Gale Force

30

Okura led Robbie down the Lion’s central hallway again. The waves outside were bigger now, the wind stronger. Okura winced every time the ship swayed, with every groan from the hull and the shifting cargo below.

They had covered every inch of the accommodations deck. Every stateroom, every hallway, every locker. No sign of Tomio Ishimaru. No sign of his briefcase. If the stowaway was still on board, he was in the engine room somewhere, or in the cargo holds.

Or he’d washed overboard.

But Okura wasn’t ready to consider that possibility. He couldn’t afford to lose faith, not yet. He led Robbie down the hall to a stairway amidships. Pushed the bulkhead door and it swung open, revealing the dark, cockeyed stairway beyond. The stairs descended into the gloom of the cargo holds. At this angle, there was no way to follow them but with ropes.

“These stairs go all the way to the last cargo hold, deck four,” Okura told Robbie. “There are nine cargo decks in all. Five thousand cars.”

Nine decks. Each deck six hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide. Miles upon miles of ground to cover, all of it dark and deadly. Okura watched Robbie rig up a climbing line. Tested the strength of the knot and hesitated at the edge of the bulkhead, his headlamp beam reflecting against the carnival funhouse angles of the listing stairway beyond.

Fifty million dollars. Okura took the rope in his hands and stepped off into the darkness, began to lower himself deeper into the Lion.

OKURA WAS HALFWAY TO the first cargo deck—deck twelve—when Robbie called down from the hallway above.

“Just heard the horn,” the deckhand reported. “My radio’s crapping out in here. I gotta get back to the surface.”

“We can’t turn around yet,” Okura replied. “We haven’t even started our search.”

“Skipper sounds the horn, I gotta jump to it,” Robbie said. “I’ll be right back.”

Okura listened to the deckhand picking his way down the passage, leaving him alone in the stairwell. He steadied his breathing. Gripped the rope tighter and pushed off from the wall. The darkness seemed almost alive beneath him, all drips and moans and swirling shadows rising up to meet him as he made his descent.

Robbie returned just after Okura had reached the bulkhead at deck twelve. “Bad news,” the deckhand called down, his headlamp piercing the gloom from above. “Urgent. There’s a salvage tug just showed up outside, the Gale Force, from Seattle. They’re trying to bump us off the tow, and Bill says they have the boat that could do it.”

Okura looked around the landing. The hatch to the cargo hold hung open on the wall opposite, now nearly vertical with the slant of the ship. This struck Okura as unusual; the door was supposed to be locked and secured while the ship was at sea. This was an aberration.

“I might have found something,” Okura called up the stairway. “I want to continue the search.”

“Not today,” Robbie said. “Look, we’ll keep poking around this damn ship as soon as we can, but right now I need to get topside and see what my boss wants us to do.”

Okura pushed open the hatch wider and peered inside. The light from his headlamp was dim and abbreviated, but what it illuminated was astonishing: row upon row of cars, all hanging at the same awkward impossible angle, suspended in space by a system of high-strength straps, ropes, and chains. They swayed almost as one with the motion of the swell, the whole fragile mess a chorus of straining material and groaning steel every time a wave hit. The cars hung in place, and they stretched to the end of Okura’s light and beyond, an obstacle course, a death trap, hanging by the proverbial thread.

“There is a storm coming,” Okura called. “We need to keep looking while the weather still allows it.”

“Look, if the other tug bumps us off the tow, they’ll kick you off this ship with the rest of us.” Robbie paused. “I’m heading back. You can stay, or you can go.”

Okura steadied himself at the bulkhead and searched in his bag for another length of rope. He had plenty of fresh water in the bag, a supply of energy bars. “Very well,” he said. “I’m staying.”

He gritted his teeth and swung across the bulkhead, listening to the echoes from above as Robbie made his retreat to the surface. He tied his line to a beam above the doorway, and let it fall down the deck between a long row of cars. Reached out, prepared to lower himself into the hold, to continue his search. Then he glanced to his left, inside the bulkhead door, and stopped and stared.

There was a structural pillar beside the door, climbing from the bottom of the ship to the top. The way the ship listed, the pillar made a sort of cradle, just as the wall and the floor of the passageways above did the same.

In this particular cradle, though, was a pile of darkness that Okura assumed were just rags. Then the darkness moved, mumbled something, and Okura looked closer, saw the bruised and battered face, the parched lips, the limbs hanging at awkward angles.

This was a human being, wounded and starved. This was Tomio Ishimaru.