Arctic Fire (3 page)

T
WENTY-FOOT WAVES
and fifty-knot gusts roared across the open ocean as darkness closed in on the
Arctic Fire
. A bad storm on the Bering Sea could be a terrifying ordeal even for a veteran crab boat captain. For any normal greenhorn it was a nightmare that made him wish to God he hadn’t been lured off dry land just by the prospect of making fast money.

But Troy wasn’t any normal rookie. Fear wasn’t an entry in his personal dictionary, and his only use for money was basic survival.

“How long we got?” Troy yelled over his shoulder. “How long till this storm goes nuclear on us, Speed Trap?”

“Five minutes!” Bobby Mitchell shouted back. “Ten, tops.”

Mitchell was a strapping twenty-three-year-old with long blond hair any glam-metal rocker would have been proud of. His nickname was Speed Trap because over the last two years he’d
chalked up five speeding violations—as well as a DUI and a resisting arrest over in Seward a month ago. Not surprisingly, he was driving on a suspended license. But then, so was half of Alaska.

“That’s what they were saying on the radio right before I came out here.”

“What are we supposed to get?” Troy shouted over the haunting wail of a powerful gust that was whipping through the mountain of huge crab traps stacked high beneath them. “How crazy at the top?”

“Thirty-foot waves and eighty-knot gusts,” Speed Trap answered. “Maybe worse.”

“No problem.”

Surviving this storm wasn’t going to be any worse than climbing Mount Everest in that blizzard two years ago, Troy figured, or fighting that crazy bull in Nuevo Laredo last month. The bull had charged him eleven times with those razor-sharp horns before he’d finally driven the rusty sword deep into its muscular black neck. After it collapsed on the dry dirt, he’d made certain its carcass was carved up and its meat given to the poorest people in the neighborhood.

Then he’d gotten that kiss from the Spanish angel. Then he’d met with that guy who’d been hanging on the fence. Then he’d gotten everything else from his angel. Then he’d kissed Selena’s forehead as she was still sleeping and headed to Alaska.

“It’ll be all right, Speed Trap!” Troy yelled reassuringly. “We’ll be fine.”

“Glad you think so,” Speed Trap yelled back. “But you don’t know the Bering Sea like I do.”

The
Arctic Fire
had been on the hunt for king crab going on two weeks. This was the worst weather yet, and the storm couldn’t have come at a worse time. With all of her traps back on deck and her surfaces coated with ice, the ship was top-heavy. Terribly vulnerable to rolling over in the rough seas and sending her crew
plunging into the thirty-seven-degree water where they’d die of hypothermia in minutes without time to scramble into their orange survival suits—if they didn’t drown first.

A frigid, salty spray whipped Troy’s unshaven face as he crawled along the top of the carefully constructed mountain of steel-framed rectangular shapes. Several of the giant seven-hundred-pound traps on the bow’s starboard side had torn loose. As the greenhorn, it was Troy’s job to resecure the expensive gear so it didn’t tumble over the side and sink to the bottom, lost forever. As the rookie on the boat, it was his job to do whatever the captain told him to do.

With her live tanks full of crab, the 118-foot vessel was grinding through the gale toward a processing plant in Akutan. If there weren’t too many dead crabs in the tanks when they unloaded, this hunt would gross the ship a million dollars.

Half of that would go to Captain Sage Mitchell.

Another $250,000 would go to the captain’s brother, Duke, who was the ship’s first mate and chief mechanic.

And the last quarter of a million would be split equally among the remaining crew members: Troy and the other two deckhands—Speed Trap and his older brother, Grant, both of whom were the first mate’s sons. Bottom line: the three of them could each earn over eighty thousand bucks for two weeks of work.

The thought of the money made Troy grin even as the ship plunged toward the trough in front of the next wave. It had been risky to sail with these cowboys, but in the end it was going to be well worth it. When he’d gotten to Dutch Harbor three weeks ago, his checking account had seventy-three dollars in it. The balance was fourteen cents the day they’d sailed. And he didn’t have credit cards. They weren’t allowed.

He could have asked his parents for money, but he hadn’t done that since graduating from Dartmouth six and a half years ago, and he wasn’t about to start now. He had too much pride.
Besides, going to Bill might draw attention. His father was well known in certain circles—some obvious, some not.

“Move your ass, Troy!” Captain Sage bellowed from the bridge.

The bridge was eighty feet to the stern, and Captain Sage was warm and dry in there with Duke, protected from the driving sleet and slashing winds behind a thick pane of reinforced glass. But Sage could still shout orders to his crew through a series of rusty speakers that were positioned around the deck.

“Hurry up or we’re gonna lose four or five of those traps!” he yelled. “If we do, we’re gonna lose you too, you son of a bitch. I guarantee you that, Troy.”

Troy glanced over his shoulder. Speed Trap was clinging to the crab trap mountain like he was part of it. He had a deer-in-the-headlights look in his eyes that was quickly morphing into one of sheer panic.

“Let’s go, you mothafuckers!” Duke shouted, grabbing the microphone from his brother. “Now!”

“
Holy sheeeiiiiit!
” Speed Trap screamed like a terrified kid taking that first incredible plunge on a killer roller coaster as the
Arctic Fire
heeled dangerously to starboard and the trap in front of Troy almost went crashing into the sea. “I can’t go any farther. I can’t, man!”

“Move it, Troy!” Sage yelled, grabbing the mike back from Duke. “Damn you, Troy Jensen, get to those traps!”

“Help me!” Speed Trap pleaded as the ship began scaling the face of a twenty-five-footer. It was the biggest wave of the storm so far. “I can’t hold on much longer. My fingers feel like they’re gonna rip off.”

“Just stay there!” Troy ordered. Speed Trap was worthless. He was petrified to the point of paralysis. “I’ll be right back.”

“Don’t leave me!”

“Stay put! I
won’t
leave you out here.”

Troy hustled to the edge of the mountain, which rose thirty feet above the deck, and moved onto the trap that had barely stayed aboard moments ago. He hadn’t bothered to hook into one of the bright yellow harnesses that would secure him to the ship by a long tether and keep him aboard in case what he was crawling on went over. He hated how the harness and the tether restricted his ability to move and react. He liked being mobile. He always had.

Speed Trap hadn’t hooked up either, and Troy knew why. He was a veteran of these hunts and didn’t want to look like he was more afraid of coming out here on the mountain than the greenhorn. He was regretting that show of bravado now.

Troy took a deep breath and slid over the edge of the man-made cliff as the
Arctic Fire
hurtled to the top of the big wave, blew through the crest in a foam explosion, and then pitched forward and began barreling down its spine. Butterflies raced through his gut as he clutched the side of the trap he’d just been kneeling on and stepped the toes of his rubber boots on one that was two down from the top.

The mountain had been built with a slight stair-step feature to it all the way up each side as the crew had stowed the traps back on board when the hunt was finished, instead of rebaiting them with cod and throwing them back into the deep to catch more crabs. They’d built it like this so they could get a toehold if necessary. Like Troy desperately needed one now.

He spotted the problem right away. Two stout ropes and a chain hung limply from the trap just behind and five below the one he was standing on. He could tell it was loose enough that if he didn’t resecure it quickly, the
Arctic Fire
was going to lose more than just a few traps to the storm. She’d lose at least twenty to thirty because this particular trap was a key to the entire side of the mountain. And if the mountain crumbled, he and Speed Trap
would be hurled overboard in a steel avalanche. They’d probably be crushed to death before they even hit the water.

With a smooth, pantherlike move, Troy reached the loosely tethered trap and moments later had it resecured. The critical trap would still move a little as the ship plowed through the rough seas, but it shouldn’t go over and start that avalanche now.

A quick pull and a leap and Troy was back atop the mountain. He grinned when he spotted Speed Trap still hanging on for dear life right where he’d left the kid.

Troy hadn’t gotten to know Speed Trap or the other three men aboard the ship that well since they’d sailed from Dutch Harbor, but they seemed like decent enough guys. They weren’t very talkative, but there wasn’t much time to talk. Just hour after hour of sinking traps to the bottom and hoisting them back to the surface after they’d snared more crabs.

It had been a hell of a grind as the traps kept breaking the surface teeming with the goods, and none of the crew had gotten more than a few hours of sleep a day. Even Troy had to admit that he was exhausted as their run across the Bering Sea was ending. But the money was going to be incredible.

He wouldn’t be sticking around for the ship’s second hunt of the season. Red Fox One had already communicated that in a coded message he’d sent to the
Fire
yesterday. After this run, Troy was headed to Eastern Europe.

As Troy got to where Speed Trap was crouched, his eyes flashed to the right, and for a moment he didn’t believe what he saw. Something inside him wouldn’t let his brain process the terrifying sight.

But it all turned hair-raisingly real when Captain Sage’s panicked command blared through the speakers. It was the first time Troy had heard fear in Sage’s voice.

“
Get
off the traps, get off the traps!
” Sage yelled as he sounded the ship’s foghorn. It was the ultimate warning. “
Now!
”

Through the sleet whipping across the ocean in the twilight, Troy saw the gigantic wave bearing down on them. If it hadn’t been so terrifying, it would have been beautiful.

“We don’t have time to get off the mountain,” Speed Trap gasped as he gazed in shock and awe at the seventy-foot rogue roaring toward them. “We’re gonna die, Troy.”

J
ACK WASN’T
a daredevil like Troy, but he didn’t back down from a challenge either. He just preferred having both feet planted firmly on the ground when he poked fate in the face, thanks to his acute fear of heights and his healthy respect for nature. Once he was more than fifteen feet up, he started getting nervous. Right now he was fifteen
thousand
feet up, and his heart felt like it was going to burst, it was pumping so hard.

“Come on, Jack!” Bill yelled as the jump supervisor slid the door open. The hum of the plane’s twin props turned into a roar, and a cold wind whipped through the fuselage. “Let’s go. This is it.”

Jack had been dreading those words ever since they’d gotten into Bill’s Mercedes a few hours ago and driven to the small airport outside Greenwich, Connecticut, to prep for the jump. “This is it.” It had a terrifying ring to it.

Despite his fear of heights, Jack had forced himself to jump out of this same plane last month when Bill had shamed him into doing this same crazy stunt. But that jump had gone off during the daylight, and it had been a tandem jump. Back in October, Jack had been tightly secured to the instructor, who’d done all the work on the way down.

But this was a night jump, and Jack had to rip the cord himself. Technically, he needed more tandem jumps to qualify for a solo, especially a night solo. But the guy who ran the place was looking the other way.

Bill must have greased his palm, Jack figured. Money seemed to be Bill’s answer to everything.

“Bill, I don’t know if I want to—”

“Don’t go there!” Bill shouted, anticipating what Jack was about to say. “Don’t embarrass me.” He moved quickly to where Jack was sitting and pulled him roughly to his feet off the wooden bench that ran along one wall of the fuselage. “Damn it, Jack. Don’t make me throw you out of that goddamned door.”