Blindfold Game

JANUARY
ANCHORAGE

KYLE WAITED UNTIL THE Hercules C-130 was in the air before he drove back to his office. He hung up his parka and stewed around a while before calling his wife.

“Where’s Hugh?” she said when she heard his voice.

“Back on the road,” Kyle said. “Listen, Lilah, I want you to take Eli and Gloria down to Seldovia for the weekend.”

There was a brief silence. “Kyle. It’s Monday.”

“Oh. Yeah. Of course. Well, then take the week.”

“I’ve got work, Kyle, as you well know.”

Lilah worked for the FBI, too. “Take some leave,” he said. “If I have to I’ll pull strings.”

“The kids have school.”

“I’ll call their teachers and tell them they’ll be back in a bit.”

Another silence. “Kyle. What’s going on?”

“I want you to take the kids to Seldovia, Lilah. Stay with the folks. You know they’d love to have them.”

“Kyle. We were there for a week over Christmas, if you recall, and I got the distinct impression that that was about six days too long for your father. Why this sudden urge to get me out of town? You got a girlfriend or something?” She paused. “Has this got anything to do with Hugh showing up in the middle of the night?”

“No,” he said, “nothing at all. Where on earth did you get that idea?”

“That response is so totally feeble I’m not even going to comment on it.

“Lilah.” Kyle rested his forehead in the palm of his hand. “Just take the kids to Seldovia. Rent a bed-and-breakfast, I don’t care. Just go. Today.”

When she spoke again her voice was softer. “You’re scaring me, Kyle.”

“Good,” he said.

The seconds ticked off while she made up her mind. “I’ll take them to Seward,” she said finally. “Is that far enough away?”

Seward was a hundred miles down the road, with the Kenai Mountains between it and Anchorage. “Yes. That should be far enough.”

“I’ll call the Edgewater. At this time of year we could probably rent the whole hotel for fifty bucks a night.”

“That sounds good,” he said, trying not to show his relief.

“Kyle?”

“What?”

“Come with us.”

“I’ve got something I’ve got to do here first.”

He hung up and swiveled to look out the window. It was a pity he wasn’t really seeing anything, because the window had a spectacular view of Denali and Foraker on the northern horizon. The day was clear and cold and icily bright for the measly five or so hours the sun was willing to poke its head up over the horizon. They’d actually had snow this year before December and it was piled in four-foot berms between which traffic negotiated streets that had gone overnight from four lanes to two. If the weather didn’t suffer a meltdown in the interim, there ought to be plenty of snow for the dogsled races.

He loved this time of year, that fleeting time before the tourists came back and you could get a table at Simon’s without an hour’s wait. He was happy to be back in Alaska, too, a duty assignment he’d been hoping for since he’d joined the Bureau. Unlike the traitorous Hugh and Sara, Kyle had stuck loyally to the West Coast, graduating from the University of Washington with a degree in criminal justice and then going to work for the Internal Revenue Service. Truth to tell, in spite of the grief he received from pretty much everyone when he admitted to his employer’s identity, he’d gotten kind of a bang out of the work. He loved catching righteous citizens-and they were always righteous-who insisted indignantly that the law didn’t apply to them. In his own small way, he felt he was contributing to the reduction of the deficit, although the current administration in Washington was doing its enthusiastic best to keep that goal well out of his or anybody else’s reach.

He’d signed up to take Russian at a community college, because by then the Wall was long down and he’d been headed for home from the moment he graduated from college. The borders were opening up between Alaska and Siberia and there was a future there for a Russian-speaking FBI agent.

In Russian 101 he met Lilah, fresh out of school with a degree in accounting-large, dark eyes, hair a downpour of heavy black, a body by Venus. He was sunk at first glance. After class he followed her into the parking lot and wouldn’t let her leave until she gave him her phone number. When he walked her to her door at the end of their first date he knew she had a brain and a sense of humor to go with the looks. By Russian 201 they were engaged, and by Russian 301 they were married, and before starting on children they applied together to the FBI. Both had been accepted immediately. The Russian had helped, and it had also helped when they both requested assignment to Anchorage, as Kyle had known it would. Lilah was from Snoqualmie in Washington State and no stranger to snow and ice, although she didn’t much care for the four and a half hours of daylight Anchorage was reduced to in winter. But then who did?

Her picture smiled up at him from his desk, with Eli in her lap and Gloria leaning against her shoulder. Yes, he had one beautiful family.

His thoughts turned naturally to Hugh and Sara, also part of his family. Not, at present, quite so beautiful. Odd, he thought now, how they’d all wound up in law enforcement. But perhaps not so odd, when he remembered the first time an Alaska state trooper had come to Seldovia, a tall man with a deep voice and an unshakable sense of authority. There had been a stabbing death in a community where if you weren’t related by blood you were related by marriage to everyone there. The town had been in a turmoil, which might very well have escalated into a lynching if the trooper hadn’t flown in from Ninilchik to investigate. It took his calming presence half a day to bring people to their senses, and at the end of it he removed the perpetrator to Homer to be bound over for trial. There was chaos, and then the trooper came, and there was order. It had been a powerful example to three awestruck little ten-year-olds.

Kyle straightened in his chair. His childhood buddy Hugh Rincon was not an alarmist. If Hugh thought there was a terrorist threat from the Far East presenting itself to a western American port sometime in the near future, then his buddy Kyle was going to take it seriously. All three of them, he and Hugh and Sara, too, had family in Alaska.

He called the local Coast Guard member of his task force. “Joe? Kyle. I’m headed out of the office. Can I drop by?”

He shrugged into his coat on the way out. “I’m going down to the port. I’ll be back after lunch,” he told the receptionist. One of the joys of being the boss was, so long as your case file didn’t back up, nobody looked over your shoulder.

Eve’s eyes followed him all the way to the elevator. Inside, he turned and winked at her. She blushed. She was just a kid, barely twenty years old, fresh out of Charter College with an associate degree in computers. He was well aware that she had a slight crush on him. He worried all the way down to the garage that he should have told her to get out of town, too.

Joe’s office was eleven blocks down the street from Kyle’s, in a handsome building erected right where Anchorage began a short slide into Knik Arm. “You know you’re toast when the next big one hits,” Kyle said.

Joe Brenner shook his hand warmly. “Yeah, but I’ll have a great view on the way down.” Behind him the Knik was beginning to fill up with bergs of ice, created by the freezing temperatures and broken by the forty-foot rise and fall of the tide. A containership was nosing into the bergs on the far side of the Knik, its hull crusted with sea spray. It was riding right down on the Plimsoll line.

Kyle thought of Hugh and wondered what the ship was carrying in its hold.

He turned. Joe Brenner was a tall, trim, broad-shouldered, square-jawed man in Coast Guard blue, with brown hair, blue eyes, and a charming manner. He was a weather forecaster on a local television station. He was also a commander in the Coast Guard Reserve who had been called up after 9/11. He still made the occasional 10:00 p.m. newscast, and he was something of a local heartthrob, because for some inexplicable reason best known only to the great television audience weather forecasters got all the action.

“Lately,” he said to Kyle with an engaging grin, “the worst part of this job has been chasing people who watch me on the news away from the gate.”

“Any potential there?”

Joe shook his head. “Nah,” he said, a little sadly. “All jailbait.”

“Shame.”

“Yeah.”

They communed together in silence over this grievous misfortune.

Kyle jerked his head at the window. “I see the CSX Anchorage is on its way in.”

“Yeah,” Joe said, and got to his feet to stand next to Kyle. “Riding low in the water.”

“I was noticing. What’re they carrying?”

Joe cocked an eyebrow. “What’s up?”

Kyle shrugged. “Curious.”

Joe didn’t believe him. “Well, you’d have to ask the port about that.”

“Okay. Wanna go for a ride?”

“Down to the port?”

“Yeah?”

“You sure you want to do that?”

Kyle’s brow creased. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Joe grinned at some secret joke. “Upon your own head be it.”

The Port of Anchorage was a three-story building painted beige with red trim, accented with oversized porthole-style windows. The manager was a large young man with the pink clear skin of a baby’s bottom and fine flyaway blond hair. Greg Wladislaw loved his job and he was a born cheerleader, anxious, even eager, to share every bit of this most wonderful job with anyone who didn’t move fast and far enough out of range first. He was devastated not to have an answer for Kyle as to the contents of the containership docking behind him. “We don’t have the manifests here, you understand. That’ll be over at Horizon with their agent. I can call, if you like. Or take you over and introduce you.”

Kyle said, “Can you tell me about traffic in and out of the port of Anchorage? When and what kind?”

Indeed Wladislaw could. “We get in two domestic ships a week, one Horizon on Sunday and one Tote on Tuesday. We’ve just started getting a third carrier in.” He dropped his voice, as if he were imparting a state secret to a select, trusted few. “Some are foreign carriers.”

If he was expecting expressions of awe and amazement he was disappointed. “Really?” Kyle said. “How often?”

“Once a week, out of Asia.”

“Asia?” Kyle said. “What ports?”

“Hong Kong-well, China now, I guess-Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore.”

“Mmm,” Kyle said. “That it?”

Wladislaw was shocked at the very suggestion. “Oh no, we have petroleum tankers coming in and out, too.”

“Any ships come in from Russia?”

Wladislaw made a face. “What do they have that we want to buy?”

“Point taken. How often do the petroleum tankers come in?”

“One tanker a month,” Wladislaw said proudly.

It wasn’t exactly Long Beach, Kyle thought, and felt relieved. Not enough traffic to hide something the size of a freighter in. Maybe Hugh was wrong. He looked out the window at the dock, which appeared to stretch from the Knik River bridge to Turnagain Arm. The three men watched as three C-130s came spiraling in from the north to touch down at Elmendorf Air Force Base’s runway, which ended on the edge of the bluff immediately above the port. A subsequent roar of engines indicated a takeoff immediately following. Aircrews doing touch-and-goes, to keep their skills sharp.

“Man, I love those big old Hercs,” Joe said. “Been flying for fifty years. No place they can’t get into or out of. Ever cop a ride in one?”

Kyle nodded. “I got to go out to Savoonga with the Alaska Air National Guard. A fun trip. Noisy, though.”

“Yeah, I pack earplugs.”

“I’ll remember that for next time. So,” Kyle said, turning to Greg, “you only get one ship in at a time?”

“Oh, no!” Wladislaw said, clearly appalled at the suggestion. He hustled Kyle and Joe to the outer office to where an aerial photograph the size of a tablecloth dominated one wall. It showed the port of Anchorage on a sunny summer day and every inch of the dock of the port used up by four ships moored bow to stern along it. “Two containerships and two petroleum tankers, all on the same day,” Wladislaw said proudly.

“Must have been a busy day.”

Wladislaw nodded vigorously. “You bet. You should come down on a ship day, Special Agent Chase. It’s a real zoo. An organized zoo,” he hastened to add.

“It’s Kyle, Greg, and I’ll take you up on that. Next week, maybe.”

Wladislaw beamed. “Anything else I can help you with?”

“What kinds of goods move through here?”

Wladislaw spread his hands expansively. “What kinds don’t would be an easier question to answer.” He smiled widely at Kyle, and Kyle had to resist the temptation to scratch Wladislaw behind the ears. “The port of Anchorage supplies ninety percent of the population of Alaska. What do you drive?”

Startled to be asked a question instead of being answered, Kyle had to think. “Ah, Subaru Legacy.”

Wladislaw nodded approvingly. “Family man, am I right? But with style.”

Behind Wladislaw, Joe rolled his eyes. It wasn’t the first time.

“Well, that Subaru came in on one of those ships. So did the gas to power it. So did the parts and oil your dealer uses to service it. Got snow tires?”

“Yup,” Kyle said. Wladislaw was so delighted with his game that Kyle didn’t have the heart to shut him down. “All came through this port, did it?”

Wladislaw beamed at him the way a teacher smiled at a promising pupil. “Yes, it did. The raisins in your oatmeal, the oatmeal, the bowl you eat it out of, and the spoon you eat it with.” Wladislaw patted the aerial photograph proudly. “All through the port of Anchorage. Apples to zinc, straight from the port to your pantry shelves.”

Kyle looked toward the windows, at the ice choking the narrow neck of Knik Arm between Anchorage and Point MacKenzie. “Has the port ever been shut down?”

Wladislaw was affronted at the very idea. “The port of Anchorage has never been closed to cargo. Ever.”

“However-” Joe said.

Wladislaw seemed to wilt a little, and cast Joe a look that could only be described as reproachful. “Well, yes, now and then when the ice is thick, it has been closed, but only to single-hulled petroleum vessels.”

“We issue ice rules of the road every year,” Joe told Kyle.

Kyle nodded thoughtfully. “Lot of silt washes down the Arm from the Knik Glacier annually.”

Eager to redeem himself in the FBI’s eyes, Wladislaw said promptly, “We dredge a million cubic yards per year out of the Knik. We maintain a depth of minus thirty-five feet at mean low tide.”

“The dredge only works in the summertime, of course,” Joe said.

“May to October,” Wladislaw said.

Kyle nodded again. “Any other traffic?”

“Bulk cement ships, from China or Korea, also May through October. And, of course, a lot of ships make their maiden voyages to Anchorage, to see how the new ship handles in our weather and tides. We had two big cruise ships last summer, and a fresh-off-the-ways petroleum tanker. Double-hulled, too!”

“Quite the operation,” Kyle said, congratulatory. “Thanks, Greg. You’ve been a lot of help.”

Back in the car, Kyle said, “What’s the port got in the way of security, Joe?”

Joe started the car and let it idle, turning up the heater. “Right now, nothing. Next April, the new MSST will be in place and operational.”

Kyle thought back. “The Marine Safety and Security Team.”

“Got it in one. A one-hundred man unit trained and equipped to handle everything from explosives to drug and migrant interdiction. It’ll have dive teams, K-9 teams, and six boats.”

Kyle nodded. “This is the team you told us about at the last JTTF meeting.”

“Yeah ”Joe said.

“But not deployed until April.”

“Okay, Kyle, what’s going on? You knew most of this stuff before.”

“A refresher course never hurts.”

Joe raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“I got a heads-up about possible terrorist activity, maybe involving marine shipping,” Kyle said.

“And you think Anchorage might be a target?”

The disbelief in his voice was plain to read. “You never have?”

Joe shrugged. “I heard what your buddy Hugh said last October, same as everyone else, Kyle, but come on. Anchorage?”

“You got family in Alaska, Joe?”

“No,” Joe said. “I’m divorced, no kids, parents live in Michigan along with about a billion other relatives. All of whom are among the reasons why I moved to Alaska.”

“I do have family here,” Kyle said. “And in Seldovia, and a lot of friends in Anchorage.”

“I get that, Kyle, but it’s not like we wouldn’t notice if someone sailed a destroyer up the inlet and parked it at the dock.”

“It doesn’t have to be a warship; all it has to be is a cargo ship with the wrong cargo on board. Bombs aren’t as big as they used to be. Have you watched the news from Iraq lately?”

Joe wasn’t convinced. “Still,” he said.

Many Alaskans shared this odd sense of invulnerability. Partly it was an inferiority complex, in that most Americans, informed by weather maps on the television news, thought Alaska was a small island off the coast of southern California. Partly it was location, twenty-seven hundred miles northwest of and an hour behind Seattle, a place where the polls were still open when the loser in a presidential election was giving his concession speech. Ninety percent of it was owned by the federal government in the form of national forests and parks and wildlife refuges. It was also a bank of raw materials, timber, fish, and minerals upon which the nation could draw when needed and when such a draw was justified by the current price of the commodity. There were only six hundred thousand people in the state and it returned only three electoral votes. As a result Alaskans were defensive and pugnacious in their attitude toward the rest of the nation. “We don’t give a damn how they do it Outside,” a local bumper sticker said.

But they did. They were acutely aware of their unimportance in the national scheme of things, and Joe was no different than any other Alaskan. It made it difficult for Kyle to mount a convincing argument that a terrorist could consider Alaska a target worthy of his attentions.

Joe looked at his watch. “If that’s all, I’ve got to be somewhere.”

And Joe, evidently, remained unconvinced. Kyle, carrying the image of Lilah and the kids headed down the Seward Highway at the back of his mind, yielded to Joe’s skepticism, at least for the moment. “Blonde, brunette, or redhead?”

Joe grinned. “Want me to ask her if she’s got a friend?”

“I’ll have you know I’m a happily married man.”

Joe held his hands up, palms out. “Just asking. You never felt the urge?

Kyle thought of Eve and said virtuously, “Never.”

“Yeah,” Joe said, “right.”