Nobody else in the five-person flight crew seemed interested, either, so Hugh retreated to the padded bench that ran across the rear of the flight deck. From there he caught only the merest flash of white glacial rivers between ragged tips of mountains that formed the southeastern edge of the bay he had once called home. That was home to them all.
They’d been only children, he, Kyle, and Sara, one of the many reasons they had banded together almost from birth and by far the least important. Their fathers were fishermen, their mothers a housewife, the city librarian, and a nurse, respectively. Their fathers had fished king crab in the heyday of king crab, from the late sixties, when Lowell Wakefield’s at first idiotic and then visionary idea of creating a market for a brand-new gourmet shellfish came to fruition. All three men, owners and operators of their own crabbers, had done very well indeed, right up until the crash of the king crab stocks in the Bering Sea in the early eighties, and by then they’d made their pile. They were sorry, of course, for the failure of the local canneries around Kachemak Bay, exacerbated and accelerated by the urban renewal following the 1964 Great Alaskan Earthquake. Hugh knew for a fact that the city library would have been out of business were it not for the generous financial support of his father, but those who no longer have to worry about the rent money tend to tune out the woes of their neighbors.
That was something else that set Hugh, Sara, and Kyle apart, and the proximate cause of friction between the three of them and their classmates, the children of those less-fortunate? hardworking? adroit in their political affiliations? pick one-than their parents had been. School in Seldovia was not joy unconfined. Hugh remembered Sara’s tenth birthday party. The sight of Sara, struggling to hold back tears, surrounded by balloons and games and little paper bags full of candies and toys for prizes for guests who never came was one of the more vivid memories of that time.
When his father didn’t have him out on the boat beating ice, anyway. Hugh hated everything about fishing, the endless hours, the numbing cold, the constant heaving of the deck. He suffered from chronic seasickness, which didn’t endear him to his father. No one had ever been happier than Hugh when the king crab stocks crashed at pretty much the very moment he graduated from high school; it meant he wasn’t going to have to carry on the family business at the helm of the Mae R. He went to college instead, in search of a warmer, drier job.
His gift for languages had brought him to his present employment. He’d been recruited right out of Harvard, received his master’s in Russian studies from Georgetown and his doctorate in Asian studies from Princeton while on the job. His mother lost no opportunity to brag about his admission to Harvard, but she bored everyone first in Seldovia and then in Wailea over her son’s graduation from Princeton.
He’d never felt all that Ivy League. He’d spent his childhood in Seldovia chafing beneath the need to get out and see with his own eyes that the rest of the world was really there. He had wanted an education that would get him a job that had him traveling all over that world.
His face stretched into a grim smile. Be careful what you wish for.
They landed in Dutch Harbor two hours after the Sojourner Truth departed the dock. Hugh swore a lot as the flight crew waited him out placidly. When he ran out of breath he turned to the pilot. “Anything you need in St. Paul?”
The pilot regarded him for a moment with a meditative expression. “No, but they may need something from Dutch.”
“Like today’s paper,” the copilot chimed in. He didn’t care where Hugh was going so long as it got him more hours in his logbook.
Hugh looked at the pilot, who was not immune to the siren song of more hours, either. He looked from Hugh to the copilot and said, “Let’s top off the tanks.”
JANUARY
EAST OF AGATTU, IN THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS
THE INSIDE OF THE container smelled like a prison sewer. In spite of the deliberately reduced diet, both chemical toilets were ready to overflow. The floor was slippery with vomit, piss, and shit, and last night Jones had given the order for the stove to be disconnected for fear that the open flame might actually ignite the air. Pirates, mercenaries, and terrorists alike had been reduced to a state of speechless misery.
The cold air whistling in through the cracks and the air holes and the flapping canvas roof was the only thing that made the journey endurable. Chen Ming, Fang’s second in command and suffering from the cold even more than his boss, stayed in his hammock, cocooned inside his sleeping bag with only his nose exposed. Jones was not forthcoming with information, but with the degree of roll they were experiencing Chen was sure they were on the deck of their freighter, which meant they were probably on an older vessel, possibly a tramp freighter.
He wasn’t sure if it was the fourth day or the fifth day of the voyage when Jones pulled out the satellite phone and dialed a number. Chen watched through the forest of swaying hammocks as Jones spoke in Korean, a language Chen recognized but did not speak himself.
He watched Jones listen, speak a few more words, and hang up. He wondered why Smith and Jones hadn’t just brought walkie-talkies, which would have been cheaper and just as effective on five hundred fifty feet of ship, but Jones stowed the phone and raised his voice to speak to the men. “It is time. Arm yourselves.”
Almost before he finished speaking men began to roll out of hammocks and drop to the floor, indifferent to the muck they stepped in. Elbows were thrown in the rush to get to their gear but no one took it personally. They were all professionals, this wasn’t their first or even their tenth op, and there was the added bonus that to go to work they had first to get out of the container.
Chen was interested in seeing how Jones was going to accomplish that, and was impressed in spite of himself at Jones’s combination of imagination and finesse. He used four very small amounts of plastic explosive slapped to the four corners of the doors, with a remote detonator triggered while the men crouched behind the cargo lashed between them and the doors. The resulting explosions were four loud pops barely distinguishable from each other and completely drowned out by the noise of the ship’s engine and the rush and plunge of water against the hull. All four hinges were destroyed and the two doors, still locked and sealed, fell outward as one unit, the top edges landing on the next container over. The doors separated a little down the middle, twisting, but they had to kick the bottom half of the left door free before they could climb out and shinny down the two containers stacked below them to the deck.
It was tricky because the ship was experiencing a roll of about five degrees. The prevailing wind appeared to be coming out of the southeast, Chen guessed at around twenty-five to thirty knots, and it was cold enough that ice was beginning to form on the outsides of the forty-foot containers stacked three deep on the deck. He felt a sudden desire to get to the bridge immediately for a look at the barometer.
But this was Jones’s show; Chen was just the hired help. He called up the specs of the vessel in his head. She was an aging catcher-processor three hundred forty feet long, with a crew of a hundred twenty-five. They’d smuggled themselves on board in an empty container, one of a dozen that the ship’s crew was confidently expecting to fill with filets of Bering Sea pollock and Pacific cod.
Fifteen men going up against a hundred twenty-five might seem like bad odds, unless the fifteen were armed as well as Smith and Jones’s were. Chen checked the magazine of his AK-104, the smaller, lighter, faster version of that classic assault rifle that won the Vietnam War, and, as always, felt reassured. Thirty rounds in the hands of someone who knew where to put them were always capable of calming hysterical crowds.