CHAPTER 2
Finn
The Quartermaster is doing what she was built to do, which is run quiet on a moonless night with a hold full of contraband.
Marcus has her at five knots, engines barely a murmur so as not to draw attention.
I’ve navigated the Salish Sea a million times, both in real life and in my dreams. It’s a marginal body of water between British Columbia and Washington state wherein you’ll find the Strait of Georgia, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Puget Sound and an intricate web of connecting channels and waterways.
It’s a smuggler’s haven.
Tonight the inky black depths are as familiar to me as my own bed and the sound of water lapping at the hull is music to my ears.
I lift the night-vision binoculars and scan the waterline, portions of which are swallowed by the night and others illuminated by dock lights. I sweep back and forth, taking in every minute detail. My diligence is why I’m not in prison.
You don’t approach a dock without doing your homework.
“Got eyes on the Brown place yet?” Marcus asks.
His voice is the same low, rich rumble it’s been since I met him in a Bremerton dive bar nine years ago. He was fresh out of the navy, looking for work, and I was two years out of my one and only stint in prison.
“Working on it,” I say, soft enough not to be heard over the water but loud enough to carry back to him.
“Tide’s against us in about twenty,” he points out.
“I know.”
“Just letting you know.”
“I know.”
I hear his coffee thermos click against the wheel mount. He’s never without it… an addiction that will eventually eat his stomach from the inside out.
The Brown place is a private dock half a mile up the channel from where we’re sitting now. It’s owned by a retired commercial fisherman named Walt, who’s taken my money for the last six years to look the other way. He’s never once asked me what I was unloading.
This evening’s cargo is a Pieter de Hooch domestic interior painting.
A private collector in Bellevue bought it on the gray market for $2.
3 million. It was supposedly looted by Nazis from a collector in Amsterdam in 1942 and my cut is five percent to get it through these waterways and into the purchaser’s hands.
That’s $115,000 for a night’s work, which isn’t a bad way to live in my opinion.
Normally, Marcus would handle a run like this with our crew, often with Connie as his first mate, but this is a new buyer and he insisted I be the one to deliver.
Which is totally fine… new buyers get the boss.
I sweep the shore again and see the light on Walt’s porch. It’s his signal that it’s safe to dock. I shift my focus east, scanning past black water to the next slip about four hundred yards away.
I lower the binoculars. “Marcus.”
“Yeah?”
“Cut the engine.”
It quiets and The Quartermaster slows to a dead drift.
I find the dock again. It’s a small private slip and I know the owners.
I know every owner on this stretch of waterfront.
Fishing family, two brothers, both retired.
They head to Arizona every September and don’t come back until April.
It should be empty but tonight there’s a forty-foot boat tied off with no running lights and three men standing on the dock. A panel van sits at the end.
My stomach knots as I watch a small line of figures being walked off the boat with hands behind their backs.
“Fuck,” I growl.
“What is it, boss?” Marcus asks, his tone laced with tightness.
“Voronin’s men.”
Marcus moves to my side, and I hand him the binoculars. He lifts them to his face and mutters the same curse before handing the optics back to me.
I look through the ocular lenses again. “I see Sokolov, but I don’t recognize the others.”
“Fucking leeches.”
Leeches is too kind a word for the assholes I’m watching, Mikhail Sokolov being the worst of the worst. As Voronin’s number one man, he handles all the runs.
A fourth man has come down the bluff behind the dock, walking a woman in front of him at gunpoint.
She’s not part of the women coming off the boat.
She’s oddly dressed in tactical pants, a dark jacket and heavy boots.
There’s an expensive camera with a long lens hanging from her neck.
Reporter?
“That’s interesting,” I murmur.
“What’s that?”
“They picked up a watcher.”
He swears under his breath, and I wait to see what happens. “We might have to ditch tonight.”
It’s too risky to unload our cargo so close to another trafficker.
“We could head down to Duwamish,” he suggests. “Connie could meet us.”
“Maybe.”
One of the men puts a gun to the woman’s lower back as the others seem to be discussing something. The sound doesn’t reach us, but I can imagine the conversation. The woman’s body language appears composed.
Too composed.
Undercover cop?
Mikhail gestures with his free hand toward the water.
“They’re going to kill her,” I say, the knots in my stomach tightening. I know what fate awaits those women being loaded into the van, but at least they’re likely to live.
This other woman though?
Not a chance.
“What do you want to do?” Marcus asks.
The instinct is to cut bait and run. Not only do I not want to be a witness to human trafficking going down, if that is a cop and there are others around, I don’t want to get caught with my own illegal cargo. I’m not going back to prison.
I calculate scenarios, weighing the risk of waiting. I consider intervening. I could fire a warning shot from the pistol strapped to my leg and perhaps it would be enough to make them scatter.
But that could have future deadly consequences if I’m seen.
I’ve spent years cultivating a relationship with Voronin to share these waterways.
It’s been a mutual agreement to leave each other alone, and if I were to interfere in his business, it would earn me a bullet to the head.
Each of my crew would pay the price as well.
Anatoli Voronin is the most ruthless person I’ve ever known.
“Need to make a decision,” Marcus urges.
My conscience is at war. “Just wait a minute.”
The woman’s head swivels, taking in the three men surrounding her. I watch as her body goes still and I can sense something’s about to happen.
When it does, it catches everyone by surprise. She strikes out with a vicious kick to Mikhail’s knee, and he buckles with a scream of pain that carries cleanly over the water.
She’s already sprinting before he hits the dock and Marcus exhales a gasp of respect as he watches beside me.
“Start the engine,” I tell him, and he moves quickly. It turns over with a deep wet purr just as the woman executes an impressive dive into the dark waters.
Voronin’s men draw their guns and race to the end of the dock. Gunshots crack and I wince, wondering if a bullet will find the woman and distantly, if someone will call the police.
I hear three, five, seven shots as they fire randomly into the general area where she went in. They aim closer to the dock, perhaps assuming she’ll surface close to them.
If she’s smart, she’ll swim away.
I make the decision that could cost me everything, moving toward Marcus. “Put us in her direction.”
He angles The Quartermaster into the current and I move to the bow, my eyes searching the midnight water.
“How long can she stay under?” Marcus asks.
“Sixty seconds in that water. Maybe ninety if she’s strong.”
I glance at my watch. It’s been thirty.
Voronin’s men fan out across the dock, looking over the edges, guns at the ready to shoot the woman if her head pops up.
And then I see her, or at least I think it’s her. A small black blob on the surface, but it goes under again.
Fuck… is she drowning? I put the binoculars back to my face.
But no… she pops back up again, seeming to tread water now.
“Ten degrees east,” I call back to Marcus. “And cut the engine again.”
It’s a risk, calling out to Marcus, but I didn’t want to run over the lady. Unfortunately, the men heard me… their heads whipping our way, peering into the darkness. There’s no way they can see us, and with the engine dead, they can’t hear now, but they know someone’s out here.
“Untie the fucking boat,” Mikhail yells at one of the men. “Find the fucking woman.”
“Goddamn it,” I mutter as I pull my pistol free of the leg strap.
I aim in their direction, high enough I won’t hit anything, and fire a warning shot.
The men duck, one of them hitting the dock face first. Another raises his gun, but Mikhail slaps at his arm. “Get in the van and go.”
Two of them race down the dock, launch themselves into the front, and peel out of there with their cargo. Those women are unfortunately lost.
Mikhail and the other men move to the boat.
“Get ready to hightail it out of here,” I warn Marcus and fire one more shot toward the dock to stall Voronin’s goons.
They duck again just as we’re sliding up adjacent to the woman.
I move to the stern as the current carries us to her. She’s twenty feet out. The only thing I can really see is the white of her face, looking right at us.
She’s now ten feet off the stern and I grab a long-handled hook. Leaning over the edge, I say, “Grab on.”
Water splashes as she makes a lunge for it and I feel the tension, hoping she’s holding tight as I pull her in.
Marcus joins me and we manage to haul her up and over the edge, where she flops on the deck gasping and coughing.
“Get us out of here,” I tell Marcus, but he’s already at the wheel and firing the engine to life. I glance back at the dock and the men have their vessel untied, scrambling to push off.
Marcus guns the engine, and I hold on to the rail as the bow lifts and the propellers dig down into the current. We shoot into the night, heading south.
I glance back over my shoulder as the dock and Voronin’s men recede. I’m confident they couldn’t see us at all, but I’m not so confident they can’t fathom a guess as to who might have shot at them. They know it’s not law enforcement because they don’t shoot and run.