Seize the Storm (5 page)

“Just so I know,” said Jeremy, “give me an example of an emergency.”

“Shako's machine gun going off by accident, cutting me in two,” said Elwood, “and you having to fly back to Kauai all by yourself. That would be an emergency.”

“That would be terrible, Elwood!”

“What, me getting killed?”

“I would hate that.”

Elwood was touched. Jeremy was an amiable young man. More than that—a decent person.

Mr. Tygart had insisted that Jeremy take this trip, a search and rescue mission, but Tygart had expected to find Kyle alive after overstating reports of his own demise, Kyle a known joker and a youthful exaggerator of his own plight. But this hunt was going on too long, and Elwood knew there was going to be more trouble than Mr. Tygart had anticipated.

Plus, Tygart had not authorized the addition of Shako to the trip. But Elwood was finished personally killing people or animals—he had long ago outgrown the practice, and he thought of Shako as a pair of gloves, non-latex laboratory gloves. Plus, if a dead body had to be handled, Elwood's philosophy was: let younger men do it.

Elwood gave a glance into the back. Shako was either asleep or gone into lizard-mode, his cell phone in his hand, watching a video. A good killer can do that. You could plug them into an MP3 and tell them to wait. They would sit for hours, stand up and kill a guy, and then sit for another ten hours, never a complaint.

“But the Ingram is here in front, in one of these bags, right?” Jeremy was asking.

“Sure,” said Elwood. “Safe and snug.”

“I think I could manage, Elwood,” Jeremy added. “I could pilot the plane back to Nawiliwili, if I had to.”

“Sure, I know you would manage, no problem,” said Elwood. “You've been a good learner.”

Elwood loved teaching young people—how to keep the aircraft engines from icing up, how to program the in-flight computer, and in the case of someone like Shako, how to bring the target down and how to finish them.

You had to be able to finish.

Elwood used to pilot a relic DC3 up from Sinaloa, Mexico, flying at night, easing it down on an airstrip marked by flashlights just across the border. He liked having the Arizona landscape all around, and every predawn that he stepped out into the desert air and watched the furtive crew unload marijuana in plastic sacks, he would pace and flex his arms and legs, eager for the return flight.

He had met Ted Tygart at the yacht club at Hanalei Bay, Kauai's glamour-set enjoying the semitropical night, and Elwood between jobs. The West Coast was a free-for-all in recent years, tunnels under the California/Mexico border taking the place of night flights, and Elwood wanted to keep his piloting skills intact.

Hawaii's economy had collapsed, and a few of the big hotels were becoming places where money was laundered, the cocktail lounges and weight rooms fronts for illegal sources of cash. Elwood ferried money by air from Lahaina to Hilo, and from Kona to Hana, an expert at water landings and loving his work.

Ted Tygart heard of this rangy, red-haired cowboy who took guns and drugs by air from one hidden bay to another throughout the islands, and when Elwood had a Heineken with Tygart in his wonderland near Poipu Beach, Elwood knew he had found his dream employer, a man who could bribe law enforcement and pay off his competition, everybody happy.

Elwood loved to go places and he loved to come back. Take the recent dive, for example, a big frigate bird smacking them hard. Sure, he had been personally surprised, but they had not been in any serious danger. Much of the dive had been just to get them down below the altitude of other large birds, the seafowl circling high and heading north and west to get away from the coming bad weather.

“Jeremy,” Elwood said now, “get on the radio again and see if you can't get
Witch Grass
.”

Jeremy did as he was told. Elwood liked to be obeyed, and having the boss's son with him gave him both a feeling of responsibility and a sense of the trust Ted Tygart felt.

“Still no answer,” Jeremy reported.

“That is a distressed vessel somewhere down there, Jeremy,” chided Elwood. “Distressed and lost. You keep trying to raise them. You wanted to know a good example of an emergency. Being lost at sea is a good example.”

Of the two missing guys, Kyle Molline was a likable individual, just a little older than Jeremy, learning to play the guitar, an easygoing type in baggy shorts who also did whatever Elwood told him to do. Paul Aiken was thin, bald, and eager to please,
Mr. Elwood, sir, can I get you another beer?
He had one steel tooth, the handiwork of a dentist in Halawa Correctional Facility on the island of Oahu. Elwood did not like Paul.

But then Elwood liked Shako. And when it was all done, Elwood would have to see that Shako met an early demise. Not on this flight, most likely. But within the next month or two, while Shako went target shooting on the Na Pali cliffs or while he was watching cage fighting on Blu-ray at Elwood's condo, some means would be found to lose the young man, and put him in a bait cooler and feed his body to the sea life off Barking Sands, the empty, hardscrabble beach on the western edge of Kauai.

There was no choice, Elwood told himself with an air of inner peace. It was all a matter of finishing the job. And behind Shako there was a long line of young men hanging out in video arcades and Pizza Huts, thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds who would love to learn how to handle a submachine gun, blow up a jacaranda or feral chicken out behind Mount Nonou, where no cops ever cruised.

“When I first started flying,” said Elwood, “you could see huge schools of albacore in the Pacific, shining limbs of light, all the way toward the horizon.”

He turned as he said this, speaking to Shako. And then he stopped himself. Why was he talking to Shako? The young man probably didn't know what an albacore was.

“Tuna fish,” said Shako, with his thin lips and his sunglasses.

He said
tuna fish
like Elwood had as a kid. Tuna fish sandwiches with pickle relish and lots of mayonnaise had been his favorite lunch. He would come home from Pacifica High School, where he lived just south of San Francisco, and his mother would have one waiting for him on a paper plate.

She'd be off to business school, studying all the different ways to subtract money. It was all subtraction, Elwood thought, ever since his mother died of breast cancer and his dad had suffered a stroke at the age of forty-four, outside the Daly City Post Office, where he was in the process of being arrested by USPS inspectors for mail fraud.

“You could see the albacore chasing away sharks,” said Elwood. “Strength in numbers.”

He looked back at Shako and the kid gave him what had to be a smile. A further tightening of the lips, a pucker of one cheek.

Elwood couldn't help himself—he liked Shako more and more. It was going to be a sad day when he had the young man killed.

T
HE YACHT WAS INCREASINGLY ALIVE
, surging through the seas. Martin sat with his uncle, getting out the map.

The shelves of the yacht were full of books about seabirds and shipwrecks, submarine kills and boat design. At one end of the shelves, held snugly in place by a horizontal rod, was a healthy collection of well-thumbed paperbacks, but even they had a nautical flavor: novels by Patrick O'Brian and translations of Greek myths, the gods competing with each other in crushing mariners.

Leonard had studied law and passed the bar exam, but had never set foot in a courtroom. He had specialized in land development and had prospered. But the construction of malls and huge exurban homes had been in a severe nosedive in recent years.

Leonard's father, Martin's grandfather, was Tyler Burgess, an assistant prop manager for Paramount, specializing in everything from derringers to bazookas. Tyler Burgess endured an on-again, off-again career, as movie fashions vacillated from crime to war to sci-fi and back again. He had urged his two sons to find steadier employment.

Now Leonard had a plastic map of the Pacific spread out in front of him. It was about the size of a large board game, and he used a black marker to show their new position, using the GPS unit he kept clipped to his belt.

The distance from San Francisco to Hawaii was about two thousand four hundred land miles, and if they managed a speed of ten miles per hour, twenty-four hours a day, they could in theory make the distance in ten days. But weather, wind, and currents were unpredictable, and making way generally required more caution. Most voyages to the islands took the better part of a month, and this crossing was likely to be no exception.

Martin had a cabin on the starboard side, not far from Leonard and Claudette's master compartment. Susannah occupied a cabin on the port side, taking her pick of several vacancies. Axel had a cabin well forward on the same side, not far from the galley.

Athena's Secret
was a sixty-foot wooden-hulled yacht with every comfort—two hot showers, private sleeping facilities, and air-conditioning. She was nearly twenty feet across at the widest point, and she had tanks that held four tons of fuel and a similar quantity of fresh water.

The vessel boasted two Sitka spruce masts and auxiliary power consisting of twin four-hundred-horsepower Caterpillar engines. She was outfitted with a Raytheon automatic pilot, but someone was expected to be at the helm around the clock.

Leonard had ordered the yacht built by a boatyard in Bodega Bay, on California's Mendocino coast, years before, when he was just out of law school and had some family money to go with his grand prospects. Bill Ingbord, the legendary Danish shipwright, had designed her, laid her keel, and had seen her through every stage of construction. Leonard had christened the vessel
Athena's Secret
, and he enjoyed giving the inside story regarding her name.

In Greek legend, a wandering adventurer named Tiresias was struck blind by Athena, the goddess of wisdom, because he accidentally saw her naked as she bathed in a stream. She regretted her rash punishment, but she could not undo her curse. So she gave Tiresias the gift of prophecy, and he became a renowned seer.

Leonard enjoyed explaining that the secret of Athena was not only her nakedness—which a mortal dare not look upon—but her power and willingness to compensate for her own mistakes. Recompense was one of the fundamentals of law, Leonard liked to say, and this made her name especially sweet to an aspiring lawyer.

But Martin knew that there was another explanation for her name: Leonard was superstitious.

Because there was another fascinating detail regarding
Athena's Secret
. Just as struggling mountaineers sometimes felt themselves in the presence of an unknown companion, and lovers sometimes sensed an unknown third party in the room, so Leonard had more than once told of feeling that when he was alone on the vessel he was not really alone. He told this to everyone—Axel, Martin, and even the harbormaster of the marina in San Francisco, but only Martin understood that his uncle was not joking or striking a colorful pose.

Leonard sometimes said that when he had to make a difficult decision he asked the boat for her advice and listened carefully.

Open-minded but gently skeptical, Martin had never had such a dialogue with the yacht himself.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Our location,” said Leonard, “is latitude 26 degrees, 16.4 minutes north, longitude 143 degrees, 56.0 minutes west. Bearing south-southwest.”

“Are you sure about all that?” asked Martin jokingly.

There could be no doubt. No one with decent equipment was ever really lost.

“You aren't worried, are you?” asked Leonard.

Martin said, “A little.”

“We're going right into the low pressure system, Martin,” said Leonard. “Head on. We have no choice, really.”

“Why is that?” Martin knew he was expected to ask.

“If we flee the storm,” said Leonard, “we'll get hit by what they call a following sea. Waves will batter our stern and we'll wallow. If we travel sideways to the weather, we'll struggle, too, and maybe turn over. It happens. Heading right into it is the only way. Besides, we don't want to back down from a challenge, do we?”

“But about that other thing,” Martin began.

“What thing?” asked Leonard, although Martin had the feeling he already knew.

He did not like to press his uncle, but the subject had to be brought up.

“How are we going to defend ourselves?” Martin asked.

Leonard smiled. “I'll take care of you.”

Maybe, thought Martin.

But maybe not. Seaplanes often worked with a surface vessel in tandem. Maritime violence was on the news all the time, innocent families held hostage, raped, killed.

T
HE DAY BEFORE
E
ASTER
, three months earlier, Martin had been witness to an upsetting incident.

He had been waiting for a Bay Area Rapid Transit train to San Francisco, on his way to see a film at the Imax Theater at Yerba Buena Center. The movie was
These Are Pearls
, a movie about coral reefs and the future of the oceans. Tom Yinn, his friend from calculus, was going to meet him there, and they would have a turkey sandwich at Lefty O'Doul's afterward.

But Martin never saw the movie.

Instead, someone jumped off the platform of the Lake Merritt Station, in front of an oncoming train. The man had worn a blue-striped, short-sleeved dress shirt, light blue pants, and a pair of Ecco dress shoes with all-terrain soles.

Martin had a vivid recollection of the clothing, because within an instant the man had been reduced to his clothes as the steel wheels of the six-car train rolled over him, and the man's body rolled with it. The blue pant legs went boneless and scarlet as they spun forward on the rails, along with the shrieking, slowly halting wheels.

The police had been considerate, but in an official, checklist way.
Show us again where he was standing, please
. At last, a BART cop had recognized how shaken Martin was and drove him home.