Gale Force

2

One thirty in the morning and McKenna Rhodes was still wide-awake as, two thousand miles to the northwest, the Pacific Lion foundered.

As Tomio Ishimaru fought to reach higher ground, McKenna stood in the engine room of the salvage tug Gale Force, staring at the boat’s twin Electro-Motive V20-710 diesel engines, and wondering where in hell she’d get the money for a new starboard turbocharger.

If she was smart, McKenna figured she’d have walked away from the boat, the whole outfit, just as soon as her boots hit the dock on the morning after her dad washed away. Anyone with a lick of sense, she knew, would have jumped in her truck and headed east. Back to Spokane and her mom’s place, and real life, leave the tug and the rest of her dad’s legacy—debt, mostly—for the banks to fight over.

For a spell, she’d done just about that. She’d left the Gale Force tied to the dock in Seattle, laid off the crew, and drifted, beat-up by guilt and unsure what to do with herself. The idea of going back on the water only reminded her of her father—specifically, how she’d killed him when she’d failed to make that turn the night they’d tried to save the Argyle Shore.

But dry-land therapy hadn’t really worked out. McKenna had known since she was a girl that she’d inherited her dad’s sailor’s blood, and even if he was gone, she couldn’t just turn her back on what made her a Rhodes. There was no job onshore that appealed to her, no life she liked better than being out at sea.

Finally, she’d compromised. She wasn’t cut out for the gold rush, the kind of salvage job that had been the end of her father. But she couldn’t just let the old man’s name die out, not without putting up a fight. A good boat like the Gale Force could do more than just salvage.

She didn’t have enough work to call back the salvage divers, Matt and Stacey, and the less said about Court Harrington, her dad’s wunderkind naval architect, the better. McKenna mostly kept to contract work—barge tows and the like—from Alaska to Mexico and anywhere in between. It was hardly the glamorous life the old man had in mind, but the tug was still earning, and that had to count for something.

So, together with Nelson Ridley, her dad’s indefatigable engineer, and a skeleton crew, McKenna had spent the three years since her father’s death working her butt off, bidding on towing contracts, trying to convince herself she was doing the old man proud.

But the tug business was what you’d politely call a boys’ club, and contracts weren’t easy to come by. More than a few potential clients had bailed once they’d heard her voice on the phone. She’d debated getting Ridley, with his thick Irish brogue, to make the calls for her.

She was going to have to do something, anyway. Three years of slim margins and deferred maintenance took tolls, and Gale Force Marine was maxed out, overextended, leveraged to the hilt. And now McKenna found herself down in the engine room, well after midnight, trying to figure out how to scrape up enough cash to get the tug back to sea.

THE TROUBLE HAD STARTED midway through the last job, a log tow gone haywire off Cape Disappointment at the mouth of the Columbia River, winds gusting to fifty, seas thirty feet. There’d been no way to cross the Columbia Bar to shelter, not in that weather, so they’d jogged offshore in the brunt of it, waiting for the weather to break and hoping they weren’t losing too many logs off that barge in the meantime.

Of course, even in fine weather, the Columbia Bar was no joke, and when you were dragging a three-hundred-foot barge and bucking six knots of river current, it could get downright hairy. Especially if your starboard turbocharger decided to crap out at the same time you were staring down an outbound oil tanker.

Not that it was the tug’s fault. Randall Rhodes had known what he was getting into when he’d purchased the Gale Force, which was to say a twenty-year-old boat with a lot of big seas under her keel, a couple of decent engines with too many hours on them, good bones beneath her, and a reputation up and down the coast as one heck of a deep-sea tug.

She’d had to be, for what the old man had in mind for her. Spent every last dollar—and a million of the bank’s—on the tug, traded the barge pulls for the treasure hunt, bringing ships back from the dead for seven-figure scores, minimum.

It had worked pretty well, until one night it didn’t. And now the old man was gone, and McKenna kept slogging, trying to do the guy proud.

HER PHONE WAS RINGING, somewhere. McKenna wiped the grease off her hands and checked the caller ID. Her engineer—her dad’s engineer—Nelson Ridley, a stubborn son of a bitch who loved the Gale Force so much it blinded him to the writing on the wall. Ridley could have bailed out about the same time McKenna should have, found a gig with one of the big outfits on the coast, Commodore Towing or Westerly Marine, something good paying, steady hours, reliable boats. But he stuck around, poured as much sweat equity—and almost as much cash—as McKenna into the operation, and McKenna had about given up trying to talk him out of sticking around.

She answered the phone. “Ridley.”

“I’ve got something here, boss.” The engineer’s voice sounded too excited for the middle of the night. “Something pretty darn interesting.”

“You should be sleeping,” McKenna replied. “Or you should be down here helping me fix this turbo.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Ridley said. “I watched a movie with the wife, another ridiculous romance, and then she fell asleep and I didn’t. And, boy, are you going to be glad, lass.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“It’s better if I tell you in person,” Ridley said. “I’m coming your way.”