Arctic Fire Read online

  “What are we supposed to get?” Troy shouted over the haunting wail of a powerful gust that was whipping through the mountain of huge crab traps stacked high beneath them. “How crazy at the top?”

  “Thirty-foot waves and eighty-knot gusts,” Speed Trap answered. “Maybe worse.”

  “No problem.”

  Surviving this storm wasn’t going to be any worse than climbing Mount Everest in that blizzard two years ago, Troy figured, or fighting that crazy bull in Nuevo Laredo last month. The bull had charged him eleven times with those razor-sharp horns before he’d finally driven the rusty sword deep into its muscular black neck. After it collapsed on the dry dirt, he’d made certain its carcass was carved up and its meat given to the poorest people in the neighborhood.

  Then he’d gotten that kiss from the Spanish angel. Then he’d met with that guy who’d been hanging on the fence. Then he’d gotten everything else from his angel. Then he’d kissed Selena’s forehead as she was still sleeping and headed to Alaska.

  “It’ll be all right, Speed Trap!” Troy yelled reassuringly. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Glad you think so,” Speed Trap yelled back. “But you don’t know the Bering Sea like I do.”

  The Arctic Fire had been on the hunt for king crab going on two weeks. This was the worst weather yet, and the storm couldn’t have come at a worse time. With all of her traps back on deck and her surfaces coated with ice, the ship was top-heavy. Terribly vulnerable to rolling over in the rough seas and sending her crew plunging into the thirty-seven-degree water where they’d die of hypothermia in minutes without time to scramble into their orange survival suits—if they didn’t drown first.

  A frigid, salty spray whipped Troy’s unshaven face as he crawled along the top of the carefully constructed mountain of steel-framed rectangular shapes. Several of the giant seven-hundred-pound traps on the bow’s starboard side had torn loose. As the greenhorn, it was Troy’s job to resecure the expensive gear so it didn’t tumble over the side and sink to the bottom, lost forever. As the rookie on the boat, it was his job to do whatever the captain told him to do.

  With her live tanks full of crab, the 118-foot vessel was grinding through the gale toward a processing plant in Akutan. If there weren’t too many dead crabs in the tanks when they unloaded, this hunt would gross the ship a million dollars.

  Half of that would go to Captain Sage Mitchell.

  Another $250,000 would go to the captain’s brother, Duke, who was the ship’s first mate and chief mechanic.

  And the last quarter of a million would be split equally among the remaining crew members: Troy and the other two deckhands—Speed Trap and his older brother, Grant, both of whom were the first mate’s sons. Bottom line: the three of them could each earn over eighty thousand bucks for two weeks of work.

  The thought of the money made Troy grin even as the ship plunged toward the trough in front of the next wave. It had been risky to sail with these cowboys, but in the end it was going to be well worth it. When he’d gotten to Dutch Harbor three weeks ago, his checking account had seventy-three dollars in it. The balance was fourteen cents the day they’d sailed. And he didn’t have credit cards. They weren’t allowed.

  He could have asked his parents for money, but he hadn’t done that since graduating from Dartmouth six and a half years ago, and he wasn’t about to start now. He had too much pride. Besides, going to Bill might draw attention. His father was well known in certain circles—some obvious, some not.

  “Move your ass, Troy!” Captain Sage bellowed from the bridge.

  The bridge was eighty feet to the stern, and Captain Sage was warm and dry in there with Duke, protected from the driving sleet and slashing winds behind a thick pane of reinforced glass. But Sage could still shout orders to his crew through a series of rusty speakers that were positioned around the deck.

  “Hurry up or we’re gonna lose four or five of those traps!” he yelled. “If we do, we’re gonna lose you too, you son of a bitch. I guarantee you that, Troy.”

  Troy glanced over his shoulder. Speed Trap was clinging to the crab trap mountain like he was part of it. He had a deer-in-the-headlights look in his eyes that was quickly morphing into one of sheer panic.

  “Let’s go, you mothafuckers!” Duke shouted, grabbing the microphone from his brother. “Now!”

  “Holy sheeeiiiiit!” Speed Trap screamed like a terrified kid taking that first incredible plunge on a killer roller coaster as the Arctic Fire heeled dangerously to starboard and the trap in front of Troy almost went crashing into the sea. “I can’t go any farther. I can’t, man!”

  “Move it, Troy!” Sage yelled, grabbing the mike back from Duke. “Damn you, Troy Jensen, get to those traps!”

  “Help me!” Speed Trap pleaded as the ship began scaling the face of a twenty-five-footer. It was the biggest wave of the storm so far. “I can’t hold on much longer. My fingers feel like they’re gonna rip off.”

  “Just stay there!” Troy ordered. Speed Trap was worthless. He was petrified to the point of paralysis. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Don’t leave me!”

  “Stay put! I won’t leave you out here.”

  Troy hustled to the edge of the mountain, which rose thirty feet above the deck, and moved onto the trap that had barely stayed aboard moments ago. He hadn’t bothered to hook into one of the bright yellow harnesses that would secure him to the ship by a long tether and keep him aboard in case what he was crawling on went over. He hated how the harness and the tether restricted his ability to move and react. He liked being mobile. He always had.

  Speed Trap hadn’t hooked up either, and Troy knew why. He was a veteran of these hunts and didn’t want to look like he was more afraid of coming out here on the mountain than the greenhorn. He was regretting that show of bravado now.

  Troy took a deep breath and slid over the edge of the man-made cliff as the Arctic Fire hurtled to the top of the big wave, blew through the crest in a foam explosion, and then pitched forward and began barreling down its spine. Butterflies raced through his gut as he clutched the side of the trap he’d just been kneeling on and stepped the toes of his rubber boots on one that was two down from the top.

  The mountain had been built with a slight stair-step feature to it all the way up each side as the crew had stowed the traps back on board when the hunt was finished, instead of rebaiting them with cod and throwing them back into the deep to catch more crabs. They’d built it like this so they could get a toehold if necessary. Like Troy desperately needed one now.

  He spotted the problem right away. Two stout ropes and a chain hung limply from the trap just behind and five below the one he was standing on. He could tell it was loose enough that if he didn’t resecure it quickly, the Arctic Fire was going to lose more than just a few traps to the storm. She’d lose at least twenty to thirty because this particular trap was a key to the entire side of the mountain. And if the mountain crumbled, he and Speed Trap would be hurled overboard in a steel avalanche. They’d probably be crushed to death before they even hit the water.

  With a smooth, pantherlike move, Troy reached the loosely tethered trap and moments later had it resecured. The critical trap would still move a little as the ship plowed through the rough seas, but it shouldn’t go over and start that avalanche now.

  A quick pull and a leap and Troy was back atop the mountain. He grinned when he spotted Speed Trap still hanging on for dear life right where he’d left the kid.

  Troy hadn’t gotten to know Speed Trap or the other three men aboard the ship that well since they’d sailed from Dutch Harbor, but they seemed like decent enough guys. They weren’t very talkative, but there wasn’t much time to talk. Just hour after hour of sinking traps to the bottom and hoisting them back to the surface after they’d snared more crabs.

  It had been a hell of a grind as the traps kept breaking the surface teeming with the goods, and none of the crew had gotten more than a few hours of sleep a day. Even Troy had to admit
that he was exhausted as their run across the Bering Sea was ending. But the money was going to be incredible.

  He wouldn’t be sticking around for the ship’s second hunt of the season. Red Fox One had already communicated that in a coded message he’d sent to the Fire yesterday. After this run, Troy was headed to Eastern Europe.

  As Troy got to where Speed Trap was crouched, his eyes flashed to the right, and for a moment he didn’t believe what he saw. Something inside him wouldn’t let his brain process the terrifying sight.

  But it all turned hair-raisingly real when Captain Sage’s panicked command blared through the speakers. It was the first time Troy had heard fear in Sage’s voice.

  “Get off the traps, get off the traps!” Sage yelled as he sounded the ship’s foghorn. It was the ultimate warning. “Now!”

  Through the sleet whipping across the ocean in the twilight, Troy saw the gigantic wave bearing down on them. If it hadn’t been so terrifying, it would have been beautiful.

  “We don’t have time to get off the mountain,” Speed Trap gasped as he gazed in shock and awe at the seventy-foot rogue roaring toward them. “We’re gonna die, Troy.”

  CHAPTER 3

  JACK WASN’T a daredevil like Troy, but he didn’t back down from a challenge either. He just preferred having both feet planted firmly on the ground when he poked fate in the face, thanks to his acute fear of heights and his healthy respect for nature. Once he was more than fifteen feet up, he started getting nervous. Right now he was fifteen thousand feet up, and his heart felt like it was going to burst, it was pumping so hard.

  “Come on, Jack!” Bill yelled as the jump supervisor slid the door open. The hum of the plane’s twin props turned into a roar, and a cold wind whipped through the fuselage. “Let’s go. This is it.”

  Jack had been dreading those words ever since they’d gotten into Bill’s Mercedes a few hours ago and driven to the small airport outside Greenwich, Connecticut, to prep for the jump. “This is it.” It had a terrifying ring to it.

  Despite his fear of heights, Jack had forced himself to jump out of this same plane last month when Bill had shamed him into doing this same crazy stunt. But that jump had gone off during the daylight, and it had been a tandem jump. Back in October, Jack had been tightly secured to the instructor, who’d done all the work on the way down.

  But this was a night jump, and Jack had to rip the cord himself. Technically, he needed more tandem jumps to qualify for a solo, especially a night solo. But the guy who ran the place was looking the other way.

  Bill must have greased his palm, Jack figured. Money seemed to be Bill’s answer to everything.

  “Bill, I don’t know if I want to—”

  “Don’t go there!” Bill shouted, anticipating what Jack was about to say. “Don’t embarrass me.” He moved quickly to where Jack was sitting and pulled him roughly to his feet off the wooden bench that ran along one wall of the fuselage. “Damn it, Jack. Don’t make me throw you out of that goddamned door.”

  Bill and Cheryl had adopted Jack when he was only a few months old. He was thirty now, but in all that time he’d never told Bill about the terrible fear of heights he’d lived with ever since he could remember. It had been decades since the old man had served in the Marine Corps, but he’d never lost the semper-fi attitude. Phobias simply weren’t acceptable in the Jensen family, especially with a blood son like Troy around who wasn’t afraid of anything.

  Jack had been hoping all day that by some miracle of God his fear of heights would evaporate or the crystal-clear weather would turn terrible—even though there wasn’t a low-pressure system within five hundred miles. But neither prayer had been answered.

  “Look, Bill, I don’t have enough experience for this. Come on, you know that.”

  “You walk to the jump door, throw yourself out of the plane, count to five, and rip the cord. There’s nothing to it. Any idiot could do it.” Bill glared at Jack. “Any idiot with guts, anyway.”

  “This is insane.”

  Jack could feel his body seizing up like an overheating engine at the thought of taking even one step toward the door. He saw the jump supervisor roll his eyes over Bill’s shoulder, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t going to be shamed into doing this. Not like he’d been shamed into doing that tandem jump last month when he’d almost had a heart attack during the first few seconds in the air. What if he couldn’t find the cord? What if the chute didn’t open? This was life and death, and he wasn’t going to tempt the ultimate degree of fate just for Bill’s entertainment.

  “I’m not doing it,” he said firmly.

  “You will do it!”

  “No I won’t. Don’t think just because—”

  Bill grabbed him with both hands and wrestled him toward the door. He was more than twice Jack’s age, but he was still a big, strong man, and he’d caught Jack completely off guard. They were only a few feet from plunging into the night before Jack even realized what was happening.

  Just when it seemed they both would tumble into the darkness, Jack threw an arm around Bill’s neck, stepped in front of him with one leg, and flipped him to the floor of the plane. Then he quickly retreated from the door. It was the first time he’d ever fought back, but it wasn’t a conscious decision. The move had been purely instinctive, brought on by his terror of being hurled into the night sky fifteen thousand feet above Connecticut.

  Bill struggled awkwardly to make it back to his feet in his jumpsuit. When he was up he shook his head and stared at Jack. “Why can’t you be more like Troy?”

  Then he turned, staggered to the open door, and plunged into the darkness.

  The Olympian was three football fields long, and the four massive domes rising from her main deck were each twelve stories high. She was carrying more than 135,000 cubic meters of liquefied natural gas in those four holds, which for all intents and purposes made her a huge refrigerator, keeping what in nature desperately wanted to be a gas, a liquid.

  In its liquid state, LNG took up less than 1/600 the volume it did as a gas. With an energy content of more than fifty-five Hiroshima bombs, the Olympian was one of the deadliest ships on the ocean. If one of those domes were suddenly pierced and the cargo detonated as all of that liquid instantaneously reverted to gas, the resulting fireball would destroy a city if the ship were close enough.

  The leader smiled thinly as he stood on the Olympian’s bridge and peered past her domes into the darkness. That city was going to be Boston. In a few hours he and his crew would sail this massive cargo of LNG into the harbor—after presenting all necessary credentials to the waiting team of law enforcement officials, and then passing a rigorous onboard inspection. Then a Gulfstream 5 would come screaming from the sky and slam into hold 2 or 3. The horrible impact would instantly ignite that deadly fireball as the ship churned slowly along with a helpless flotilla of small-boat escorts. And millions of people would die.

  Detonating an LNG tanker near a coastal city wasn’t a particularly creative idea. Federal, state, and local authorities had been worried about the possibility for years, and they were extraordinarily careful each time one of the huge ships approached the United States. The key to executing this mission was having all of the correct authorizations—which they did, thanks to a series of bribes the leader had made to a well-placed individual in the United States.

  Money was the American’s Achilles’ heel, he believed. You simply had to identify the weakest link in the chain and then offer him enough cash. The American wouldn’t care that so many people had died, only that his bank account had grown much larger. Americans really were capitalist pigs. The one who’d sold him the authorizations certainly was.

  It had been a long, exhausting voyage from Malaysia, and he had only a few hours to live. But in death he and his squad would become idolized immediately and revered forever. He couldn’t wait to spot that plane streaking toward the Olympian and see the first instant of the explosion just before he was incinerated. He wanted to die. The other s
ide was better. He’d been told that for a very long time, and he was ready to enjoy his harem of beautiful virgins.

  “It will be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” the leader murmured. “It will be a masterpiece of red and orange.”

  A moment later he lay dead on the floor of the bridge with his neck cleanly snapped.

  The Navy SEAL who’d just carried out the execution lifted his wrist to his mouth. The rest of the crew had been killed a few moments ago by other members of his team. “All clear,” he called loudly into his watch as he began to familiarize himself with the ship’s control panel. “Let’s get the bodies ready for the chopper.”

  CHAPTER 4

  TROY GRABBED Speed Trap by the neck of his orange poncho and half dragged, half pushed him across the traps as fast as he could. The air temperature was just twenty-seven degrees, and the spray whipping off the ocean combined with the sleet pouring down from above had made the top of the mountain treacherously slick. It was a situation made even more dangerous by the ship’s steep angle of descent as it dived toward the bottom of the deep trough. Still, Troy and Speed Trap made it up the mountain to the forward masthead.

  As the ship flattened out, Troy rushed Speed Trap into a harness. Then he grabbed another one and put it on himself as the ship began to climb.

  The Arctic Fire wouldn’t go up and over the mammoth wave that was bearing down on them. She was too long and heavy and the wave was too tall and narrow. She’d go through it, instead. She’d try, anyway.

  At least the rogue was hurtling straight at them, Troy thought as he stared in awe at the huge wave. If it had been coming from either side, the ship wouldn’t have a chance. The Fire would roll, and that would be that. It would take all of Captain Sage’s skill, but the ship still had a chance with this wave coming straight at her bow.

  As hell came hurtling down on them, Troy grabbed Speed Trap, took a deep breath of precious air, and shut his eyes tightly.

  For several terrifying seconds he felt like a rag doll inside a tornado, and at the same time, as if he were encased in ice on the dark side of the moon. The ferocity of the wave and the bitter cold of the seawater cost him his grip on Speed Trap and forced a bloodcurdling scream from his lips. It was the first time Troy could ever remember thinking that the candle of his life was actually about to go out.