Death Echo

36

DAY FOUR

NANAIMO

11:40 A.M.

After being at full throttle, or even at sixteen knots, four to six knots was a yawning crawl. Emma felt like giving back the controls to Mac, who had let her take over as soon as they were through Dodd Narrows.

She wouldn’t have touched the controls in the narrows. The current had been running at six knots and the slot looked like a churning, foaming invitation to disaster.

Mac had brought Blackbird through without hesitation. “Are they serious?” Emma asked, looking at the “speed limit” sign floating at the beginning of Nanaimo Harbor.

“Very,” Mac said. “Enjoy the slow-motion scenery.”

She shook her head, but didn’t argue, just kept easing off the throttles. After some time at Blackbird’s controls, she was more relaxed, if no less alert to the hazards on the water.

She spared the scenery a few admiring glances. Nanaimo was a surprising gem set about halfway up to Campbell River on the east side of Vancouver Island, right in the middle of boating paradise-green and blue and white, rocky islets, whipped-cream clouds, and picturesque shoreline. The water was alive with workboats and cruisers, water taxis and the single-and twin-engine seaplanes of three different airlines. Not enough commerce to totally destroy the ambience, yet enough to sustain a small city.

Except…

“That smell,” she said.

“Pulp mill,” Mac answered. “Used to be the perfume of the Pacific Northwest, the engine of growth. Now, so few lumber operations are active that the smell is almost nostalgic.”

“Nostalgic.” She cleared her throat. “That’s one word for it. I suppose you get nostalgic over the odor of fish canneries.”

“Me? No. But a lot of old men who used to provide a good living for their children and grandchildren sure would.”

“The world still eats boatloads of fish.”

“Processed by factory ships on the high seas, ships fed by trawlers clear-cutting the ocean bottom far away from shore,” Mac said. “Out of sight, out of mind, the way clear-cutting forests used to be.”

As he spoke, he kept a wary eye on a nearby sailboat struggling with the Pacific Northwest’s famously fickle winds. But he couldn’t decide if it was the on-and-off wind or the captain’s inexperience that was causing the bigger problem.

Then there were the young kayakers larking about in chunky, wide-bottomed plastic craft, ignoring shouted directions from the leader of their colorful little flock.

Not to mention the aluminum workboat that thought speed limits were for tourists. It was leaving a wake steep enough to cap-size a careless or inexperienced kayaker.

Emma had also noticed the sudden complications of her life as newbie captain. Trying to figure out where the sailboat, kayakers, and speeding workboat would/might intersect with Blackbird gave her a headache.

“I just surpassed my pay grade,” she said. “The wheel is yours.”

“Sure?”

“Positive. It’s not an emergency, so I’m outta here.”

She switched places with Mac.

After a few moments she got twitchy. To everyone else, she and Mac looked like a couple on an autumn vacation, but they weren’t on vacation. The gap between appearance and reality kept smacking her in the face. She just wasn’t used to the double game. Or triple. Maybe more.

“When I was in training,” she said, “we spent hundreds of hours preparing for border crossings. Potentially, they’re always the most dangerous part of any operation.”

“You aren’t crossing from Casablanca to Lisbon, sweetheart,” he said, doing a reasonable impression of Humphrey Bogart.

She smiled in spite of her restlessness. “You’re saying the natives really are friendly? Even after Steele’s heads-up call?”

“Oh, we’ll probably get tossed, thanks to the FBI ass clown who put a flag in the Canadian customs’ computer.” Mac’s dark eyes checked gauges. “But I doubt if it will be a rubber-hose experience. America as a nation may be genially despised, but our money is always welcome.”

“If the government isn’t the problem, why did Lovich and Amanar send you on Blackbird? Why didn’t they just take the boat themselves?”

“Same question Faroe asked. And I asked,” Mac said.

“And the answer is?”

He shrugged and adjusted the throttles so that the sailboat and the most foolish kayakers could get tangled up without him. The workboat was little more than a frothing, receding wake, throwing small craft around like wood chips. Somehow the kayakers had managed to stay human side up.

“I think Blue Water wanted to establish an unremarkable profile for Blackbird in Canada,” Mac said.

“New owner and new girlfriend taking new boat for a cruise?”

“Pretty much. Nothing special. Nothing different. Nothing unexpected. Absolutely nothing to notice.”

“Amanar didn’t expect the FBI to say that we’re smuggling in enough champagne for a party of two hundred,” Emma said, thinking about Steele’s call. “If we don’t get through Canadian customs…” She hesitated. “I can’t figure out if that’s good or bad. It’s certainly a game changer.”

Mac eased through the kayakers without upsetting anyone. The sailboat had lowered yards of flapping cloth and gone back to good old diesel power.

“But since we don’t know what the game is,” he said, “we don’t know if this is opportunity knocking or an IED ticking by the roadside.”

She winced. “I don’t suppose Alara gave any hints to Steele. Beyond the champagne charade.”

“You don’t suppose correctly.”

She started to say something, then looked at him. “Was that grammatically possible?”

“Did you understand me?”

“Yes. Frightening, but true.”

“Then it was possible.”

Laughing, enjoying his quick mind, Emma put her head against Mac’s shoulder. And bit him.

He gave her a look that went from startled to smoky in one second flat.

“Shouldn’t we go through the border protocol again?” she asked as though nothing had happened.

“There are a lot of things I’d like to do. Doubt that they’re in the protocol manual.”

“You’d be surprised. The manual is very…thorough.”

“Some day you’re going to read it to me,” he said. “Thoroughly.”

Emma thought of all the dreary paragraphs and subparagraphs. “You’d fall asleep.”

“Try me.”

She wanted to. Really wanted to.

“Border protocol,” she said.

“Nothing we haven’t covered. You help me dock-”

“That’s a whole different thing we haven’t talked much about.”

“-then get back aboard immediately,” Mac said, ignoring her interruption. “I take our passports and Blackbird’s papers to the official on duty. He runs them through the computer, asks a few questions, and decides to search the boat or not. Either way, you don’t set foot on the dock again until the official tells you to, or I have an entry number, or we’re told to take our ugly American selves back south.”

She nodded.

“Are you worried that we won’t get the magic number?” he asked.

“I’d be surprised if we got turned back,” Emma said. “The FBI isn’t stupid. They’ll get in the CIA’s knickers just to remind everyone to play nice, but they won’t intentionally blow an op.”

“Unintentionally?”

“It happens. Too many agencies. Too many secrets. Too little real cooperation, because budgets depend on delivering departmental success stories. Partial gold stars for taking part in joint operations doesn’t get you as many points as getting a job done within your own department.”

“Sounds like branches of the military fighting over whose elite ops get used in a high-profile rescue,” Mac said, disgust clear in his voice. “None of the brass cares about the poor sucks caught behind enemy lines, just who gets the glory for saving the day.”

“The really good news is that our enemies are the same.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah. Petty, jealous, kiss-up, shit-down humans.”

“Huh,” he said. “Never looked at it that way.”

“Feel better?”

“I don’t know.”

She smiled rather grimly.

“Makes the amount of cooperation between Canadian and American border guards all the more impressive,” Mac said. “And I don’t mean the tit for tat of international politics. I mean that the Canadians and the U.S. exchange information on boats crossing the border. The entry number you get from Canada is logged in right next to your return number when you check back into the States.”

“I’m guessing that’s post-9/11,” she said.

He nodded. “Even with ‘heightened security,’ most of the yacht traffic between countries doesn’t get more of a look-over than a car full of tourists at the land border crossings.”

“Probably because the terrorists everyone is worried about don’t use expensive yachts for transport. Neither do smugglers. If you’re caught with contraband, it’s not worth the price of losing a multimillion-dollar yacht. Not cost effective.”

“But yutzes with small, fast boats and smaller brains…real cost effective,” Mac said.

“Cannon fodder.”

“What would a barbecue be without hot dogs?” Mac asked bitterly.

Emma remembered the reservation and wished she’d kept her smart mouth shut.