Gale Force

89

From his hiding place at the water’s edge, Daishin Sato felt his phone vibrate. He removed it from his pocket. A new text message.

The American has flown to Anchorage. I am following him.

Sato waited.

As he’d expected, the phone buzzed again.

He was not carrying a briefcase.

Sato replaced his phone. “We proceed as planned,” he told his colleagues, who waited in the shadows. “The American does not have the briefcase.”

For all Sato knew, the young American man had transferred the stolen bonds into his luggage. He might have discarded the briefcase, and taken the contents back with him to the mainland. If that were the case, Masao would find out soon enough. In the meantime, Sato and the other two men would operate under the assumption that the bonds were still aboard the freighter.

He and his colleagues had spent the last night and day waiting for the Coast Guard to release the ship, once again, to the salvage crew’s custody. Waiting for the salvage crew to pronounce the ship ready to tow. Ready for the darkness, for their own opportunity.

Waiting, and preparing.

They had liberated a small rowboat from the government docks near the town. Such was the size of Dutch Harbor that the boat was simply tied to a piling, no locks or alarms. It had simply been a matter of untying the rope, climbing aboard, and rowing the little dinghy around the point and out of sight. There, they had stocked it with food and provisions for the next stage of the task.

The Dutch Harbor citizens’ relaxed attitude toward security extended, Sato had discovered, to their firearms. This was a frontier town, full of hunters and fishers and men and women of the wild, and nearly all of them owned guns. Sato and his colleagues had drifted from house to house, trying back doors and finding them largely unlocked.

They’d searched the empty houses, found what they needed quickly. Amassed two pistols and three rifles, sufficient ammunition. Sato would take no chances with this stage of the operation. There was a good probability that success would demand violence.

Sato tucked the phone into his trousers. He and his men had dressed in black: pants, sweaters, watch caps. They would blend in with the dark water after night fell. Nobody would see them as they crossed the bay.

“As soon as there’s darkness,” he told his colleagues, “we row for the Lion.”