Gale Force Read online

  ALSO BY OWEN LAUKKANEN

  The Stevens and Windermere novels

  The Professionals

  Criminal Enterprise

  Kill Fee

  The Stolen Ones

  The Watcher in the Wall

  The Forgotten Girls

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Owen Laukkanen

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Laukkanen, Owen, author.

  Title: Gale force / Owen Laukkanen.

  Description: New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017020483| ISBN 9780735212633 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735212657 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Deep-sea sounding—Fiction. | Salvage—Fiction. | Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR9199.4.L384 G35 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020483

  p. cm.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  FOR MY DAD, WHO BROUGHT ME TO THE BREAKWATER; AND FOR JOEY AND SUZI, WHO TOOK ME TO SEA

  CONTENTS

  Also by Owen Laukkanen

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  THREE YEARS AGO // SIXTY NAUTICAL MILES OFF THE OREGON COAST

  The freighter loomed in the distance, six hundred feet of black steel and burning light, lurching, punch-drunk, in the face of the storm. The ship was the Argyle Shore, a bulk carrier with fifteen thousand net tons of Columbia Basin grain, dead in the water and broadside to the swell, waiting on the knockout punch that would send her to the bottom.

  In the wheelhouse of the salvage tug Gale Force, fifty yards away, McKenna Rhodes watched the lights of the freighter and aimed for the bow. She was used to nights like this; she’d grown up on her dad’s boats, spent most of her thirty years on the water. She’d worked summers on barge jobs, all over the Pacific Coast, up the Columbia River, and to the farthest reaches of Alaska. But the salvage business wasn’t much like towing barges. The money came sporadically, when it came at all, and you took risks to earn it—risks like tonight, the Argyle Shore in one hell of a nasty storm.

  “Keep her face to the sea, McKenna.”

  Randall Rhodes’s voice came into the wheelhouse through the loud-hailer from the afterdeck, barely audible over the roar of the wind. McKenna stood at the tug’s controls, wrestling the bow into the roiling sea, the oncoming waves spilling white water everywhere. She still wasn’t sure she was comfortable up here, warm and dry at the wheel, her dad down on deck with the crew, preparing to launch a messenger line to the bow of the freighter. Her father, though, had insisted.

  “You’re going to run this boat one day,” he’d told his daughter, often enough that she could hear him in her sleep. “You’ve been on the water long enough; you’re plenty qualified. Might as well get used to that captain’s chair.”

  The Coast Guard had taken care of most of the Argyle Shore’s crew. They’d sent a Jay
hawk from Astoria almost as soon as the ship’s captain had put out the distress call, and the crew of the helicopter had plucked all but the ship’s master and a couple of seamen from the deck below, the wind blowing a hurricane around them, seventy-knot winds whipping white froth off the wave tops.

  That left only the freighter. Enter the Gale Force, one hundred and forty-four feet of stout steel, a couple brawny engines and a crew hungry to enter the fray. Under maritime law, the Argyle Shore was up for grabs as soon as her crew abandoned ship, fair game for any salvage team who thought they could save her. Success meant a share of the wrecked freighter’s value, ten percent minimum, but paid only on completion. There’d be no points for effort. No sympathy offered.

  No matter. Within an hour of the distress call, Randall Rhodes had assembled his crew and pointed the Gale Force into the teeth of the storm. And now, after sailing through the night into waves as tall as apartment buildings, the Gale Force had arrived. With rival tugs just hours behind, it was time to get to work.

  Through the closed-circuit TV mounted beside her chair, McKenna could see her dad and the crew on the afterdeck, preparing the messenger line and gesturing her onward. Through the front windshield, she could see the master of the Argyle Shore standing on the bow of the freighter with his few remaining crew, waiting to draw the line in, along with the towing bridle behind it—the heavy three-inch wire that would fasten the two vessels together.

  Might as well get used to the captain’s chair.

  “Crossing the t,” her dad called it—rigging a tow in rough seas. It meant running the Gale Force into the waves and across the freighter’s bow, then, from the tug’s starboard side, shooting the messenger line, some six hundred feet of rope fired off with a rocket.

  The waves came in sets, mountains of water fifty, sixty feet high, launching the Gale Force skyward, then plunging it down to the trough. To McKenna’s right, the Argyle Shore rolled; the men on her bow fought to keep upright. McKenna watched on the monitor as her dad struggled forward with the messenger line as another wave broke, sending a surge of water over the wheelhouse windows. She felt her breath catch as her dad disappeared from view, then relaxed again, but just slightly, when the water receded and he was still there, coughing and spitting water and soaked to the bone—and, damn him, was he smiling?

  Never ask the crew to do a job you’re not willing to take on yourself, McKenna. The skipper leads from the front.

  Randall Rhodes hauled the messenger line up the starboard side of the tug, then reappeared at the bow, below McKenna’s window, holding the launcher, a bright yellow device about the size of a toolbox. McKenna kept her hand on the throttle, modulating the tug’s power as the next wave rose, the Argyle Shore almost in line with the bow of the tug now. It was almost time to fire.

  Her dad twisted around, found her eyes through the window. He was smiling, the maniac, and McKenna couldn’t help but smile back. The old man’s built for this stuff, she thought, reaching for the radio.

  “Argyle Shore, this is Gale Force. We’re going to launch the messenger line.”

  A moment later, the radio crackled. “Affirmative.” An accent, heavy static. “We’re ready.”

  McKenna leaned forward and gave her dad a thumbs-up. Watched as he aimed the launcher and pulled the trigger.

  Pop.

  The shot was a beauty. The line arced high over the water and landed across the bow of the freighter with plenty of rope to spare. McKenna’s radio came to life again.

  “Hello, Gale Force, we are hauling in the line.”

  Bingo. One step closer to a seven-figure payday.

  Randall disappeared again, headed aft. McKenna checked the monitor, saw Matt Jonas and Al Parent back there making a last-minute double check on the winch. She waited for her dad to show up on-screen again, knew she’d breathe easier when he’d made it back around, when everyone was inside and dry, when all that mattered was to ride out the storm and keep the towline intact.

  She felt the wave coming before she saw it. Felt the Gale Force drop into the trough, that same sickening, roller-coaster feeling, but this time it was worse; this time, the drop seemed to last a fraction of a second too long, the crash at the bottom like a swan dive into concrete, and McKenna knew without looking up that the wave was a bad one.

  She grabbed for the radio. “Rogue! Rogue wave!”

  She’d barely said the words when the wave hit, and hit hard, came plunging over the bow and driving the tug under, green water at the windows now, the crest somewhere above, knocking McKenna nearly off her feet, the tug shuddering, rolling, water roaring past, and for a moment McKenna caught herself thinking, This is it, we’re done, this is how it all ends.

  But the Gale Force was a tough boat. It plowed through the wave and surfaced again, shook itself off and kept going, no harm done. McKenna picked herself up and reached for the radio handset where it dangled, meaning to check on the crew, but the crew beat her to it; the loud-hailer was live.

  “Man overboard!” someone called, and suddenly the Argyle Shore and that seven-figure payday were about the last things on McKenna’s mind.

  The voice on the loud-hailer was too garbled to place, but on the monitor McKenna could see bodies in bright orange rain gear rushing to the starboard rail. She hurried to the window and looked out to the passageway, where her dad should have been. There was nothing, no sign of him, just water and spindrift and random, scattered jetsam. McKenna felt it like a punch to the stomach.

  She picked up the radio. “Someone get eyes on him! You find him, and don’t let him get away!”

  They’d trained for this. Randall Rhodes was a maverick, but he wasn’t reckless. His crew ran emergency drills as a matter of course—ship evacuation, fire suppression, first aid. Everyone on the boat had to prove they were able to climb into their bright red survival suit in less than one minute flat or they didn’t go out on a job. They’d trained for disaster. But training didn’t count for very much with waves the size of apartment buildings and your old man in the water.

  McKenna switched on every spotlight the Gale Force could muster. Picked up the radio and called the master of the Argyle Shore, telling him to forget the messenger line and to hold tight. She tried to keep the panic out of her voice as she broadcast Man overboard over the distress channel, knowing it was pointless; there was no one close enough to respond in time.

  On the afterdeck, Matt Jonas was throwing a life preserver in the water. That wouldn’t matter a bit, though, if McKenna couldn’t turn the tug around.

  The waves kept coming, ship-swallowing monsters. McKenna knew if she timed the turn wrong, those waves would bowl the Gale Force over, rolling her and dooming them all. On the other hand, if she waited too long, the crew would lose sight of the old man, or hypothermia would set in, numbing his faculties and pulling him under.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  It was her failure to make the turn, McKenna decided later, that had killed her father.

  She stood frozen at the wheel, searching for a break in the waves—but, of course, the sea wasn’t going to give it to her that easy. The waves weren’t letting up; there was no safe way to do it. There was no way to turn back without risking the boat.

  She’d frozen. Afterward, Matt and Stacey Jonas would try to console her, telling her it had been only a minute, two at the most. But that minute mattered. By the time she’d regained control, swung the boat around—a harrowing, life-before-your-eyes turn—the life preserver Matt had thrown was drifting four or five boat lengths away, disappearing in the trough and only reappearing intermittently. There was no sign of Randall Rhodes anywhere.

  “I lost him,” Nelson was shouting, over the hailer. “That last wave, I had him, but I just bloody lost him.”

  McKenna urged the boat back, the sea following now, the tug surfing down monster waves and closing in on the life preserver, spotlights chasing the dar
k away. She still couldn’t see the old man anywhere. The minutes ticked onward, and the storm kept coming, and McKenna stood in the wheelhouse and looked out at the black water, knowing in her heart that her dad was gone.

  1

  PRESENT DAY // YOKOHAMA, AFTER DARK

  The cargo ship Pacific Lion stretched 650 feet along the pier, her hull rising a hundred feet out of black water. At her stern, on a massive loading ramp, a long line of brand-new Nissan cars waited to be loaded, while amidships, a man smoked near a gangway leading from the pier to a small hatchway in the hull, the cherry end of his cigarette a beacon in the darkness.

  Tomio Ishimaru stuck to the shadows as he hurried toward the man. He’d bribed a customs officer to let him access the docks, but at that moment, customs officers were the least of his problems. In his briefcase, he carried bearer bonds worth more than forty-five million euros—nearly fifty million American dollars—property of the Inagawa-kai syndicate of the yakuza, Japanese organized crime.

  The bonds were a simple game. The syndicate funneled money from its numerous criminal enterprises into stock certificates for an anonymous corporation based nominally in Switzerland. Basic money-laundering—except, instead of delivering the bonds as he’d been contracted, Tomio Ishimaru had made a play. Now the bonds were his, and that made him—for the moment—a very rich man.

  Assuming he could get out of Yokohama alive.

  The man with the cigarette stepped out of the shadows as Ishimaru approached. His name was Okura, and, once upon a time, he’d been a teenage friend of Ishimaru. Now he wore the dress uniform of an officer in the Japanese Overseas Lines, and his face had aged considerably since those early years.

  Okura took another drag of his cigarette. Regarded Ishimaru with a wry smile. “Ishimaru-san,” he said. “I thought you were going to miss the boat.”

  Ishimaru didn’t bother to return the smile. Okura hadn’t any idea how much effort he’d expended to be there. There were bodies in his wake. There were members of the Inagawa-kai close behind. There was no time for idle banter.

  “The bonds took more effort to obtain than expected,” he replied. “When can we board the ship?”

  Okura looked up and down the dock. The row of Nissans, five thousand of them, was nearly at its end. Soon, the ship would sail.