William Johnstone - Winter Kill

“Don’t worry about the Montclair ! She can handle a little blow like this!”

If Hoffman thought this was a little blow, Frank would have hated to see what the captain considered a major storm. The wind lashed viciously at the ship, and the angry waves seemed to be trying to toss it straight up into the sky. The sails were lowered, so the Montclair was running on its engines alone. Frank thought the wind would probably rip the sails to shreds if they were raised.

He leaned closer to Hoffman and asked, “We’re not that far from the coastline, are we? Maybe you should make a run for shore so we can ride out the storm there!”

“And risk being battered to pieces on some rocks?” Hoffman shook his head. “I know what I’m doing, Morgan! We’ll be all right! This squall will blow itself out before the day’s over!”

Frank didn’t believe that. It looked to him like the first of the winter storms had arrived a few weeks earlier than Hoffman expected it.

But he had to admit that he was no sailor, and certainly no expert where the sea was concerned. Hoffman had made this Seattle-to-Skagway run before. He ought to know what he was doing.

“All right!” Frank said. “But if there’s anything I can do to help…”

“Just go below, dry off, and don’t worry! We’ll be fine!”

As the day went on, though, it began to look like they would be anything but fine. The storm continued unabated. If anything, its ferocity seemed to grow stronger. Fiona and all the young women were sick again, as were some of the cheechakos. The ones who had purchased deck space were allowed belowdecks to huddle miserably in the corridors, because they would have frozen to death and wound up ice-covered corpses if they had remained topside.

Frank weathered the storm better than most of the landlubbers. His stomach was a little unsettled, but he never completely lost his appetite. He wound up taking his meals in the officers’ mess, at Captain Hoffman’s invitation. The officers expressed confidence in the captain and in the Montclair ’s ability to handle this rough weather, but Frank thought he saw worry lurking in their eyes.

It was the same sort of concern he had seen more than twenty years earlier at Fort Lincoln, in the eyes of some of the junior officers of the Seventh Cavalry as they were about to follow Colonel George Armstrong Custer into Indian country. Frank had been passing through, headed in the opposite direction, and he remembered thinking that he wouldn’t have gone with those soldier boys for all the money in the world.

Now he had no choice but to put his trust in Captain Rudolph Hoffman. Hoffman was the only man who could get them where they were going.

The seas were still extremely rough that evening, but the wind had died down slightly. Sleet showers still lashed the vessel and added to the layer of ice that had formed on the deck. Frank slept only fitfully, and during the night he heard groans coming from some of the other cabins. The women were suffering a lot more than he was, but there was nothing he could do for them.

The next morning, he sought out Hoffman again and found the captain in his cabin, pouring over the charts. “Do you still think we’ll reach Skagway today?” Frank asked bluntly. He knew from looking at the maps that they would have to sail through Glacier Bay and then up a long inlet to reach the port city, and he hoped that once they made it to the bay, the water would be calmer.

“I…I don’t know,” Hoffman replied, and Frank didn’t like what he heard in the captain’s voice. The confidence and decisiveness that had been there earlier were gone now. “I’ve never seen a gale quite this bad. So early, I mean.”

Frank had a feeling Hoffman meant he had never encountered a storm this bad before, period. That wasn’t good.

“You do know where we are, don’t you?”

Hoffman got to his feet and glared angrily at Frank. “Of course I know where we are. Taking readings has been difficult because of the weather, but I’ve sailed these waters more than a dozen times. We’ll be fine, Mr. Morgan, and the best thing you can do is go back to your cabin and wait. If there’s anything you need to know, I’ll make sure you do.”

“All right,” Frank said, his face and voice grim. “I don’t mean any offense, Captain, but I promised an old friend that I’d get Mrs. Devereaux and those young ladies safely to their destination. I intend to do that.”

“So do I, Mr. Morgan. So do I.”

Frank went back to his cabin, and paused in front of the door to shake off some of the ice pellets that clung to his hat and coat before he went in. While he was standing there, the door to Fiona’s cabin opened. She peered out at him, her face haggard with strain.

“We’re not going to make it, are we, Frank?” she asked.

“I reckon we will,” he replied, trying not to sound as worried as he felt. “I just talked to the captain, and he says this is nothing to worry about.”

“Of course he says that! He’s not going to admit that we never should have left Seattle this late in the season!”

Frank refrained from pointing out to her that she had been just as determined to get to Skagway as Captain Hoffman was, if not more so. That wouldn’t do any good.

Fiona pawed hair out of her eyes and moaned. “We’re all going to die,” she said. “Frank…Frank, come in my cabin and hold me. I…I don’t want to die alone.”

“None of us are going to die,” he told her. “And I’m covered with melting ice right now.”

“I don’t care.” She clutched at his arms. “I’m so scared, I can’t be alone—”

With a grinding racket, the ship gave a sudden lurch. The deck tilted for a second under Frank’s feet, then settled back. That tilt was enough to throw Fiona into his arms. She screamed in fear as she fell against him. He held on tightly to her to keep her from toppling to the floor.

Eyes wide, she stared up at him and exclaimed, “Oh, my God! We hit something! We’re going to sink!”

“No, we’re not,” Frank said, although he didn’t know if that was true. “I’ll go find the captain and see what happened.”

By now, the doors of the other cabins were opening and the brides started to pour out into the corridor. Fear had banished their sickness for the moment. Several of them cried out, demanding to know what was going on.

Meg Goodwin was really the only one who didn’t look like she was on the verge of hysteria. Frank called her over and practically thrust Fiona into her arms.

“Take care of Mrs. Devereaux,” he said. “I’ll go find out what’s going on.”

“We hit something,” Meg said. “It’s just a matter of how bad the damage is.”

Frank figured she was right about that. He said, “I’ll be back as quick as I can.”

He left the crowd of panicky women in the corridor and ran up the stairs to the deck. Something felt wrong, and as he emerged from the hatch, he could tell what it was. The ship had started to list a little to the right. Starboard, that was what the sailors called it, Frank told himself, then shoved that thought aside because it didn’t matter now. The important thing was that the Montclair must have suffered some serious damage, or it wouldn’t be tilting like that.

As he hurried toward the bridge, slipping a little on the ice that coated the deck, he saw that a frigid fog had closed in around the ship, but through those billows of white, he saw dark, hulking shapes sliding past. Ice-mantled pine trees thrust up from some of them. The ship was in the middle of a bunch of rocks and tiny islands, Frank realized. That meant they were a lot closer to shore than he had thought they were.

He wondered if Hoffman had known just how close those rocks were. Frank had a hunch that they had taken the captain by surprise.