Fire and ice (26 page)

"Dutch Girl Island," Wolfe said finally. "About ten miles north."

"Roger that," Wy said. She goosed the Cub and fifteen minutes later they were circling three boats off a round island that rose straight up out of the sea to a flattish, rounded peak. Two rocky ridges jutted out of the sea to the east and west, forming a vague similarity to a Dutch girl's winged cap, at low tide and from a distance. Life clutched tenaciously to the steep sides in the form of thick grass and brush and a swarm of slender black seabirds. "What are they?" Liam said.

Wy looked through her binoculars. "Murres, I think." She let the lenses wander. "Well, well," she said with an undertone of excitement that made Liam sit up. "What have we here?"

She put the Cub in a slow, wide circle, and Liam looked out the window through his binoculars.

About five miles off the southwest side of the island he saw a silver-gray layer just beneath the green surface that seemed to go on forever, in every direction.

"Is that them?" Liam said in disbelief. He'd never seen so many fish in one place in his life.

"Oh my," Wy breathed. "Oh my my. And aren't they balling up nicely."

"That means they're about to spawn?"

"That's what that means," Wy said. She sounded tense and absorbed, and Liam shut up and let her concentrate. His eyes roved the sky for other traffic. So far, nothing.

Wy didn't dare complete more than one circle for fear that someone else, another spotter or a crew member of one of the hundreds of boats in the area, would see her and guess what they had found. She rolled out and headed straight for Wolfe's three-boat flotilla. When she got there she dropped down to fifty feet off the deck and folded up the left-hand window. Even with earphones clamped to his head the rush of air and the roar of the engine was deafening. Liam wanted to pray but he was so scared he forgot how, and he'd stopped believing in God a long time ago anyway.

Wolfe had come out of the cabin on his flying bridge and stared upward. The expression on his face was clearly visible, and the words on his lips easily read. "What the fuck do you think you're doing, Chouinard?" Next to him stood the immediately recognizable bulk of Kirk Mulder.

Wy leaned her head out the window and yelled, "Follow me!" She circled the boats once for emphasis and headed back to the ball of fish.

Liam managed to reswallow his heart and said, "Why didn't you just call him on the radio?"

"I was scared somebody might be listening in."

"I thought all the radios were scrambled."

"They are."

Not the trusting type, Wyanet Chouinard.

"Please, please, please," Liam heard her mutter over the earphones, "Please, please, please don't let anyone beat us to it, please, please, please. You watching for traffic, Campbell?"

He hadn't been, and jerked his eyes guiltily to the skies. There were six or seven specks on the horizon, but nothing nearby. "All clear. So far so good."

"Good." Five minutes more and Wy said, "There's the little sonsabitches!" Again, she didn't dare sit on them for fear of calling attention and made a wide sweep around Dutch Girl Island instead, trying to look as if she hadn't found anything and was still searching. "What time is it?"

Liam checked his watch. "Eleven forty-eight."

"Okay."

Liam, caught between Wy's tension and his own fear, knew a compulsion to talk, about anything. "How big is that boat of Wolfe's?"

"Fifty-six feet," Wy said.

"How much you figure it cost?"

"The hull price was seven hundred thousand. With electronics, total price comes close to a million. Or so he likes to brag in the bars."

Liam whistled. "I can't even imagine what payments on a boat like that would be."

Wy snorted. "Try insurance."

"Yikes."

"Yeah. You can make a lot of money fishing, but you've got to spend a lot first."

They made another deceptively unhurried turn. There was a plane growing larger on the northern horizon. Liam poked Wy and pointed. "I know, I saw him. That's Miller Gorman, the guy in the 172 on floats who tried to sideswipe us earlier. He's spotted us, all right. But here comes the cavalry."

She banked the plane and Liam caught a glimpse of three boats approaching, all of them on the step with full white wakes. "The other two boats are a lot smaller."

"Thirty-two feet each," Wy agreed. "They're rerigged gillnetters. Most herring boats are. Wolfe's an exception. He does well enough to be an exception. Boat one, you read me?"

Wolfe's voice, unmistakable in its arrogant assurance, replied, "Read you five by, flygirl. I see them."

"I figure three hundred tons."

Wolfe's laugh was cut off by static, but his words came through loud and clear. "Try four."

"Four hundred tons?" Liam said. "Four hundred tons? As in fourteen hundred dollars per ton?" He tried to work it out in his head but again the number of zeroes defeated him.

"As in fifteen percent of fourteen hundred times four hundred tons," Wy said, her voice rich with satisfaction. Beneath it, because he was listening for it, Liam could hear the undercurrent of heartfelt relief. "Now all we've got to do is make sure we get most of 'em."

The tension and excitement were manifest in the set of her shoulders as she put the plane into a sweeping left circle, as they passed over it with the southwestern side of Dutch Girl Island always on their left. Other boats were arriving. Liam poked and pointed. "Yeah," Wy said, "there are always skippers watching what Cecil's doing. They know he's not going to get his nets wet unless--"

A new voice came on the air. "This is the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, announcing an opening for herring fishing in the Riggins Bay District. This opening will last for twenty minutes, beginning at twelve o'clock today. Five minutes to the opening."

"Twenty minutes!" Liam yelped. "We're doing all this for twenty lousy minutes' worth of fishing?"

Her sigh was audible in the earphones even over the noise of the engine. "Liam, one year the whole season was twenty minutes. We're just lucky we didn't pull our quota three days ago, that we've got another shot at it."

"Four minutes to the opening," the disembodied voice intoned.

"Shit," Liam said, and poked and pointed at a big blue and white plane approaching from the sea.

"Yeah, Fish and Game's 206," Wy said. "Don't worry, they'll stand off. They're just here to keep us honest."

"How do they do that?" Liam said, watching the float plane with his own service's insignia on the side climb to a higher altitude. The Fish and Wildlife Protection officers were state troopers, too. They went through the same training he did, but enforced the fish and game laws throughout the state, or tried to. Liam didn't envy them that task; he'd rather disarm an axe murderer before trying to relieve a rabid sport fisherman of his illegally caught king salmon, any day.

"They've got cameras with clocks in them bolted to the fuselage, and they're aiming them at the boats below. They'll know if we put our nets in the water one second before we should, or keep them there one second longer than we should."

"What happens if we do either of those things?"

"Then Cecil could probably kiss his million-dollar boat goodbye."

"They'd confiscate it?"

"You bet your ass. And, more important, we wouldn't get paid."

"Three minutes to the opening."

"Cecil," Wy said, "stay on course for another minute. Alex, stand to and prepare to drop your skiff where you are. Mike, you've got company, coming up hard astern."

Liam saw two more boats approaching. The second of the smaller boats in Wolfe's miniflotilla broke off from the steadily increasing ball of herring and put itself in the way of the oncoming boats. Liam poked and pointed. "Goddammit," Wy swore as the Cessna 172 insinuated itself into their circle. "It's okay, we got 'em, we got 'em." Barely audible over the headphones, Liam heard her say, "Please let us have them, please let us have them."

"Two minutes to the opening."

The two new boats broke ranks, one circling around Wolfe's second gillnetter, or Mike, which Liam supposed was the skipper's name. "Mike, stay on the first boat," Wy ordered. "Cecil, you've got company."

The big boat was on the other side of the ball of herring. It looked twice as large and three times as powerful as the little gillnetter heading over to challenge it. Wolfe's voice was elaborately casual. "What company? Oh, you mean that little itty-bitty skiff over there? I can hardly make him out, the little peckerhead's so tiny."

"Cecil--"

"One minute to the opening."

Cecil--by now Liam, too, was calling the boats by the names of their skippers--made a course correction and found itself directly in the path of the oncoming vessel. "Goddammit, Cecil, you're on his portside, he has right-of-way!"

"Is that a fact?" Wolfe sounded mildly surprised.

Twenty minutes was going to be just long enough for a fisherman on his toes to scoop up as many herring as he could. "With a ball of herring this bunched together," Wy said, her voice taut with excitement and anticipation and, yes, unabashed greed, "we're going to beat the hell out of them!"

Liam took this to mean that they were going to catch a lot of fish, as long as they could beat the other fishermen to them, and as long as-- "Watch out!" he yelled, slapping the side of Wy's head as the 172 nearly brushed their wing with a float--as long as they survived the experiment.

"Miller, watch your goddamn six!" Wy roared.

"Ten seconds to the opening," the expressionless voice droned. "Eight seconds, seven seconds, six seconds, five, four, three, two, one, open; the herring season for the Riggins Bay District is open."

Suddenly Liam was too busy to be scared.

Wy's voice, excited but controlled, sounded continually in his ears. "All boats, drop your skiffs, now! Cecil, hard left rudder, hard left rudder!"

"Wy, watch it, traffic, blue plane with floats ten o'clock descending!"

"Alex, steady as you go, you got 'em, you got 'em!"

"Wy, watch out, you're coming up too fast on that red plane, back off, back off, back off!"

"Mike, come left, come left, come left, don't let him get around you!"

"Wy, Cub at two o'clock, go left, go left, your other left, dammit!"

Suddenly it seemed that the sky was filled with planes and the water with boats. Liam didn't have time to wonder where they'd all come from; all he could do was point and poke and prod and slap and kick and yell, all as Wy watched the water and directed the boats.

A hundred feet beneath the tight circle Wy had locked the Cub into, the fishing boats launched their skiffs. These weren't dories with little 40-horsepower Evinrudes, but powerboats with 250- to 300-horsepower outboards that were on the step practically before their hulls hit the water.

The way it worked was this. One end of the purse seine was fastened to the skiff, the other end to the boat. The idea was for the skiff to make a large circle around as many herring as possible and head back for the mother boat, which would then draw the bottom of the seine together, making a bag of the net. From there, they would use the boom to lift the net into the boat, or brail the fish into the hold one large scoop at a time, or deliver the fish to a waiting tender --Liam caught distant glimpses of three larger boats hanging around the perimeter of the action, but they weren't about to run into him so he ignored them. "Watch it, that green plane--son of a bitch!"

The green plane's pilot misjudged his altitude and the 172's speed and his gear glanced off the left wing of the 172 as it was coming up from behind. The 172's wing dipped sharply waterward, started to spin, and recovered, pulling up and banking right, out of the circle.

Something wet running into his eyes blinded him for a moment. Liam wiped it away and discovered that sweat was pouring down his forehead in rivulets. In front of him Wy was oblivious, all her attention trained on the water below. "Yes! Okay, Cecil, close it up, close it up, close it up!"

The expressionless voice came over the headphones. "Ten minutes remaining in the opening; I say again, ten minutes remaining in the Riggins Bay herring opener."

"Mike, you've got ten minutes to lose that jerk and set your net! Alex, hard right rudder, you got nothing but net if you close it up now! Cecil, you still got company off your stern, watch out he doesn't foul your seine!"

One of the two poaching gillnetters was still being fended off by Mike's boat, every zig of the gillnetter being met by a zag from Mike's. The boat tagging Cecil had dropped his skiff and was preparing to make a run for the fish.

Liam saw water boil up from Wolfe's stern, and the big seiner surged forward and ran right over the top of the other boat's skiff. The man in it dove over the side at the last possible moment, the prop of the big seiner passing over the exact spot he'd been standing not three seconds before.

"Jesus Christ," Liam said in disbelief.

"Nine minutes to closing; I say again, nine minutes to closing."

"Watch the sky, Campbell!" Wy snapped. "Close it up, Cecil, close it up, you've got nine minutes!"