the bulkhead and knocking him breathless. Grisha slid down on the deck, gasping. The boat again put beam to the wind and rolled heavily to starboard, hanging for an impossibly long time before rolling back to port.
More seawater inundated them. The bridge deck swirled with the increasing water the scuppers couldn’t handle.
“Wheel!” Grisha gasped. “Get the wheel!”
Karpov threw himself on Grisha and hit him with three hammering blows. The vessel lurched in the moaning gale and crunched into a trough. Crockery shattered in the galley and Grisha twisted his body and threw Karpov off him.
He rolled over and pushed himself up, tried to hit Karpov but couldn’t find a target the few times he could put any strength behind his fist. Valari grabbed the wheel and turned it back and forth uselessly.
“Into the wind!” he screamed. “Turn into the wi—”
Karpov’s fist drove the oxygen from his lungs again. Grisha crashed back on the deck. The heavy man straddled him and began choking him with both hands.
Grisha stared at the hate-filled eyes in the bloody face. He dimly realized this was the first fight he’d been in since he got married. He felt his windpipe crackle and knew he was going to die very soon.
The lack of air became more pressing than the pain. He tried to struggle. But his arms lacked strength, pinned under the Russian’s massive weight. Spots swam redly before his eyes.
Karpov lurched violently, his jaw dropped open and his eyes lost focus. The terrible crushing at Grisha’s throat eased as the man collapsed on him. The medicinal scent of vodka mingled with his last shuddering breath.
Karpov suddenly rolled off Grisha and flopped on the deck, arms flung wide, and slid to the back of the boat in the quarter meter of water running across the deck. Valari pulled back the foot she had used to push Karpov’s corpse and stood braced against the console. Blood and rain dripped off the steel spike on the halibut club in her hands.
“Get up and drive this goddamned thing!” she screamed, waving the club.
Even though Grisha felt like lying there and going to sleep, he rolled over and dragged himself up into the captain’s chair bolted to the deck.
“This isn’t good weather for fishing,” he said in a croak and shook his head. He pointed the bow into the wind and increased the throttle.
He estimated the waves to be ten meters from trough to top.
Valari huddled against the far bulkhead, braced and sobbing. “What are we going to do?”
They were both soaked to the skin. The ocean temperature rarely warmed more than eight or ten degrees above freezing. With the squall blowing in excess of fifty knots, they both were in the depths of hypothermia.
“We’re going to live!” he said roughly, wincing at the pain in his throat. “We beat him, we can beat the storm!”
“I’m so cold!” she wailed.
“Go below, first locker on your right. Coats. Bring me one, too.”
The few minutes she took seemed like hours to him. She reemerged bundled in a coat too large for her and handed him a foul-weather jacket. He shrugged into the dry coat and knew he was going to be all right.
“We m-must get rid of that,” she said, nodding toward Karpov’s bloody body. She was all business again, the tears gone but teeth still chattering.
“B-but how?”
“Why do we have to get rid of him?”
“You f-fool! We’ve k-killed one of the Czar’s co-Cossacks! The Okhana will hang us both for that.”
“Find something heavy,” he said. “Tie it to him. Once we’re out of the weather, we’ll dump him over. Tell them he fell over the side when he was drunk. They’ll believe us.”
She gave him a look of respect and something else—he didn’t know what. Despite the heavy weather she conducted a quick search, and dragged out Karpov’s heavy tackle kit.
“Will this do?” Color had returned to her face and she no longer shivered. She only held the rail with one hand and didn’t watch her feet. Grisha decided she was a natural sailor.
“Open it. He brought that onboard. I want to see what’s in it.”
Valari grabbed the halibut club and brought it down with on the kit with a crash. The broken padlock skittered across the deck. She unsnapped the clasps and threw the lid open. Oily metal glistened from the box.
“What the hell?” Grisha said.
Valari pulled out a gleaming pistol, twisted it about while she examined it and released the rail to pull the slide open to look into the chamber. She had handled weapons before. Grisha felt his stomach drop. Other pistols rested in the box.
“Kharitikoff, nine-millimeter,” she announced. “Holds a clip of seven rounds, accurate up to twenty meters. An excellent weapon.”
Over the last seven years Grisha had carried many illegal items on his boat, but never this. He had two rifles locked in their rack down in the main cabin, but pistols?
“Do you know what they do to you if they catch you with an unauthorized handgun?” Grisha asked, horror in his voice. “They take your dominant hand off at the wrist!”
She looked at him for a long moment, then returned the pistol to the box and shut it. “Where’s the rope?”
Grisha pointed to another locker. “In there, but for now just hang on.”
The boat dropped heavily into another trough as he worked his way toward land.
2
It didn’t take Grisha long to realize this was the charter trip from hell. He’d puzzled at it ever since the broker called to book boat and skipper for a five-day fishing trip to New Archangel, the capital of Russian Amerika, three hundred miles west. Most fishermen arrived at the dock the same time he did, eager to pursue the
Grisha had arrived just after sunrise. The summer sun hung two hand widths above tree-covered Mt. Robare when he finally spied the big man lumbering toward him down the dock. The client dressed like a fisherman, complete with trolling pole and tackle kit, but he walked like a Cossackarrogantly precise in a ruler-straight line and exuding the certainty he owned the world. At the edge of the dock he stopped and stared into Grisha’s eyes, spoke Russian. “You are Charter Captain Grigoriy Grigorievich, yes?”
“Yes,” Grisha replied in English. “Are you my charter to New Archangel?”
The man casually threw his tackle kit over the gunwale. When Grisha caught it, he nearly collapsed with the surprising weight of the locked metal box. The man climbed on deck and looked around.
“You have vodka on board?”
Grisha glanced at the chronometer in the console, it was half past eight of the morning. Stale sweat and bowel gas eddied around the large man, who dropped into the other seat bolted to the bridge deck.
Grisha watched the man look around at his nautical surroundings, obviously for the first time. So what was in the tackle box? This was obviously a smuggling run and would provide much more money at the end of the trip than previously agreed.
“Yes, and beer, even some California whiskey.”
