Kyle straightened in his chair. His childhood buddy Hugh Rincon was not an alarmist. If Hugh thought there was a terrorist threat from the Far East presenting itself to a western American port sometime in the near future, then his buddy Kyle was going to take it seriously. All three of them, he and Hugh and Sara, too, had family in Alaska.
He called the local Coast Guard member of his task force. “Joe? Kyle. I’m headed out of the office. Can I drop by?”
He shrugged into his coat on the way out. “I’m going down to the port. I’ll be back after lunch,” he told the receptionist. One of the joys of being the boss was, so long as your case file didn’t back up, nobody looked over your shoulder.
Eve’s eyes followed him all the way to the elevator. Inside, he turned and winked at her. She blushed. She was just a kid, barely twenty years old, fresh out of Charter College with an associate degree in computers. He was well aware that she had a slight crush on him. He worried all the way down to the garage that he should have told her to get out of town, too.
Joe’s office was eleven blocks down the street from Kyle’s, in a handsome building erected right where Anchorage began a short slide into Knik Arm. “You know you’re toast when the next big one hits,” Kyle said.
Joe Brenner shook his hand warmly. “Yeah, but I’ll have a great view on the way down.” Behind him the Knik was beginning to fill up with bergs of ice, created by the freezing temperatures and broken by the forty-foot rise and fall of the tide. A containership was nosing into the bergs on the far side of the Knik, its hull crusted with sea spray. It was riding right down on the Plimsoll line.
Kyle thought of Hugh and wondered what the ship was carrying in its hold.
He turned. Joe Brenner was a tall, trim, broad-shouldered, square-jawed man in Coast Guard blue, with brown hair, blue eyes, and a charming manner. He was a weather forecaster on a local television station. He was also a commander in the Coast Guard Reserve who had been called up after 9/11. He still made the occasional 10:00 p.m. newscast, and he was something of a local heartthrob, because for some inexplicable reason best known only to the great television audience weather forecasters got all the action.
“Lately,” he said to Kyle with an engaging grin, “the worst part of this job has been chasing people who watch me on the news away from the gate.”
“Any potential there?”
Joe shook his head. “Nah,” he said, a little sadly. “All jailbait.”
“Shame.”
“Yeah.”
They communed together in silence over this grievous misfortune.
Kyle jerked his head at the window. “I see the CSX Anchorage is on its way in.”
“Yeah,” Joe said, and got to his feet to stand next to Kyle. “Riding low in the water.”
“I was noticing. What’re they carrying?”
Joe cocked an eyebrow. “What’s up?”
Kyle shrugged. “Curious.”
Joe didn’t believe him. “Well, you’d have to ask the port about that.”
“Okay. Wanna go for a ride?”
“Down to the port?”
“Yeah?”
“You sure you want to do that?”
Kyle’s brow creased. “Why wouldn’t I?”
Joe grinned at some secret joke. “Upon your own head be it.”
The Port of Anchorage was a three-story building painted beige with red trim, accented with oversized porthole-style windows. The manager was a large young man with the pink clear skin of a baby’s bottom and fine flyaway blond hair. Greg Wladislaw loved his job and he was a born cheerleader, anxious, even eager, to share every bit of this most wonderful job with anyone who didn’t move fast and far enough out of range first. He was devastated not to have an answer for Kyle as to the contents of the containership docking behind him. “We don’t have the manifests here, you understand. That’ll be over at Horizon with their agent. I can call, if you like. Or take you over and introduce you.”
Kyle said, “Can you tell me about traffic in and out of the port of Anchorage? When and what kind?”
Indeed Wladislaw could. “We get in two domestic ships a week, one Horizon on Sunday and one Tote on Tuesday. We’ve just started getting a third carrier in.” He dropped his voice, as if he were imparting a state secret to a select, trusted few. “Some are foreign carriers.”
If he was expecting expressions of awe and amazement he was disappointed. “Really?” Kyle said. “How often?”
“Once a week, out of Asia.”
“Asia?” Kyle said. “What ports?”
“Hong Kong-well, China now, I guess-Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore.”
“Mmm,” Kyle said. “That it?”
Wladislaw was shocked at the very suggestion. “Oh no, we have petroleum tankers coming in and out, too.”
“Any ships come in from Russia?”
Wladislaw made a face. “What do they have that we want to buy?”
“Point taken. How often do the petroleum tankers come in?”
“One tanker a month,” Wladislaw said proudly.
It wasn’t exactly Long Beach, Kyle thought, and felt relieved. Not enough traffic to hide something the size of a freighter in. Maybe Hugh was wrong. He looked out the window at the dock, which appeared to stretch from the Knik River bridge to Turnagain Arm. The three men watched as three C-130s came spiraling in from the north to touch down at Elmendorf Air Force Base’s runway, which ended on the edge of the bluff immediately above the port. A subsequent roar of engines indicated a takeoff immediately following. Aircrews doing touch-and-goes, to keep their skills sharp.
“Man, I love those big old Hercs,” Joe said. “Been flying for fifty years. No place they can’t get into or out of. Ever cop a ride in one?”
Kyle nodded. “I got to go out to Savoonga with the Alaska Air National Guard. A fun trip. Noisy, though.”
“Yeah, I pack earplugs.”
“I’ll remember that for next time. So,” Kyle said, turning to Greg, “you only get one ship in at a time?”
“Oh, no!” Wladislaw said, clearly appalled at the suggestion. He hustled Kyle and Joe to the outer office to where an aerial photograph the size of a tablecloth dominated one wall. It showed the port of Anchorage on a sunny summer day and every inch of the dock of the port used up by four ships moored bow to stern along it. “Two containerships and two petroleum tankers, all on the same day,” Wladislaw said proudly.
“Must have been a busy day.”
Wladislaw nodded vigorously. “You bet. You should come down on a ship day, Special Agent Chase. It’s a real zoo. An organized zoo,” he hastened to add.
“It’s Kyle, Greg, and I’ll take you up on that. Next week, maybe.”
Wladislaw beamed. “Anything else I can help you with?”
“What kinds of goods move through here?”
Wladislaw spread his hands expansively. “What kinds don’t would be an easier question to answer.” He smiled widely at Kyle, and Kyle had to resist the temptation to scratch Wladislaw behind the ears. “The port of Anchorage supplies ninety percent of the population of Alaska. What do you drive?”
Startled to be asked a question instead of being answered, Kyle had to think. “Ah, Subaru Legacy.”
Wladislaw nodded approvingly. “Family man, am I right? But with style.”
Behind Wladislaw, Joe rolled his eyes. It wasn’t the first time.
“Well, that Subaru came in on one of those ships. So did the gas to power it. So did the parts and oil your dealer uses to service it. Got snow tires?”
“Yup,” Kyle said. Wladislaw was so delighted with his game that Kyle didn’t have the heart to shut him down. “All came through this port, did it?”
Wladislaw beamed at him the way a teacher smiled at a promising pupil. “Yes, it did. The raisins in your oatmeal, the oatmeal, the bowl you eat it out of, and the spoon you eat it with.” Wladislaw patted the aerial photograph proudly. “All through the port of Anchorage. Apples to zinc, straight from the port to your pantry shelves.”
Kyle looked toward the windows, at the ice choking the narrow neck of Knik Arm between Anchorage and Point MacKenzie. “Has the port ever been shut down?”