This was going to be his last trip, he realized, and with the decision made, he felt almost lighthearted. One more trip, and home for good.

Fang curled more tightly ship’s helmsman wasn’t doing much to compensate, either. Fang foresaw an overhaul in the ship’s engine room in the not too distant future.

By now all of Smith’s men were puking, some of them just hanging their heads over the sides of their hammocks and others taking turns kneeling in front of the portable toilet. The miasma of vomit and sour sweat mingled with the smell of diesel exhaust creeping into the container. It was enough to make even Fang nauseous. He pulled his sleeping bag over his nose and thought again of that plump wife in Shanghai, with a sturdy son he could raise to be a real seaman, with his own shipping line bankrolled by his father.

This was going to be his last trip, he realized, and with the decision made, he felt almost lighthearted. One more trip, and home for good.

Fang curled more tightly into his sleeping bag and drifted off to the sleep of the righteous.

JANUARY

OH BOARD THE USGG CUTTER SOJOURNER TRUTH

UNDER THE SURE HAND of Chief Edelen the Sojourner Truth sidled away from the dock at Dutch Harbor like a hooker caught by a cop in the act of propositioning a John, only with a lot more style. The sky was gray and so was the attitude of most of the crew.

This had not been the Sojourner Truth’s best port call. Two underage seamen had spent the better part of their first night in port at Tommy’s Elbow Room and most of their second day and night confined to quarters, although most of that had been spent crouched over toilets in the head. Together they had been the proximate cause of three injuries bad enough for the victims to be taken to the hospital and damages to the Elbow Room and a passing pickup truck in excess of five thousand dollars. It was one seaman’s first offense and the other’s second. Ensign Ryan had been the investigating officer. Still smarting from the harangue he had received from the owner of the hotel to which the two seamen had retreated, which harangue repeatedly featured the phrase “fucking Coasties,” his report on the incident had been tart and testy. Sara, still smarting from a lengthy conversation with the Dutch Harbor police chief, had signed off on the report without her usual diplomatic toning down of pejorative adjectives and passed it up to the captain.

The captain, still smarting from the two-hour delay in getting away from the dock, was disinclined toward forgiveness. He convened captain’s mast before they were all the way out of Unalaska Bay in the hangar in front of all the crew not on watch, instead of in the relative privacy of the wardroom. The two seamen departed broken in rank with thirty days’ restriction, thirty days’ extra duty, their wages attached to pay for damages incurred, and with substantial portions of their asses missing. The captain vented the rest of his spleen on a pithy indictment of a dozen other crewmen who had had the bad timing to be present at the scene, including Petty Officer Barnette, all of whom he held accountable for not keeping their fellow crewmen from “steering into Stupidland.” The crew didn’t know who to be more pissed off at for that blanket condemnation, the captain or the offending crew members. PO Barnette, who had made an honest effort to break up the fight, was particularly stung.

It didn’t help that the C-130 from Kodiak hadn’t made it in with their last shipment of mail, and when they learned that District 17 had tasked them with patrolling the Maritime Boundary Line there was very nearly a mutiny. “There’s nothing going on up there this time of year!” PO Barnette said when informed. “Ma’am,” he added, a lot quicker than usual, when Sara glared at him.

To a man and a woman everyone on board hated patrolling the MBL. Basically they were there to show the flag. Most of the time the American side of the line was empty of vessels, all the fishing going on on the other side, in Russian territorial waters, which meant no boarding opportunities except for the occasional marine research vessel.

And it was fresh in everyone’s memory that even when a foreign flag-say a Russian fishing vessel-did cross the MBL into U.S. territory, and even when a Coast Guard cutter-oh, say the Sojourner Truth- caught them half a mile the wrong side of the MBL with their nets in U.S. waters and those nets full of U.S. fish, when said fishing vessel hightailed itself back across the line into Russian territory the cutter was held on the U.S. side, fuming, waiting for District to give them permission to cross the line in hot pursuit.

Said permission, if and when it came, was always too late. Such had been the case the previous August, when District made them wait for the Russian Federal Border Service to show up and escort them across, thirty-six hours later. By then the illegal catch had been long since processed into unidentifiable filets packed deep in an endless line of refrigerated freight containers, the location data on the GPS altered or erased, and the taste of hot pursuit was cold ashes in Coastie mouths.

No, patrolling the Maritime Boundary Line was not an ingredient in any recipe for improving shipboard morale. Sara encouraged the training teams to pile on the fire and damage control drills and helo launches in the hope that it would keep the crew too tired to sulk. She and the senior chief had also organized a Trivial Pursuit championship for this leg of the trip, and the officers would be making pizza that Saturday in the galley, an event the crew always enjoyed, but they all knew it would take awhile before the goodwill kicked in.

She wondered how the miscreants were being treated by their fellow crew members below, but not for long and not with very much sympathy. She sat at her desk, brooding over the inevitable stack of reports, crew assignments, supply orders, and District communiques.

She worked where she slept, in the forwardmost stateroom in officer country, a step and a stairway from another set of stairs leading to the comm deck and the captain’s cabin, which was located directly beneath the bridge. XOs, mercifully, slept alone. She used the upper bunk in her room as a rotating library, but every privilege comes with a price. A stateroom to herself meant that under way there was no getting away from the job. There were two telephones in her stateroom, one of which was Velcroed to the head of her bunk.

As it should be, she told herself. Suck it up, Lange, and stop feeling sorry for yourself.

There was a knock at the door and she looked up. “Sparks? What’s up?”

Sparks was the petty officer on duty in communications. He handed her an e-mail and made best speed in the other direction. She read it. “Sparks! Get back here!”

He returned, reluctantly. She read it again, letting him wait. She even read it a third time, hoping against hope that the letters would form new words. They didn’t. “I am ordering you to tell me that this is a joke.”

He looked as apologetic as his naturally mischievous face was capable of. “It’s not a joke, XO. I confirmed, and you know how they are, they’ve already held a press conference from the bridge of their ship. I e-mailed my wife and had her check CNN. It’s already aired. They’re en route, all right. They may even beat us back to the line.”

“You’re fired,” Sara said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Sparks said, and added hopefully, “Maybe the Russians will sink ‘em.”

“I wish. Thanks, Sparks.”

Correctly reading this statement as his dismissal, he returned to his duty station. Sara relieved her feelings with an uncharacteristic burst of profanity that earned an admiring glance from a passing seaman, and called the captain. “Captain, we’ve just received a heads-up from District. The Greenpeace vessel Sunrise Warrior is en route to the Maritime Boundary Line.”