Blindfold Game

JANUARY

OH BOARD THE USGG CUTTER SOJOURNER TRUTH

UNDER THE SURE HAND of Chief Edelen the Sojourner Truth sidled away from the dock at Dutch Harbor like a hooker caught by a cop in the act of propositioning a John, only with a lot more style. The sky was gray and so was the attitude of most of the crew.

This had not been the Sojourner Truth’s best port call. Two underage seamen had spent the better part of their first night in port at Tommy’s Elbow Room and most of their second day and night confined to quarters, although most of that had been spent crouched over toilets in the head. Together they had been the proximate cause of three injuries bad enough for the victims to be taken to the hospital and damages to the Elbow Room and a passing pickup truck in excess of five thousand dollars. It was one seaman’s first offense and the other’s second. Ensign Ryan had been the investigating officer. Still smarting from the harangue he had received from the owner of the hotel to which the two seamen had retreated, which harangue repeatedly featured the phrase “fucking Coasties,” his report on the incident had been tart and testy. Sara, still smarting from a lengthy conversation with the Dutch Harbor police chief, had signed off on the report without her usual diplomatic toning down of pejorative adjectives and passed it up to the captain.

The captain, still smarting from the two-hour delay in getting away from the dock, was disinclined toward forgiveness. He convened captain’s mast before they were all the way out of Unalaska Bay in the hangar in front of all the crew not on watch, instead of in the relative privacy of the wardroom. The two seamen departed broken in rank with thirty days’ restriction, thirty days’ extra duty, their wages attached to pay for damages incurred, and with substantial portions of their asses missing. The captain vented the rest of his spleen on a pithy indictment of a dozen other crewmen who had had the bad timing to be present at the scene, including Petty Officer Barnette, all of whom he held accountable for not keeping their fellow crewmen from “steering into Stupidland.” The crew didn’t know who to be more pissed off at for that blanket condemnation, the captain or the offending crew members. PO Barnette, who had made an honest effort to break up the fight, was particularly stung.

It didn’t help that the C-130 from Kodiak hadn’t made it in with their last shipment of mail, and when they learned that District 17 had tasked them with patrolling the Maritime Boundary Line there was very nearly a mutiny. “There’s nothing going on up there this time of year!” PO Barnette said when informed. “Ma’am,” he added, a lot quicker than usual, when Sara glared at him.

To a man and a woman everyone on board hated patrolling the MBL. Basically they were there to show the flag. Most of the time the American side of the line was empty of vessels, all the fishing going on on the other side, in Russian territorial waters, which meant no boarding opportunities except for the occasional marine research vessel.

And it was fresh in everyone’s memory that even when a foreign flag-say a Russian fishing vessel-did cross the MBL into U.S. territory, and even when a Coast Guard cutter-oh, say the Sojourner Truth- caught them half a mile the wrong side of the MBL with their nets in U.S. waters and those nets full of U.S. fish, when said fishing vessel hightailed itself back across the line into Russian territory the cutter was held on the U.S. side, fuming, waiting for District to give them permission to cross the line in hot pursuit.

Said permission, if and when it came, was always too late. Such had been the case the previous August, when District made them wait for the Russian Federal Border Service to show up and escort them across, thirty-six hours later. By then the illegal catch had been long since processed into unidentifiable filets packed deep in an endless line of refrigerated freight containers, the location data on the GPS altered or erased, and the taste of hot pursuit was cold ashes in Coastie mouths.

No, patrolling the Maritime Boundary Line was not an ingredient in any recipe for improving shipboard morale. Sara encouraged the training teams to pile on the fire and damage control drills and helo launches in the hope that it would keep the crew too tired to sulk. She and the senior chief had also organized a Trivial Pursuit championship for this leg of the trip, and the officers would be making pizza that Saturday in the galley, an event the crew always enjoyed, but they all knew it would take awhile before the goodwill kicked in.

She wondered how the miscreants were being treated by their fellow crew members below, but not for long and not with very much sympathy. She sat at her desk, brooding over the inevitable stack of reports, crew assignments, supply orders, and District communiques.

She worked where she slept, in the forwardmost stateroom in officer country, a step and a stairway from another set of stairs leading to the comm deck and the captain’s cabin, which was located directly beneath the bridge. XOs, mercifully, slept alone. She used the upper bunk in her room as a rotating library, but every privilege comes with a price. A stateroom to herself meant that under way there was no getting away from the job. There were two telephones in her stateroom, one of which was Velcroed to the head of her bunk.

As it should be, she told herself. Suck it up, Lange, and stop feeling sorry for yourself.

There was a knock at the door and she looked up. “Sparks? What’s up?”

Sparks was the petty officer on duty in communications. He handed her an e-mail and made best speed in the other direction. She read it. “Sparks! Get back here!”

He returned, reluctantly. She read it again, letting him wait. She even read it a third time, hoping against hope that the letters would form new words. They didn’t. “I am ordering you to tell me that this is a joke.”

He looked as apologetic as his naturally mischievous face was capable of. “It’s not a joke, XO. I confirmed, and you know how they are, they’ve already held a press conference from the bridge of their ship. I e-mailed my wife and had her check CNN. It’s already aired. They’re en route, all right. They may even beat us back to the line.”

“You’re fired,” Sara said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Sparks said, and added hopefully, “Maybe the Russians will sink ‘em.”

“I wish. Thanks, Sparks.”

Correctly reading this statement as his dismissal, he returned to his duty station. Sara relieved her feelings with an uncharacteristic burst of profanity that earned an admiring glance from a passing seaman, and called the captain. “Captain, we’ve just received a heads-up from District. The Greenpeace vessel Sunrise Warrior is en route to the Maritime Boundary Line.”

There followed a long silence. “What is their purpose on the MBL?” the captain said.

“According to Sparks, whose wife watched the press conference on CNN, they are protesting the overfishing of the North Pacific Ocean, which they say is causing the precipitous drop in the Steller’s sea lion population in the Bering Sea, the sea otter population in the Aleutian Islands, and the salmon runs in Bristol Bay.”

There was another long silence while they both thought about the last time they’d had dealings with the Sunrise Warrior. Six months before, Greenpeace had been protesting the taking of bowhead whales in the Arctic Ocean by the Inupiat people who lived there. Television footage had been involved, featuring bloodied whale carcasses being winched to shore and one memorable scene when one of the catch was revealed to be female and pregnant. Sara wasn’t sure the sight of the dead baby whale rolling out of its dead mother’s abdomen had faded from the public consciousness six months later. She knew for a fact that the footage of the Sojourner Truth getting in front of the Sunrise Warrior so the Sunrise Warrior couldn’t get in between the whales and the exploding harpoon heads had not. They were still getting indignant letters from whale lovers all over the world.

At last the captain said, “Thanks, XO.”

He was right. There wasn’t much else to be said. At least this time nothing as beloved-or as photogenic-as whales was involved. She hoped. “You’re welcome, captain.”

She hung up and sat staring at the screen of her computer, trying to summon up enough energy to move.

Truth was, she was tired. This was the Sojourner Truth’s second patrol in four months, the first one lasting fifty days and this one scheduled for fifty-one, with barely enough time in port between patrols for a crewman to father a child and then out to sea again. They were short two cutters on the Bering Sea, and the remaining fleet had to pick up the slack.

But she knew that it was as much loneliness and depression as it was fatigue. Her mind started backsliding toward that hotel room in Anchorage three months before. Just the memory made her breath come faster.

There wasn’t anything she didn’t love about sleeping with Hugh Rincon. They’d barely waited for the elevator doors to close before they were on each other, and she didn’t know now if anyone had been waiting to get on when the doors opened again on his floor or if there had been maids or other hotel staff who had watched them stagger from wall to wall down the hall, see Sara climbing up Hugh’s body and wrapping her legs around his waist. His tie was twisted around to the side and his shirt was missing two buttons by the time she got her key out, and by then he had his hand up her skirt and she had a very difficult time focusing on the lock.

And then they were inside the room and he had shoved her up against the door and gone down on his knees and his mouth was there and, oh, she couldn’t get her legs open far enough, couldn’t press his face to her hard enough, couldn’t scream loud enough when she came. He got back to his feet and tossed her up into his arms for the three steps to the bed, threw her down, and fell on her before she had a chance to protest. Not that she tried. He didn’t bother undressing, just moved his clothes enough out of the way before he was on her and in her, and that was when he stopped, bracing himself on his arms, looking down into her face with fierce eyes. “Sara,” he said, his voice a husk of sound. “Sara.”

“Move,” she said, arching up, clawing frantically at his back, and he laughed, deep and low and triumphant.

He hadn’t slept much that night, and hadn’t let her sleep, either. He was proving to her how much she had missed him, and she knew it, and she didn’t care. He wanted everything she had to give him and he took it without hesitation or apology, tender only when it suited him, rough and urgent when it did not.

She had reveled in it. She’d never understood other people talking about how the sex had become routine in their marriages. There couldn’t be anything better than married sex, with each knowing exactly what button to push when, that one move that would-

“XO?”

Her eyes snapped open to see Ensign Hank Ryan looking in her open door with a quizzical expression on his face. By sheer willpower she forced the color from her face. “What’s up, Hank?” she said.

“You look tired, XO,” he said. “The cap’n still pissed?”

She sat up and said briskly, “Captain Lowe doesn’t dwell, Ensign. It’s done, it’s over, and we’re moving on. What’s up?”

A member of that generation raised by baby boomers, he had no problem serving under a woman and moreover thought Sara was a damn fine officer, and if he also thought she was hotter than a stick of dynamite he was able to hide his admiration beneath a suitably professional veneer. He accepted the implied rebuke without flinching. He had some crew requests for training to discuss, and when he left she turned to her computer to check her e-mail. Hugh’s name in the in-box was like a siren going off. She swore out loud, earning a quizzical look from BMOW Meridian, passing by on the bosun’s mate of the watch’s duty round.

She swore again, silently this time, resisting the urge to close the door to her cabin, and turned away from the computer and her in-box and the e-mail that seemed to glow in the dark.

That night in October was the first time they’d seen each other in over a year, since the big fight when she was offered the XO position on “I thought you wanted to join the Peace Corps!”

He looked at her, still with that saintly patience that made her want to rip his head from his shoulders and hand it to him, and said, “Sure. Someday. When I’m older. When we’re both older.”

“When we’re retired and too old to be of any use elsewhere,” she freely translated.

They’d managed to battle their way back from that precipice to maintain an uneasy peace in a marriage that was conducted in at best rare and admittedly joyous fragments of time when they were both in the same town at the same time and at worst with long stretches of separation endured with at least the appearance of compliance.

Until she’d been offered the XO position on the Sojourner Truth, when it had been Hugh’s turn to stage a meltdown. “We don’t spend enough time apart already, now you’ve got to go to sea again?”

“You could move to Kodiak,” she said, her turn to be patient, if not precisely saintlike.

“And what the hell am I supposed to do in goddamn Kodiak, Alaska, while I’m waiting for you to get back into port? Learn to speak grizzly?”

This time, the fight had ended with her packing her bags and moving into bachelor quarters on base until her orders came through. She hadn’t called him before she left, either, maybe the one thing she felt guilty about.

Well. She shied away from thinking about how she’d crept out of that hotel room in Anchorage while Hugh was still asleep. Make that two things.

But still, it wasn’t like Hugh didn’t know whom he had married. They’d been friends since birth, coconspirators since they were five, and lovers since they were seventeen. During all that time she had never made a secret of her intention to follow a life at sea.

She tried to imagine that life without Hugh and couldn’t, but truth be told, that was essentially the life she was living.

There were other maritime jobs, even other Coastie jobs she could have taken and been home for dinner every night, but none of them had either the sense of mission or the freedom of action she craved. With the advent of satellite communications it was true that much of the autonomy of a ship at sea had leached back to the District HQs, but she still dreamed of the day when she would command her own two-sixty-four. It was a dream she had had since her father sat her on his lap in the wheelhouse of the Melanie L, and placed her five-year-old hands on the wheel. Sara could have paid her way to the college of her choice with ease, but nothing but the Coast Guard Academy would do. She wanted ships, and in some atavistic throwback to a more barbaric time, she wanted an armed ship. She had been raised by a commercial fisherman in a commercial fishing town and there had never been any question what service she wanted.

She’d been lucky in being born American. She’d been lucky in that her father had had friends in the Coast Guard. She’d been even luckier to have been born smart enough and competitive enough and right-brained enough to merit a place in the academy.

She only wished she could apply those same qualities to her personal life.

For the first time she allowed herself to say the word out loud: “Divorce.”

She hated the sound of it. For one thing, it signified failure. For Sara Lange, failure was not an option in any endeavor.

Even more important was the sense of being not quite complete without him in her life. With Hugh, she never had to explain herself. He always understood what she meant rather than what she said. He was the only person, come to think of it, who understood her relationship with her mother. She wasn’t sure she understood it herself, but somehow Hugh got it.

Was it only geography that kept them from making it work? No. He worked for a government agency she despised in principle and in practice. She worked for a government service that replaced its personnel around the country and around the world in two- and three-year rotations.

She said the word out loud again. “Divorce.”

It sounded just as bad as it had the first time, and she was therefore relieved when the quick rap sounded at her door. “XO?”

“Yes?” she said.

The phone rang at the same time Cliff Skulstad stuck his head in with something perilously close to a grin on his face. “We’ve got an incursion.”

She unhooked the bungee cord that kept her chair from sliding away from her desk with the roll of the ship and was on her way to the bridge before the last word was out of his mouth, with not even a backward look at the screen of her computer and the unopened letter in her in-box.

THE BRIDGE WAS SILENT but for the whisper of static coming out of the radio and the sound of two hundred and eighty-four feet of metal hull slicing through a two-foot chop. There was a very slight long swell beneath the chop, not enough to slow them down and certainly not enough to cause more than the most imperceptible roll in a vessel with a fifty-foot beam and a three-thousand-ton displacement. The Sojourner Truth was a great ride, even in the Bering Sea, also known as the Birthplace of Winds, where boxcar lows beginning in Kamchatka regularly turned it into a roller coaster for every ship within five hundred miles.

A swift glance at the captain’s expression told Sara that this was one of the times when he was going to compensate for his lack of height with a serious display of attitude. The helmsman, who looked as if he’d lied about his age to get into the Coast Guard, and not that long ago, either, appeared to be oblivious to the scowling visage glowering out of the captain’s chair, but Sara noticed that his knuckles were white on the small brass wheel. She met his eyes briefly, and winked.

Seaman Eugene Razo eased off on his grip. He felt better with the XO on the bridge. They all did. It reflected no doubts about their commanding officer’s abilities, it was just that Captain Lowe had a very low tolerance for ineptitude and while Seaman Razo was among the fortunate who had escaped the recent conflagration in Dutch Harbor, he had a lively sense of self-preservation and serious plans for his future that didn’t include official reprimands in his personnel file. He had selected the Attu loran station as his first duty station so he’d have top priority for his next assignment, which meant he could select a ship out of his hometown of Kodiak with a fair chance of getting it. It was his firm intention to run through every black, orange, and white hull in the Kodiak fleet for the next sixteen years, until he retired at full pay to take over his father’s halibut charter business in Larsen Bay. He was engaged to his high school sweetheart, at present studying for her teaching degree at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She would graduate this year and they would be married out of her father’s house in Chiniak in June.

He stole a sideways glance at Lieutenant Commander Lange, standing with her shoulders squared, her hands clasped lightly in the small of her back, swaying slightly with the roll of the ship. She was taller than he was, he guessed right around five eight, with a lush figure that the baggy fleece uniform did absolutely nothing to hide. It was generally agreed among the enlisted men that Lange was the officer they’d most like to be marooned on a loran station with, but mostly they thought of her as a good officer, smart without being arrogant, friendly without playing favorites, and a good leader without descending into tyranny. She was also, they all knew, targeted for promotion. She’d have her own two-eighty sooner or later. Razo wouldn’t mind serving under her when that happened, so long as her ship was stationed in Kodiak.

Sara, unaware of the Eugene Razo Seal of Approval she’d just been awarded, saw Razo’s hands relax and faced forward again to watch the bow cleave white water against a gray sky. The old man was a good sailor, but he lacked anything approaching a recognizable social skill. Of course, that was why God made executive officers. She grinned to herself and bent a weather eye forward.

There was a ten-knot wind blowing out of the southeast, whipping the surface of the water into a froth of stiff white peaks. She raised binoculars to search the horizon. Still nothing. She consulted the display hanging from the overhead, with the Sojourner Truth in the middle of the screen and a series of dots in the upper-left-hand section of the screen moving in an elongated circular route the eastern edge of which defined the Maritime Boundary Line.

There were a lot of dots. She counted eleven, each of them representing a Russian seafood processor with one- and two-mile-long nets dragging the bottom of the ocean trailing behind, some of which played mother ship to smaller vessels with their own nets out.

One of the dots was way over the line, with another dot coming up fast behind her from the south.

“Where’s our target, Tommy?” the captain said.

“They should be in sight at any moment, Captain,” Tommy Penn replied.

“Good.” The heavy beat of all four Caterpillar generators and both propellers pushed the Sojourner Truth along at fifteen-point-two knots, better than anything any of the rust buckets ahead of them could do. Sara had cause to know. It had become almost a habit to head out on patrol and arrive just in time to see the Russian fish processor Pheodora slide over the line from American waters to Russian.

It happened once and if you were charitable you might think it was a mistake, that the man on watch wasn’t paying attention to his GPS, and okay, you’d let the incursion ride this time. It was not the Coast Guard’s job to interfere with fishers going about the lawful business of making a living.

A second incursion, you could allow for wind and tide and swell and chop to shove the boat off course. Even a third time, you could make allowances for equipment breaking down. But crew carelessness, bad weather, and instrument failure did not explain five incursions. There wasn’t any excuse, really; the Russians had established a 1.5-mile buffer zone on their side of the line in which no vessels were supposed to fish, specifically to limit the incursions that precipitated incidents like this one.

All five times the Pheodora‘s skipper had been cagey enough to keep the ship within three hundred yards of the line, so that if a Coast Guard C-130 Hercules on patrol or a helo launched from a cutter appeared on the horizon, one kick to the rudder put the vessel’s bow back over. Given the conservative nature of American interdiction on the MBL, that was enough to cause the Coast Guard to back off.

This, however, was the Pheodora‘s sixth incursion in two patrols in one calendar year, and this time she’d been caught two miles into American territorial waters. Her gear was out, although the pilot of the Coast Guard Here who had first spotted her had informed them that she was pulling it in fast. The Sojourner Truth had launched her helo immediately and the Here had handed off hot pursuit and continued on its patrol.

Captain Lowe was a prudent man nearing retirement, not known as a cowboy, but it was obvious to all of them that he had had just about enough. The last time they’d threatened a boarding. This time, Sara was pretty sure, they would be boarding the Theodora, arresting the crew, confiscating the catch, and taking command of the vessel to bring it into Dutch Harbor and turn it over to the federal authorities. Where, Sara very much hoped, it would be sold at auction to the highest bidder and the resulting monies invested in some worthy government agency, like, say, the U.S. Coast Guard.

“What the-” The captain was training a pair of binoculars on the horizon. “What’s that?”

It was, of all things, a freighter.

The entire bridge crew stared. The chief put what they were all thinking into words. “What is she doing way the hell and gone up here? Especially at this time of year?”

She wouldn’t have been such an odd sight if they’d spotted her four degrees south, where freighters and containerships hid from weather north of the Aleutians year round on the great circle route between Asia and North America, but here, crossing the Doughnut Hole, she was as exotic as a scarlet macaw in Kaktovik. She rode low in the water, indicating a full load. She had cargo containers strapped three high to her foredeck. Everything looked well secured, which made Sara think well of her master. The weather was clear enough to read the name lettered on her bow.

“Ops,” the captain said.

“On it, Captain,” Ops said, busy on the computer. A moment later he said, “Their IRCS checks out, captain. It’s the Star of Bali, a tramp freighter. Panamanian-owned.”

“Give them a call.”

Ops reached for the mike. “U.S. Coast Guard cutter Sojourner Truth to freighter the Star of Bali.”

There was a momentary silence, then response. The voice was male, with an Indian accent that stumbled badly over the cutter’s name. “Cutter Sojourner Truth, freighter the Star of Bali. We read you loud and clear, over.”

“Yeah,” Ops said into the mike, “freighter the Star of Bali, cutter Sojourner Truth, no problems here. Just wondering what you’re doing so far north.”

“Coast guard, Star of Bali, we running from weather, over.”

“Any farther north and you won’t have to worry about the weather, you’ll have to worry about the ice,” Ops said. He keyed the mike. “Yeah, Star of Bali, cutter Sojourner Truth, understood. What was your last port of call, what’s your next port of call, and what cargo are you carrying?”

“Coast guard, Star of Bali, our last port of call was Petropavlovsk, our next port Seward is. Our cargo is steel and drilling equipment.”

Ops looked at the captain, who looked at Sara, who shrugged. “No reason to stop them, sir.”

“No.” The captain nodded at Ops.

^uStar of Bali, cutter Sojourner Truth, good copy. Be advised, there is another storm headed out of the southeast, rated hurricane force.“

“Cutter Sojourner Truth, Star of Bali, many thanks for the advisory. Star of Bali out.”

“Safe journey, Star of Bali, Sojourner Truth out.” Ops looked at Sara. “It takes all kinds.”

“That it does,” the captain said. “Back to business, people.”

“Aye, Captain.”

The radio erupted with an excited call from the lookout on watch above at the same time Chief Edelen said in a voice that was not quite a shout, ^uPheodora in sight, sir!“

Everyone who had them raised binoculars.

The Pheodora’s rust-streaked hull was plowing along at full throttle, as evidenced by the wake boiling up from the stern, but the Russian processor’s single-screw diesel was no match for the Sojourner Truth’s two, and they were closing fast. The helo, an orange flea to the Pheodora’s large bulk, was hovering on the starboard side of their bridge fifty feet off the water.

“Tell the helo,” the captain said.

Ops reached for the mike on the radio with the secure operations channel. “Coast Guard helo six five two seven,” Ops said, “this is the cutter Sojourner Truth. We have the target in sight, I say again, we have the Pheodora in sight.”

“Two seven, Sojourner Truth, roger that. We have hailed them and requested that they heave to. They have not responded.”

“Roger that,” Ops said, and looked at the captain.

District, as fed up as the captain at the repeated incursions, had already given Truth the go-ahead. Captain Lowe nodded. Ops nodded back and said into the microphone, “Russian fishing vessel Pheodora, this is the United States Coast Guard cutter Sojourner Truth. You have intruded into American territorial waters and are in violation of the Maritime Boundary Line. Reduce speed and prepare to be boarded.”

They waited. There was no noticeable reduction in the Pheodora’s speed. The captain’s mouth thinned. Sara saw it and rejoiced inwardly. Ops was grinning openly, and the bridge exuded an air of taut expectation. Partly it was a desire to do good to wipe out the Dutch Harbor debacle, and partly it was delight at the unexpected gift handed to them by this patrol that none of them had wanted to go on.

It was also the John Wayne reflex, that intrinsically American instinct to chase after the bad guy, the chance to wear the white hat, the unmistakable thrill of the cops-and-robbers chase that came so seldom into the daily routine of their patrols. Sara bit the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning back at Ops.

Ops keyed the mike to repeat the message and at the same moment the secure channel erupted into life again. “Sojourner Truth, Sojourner Truth, this is Coast Guard Hercules aircraft one seven five two, come in.”

Ops raised an eyebrow at Sara and said into the mike, “Go ahead, five two.”

The Here’s aviator’s voice was terse. “Truth, we’ve got another incursion about five miles south of your location.”

The captain swung around in his chair and stared at Ops. “Here five two, how far inside the line?”

“Sojourner Truth, five two, this one’s a little over two miles inside.”

“Son of a bitch,” the captain said, frightening everyone within earshot. Captain David Josephus Lowe, officer, family man, and deacon of the Kodiak First Baptist Church, never, ever swore.

Sara, however, sympathized, and was thinking a lot worse than the captain was saying out loud. The Coast Guard had run into this before in the Bering, one or more Russian vessels making an incursion over the line at the same time, so that the one vessel being boarded occupied the attention of the lone cutter on patrol, while the other vessel pulled in their gear more or less at their leisure and moved back to their side of the Line. Bait and switch.

Ops said into the mike, “Here five two, this is the Sojourner Truth, have you identified the vessel, I say again, what is the vessel?”

“Sojourner Truth, Here five two, their IRCS number is about six inches high and on the front of the flying bridge.”

Which meant that the foreign ship’s four-letter international identification number had been deliberately painted too small for the Here’s crew to read from two hundred feet up going one hundred seventy knots, which meant the cutter couldn’t input it into their onboard database.

“Five bucks says it’s the Agafia,” Seaman Razo said.

Chief Edelen snorted. “No bet.”

The Pheodora and the Agafia were both leased by the same Russian fish processor. In the litter of three-hundred-foot vessels maintaining a year-round presence in the Bering Sea next to the Maritime Boundary Line each year, the two could always be found near each other, and all too often a little too close to the line for comfort. This put them both in the HIV or High Interest Vessel category.

The captain said nothing. Sara wanted to scream with impatience. Instead she said to Ops, “Ask the Here about fuel.”

“Coast Guard Hercules aircraft one seven five two, Sojourner Truth, how much fuel do you have?”

There was a brief pause. “Sojourner Truth, Here five two, we’ve got maybe four hours before the point of no return.”

“Raise Kodiak and tell them to dispatch another Here,” the captain said. “Then get the helo back here to refuel. Tell the Here on the scene to maintain contact until they can hand off hot pursuit to our helo.”

Kodiak came on the air and confirmed the dispatch of the second Here with so little questioning that Sara knew they’d been monitoring the channel from the beginning of the incident and had been standing by for just this request.

Maintaining hot pursuit was critical in making a legal case in a federal court against a substantial piece of property owned by a foreign corporation. The Russians’ lawyers were usually American and the best that money could buy, and the first thing any decent attorney said in this kind of case was that the pursued vessel hadn’t heard the order to give way.

As if she had spoken out loud, Ops keyed the mike and said, “Russian fishing vessel Pheodora, Russian fishing vessel Pheodora, this is the United States Coast Guard cutter Sojourner Truth. You are trespassing in American territorial waters, I say again, you are trespassing in American territorial waters. Reduce speed and stand by to be boarded.”

“Any answer?” the captain said, formally and unnecessarily.

“No answer, Captain,” Ops replied, equally formally.

There was a long moment of silence. “Break out the.50 caliber.”

“Sir?” Sara said.

The captain chose to overlook her involuntary exclamation. “Muster the gun crew and mount it forward to starboard.”

Sara pulled herself together. “Aye aye, Captain.”

“I want two boarding teams ready to go when we catch up to her.” He paused, and added deliberately, maybe even raising his voice a little, “Each boarding team is to be issued shotguns.”

Yeah, Sara thought, not without respect, the old man was really pissed. It gladdened her heart, even though she didn’t believe anyone should ever be shot over fish. “Aye aye, Captain,” she repeated.

“XO?” the captain said.

“Sir?”

“I want you to go with one of the boarding teams.”

There was a brief, startled silence. “I want you to report to me personally every step of the way,” the captain said. “Go codes one, two, three. Understood?”

“Understood, Captain,” Sara said. She reached for the IMC and her voice boomed out over speakers all over the ship. Through the aft windows she could see men and women boiling out of various hatches and swarming around the two rigid-hulled inflatables lashed to cradles on either side of the ship.

Like any capable executive officer Sara knew her crew, from EO Nathaniel McDonald, who so far as she knew never left the engine room except to eat, sleep, or depart the ship, to FS3 Sandra Chernikoff, a mess cook not a year out of boot camp and an Alaskan like herself and Eugene Razo. She knew which of three categories each member of the crew fit in, the keepers, the time-markers, and the no-hopers. She knew who was on watch and who wasn’t. From memory she reeled off a list of twenty names, beginning with Ensign Ryan, their legal enforcement officer and boarding officer, and ending with PO James Marion, a fireman, damage controlman, and boat crew member. Everyone on board had at least two jobs and probably three. She had about twelve the last time she looked, but then she was a keeper herself.

By the time she got to the armory the rest of the team had donned their orange and black Mustang dry suits, Kevlar vests, helmets, life jackets, helmets, and sidearms. She jerked her chin at the rack of shotguns and said to Chief Petty Officer Marvin Katelnikof, “Break out the shotguns.”

He complied without comment. Katelnikof, a balding veteran with twenty-nine years in, had earned his cutterman’s pin before Sara had graduated from high school. Not a lot surprised him. She accepted a shotgun and headed below to the fantail where the rest of the BTMs were mustering, followed by Katelnikof, who was their designated Russian translator on board. The two Zodiacs had already been lowered into the water with their three-man crews and were now circling back to pick up the boarding teams.

Ryan saw her coming. “You’re stylin‘, XO. Something about Kevlar that really does it for you.” He nodded at the shotguns. “The old man must really be pissed off this time.”

“The Agafias over the line just south of here.”

Ryan whistled low and long. “Man, they’ve just got to push it, don’t they? You’d think they would have learned after the last time.”

Sara scanned the horizon. “Yeah, where’s the Russian Federal Border Service when you really need them?”

Ryan followed her eyes and stiffened. “Hey-”

“I see them,” Sara said, and keyed the mike clipped to her shoulder. “Captain Lowe, XO. I’m seeing a couple of other vessels approaching our location at speed.”

“We have them in sight, XO. There are three vessels, identified as the Nikolai Bulganin, the Nadeshda, and the Professor Zaitsev.”

“So, okay, this is new,” Ryan said. He cocked an eye at Sara. “Do we go?”

“Captain, do we go?”

There was a momentary pause. The wind bit into her in spite of the dry suit, and her face was already damp with salt spray. “Go, XO,” the captain said.

“Yep,” Ryan said, “seriously pissed.” He grinned and climbed over the side to scamper down the rope ladder and drop solidly into the small boat. The rest of the first boarding team followed. “Rrrrrraaaaamming speeeeeeeeeeeed!” Ryan yelled at the coxswain in a passable Animal House imitation. The Zodiac roared away and the second pulled up neatly behind it and Sara led the second team down.

Petty Officer Duane Mathis hated not to be first in line for anything and roared after the first boat. The hull thudded over the top of the chop in a bone-jarring but exhilarating ride. Sara looked over at the coxswain and he was leaning forward, teeth bared as if he wanted to take a bite out of the wind. Mathis was from San Francisco, she remembered, and he’d grown up off the coast of Peru on the deck of his father’s tuna boat. He and Sara had swapped a lot of lies about fishing over this patrol, although it seemed to Sara that the only difference between fishing off Peru and fishing off the Aleutian Islands was the temperature and the species of bycatch.

They stood off as Lowe goosed the Sojourner Truth to overtake the Pheodora, giving the Russian just enough sea room to slow down and no more. If you’re the captain of an oceangoing vessel in the middle of the Bering Sea, ninety miles from the nearest land and that land not under the flag of your own nation, there are worse things than having a two-hundred-and-eighty-four-foot Coast Guard cutter bearing down on your port side with no indication of slowing down before impact, but not many. When the distance between the two closed to two hundred yards the Pheodoras skipper caved and pulled back on the throttle. A moment later a rope ladder was tossed over the lee side.

Sara was first on deck. The conditions of the processor were about what she’d expected, the deck slimy with guts and gurry, lines loose from gunnel to gunnel, and anything with a moving part so long overdue for an overhaul that it all probably ought to have been junked. Ten feet away the deck sported a jagged hole, which disappeared into darkness and whose edge had yet to be cordoned off and flagged.

Seaworthiness had two entirely different meanings on either side of the Maritime Boundary Line. Sara revised severely downward her estimate of how much the Pheodora might fetch at auction. They might just possibly be able to sell her for scrap.

“XO?” her radio said.

She keyed the mike clipped to her shoulder. “Code one,” she said in a mild voice. She didn’t like anything about this situation, but as yet the boarding team had not been threatened, not counting the imminent peril everyone stood in of breaking an ankle tripping over crap scattered across the deck.

“Code one, roger that,” the captain said. “Keep me advised.”

She clicked the mike twice in reply. A man in a bulky sweater and stained pants stepped forward. In heavily accented English he said, “Vasily Protopopov. I am master of vessel.” It came out “wessel” and behind Sara there was a snicker, followed by the flat slap of a hand on someone’s helmet.

Ryan stepped forward. “Captain Protopopov, I am Ensign Henry Ryan of the United States Coast Guard. You have been stopped because you were fishing over the Maritime Boundary Line in American waters.”

Protopopov let his eyes slide past Ryan to Sara. He gave her a long, leisurely once-over. Sara, crammed into her dry suit like chopped pork into a sausage skin, girded about with Kevlar like a medieval knight in his armor and feeling almost that seductive, felt like laughing in his face. Instead, she remained silent, keeping her expression calm and nonconfrontational. Protopopov waited just long enough to make his rudeness clear, and then shifted his attention to CPO Katelnikof, standing at Sara’s elbow holding the shotgun she’d handed off to him in the Zodiac. “No gear in waters,” he told Katelnikof.

Chief Katelnikof, a salty old fart and the last man to agree that women on board ship were a good thing, was already stiff with outrage at Protopopov’s insolence to his executive officer. This blatant untruth did not soften his attitude. He dropped the shotgun from shoulder arms to cradle it in deceptively casual hands, the barrel now pointing at the deck between himself and the Russian captain.

Sara looked aft and saw that Protopopov was correct; the Pheodora’s gear had been reeled on board.

The captain’s voice came over her radio. “XO? Status?”

She keyed the mike. “Code two, Captain.”

The codes were the captain and the executive officer’s way of assessing a boarding situation. Code one was standard operations, no threat. Code three was get us the hell of here. Sara didn’t see any weapons other than their own, but it was a big ship, the crew was obviously hostile, and there were too many windows and doors looking out on the foredeck in which someone with a weapon could be stationed.

Lowe’s voice was full of grim purpose when he responded. “Stand by, XO, and we’ll fix that for you.”

Sara clicked her mike twice in response. Ryan looked at Sara. He was the boarding team officer and the person to whom Protopopov should be addressing his remarks, but the Russian captain had good instincts for spotting a superior officer. Not to mention which, it was the first time since Ryan had rotated on board that she’d come along on a boarding. She jerked her chin and he turned to face Protopopov.

“Captain,” Ryan said, “we have you, with your gear in the water, on videotape, a good mile to the east of the line. As this seems to becoming something of a habit with your vessel, I’m afraid we are left with no option but to seize your ship and your catch and to place you and your crew under arrest.”

Protopopov looked at the boarding teams, both now fully assembled on the deck of his vessel. They each had nine-millimeter sidearms strapped to their waists, and half of them carried shotguns. He raised his head and opened his mouth. His eyes looked past Sara and his sullen expression lightened.

She turned to see what he was looking at, and found that while they’d been talking the three other Russian vessels had arrived on scene and were now circling the Sojourner Truth and the Pheodora about three hundred yards off.

“One boat it’s a Sunday sail, two boats it’s a race, three boats it’s a bloody regatta,” Ryan said.

Nobody laughed. Protopopov looked back at Sara with an expression that couldn’t be called anything other than triumphant. “Maybe you leave now.”

“I don’t think so, sir,” Sara said, who had been monitoring the activities on the deck of the Sojourner Truth out of the corner of her eye.

“Oh, yeah,” Katelnikof said approvingly, following her gaze, and Protopopov turned to look as one of his men let out a warning shout.

Lowe had closed to within a hundred yards of the Pheodora’s port bow without slowing down. The.50-caliber gun now mounted to starboard was manned, with a belt of ammunition already threaded into the magazine. In addition, Lowe had manned the starboardside 25-millimeter cannon, which Sara happened to know was the one that worked. The portside cannon had been waiting on parts for months. They were U.S. Navy guns, and the navy had never liked the idea of giving weaponry they’d bought and paid for to another service.

Lowe gave the Russians a good long look as the Truth flashed by, to cut neatly across the Pheodora’s bow with what felt like inches to spare.

Somebody screamed. Sara hoped it wasn’t one of hers. Captain Lowe was doing the thing in style, and she had to repress a chuckle.

Ryan didn’t bother repressing anything. “Flame on, Captain Lowe!”

They all staggered as the Pheodora’s helmsman panicked and spun the wheel and the processor lurched abruptly to starboard. Protopopov let out a stream of Russian, face going from red to white to purple. He could have been yelling at his helmsman, but then he turned on Sara and pushed right up into her face, still shouting.

“I’m so sorry, Captain,” she said blandly, ignoring the spray of spittle, “I’m afraid I don’t speak Russian.”

“But I do,” Katelnikof said to Protopopov, or so he translated for Sara when they were back on board the Sojourner Truth. “Don’t let this broad’s lack of balls fool you, Captain. Given half a chance she’ll order our ship to run right over the top of this paddle wheeler of yours.”

Aghast and agape, Protopopov stared at Katelnikof, whose grin was wide and not at all friendly. The Russian captain rounded on Sara again. “Your captain crazy! What you do, ram us, sink us! Russian government will not stand for this! I lodge complaint!”

The combination of speed and the show of weapons, in addition, Sara believed, to the display of extremely able seamanship, was enough to cause the other vessels to veer off and make best speed for the horizon.

Besides, they all had catch quotas, which if not met might relieve the skippers of their commands.

And it wasn’t like there wouldn’t be another opportunity to yank the Coast Guard’s tail on the Maritime Boundary Line. Job security, she thought, for all of us, and turned to Protopopov, whose face had yet to regain any semblance of normal color.

“Captain Protopopov, I relieve you of command of the Pheodora. Chief,” she said to Katelnikof, “have Captain Protopopov identify the rest of his crew and place them under guard. Ensign,” she said to Ryan, “go below and tell the working folks that they’ve got an all-expenses-paid trip to beautiful downtown Dutch Harbor.”

An hour later they were under way, following the wake of the Sojourner Truth as she headed south-southwest in pursuit of the Agafia.

The Pheodora’s bridge was in a little better shape than the rest of her, but not much. A large spoked wooden wheel reinforced with tarnished brass stood at the center, ranged about with a fathometer and radar and radios and a GPS. The GPS had been trashed, but that was to be expected, the crew covering their asses. All Sara really cared about was that at an ambient temperature right around fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, it was warmer than the bridge of the last foreign vessel she’d had to board.

Ryan entered the bridge through the port wing hatch. “Ship’s crew all secure in the galley, XO, and the workers are getting out their party clothes. I put Katelnikof on watch in the engine room. Not that the Russian engineers want to miss out on a shopping trip in Dutch Harbor, either.”

Everyone laughed, a little giddy at the success of their mission. Their mood was hardly dampened when they saw the helo return and land on the Truth, which meant that the Agafia had slipped back over the line before they could arrive on the scene. Bagging the Pheodora was enough of a prize, and besides, they were headed back for Dutch Harbor riding on a white horse, in distinct contrast to their recent exit.

Sara couldn’t keep the smile from tugging at the corners of her mouth. Looking around, she saw that same suspicion of a smile on the faces of the rest of the other two boarding teams.

It was hard sometimes for her to believe her luck, that she got to whup bad guy ass on her nation’s territorial frontier. “Just another day at the office,” she told Ryan, a big fat lie if there ever was one.

“We are the defenders of the homeland,” Ryan said, dropping his voice to his best basso profundo.

“We are the shield of freedom!” Sara said, and the bridge exploded into laughter, in part triumphant because they were the prize crew of a seized vessel and because at heart every Coastie was part pirate, and in part relieved because no shots had been fired and everyone was going home alive.