Gale Force

62

The wait was maddening.

Court Harrington rested on the starboard wall of the Pacific Lion’s accommodations house and cursed the bad luck that kept him topside on the wreck while McKenna and the rest of the crew had all the fun down below. Nothing against Nelson Ridley, who leaned against the starboard deck, eating a sandwich, but Harrington wasn’t used to letting other people do the work for him.

Heck, the way the ship rested, he couldn’t even pace properly. All he could do was stand there and freeze and stare up at the sky, the clouds scudding past overhead, pushed by the gale that still raged on the other side of the island. Stare at the sky, and wait.

Ridley beckoned to him with a half-eaten sandwich. “So, is it true that you can’t remember what happened, lad?” he asked. “The fall, and all that?”

“That’s right,” Court replied. “I got nothing from when I was down bottom with McKenna to when I woke up in the hospital. But everyone seems to think it was bad.”

“It was bad,” Ridley said. “They were saying you might not ever walk again. Hell, they thought you might die.”

“Well, I didn’t die.” Court maneuvered his way over to the engineer. “And here I am walking, but damned if I don’t still feel useless.”

“Useless?” Ridley laughed. “Lad, you’re the most important part of this job—after the skipper, of course. You just have to learn patience.”

He dug out another sandwich. Held it out to Court. “Here, eat up and get comfortable,” he said. “You’ll be back at it soon enough.”

OKURA STARED OUT THROUGH A PORTHOLE, envious, as the two salvage men ate their meal on the Lion’s weather deck. Sandwiches, simple, but to Okura’s hungry eyes, a feast: thick pieces of bread, healthy cuts of meat. Tomatoes and lettuce and plenty of cheese, all of it fresh—or fresher, anyway, than the slim choices that remained in the Lion’s stinking, noxious galley.

Okura had been eating canned food for days, cold tins of beans, soup stock, preserved fruit. He’d polished off the ship’s store of chocolate and candy, a case of Coca-Cola for good measure. He wouldn’t starve on this vessel, no matter how long the salvage crew took to do their work. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t long for a nice steak, some fresh fish, a glass of cold beer or a bottle of wine—or even a decent sandwich, for god’s sake.

The crew moved with less urgency, now that they’d brought the ship into the lee. They weren’t quite relaxed, but the worry that had defined them wasn’t etched so firmly on their faces. Okura supposed he should be happy; the crew seemed to believe they could save the Lion. He wished they would hurry up and get started.

Someone was looking at him. Okura scanned the deck, and locked eyes for an instant with one of the men—the younger one, the one who’d been injured—no more than twenty feet away. Okura flinched, and drew back, down into the stateroom, his hair on end, his heart racing. Dropped as stealthily as he could down the skewed stateroom floor, slipped out into the bowels of the ship.

ON THE WEATHER DECK, Court Harrington frowned. “Hey, you see that?”

Ridley followed his eyes to the porthole. It belonged to a stateroom that stuck out a few feet onto the weather deck, the window looking aft, down the deck toward them.

“I didn’t see anything,” Ridley replied. “Did you see something?”

Court pushed himself to his feet, limped his way down the deck to the porthole, and peered inside. The glass was filthy, stained, almost useless, and the stateroom beyond was dark. Nothing moved inside.

“Thought I saw something in there,” he told Ridley without lifting his eyes from the porthole. “Someone.”

“Could be Matt or Stacey coming back. The skipper, maybe.” Ridley paused. “Mind you, they did pull a body out of the cargo hold earlier. And I won’t say there haven’t been times on this ship I’ve felt like I’m being watched.”

Harrington pressed his face to the porthole. Tried to replay the image in his mind. Whatever he’d seen, it hadn’t been for long; just a shift of the light, a suggestion of movement, and then stillness again.

Still—for the briefest of moments, he could have sworn he’d seen a face.

“I’ll be right back,” he told Ridley, pushing off from the wall. “I’m probably crazy, but I won’t sleep tonight if I don’t check this out.”

Ridley looked at him. “You’re going in?”

“Sure. McKenna isn’t back yet. We have nothing to do but wait.” He grinned. “Why not go hunt us a ghost?”