Gale Force

41

Okura woke up in darkness. In cold and damp, with the ship still moving, still shuddering as the waves outside battered the hull. He was lying on something hard, something painful, and for a moment, he couldn’t move his arms or his legs, and he panicked, afraid the fall had paralyzed him.

Gradually, though, he regained feeling in his limbs. Brought his hand up to his face, felt blood, warm and sticky. His face hurt, his nose. The side of his head. He reached for his headlamp, but it wasn’t there. The cargo hold was pitch-black. Water sloshed beneath him, but Okura had no way of telling how far below.

The briefcase.

He’d landed on a car. He could feel the windshield beneath him, cold steel at his back, the wipers digging through the fabric of his pants. The car rocked with the movement of the freighter, and the tie-up straps groaned.

Where is the briefcase?

Slowly, cautiously, Okura steadied his body with his hands and sat up. Felt the car shift beneath him, unsteady, dangling from the deck. He groped in the darkness, but couldn’t find the case. Down here, he was blind.

There was a new noise, unfamiliar, from high above. An irregular banging against steel. Then, there were voices, and light. Okura could see them through the windshields, and the windows of the cars that hung above him, thin beams cutting through the dark. He couldn’t make out what the voices were saying.

“Robbie?” Okura struggled to sit up. “Help me. I’m down here.”

The lights swung around in the darkness, blocked by rows of cars. Okura remained obscured in darkness.

“Anyone down there?” someone called. “This is the Coast Guard. It’s time to go home.”

Okura watched the men’s beams, saw the light play off of their Coast Guard flight suits. Rescue jumpers, he realized. Survival technicians.

He said nothing.

The men ventured out onto Ishimaru’s platform. Peered over, and now their headlamps found Okura’s rope. Okura shifted farther into the shadows, felt the Nissan rock unsteadily beneath him. Tried not to breathe.

He’d been waiting for Robbie to return, help him retrieve the briefcase, and rescue him from the ship. But the Coast Guard’s arrival meant something had happened up there on the surface. And whatever it was, it was bad news for Okura.

As Okura watched, the techs rigged a harness and looped it over a pipe on the ceiling. One of the technicians climbed inside while the other stayed on the platform, gripping the rope and belaying his partner, slowly, through the rows of cars.

“Hello?” the first technician called. “Anyone down here?”

His light swept over the cars above Okura’s head. Shone through the windshield above Okura, paused for a split-second on something alien to this space, something shiny, and Okura felt his breath hitch.

The briefcase.

It lay wedged against a car tire, just above Okura, well within reach. He could retrieve it easily from his position. But the technician was still dropping closer to Okura, closer still. Okura didn’t move. Held his breath and stayed motionless until his muscles screamed from the effort. Finally, the technician was passing him, two or three cars away, and as he dropped farther, Okura let himself breathe, let himself shift, just a little.

Then, from above, the other technician’s voice, and another beam of light. “Hey, Tommy, over there. I think I see something.”