Charon's Landing

Homer, Alaska October 17

Howard Small leaned over the gunwale of the charter boat and retched so violently that he nearly lost his glasses. The soured contents of his stomach hit the water loudly, alerting the crews on the other charter boats. They looked over and cheered. Howard spat several times in a vain attempt to clear the foul taste from his mouth before straightening. He wiped clotted brown smears from his lips with his parka sleeve, laid his head back against the fiberglass hull, and moaned.

“Christ, Howard, we’re still tied to the dock. Don’t tell me you’re already seasick,” teased Jerry Small, captain of the fishing boat.

The two were cousins but couldn’t have been farther apart as physical types. Howard, younger by a few years, was prematurely bald, while Jerry still retained a tangle of black and silver hair. Where Howard was slightly built and bookish, Jerry’s features were broad and deeply weathered, and he carried his more than two hundred pounds on a solid frame.

“Don’t blame me, Jerry. It was that sadist there that did this to me,” he answered, waving an arm weakly at the other passenger on the thirty-foot craft. “We were up until about four hours ago drinking tequila shots at the Salty Dog Saloon.”

In the opposite corner of the boat, the other passenger smiled like the Cheshire Cat. He leaned negligently against the transom, one leg stretched out along a bench, the other tucked against his chest, battered hands cupping his bent knee. He wore faded jeans, a plain black sweatshirt, and a leather bomber jacket. His hiking boots were of good quality but heavily worn. His clothes looked slept in, but there was still a rough elegance about the man, the way a suspension bridge or a high dam can be elegant.

Despite the few hours of sleep and the massive amount of alcohol he must have consumed, the passenger’s eyes were sharp and focused. They were an unusual shade of gray, hard yet at the same time friendly and laughing. They possessed a captivating depth that caught Jerry’s attention. He had to force himself to look away.

“I know just what you need.” The passenger glanced at his TAG Heuer watch and took note of the still distant dawn. “Just as I suspected, it’s Happy Hour in Oslo, Norway.”

He fished two bottles of Alaska Pale Ale from the plastic cooler on the deck next to him and tossed one toward Howard.

“Nothing like a little hair of the dog.” The man grinned, twisting the cap off what he considered the finest beer in the world.

“At four-thirty in the morning, this is the whole dog again,” Howard complained, but he opened the beer and took a long swallow.

“Better?”

“Better.”

“The fore lines are off, Dad. Let’s get going.” Jerry Small’s teenage son was an even larger version of his father. The boy, man really, was at least four inches taller than six feet, with shoulders like an ox. His youthful face was incongruous on his large body.

“Get ready to cast off stern, John,” Small said, as the big stern-mounted Chevy engine rumbled to life.

John cast off the final line and jumped aboard their charter boat, Wave Dancer, a poetic name for a stout, roughed-up craft that had fared too many Alaska winters. The two passengers joined the captain and his son in the relative protection of the open-sided cabin.

They were the first vessel of Homer’s charter fleet to head out in search of halibut, huge bottom-feeding fish strongly resembling flounder. Though it was late in the season, Jerry assured his party that he could still lead them to some monsters. To starboard, the boat motored past one of the largest natural spits in the world. In the protection of the Cook Inlet, where the currents from the Gulf of Alaska met those from the Shelikof Strait, the seas had created a mile-long thrust of land, narrow enough that someone could throw a baseball from one side to the other. The spiny projection on the Kenai Peninsula’s northern coast was home to some of the best salmon and halibut fishing in the world as well as the nesting site of a huge flock of bald eagles that scavenged around the sleepy town’s garbage dump.

The Wave Dancer rounded the tip of the spit. To port, the Kenai Mountains were a murky shadow in the dim light of the false dawn. The sun was just a stroke of blush against the horizon. The temperature was a raw thirty degrees, forcing the men to hold themselves close to the cabin’s heating vents. The wind was mild, and the seas were no more than three feet — a gentle ride for a boat designed to battle ten-foot swells.

“You don’t strike me as one of the regular eggheads Howard usually brings fishing,” Jerry Small said to his other passenger.

The man smiled. “No, I’m an independent consultant, hired to check the viability of Howard’s work for commercial application.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Does my cousin’s gizmo work?”

“If my recommendation holds any weight with Pacific Machine and Die, this time next year, Dr. Howard Small is going to be a very wealthy man.”

Howard grinned around his hangover. This was the first he’d heard of the endorsement after the two weeks of field trials they’d just completed north of Valdez. “Thanks, Mercer.”

“Don’t thank me.” Philip Mercer shook Howard’s hand. “You did all the work. In a couple of years, the mining industry is going to be turned on its ear by what you’ve developed.”

For the past three years, Professor Howard Small and his staff at UCLA had been developing a mini-mole, a type of tunnel-boring machine that utilized the latest in laser guidance, hydraulic technology, and microminiaturization. Their creation, dubbed Minnie, had just proven itself on its first true test, under some of the harshest conditions any machine was forced to endure.The machine had bored a two-mile-long tunnel through granite bedrock with a deflection of only one ten-thousandth of an inch from her original course. Unlike other tunnel-borers, Minnie was small and economical. A crew of twenty could keep the sixteen-foot-long machine running twenty-four hours a day as she chewed out a four-foot-diameter tunnel. By comparison, the borers used to dig the Channel Tunnel between England and France were six hundred feet long and required hundreds of men to maintain.

Mercer had been hired by Pacific Machine and Die, a huge equipment manufacturer, to evaluate Minnie’s utility in hard rock mining. A borer that small could potentially eliminate explosive blasting in mines and the hundreds of deaths and injuries it caused each year. With his formidable reputation in the mining industry, Mercer’s recommendation ensured that Pac Mac & Die would be buying the rights to Minnie within months. Howard’s years of work were about to pay off.

This fishing trip was a way for both men to unwind after the long weeks of testing. Strangers just a short time ago, they had developed a rapport that felt as if it had been forged over many years.

“Does this mean you’ll finally pay for one of these charters?” Jerry Small asked his cousin.

“Don’t count on it.”

An hour out of Homer, Jerry slowed the Wave Dancer in a small protected cove, cutting her engines to a slow trawl. He and his son watched the depth finder intently, comparing the bottom reading with geographic references from shore. After a few adjustments, Small shut down the engines and allowed the silence of the Alaska coast to wash over them.

“Best fishing hole in these waters,” he announced, heaving himself from his seat to prepare the heavy rods.

The Arctic Ocean pack ice, eight hundred miles north, seemed to strip the sun of its warmth so that it gave off a cold pearly light. Backed against the low scudding clouds, the sky was like an opaque shroud, a special effect only nature could create.

Within a few minutes of getting the baited hooks in the water, Mercer heaved a ninety-pound halibut to the surface. Jerry and John used heavy gaffs to haul the fish over the gunwale. Its flat white body was smooth except for the two blisters on the top of the fish that protected its eyes. Although the halibut was one of the ugliest creatures in the world, Mercer was congratulated soundly.

“Great fish.”

“Beautiful fish.”

“Looks like my ex-wife. Don’t tell your mother I said that, John.”

Five minutes later, Mercer and Jerry helped John land a forty pounder, and then it was Howard’s turn to haul in one of the monsters from two hundred feet down. For an hour it went on like this, each man catching only a few minutes after his hook reached bottom. After they had all caught one, they released the fish back into the depths. There was no real sport to this type of fishing; it was just a test of strength to bring the sluggish creatures to the surface.

Jerry compared it to pulling a queen-sized mattress from the bottom of the ocean, no fight but plenty of weight. The camaraderie was halibut fishing’s true appeal. Jerry said that to experience real Alaska fishing they had to stand hip deep in an icy river while the salmon were making their spawning run. There were so many fish, they butted against your waders as if you were just another obstacle in the water. Yet, during the spawning runs the salmon almost never feed, so most fishermen just watch them swim past their lines.

“More frustrating than impotency in a whorehouse,” was how Jerry described it.

Howard had recovered from his hangover enough to begin enjoying the beers Mercer kept passing to him. Jerry Small too was drinking steadily. Only John, too young to drink legally, seemed to have any interest in remaining sober. Jerry had told the boy it was all right to have a few, but John said he was training for the upcoming basketball season, so he abstained completely.

By ten in the morning, it seemed that they were catching the same fish over and over again, so they hauled in their lines, and Jerry started out for another hole farther from Homer. They motored south, the Chevy keening sharply so the Wave Dancer trailed a fat wake behind her. The seas were still calm and the sky had cleared enough so the sun poked through in sharp rays that flashed against the water like heliograph signals.

About twenty minutes into the run, John pointed starboard and shouted, “Dad, what’s that?”

Jerry throttled back immediately and turned the boat hard over, Mercer and Howard clutching at the dash to maintain their balance. About five hundred yards away, another boat bobbed eerily in the low swells. She was larger than the Wave Dancer by twenty feet, a commercial fishing vessel with a small cabin hunched over her heavy bows, her afterdeck supporting a purse net derrick at the very stern.

Even at a distance, everyone could tell there’d been trouble aboard the other ship. She was unnaturally low in the water, and her upper works were darkened and scored by fire. There was a forgotten, haunted feeling to the vessel. It was the unnatural silence of the crypt that hung over her. Jerry swung Wave Dancer closer. No one moved on the derelict or answered his call of “Hello.”

“What boat is that?” Jerry asked absently as he brought his boat alongside.

“Her name’s burned off the transom,” his son answered as he tied fenders to the Wave Dancer’s gunwale. “But I think it’s the Jenny IV out of Seward.”

Mercer was in position to jump across with a line when the two came together. He secured the boats quickly. The alcohol-fueled banter had died as soon as the Jenny IV was spotted, and he moved with a calm professionalism, as if finding burned-out wrecks was an everyday occurrence.

Six inches of sea water washed across the Jenny IV’s scarred decking, slopping from gunwale to gunwale as she rolled sluggishly. The waterproofing on Mercer’s boots failed soon after leaping aboard the fishing vessel, and his feet quickly numbed. He looked around the deck, then turned to Jerry.

“Radio the Coast Guard and report what we’ve found. Tell them to take their time, no one survived.” Mercer’s voice possessed an edge of command that hadn’t been there before.

“How can you tell?” Howard asked, leaning over between the two boats.

Mercer looked forward again before speaking. “Because the life raft is still hanging in its davit and there’s a charred body at my feet.”

“Oh, shit,” Jerry Small said from the console of his boat. “John, make that call to the Coast Guard.”

He leapt onto the Jenny IV, steadying himself against a scorched deck winch when he saw the facedown corpse.

“Oh, shit,” he repeated.

If the condition of the boat was bad, leaking and burned as she was, the body on the deck was much, much worse. Whoever it was had obviously survived much of the fire, because the corpse’s position indicated that he’d dragged himself from the cabin. He lay stretched out on the deck as if he’d been crawling from the worst of the flames before dying. The upper body was remarkably undamaged, and he still wore a safety orange coat over a checked flannel shirt, but from the pelvis downward, nothing remained except the blackened stumps of femur bones sticking obscenely from his hips. His hands were twisted claws, charred bone and tendrils of flesh that waved delicately with the water sloshing across the deck.

Mercer had no desire to turn the body and see what damage the fire had done to its face.

The odd state of the body only compounded a deepening mystery surrounding the vessel. Already Mercer’s mind was worrying at a problem with the boat’s condition. There had been an accident on board and a raging fire, one that had caught the victim unaware, but there was no explanation as to why the fire went out before sinking the craft. Had it been extinguished by another ship, then surely the body would not have been left on the derelict. It didn’t make sense.

“Get back aboard your boat,” Mercer said to Jerry. “I need a flashlight and an ax.”

Jerry thankfully reboarded the Wave Dancer and handed the items over to Mercer. He sat anxiously against the gunwale as Mercer continued his investigation.

“Don’t you think we should wait for the Coast Guard?”

Howard had a good point, Mercer thought, but something about this fire bothered him and he wasn’t going to wait for the authorities to find out what.

“I won’t be a minute.”

Forward, a short set of stairs led up to the wheelhouse. Next to them a door led to the belowdecks area. The pilothouse, though damaged by the fire, wasn’t nearly as ravaged as the deck below, so Mercer went to the door and tried to wrench it open. The wood had been so warped by the heat that it jammed almost immediately. Mercer swung the ax a few times, and the wood splintered. Half the door fell to the deck with a splash.

He flicked on the heavy flashlight and cast its beam around the cramped room below the pilothouse. A small galley was to his left next to a couple of bench seats and a dining table. Everything was burned horribly. To the right were three bunks, two of them empty save for smooth layers of ash that had been the mattresses and blankets. The third bunk contained another skeleton, this one burned so badly that no flesh remained on the bones. Empty eye sockets watched Mercer almost accusingly, sending a superstitious chill up his spine. No matter how strong the urge to escape the charnel cabin, he forced himself to remain critical and press on.

He suspected that the third crewman of the Jenny IV must have jumped overboard to escape the inferno. Placing his hand against a steel bulkhead, he noted the metal was ice cold. Because the night before had been so bitterly cold, it would be impossible to guess the fire’s exact time until a forensic specialist went over the bodies.

The room’s ceiling was scorched by the flames, but it didn’t appear as if there had been enough time for the wood to burn through. Next to the door that Mercer had smashed through, another led down a short hallway to the cargo holds. Of the door itself nothing remained, and the casing and bulkhead near it had been blown outward by an explosion farther belowdecks. That explained why the fire hadn’t totally destroyed the boat. The explosion must have robbed the flames of oxygen, snuffing the inferno.

Mercer wondered what the fishing boat could have carried to cause such an explosion.

The vessel’s engines were in the stern, and logically the fuel tanks would be close to them, but there would be evidence of that sort of explosion abovedecks. Certainly that would have sunk the vessel. It was something else.

Murky green water reflected Mercer’s flashlight as he trained it into the holds. The smell of burned wood and plastic couldn’t mask the overpowering stench of years of fishing. A thick scum choked the surface of the water, pools of fuel flashing rainbow hues in the few clear areas. Mercer took a cautious step into the flooded hold, feeling for a step as he made his way down. The water leached his body heat through the thin protection of his pants.

He knew, as he stood thigh deep, that nothing could be accomplished here without diving equipment. He was just turning to leave when the beam of the flashlight reflected something in the water one step below where he stood.

He groaned as he reached under the surface to retrieve it, soaking his arm up to the shoulder. It was a piece of bright stainless steel about ten inches long and six wide. Whatever had exploded on board had torn the steel as if it were paper; its edges were distorted like a chunk of shrapnel. Mercer turned it in the beam of his flashlight and saw the name roger on one side, the last letter being the point where the steel was shredded.

He slipped the fragment into a cargo pocket of his jacket and made for the upper deck. He took a few deep breaths in the veiled daylight, realizing he’d been breathing shallowly since entering the vessel.

“Find anything?” Jerry called.

“No,” replied Mercer, noticing the damage to the net derricks for the first time.

The top of the A-frame fishing gantry was gone, as if it had been removed with a cutting torch. He looked closely at the two steel stumps, all that remained of the net hauling crane, and saw that the breaks were clean and sharp. There was no evidence of explosive damage. Whatever had destroyed the derrick had sheared it off. Curious, he turned and saw that the antennas for the Jenny IV’s radios also had been snapped off, about a foot above the wheelhouse roof.

He had no explanation.

“Did you contact the Coast Guard?”

“Yeah. They’re sending a cutter from Homer. It should be here in about an hour.”

“Fine.” Mercer jumped back to the Wave Dancer after taking another look at the body on the commercial ship. “There’s no sense remaining tied up. Her lower decks are flooded and she could sink at any time.”

Jerry fired up the engine while his son cast off the securing lines. Once they were fifty yards from the Jenny IV, Jerry idled his boat and kept her at a constant distance from the derelict. There was a mystery about the burned-out vessel and its skeletal crew that went beyond an engine explosion, and all four men knew it. They were silent for many long, unsettled minutes, watching the deathly quiet Jenny IV as she swayed with the rolling waves. The two bodies aboard her would never give them the answers they wanted.

“Well, I guess that takes care of fishing for the day.” Jerry’s voice was unnaturally loud.

Mercer turned to him and smiled back his own misgivings. “Hell, fishing’s just a reason to drink, and I’ve never really needed an excuse for that.”