The little room, dark and dank and smelling of mildew, had begun to close in around Kate and she was glad to leave it. The air outside felt fresh and clean and she pulled it into her lungs in big, cleansing breaths.
The dugout stood on the south slope of a tiny rise that fell away to the beach. Jack stood with his back to the water, looking at the structure, impressed by its air of having grown there. The rye grass grew tall and thick and right up to the walls and over the roof, and even now, in winter, from three, even two steps away, the door was invisible. He could see how the Coasties had missed it. Of course, they hadn't been looking with murder in mind. "Who built this place? And why?"
"You said this island has a natural strategic location,"
Kate reminded him, pulling the door closed, noting as she did that it was made of meticulously assembled planks in which no nail had been placed without careful thought and attention. "You think the Aleuts wouldn't have noticed that, too?"
He was skeptical. "You think there was a village here at one time? You think this place has been here that long?"
"Why not? It's built in the old way. Those dirt walls have been there so long they feel like concrete. Look at this door. Those planks are salvage, and old salvage at that. See? Hand-planed. And these nails? Those weren't mass-produced. Some whaler broke up offshore a hundred years ago and whoever lived here made doors out of the wreck. And that hole you fell through."
"What about it?"
"Before the Russians introduced doors, the Aleuts built these barabaras with the doors in the roof." She looked around. "I bet if we looked, we'd find the ruins of others."
"There are no records of a village on Anua, Kate. There's no mark on the map for archaeological ruins. This is probably just some seal hunter's cabin."
She shook her head. "The beach is long, wide and relatively level. There aren't that many good beaches in the Aleutians. Mostly it's just one steep slide from mountaintop to ocean bottom. That makes this a natural site"-she gave him a brief smile-"for landing kayaks.
They walked the ten feet to where the rye grass left off and the beach began. Over a mile in length, Kate estimated, with a jumbled rock formation on one end and cliffs on the other. A creek burbled seaward, cutting a shallow bed through the center of the beach down to the waterline. There, the surf pounded viciously at the gravel, and the ebb and flow of the swells coming in from the southeast alternately revealed and swallowed up a half-dozen reefs within the curve of the land, staggered one after the other, jagged and threatening. "Yeah," Jack said dryly, "real inviting place to beach a boat."
"They would have found a way in," Kate said, positive.
"And it would have been a tremendous natural defense against attack."
"What are you looking at?"
Her eyes were squinted against the sun. "Right there, I-yes! I think it is!" she cried, pointing, and took off running.
"Oh, Christ," Jack said, and took off after her.
He caught up with her where the towers of rock broke the furious surf into white sheets of spray some hundred feet away. Not near far enough away, in his humble opinion, and he was about to say so when he saw that she was stripping out of her clothes. His heartbeat, which had started to slow down at no sign of a mad marksman with a mad on for Van Camp's Pork and Beans, began once again to speed up. "What in the hell are you doing, Shugak?"
"Look," she said, pointing in front of them.
"What?" He cast about wildly for some reason for Kate to be stripping down to the buff, on an Aleutian Island, between the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea, in the middle of October.
They were standing at the edge of a tumble of rock that stretched between beach and the rock towers. The surf pounded at the towers in what Jack considered to be determined and ominous fashion. Some amphibious mammal, probably one with very large and very sharp teeth, was barking in large numbers somewhere beyond those rock towers. Gulls screamed and dived in the blue sky above. Kate gave an exasperated sigh at his confused expression and pointed again. "Right in front of you, idiot."
His gaze dropped. Directly in front of the toes of his boots, on the tumble of rock between them and the ominous surf, there was a series of shallow pools in the dips and hollows between the rocks. One of the larger pools began at their feet, stretched out some twelve feet across and looked to be some three to four feet deep. He gave the still, green surface a suspicious look. "Tidal pools?" he said. "So what?"
"Not tidal pools, hot springs!" Kate said impatiently.
"See the steam! Can't you smell the sulfur?" She shucked out of panties and bra and waded in. "I knew it!" she said, feeling her way with her feet. "The bottom is almost smooth and-yes," she said, bending over and feeling beneath the surface with her hands, "I can feel where they leveled out a place to sit." She turned and lowered herself into the water. It came up almost to her chin, and she let loose with a long, voluptuous sigh. "Not too hot, not too cold, just exactly, perfectly right."
Her spirits rose with her body temperature, and the ghosts she had felt pressing about her as she worked in the dugout dissolved in the wisps of steam that rose from the water's surface. She looked at Jack, one corner of her mouth curling. The challenge was implicit. He gritted his teeth and bent over to unlace his boots. She watched with enjoyment, and went so far as to hum the tune to "The Stripper" when he got to his belt. He had a terrible time with the buttons on his jeans.
When he lowered himself into the water next to her Jack was amazed to discover that this wasn't some perfidious Shugak practical joke after all. The water was hot, but not too hot. It bubbled up around him in a natural Jacuzzi and sizzled right through his skin into his bones.
"Oh, yeah," he said, relaxing with a long, satisfied groan.
Curious, he tasted the water. "It's not very salty," he said in surprise.
"It's probably a mixture," she said, leaning back and closing her eyes. "Salt from the spray, fresh from underground."
He looked over and admired the way her body shone up at him through the water. It was a perfect body in his eyes, compact, well muscled, just the right balance of lean to soft, lithe in motion and at rest. Her face was broad across the cheekbones, softening to a small, stubborn chin that held up a wide, determined mouth.
Her hazel eyes tilted up at the sides with the hint of an epicanthic fold. Even the twisted scar that stretched across her throat almost from ear to ear looked right today, a badge of honor, an emblem of courage. A warning, too. Anyone who had a scar like that and was still around to wear it was not someone you wanted to mess with.
She opened her eyes and caught him admiring, and after that they didn't talk for a while.
"Nice day," Jack said, in an inadequate expression of postcoital bliss.
"Enjoy it," Kate replied, her face nuzzled into his neck. "It'll get worse."
The lover in him didn't move a muscle. The pilot looked nervously over her head to the southeast for signs of an incoming weather front, and found only the merest wisps of cloud low on the horizon. "How do you know?"
"Because in the Aleutians the one rule is, if the weather is good, it'll get bad. And if it's bad, it'll get worse. During the war, the air force lost two times the amount of casualties and five times the amount of planes to weather and mechanical trouble due to weather than they did in combat." She mustered up enough energy to point. "See the end of the runway?"