Blindfold Game

OCTOBER 22,

ON BOARD THE USCG CUTTER SOJOURNER TRUTH

I SAY WE USE him to troll for orcas.“ ”That’s a little harsh, Petty Officer, don’t you think?“ Sara said, trying not to laugh.

“Already tasked anyway,” Chief Mark Edelen said from the conn.

“Tasked how?” PO Barnette said, raising one skeptical eyebrow. Or so Sara assumed, as it was 11:00 p.m. of a Bering Sea winter’s night and there was nothing blacker this side of hell. The bridge had red filters taped over the navigation and radar and fathometer screens, dimming their readouts and allowing everyone’s eyes to adjust to see out the windows. Except for Orion looming large on their starboard bow, there wasn’t a lot to see, and wouldn’t have been much beyond an endless green ocean even if it were daylight.

But even in the dark Barnette sounded skeptical, and also thwarted. Seaman Rosenberg, an eighteen-year-old typically twirpish adolescent fresh out of boot camp, had managed in only fifteen days underway to step all over the senior crewman’s toes.

There was a smile in the chief’s voice when he replied. “They duct-taped his bunk shut, poked a hole in it, and sprayed it full of Right Guard.”

“Ouch,” Sara said. “Why?”

“Because he hasn’t had a shower since he got on board,” PO Barnette said, “and when you’re sleeping forty-two to a room it can get kind of rank. Plus he’s been puking his guts up ever since we left the dock. You can smell him coming a deck away.” A brief pause. “Ma’am.”

The smile in the chief’s voice was wider this time. “They also stuffed all his clothes into his duffle and filled it with Scrubbing Bubbles Basin Tub and Tile Cleaner.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Well, you know.”

“No. What?”

“It’s a disinfectant.”

Sara couldn’t help it, she let loose of the laugh that had been building inside for the last five minutes. She pulled herself together and cleared her throat. “I mean, this must stop, immediately.”

They knew her, and they laughed. PO Barnette’s ire was soothed, even if his hand had not been the one to mete out justice, and he returned to his brace at the conn, feet flat against the deck as if they’d been spot-welded there, hands clasped at the small of his back, leaning forward into the pitch of the ship. Salty, that was PO Barnette, eighteen years in. He never lost his balance, not even in the heaviest seas, as opposed to Sara, who had long ago perfected a complicated polka slash tango with the ship on any seas over three feet. It was effective; it had been years since the sudden lurch of a hull had tossed her into a bulkhead, but still she envied PO Barnette’s tranquil stolidity.

The bosun’s mate, Thomasina Penn, went back to the plot table to continue work on their route, but it was perfunctory as they were running box ops, hiding from a hurricane-force low in the lee of St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs. Running box ops meant steering a course confined within a box drawn on the radar screen that out of sheer boredom on occasion resembled the initials of the officer on watch. The S for Sara was fun, the L in Lange less so.

Mark Edelen’s initials were more challenging, resulting in a call to the bridge earlier that evening from the captain requesting the conn to straighten out their course so his dominoes wouldn’t keep sliding off the wardroom table. It was the threat of being drafted into playing dominoes that had caused Sara to retreat to the bridge in the first place.

As executive officer, she was exempt from watch rotation, but truth to tell, she missed it. She missed the heave and roll of the sea at night, more pronounced on the bridge thirty-six feet up from the waterline than it was in her stateroom two decks below. She missed the occasional glimpses of white as the bow sliced through the ocean. On clear nights it was horizon to horizon stars, crowding one another in three hundred and sixty degrees of sheer glory.

Nights like tonight. On nights like tonight, it was as if they were sailing straight off the edge of the earth and into the cosmos. Nights when the moon came up or the aurora came out verged on the paranormal.

On the night watch voices were muted, lights were softer to the eye, and the seas seemed somehow less severe no matter the height of the wave or the length between swells. At night, things were a little less formal and a little more friendly. Sara loved her job and she loved the Coast Guard, but executive officer was just another description for captain’s hatchet man. It could get pretty lonely, especially since she was the only female officer. Being one of only eleven women in a crew of a hundred didn’t help.

Promotion to executive officer was not anything an ambitious officer in the United States Coast Guard refused, not if she were in her right mind, but as XO her days with filled with administrative minutiae and a lamentable lack of action. Logistics made the boat go, she understood that, but instead of driving the boat-or standing watch-her days were spent in two-hour meetings over ways to dispose of the trash accumulated during a fifty-one-day patrol on a ship with ten officers and ninety enlisted men and women on board. It wasn’t that she wanted to be an ensign again, but she wished, not for the first time, that she were on a smaller ship with fewer officers, where once in a while she might get to lead a boarding.

And where she didn’t have so many memories eight hundred miles off their starboard bow. She pulled her hat down to hide her expression, forgetting that it was black as the pit on the bridge, raised one foot to the ledge that ran around the radar console, and wedged herself in the narrow space between it and the control console. She put an elbow on her raised knee and her chin in her hand.

“Can’t sleep?” the chief said in a low voice.

“Dominoes,” Sara said.

He laughed. He had a marvelous laugh, which pretty much matched the rest of him. He was smart, funny, and good at his job, and if that wasn’t enough, he was handsome, too, with the most beautiful brown eyes Sara had ever seen. That wasn’t all that was beautiful about him, either. Their first full day underway she’d gone below to work out in the ship’s gym and found the chief there before her, dressed in T-shirt and shorts, far less clothing than she was accustomed to seeing him in. She’d been unable to meet his eyes for a good twenty-four hours afterward for fear that he would know exactly what she was thinking. Aside from the fact that she was an officer and he was an enlisted man, that they were underway on two hundred and eight-two feet of ship that seemed to shrink with every day of patrol that passed, and that the last thing the crew needed was to have its nose rubbed in what the Coast Guard officially referred to as an “inappropriate romantic relationship,” they were both married to other people.

Even if Sara was feeling less and less married as time went on. “Got any plans for Dutch?” she said at random. She didn’t need to be thinking about Hugh.

They were headed for Dutch Harbor the next day, their first port call of the patrol. “Seafood buffet at the Grand Aleutian,” Mark said. “Hike up the mountain beforehand to earn it.”

“No joy ride on the helo?”

The helicopter pilots took crew members for rides in port, racking up hours in the air and making friends with the crew as a bonus. “Nah,” Mark said, with the disdain only a career sailor could display toward an aviator. “I’ve been. Figured I’d let some of the newbies have a shot. You?”

“District is flying in for a briefing.”

Mark’s teeth flashed. “Oh yeah, I remember you and the captain talking about that the other day. What was it Winston Churchill said? Some thing about democracy being the worst system of government ever invented, except for all the others? Didn’t mention bureaucracy, did he.”

And he could read. Sara hardened her heart to this suddenly even more attractive man and did not reply. Instead, she thought about what she always thought about, her next duty assignment, and if she could finagle another tour in Alaska, or at the very least on the West Coast. She was terrified that she would be assigned to command in D.C. again, and was equally determined to foil, thwart, or otherwise avert that misguided effort on the part of her commanding officers if at all possible.

She’d been amazing lucky so far. The Sojourner Truth was her fifth boat in ten years, if you counted her summer on the Eagle, the Coast Guard’s tall ship, and she did. She would have her cutterman’s pin before the year was out, denoting seven years’ sea duty, which included two years’ command of a one-ten white hull out of Eureka, California. The time in D.C. had probably been essential in getting her the one-ten, she admitted, if only reluctantly and if only to herself, but shore duty was not what she had signed on for with the U.S. Coast Guard, and she made sure that every commanding officer she served under knew it. She’d been lucky in them, too, but then she worked hard at fostering the good opinion of her COs. When she had gotten the Sojourner Truth, she had showed up for duty a week early and spent that time learning every nook and cranny of the ex-navy salvage tug from bilge to crow’s nest and pestering the then first officer for every detail of his two years on board. When she had drained him dry, she started in on the engineer officer.

Blond hair, blue eyes, and long legs tended to engender thoughts other than her competency as a serving officer in the “always ready” service, but it helped that she deliberately desexed herself for each patrol, wearing her uniform a size too large, with a T-shirt and leggings beneath, no makeup, no jewelry, no perfume, no scented soaps or body lotions. Her hair she kept just long enough to wear in a ponytail, drawn through the band of the uniform baseball cap, which never left her head except at flight quarters, meals, and asleep in her bunk. She showered, she washed her clothes regularly, she was clean and neat-if only to keep herself from the unfortunate Seaman Rosenberg’s fate-but that was the most effort she made for her personal appearance under way.

“For crissake, Sara,” Hugh had said the first time he’d seen her in what she called her underway ensemble, “where are your breasts?” He’d pulled out the neck of the dark blue polar fleece jacket to check that they were still there, and that had been the end of that conversation.

She drew in a sharp breath. It had been a while since Hugh Rincon had managed to creep into her thoughts unawares, and now there he was again, the second time in five minutes. She wondered how he was, what he was doing, whether he was still in Anchorage or back at his desk in Langley, gathering gossip in the service of his country.

It was with heartfelt relief that she heard the marine band crackle into life. The voice was male and on the ragged edge of panic. “Coast Guard, Coast Guard, this is the fishing vessel Arctic Wind, emergency, emergency, Coast Guard, Coast Guard, this is the fishing vessel Arctic Wind, over.”

In a photo finish Sara beat both Mark and Tommy to the microphone mounted over the plot table. “Fishing vessel Arctic Wind, this is the Coast Guard cutter Sojourner Truth, go up to two-two-alpha.”

“Up to two-two-alpha, roger.”

She reached up and clicked the frequency knob on the radio to twenty-two-alpha, aware of an attentiveness on the bridge that had not been there a moment before. “Arctic Wind, this is cutter Sojourner Truth, how copy?”

The voice came back with distinct relief. “Five-by, Sojourner, good to know you guys are out there.”

“Good to hear, Arctic Wind, what’s the problem?”

“Sojourner, I’ve got a deckhand with three-inch J-hook in his eye.”

“Chief, call the captain,” Sara said to Mark. “Tommy, pipe Doc and the aviators to the bridge.” She keyed the mike. “Arctic Wind, roger that, you’ve got a deckhand with a three-inch J-hook in his eye. Is he conscious?”

“He’s conscious and he’s mobile, Sojourner. It’s still got the bale attached. I’ve got the hook stabilized with a bunch of tape and gauze, but I don’t know where the barb is. I don’t want to mess with it any more than that.”

“Don’t touch it!” Tommy said involuntarily. Sara keyed the mike and said, “Roger that, Arctic Wind, what’s your lat and long?”

She turned to watch Tommy punch the numbers into the radar as the longliner skipper read them off. The screen readjusted itself and the bosun’s mate ran the cursor over a small glowing green X on the screen. “A little over forty miles north-northeast of our present position, XO.”

“Come about to zero-three-zero, all ahead full,” she told the helmsman.

“Zero-three-zero all ahead full, aye,” Seaman Eugene Razo replied. A moment later she felt the vibration in the deck increase as the cutter leaped forward in pursuit of her top speed, fifteen-point-four knots.

“Arctic Wind, this is the Sojourner Truth. We’re on our way. We’ll either be sending a boat over or doing a hoist with our helicopter. We’ll let you know which so you can make ready.”

She waited. They all waited. At last the Arctic Wind came back on, her skipper sounding very tightly wound. “Sojourner, I’m not set up for a hoist by helicopter. I’ve got wires and crap all over the deck.”

She heard the door open behind her and heard Mark say, “Captain on the bridge.”

“Understood, Arctic Wind, stand by,” Sara said, and turned.

USCG Captain David Josephus Lowe was a short, stern-faced man who made up for his lack of height with a determinedly erect carriage. A strict, by-the-book disciplinarian redeemed by an equally rigid sense of fairness and an elusive sense of humor, his command was nothing if not restful. So long as the crew did their jobs when and where he told them to and did them well while they were at it he had no complaint. If they didn’t, he had no difficulty in saying so and, if the problem proved to be repetitive, in meting out swift and sure punishment at mast. There was comfort in knowing always exactly and precisely what was expected of you, and security in knowing the rest of the crew knew it, too. Sara had served in far worse commands.

“XO,” Captain Lowe said, settling into the armchair bolted to a metal pole to the right of the bridge console. He always sat a little forward, the crew speculated, so his legs wouldn’t stick straight out like a little kid’s in a high chair.

“Captain,” she said, facing him and going unconsciously into a brace that mimicked PO Barnette’s, shoulders squared, feet spread for balance, hands clasped at the small of her back. “We’ve got a longliner fishing pacific cod approximately forty miles north-northeast of our present location.”

The door to the bridge opened and she looked over the captain’s shoulder to see Doc Jewell enter the bridge. She waited until he was standing next to her to continue. “They’ve got a crew member with a three-inch J-hook in his eye. Their skipper says he’s got the hook stabilized with gauze and tape.”

“Is he conscious?” Doc said.

“Yes, and his skipper says he’s mobile, which I guess means he can walk.”

“Can he climb into a basket?”

“The skipper also says he’s not set up for a hoist by helo.”

“Why not?”

“He says he’s got wires and… stuff all over the deck.”

The captain looked at Doc. “You feel comfortable taking an EMT over in a small boat and bringing the guy back here?”

Even in the dim light of the bridge Sara could see that Doc was less than thrilled at the prospect. “Even with the hook stabilized, Captain, we’d have to get him down the side of his ship and up the side of ours. And then the action in the boat coming over. A hook in the eye…” Doc shook his head. “I don’t like the odds of getting him on board without doing more damage.”

“How long is the longliner?” a new voice said, and Sara turned to see the two aviators standing behind her.

“A hundred and seventy feet,” she replied.

The aviators exchanged a look. “In a hundred and seventy feet,” Lieutenant Laird said, “we can hoist from somewhere.”

Lieutenant Sams nodded.

The longliner skipper was not happy. “I’m not set up for a hoist,” he repeated, his apprehension coming through loud and clear. “I’ve got two masts and a guy wire running from the bow to both masts to the stern, and trash and crap all over the deck.”

“How long will it take us to get into range for the small boat?” the captain said.

“Two and a half hours, sir,” Tommy said.

“Devil’s advocate, Captain?” Sara said. “If we slow down to come onto a flight course to launch the helo and they can’t get the guy off, it’ll take that much longer for us to go get him by small boat.”

Harry Sams’s lower lip pushed out into something perilously close to a pout, and Roger Laird opened his mouth, but before either aviator could start whining the captain called it. “Let’s try it by helo first, night vision goggles.”

Doc looked immensely relieved. “Agreed,” he said.

“Aye aye, Captain,” the aviators said in unison and then left the bridge in a hurry, like they were afraid the captain might change his mind.

The operations officer showed up, in gym shorts, sweaty and out of breath. “I’m sorry, Captain, I was working out, I didn’t hear the pipe.”

The captain jerked his chin at Sara, who said, “We’ve got a hundred-and-seventy-foot longliner forty miles off our starboard bow. He’s got a deckhand with a three-inch J-hook in his eye.”

Ops, Clifford Skulstad, a slim, intense lieutenant in his late twenties, whistled. “That’s gotta smart,” he said. “The aviators tell me we’re trying an NVG hoist?”

“Roger that,” Sara said, and Ops went to the nav station to coax the sat phone into operation, which he alone on board seemed to be able to do.

“Flight quarters,” the captain said, and everyone on what was now a very crowded bridge pulled off their caps and stuffed them into their belts or hung them on bulkheads or wedged them behind handrails. Ensign Hank Ryan, the helo communications officer, donned mike and earphones and started turning things on. As the closed-circuit television overhead warmed up, they saw the hangar telescoping back and the helmeted and vested hangar deck crew scurrying around. On the sat phone Ops called Anchorage to arrange a Life Flight to meet the helo in Dutch Harbor, and then got the name of the ship’s agent and called her, too.

“I relieve you, Chief,” Sara told Mark.

“XO’s got the conn,” he said, followed by a chorus of ayes acknowledging the handover.

“Helm, steer three-four-zero, all ahead full,” Sara said.

“Three-four-zero, all ahead, aye,” Charlie said.

Sara took up station in front of the control console and watched the bow pull to port. The Sojourner Truth was a joy to handle, quick to respond, a Cadillac of a ride. There wasn’t five knots of a prevailing breeze, and most of the wind now coming across the port bow was created by their own forward motion. There was no pitch and no roll to speak of. Conditions could not be better for a helo launch. If it was daylight, they would, in Coastie vernacular, be riding the seagull’s ass. “Maintain course and speed,” she said.

“Maintaining course and speed, aye,” the helm responded, and everyone turned to watch the television screen as the helo was rolled out onto the hangar deck, its rotors unfolded, and the flight crew climbed in. The rotors began to turn, slowly at first, accelerating into a blur.

“Black out the ship,” the captain said, and everything except for the nav screens was turned off, including the running lights, because any light no matter how small could white out the night vision goggles. It wasn’t exactly legal but it was an acceptable alternative to crashing the helo.

“Go for launch, Captain?” Ryan said.

“Go,” the captain said. Ryan spoke into the microphone and almost instantaneously the whine of the helo ratcheted up to where it drowned out the Sojourner’s engines. A dark shape rose into the air off their stern, nosed into the wind, and roared past their port bow.

“Secure from flight quarters,” the captain said, and everyone put their caps back on.

“Resume course zero-three-zero, all ahead full,” Sara said.

“Zero-three-zero, all ahead full,” the helm replied.

Everyone strained their eyes at the distant masthead light on the northeastern horizon. Sara couldn’t get the image of the fisherman with the three-inch J-hook in his eye out of her mind, and she knew she wasn’t alone.

Five minutes later Laird’s voice crackled over the radio. “Longliner Arctic Wind, this is Coast Guard Rescue six five two seven.”

“Coast Guard, Arctic Wind, go ahead.” The skipper sounded unenthusiastic but resigned.

“Yeah, Arctic Wind, Coast Guard, could we get you to turn out some of your lights? We’re operating with night vision goggles and light kinda gets in the way.”

“Roger that, Coast Guard.” There was about five more very long minutes’ worth of conversation as the helo and the longliner identified which lights should be turned out.

“Yeah, Arctic Wind, Coast Guard, that’ll do it. We’d like to hoist from the portside stern area, I say again, portside stern. Can you get your guy out there?”

“Roger that, Coast Guard.”

Sara peered through the forward windows, trying by divine telepathy to follow what was going on on board the longliner. After a moment a smaller light came on next to the brighter masthead light off their starboard bow and lifted up and away. “They’re off,” she said.

Laird’s voice came over the radio. “Cutter Sojourner Truth, Coast Guard helo six five two seven, we’re off and en route for St. Paul. Our compliments to the deck crew, they were flawless.”

“Roger that, six five two seven,” Ops said. “Cutter out.”

“Helo out. See you tomorrow morning.”

No one cheered out loud but there was a communal exhalation of breath. Ensign Robert Ostlund, the landing signals officer, entered the bridge. “Everything by the book and then some, Captain. The deck crew performed just about perfect.”

“Coast Guard cutter Sojourner Truth, longliner Arctic Wind.” If the guy had been anything but a Bering Sea fisherman he might have been crying, he sounded so relieved. “Thank you. That was amazing, I didn’t know you guys could do that.”

“All part of the service, Arctic Wind,” Ops said. “Cutter Sojourner Truth out.” He clicked the marine radio back up to channel 16 and said over his shoulder, “Let’s see if he remembers that the next time we board him.”

“Well done, all,” the captain said. “XO, pipe the news to the crew. Wait, belay that last,” he added. “Let them sleep. And holiday routine tomorrow until noon.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” Sara said. She’d have to revise the plan of the day, but the flight deck crew, some of whom were also boarding team and fire team members, would work better with the extra rest.

Within sixty seconds the bridge was empty of everyone except Sara, Chief Edelen, PO Barnette, Tommy Penn, and Seaman Razo. In all, the SAR case had taken about ninety minutes from the time the first call came in from the Arctic Wind to the last communication from the helo.

Mark grinned at Sara. “Coast Guard,” he said.