He’d signed up to take Russian at a community college, because by then the Wall was long down and he’d been headed for home from the moment he graduated from college. The borders were opening up between Alaska and Siberia and there was a future there for a Russian-speaking FBI agent.
In Russian 101 he met Lilah, fresh out of school with a degree in accounting-large, dark eyes, hair a downpour of heavy black, a body by Venus. He was sunk at first glance. After class he followed her into the parking lot and wouldn’t let her leave until she gave him her phone number. When he walked her to her door at the end of their first date he knew she had a brain and a sense of humor to go with the looks. By Russian 201 they were engaged, and by Russian 301 they were married, and before starting on children they applied together to the FBI. Both had been accepted immediately. The Russian had helped, and it had also helped when they both requested assignment to Anchorage, as Kyle had known it would. Lilah was from Snoqualmie in Washington State and no stranger to snow and ice, although she didn’t much care for the four and a half hours of daylight Anchorage was reduced to in winter. But then who did?
Her picture smiled up at him from his desk, with Eli in her lap and Gloria leaning against her shoulder. Yes, he had one beautiful family.
His thoughts turned naturally to Hugh and Sara, also part of his family. Not, at present, quite so beautiful. Odd, he thought now, how they’d all wound up in law enforcement. But perhaps not so odd, when he remembered the first time an Alaska state trooper had come to Seldovia, a tall man with a deep voice and an unshakable sense of authority. There had been a stabbing death in a community where if you weren’t related by blood you were related by marriage to everyone there. The town had been in a turmoil, which might very well have escalated into a lynching if the trooper hadn’t flown in from Ninilchik to investigate. It took his calming presence half a day to bring people to their senses, and at the end of it he removed the perpetrator to Homer to be bound over for trial. There was chaos, and then the trooper came, and there was order. It had been a powerful example to three awestruck little ten-year-olds.
Kyle straightened in his chair. His childhood buddy Hugh Rincon was not an alarmist. If Hugh thought there was a terrorist threat from the Far East presenting itself to a western American port sometime in the near future, then his buddy Kyle was going to take it seriously. All three of them, he and Hugh and Sara, too, had family in Alaska.
He called the local Coast Guard member of his task force. “Joe? Kyle. I’m headed out of the office. Can I drop by?”
He shrugged into his coat on the way out. “I’m going down to the port. I’ll be back after lunch,” he told the receptionist. One of the joys of being the boss was, so long as your case file didn’t back up, nobody looked over your shoulder.
Eve’s eyes followed him all the way to the elevator. Inside, he turned and winked at her. She blushed. She was just a kid, barely twenty years old, fresh out of Charter College with an associate degree in computers. He was well aware that she had a slight crush on him. He worried all the way down to the garage that he should have told her to get out of town, too.
Joe’s office was eleven blocks down the street from Kyle’s, in a handsome building erected right where Anchorage began a short slide into Knik Arm. “You know you’re toast when the next big one hits,” Kyle said.
Joe Brenner shook his hand warmly. “Yeah, but I’ll have a great view on the way down.” Behind him the Knik was beginning to fill up with bergs of ice, created by the freezing temperatures and broken by the forty-foot rise and fall of the tide. A containership was nosing into the bergs on the far side of the Knik, its hull crusted with sea spray. It was riding right down on the Plimsoll line.
Kyle thought of Hugh and wondered what the ship was carrying in its hold.
He turned. Joe Brenner was a tall, trim, broad-shouldered, square-jawed man in Coast Guard blue, with brown hair, blue eyes, and a charming manner. He was a weather forecaster on a local television station. He was also a commander in the Coast Guard Reserve who had been called up after 9/11. He still made the occasional 10:00 p.m. newscast, and he was something of a local heartthrob, because for some inexplicable reason best known only to the great television audience weather forecasters got all the action.
“Lately,” he said to Kyle with an engaging grin, “the worst part of this job has been chasing people who watch me on the news away from the gate.”
“Any potential there?”
Joe shook his head. “Nah,” he said, a little sadly. “All jailbait.”
“Shame.”
“Yeah.”
They communed together in silence over this grievous misfortune.
Kyle jerked his head at the window. “I see the CSX Anchorage is on its way in.”
“Yeah,” Joe said, and got to his feet to stand next to Kyle. “Riding low in the water.”
“I was noticing. What’re they carrying?”
Joe cocked an eyebrow. “What’s up?”
Kyle shrugged. “Curious.”
Joe didn’t believe him. “Well, you’d have to ask the port about that.”
“Okay. Wanna go for a ride?”
“Down to the port?”
“Yeah?”
“You sure you want to do that?”
Kyle’s brow creased. “Why wouldn’t I?”
Joe grinned at some secret joke. “Upon your own head be it.”
The Port of Anchorage was a three-story building painted beige with red trim, accented with oversized porthole-style windows. The manager was a large young man with the pink clear skin of a baby’s bottom and fine flyaway blond hair. Greg Wladislaw loved his job and he was a born cheerleader, anxious, even eager, to share every bit of this most wonderful job with anyone who didn’t move fast and far enough out of range first. He was devastated not to have an answer for Kyle as to the contents of the containership docking behind him. “We don’t have the manifests here, you understand. That’ll be over at Horizon with their agent. I can call, if you like. Or take you over and introduce you.”
Kyle said, “Can you tell me about traffic in and out of the port of Anchorage? When and what kind?”
Indeed Wladislaw could. “We get in two domestic ships a week, one Horizon on Sunday and one Tote on Tuesday. We’ve just started getting a third carrier in.” He dropped his voice, as if he were imparting a state secret to a select, trusted few. “Some are foreign carriers.”
If he was expecting expressions of awe and amazement he was disappointed. “Really?” Kyle said. “How often?”
“Once a week, out of Asia.”
“Asia?” Kyle said. “What ports?”
“Hong Kong-well, China now, I guess-Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore.”
“Mmm,” Kyle said. “That it?”
Wladislaw was shocked at the very suggestion. “Oh no, we have petroleum tankers coming in and out, too.”
“Any ships come in from Russia?”
Wladislaw made a face. “What do they have that we want to buy?”
“Point taken. How often do the petroleum tankers come in?”
“One tanker a month,” Wladislaw said proudly.
It wasn’t exactly Long Beach, Kyle thought, and felt relieved. Not enough traffic to hide something the size of a freighter in. Maybe Hugh was wrong. He looked out the window at the dock, which appeared to stretch from the Knik River bridge to Turnagain Arm. The three men watched as three C-130s came spiraling in from the north to touch down at Elmendorf Air Force Base’s runway, which ended on the edge of the bluff immediately above the port. A subsequent roar of engines indicated a takeoff immediately following. Aircrews doing touch-and-goes, to keep their skills sharp.