Gale Force

8

Christer Magnusson awoke at first light. He rolled out of bed, stood and stretched, and stared out through a wall of windows at the expanse of blue beyond. Then, as he’d done every morning for the past month, he walked into his kitchen and fired up his laptop computer and cursed the shipyard workers who’d tied up his boat for so long.

The master of the Commodore Titan wasn’t used to spending this much time on land, and it was making him crazy. But with the pride of the Commodore fleet—and, hell, the Pacific Coast—tied up all month for a refit, he’d been forced to adapt. Grocery stores. Starbucks. Netflix. Traffic jams.

Magnusson could adapt, but he’d never learn to like it. He belonged on the ocean, and he itched to get back.

Three more weeks.

It felt like an eternity.

Magnusson’s computer loaded, and he logged on to the Commodore database. Commodore kept an in-house ship-tracking server with real-time GPS monitoring of every registered cargo ship and passenger liner on salt water, the easier to anticipate lucrative salvage assignments. On a normal day, with his tug in the water, crewed and fueled and ready, the salvage master would have kept the server live around the clock, would bring his laptop to bed, even, so as to know instantly when a ship ran into trouble.

Lately, though, he’d had to shut down the computer, leave it in the kitchen if he wanted to sleep. It was torture otherwise, watching the ships pass, each one a potential million-dollar award, and none of them remotely accessible, not for twenty more days at the earliest.

This was the danger with the salvage profession. Heck, it was the danger with any life lived at sea. Sooner or later, you’d find yourself stuck on dry land for a spell of time, and if you hadn’t planned for it—well, it was a prison sentence.

Magnusson was forty-six years old, descended from a long line of blue-water sailors and merchant mariners. He’d crossed the ocean on cargo ships and ocean liners more times than he could count, had been working the sea since before he could drive a car; he’d simply never had time to build out the normal, onshore, storybook life.

And so he found himself in this vast, empty condo, no wife for company, no children or even a dog, just a laptop computer, a list of transient vessels, and a gnawing impatience he feared might just drive him mad.

ON MOST DAYS, the Commodore database looked like a slow-speed video game, an air-traffic control screen on the water. But today, up near the Aleutian Islands, Magnusson saw a hazard alert flashing.

Cargo vessel Pacific Lion involved in deep-water incident, the alert read when Magnusson clicked to open it. Crew evacuated to Dutch Harbor. One survivor still missing.

Magnusson muttered an oath. Stared at the map on the screen, the little dot where the Lion was last reported, the vast expanse of blue around it. Dutch Harbor, Alaska, sat in the middle of the Aleutian Islands, closer to Russia than to any meaningful part of America, literally in the middle of nowhere.

And the Pacific Lion, a 650-foot cargo vessel, was in trouble up there.

WITHIN TEN MINUTES, Magnusson had Commodore headquarters on the phone.

“Nobody’s really sure how it’s going to play out,” he was hearing from a man in the home office named Mueller, a vice president of something, a bottom-line, corner-office, dry-land kind of guy. “Crew abandoned her, expecting the ship would sink, but she hasn’t yet. Just lying there on her side, drifting into American waters.”

Magnusson walked back through his unlived-in condo to the windows. Stared out at the water.

“The vessel,” he said to Mueller. “Is there any sign that sinking is imminent?”

Mueller didn’t answer right away. Magnusson could hear him typing something. “No,” the vice president said finally. “According to the Coast Guard, it looks pretty stable.”

“And the weather?”

“The weather.” Another pause. “Decent for the foreseeable future. It was rocky last night, but it calmed down some this morning. Looks like there’s a window, anyway, before the wind starts to blow again.”

“And the Waverly boat is unavailable.”

“Right.”

“So who is going to salvage the ship?”

Mueller let out a long breath. “No idea,” he said. “Damn it, Christer, if the Titan wasn’t still laid up, we could save that old hulk and make the company a pile.”

This, obviously, was the worst-case scenario. A freighter in trouble, a potentially lucrative payday, and, someone else would win the award.

This, Magnusson figured, must be what it felt like to be stuck in prison, watching some other man marry your bride.

But Magnusson hadn’t built a career on the water by doing what he was told. And he hadn’t turned his Titan into the envy of the Pacific Coast salvage fleet by backing down from an obstacle, be it wind, weather, wave, or lack of proper equipment.

“We can still save the ship,” Magnusson said, and he knew immediately that he was finished with dry-land living.

“What? The way that ship’s drifting, it either sinks or makes landfall long before the Titan’s even back in the water. It’s impossible.”

“So I don’t use the Titan,” Magnusson said. “Get me a couple good crew and a flight to Dutch Harbor immediately.”

The master could sense the vice president’s confusion on the other end of the line. “Christer, I don’t—”

Magnusson ignored him. He’d been doing this for too long to let a chance like the Lion slip away. “And a boat,” he told Mueller. “Find me the best boat in Alaska, right away.”