It was forty-seven feet, eighteen tons (incredibly light for a boat of this size), and over a million dollars of mean, robust, Coast Guard machine.

  “Thanks for having me.” If she was going to pretend to play it light, so could he.

  She watched him for a long moment, then shrugged. “Vicks and Marnham. Get him suited up to get wet. You don’t mind getting wet, do you?”

  “No, ma’am,” seemed the safest answer. But he risked adding, “Though usually I’m more of a track-and-field guy.” Because why the hell not?

  4

  Sarah managed to keep the smile off her face until she was turned away. The float crew would get him in a suit while she finished checking over the pre-mission list.

  Javits came over with his engineer’s sign-off that all of his systems were good to go and she sent him to suit up as well.

  Track and field.

  He had the shape for it. At first she’d thought it was a swimmer’s form, all lean except for legs and shoulders. That how you knew a true rescue swimmer. Most swimmers built up the big shoulders, but the real top guys—like Vicks and Marnham—had thighs of steel as well.

  Mr. Torres had surprised her. She’d expected a mouse of a man who never crawled out from his mom’s basement except to get his delivery pizza. Six foot of strapping Latino with dark curly hair, olive skin, and a bright smile just didn’t fit her mental image. Neither did track-and-field. He was built for it with a top-swimmer’s legs filling out his jeans. Though while his shoulders were good, they weren’t quite broad enough to be a USCG swimmer.

  That’s what almost made her laugh in his face. How many times had Senior Chief McAllister lambasted her over these last months about making assumptions?

  “Every situation is an unknown. Even if you know it, it’s an unknown. Next time you bump up against a log, it’s going to be a WWII floating mine with your name carved in the rust. Next time you pull up to help a dismasted sailboat, it’s going to be the conning tower of a narco-submarine and they’re going to come out guns blazing to take your boat. You gonna give it to them, Goodwin?”

  “Never, Senior Chief!” she’d shout from full attention.

  And then he’d set her another scenario and she’d walk straight into his next trap.

  She rubbed her fingers over her Surfman badge: crossed oars over a life preserver. Only a hundred and sixty active-duty men and women wore these. They were the smallest specialty in the entire Coast Guard and the feeling was still shiny and new. No miscreant radio jockey was going to make her feel one bit less than she was.

  Carlos Torres was handsome and fit rather than basement-pizza pale. Fine. She’d see just how wet he could take.

  “Hi.” He’d come up beside her without her even noticing. That was bad; usually she could feel a seagull even thinking about landing on the aft rail of her boat.

  “You ready for this?” She wanted to keep him in his place. His dark eyes were dead-level with her own. She scared off a lot of men with her height, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He looked damn good in a float suit.

  “Always,” he replied with that naive ease of the unsuspecting.

  “Sit your ass over there,” she aimed a finger at the port-side chair. He was in her world now and there was no listening audience to make her pretend to be nice. “Put on the seat belt. You do not take it off without a direct order from me. And if you touch a single control or lever, I will take your belt off myself and throw you overboard. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He shot her a salute that said he’d never served. But it was close enough to right that it meant he’d watched too many war movies or something. Also, his smile just grew bigger as if he knew he was pissing her off and was enjoying himself.

  She glanced down at the morning’s surf report on her own console and made a bet with herself on just how long he wasn’t going to keep wearing that smile.

  5

  “Cushy,” Carlos dropped into the chair. “How hard is the ride on this boat?”

  Sarah looked over at him with narrowed eyes. Blue eyes that seemed to see everything and true blonde hair just long enough to make a short ponytail. BM Goodwin might sound like a force of nature, but she looked, oddly, like a fighter. It wasn’t that she wasn’t beautiful, because…well, damn. It was that there was a determined set to her expression that he bet could run over anything in her way: man, rough surf, or Neopanamax container ship. He wondered how many times she’d tracked the long path down to the principal’s office during her high school years. More than a few.

  “Why the surprise?” Carlos enjoyed doing that to her.

  “Most civilians think the seat is cushy for its own sake.”

  “Uh-huh. Where you from?”

  “Chicago originally.”

  “Great Lakes. That’s heavy duty,” Carlos was impressed.

  Sarah looked surprised that he knew that as well. Most people didn’t even know the Coast Guard also guarded those inland waters among many others. The Great Lakes boasted sixteen Coast Guard stations between ship and air stations—the entire Mississippi River system only boasted four stations. The storms thrown up on the Great Lakes had actually claimed far more ships than the Columbia Bar. Of course they were also far more expansive. Still, she definitely knew about the wind-water dynamic that so many landlubbers didn’t understand.

  “I grew up local,” he explained. “And while I was never crazy enough to surf this section of the Oregon Coast—which requires a wetsuit and no fear of imminent death—I’ve been out in the chop when it starts blowing a gale with no warning. Most locals don’t even get interested in a storm around here until it crosses fifty knots. And it isn’t until it gets up into the eighties that we consider trekking out in our pickups to the headlands and watch the thirty-foot surf rolling in under the horizontal rain. I’ve never been out in a motor lifeboat, but I’m not dumb enough to think this padding is for comfort.”

  It earned him a grunt of acknowledgement. Then she turned her attention to casting off lines and getting underway.

  He noticed that she didn’t snap and bark at the crew for all of her unexpected attitude. They all moved with the calm efficiency of an integrated team. That was part of the reason he’d ended up in track-and-field—he sucked at “team.” He could do his part of a relay just fine, by treating it as an individual challenge to outperform not only the other teams, but the other members of his own as well. Sarah’s team might have all been cogs of the same wheel they were so smooth.

  She worked the heavy aluminum steering wheel with one hand and the pair of red-knobbed throttles with the other as if they were extensions of her body. He also noticed that she too wore her seatbelt, meaning she didn’t just make him wear his to keep him out of trouble.

  Just how rough a ride had he agreed to?

  Inspecting his own station, he didn’t have a wheel. One arm of the chair had a small lever at the end marked “Port” and “Starboard”—steering adjustments if someone had to work from his seat instead of the one with the wheel. He also had a matching pair of the red throttle levers. Carlos made a special note to not even think about bumping any of them. There were engine-speed and rudder-angle indicators, engine start and stop buttons, and not much else. Mounted between their two positions were radar and radios.

  In front of her was another radio and some more electronics, but less than he’d expected. The more he looked, the more he realized that it wasn’t about someone tending an amazing machine. A 47-MLB was a simple, seaworthy tool used by a capable woman for going to the rescue.

  “Superwoman!” The exclamation was just knocked out of him as the boat slipped out from where the Coast Guard station lay tucked behind Ruby Island and headed into the throat of the Columbia River.

  Sarah glared at him. He had about enough of her silent, feminist-action shit.

  “Tough, lady. If the superhero uniform fits, wear it.”

  6

  If Carlos Torres was busy picturing her in some skintight superhero outfit, she wasn’t going to drown him—she was going to gut him like a salmon.

  Assumptions, Goodwin. She could hear McAllister even over the roar of the two Detroit diesels as she took them up on the planing hull to twenty-two knots and headed toward the open ocean.

  “What’s your problem, Torres?” Sarah shouted over to him.

  “My problem?” He wasn’t clutching the chair arms like some desperate civilian as they began popping over the two-meter waves washing in from the sea. Instead he sat with his hands folded in his lap as calm as could be. “I got no problems. Sunny day. Out for the morning on a 47-MLB with a beautiful and skilled woman who wants to jettison me overboard every time I pay her a compliment. What’s up with that anyway?”

  “Nothing’s up with that,” she clenched her jaw and faced the sea.

  Directly starboard lay the tip of the half-mile long North Jetty that ran out from Cape D, Washington. It anchored at the end of Peacock Spit, which had probably claimed more shipwrecks than anywhere else in the world over the last two hundred years. Two miles to port lay the tip of the three-mile long South Jetty stretching out from Clatsop Spit at the very top corner of Oregon. In between lay her job.

  She scanned the area as they bounced along the wavetops. Five cruisers under fifty feet, agile enough to be doing pretty much whatever they damn well pleased—which created headaches for everyone, accounting for over twenty percent of Coast Guard rescues every season. A twenty-six-foot daysailer tacking neatly across shipping lanes in a gap between passing ships and not looking to be stupid enough to be headed out to sea over the bar. Two inbound container ships and an outbound bulk carrier all showing their transponders on her radar sweep—meant that three of the sixteen bar pilots were working this morning. Everything appeared in order.

  “So, you treat compliments as insults out of some sort of self-defense mechanism. That’s interesting.”

  “I thought you were a journalist not a headshrinker.”

  “Me? No, I’m neither. Just a directionless bum with a radio show for three weeks while Aunt Roz is on vacation.”

  “And you’re fine with that?”

  “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  Because it makes you even lamer to admit it than being a directionless bum in the first place.

  “Personally, I’ve always found overachieving to be a waste of energy.”

  “So, what do you find worthwhile?” She’d thought to run some shore patrols along the South Jetty, but rejected that. She wanted this Carlos Torres to hurt a little. So instead, she swung wide of the North Jetty and turned northwest for the heavy surf off the Peacock Spit.

  Javits must have read her mind, because he came up on the bridge with a pair of safety harnesses. He used one to latch Mr. Bum Torres’ suit to a safety ring on the bridge so that he was doubly attached to the boat.

  Normally her engineer would be in the seat occupied by Torres. Instead, he harnessed into one of the jump seats directly behind his usual position. Nicer than she’d have been, but then Javits was a nice guy.

  Vicks and Marnham would be sitting in the Survivor Compartment, belted in and probably playing a game of Gin Rummy. How had they become blasé about getting out on the water? Every single time she escaped the dock was like the first time she’d gone to a rock concert—some part of her disconnected and danced. She’d always been the perfect student: straight As, head of the volleyball team with her height, and anchor on the swim relay team. And she could count the number of kids she was in touch with from high school on a closed fist.

  Why had wanting to be best been such a crime?

  It wasn’t a crime in the Coast Guard. It had value.

  Even Vicks and Marnham, with their ever-so-chill game of Rummy, were actually top flight—they just made a whole point pretending they were too cool to care. They were already top-rated swimmers and she knew they spent most of their off hours preparing for the brutal USCG rescue swimmer course—a 24-week challenge with an eighty percent failure rate. They were so good that even McAllister was giving them better than even odds of making it.

  She never fraternized inside the Guard. And she’d yet to find a worthwhile man outside the Guard. Good thing she was used to being alone.

  Sarah checked the surf ahead. The bright sun glared off the breaking crests, but added little warmth. Temperatures ran a consistent five to ten degrees lower out on the ocean here, especially when the offshore fog banks were nudging shoreward.

  A pair of 47-MLBs were “in it” farther up the line—a new Surfman class getting their “scare them off the boat” ride. First day of class, driven straight into the heaviest surf. There were always a couple that decided they were in over their heads and bailed. Even some heavy-weather-certified coxswains bailed after a day in the Cape D surf.

  The trick was, the waves always looked milder than they were. From the east, the Columbia pumped a quarter of a million cubic feet per second into the ocean—the fifth largest river by discharge in North America and thirty-eighth in the world. From the south, a northbound sea current traveled up the coast at a couple kilometers per hour. And from the west, or any direction the Pacific Ocean was in the mood for, sea swells that had been building energy across ten thousand kilometers ran into the other two currents and created utter mayhem just where the ships needed to go. When the tide was outbound and the swells were inbound, like this morning, everything doubled up.

  She shared a glance with Javits.

  He nodded that everything and everyone was ready—which meant he’d already warned the float guys they were headed into the rough. He included a grimace that said she was pushing it.

  When she shrugged a reply that maybe she was, he waved her toward the waves. There was a reason she liked this crew. She knew if she rolled them sideways onto their beam’s end, the float guys would simply slap a hand down on their Rummy cards until she righted.

  Sarah took the first big wave at a sixty-degree angle, goosing the starboard engine hard as the bow lifted up the face. Ten meters of breaking waves slapped the 47-MLB solidly on the butt, slamming her straight as Sarah shot up over the top.

  Half the hull went airborne before they tipped and the nose slammed down on the back of the wave. Just like she’d planned.

  She heard Torres grunt with the impact as she was judging the next wave. Her obvious move would take her closer to the two boats giving the First Day cruise, which the instructors wouldn’t appreciate. Instead, she let the next wave break hard across the deck.

  “Take a breath,” she shouted to Torres moments before it hit. Which, like walking into one of McAllister’s traps, left her with no air of her own while the 47-MLB lay on its side and a couple tons of sea spray robbed them of air. She was the one sputtering by the time they hit clear air.

  She cranked the wheel hard and took the next wave—a chaotic slasher from the south—head-on with a burst of diesel power.

  Unlike the older 42-MLB that plowed through the waves, the 47 climbed like the champion it was and shot over the top with almost no water on the deck.

  All three of them grunted in unison as the bow slammed down and she began carving for the next wave. She needed to check if Torres had hit his limit yet. Scaring a civilian was one thing, terrifying a radio personality was something McAllister wouldn’t appreciate. But the last wave had tossed her toward the First Dayers again and she had to concentrate on hitting the next wave at the same angle they did so that all three boats kept their spacing along the wave face.

  “Is this pretty typical?” Torres shouted out to her. He didn’t sound upset. Instead he was curious.

  “Pretty mild for Peacock Point,” she shouted back, too busy to say more as she watched Chief Wester on the next boat to see what his next line of attack would be.

  “This is about half of what the boat is rated to take,” Javits answered for her. He was the boat’s mechanic and always thought of everything from that angle. “Of course to us—”

  They all held their breaths as a wall of spray slashed over them and she was able to angle away from the other two boats.

  “—as passengers, when we’re getting up into the kind of violence this boat can still handle, it will feel about ten times worse.”

  This time she could feel Torres watching her.

  She took advantage of a bad break to the south, to let the next wave slam Torres from behind without warning.

  His sputters when they resurfaced were very gratifying.

  7

  Carlos would have laughed if he had any air. Surfman Sarah Goodwin was definitely out to get him. He’d have to watch himself around her.

  He tried to imagine “ten times worse” and decided that he was glad it wouldn’t be him feeling it. He’d already bottomed out the chair’s heavy padding twice with breath-stealing butt plants. At first he’d felt insulted at Javits doubling Carlos’ harness; now he was grateful. It was very comforting to feel firmly attached to the boat when the waves tossed eighteen tons of aluminum and five humans about like a bath toy.

  He tried to watch what Sarah was looking for as she surveyed the next wave and drove them into it, but she was too distracting. Her focus, her whole being, had such a clear purpose. Her, the boat, the wave. Tweak a throttle, cock the wheel, brace for the blow, already turning for the next while the boat still shuddered from the hit. Scan right and left. Other waves? Other craft?

  No chance to ask as they plunged back into the roiling mess that was the sea. Waves seemed to come from every direction, yet still she took them one after another. One moment he had a high view out to sea and back to the beach. The next they plunged into a trough where the entire vista was made up of a bowl of wind-shredded water.

  After twenty crestings, or maybe twice that, he decided that the two other boats had left when he wasn’t paying attention to them. And still Sarah took on the waves.

 

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