Gale Force

52

McKenna surveyed the Lion’s unsteady deck. The wind roared. The waves battered the ship. The gale surrounded her. It was hellish, and Court Harrington was gone.

Stacey Jonas reached the top of the stairway. Matt hurried over to help her out of the hole. Nelson Ridley stayed put. Watched McKenna.

The ship shuddered constantly, threatening to knock McKenna and her crew off their feet. Just descending into the engine room would be a hell of a job, and even if McKenna could gather the fluid levels for the rest of the tanks, she’d be damned if she could figure out Harrington’s computer.

Sometimes the ship just keeps going, the whiz kid had said. The ship tips all the way over onto her starboard side. And then she sinks.

McKenna shivered. There was no way she would try to right the Lion without Harrington. And right now Harrington was clinging to life in the back of a Coast Guard helicopter.

“We can’t just wait around for him, skipper,” Ridley said, reading her mind. “They’re talking forty-five-knot winds in the next couple of days. We stick around here, we might lose the tow. We gotta make something happen, and fast.”

McKenna knew he was right. Knew they were already testing their luck, knew it couldn’t hold forever.

And it hasn’t. Down one crew member. How many more to go?

“We can put another line on this wreck,” Ridley said. “Tow her out away from land, as far as we can get her. Buck into the storm and hope she doesn’t sink on us.”

“We won’t make much progress,” McKenna replied. “Not in this wind. Not with this tow. If the weather gets as bad as they’re saying, it could drive this ship onto the rocks, no matter what we try to do. We just don’t have the power to hold her steady forever.”

McKenna leaned against the starboard deck. Stared up at the sky, the clouds racing by overhead. Tried to picture her charts in her head, the Aleutian Islands to the north.

“There’s a pass,” she told Ridley. “Between the Aleutians. I saw it on the map. We put that second line on the ship, ride the flood tide right through to the Bering Sea. Take shelter in the lee of the islands.”

“Be a hell of a job to drag this wreck through. Just turning her in the right direction will be a chore. And then getting her there in a following sea—”

“It’s our only play, Nelson. It will be calmer on the other side. We can anchor up and wait for Court to recover. Buy us some time.”

Ridley’s brow furrowed. He didn’t say anything.

“Thirty million dollars,” McKenna said. “If our boat sinks, our money sinks, too.”

“Fine.” Ridley’s eyes darkened. “But what if the kid doesn’t make it?”

McKenna looked at him.

“You saw the kid. It was bad, skipper,” Ridley said. “What if he doesn’t come back?”

McKenna saw Harrington’s face, the look in his eye as he fell. Saw his broken body at the bottom of the stairway. The grim look in the AST’s eyes as he maneuvered Harrington skyward.

You did this. You lost another one.

Ridley cleared his throat. “Skipper?”

McKenna shook her head clear. “We cross that bridge when we come to it. First, let’s get this ship through the pass.”

ABOUT AN HOUR LATER, McKenna dropped from the Munro’s backup Agusta helicopter onto the afterdeck of the Gale Force. The Dolphin was gone, airlifting Court Harrington back to Dutch Harbor.

The architect’s prognosis was not great. “He’s surviving, Captain,” the Munro’s radio operator had informed McKenna. “He’s still unconscious, last we heard, and it looks like he’s bleeding internally. The doc managed to get him stabilized, but that’s about the best I can tell you.”

“How bad could it get?” McKenna asked. “Worst-case scenario. Do you know?”

A pause. “I’m sorry, Captain. I can’t say.”

“You can’t say? Or you don’t know?”

“I don’t know, Captain. I’m sorry.”

McKenna stared out at the gale through her tug’s wheelhouse windows. “We’re taking the ship through the Samalga Pass,” she told the radio operator. “It’s too miserable to work out here. We’re going to tow her across to the Bering Sea side.”

Another long pause, this one stretching for miles. “Uh, stand by, Gale Force.”

McKenna stood by. Waited for twenty minutes, and when the radio came to life again, it was Tom Geoffries, commander of the Munro.

“Captain Rhodes, I’ve talked to my superiors in Kodiak, and there’s no way I can let you through that pass. Not in this weather. Not a single tug.”

“The weather’s only getting worse,” McKenna told him. “Short of opening the seacocks and scuttling the ship, there’s not much my crew can do in these conditions. If you want the ship saved, this is our only option.”

Geoffries was silent. “Let me make a call, Captain,” he said at last.

McKenna stood by again. In the back of her mind, a little voice whispered something, reminded her of the Gale Force’s troublesome starboard turbo, that hair-raising encounter with the oil tanker in the Columbia River.

She pushed the thought from her mind as Geoffries hailed back over the radio. “We have Kodiak on board,” he told McKenna. “You can have the pass, Captain Rhodes, but if you screw up—” A beat. “If you screw up, Captain, it’s both of our asses. Understand?”

“Roger that, sir,” McKenna replied. “We’ll make it work.”

Ridley fixed that engine, she thought as she replaced the radio. She’s bulletproof. No way she conks out again.

She looked around—the pounding, incessant swell, the wind howling through the Gale Force’s stay wires.

She’d better not conk out, she thought, or we’ll have a heck of a lot more to worry about than a lost paycheck.