ON BOARD THE USCG CUTTER SOJOURNER TRUTH
I SAY WE USE him to troll for orcas.“ ”That’s a little harsh, Petty Officer, don’t you think?“ Sara said, trying not to laugh.
“Already tasked anyway,” Chief Mark Edelen said from the conn.
“Tasked how?” PO Barnette said, raising one skeptical eyebrow. Or so Sara assumed, as it was 11:00 p.m. of a Bering Sea winter’s night and there was nothing blacker this side of hell. The bridge had red filters taped over the navigation and radar and fathometer screens, dimming their readouts and allowing everyone’s eyes to adjust to see out the windows. Except for Orion looming large on their starboard bow, there wasn’t a lot to see, and wouldn’t have been much beyond an endless green ocean even if it were daylight.
But even in the dark Barnette sounded skeptical, and also thwarted. Seaman Rosenberg, an eighteen-year-old typically twirpish adolescent fresh out of boot camp, had managed in only fifteen days underway to step all over the senior crewman’s toes.
There was a smile in the chief’s voice when he replied. “They duct-taped his bunk shut, poked a hole in it, and sprayed it full of Right Guard.”
“Ouch,” Sara said. “Why?”
“Because he hasn’t had a shower since he got on board,” PO Barnette said, “and when you’re sleeping forty-two to a room it can get kind of rank. Plus he’s been puking his guts up ever since we left the dock. You can smell him coming a deck away.” A brief pause. “Ma’am.”
The smile in the chief’s voice was wider this time. “They also stuffed all his clothes into his duffle and filled it with Scrubbing Bubbles Basin Tub and Tile Cleaner.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Well, you know.”
“No. What?”
“It’s a disinfectant.”
Sara couldn’t help it, she let loose of the laugh that had been building inside for the last five minutes. She pulled herself together and cleared her throat. “I mean, this must stop, immediately.”
They knew her, and they laughed. PO Barnette’s ire was soothed, even if his hand had not been the one to mete out justice, and he returned to his brace at the conn, feet flat against the deck as if they’d been spot-welded there, hands clasped at the small of his back, leaning forward into the pitch of the ship. Salty, that was PO Barnette, eighteen years in. He never lost his balance, not even in the heaviest seas, as opposed to Sara, who had long ago perfected a complicated polka slash tango with the ship on any seas over three feet. It was effective; it had been years since the sudden lurch of a hull had tossed her into a bulkhead, but still she envied PO Barnette’s tranquil stolidity.
The bosun’s mate, Thomasina Penn, went back to the plot table to continue work on their route, but it was perfunctory as they were running box ops, hiding from a hurricane-force low in the lee of St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs. Running box ops meant steering a course confined within a box drawn on the radar screen that out of sheer boredom on occasion resembled the initials of the officer on watch. The S for Sara was fun, the L in Lange less so.
Mark Edelen’s initials were more challenging, resulting in a call to the bridge earlier that evening from the captain requesting the conn to straighten out their course so his dominoes wouldn’t keep sliding off the wardroom table. It was the threat of being drafted into playing dominoes that had caused Sara to retreat to the bridge in the first place.
As executive officer, she was exempt from watch rotation, but truth to tell, she missed it. She missed the heave and roll of the sea at night, more pronounced on the bridge thirty-six feet up from the waterline than it was in her stateroom two decks below. She missed the occasional glimpses of white as the bow sliced through the ocean. On clear nights it was horizon to horizon stars, crowding one another in three hundred and sixty degrees of sheer glory.
Nights like tonight. On nights like tonight, it was as if they were sailing straight off the edge of the earth and into the cosmos. Nights when the moon came up or the aurora came out verged on the paranormal.
On the night watch voices were muted, lights were softer to the eye, and the seas seemed somehow less severe no matter the height of the wave or the length between swells. At night, things were a little less formal and a little more friendly. Sara loved her job and she loved the Coast Guard, but executive officer was just another description for captain’s hatchet man. It could get pretty lonely, especially since she was the only female officer. Being one of only eleven women in a crew of a hundred didn’t help.
Promotion to executive officer was not anything an ambitious officer in the United States Coast Guard refused, not if she were in her right mind, but as XO her days with filled with administrative minutiae and a lamentable lack of action. Logistics made the boat go, she understood that, but instead of driving the boat-or standing watch-her days were spent in two-hour meetings over ways to dispose of the trash accumulated during a fifty-one-day patrol on a ship with ten officers and ninety enlisted men and women on board. It wasn’t that she wanted to be an ensign again, but she wished, not for the first time, that she were on a smaller ship with fewer officers, where once in a while she might get to lead a boarding.
And where she didn’t have so many memories eight hundred miles off their starboard bow. She pulled her hat down to hide her expression, forgetting that it was black as the pit on the bridge, raised one foot to the ledge that ran around the radar console, and wedged herself in the narrow space between it and the control console. She put an elbow on her raised knee and her chin in her hand.
“Can’t sleep?” the chief said in a low voice.
“Dominoes,” Sara said.
He laughed. He had a marvelous laugh, which pretty much matched the rest of him. He was smart, funny, and good at his job, and if that wasn’t enough, he was handsome, too, with the most beautiful brown eyes Sara had ever seen. That wasn’t all that was beautiful about him, either. Their first full day underway she’d gone below to work out in the ship’s gym and found the chief there before her, dressed in T-shirt and shorts, far less clothing than she was accustomed to seeing him in. She’d been unable to meet his eyes for a good twenty-four hours afterward for fear that he would know exactly what she was thinking. Aside from the fact that she was an officer and he was an enlisted man, that they were underway on two hundred and eight-two feet of ship that seemed to shrink with every day of patrol that passed, and that the last thing the crew needed was to have its nose rubbed in what the Coast Guard officially referred to as an “inappropriate romantic relationship,” they were both married to other people.
Even if Sara was feeling less and less married as time went on. “Got any plans for Dutch?” she said at random. She didn’t need to be thinking about Hugh.
They were headed for Dutch Harbor the next day, their first port call of the patrol. “Seafood buffet at the Grand Aleutian,” Mark said. “Hike up the mountain beforehand to earn it.”
“No joy ride on the helo?”