Gale Force

21

The Lion was a mountain up close. Carew guided the Salvation around the Lion’s keel. There was a swell building, and the underside of the wreck was awash with breaking waves. Okura stood on the Salvation’s bridge wing and stared up and watched. Apart from the sound of the surf, the ship was eerily quiet.

Carew circled the Salvation around the stern of the freighter, where its massive propeller hung half submerged in the icy water, the flat slab of rudder sitting useless, hard-over to port.

There was an access walkway on the stern of the ship, and an opening just above where the name PACIFIC LION was painted in big white letters against the blue hull. At its lowest point, the walkway was maybe ten feet from the surface of the water, but it angled up so sharply that it might as well have been a wall.

Good thing we have rope, Okura thought. This is going to require some agility.

Carew idled the Salvation around to the portside of the ship, the weather deck at the top of the superstructure now just a few feet from the water. Okura could see the whole of the accommodations house, the plain, low boxes above the white hull that served as home and working space for the crew. The aft lifeboat remained in place, hanging from its stanchions near the giant exhaust funnel at the stern.

So Ishimaru hadn’t stolen away. Not in a boat, anyway.

The bridge appeared empty as well. No sign of life anywhere. If the stowaway was still aboard, he’d had a lonely time at sea.

When the Salvation had completed its circumnavigation of the wreck, Okura turned and walked off of the bridge wing and into the wheelhouse, where Magnusson was on the satellite phone. He hung up as Okura entered.

“The shipowners have faxed an agreement to the Commodore headquarters,” he told the men. “No cure, no pay. If we don’t salvage this ship, we don’t earn a dime.”

He stared out at the Lion, silent. The rest of the men followed his gaze. Finally, Magnusson squared his shoulders. “First things first,” he said, fixing his eyes on Okura. “We’d better get you on board to retrieve your lost item—and our fee.”

MAGNUSSON AND CAREW DECIDED that the best way aboard the Lion was from the portside weather deck, the same way that Okura and his shipmates had evacuated the vessel days earlier.

“Best best way on board is with a helicopter,” Magnusson told Okura. “We wait until the Munro shows up and they’ll put you down nice and easy at the top of the starboard rail. You can drop in and search how you please.”

“No Coast Guard,” Okura told the salvage master. “They can’t know that I’m out here.”

Magnusson smirked, like he’d anticipated that response. “No helicopter, then.” He nodded to Carew, who sidled the Salvation alongside the Lion’s empty lifeboat station on the portside, forward deck. The freighter was just a few feet away from the salvage boat now. It loomed high above the Salvation, skewed at its impossible angle. It looked seconds away from crashing down on them all.

Carew ducked his head out the wheelhouse window, called back instructions to Robbie, who stood at the starboard rail with a pike pole.

“Grab a tie-up line,” Magnusson told Okura. “Make it fast to something when the deckhand grabs the rail.”

The Salvation inched closer to the Lion, its bow thruster grumbling and churning up water, the propeller doing the same at the stern. Robbie stretched with the pike pole, hooked it around the freighter’s side railing, and used it to guide the Salvation closer, until the railing nearly touched the smaller ship’s bulwarks. Okura looped his rope around the railing, tied it off.

Robbie hoisted himself up and onto the freighter, two more coils of rope on his shoulder, a duffel bag in his free hand. He steadied himself, reached for Okura’s hand, and pulled him aboard.

“You have three hours,” Magnusson called up to them. “If the weather gets dire or the situation changes, we’ll sound the horn. When you hear the horn, you return to this vessel immediately, understand?”

The tug motored away from the wreck, headed toward the stern. Okura listened as the sound of the engines died away. Then he turned to where Robbie waited.

Fifty million dollars.

“Right,” Robbie said from beside him. “How about we go find your twenty-five thousand, before we do anything else?”

THE DECK WAS SLICK AND BARE, and the Lion groaned and wallowed as the sea battered against it. Okura followed Robbie along the railing to the bridge, conscious of the roiling sea beneath the grate of the rail.

Robbie reached the bridge, pushed a door open. It fell in and hung there, suspended by gravity. Okura followed the deckhand inside.

The bridge was dark. Its width spanned the ship, save for a couple of abbreviated wings on either side. Okura looked around, took in the shadowy instruments, the chart tables, the cupboards with books and coffee cups and creamers scattered on the floor. Everything looked familiar, but at the same time so alien. The last time he’d been here, he’d caused a disaster.

It was cold inside the bridge. Robbie reached into his duffel bag and switched on a headlamp. Passed it to Okura and produced another for himself. Then he reached up to a chart table and pulled himself skyward, toward the aft bulkhead door in the middle of the bridge.

Okura followed, sweating a little from the exertion, and they reached the bulkhead door and carefully negotiated the long, angled corridor. The thin light from the bridge windows disappeared quickly. The howl of the wind quieted, as did the drone of the Coast Guard rescue plane overhead. The only sound Okura could hear was the occasional groan of the five thousand Nissans still lashed down in the cargo hold.

“What are you looking for, anyway?” Robbie asked as they made their way aft toward Okura’s stateroom.

Okura glanced back at him. Said nothing.

“Just so I know what I’m looking for,” the deckhand explained. “Like, is it big, is it small, what is it?”

“It’s a briefcase,” Okura told him. “Silver.”

“A briefcase.” Robbie went silent for a moment, waiting, no doubt, for Okura to elaborate. He didn’t. “Okay,” the deckhand said finally. “A briefcase it is.”

A briefcase. And the man who owned it.

But Okura kept his mouth shut about Ishimaru.

THEY REACHED A BULKHEAD door about thirty feet down from the bridge. Okura stopped. “The officers’ staterooms are beyond.”

He hesitated there as Robbie watched him. He didn’t want to return to his stateroom, he realized. He would have liked to forget he ever lived here, ever worked here. He would have liked to forget, period.

He opened the bulkhead to another hallway, a line of doors on either side. Climbed into the hallway and across to his stateroom door, pushed it open. It smelled musty inside, like a forgotten room in an old house. the porthole was dim; it looked up at the gray, featureless sky, the sun obscured by thick clouds. Okura’s belongings were pretty much as he’d left them, though anything loose had fallen onto the floor—the paperback novel he’d been trying to read, the photographs he’d arranged on his desk.

Okura picked up one of these, a framed picture of his sister and her husband, their young daughter. The girl was three now, and he could count the number of times he’d seen her on one hand, so long had he been out at sea. She was a beautiful little girl, intelligent and inquisitive, and her parents were kind and loving. Okura studied the picture and wondered what his sister would think, if she knew what he’d done.

Robbie coughed from the doorway. “I don’t see any briefcase,” he said. “How about that twenty-five grand?”

Okura looked up from the picture. “Just give me one minute,” he said. “I didn’t expect I’d be back here.”

“It’s your money,” Robbie said. “You want to spend it on memory lane, be my guest. But my boss is going to want to get paid.”

Okura glanced down at the picture again. His sister was smiling, as happy as Okura could ever remember seeing her. Her husband was a hardworking man, a lawyer. His life must have been stressful, but he was smiling, too, his arm around Okura’s sister, his hand mussing his daughter’s hair. They were a happy family.

Robbie sighed, his impatience obvious. Okura set the picture aside. Climbed over to his desk and withdrew his passport and the twenty-five thousand dollars he’d hidden away.

THEY MADE THEIR WAY to Ishimaru’s hiding space, the storage locker aft of the ship. The stowaway wasn’t there, hadn’t returned, and the briefcase was still absent, too.

Damn it, Okura thought. Why couldn’t this be easy?

Ishimaru could have been anywhere on board the ship by now, if he was even still there. Okura hoped the stowaway had at least had the sense to remain on the accommodations deck; the prospect of venturing farther below, to the cargo holds, was a nightmarish proposition.

So Okura and the deckhand searched every stateroom for the stowaway, inch by painstaking inch. There were two guest staterooms, the captain’s suite, the first officer’s suite, and Okura’s. Beyond that, more staterooms, and the general crew quarters.

Okura searched the third officer’s quarters and the cadet’s modest suite and found nothing. Continued aft and found two more doors: to starboard, the deckhand’s berths. To port, the galley and the crew mess.

“Which do we check first?” Robbie asked.

Okura considered. “The galley.” Perhaps Ishimaru got hungry.

But the galley showed no sign of the stowaway. It was a long, low kitchen, stainless-steel islands and cooking areas, a walk-in refrigerator and a similar freezer. The meat had gone bad; the stench inside the freezer was horrific. Robbie gave it a sweep with his headlamp and slammed the door shut again.

“Dang it,” he said, gagging. “I don’t even know why I did that.”

The galley floor was covered in foodstuffs: sauces and stale breads and broken eggs. The galley was a 24-7 operation, and even in the middle of the night, someone would have been working, setting out food for the midnight watch. The food was spilled everywhere, but there were no telltale footprints in the flour, nothing obviously stolen from the dry-goods locker. If Ishimaru was still aboard the ship, he hadn’t made it to the galley.

The crew mess was adjacent to the galley. It was a small cafeteria, the tables bolted to the floor, the benches loose and scattered. There was spilled food here, too, but no Ishimaru.

Suppose we’ll have to check the crew berths, Okura thought, but before he could tell Robbie, the Salvation sounded a blast on her horn from somewhere outside.

The deckhand emerged from another locker. “You hear that?”

“I heard it,” Okura said. “I need more time.”

“No more time. They blow the horn, we come running, remember? Get back down to the boat and try again tomorrow.”

Shit.

Okura looked at the deckhand, who shrugged. It is what it is.

“Tomorrow,” Okura said finally. “We come back early.”