Gale Force

80

By the middle of the next morning, the Pacific Lion had leveled out.

On Harrington’s instruction, the crew had killed the forward pump when the list hit fifteen percent, just before darkness fell. The skipper had sent Ridley back to the tug, kept Matt and Stacey on the first deck to babysit the last pump. She’d tried to send Harrington back, too.

“I’d rather stay, if it’s okay with you,” he said. “This is crunch time. I need to be here.”

The captain made to argue, then seemed to think better of it. “I guess you’re right. If anything’s going haywire, it’s happening tonight.”

“It’s not going haywire,” Harrington told her. She didn’t look convinced.

They’d found a platform in the access stairway on cargo deck seven, midway from the surface to the Jonases on deck one, close enough to the open air that the radios still picked up a little reception, and they could holler down to Matt and Stacey for status reports. They’d brought down their sleeping bags, some food, and the last of the Red Bull. Harrington had bundled his sleeping bag so the skipper wouldn’t notice the briefcase inside.

He needn’t have worried. The captain was spent. She’d wrapped herself up in her sleeping bag, made a cursory attempt at conversation, lay her head back on the wall of the stairwell, and passed out cold, finally asleep.

Harrington had watched her for a moment, studied her face as she slept. He’d missed her, he realized. More than he’d expected to. He’d pushed her away when she’d fallen for him, sure; he was young then. She’d surprised him. He wasn’t planning for commitment.

He wasn’t so young anymore. He wasn’t so scared to get serious. And he’d never known anyone quite like McKenna Rhodes, no matter where he looked. He just didn’t have a clue how to tell her this stuff without messing up the, ahem, chain of command.

McKenna slept soundly. Harrington leaned over and switched off her headlamp. He pulled a sleeping bag over his shoulders, and settled in to wait.

The night passed, uneventful. Morning came. The last pump kept working, and the list continued to ease. By midmorning, the Lion was nearly at zero degrees.

Harrington had supervised the last hour of pumping. Monitored the water level on the fifth starboard-side ballast tank, one eye on the gauge, the other on his battered laptop. Then the skipper had woken up, sheepish, hadn’t said much. Headed topside to call the Coast Guard.

IT WAS TEN FORTY-THREE in the morning when McKenna heard the final pump shut off. She was standing on the starboard deck—on the deck now, not the wall—waiting for the Coast Guard to send Captain Geoffries over with a party to survey the Lion and pronounce her saved.

McKenna would wait for the Coast Guard and the shipping company to give her the final verdict, but from where she was standing, the job looked done. The Lion’s list was erased. She sat level now, steady in the water, a ship again. Her owners would get her engine repaired, offload her cargo of Nissans, and put her back to work, whereas last week they’d been ready to write her off as gone.

McKenna looked up and down the deck, from the bridge to the exhaust funnel. Saw the access hatch where she and Matt and Stacey and Ridley and Jason Parent and Court Harrington had entered the ship, where they’d muscled down their pumps and walked on the walls, where they’d curled up with sleeping bags and sandwiches and those paperback novels, where they’d cheated death to save the ship.

And now the ship was saved. The prize was theirs. The job was finished, save a few minor details. Court Harrington’s plan had worked, the crew had played their parts perfectly, and the big freighter was nearly as good as new. Soon, Gale Force Marine would be thirty million dollars richer.

And none of it would bring her father back to life.

McKenna knew she should be happy. Knew her crew would tell her she’d done the old man proud. Knew, by rights, she should be jumping for joy and grinning ear to ear and pricing out Corvettes on the Internet. But she couldn’t enjoy the moment, not completely.

She just really wished her dad had been here to see this.