Dead in the Water

SIX

THE harbor's dock space was so limited that the Avilda was again third in a row of boats rafted four deep. The next morning the tide was at slack and it was a long way down to the first boat tied to the dock. There are worse things in life than hanging in the pitch-dark from a forty-foot ladder, trying to find a foothold on the icy railing of a boat being tossed up and down in the enthusiastic embrace of a spirited groundswell. Offhand, Kate couldn't think of one.

She shut her ears to the rush of water, the smack of the swell on the bottom of a hundred hulls, the murmur of idling engines, the shout of impatient skippers. Moving one limb at a time, she felt her cautious way down to the next rung on the ladder and extended a foot in what she prayed was the general direction of the boat. A barnacle crunched beneath the foot still on the ladder, the sole of her boot slid across the rung, her balance shifted and one hand pulled free. She made a wild grab for the ladder and by a miracle caught it.

She pressed her forehead against cold metal and scratchy barnacle, her heart pounding in her ears, gasping for breath. Water rushed in among the pilings with a chuckling sound. Her mouth tightened into an unseen snarl and she swiveled on the rung, bent her knees, let go and jumped blind. For a moment she was suspended in midair, and then she hit the deck awkwardly. Instinct took over and she tucked her head and rolled forward in a somersault. Her butt hit something hard and she stopped rolling, her feet failing forward with a thump.

For a moment she just lay there, panting. She heard a noise from the boat's cabin like someone was about to come on deck and she shot to her feet and made for the opposite railing. The rest of the journey was by comparison a piece of cake; all she had to do was straddle the tied-together railings of the two boats with one leg and swing her other leg over. Always supposing the boats were of equal size, which they often weren't, in which case she had to either climb up or jump down or both. When she slithered onto the Avilda's heaving deck she knew a moment of pure triumph.

She was making breakfast when Andy emerged from their stateroom, rumpled and yawning. He peered over her shoulder at the eggs scrambled with cheese and onions and green chile and bits of shredded tortilla.

"Looks good. Smells great."

"You eat eggs?" she said, eyes wide. "Eggs come from chickens. Come to think of it, eggs are chickens, before they hatch. You might be chowing down on something's soul here, messing up their prana all to hell and gone. Maybe you should reconsider." She gave him a big smile. "I could pour you a bowl of cereal."

Ignoring her, he poured himself a cup of coffee.

"Thought it was Ned's turn to cook."

"He's not back on board yet."

Andy looked surprised. "I thought we were taking this tide."

"So did I " Kate sprinkled in some garlic powder and gave the eggs a final stir before turning off the burner and removing the skillet from the stove.

"Harry'll be pissed," Andy said, sounding satisfied at the prospect.

"He's not back yet, either." The toast popped out and Kate buttered it with a lavish hand.

Andy stopped with his cup halfway to his mouth.

"Seth?"

"Nope.

There was a short silence. Into his coffee mug Andy said, "This isn't a very well-run boat, is it, Kate?"

"Nope.

"I mean it, I'm getting off, soon as I find something else."

Kate shrugged. "You should have been on my last boat." And only, she thought but didn't say. "The skipper had a loudspeaker mounted on the foredeck and wired into a microphone on the bridge so he could talk to the crew on deck whenever he wanted to, and he wanted to all the time. Yap, yap, yap, from how to grab a buoy with a boat hook to how to chop bait to how to fill a bait jar to how to tie door ties to how to sort crab. This guy never but never shut up." Kate ladled eggs onto a plate and paused, remembering. "He had this real high, squeaky voice that sounded ten times worse amplified.

It drove everybody crazy."

"What happened?"

Kate shrugged again. "One day the speaker didn't work. For a while the skipper didn't notice it. We'd look up at the bridge and he'd be standing at the wheel, yapping away into the mike, but we couldn't hear a word. It was like the difference between heaven and hell. Then he gave somebody an order and of course nobody heard him and he realized something was wrong.

He traced the wires to the speaker and found somebody'd cut them."

Andy grinned. "How much do you know about electronics, Kate?"

Kate handed him a heaping plate. "Shut up and eat your breakfast." She made herself a plate, scraped the remaining eggs to one side of the frying pan and stacked the rest of the toast next to them, She covered the whole thing to keep it warm and sat down to eat. She, too, wondered where the rest of the crew was, and what they were doing. If Harry old buddy and his two chosen sons were going to make this vanishing act a habit, she was going to have to figure out how to tail them through Dutch Harbor 's immense metropolitan district without getting spotted. The prospect did not delight her. She was good, but she wasn't that good.

They were on their second cup of coffee when Harry, Ned and Seth finally showed up. Ned and Seth were carrying suitcases, one each, the shiny silver kind that photographers use to pack their lenses into.

Kate eyed the suitcases. "Been Christmas shopping?"

"You could say that," Ned said, almost pleasantly, which made Kate wonder if there was something wrong with her hearing.

"Yep, visions of sugar-plum dance in our heads,"

Seth added, and the three of them burst out laughing, even Seth.

They were in a wonderful mood in an exclusive sort of way, nudging each other, exchanging winks, sharing muffled comments and chuckles. The only thing worse than this crew surly was this crew merry. Andy finished his coffee and, reassured by an expansive Harry Gault that the Avilda was staying where she was for the time being, went uptown, probably to work on sniffing out a new berth. Kate put her dishes in the dishwasher and went out on deck to coil shots and chop bait, and plot a chance to locate and find out what was inside the shiny silver suitcases brought on board that morning.

She was still on deck when a pump started below and began emptying the bilge into the harbor. After a while the pump stopped, but in the growing daylight the oily sheen growing from their hull was easy to spot, until Ned came forward with a bottle of detergent and squirted it over the side. It cut through the oil and the sheen floated off. Ned grinned at her. "Slicker'n snot."

"Thought we weren't supposed to pump the bilge out into the harbor," she said in a neutral voice, eyes on the line she was coiling. "Turn the place into a sewer if we all did it."

He shrugged. "Ain't my harbor."

He went aft, and Kate thought that maybe Andy had the right idea.

When the Avilda arrived back out on the fishing grounds Kate was surprised and relieved to find all their gear right where it was supposed to be. The take had decreased, but the lines were intact, the netting unslashed and the buoys whole. It was more than she had expected.

On their two previous trips they had averaged a hundred tanners per pot (or at least that was their average on Pots that had not previously been picked). If the average weight of bairdi was two and a half pounds, at $1.50 per pound that meant each pot was worth $375. Her crew share, eight percent, had been thirty dollars a pot, and they had been picking a minimum of forty pots a day.

Kate began to feel cheated whenever a pot came up half empty, and she got downright surly when most of what was in the pots proved to be garbage.

Apparently Harry Gault felt the same way. He gave orders not to bait and reset the pots as they were pulled, but instead to stack them on deck. Naturally the deck boss didn't bother telling the rest of the crew what the plan was.

Andy finished coiling and stacking a shot of polypro and wandered over in Kate's direction. "What's going on?" he asked in a low voice.

Kate ran a final loop through the frame of the last pot and tested the line. It held firm. She gave a satisfied nod.

"Looks like the skipper's finally noticed we've lost the crab. Best guess? We're going prospecting."

Andy looked confused. "Prospecting?"

"Set a pot here, there. Try to find where the tanners went."

For the next week that's what they did, cruising up and down the Chain, setting a few pots, pulling them to examine the contents, meandering a little farther west, a little farther south to repeat the process in untested waters. Occasionally the fog would clear and a smoking, snowcapped volcano would loom up off the bow. With the amount of weather that swirled in and out in a twenty-four-hour period, it was hard for the crew to tell just what direction they were traveling in, and of course Harry Gault was as garrulous and forthcoming as always, which meant that the only time he opened his mouth was to bark an order.

So immersed was she in her role as deckhand that Kate began to be concerned over the lack of crab in each pot and the subsequent lack of crab in the hold.

The paychecks from her last two trips out were folded away into the pocket of her jeans, where they made a nice, solid weight. Her sleep had begun to be disturbed by dreams of a new truck, a larger generator for the homestead. Maybe even a satellite dish. She liked to watch MTV and VH-I when she visited the Roadhouse, catch up on the latest in music. She used to sing and play the guitar. Singing was out now, as that baby raper's knife had almost taken out her vocal cords, but she still loved music, and her taste was eclectic to say the least. She had recently become a fan of k. d. lang's, and remembered suddenly that on satellite you got The Nashville Network, too. She reached inside her pocket to touch the two folded slips of paper, and dreamed on.

She woke up to realize it was coming up on dinnertime and her turn to cook. She straightened and stretched.

The gray-green gulf stretched out endlessly in every direction, a snowcapped peak with a faint plume rising from it floated in a ring of fog off the port beam, and Ned was emptying a pot on deck.

He was about to toss its contents over the side and she raised her voice. "Hold it, Ned."

"Nothing but garbage," Ned growled when she came up next to him.

Kate sorted through the pot's contents. "We've got four red kings-"

"Not in season."

"-a chicken halibut-"

"Which can't weigh fifteen pounds."

"-and a half-dozen Dungeness. Big ones, too," Kate said admiringly.

"What you want them for?" Ned asked suspiciously.

Kate gave him her sweetest smile. "I'm on dinner tonight."

She found the biggest cooking pot in the galley, filled it with water and set it on a burner turned on high, and went below to assemble the ingredients for the rest of the meal. The industrial-size refrigerator and freezer were located in a small room set down into the hull behind the hold and the engine room. She descended the ladder with reluctance. She hated the small, square, walk-in freezer in the storeroom. The door was so heavy, she was always afraid it would swing shut behind her, that the bar across the outside would fall into its bracket and she would be locked inside, left to spend eternity between the prime rib and the pork chops. The thought alone was enough to send a shudder down her spine, and she snatched up a can of lard and scuttled out of the freezer, kicking the door shut behind her with an explosive breath of relief.

An armful of salad makings out of the refrigerator and dinner was as good as done.

She busied herself in the galley as the Avilda beat to windward, and her crew that night sat down to a dinner of boiled king and Dungeness crab, halibut deep-fried in beer batter, a mountain of mashed potatoes and, for Andy, a tossed green salad. Ned, Seth and Harry took one look and fell into their seats. Pawing through the pile of cutlery Kate had stacked in the center of the table, each man found the pair of pliers that suited him best and began cracking crab with gusto. Mayonnaise mustachioed their mouths, melted butter ran down their chins, crab juice ran down their arms and soaked the newspapers Kate had spread on the floor, and the empty shells piled steadily higher in the emptied cooking pot she had placed in the center of the table for just that purpose.

When they were through, not a leg or a claw or a shoulder of crab was left, nor was a single piece of the halibut. Harry sat back and patted his belly, expressing his feelings with a loud, satisfied belch. This appeared to be the general consensus. "Jesus, that was good," Seth said, and even Ned nodded grudgingly. Overwhelmed by such enthusiastic, unqualified approval, Kate decided she could get to like these guys, given time. Say about a hundred years. She stretched. "Who cleans up?"

Three thumbs jerked at Andy. Kate grinned at his woebegone expression. "Think I'll turn in. Nighty-night."

"Me, too," Harry said, yawning. "Ned, you take the first watch; Seth, you take the second. Roust me out if there's trouble."

Kate hit the rack and fell instantly into a deep, dreamless sleep.

A thump on the door brought her wide awake. "What?" she croaked. There was another thump and she raised her voice. "What, dammit!"

Harry's voice was already receding down the hallway.

"Roll out. We're making ice."

She groped for her watch and saw that it was barely midnight. Her head fell back on the pillow with a thump.

"Oh, shit." An instant later she was up and yanking on her clothes. Andy's face peered down at her with a bewildered expression. "What's going on?"

"We're making ice."

"What's making ice?"

"Get up on deck and you'll see. And, Andy?" She met his eyes. "Put on all your clothes."

A collection of blunt instruments waited for them in the galley. Kate took a baseball bat and, since he looked confused, chose one of the smaller sledgehammers for Andy. "Can you lift that? Show me. Okay. Let's go."

He followed her, the words of protest dying in his throat when he saw what waited for them on deck.

The weather, predictably, had worsened while they slept. The Avilda labored sluggishly up and down the swells, crashing into waves twelve to twenty feet high.

That was nothing new, but the cold was.

The temperature had dropped as the weather worsened, and in the time it took the salt spray to fly through the air and hit the deck it had frozen into a multitude of tiny pellets that skipped and crackled across the deck, sounding like Rice Krispies after pouring the milk in.

The spray froze to everything it touched, to the deck itself, to the pots stacked on that deck, to the mast and boom, to the rigging attached to the mast and boom, to the superstructure of the Avilda's cabin. Every inch of the surface of the boat that was above water was encased in a sheet of ice. It was already inches thick on the bow and mast, and thickening rapidly everywhere else.

"Sweet Jesus H. Christ on a crutch," Andy said, his voice sounding awed even over the storm. It was the first time Kate had ever heard him swear. "We look like the fucking Flying Dutchman."

Kate cocked her head. It might be her imagination, but she thought she detected a hint of strain in the movement of the Avilda's hull; she seemed to wallow through the next swell, puffing and panting as she went.

Kate advanced to the boom across a terrifyingly icy deck, braced her feet against the raised lip of the hatch, raised the bat and brought it down as hard as she could.

Her feet slipped and she felt the strike reverberate back up her arms. Gritting her teeth, she struck again. A large chunk of ice cracked and fell to the deck. A swell passed beneath the hull, the deck slanted and the chunk of ice slid overboard. She slipped again and almost followed it. From the corner of her eye she saw Andy, openmouthed, look from her to Ned, who was hammering at the bow with a sledgehammer twice the size of the one he held, to Seth, who was perched precariously on the catwalk in front of the bridge, trying to beat the windows clear with a three-foot piece of rebar.

"Beat on it," she growled, and wound up for another swing.

"Beat on the ice?"

"Yes. Hammer at it. Break it off and throw it overboard."

"Why?"

The bat thumped into the mast again. "Because it's heavy. Because we don't have jack shit in the hold.

Because if we let the ice build up, we'll get top-heavy, and if we get too top-heavy it'll make the ship roll over and capsize, and if we capsize we'll go in the water, and if we go in the water, we won't have time enough to drown before the hypothermia sets in." Because the Bering Sea 's just looking for a reason to give Harry Gault what for, she thought. Kate had four years of college, a year's additional training in the most sophisticated police technology, and she'd worked five years in Anchorage, what passed for a city in Alaska. In spite of it all, her Aleut heritage, generations of living on and from the ocean, told her that the sea itself had risen up in outrage at Harry Gault's mean-spirited, spiteful, venemous revenge on Johansen and the Daisy Mae. She didn't think this, she would have laughed out loud if someone had told it to her, but she was convinced of it on some deep, instinctual, atavistic level. Agudar, Master Hunter, had called down the North Wind and called up the sea to punish them, to bring the forces of nature back into balance. "Beat on it, dammit!" she told Andy through clenched teeth. "Beat on it! Break it off!"

Her snarl snapped Andy out of his trance. He closed his mouth, raised his sledgehammer and advanced toward the fo'c'sle. Over the roar of the wind, Kate heard a crunching thud, a pause, another thud, another pause.

Someone swore. The thudding began again and settled into a kind of rhythm, uncertain at first, a little ragged, but maintaining a dogged persistence. After a while Kate ceased to hear anything but the slap of the hull into the sea, the cackle and skitter of freezing spray and the roar of the wind all around.

The bat rose and fell, rose and fell. Ice shattered and broke and as quickly froze over again. The Avilda groaned through the waves, creaking all the way down her hull under the strain. Kate groaned through the swing of the bat, her shoulders creaking beneath the weight, the strain. This wasn't work, this wasn't making a buck, this was survival, plain and simple. Numbness began in the tips of her fingers and crept up through her hands to her wrists and arms. Behind her came the crash of ice as Seth broke a large piece free from the catwalk.

Ice shattered from the bow and splashed into the water below. Andy worked his way up one railing and down the other, as behind him a new layer froze and thickened.

The baseball bat beat its way with monotonous regularity from one side of the fo'c'sle and back again. The wind made the rigging hum, sharp needles of freezing spray pierced her skin, the deck was icy and treacherous beneath her feet.

Kate had ceased to care. The bat rose and fell, rose and fell. The ice began to take on personality, to become an animate force, malevolent, vindictive, relentless, maniacal, homicidal. No matter how hard or how often the bat fell, the ice reappeared inexorably, inevitably behind it, enfolding the Avilda in a cold embrace, enveloping the crew in wintry arms, its purpose a deadly seduction whose end was death.

The ever-increasing weight of this deadly seduction slowed the movement of both ship and crew. With each sluggish list the layer of ice grew thicker and the Avilda took longer to right herself again. With each lift of her arms it seemed to take Kate longer to bring the bat down, harder to exert the force necessary to break off the ice.

She felt lethargic, torpid, apathetic. She was so tired. All she wanted was to find somewhere to lay down and go to sleep forever. It didn't matter if the bunk was wet or dry or frozen over. She just wanted to close her eyes.

She came alert with a jerk that pulled her out of her stupor, and blinked her eyes against the ice forming on her lashes. Think, she told herself. Just think for a minute.

The engine coughed once, hesitated for one eternal moment and again picked up the beat. The vibrations pulsated up through the deck into her feet, a life-giving cadence counting off. Kate refused to think of it as counting down.

Cadence. Meter. Stress. Poetry. In another life she used to read poetry. What poetry did she used to read? Her Mind was blank, like the engine forgetting how to run for that one terrifying second. Words finally came. "The ice was here, the ice was there, the ice was all around."

The words of the Ancient Mariner sprang unbidden to mind and Kate shook her head doggedly. What else?

"Full fathom five thy father lies; of his bones are coral made." No. Definitely not. "Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me."

She stopped the bat in mid-swing, brought it down to rest on the deck and leaned on it, letting her head hang, ignoring the bite of the freezing spray, the icy fingers of the wind, taking long, deep, steadying breaths.

When she raised the bat again, it was to the four-four, four-three beat of ballads. "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." "A French cocked hat on his forehead and a bunch of lace at his chin."

"One if by land, and two if by sea; and I on the opposite shore will be." "I sprang to the stirrup and Joris and he, I galloped, Dirk galloped, we all galloped three."

She wondered why she had never noticed before how so many ballads were written on horseback. The bat was coming down steadily now, in its own asymmetrical rhythm, batting out a tattoo of endurance, a measure of survival. When she got home, if she got home, she could write a ballad of her own. A bat in my hand and ice at my feet, and I in Dutch Harbor will Jack Morgan meet, ready his head into marshmallow beat, sheer satisfaction was never so sweet. She laughed, an involuntary snort of real amusement, surprising herself and astounding Andy, who paused with his sledgehammer in the air to look over at her with incredulous eyes. Longfellow she wasn't. She wasn't even Dr. Seuss.

Hours later, days later, years later, she felt rather than heard someone shouting. After a moment, she realized they were shouting at her. She looked up, dazed, to see Andy reaching for her. As if from a great distance she saw his hand close on her shoulder. He gave her a hard shake and she couldn't feel it. "Kate?"

She tried to shrug his hand away. Had to keep swinging.

Had to beat the ice. Had to keep the Avilda with her head up and her feet down. " 'He would answer to hi or to any loud cry,' " she muttered.

He peered at her, his young face red and chapped with frostbite. "Kate! Are you all right?"

"Of course I'm all right," she said petulantly, shrugging again beneath his hand. "What do you want?"

"We've stopped making ice. You can quit now."

Like coming out of a trance, Kate woke to the realization of a deck no longer canting so drastically beneath her feet that she had to fear losing her foothold and sliding overboard. There was no noise from the engine, from which she painstakingly formulated the hypothesis that it had been shut down. No spray hit the deck.

The gusting wind had died to a breeze that barely rippled the surface of the water, as if the Cradle of the Winds were saying, What, me? Hurt you? How could you think such a thing? It was all just a little joke, teehee. You can relax now, catch some Z's. Sleep tight, and don't let those bedbugs bite.

Kate didn't believe a word of it but she was too tired to express her distrust. "Where are we?"

"Some island," Andy said, his voice weary. "Some bay on some island. I didn't ask."

"When killer whales come into a bay it means someone is going to die," Kate said.

"What?" Andy looked closer at her. "You look like hell, Kate. Hit the rack. I'll stow these." He reached for the bat. She resisted for a moment, and then let go so suddenly he staggered back a step. "Go on," he said, recovering his balance. "Go to bed."

Her mind searched tiredly for the correct response.

When she spoke her tongue felt thick in her mouth.

"Who's on watch?"

"We're on the hook, Kate," he said patiently. "We're anchored up in a bay on some island."

"A bay on some island," Kate repeated. "Did I tell you about the killer whales?"

"Yes, you told me." He turned her firmly in the direction of the galley door. "Go to bed."

She twisted her mouth into the semblance of a smile and he winced away from it. "Isn't Alaska just the greatest place?"

In the galley she stumbled into Ned and Seth coming down from the bridge, Harry behind them. As weary as she was the expression on their faces stopped her in her tracks. "What's wrong?"

The two men exchanged glances. "Another boat got caught in the same storm."

"Which one?"

Again that exchange of glances. "The Daisy Mae."

A sick dread grew inside her. "And?"

Seth shook his head, his gaze somber. "They were able to get off a distress call, and their Loran numbers. The Coast Guard responded but by the time they got there, there was nothing."

"They recover the bodies?"

He shook his head again. "Then we have to go," Kate said. "They might have had time to get into their survival suits. We have to go help look. We have to," she insisted at his disbelieving look. "We have to look for them.

They'd look for us."

"We barely made it this far," Harry growled. "The Coasties are on the scene, and half a dozen other boats.

We go back out there and they're liable to have to come looking for us."

She couldn't stop the words. "You make a habit of not looking for fishermen lost at sea."

Suddenly it was very still in the galley. A dark red flush rose up from Harry's collar to flood his face. He stared at her, his lips drawn back from his teeth. She met his look squarely, knowing her contempt was obvious, unable to disguise it. From the corner of one eye she saw him raise one clenched fist, and waited with a curious kind of detachment to see what would happen next.

Seth caught Harry's elbow. With a growled obscenity Harry whipped around. Their eyes locked and for a moment, just for a moment, Harry froze. Seth said nothing, just looked at him. Breaking the spell, Harry yanked his arm free and shouldered past Seth, leaving Kate standing alone, unanswered, exhausted and sick at heart.

She shook off her paralysis long enough to wobble down the passageway and fumble the door open to her stateroom. Her rain gear snapped and was easily discarded and she toed her boots off, but for some reason her sweater just wouldn't come over her head. She looked down at her hands. They were curled in imitation of her grip on the baseball bat. She couldn't straighten them, She couldn't even feel them. They were incapable of gripping the hem of her sweater.

It said much for her state of mind that she was unalarmed. She tucked her hands into her armpits, rolled into her bunk fully dressed, curled up in a ball and fell into a fitful, restless sleep, to dream the same dream over and over and over again, white fog and green water and thickening ice and a sinking boat and drowning crewmen. The last boat to sink was the Avilda, and the last drowning crewman's face was her own.

Her eyes snapped open and she stared into the darkness.

She lay still, listening, trying to figure out what it was that had woken her. She would have bet every dime the Avilda had earned her that nothing short of a nuclear holocaust could have gotten between her and the land of Nod that night.

As usual on the Chain, the weather had done a volteface and the slight swell was barely perceptible. The wind had died completely. The Avilda rode calmly at anchor in her bay on some island like a car in a parking lot. Kate had just decided that Andy's snoring must have woken her when a thump reverberated down the starboard side of the hull, the side her bunk was on, followed by a distant splash, a splash that sounded exactly like oars hitting water.

She rose with an effort, her body aching from the bones out. She sidled into the passageway, pausing when she saw that the door to Seth and Ned's room was ajar.

She pushed it open a bit farther and peered around it.

Their bunks were empty. She took a chance and opened the skipper's door. He, too, was gone. In stocking feet she padded swiftly to the galley and over to the starboard side door to peer out the window.

In the faint light of the stars Kate could detect the outline of the island. There was something familiar about its shape, and she studied it, brows puckering, before a movement below drew her gaze down to the water level.

She stared intently, her eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness, and caught the movement again.

It was oars, oars attached to the Avilda's skiff, a skiff that should be stowed upside down on the aft cabin roof at this moment. Remembering something Abel had taught her about making out indistinct, distant objects in the dark, she shifted her gaze a fraction to the right. On her peripheral vision the skiff registered clearly. It was heading toward the island, and there were three men in it.

Kate thought rapidly. The life rafts were out, she would never be able to deflate a life raft and repack it into its barrel without being caught. Besides, with Harry Gault at the helm she wanted both life rafts right where they were. Her hands clenched. Dammit, she had to know what was going on on that island, what Harry and Ned and Seth were up to.

She heard Jack's voice again, so carefully nonchalant.

"There are survival suits aboard the Avilda, aren't there?"

Without stopping to think, because if she'd thought about it for even five seconds she never would have done it, she whipped around and headed for the opposite side of the galley and the locker beneath the bench next to the galley table. In the darkness she fumbled for the finger hole. She didn't dare turn on a light for fear it would be seen from the skiff. She hooked the hole at last, pulled the seat cover up and out and felt around inside for one of the plastic-wrapped packages, the one that had been opened before.

She had been looked at a little sardonically when she had insisted, her first day on board, on trying on one of the survival suits, but it was a good thing she had. It was bulky, made of a thick synthetic material that reminded her of nothing so much as woven polypropylene, with a multitude of zips and snaps and pull-tabs for an inflating collar and a buddy belt and a helicopter ring and who knew what else. She would never have been able to fumble her way into it in the dark if she hadn't done it at least once in daylight. As it was, she fought to get the right fingers into the right sections of the divided mitts and prayed the zip flap and the hood were properly fastened.

Opening the galley door, carefully muffling any sound that might carry across the water to the cursing men just now working the skiff off where it had caught on a reef, she stepped across to the railing and with great courage and no brains lowered herself over the side and into the water.

A body submerged in water loses body heat twenty-four times faster than it does in air of the same temperature. Kate's inconvenient memory produced this interesting fact at exactly the same moment the chill waters of the Bering Sea closed over her body.

Cold, cold, it was so cold. Her hands and feet, which had already taken enough abuse that night, went numb instantly. Swearing at Gault, swearing at Jack, swearing at herself, she struck out for shore, struggling to keep her head up and her face out of the water.

The Avilda was anchored half a mile offshore. The tide was almost in and the distance seemed endless. The water lapped at her chin. She alternated a breaststroke with a dog-paddle and concentrated on breathing while trying not to splash. Once her knee scraped against a rock too close to the surface, and she knew a moment of terror that the suit had been breached. Ahead of her she heard a scrap of muttered conversation, the grating sound of the skiff's hull as it was drawn up the shore, the crunch of sand beneath boots. Galvanized, she struck out for shore.

One kicking toe touched bottom, another, and she stood up and waded out, crouching in the water as long as she could so the water pouring off her would make as little noise as possible. Once on the beach, she stopped to catch her breath and listen. The sound of footsteps crunching through crusted snow floated back to her clearly on the still morning air. Trying to keep up with their pace so as to disguise the sound of her own steps, she began to walk behind them.

If Jack could see her now. This was a little different from tailing someone through the greater metropolitan area of Dutch Harbor, or downtown Anchorage, for that matter. Dripping and numb, she smiled into the darkness.

Unzipping her mitts and freeing her hands, she moved forward cautiously, feeling her way up over the lip of the beach and into the thick grass. The sound of the men's footsteps began to fade, and afraid she was going to lose them she quickened her pace. Something tripped her and she lost her balance. The heavy survival suit made her clumsy and she fell. Something caught her and held, for just a moment, before it gave way and she was tumbling, down in the dark. She hit hard, and lay, feeling bruised and shaken, staring up at a hole in the world through which she could see stars twinkling. She gave an experimental wriggle. Material rustled beneath her. Feeling around with an inquiring hand, she touched tarpaulin. She looked back up at the hole and realized why the outline of the island had looked familiar. "Anua!

We're on goddam Anua!"

At that moment she heard the sound of a distant engine, and for a single panicked moment thought the men had doubled back on her, returned to the Avilda and were leaving the island without her. She leapt to her feet, and recognized the sound of an airplane engine. Extremities numb from the cold water, body bruised from the fall, self exhausted from fighting the ice storm, all were forgotten as she yanked open the barabara's door. The sound of the airplane grew louder and Kate turned and headed for the airstrip at a smart clip, the thudding of her feet through the dry grass and snow covered by the noise of two engines on a short final. This time she didn't stumble. She was in familiar territory and she knew where she was going.

She topped the little rise and crouched immediately behind a clump of dead rye grass. A twin-engine Navaho was touching down to a landing on the hard-packed snow of the strip. Kate immediately stretched out flat on her stomach and prayed they hadn't seen her come crashing up while they were still in the air.

The Navaho bounced twice before rolling out to a stop next to the gas tank. Two men got out. The three men from the Avilda advanced to meet them. Nobody shook hands. Kate, cursing the lack of cover and the bright orange of her survival suit, strained to hear something, anything.

"Have you got it?" she thought she heard Harry say.

He was answered by a low laugh. One of the men returned to the plane and produced a suitcase. A thickset figure Kate recognized as Ned produced two suitcases of his own, shiny silver suitcases that gleamed even in the predawn light. Shiny silver suitcases so well chaperoned that she hadn't been able to lay her hands on them for the past seven days.

One man each from boat and plane went to the gas tank to connect the hose to the Navaho's wing tanks and refuel the plane. The other three squatted down on their haunches, produced flashlights and opened two of the suitcases. One was filled with a lot of something white, the other with a lot more of something green.

"Yes, " Kate hissed. She was filled with a rush of fierce triumph. "Gotcha, you sonsabitches."

Kate harbored no illusions about honor among thieves.

With leverage like this, it was only a matter of time before she got one crew member to roll over on the others and finally tell what had happened to Alcala and Brown. "Yes," she said again, her satisfaction as cold and hard as her toes presently were.

She'd seen enough, but she hesitated. If she could just wait until it got light enough to make out the Navaho's tail numbers. No. It was too risky. She had to get back to the Avilda and on board before the men. Already the suitcases were being closed. Stealthily, she rose enough to move in a kind of crouching, sideways walk, hands and feet the only things touching the ground. When she was out of sight she straightened up and ran, no mean feat in a survival suit in the dark, over clumps of rough grass and sudden drifts of snow. Her feet splashed into the water, she fell forward and struck out, suddenly terrified that she would be caught. At first she couldn't see where she was going, then the Avilda's hull swung sharply into focus and with alarm Kate realized how light it was getting. They would see her climbing aboard from shore. Fear spurred her on and she maintained a steady breaststroke, eyes fixed on the Avilda's oh-so-slowly nearing hull, ears straining for the launch of the skiff and the dip of oars in the water.

Her knee hit a rock, probably the same one that got her on the way in, she thought wearily, and began a halfhearted frog kick. For Harry Gault to have found his way through the series of killer reefs she remembered seeing, he had to have made this trip more than once.

So interesting did she find this thought that she missed her stroke and swallowed a mouthful of seawater and began to choke. A violent cough brought her knees up, a second banged her head against the hull, surprising her into swallowing another lungful of seawater and setting up another bout of hacking. A clumsy hand searched for some kind of hold on the hull, and slid off. God, she was just so tired.

"What the hell?" From a long way off, the voice was young and scared, and a little angry, too. "Kate? Kate, is that you?"

She almost went down for the third time. "Andy?"

Then, sharply, "Shh! Sound carries over water. Meet me on the other side."

"What?"

"Hush! The other side of the boat! Meet me around the other side of the boat!"

It took all of her remaining energy to push and pull her way around the hull, ducking beneath the anchor chain at the bow, and by the time she reached the opposite side she was nearly spent. Back on Anua the Navaho revved its engines and began the long whine to takeoff.

Galvanized, Kate said, "Andy?"

"I'm here."

She paused for breath, just trying to speak exhausting her all over again. "I can't get up, Andy. Can you help me? Don't turn on the deck lights!"

His whisper was annoyed. "I wasn't going to. Hold on a minute."

"To what?" she asked.

A moment later there was a soft scrape. "Here. Grab this."

It was the boat hook, and with the last ounce of strength left in her Kate grasped at it with both hands, realizing for the first time that she'd forgotten to pull her mittens back on before reentering the water. The suit had been leaking up her arms all the way back to the boat. She wondered in a detached sort of way if her hands had the strength to hold on long enough to get her aboard. The next thing she knew she had collapsed on the deck, gasping like a dying fish. Andy knelt next to her. "Are you all right? What the hell were you doing out there?"

Kate gave a ghost of a laugh. "Surf's up."

"Surf's up, my ass!"

"Why, Andy," she said weakly, "you're sounding more like me every day." A giggle rose to her throat.

Recognizing the beginnings of hysteria, she quelled it sternly.

"Where's the skipper? And Ned and Seth?"

Wet, cold, sore, tired, she said, her voice an unconscious plea, "Can you get me to our stateroom?"

In stiff-lipped silence he hauled her to her feet. "No," she said, when he would have taken her through the galley,

"let's use the aft cabin door. And you go in first and get some towels so I don't drip all over everything."

He did as she said, helping her out of the survival suit and mopping up the floor where it had dripped. With impersonal hands he stripped her to her skin, rubbed her down and tucked her up in her bunk with three extra blankets on top of her sleeping bag. She was shivering uncontrollably and he wanted to make her a hot drink but she wouldn't let him. "Get into your bunk. Now." When he hesitated, she said, her voice a thin thread of sound,

"Now, Andy. Please. They can't know we were awake."

He hesitated a little longer, and then reluctantly did as she asked. Together in the darkness, they listened as the bow of the skiff bumped the hull, as oars were shipped, as footsteps padded the length of the boat, as doors creaked open and slid shut.

"Are you asleep?" Andy whispered.

"No," she whispered back.

"Care to tell me what the hell is going on?"

"No," she said. "Not yet."

She went to sleep listening to him toss and turn in the bunk above.