Оуэн Локканен - Gale Force

“Kind of a puddle jumper,” she said to make conversation. “Might be bumpy, but you’ll be okay.”

“I made it to the tug on a Coast Guard rescue helicopter,” Harrington replied. “I think I can handle it.”

“You’re booked through to Anchorage, then down to Seattle. You can pick up your tickets from Alaska Airlines when you get to Anchorage.”

“Okay.” He wasn’t looking at her, and she wasn’t really looking at him, either. They were both kind of marking time, and McKenna wondered what more she was supposed to say here.

“Anyway, thanks for coming out,” she said finally. “You should have the money in a day or two, tops.”

He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Thanks,” he said. He hoisted his carry-on bag. Exhaled. “See you around.”

McKenna watched him walk away, out through the security checkpoint and into the waiting room. Watched him join the line of other passengers, present his ticket to the agent, walk out the other side of the terminal and across to the plane. He climbed the stairs to the cabin, found McKenna through the glass, and waved, once. Then he ducked inside the plane, and only then, when she couldn’t see him any longer, did McKenna walk away.

HARRINGTON WATCHED THROUGH THE WINDOW as the little plane rocketed down the runway and lifted off above Dutch Harbor. He could see the airport below, could see Nelson Ridley’s borrowed truck waiting outside the terminal, could almost convince himself he saw McKenna walking out as the plane banked and climbed. In the distance, he could see the Pacific Lion in the harbor, the Gale Force tethered to her bow. He could see it all, briefly, and then the plane was climbing into the clouds, and he could see nothing but gray. He sat back in his seat and tried to forget about McKenna Rhodes, steeled himself for the long flight south.

UNNOTICED BY McKENNA, and Court Harrington, too, was the well-dressed young Japanese man who’d arrived at the terminal in a taxi shortly after the three Gale Force salvors, hurried to the PenAir desk with barely a glance at where Harrington and McKenna carried out their awkward goodbyes, purchased a last-minute ticket to Anchorage and, while Harrington hoisted his carry-on bag and turned away from the salvage captain, slipped past and through security to the waiting area.

When Harrington boarded, the young man was already on the plane, tucked into a window seat near the rear, his nose in his phone, steadfastly ignoring the other passengers.

Harrington might have seen him, might not have, but he didn’t notice, in any case. The man was just another passenger on a half-full flight, another refugee from the edge of the world.

From his hiding place at the water’s edge, Daishin Sato felt his phone vibrate. He removed it from his pocket. A new text message.

The American has flown to Anchorage. I am following him.

Sato waited.

As he’d expected, the phone buzzed again.

He was not carrying a briefcase.

Sato replaced his phone. “We proceed as planned,” he told his colleagues, who waited in the shadows. “The American does not have the briefcase.”

For all Sato knew, the young American man had transferred the stolen bonds into his luggage. He might have discarded the briefcase, and taken the contents back with him to the mainland. If that were the case, Masao would find out soon enough. In the meantime, Sato and the other two men would operate under the assumption that the bonds were still aboard the freighter.

He and his colleagues had spent the last night and day waiting for the Coast Guard to release the ship, once again, to the salvage crew’s custody. Waiting for the salvage crew to pronounce the ship ready to tow. Ready for the darkness, for their own opportunity.

Waiting, and preparing.

They had liberated a small rowboat from the government docks near the town. Such was the size of Dutch Harbor that the boat was simply tied to a piling, no locks or alarms. It had simply been a matter of untying the rope, climbing aboard, and rowing the little dinghy around the point and out of sight. There, they had stocked it with food and provisions for the next stage of the task.

The Dutch Harbor citizens’ relaxed attitude toward security extended, Sato had discovered, to their firearms. This was a frontier town, full of hunters and fishers and men and women of the wild, and nearly all of them owned guns. Sato and his colleagues had drifted from house to house, trying back doors and finding them largely unlocked.

They’d searched the empty houses, found what they needed quickly. Amassed two pistols and three rifles, sufficient ammunition. Sato would take no chances with this stage of the operation. There was a good probability that success would demand violence.

Sato tucked the phone into his trousers. He and his men had dressed in black: pants, sweaters, watch caps. They would blend in with the dark water after night fell. Nobody would see them as they crossed the bay.

“As soon as there’s darkness,” he told his colleagues, “we row for the Lion .”

Early the next morning, McKenna Rhodes stood at her tug’s wheel, plotting a course through the Aleutian Islands as the Gale Force ’s mighty engines pulled the Pacific Lion away from her moorings in Unalaska Bay.

Dutch Harbor lay behind the big freighter, fading into the fog. The airport was closed again. Even if McKenna had wanted Harrington back, she couldn’t have him. She still wasn’t sure she’d made the right decision sending him away.

Working at sea was a lonely business. For the most part, McKenna could handle the loneliness when she was working, when there was a job and a rhythm and a simplicity to life: the tug, and the tow, and the ocean beyond. It was harder on dry land, when the grocery stores and streets and sidewalks were filled with happy couples, romantic movies, love songs. It was easier to take refuge out on the water, easiest to just shut yourself off from romance completely.

She’d had a long, sleepless night to think about the architect, to remember the strength in his arms as he’d held her, the wry humor behind those eyes. Now, in the morning, she was tired of feeling heartsick. Tired of longing for a man who’d already kicked her aside once, for a life she damn well knew was impossible. She had a job to do, a ten-day tow worth another half a million dollars, easy—and it would be easy, compared to the challenge of saving the Lion in the first place.

Behind the Lion , the Coast Guard cutter Munro idled away from her dock. The cutter would tail the Gale Force up and out of Unalaska Bay, and back down through busy Unimak Pass, between Unimak and Akun Islands, just east of Unalaska. The pass saw more than three thousand freighters a year traversing the Great Circle Route between Asia and the Pacific Coast of North America. Things weren’t liable to get near as hairy as in Samalga Pass, but Captain Geoffries on the Munro wanted to see the Pacific Lion safely across to the North Pacific before he let McKenna on her way.

McKenna didn’t mind. If she were honest, she appreciated the support. The waters around the Aleutian Islands were tricky and treacherous, and given the Lion ’s history, it couldn’t hurt to have someone around who knew the local currents.

The crew was mostly down below. Jason Parent cooked breakfast. Al Parent was asleep, resting for his wheel watch. Ridley was in the engine room, and Matt and Stacey Jonas had returned to the Lion , camping out on board the freighter to keep an eye out for flooding or any other mishap. Everyone was where they should have been. The Gale Force was operational, solvent, triumphant. And McKenna still felt the same gnawing loneliness she’d felt since she’d watched Court Harrington board his plane. She figured she would be happy if the feeling was gone by the time she reached Seattle.