Blindfold Game

JANUARY

ON BOARD THE USCG CUTTER SOJOURNER TRUTH

SARA HAULED HERSELF TO her feet with numb hands reaching for anything left intact. “Captain,” she said, groping her way forward, trying to find some footing in the debris on the deck, fighting the roll of the ship’s hull. The sleet driving through the shattered windows seemed to penetrate every pore.

She heard a moan. Someone swore. This time she yelled. “Captain!”

Her outstretched hand touched an arm. It was dangling down the side of the captain’s chair. The ship jerked, off course because the helmsman was no longer at his post, and the motion caused the body attached to the arm to fall to the floor. She had to jump out of the way to avoid being knocked over.

She got her eyes open against the wind enough to see that Captain Lowe was dead, his torso severed almost in two by a large gaping wound, a bloody mass of torn tissue and splintered bones. The motion of the ship caused his body to roll onto his back. His eyes stared in surprise at the ceiling.

Sara looked around and slowly the rest of the bridge came into focus.

Tommy was clutching a shoulder, a dark liquid seeping from between her fingers, her other hand clutching the radar console to pull herself erect. The helmsman, Razo, had been thrown from his chair and lay facedown on the floor, unmoving. His head looked misshapen. Ops was bleeding from his right temple and Sara could hear him swearing. “Ops?”

“I got hit by some glass, XO, I’m okay!”

Everyone was yelling to be heard over the wind roaring in the broken windows. It didn’t help when general quarters sounded and alarms whooped up and down the length of the ship. “Chief? Chief!”

A hand came up to grasp the controls console and Mark Edelen pulled himself to his feet. His face was bruised and his right eye was swelling shut, but the rest of him was mercifully intact. “Find out if our controls still work and put our ass to the storm!”

“Aye aye, XO!” He stumbled over bodies and binoculars and broken glass to the helm. A few minutes later the gale roaring through the bridge had eased.

“Sara!” Hugh said, voice fighting the sound of the wind. “You’re bleeding!”

She looked down and saw with some surprise that he was right. No wonder her left arm felt so numb. She touched her reddened sleeve and found a three-inch splinter of metal run completely through the flesh. It didn’t hurt yet, but it would.

She raised her head and saw them all gaping at her.

“XO,” the chief said, taking a step forward and being thrown back by the movement of the ship.

“Are you okay, XO?” Tommy said.

“I’m fine.” She looked around and raised her voice. “How is everyone else?”

There were more wounds from flying glass and debris. Due to the chest-high sills of the windows, most of those wounds were to the upper torso, shoulders, arms, and heads. The captain and the helmsman had both been seated, the helmsman behind the captain and to his left. They were the only fatalities on the bridge.

“Tommy?”

Tommy had to shout to be heard. “XO!”

“Does the pipe still work?”

“I don’t know, XO!”

“Try it! Pipe damage control to the bridge at once! And Doc!”

Tommy was shaken but still capable of thought and action. “Doc and damage control, aye aye, XO!”

“Sams! Laird!” Sara lurched across the bridge, staggering from one handhold to the next, slipping and sliding in blood and glass. “Sams!”

“We’re here, XO!” Both had facial wounds from glass cuts but were otherwise unhurt.

The pipe worked. Tommy must have cranked the volume knob all the way over to the right because her voice blasted out all over the ship, loud and high but amazingly calm. “Damage control, Doc Jewell, report to the bridge immediately, damage control and Doc Jewell, to the bridge at once.”

Sara continued to move around the bridge, trying to assess the damage. The Transas hanging from the bulkhead in front of the window before the captain’s chair was gone, nothing left but shreds of circuit board and wire, but the one over the plot table was still there, to all appearances intact and still working. The radar console was still blinking out contacts, too, but then it was located almost directly behind the captain’s chair, which had taken the brunt of the attack.

People began to tumble onto the bridge. The captain’s and the helmsman’s bodies were removed. Doc Jewell bandaged everyone who didn’t move out of his way first. He winced when he came to Sara’s splinter, and it hurt like hell when he extracted it, but she refused anything stronger than aspirin. He looked as if he wanted to insist.

Sara cut him off, curtly. “Not now, Doc.” She flexed her arm beneath the bandage. Everything still worked, even if it felt like she’d been seared with a red-hot branding iron. “Anyone hurt anywhere except on the bridge?”

No, ma am.

“Very well.” She pulled her fleece back on. Damage control had unearthed some Plexiglas from somewhere and cut rough squares to fit over the gaping holes where the windows had once been, riveting them in place with power drills. The ravenous howl of the wind was reduced to a distant snarl of disappointment at being balked of its prey. Hugh had found a broom and was sweeping debris into someone’s cap and chucking it out the port hatch, which was still latched open. Tommy was standing at the chart table, staring at the captain’s chair with a set face. She looked at Sara. “If he hadn’t been sitting there-”

“Belay that, Tommy,” Sara said. “PO Barnette, you have the helm.”

Tommy’s face stiffened. “PO Barnette has the helm, aye aye, XO,” she said, and there was a chorus of ayes.

“Aye aye, XO.” Barnette took Razo’s place at the small brace wheel.

“Tommy, you have the conn.”

“BM2 Penn has the conn,” Barnette said. He had a deep voice and it seemed to boom off the Plexiglas.

Tommy looked at him, swallowed, and pulled her way around the console to stand in an imitation of Barnette’s brace. “I have the conn, XO.”

“Doc, canvass the ship for any casualties. I want a report ASAP. Chief?” This to Chief Lindsey Moran, the head of damage control on board, who stood waiting, power driver at the ready. “Report.”

“They only hit the bridge, XO. There has been no other damage reported.”

“Make sure of that yourself, Chief, and then report back to me.”

“Aye aye, XO.”

“Mr. Rincon, follow me. Chief Edelen, pipe all the officers to the wardroom, and then join us.”

THEY STOOD INSTEAD OF sitting, mostly because Sara refused to take the captain’s chair and no one else would sit down while she was still standing. “Talk to me, Lieutenant.”

“I was watching the roll indicator before we got hit,” Sams said. “It’s showing at least seven degrees, and sometimes more.”

“Which means?”

“We can do it, if we pick our moment.” Sams looked at Laird. “Maybe you should stay behind.”

“What!”

Sams looked at Sara. “Maybe you’ll need a spare pilot, if we don’t make it.”

“It’s a moot point, since we only have one helo,” Sara said. She looked at Ryan. “Put together a team. I want them armed. Anything you can find on this ship that will shoot, stab, or explode on contact, you make sure every member of your team has two of each.”

“Aye aye, XO.”

She looked at Sams. “How many can you take?”

“Well, maybe a few less than before you loaded them down with an armory,” Sams said.

Several of them smiled, but Sara was too focused on the task at hand and too close to what had happened on the bridge for anything remotely resembling humor. “How many?”

Sams’s shoulders straightened at the snap in her voice. “Six boarding team members total, XO.”

Sara looked at Ryan. “Can you get the job done with six?”

He started to go with bravado, saw her expression, and ratcheted it down. “Depends on how many people they’ve got on board and how well armed they are.”

She looked at Hugh.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I know about the two brothers. Noortman told me that the brothers told Fang he couldn’t bring all of his usual crew, that they were hiring some help of their own. Could be ten. Could be twenty, could be fifty. I just don’t know.”

She nodded and looked at Ryan. “Who is your best man on the can-non?

“Sullivan,” he said without hesitation.

“Have him report to me immediately. And then start putting your team together. Remember, the goal is to commandeer the ship, disable the launcher, and get her into the nearest port.”

“Aye aye, XO.” Ryan vanished.

“But if we have to, we sink the son of a bitch, and I’m not saying that’s a bad second-best.” She looked at Ostlund. “Ensign, start prepping for helo launch. I imagine you’ll have to do another traverse.”

Ostlund shrugged. “Not like we haven’t had a lot of practice lately, XO. I think we’ve got it down.”

“Good. Go.” She looked at Sams. “Anything?”

He thought, and shook his head.

“We won’t be able to bring you back on board the Sojourner Truth, not in this soup,” she said.

“I know, XO.”

“So once the boarding team is on board, you haul ass for Cape Navarin.”

He gave a curt nod.

“Good. Go.”

The aviators left.

“Chief,” Sara said to Edelen, “I want you on the conn.”

“All due respect, XO, I want you on the conn.”

She gave a half laugh. “Go on up to the bridge. I’m right behind you.”

“Where’s Cape Navarin?” Hugh said.

“About a hundred miles northwest of where we are now. It’s the nearest land.”

He thought about it. “In Russia.”

“Yes.”

“That going to be a problem?”

“The fact that they’ll be out of fuel before they get there is a bigger one.”

BACK OH THE BRIDGE she looked at the radar screen. The Agafia was still there, still not making enough speed to pull out of range, but enough to keep her tantalizingly out of reach. It was almost as if she were playing tag with them, which made no sense to Sara. Perhaps all terrorists were by definition mad.

The Sunrise Warrior was lagging about midway between the other two ships. Sara looked up and out the new Plexiglas windows. She thought she could make out lights off their port bow. She noticed something else, too. “Are we making ice?” she said.

“We are, XO.”

Sara swore, a round and mighty oath. “Assemble a crew to chip ice, Chief,” she said, snapping out the words.

“Aye aye, XO,” Chief Edelen said, moving with alacrity.

Sara told Tommy, “I need to be able to talk to the Sunrise Warrior.”

“The VHF is down, XO, like almost everything else. Whatever they hit us with took out all our communications, except for handhelds.”

“I know. How’s your Morse, Tommy?”

“My Morse?” The bosun’s mate looked dubious. “It’s okay, XO. It’s not great, but I can make myself understood.”

“Good.” To the chief, finishing up his pipe for the ice-chipping team, Sara said, “Get me in close enough for them to see our signal.” He hung up the mike. “Aye aye, XO.”

“IS THAT MORSE CODE?” Vivienne said.

“It is, Vivienne, now hush up so I can read it.”

They all waited with varying degrees of impatience. No one had been very happy with pursuing the processor into the storm. For one thing, it made for horrible photography, and Greenpeace was all about film at eleven.

Doyle lowered the binoculars.

“Well?” Vivienne said. “What’d they say?”

“They said those explosions we heard was the Agafia firing on them,” Doyle said.

There were exclamations of disbelief all around.

“Come on, Doyle,” Vivienne said. “A fishing vessel fired on a Coast Guard cutter?”

“That’s what they’re saying,” Doyle said. “And that’s not all they’re saying, Vivienne. They want a favor.”

Vivienne stared at him. “The U.S. Coast Guard wants a favor from Greenpeace?”

“Not exactly,” Doyle said. “They want a favor from you.”

THE FLIGHT CREW HAD finished their second heavy weather traverse in three days on the hangar deck, although this one had been a lot dicier due to the steadily increasing layer of ice that was forming on every surface above water. A crew had already been detailed to the bow with clubs, where the ice was accumulating faster than they could beat it off.

Sams called the bridge. “We’re good to go, XO.”

Sara was standing next to Seaman Royce Lee Cornell, North Carolina-born, a year out of boot camp and barely qualified on the helm.

She could hardly see his black face in the dim light of the bridge. “Hold her steady, Seaman.”

“Holding her steady, aye, XO.” Just turned twenty, Seaman Cornell had the maturity of a petty officer with twenty years in. Mark Edelen had recommended he replace Razo, and it spoke well for Cornell that he was on the bridge before he’d been called to duty.

Sara looked at the indicators hanging from the overhead. Bubbles of air in twin curving plastic tubes full of water, the bubbles rolled back and forth and pitched backward and forward with the motion of the ship, indicating degrees of pitch and roll with a gauge printed beneath. As Sara watched, the roll went to seven, and the pitch went to nine. She swore under her breath. “Let her fall off the wind a little, Seaman.”

“Aye aye, XO,” Cornell said. His hands moved on the small brass wheel. A minute passed, two, and then the Sojourner Truth hit a patch of what felt like relative calm.

“Launch,” Sara said.

On the monitor they saw the rotors increase to a blur and the body of the helo begin to lift. Sara made it to the port wing of the bridge in time to see them appear, and then Sams really goosed it. The helo shot past the bridge in a bright orange blur fifty feet off the deck.

Sara stared after them, until recalled to where she was by the wind and the cold and the snow and the fog and the ice and, oh, the hell with it. She went back inside.

“Will she do it, Sara?” Hugh said.

“Who? Oh. The Sunrise Warrior‘? Yes.”

He was silent. “What?” she said.

“I guess what I meant was, will the rest of them let, what’s her name, Kincaid, do it?”

“Yes,” Sara said firmly, “they will.” She couldn’t stand still. She paced back and forth in front of the controls console and around it several times, not an easy thing to do on a packed bridge in twenty-foot seas, until Chief Edelen said, in a very respectful voice, “Why don’t you have a seat, XO?”

She stared at him. He gestured at the captain’s chair. The back was ripped up but someone had cleaned off the blood and guts and bone.

“No,” she said, a little more strongly than she ought to have. Hugh, standing next to Tommy over the radar screen, looked up. She recovered, and managed a smile. “Thank you, Chief. But no.”

After that, she stood in front of one of the intact forward windows, staring through the fug on the other side of it, praying for the sun to rise.

HARRY SAMS HAD SEVENTEEN years on helos, first with the U.S. Navy and then with the U.S. Coast Guard. He was fond of quoting that old aviation aphorism, “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” He didn’t hold with that other old aviation aphorism, “Any landing you walk away from is a good landing,” either. He not only wanted to bring home his people alive and well, he wanted his craft intact and ready to fly again.

Which was why he was wondering, with the very little portion of his brain allowed to do anything so entirely frivolous, why it was that he was speeding twenty-five feet above twenty-foot swells at a hundred fifty-seven knots with a cargo hold full of Coasties armed to the teeth toward a blip on a radar screen that had already proved itself to be rather better armed than the average Bering Sea catcher-processor.

And then the Agafias lights loomed up out of the driving snow and fog, and there was no time to think of anything but the job at hand.

The processor was pitching and rolling and yawing worse than the Sojourner Truth, which meant it would be noisy on board with the creak and groan of the ship, the slipping and sliding and rolling of everything not lashed down, and the whip and slap of the ocean.

“Target in sight,” he said into the mike, and heard Ryan reply, “Target in sight, aye.” Next to him Laird moved like an automaton, hands in constant motion, senses reaching out to listen to the bird, to what she was saying, how she was handling a tailwind of forty-five knots and gusts of over fifty.

“I’m not making any test runs,” Sams said. “We don’t have enough fuel for that. One shot is all we get. Everybody ready?”

“Ready, Lieutenant,” Ryan said.

“Ready, Lieutenant,” Airman Cho said.

“Okay,” Sams said. “It’s all going to happen very, very fast, so be ready.” He took another look as the Agafias stern came into view, and added, “And she’s making ice as fast as the Sojourner Truth, so watch your asses, Ryan.”

“Watching our asses, aye aye, sir.”

Sams banked rapidly to slide up her hull, slowing speed as they approached the bow. The only even reasonably empty space was a triangular section forward of the mast and boom, framed by the two massive anchors and the bow itself. He estimated a bare twenty square feet, if that. The good news was that the six containers stacked on the foredeck hid the helo from the windows on the Agafias bridge.

“Lieutenant?” Laird was looking at him.

Sams shook himself back into the present. “Are we good to go?”

Cho had the line hooked to the hoist. The helo came around the bow and Sams popped up on a rapid flare, virtually halting the helo in midair, letting it hang there like it was painted on the fog. Cho dropped the line and out of the corner of his eye Sams saw it hit the deck. A second later a man in a Mustang suit was sliding down it. He grabbed the end, belayed it around a stanchion, and five more men, bristling with weapons, hurtled down in rapid succession. Cho disconnected the line at the hoist and let it fall and Sams let the helo fall forward.

He stood off far enough to grab some fog for cover but not too far to be out of range of the boarding team’s radios. He made a wide circuit of the ship and was rewarded when Ryan’s voice came over the air. “All down safely, Lieutenant. See you back in Kodiak. You did say the beer was on you, right?”

“In your dreams, Ryan. Good hunting. And watch your back!”

Laird brought up Cape Navarin on the GPS and set a course, and as he did so the Sojourner Truth loomed up out of the mist looking like the wrath of God. She was even throwing a few thunderbolts by way of the portside 25-millimeter cannon.

The shells crossed the Agafia’s bow with inches to spare and were immediately followed by a voice on a loudspeaker turned up high enough to be heard on the moon, never mind over the storm. “Fishing vessel Agafia, this is the United States Coast Guard cutter Sojourner Truth. Heave to and prepare to be boarded. I say again, heave to and prepare to be boarded.”

And the guns on both sides opened up and Sams pointed the helo’s nose at three-five-zero and hit the gas.

THE MEN ON BOARD the Agafia were demoralized and panicking, especially the mercenaries. They had shot at the American ship and then proceeded to lead it farther south, as Jones had instructed. The storm was hitting them hard, tossing the ship around like a Ping-Pong ball in a bathtub full of Jell-O. It never stopped, everyone was getting slammed into bulkheads, hatch handles, and other crewmen.

Fang’s men were more disciplined and had the advantage of time served at sea, but they, too, were growing increasingly alarmed. Someone had come at them out of the snow and the sleet and the hail and had begun shooting. Windows had shattered; men had been hit and were screaming in fear and pain. At first Chen thought the ship’s crew must have broken loose and were trying to retake the ship, and then he remembered that Jones had put them all over the side.

And then a blue-hulled ship with a rainbow on the bow materialized on their starboard side on what looked like a course to ram them amidships. Even Jones yelled at that. Chen spun the wheel into a blur, only to find that way blocked by the Sojourner Truth. All three ships were pitching and tossing violently, adding to the feeling of an uncontrollable and imminent doom.

During those precious minutes when the bridge crew of the Agafia was preoccupied with finding some sea room in twenty-foot seas, Ryan’s men were working their way aft, picking off the enemy one at a time. Later, his report would state that most of these fell overboard into the Bering Sea. Hank Ryan had helped carry Captain Lowe’s body below. He still had the captain’s blood on his uniform and he was not inclined to show mercy, especially when he didn’t know what his team was facing in the way of opposition on board the Agafia. He knew that they had at least one big gun, and that was all he needed to know.

The first man they took out was the mercenary who had run aft to man the Browning machine gun newly bolted to the Agafia‘s deck. Ryan disarmed the weapon by pulling the bolt securing it to its stand and letting it follow its gunner over the side.

They were on the bridge fifteen minutes later without a scratch on any of them. One Asian guy was screaming something at them in his native tongue, which no one understood or even tried to very hard. From the way the other four surviving crew looked at him, he was the boss.

Ryan almost shot him down where he stood before he remembered that command might actually want to talk to the boss, so he said, “Secure them all below somewhere and mount a guard. If they so much as sneeze, shoot ‘em. The rest of you, let’s start looking for Mr. Rincon’s missile launcher.”

An hour later, they had inspected the Agafia bow to stern, containers hold, engine room, galley, and staterooms, and they still hadn’t found it.

ICE WAS BUILDING UP on the rescue hoist. No one in the aircraft said anything about it because what was the point, but the silence was getting a little strained.

Laird pointed at the radar screen. Sams nodded without leaning over to look. The radar was degrading because ice was building on the nose of the aircraft, too.

They’d left the Agafia with forty-five minutes of fuel remaining in their tanks. They’d been in the air forty-seven minutes. Sams avoided looking at the fuel gauge, concentrating instead on the horizon, a dark gray, featureless expanse. He’d put some altitude between the helo and the deck so he’d have some choices when the time came.

When it did, it came fast, and it looked like a tall iceberg, so he didn’t see it at first. Laird shouted and pointed, and there it was, a steep cliff footed with a narrow strip of beach. He eyeballed it. It ought to be wide enough for the fifty-one foot rotor.

It had to be.

One engine died, and they made the beach.

The other died, and they started to fall.

After that, they started to spin.