Fire And Ice

ELEVEN

So they moved like they had a purpose. The Cub raised up off the beach smoothly and without incident, Liam helping in his usual fashion by clutching the edge of his seat. They headed south down the coast for about thirty minutes before making a one-eighty and retracing their steps. Fifteen minutes later she pointed out the left side. "Look," she said. Even over the headphones her voice sounded tense with excitement.

"For what?" he said, forcing himself to look out.

"Herring."

"What do they look like?"

"Big dark patches in the water. If you see some, poke and point."

"Okay."

All Liam saw was an endless expanse of green with a shoreline that looked too far away, a couple of boats cruising through, their wakes zigzagging with apparent aimlessness, and three other small planes at one, three, and eight o'clock, flyspecks on a light blue horizon. Then there was a glint of something in the distance, at about ten o'clock. He focused on that spot, and saw it again. "Hey?"

"Poke and point," she said, and he poked her in the shoulder and pointed past her left eye.

"Attaboy," she said. "Let's take a look." She made a slow left bank that from a distance would have looked as aimless as the course of the boats below. Ten minutes later they were drawing a perfect circle in the sky, as if they hadn't a care in the world. It was herring, all right, a dark patch with occasional flashes of silver as the fish hit the surface.

"Too small to bother Wolfe with," Wy said. "He's high boat; he's not interested in less than the offspring of an entire species."

"You don't like him," Liam said, looking at the back of her head, which didn't reveal much.

"Nope," she said.

"Then why work for him?"

"Because he's high boat," she said, in a tone that made him feel a fool for asking. "I'd work for the devil himself if he'd been high boat for herring for four years running."

"Fourteen hundred dollars a ton," Liam said.

"We can only hope," Wy said.

They found two other schools-Wy called them skeins-both too small to bother with. One already had a couple of boats sitting on it, waiting for the go-ahead to drop their nets. The second was being scouted by another plane, a Cessna 172 on floats. Liam knew that because they got close enough for him to read the manufacturer's lettering along the side.

"Knock that crap off, Miller," Wy ordered, and it took Liam a moment to realize she was talking to the pilot of the other plane. The 172 waggled its wings and banked hard left rudder. It was a little above and a little ahead of the Cub, and Liam had an excellent view of the bottom of its floats through the skylight in the roof of the Cub as it roared overhead. "Sweet Jesus," he muttered, forgetting his mike was hot.

"Get used to it," Wy said. "And don't forget, when you see a plane out of the pattern, don't be shy about pointing it out. Yell; slap me if that's what it takes to get my attention. Got it?"

"Got it," Liam said, clenching his teeth as the Cub pulled what felt like ten g's as Wy circled to head back down the coast.

"Good."

"Tell me again about the pattern."

"There's really only two rules. One is, always circle to your left. Two is, always keep the beach on our left."

"Explain it to me again."

With saintlike patience, Wy explained it to him again. "If we're all circling left, we're all circling left. Minimizes the chance of collision with somebody circling right. As we circle, we come up on and cross the shoreline. As we cross the shoreline, if we keep the beach on our left, it keeps us in the circle and going the same direction."

Liam realized and appreciated her patience, but he needed the repetition. The rules were safety rules. The safer Liam felt, the less distracted he would be, and the less distracted, the more observant. Observant in particular of planes that didn't circle to the left and didn't keep the beach always on their left.

At ten the radio crackled into life, and the same lifeless voice heard the night before came on. "This is the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. There will be an announcement concerning a herring opener in the Nushagak District for both drift and seine at twelve noon, May 2, on this frequency. I repeat, this is the Alaska Department of-"

"The Alaska Department of Hurry Up and Wait," Wy finished for him. "Okay, that's it, the point of no return. Time to head back to the beach and gas up." She stood the Cub on one wing, Liam grabbed for his stomach, and they headed back the way they had come. Below passed boats too numerous to count, two and three and four and five at a time, each group guided by its own spotter. Wy shook her head and said disapprovingly, "Five boats is too many for one plane to spot for. So is four. Three is about right. Two would be better."

"Why?"

"Because you've already got too much to do. You've got to fly the plane, look out for other planes, spot the herring, track the herring, and advise your boats. Advising three boats where to put their nets is plenty. Advising five, something else suffers."

They set down on the beach without incident, although the tide was considerably higher, and the available landing strip, to Liam's terrified eye, considerably narrower as a result. Someone had been at their fuel dump while they were gone; the first barrel was empty. The other two hadn't been tapped, and Wy took the discovery philosophically. "Probably whoever took it will let me know and reimburse me."

"How do you know?" Liam looked up and down the beach again. "It doesn't look like any of the dumps are marked. How does anyone know which gas is his? If you're taking somebody else's gas, or he's taking some of yours, how do you know?"

She shrugged, getting the stepladder out again. "Happens every year. The dumps aren't well marked; we're all using the same gas; everybody's in a hurry. After the season closes, the pilot will put the word out that he took some gas he thought was his and turned out not to be, and who can he pay back?"

Liam thought about it, working the pump arm, listening to gas slosh through the hose. "I'm not going to get this, am I," he said finally.

She tossed him a cheerful grin. "Nope. But don't worry about it, I've never been shot at for thieving." The grin flashed again. "Not yet, anyway." She topped off the wing tank and closed it up. She paused, up on the ladder. "What's that?"

"What's what?" He looked up from closing the drum and saw her pointing at the edge of the beach where it began to slope down. There was a thick stand of tall ryegrass bending gently in the breeze.

She scampered down the ladder and hared up the beach. "Wow, look at that!"

He came panting up behind to find her burrowing into the soil with both hands. "Wy, what is it?"

"Help me dig!"

He saw a round shape emerging, and fell back with an explosive sigh. "Jesus, I thought it was a dead body at least."

"Come on, help me dig!"

He resigned himself, and helped her dig.

It was a glass float, one of thousands and over the years probably millions that had broken loose from Japanese fishing nets and floated across the Pacific Ocean to wash ashore on Alaska's coast. The usual find was four inches in diameter. This one, a clear green unbroken sphere with tiny bubbles of air caught inside the shell, was over eighteen inches across.

"Score!" Wy said, sitting back on her heels and beaming.

Liam remembered the glass floats from the Cub's inventory. He sat back and brushed the dirt from his hands. "Beachcombing's part of herring spotting, I take it."

"Beachcombing is a part of everything," Wy said severely, getting to her feet. "You never know what you're going to find-a glass float, a walrus tusk, an eagle feather. A case of Spam."

"A case of Spam?"

She nodded. "I found one last year, washed up on shore south of here. The box was falling apart but the cans were okay. We're still eating them." She held the float up by its netting, admiring it. "I bet I could get a hundred bucks for this."

"You sell them?"

"Five bucks for the little ones, seven-fifty if they've still got their nets. And on up, depending on what kind of shape they're in and if they've still got their netting on." She grinned. "I get a lot of tourists my way, Liam. They don't call themselves that, of course, they are fishermen and hunters and hikers and like that, but they're tourists all the same, from Outside and overseas and all over the world. Most of them have never seen something like this. I've got a basketful of them in my shack at the airport."

"The door of which you oh so casually leave open while you're loading the plane."

"Every little bit helps," she said cheerfully. She placed the float in back of Liam's seat, wrapping it in her sleeping bag. "A good omen," she said, regarding it with satisfaction. "It's going to be a good day for us."

Liam thought of what was in store for him and shuddered, but maintained a diplomatic silence. Wy knew he didn't like flying, but pride had kept him from showing her how much, and he was damned if he was going to confess now. Instead he said, "You have dimples."

She blinked up at him. "I beg your pardon?"

"You have dimples," he said. He framed her face with his dirty hands. "One here"-he kissed it-"and one here." He kissed it, too, and drew back to smile at her. "Never saw them before."

He watched with a secret smile as it took her two tries to fumble out the Ziploc bags full of sliced dry salami and Tillamook extra sharp cheese. They ate a quick lunch, washing it down with bottled water and following it with another Hershey bar. Ten minutes later they were back in the air. By this time Liam was inured to it, or so he told himself. Maybe he was going to get over his fear of flying after all. Maybe, just maybe he was going to learn how to climb on board a plane without breaking into a sweat of fear.

They cruised down the coast for forty-five minutes, seeing various groups of boats staking out various likely-looking balls of herring. The radio crackled into life. "Wy, you up there?"

"I'm up here, Cecil."

"You seeing anything?"

"Nothing worth mentioning."

"Get the goddamn lead out," Wolfe ordered. "We're an hour away from the announcement."

"Where are you?"

"You can spot me easy-I've got an orange buoy in the crow's nest."

Wy muttered something.

"What was that?"

"Could you be a little more specific, Cecil? Like what landmass is off your bow?"

There was a silence ripe with things unspoken. Liam imagined Cecil rending the air blue with imprecations about uppity bitches who had no business mouthing off to their employers. Either that or Wolfe didn't know where he was.

"Dutch Girl Island," Wolfe said finally. "About ten miles north."

"Roger that," Wy said. She goosed the Cub and fifteen minutes later they were circling three boats off a round island that rose straight up out of the sea to a flattish, rounded peak. Two rocky ridges jutted out of the sea to the east and west, forming a vague similarity to a Dutch girl's winged cap, at low tide and from a distance. Life clutched tenaciously to the steep sides in the form of thick grass and brush and a swarm of slender black seabirds. "What are they?" Liam said.

Wy looked through her binoculars. "Murres, I think." She let the lenses wander. "Well, well," she said with an undertone of excitement that made Liam sit up. "What have we here?"

She put the Cub in a slow, wide circle, and Liam looked out the window through his binoculars.

About five miles off the southwest side of the island he saw a silver-gray layer just beneath the green surface that seemed to go on forever, in every direction.

"Is that them?" Liam said in disbelief. He'd never seen so many fish in one place in his life.

"Oh my," Wy breathed. "Oh my my. And aren't they balling up nicely."

"That means they're about to spawn?"

"That's what that means," Wy said. She sounded tense and absorbed, and Liam shut up and let her concentrate. His eyes roved the sky for other traffic. So far, nothing.

Wy didn't dare complete more than one circle for fear that someone else, another spotter or a crew member of one of the hundreds of boats in the area, would see her and guess what they had found. She rolled out and headed straight for Wolfe's three-boat flotilla. When she got there she dropped down to fifty feet off the deck and folded up the left-hand window. Even with earphones clamped to his head the rush of air and the roar of the engine was deafening. Liam wanted to pray but he was so scared he forgot how, and he'd stopped believing in God a long time ago anyway.

Wolfe had come out of the cabin on his flying bridge and stared upward. The expression on his face was clearly visible, and the words on his lips easily read. "What the fuck do you think you're doing, Chouinard?" Next to him stood the immediately recognizable bulk of Kirk Mulder.

Wy leaned her head out the window and yelled, "Follow me!" She circled the boats once for emphasis and headed back to the ball of fish.

Liam managed to reswallow his heart and said, "Why didn't you just call him on the radio?"

"I was scared somebody might be listening in."

"I thought all the radios were scrambled."

"They are."

Not the trusting type, Wyanet Chouinard.

"Please, please, please," Liam heard her mutter over the earphones, "Please, please, please don't let anyone beat us to it, please, please, please. You watching for traffic, Campbell?"

He hadn't been, and jerked his eyes guiltily to the skies. There were six or seven specks on the horizon, but nothing nearby. "All clear. So far so good."

"Good." Five minutes more and Wy said, "There's the little sonsabitches!" Again, she didn't dare sit on them for fear of calling attention and made a wide sweep around Dutch Girl Island instead, trying to look as if she hadn't found anything and was still searching. "What time is it?"

Liam checked his watch. "Eleven forty-eight."

"Okay."

Liam, caught between Wy's tension and his own fear, knew a compulsion to talk, about anything. "How big is that boat of Wolfe's?"

"Fifty-six feet," Wy said.

"How much you figure it cost?"

"The hull price was seven hundred thousand. With electronics, total price comes close to a million. Or so he likes to brag in the bars."

Liam whistled. "I can't even imagine what payments on a boat like that would be."

Wy snorted. "Try insurance."

"Yikes."

"Yeah. You can make a lot of money fishing, but you've got to spend a lot first."

They made another deceptively unhurried turn. There was a plane growing larger on the northern horizon. Liam poked Wy and pointed. "I know, I saw him. That's Miller Gorman, the guy in the 172 on floats who tried to sideswipe us earlier. He's spotted us, all right. But here comes the cavalry."

She banked the plane and Liam caught a glimpse of three boats approaching, all of them on the step with full white wakes. "The other two boats are a lot smaller."

"Thirty-two feet each," Wy agreed. "They're rerigged gillnetters. Most herring boats are. Wolfe's an exception. He does well enough to be an exception. Boat one, you read me?"

Wolfe's voice, unmistakable in its arrogant assurance, replied, "Read you five by, flygirl. I see them."

"I figure three hundred tons."

Wolfe's laugh was cut off by static, but his words came through loud and clear. "Try four."

"Four hundred tons?" Liam said. "Four hundred tons? As in fourteen hundred dollars per ton?" He tried to work it out in his head but again the number of zeroes defeated him.

"As in fifteen percent of fourteen hundred times four hundred tons," Wy said, her voice rich with satisfaction. Beneath it, because he was listening for it, Liam could hear the undercurrent of heartfelt relief. "Now all we've got to do is make sure we get most of 'em."

The tension and excitement were manifest in the set of her shoulders as she put the plane into a sweeping left circle, as they passed over it with the southwestern side of Dutch Girl Island always on their left. Other boats were arriving. Liam poked and pointed. "Yeah," Wy said, "there are always skippers watching what Cecil's doing. They know he's not going to get his nets wet unless-"

A new voice came on the air. "This is the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, announcing an opening for herring fishing in the Riggins Bay District. This opening will last for twenty minutes, beginning at twelve o'clock today. Five minutes to the opening."

"Twenty minutes!" Liam yelped. "We're doing all this for twenty lousy minutes' worth of fishing?"

Her sigh was audible in the earphones even over the noise of the engine. "Liam, one year the whole season was twenty minutes. We're just lucky we didn't pull our quota three days ago, that we've got another shot at it."

"Four minutes to the opening," the disembodied voice intoned.

"Shit," Liam said, and poked and pointed at a big blue and white plane approaching from the sea.

"Yeah, Fish and Game's 206," Wy said. "Don't worry, they'll stand off. They're just here to keep us honest."

"How do they do that?" Liam said, watching the float plane with his own service's insignia on the side climb to a higher altitude. The Fish and Wildlife Protection officers were state troopers, too. They went through the same training he did, but enforced the fish and game laws throughout the state, or tried to. Liam didn't envy them that task; he'd rather disarm an axe murderer before trying to relieve a rabid sport fisherman of his illegally caught king salmon, any day.

"They've got cameras with clocks in them bolted to the fuselage, and they're aiming them at the boats below. They'll know if we put our nets in the water one second before we should, or keep them there one second longer than we should."

"What happens if we do either of those things?"

"Then Cecil could probably kiss his million-dollar boat goodbye."

"They'd confiscate it?"

"You bet your ass. And, more important, we wouldn't get paid."

"Three minutes to the opening."

"Cecil," Wy said, "stay on course for another minute. Alex, stand to and prepare to drop your skiff where you are. Mike, you've got company, coming up hard astern."

Liam saw two more boats approaching. The second of the smaller boats in Wolfe's miniflotilla broke off from the steadily increasing ball of herring and put itself in the way of the oncoming boats. Liam poked and pointed. "Goddammit," Wy swore as the Cessna 172 insinuated itself into their circle. "It's okay, we got 'em, we got 'em." Barely audible over the headphones, Liam heard her say, "Please let us have them, please let us have them."

"Two minutes to the opening."

The two new boats broke ranks, one circling around Wolfe's second gillnetter, or Mike, which Liam supposed was the skipper's name. "Mike, stay on the first boat," Wy ordered. "Cecil, you've got company."

The big boat was on the other side of the ball of herring. It looked twice as large and three times as powerful as the little gillnetter heading over to challenge it. Wolfe's voice was elaborately casual. "What company? Oh, you mean that little itty-bitty skiff over there? I can hardly make him out, the little peckerhead's so tiny."

"Cecil-"

"One minute to the opening."

Cecil-by now Liam, too, was calling the boats by the names of their skippers-made a course correction and found itself directly in the path of the oncoming vessel. "Goddammit, Cecil, you're on his portside, he has right-of-way!"

"Is that a fact?" Wolfe sounded mildly surprised.

Twenty minutes was going to be just long enough for a fisherman on his toes to scoop up as many herring as he could. "With a ball of herring this bunched together," Wy said, her voice taut with excitement and anticipation and, yes, unabashed greed, "we're going to beat the hell out of them!"

Liam took this to mean that they were going to catch a lot of fish, as long as they could beat the other fishermen to them, and as long as- "Watch out!" he yelled, slapping the side of Wy's head as the 172 nearly brushed their wing with a float-as long as they survived the experiment.

"Miller, watch your goddamn six!" Wy roared.

"Ten seconds to the opening," the expressionless voice droned. "Eight seconds, seven seconds, six seconds, five, four, three, two, one, open; the herring season for the Riggins Bay District is open."

Suddenly Liam was too busy to be scared.

Wy's voice, excited but controlled, sounded continually in his ears. "All boats, drop your skiffs, now! Cecil, hard left rudder, hard left rudder!"

"Wy, watch it, traffic, blue plane with floats ten o'clock descending!"

"Alex, steady as you go, you got 'em, you got 'em!"

"Wy, watch out, you're coming up too fast on that red plane, back off, back off, back off!"

"Mike, come left, come left, come left, don't let him get around you!"

"Wy, Cub at two o'clock, go left, go left, your other left, dammit!"

Suddenly it seemed that the sky was filled with planes and the water with boats. Liam didn't have time to wonder where they'd all come from; all he could do was point and poke and prod and slap and kick and yell, all as Wy watched the water and directed the boats.

A hundred feet beneath the tight circle Wy had locked the Cub into, the fishing boats launched their skiffs. These weren't dories with little 40-horsepower Evinrudes, but powerboats with 250- to 300-horsepower outboards that were on the step practically before their hulls hit the water.

The way it worked was this. One end of the purse seine was fastened to the skiff, the other end to the boat. The idea was for the skiff to make a large circle around as many herring as possible and head back for the mother boat, which would then draw the bottom of the seine together, making a bag of the net. From there, they would use the boom to lift the net into the boat, or brail the fish into the hold one large scoop at a time, or deliver the fish to a waiting tender -Liam caught distant glimpses of three larger boats hanging around the perimeter of the action, but they weren't about to run into him so he ignored them. "Watch it, that green plane-son of a bitch!"

The green plane's pilot misjudged his altitude and the 172's speed and his gear glanced off the left wing of the 172 as it was coming up from behind. The 172's wing dipped sharply waterward, started to spin, and recovered, pulling up and banking right, out of the circle.

Something wet running into his eyes blinded him for a moment. Liam wiped it away and discovered that sweat was pouring down his forehead in rivulets. In front of him Wy was oblivious, all her attention trained on the water below. "Yes! Okay, Cecil, close it up, close it up, close it up!"

The expressionless voice came over the headphones. "Ten minutes remaining in the opening; I say again, ten minutes remaining in the Riggins Bay herring opener."

"Mike, you've got ten minutes to lose that jerk and set your net! Alex, hard right rudder, you got nothing but net if you close it up now! Cecil, you still got company off your stern, watch out he doesn't foul your seine!"

One of the two poaching gillnetters was still being fended off by Mike's boat, every zig of the gillnetter being met by a zag from Mike's. The boat tagging Cecil had dropped his skiff and was preparing to make a run for the fish.

Liam saw water boil up from Wolfe's stern, and the big seiner surged forward and ran right over the top of the other boat's skiff. The man in it dove over the side at the last possible moment, the prop of the big seiner passing over the exact spot he'd been standing not three seconds before.

"Jesus Christ," Liam said in disbelief.

"Nine minutes to closing; I say again, nine minutes to closing."

"Watch the sky, Campbell!" Wy snapped. "Close it up, Cecil, close it up, you've got nine minutes!"

There were six or seven planes-or maybe twenty; Liam was never really sure-in the same tight circle, buzzing around the fishing scene like angry wasps, the 172 recovering enough to rejoin the group. It seemed as if every time he looked up he saw a pair of floats through the skylight. Every time he looked right, another plane filled up the window, someone in the backseat slapping the back of his pilot's head. There was never a moment when it seemed to him that they were not in imminent danger of a midair collision. Here a pair of floats passed so closely by he could see water dripping from the rudders; there the face of another observer was so near he could see the strain and fear on it as plainly as he could feel his own. The sharp blur of a propeller reminded him of what had happened to the last person to fly observer for Wy, not a comforting thought. Liam's poking and slapping became less tentative. Yelling and cursing seemed natural; in the space of twenty minutes, Liam was learning a whole new vocabulary.

There was as much or more chaos on the water below, where twenty-five boats battled for sea room and herring, with more competitors arriving every moment. In between his constant scanning of the sky and the equally constant poking and prodding of Wy he caught glimpses of a continual game of bump-and-run, of the gillnetter's swamped but not sunken skiff, of a bulging purse seine black with fish-he hoped theirs, but for the life of him he couldn't tell one boat from another-of a gillnetter with its prop fouled in its own seine, of another adrift with a dead engine, of a third-Liam blinked. If his eyes did not deceive him, there were three men on the deck beating the hell out of each other.

The man who had dived off the swamped skiff had bobbed up to the surface and one of his crewmates on the gillnetter ran a boat hook out for him to grab on to and hauled him on board. From the brief glimpse Liam caught of him, he didn't appear to be bleeding. Bleeding or not, Liam had personally witnessed a thirddegree assault, a class C felony at least. They came around again in their circle and Liam caught a glimpse of the big seiner getting its catch on board-lowering the boat considerably in the water-then running its net out again.

The dispassionate, disembodied voice came over the air once more. "Five minutes remaining in the opener; I say again, five more minutes remaining."

Liam went back to watching the sky. Either everyone had slowed down or in the short space granted to him he had adjusted to the pace of the job. He felt like someone had switched him from 45 to 33-1/3. Everything took on a dreamy, slow-motion quality. There was plenty of time to spot traffic, forever to notify Wy, an eternity for her to find them safe passage. The loud jumble of excited voices over the earphone receded, and all he could hear was the sound of his own words, concise, deliberate, heavy with importance.

Slap. "Cessna on floats at ten."

Poke. "We're sneaking up on the red plane again; fall back, fall back, fall back."

Nudge. "Watch out, there comes that 172 again."

Point. "Trooper plane at two, trooper plane at two."

"One minute remaining in the opener; I say again, one minute remaining."

The Cub's circles seemed to tighten, and Liam's entire focus narrowed to five square miles of sea and air. Planes, boats, fish seemed to blur together; he heard his own voice speaking, saw his own hands moving, felt his own eyes roving back and forth, looking, watching, waiting.

"-ten seconds to closing, eight seconds, seven seconds, six seconds, five, four, three, two, one… The herring opener for seiners for the Riggins Bay District is now closed; I say again, the herring opener for seiners for the Riggins Bay District is now closed."

Wy immediately straightened out the Cub, heading it away from the scene on a southwest course. "What's it look like, Cecil?" There was no immediate answer, and she banked right and made a relaxed sweep north to look over the situation from what Wy considered a safe distance and from what Liam, returning slowly and reluctantly to real time and space, did not. He squinted at the sky as if he'd never seen it before. It had never seemed so blue. "Is it really over?"

Wy was busy going into a tight circle and didn't answer.

Directly below, one of the big processors had come alongside Cecil's fifty-twofooter. There was a widemouthed hose stuck into the bulging seine net, busily vacuuming up the herring penned there and sucking it into its own hold. The hose was transferred to Corseiner's hold, where it sucked up everything there, too. Alex was next in line with a catch a third the size of Wolfe's. Mike's catch looked smallest of all, but then he'd been busy for much of the opener fending off the encroaching gillnetter, which Liam privately thought was a little greedy of him-surely in a ball that size there was more than enough herring to go around. He knew better than to voice this thought in present company, however.

The other boats, the ones that had not fouled themselves in their own nets or had their sides stove in by someone else or whose engines had not failed them at the crucial moment-or whose crews had not mutinied-had done well, if not as well as the first three boats on the scene. Everybody had fish in their nets, including one tardy soul who failed to close up his purse in time. Over the radio for all the fleet to hear, he was commanded by the Fish and Wildlife officer in the air above to open his seine and let the fish go. It was one of the larger of the lesser catches, and it took a minute for the skipper to bring himself to do it.

"I say again," the Fish and Wildlife officer's voice said sharply, "FirstVery Bonnie Doon, you have exceeded the time allowed to fish; open up your seine."

The Bonnie Doon opened up her seine, and the teeming mass of herring boiled out into open water.

"Ouch," Wy said. "There goes about forty-five grand, swimming away. Cecil, quit sitting on your thumb and tell me how we did!" There was no answer, and she cursed. "Hang on, Liam."

"Wy," Liam said apprehensively. "What are you doing?"

"Just hang on."

"Wy!"

She waited for an opening and when it came, dived toward the big seiner, pulling up again at what Liam felt was the last possible moment. He was so terrified he couldn't catch his breath, let alone scream. "Cecil, goddammit, what have we got?"

It was with real gratitude that Liam heard the radio crackle into life. "Hold your goddamn horses, flygirl. We're busy."

"Well, get the lead out, I want to know if I get new wings for my Cub!"

The other planes were standing off, no doubt conversing impatiently with their own skippers. Wy flew a lazy eight pattern over the fishing ground and back around Dutch Girl Island for about ten minutes before Cecil came on again, while Liam indulged himself in fantasies of her slow and painful death, preferably at his hands. "Hold on to your drawers, flygirl. Looks like we got about a hundred sixty tons between the three of us, maybe a little less."

"What's the percentage?"

Liam could hear the grin in Wolfe's voice. "The Japs say it's looking good-about fifteen."

Wy's whoop was exuberant and deafening. The stick between Liam's knees came back hard and the Cub went into a steep climb. "You buckled up, Liam?"

"Wy? Wy, what the hell are you doing! Wy! WY! Goddammitohshitohshitohshiiiiiiiiit!"

She took them up to 2,500 feet, and they were cruising at 125 miles per hour with all the air room in the world between them and the next plane over when she put the Cub into a shallow dive, building up speed until they hit 140 miles per hour. She pulled back on the stick and pushed in the throttle and whooped again as they sailed around in a picture-perfect loop.

They regained level flight at precisely 142 miles per hour at 2,010 feet. "There," Wy said, and turned to grin at Liam. "We done good, Campbell. Goddamn, but we done good!"

Liam spoke between clenched teeth and meant every word. "I am going to kill you, Chouinard."

She laughed, the sound full of triumph. "Let's fuel up and head for home, stud! We are rich!"