Death Echo

The owner laughed. “That explains it. He spent a lot of time on his phone. Didn’t look like he enjoyed it. In fact, he was heading home real quick, taking the shortest way.”

Emma sensed Mac’s sudden intensity, but nothing showed on his surface.

“You mean he’s going down the outside?” Mac asked, shaking his head. “Damn fool. Weather is tricky this time of year.”

“I said something about that. He just kept on buying charts from the Brooks Peninsula all the way to Bamfield. I didn’t have any for farther south. One of the men, the taller one, was screaming about not piloting the whole west side without charts, and the other guy said they’d pick up the rest in Tofino, since they were going to have to fuel there anyway.”

Mac was too busy clamping down on his control to make a polite and casual reply.

Son of a bitch!

Nobody had expected anyone to take on the Pacific Ocean in autumn in a Blackbird twin designed for the very different waters of the Inside Passage.

The owner shrugged. “Man’s captain of his own boat. I just put fuel on board and rang up the sale.”

“He never was real good at listening,” Mac said.

“He’s got a sound boat underneath him, for a yacht.” The owner stepped away for a moment to flip on a fuel pump. “They figured to run close to twenty knots, be home in eighteen hours. I looked at the numbers on a big chart and it came to seven hundred kilometers, give or take.”

“He’s shooting for Seattle?” Mac asked. “All at once?”

The owner laughed. “Yeah, his wife must have put fire up his butt. He wasn’t entirely stupid, though. He listened when I told him to head two-hundred-seventy degrees for twenty minutes, long enough to miss the big reef out there, before he headed south.”

Mac remembered the reef. Just one of the many treacherous features of the beautiful, wild stretch of ocean that thundered along the west side of Vancouver Island.

“I saw him make the turn a little later,” the owner said, tugging her cap down with an automatic gesture. “He was throwing a bow wave like a customs cutter on a hot run. Made my kidneys ache to look at it.” She sighed. “That’s why I got out of the crabbing business in Alaska. Didn’t have the kidneys for it.”

“Seattle in eighteen hours. Wow,” Emma said. It will take an airplane to catch them.

“Big storm coming, too,” the owner added absently, looking around the fuel dock. “Guess he plans to beat it to Seattle. Hope he makes it.”

Mac and Emma looked at each other, wondering the same thing.

Would it be good or bad if Blackbird’s twin sinks?

Suddenly the owner loped off to help an old yacht that was making hard work of landing at the fuel dock. Apparently the captain was single-handing the boat.

Mac took Emma’s arm and urged her back to the seaplane. She hurried along beside him.

“Did I understand that correctly?” she asked in a low voice.

“Lovich and Amanar are taking the outside route. Stupid bastards.”

“Why? It fooled us.”

“Blackbird wasn’t built for ocean storms,” Mac said simply. “She can take swells in decent weather, even lousy weather, but without a stabilizer, the crew will get hammered real good. A big enough wave over the beam could blow out all her side windows and sink her.”

“God.” Emma swallowed. “Is that likely?”

“She’s well built. Lovich and Amanar may be greedy, but they’re good captains on the water. Their spines will hate them, and their stomachs will be slamming against their brains, but without bad luck they’ll get through.”

“What is Tofino?” she asked.

“A port about three-quarters of the way down the west side of Vancouver Island.”

“Reliable fuel?” she asked.

“Yes,” Mac said.

“Can our plane reach Tofino before Lovich and Amanar refuel?”

“That’s the easy part.”

Emma didn’t ask about the hard part. She already knew.

67

DAY SIX

WEST SIDE OF VANCOUVER ISLAND

5:12 P.M.

Emma searched the Pacific Ocean beneath her through binoculars. The slanting light and broken clouds-and her weary eyes-made shadows that looked like black-hulled ships.

At her side, Mac searched between the plane and the ragged black line of shore. Waves that surged rather than broke against cliffs flashed white against the darkening land.

She saw a shadowy black hull, lifted the glasses enough to rub her eyes, and focused again. The hull was still there.

Then it wasn’t.

With fingers that wanted to tremble, she refined the focus. The silhouette of a ship settled into the clear viewing field of her binoculars. She wanted to use the computerized zoom feature, but was afraid to lose contact with the shadow in any way.

“Mac.”

The huskiness of her voice brought every nerve alive in him. “Here.”

“About two-thirty. Out to sea. When you find it, zoom in.”

He found the ship quickly, zoomed in. “Hello, Blackbird. Or Black Swan. Aren’t you a beauty.”

“ID positive?” she asked.

“Unless someone built a triplet, that’s our baby.”

The certainty in his voice was as unmistakable as the elegant silhouette sliding down the side of a wave.

“Want me to circle?” the pilot asked.

“No,” Emma and Mac said as one.

“Just keep on like you’re flying in to one of the remote resorts on the west side,” Mac said.

“When we’re out of sight of the boat, go straight to Tofino,” Emma added.

“Roger.”

The plane kept on a course that angled slowly away from the boat. Before it was out of sight, Emma was on her special phone.

Grace answered immediately. “Anything?”

“We found a ship identical to Blackbird going down the west side of Vancouver Island,” Emma said.

“Thank you, God,” Grace breathed. “Above or below Tofino?”

“Above.”

Grace sighed more thanks into the phone. Then her voice became precise, efficient. “I have permission for you to repossess a ship of Black Swan’s description.”

“Repo? As in steal?”

“Stealing is illegal. Repossessing is part of a legal process.”

“Um, right,” Emma said, feeling an absurd kind of laughter tickling her throat. “So we go to the local cops and-”

“We’d rather you didn’t,” Grace cut in. “The insurance company paid off Black Swan, which means that they legally own the ship if and when it is found. However, it would be a much smoother