Dead in the Water (3 page)

Andy bent back over his cereal bowl without another word, and Kate bit into her last piece of bacon with relish.

After breakfast it was Kate's watch and she went up to the bridge to relieve Seth, who gave her a quizzical look, or as near to it as those bland gray eyes could produce.

She responded with an equally bland smile.

Not five minutes after her butt hit the seat of the long-legged chair bolted to the deck next to the steering wheel, Harry Gault appeared on the bridge. He came to a stop next to her and waited, obviously expecting her to move so he could sit down.

She didn't budge. "Harry," she said calmly, "it's my watch, and I'm standing it. If you didn't trust me to steer this bucket, you should never have hired me on."

His answer was almost a snarl. "Like I had a say."

That was true enough, but Kate forebore to belabor the point. The fog was lifting a little, far enough to see a flat sea the same color as the fog rolling out in every direction. The automatic pilot was on, and all Kate had to do was mind the compass and watch for deadheads.

Harry stood there for another minute, his glower gathering in force and ferocity. Kate glanced over at the radar, found a clear screen and began to hum a little beneath her breath. After a moment or two and another near snarl, Harry stamped back down the stairs into the galley. The slam of his stateroom door reverberated all the way up to the bridge, and Kate broke into song.

" ' 'Tis a damn tough life full of toil and strife we whalemen undergo.' " She leaned forward to get a better look at a spot on the endless plain of water that turned out to be an Arctic tern, starting his 22,000-mile trip south a little late in her opinion. She sat back, hooked her toes over the top rung and thought about her skipper.

" 'And we don't give a damn when the gale is done how hard the winds did blow.' " And then there were three, and the third was Harry Gault, skipper of the good ship Avilda, now and six months ago, when Alcala and Brown had disappeared. He was short, bulky and obstreperous, one of those men who took his lack of height out on every moving target that came within range. That and the fact that his seamanship was borderline competent were the only two things she knew about him. So far. Finding out more was why she was on board.

"'Now we're homeward bound 'tis a grand old sound on a good ship taut and free, and we won't give a damn when we drink our rum with the girls of old Maui."' There was a tentative noise at the top of the stairs and she turned to see Andy Pence standing there, his expression indicating he had yet to forgive her for the scene at the breakfast table. "Hey there."

He directed his gaze at a point two inches above her left shoulder. "I was just on my way into the chart room."

She waved a benevolent hand. "Be my guest.

Fourth on the crew roster was Andy Pence, fresh off the beach of Ventura, California, seeking true adventure in the Far North, high as a kite on anything and everything Alaskan, and Kate's bunkie. Thus far, she had discovered that he meditated beneath a percale pyramid and didn't eat red meat. Last and most important, Andy Pence had been hired on after Kate, when the deckhand who had replaced Alcala had quit, and probably had nothing whatever to do with Alcala's and Brown's disappearance.

At best, he was harmless; at worst, a hindrance.

She thought back to the galley and grinned to herself. He was also, she hoped, a fast learner.

The rustle of stiff paper came from behind her. Curious, she checked the horizon and the autopilot and went back to see what Andy was up to.

The chart room stood aft of the wheelhouse. Andy was leaning his elbows on the tilted surface of the chart table, mooning over a marine chart. Kate stood up on tiptoe to peer over his shoulder. "What're you looking at the Shumagins for? That's a tad north of our heading, isn't it?"

Still very much on his dignity, he did not deem the question worthy of a civil reply. She smiled a little behind his back. He was so very young. The smile faded. As young as Stu Brown and Chris Alcala. She returned to the wheelhouse and hoisted herself back into the captain's chair, resuming her scan of the horizon.

It was almost noon, and the fog was beginning to burn off.

It was one of those still winter days when the Cradle of the Winds lay calm and deceptively quiescent, gray sky and silver sea melding into a luminescent horizon without color or definition, a day handmade for dreaming.

Sam Shugak had shown Kate a picture of a very old map once, drawn when people thought the world was flat and square. On each edge the mapmaker had written

"Beware-Heare Bee Dragons and Diverse Monsteres of Ye Deepe." It was that kind of day, a gift of a day, a day with dragons just over the next swell, a day when she didn't wince away from the thought of her father, or worry at the task that lay before her. The sea and the sky and the throb of the engine was all there was, and she settled back and gave herself up to it.

The knots rolled by. She heard the sounds of a chart being rolled and stowed. A moment later Andy appeared, still very much on his dignity. "Have some coffee," Kate said amiably, pouring him a mug from the thermos she'd brought topside with her.

"I'm not thirsty," he said stiffly.

"Have some anyway."

He took the mug because she might have dropped it on him if he hadn't. She jerked her head. "So what's with the chart on the Shumagins?"

His face lit up. For a moment the desire to share his news with someone, anyone, warred with the awareness of who he was talking to, but eagerness won out in the end. "I was looking for Sanak and Unga."

"Why?"

"Because I was reading this book about the Aleutians, and there's a story in it about a boat race back in the thirties or thereabouts. A boat race between a hundred twenty-five-foot steamer and a kayak."

He beamed at her, blue eyes expectant beneath tousled blond hair, and dutifully she said, "A steamer and a kayak? No kidding? What happened?"

"The kayak won!" The announcement was delivered with all the air of an eyewitness to the event.

Kate expressed suitable astonishment, and he needed no further urging to disgorge the whole story. "The steamer put in at Sanak to offload cargo, see, and these four Aleut guys came up in a kayak and challenged the captain of the steamer to a race." Andy's lip curled. "He wouldn't do it until they bet him a hundred dollars they could win."

"Easy money," she observed. She thought she caught a glimpse of an island off to starboard, but a tardy wisp of fog obscured it almost as soon as she saw it, and she settled back in the chair, listening to Andy with half an ear.

"That's what he thought," Andy said, his scorn immense and magnificent. "The steamer took off, and the kayak just sat there, and everybody onshore started hooting and laughing, but the Aleuts were waiting, counting the waves for the right wave, what they called the ninth wave. When it came along, they paddled to catch it and balanced themselves on top of it, and then they rode it, all the way to Unga! Before the trip was half over, they were out of the steamer's sight!" The beam was back. "First surfers north of the fifty-three!

God, don't you just love Alaska!"

"Hitchhiking on a wave," Kate said. "I like it. Did the Starr's skipper pay up?"

Andy nodded vigorously. "Uh-huh. He was a good sport."

"Good for him. More coffee?"

"Wait a minute." Andy paused, mug outstretched.

"Did I say the steamer's name was the Starr?"

"Sure you did." The can of Carnation Evaporated Milk was empty but for a few drops. Kate sighed.

"No, I didn't," he said. "You already knew it. You already heard that story."

She looked over at his accusing expression. "About a thousand times," she admitted, a slow smile spreading across her face.

He didn't know whether to take offense or not, and as the decision hung in the balance Kate played her trump card. "I'm an Aleut myself, Andy. I think the first time my dad told me that story I was four years old."

Andy stared at her, eyes and mouth three round, astonished O's. "Gosh," he breathed. "You're an Aleut? A real live Aleut?"

Kate kept her face straight with an effort. "A real live Aleut. Now be a good guy and go get me another can of milk for my coffee, okay? And toss the empty while you're at it."

She handed the can to him. He took it automatically, his eyes still wide and fixed on her face. "Have you ever paddled a kayak?"

"Never in my life," she said, and took him by the shoulders to turn him around and give him a firm shove in the direction of the stairs.

They made Dutch that evening. The harbor was crowded with crabbers, and their turn to unload didn't come until the following morning. The crew suited up in rain gear while Harry brought the Avilda around to the processor's dock. Working both booms on the dock and with all four of the deck crew in the hold loading brailers they had the old girl emptied out in less than two hours.

Harry shinnied up the ladder to the dock, reappearing in the galley half an hour later. "How much?" Andy said, his young voice excited. "What kind of price did we get?"

The skipper made a show of consulting the fish ticket he held in one hand. "Buck-fifty."

"A dollar and fifty cents?" Andy said. "Per crab?"

"Per pound," Kate corrected him gently.

Andy's voice went up into a squeak. "Per pound? Per pound?"

He lunged for paper and pencil. His face screwed up with concentration, the tip of his tongue protruding from one corner of his mouth. After tremendous amounts of scribbling and adding and erasing and multiplying, he produced a figure and stared down at it with disbelieving eyes. "Eighty-three hundred dollars?" he said finally. His face paled, flushed and paled again beneath its tan. Again his voice went up to a squeak. "A crew share for this one trip is eighty-three hundred dollars?"

Kate smacked him on the back. "If it was easy, everybody'd be doing it. That's why they pay us the big bucks, boy."

She looked around for agreement and found it, in a mild sort of way. Seth gave a casual nod, Ned said "uhhuh" in an absentminded tone, and Harry disappeared into his stateroom.

A little deflated, Andy turned to Kate. "For crying out loud, you'd think they made eighty-three hundred bucks every day out there."

"Yes," Kate said, "you would think that, wouldn't you." She picked up the piece of paper and peered at the clumsy squiggles. She made a few doodles with the pencil and totaled them up.

"Eighty-three hundred dollars?"

She nodded, her face wearing a rueful expression he didn't understand but was too wrought up to question.

"Yup. It's eighty-three hundred dollars, all right. Each."

Laying pencil and paper aside, she rubbed her face with both hands, hard. "Eighty-three hundred dollars," she repeated in a thoughtful voice. "Not bad for eight days' work."

Jack Morgan might live after all.

In one of those impetuous changes of mind for which Aleutian weather is rightfully famed, the fog shifted and revealed a high, broken overcast and, if Kate was not mistaken, a pale, brief and wholly transitory gleam that might be sunshine. The resulting scene was somewhere between appalling and enthralling. Dutch Harbor was a sheltered piece of Iliuliuk Bay, nuzzled up against Amaknak Island behind a mile-long spit of sand and gravel and grass. Amaknak Island, four miles long and a mile wide, in turn Jay snugly within two arms of the much larger Unalaska Island, eighty-seven miles long and thirty-seven miles wide and the second largest in the Aleutian Chain. Amaknak Island looked like a pelican facing northeast, Unalaska like a tomahawk with the blade facing north-northwest.

Mount Ballyhoo formed the beak of Amaknak's pelican, so named, Kate dimly remembered from some long-ago lesson in Mr. Kaufman's sixth-grade geography class, by Jack London when he'd been sealing between the Aleutians and the Kuriles at the turn of the century.

That voyage had formed the basis for local color in The Sea Wolf which Mr. Kaufman had forced down the class's collectively unwilling educational maw. All Kate could remember of the story was her conviction that though Humphrey Van Weyden might have survived Wolf Larsen, he wouldn't have lasted five minutes in the Park.

Ballyhoo had been her first sight of Dutch. In fact when she saw it loom up in the window of the 727 she flew in on she had been certain it was going to be her last sight of anything at all, as the airstrip clung precariously to a very narrow strip of land between the southwestern slopes of Ballyhoo (or the back of the pelican's head) and the Bering Sea. From the maps she knew a five-hundred-foot bridge connected Amaknak with Unalaska, and on the island of Unalaska was the village of Unalaska. Somewhere off to the northwest in the surrounding clouds was 6,680-foot Makushin Volcano, the second largest in the Chain. It was still active, as were most of the volcanoes in the Pacific's Ring of Fire.

Kate tried not to think about it.

From nowhere on either island was there a view that did not include a vast, unending expanse of water. In the north it was the Bering Sea; in the south, the Pacific Ocean. Both bodies of water were a constant reminder of what fueled Dutch Harbor. Dutch was a boom town and looked it. Prefabricated buildings crowded up against each other along narrow strips of beach, beaches that were themselves crowded between a landscape that rose suddenly and vertically with very few softening curves, and a sea that from one moment to the next varied in color from bright blue to dull green. Looking at this view was as alarming as it was invigorating, Kate now discovered, as if she were riding a roller coaster with both feet planted firmly on the ground.

Kate always felt better when she knew exactly where she was, and having identified all the relevant topographical features, she started out down the gravel road with a will. It was sodden be6eath her feet. Gulls gave raucous screams as they swooped and dived overhead. A bald eagle perched on the top of a streetlight. He looked down his beak at her in the haughty manner of his kind, and after admiring him for a moment she passed on. The road was an obstacle course of fast-moving pickup trucks and vans, each of the vans with the logo of a different taxi service painted on their sides. Another interesting fact Andy had gleaned from his book on the Aleutians was that there were thirteen cab companies in Dutch, and within the first mile of her walk Kate had narrowly missed being run over by twelve of them.