, she worked hard. Certainly, she had guts, sailing the old man’s tug all the way here on a gamble.

Magnusson hurried back inside the Salvation , up into the wheelhouse, where Riptide’s daughter was still trying to raise him on the radio.

“ Salvation , Salvation , I know you’re out there,” McKenna was saying. “This is McKenna Rhodes on the Gale Force . How do you read?”

Magnusson glanced back at the tug again, through the rear windows. Then he picked up the radio. “ Gale Force , this is Salvation .” He forced a smile, kept his voice nonchalant. “Fancy meeting you all the way out here, McKenna. How are you?”

But McKenna Rhodes wasn’t having any small talk. “What are you up to, Christer? You know damn well you can’t save that ship with that old boat you’re running.”

Magnusson spit into his ramen cup. “We have a line on her, and we’re holding our own. If you came out here thinking you’d push me off this wreck, I’m sorry, but you wasted a trip.”

“Unless you’re hiding about five thousand horsepower, the wind will give you all the pushing you can handle,” McKenna answered. “Weather’s building, and I have a team here who can get that ship upright. I suggest you stand down and let us do our jobs.”

Magnusson pursed his lips. McKenna had her dad’s audacity, that was for certain. And she probably had Court Harrington on board, too. But she was still in second place, and Magnusson wasn’t about to back down.

“Sorry, McKenna,” he replied. “We signed an Open Form with the owners, and we’re salvaging this ship. We’ll keep you in mind if we require assistance. Over and out.”

He hung up the radio. Then he picked up the sat phone. Dialed in to Commodore home base, waited on the connection.

Pick up, damn it, he thought, studying the Salvation ’s lack of progress on the GPS screen. I need another boat, and an architect, now.