could just see the light, blinking away every eight seconds, just as the chart said it did. Once they reached their destination beach, the lighthouse would be less than a kilometer away, up a spiral switch-backed road that led to the top of the cliff. That was going to be the worst part, Vitaliy knew. No more than three meters across, the roads were barely wide enough to accommodate the GAZ.
Why come here? he again wondered. The seas alone were daunting enough, but the journey by truck over this wasteland was a job for neither the fainthearted nor the irresolute. While it would take Fred and his men only ten minutes to reach the lighthouse, he’d told Vitaliy to expect they would be gone for the day, if not overnight. What could they be doing that would take so long? Vitaliy shrugged off the question; not his job to wonder. It was his job to drive the boat.
Sea conditions looked glassy-flat, and the slapping of shore waves against the steel sides of his landing craft was hard to hear. On deck, his charter party was brewing up coffee on a small, gasoline-powered stove they’d brought with them.
With a throaty rumble from the diesels, Vitaliy shifted the engines to reverse and increased the throttle, grinding away from the gravel beach. After a hundred meters, he turned the wheel to bring his boat about, and then consulted his gyrocompass before turning again, this time on a heading of zero-three-five.
Vitaliy lifted his binoculars and swept the horizon. Not a thing in sight that God didn’t Himself put here, except for a buoy or two. The winter ice often swept them away or ground them into pulp, sending them to the bottom, and the Navy didn’t trouble itself to replace them as they should, because nobody came here in a deep-draft ship. Another indicator of just how far into the wildlands they were.
Four hours later he opened the side window and called out, “Attention! Landing in five minutes.” He pointed to his watch and held five fingers out. He got a wave from Fred in reply. Two members of the party went to the truck to start the engine, while two others started throwing their duffel-bagged gear in the back.
Peering through the window, his eye picked a spot to aim his boat for, and he came in at about five knots, enough to be properly beached but not so hard as to jam his bow hard on the stones.
About fifty meters out he unconsciously braced for the impact and stopped his propeller. He hardly had to bother. The T-4 hit bottom, not too hard, and quickly came to a stop with the mild grinding sound of gravel on steel.
“Set the anchor?” Vanya asked. There was a fair-sized one on the stern for hauling the boat loose of a sticky shore.
“No. It’s low tide, isn’t it?” Vitaliy answered.
They throttled the diesels down to idle, moved to the ramp-control lever, and bled the hydraulics. The ramp dropped under its own weight and crashed down on the beach. The beach gradient was fairly steep, it appeared. Hardly a splash of water when the ramp went down. One of the men climbed into the GAZ’s cab and pulled it forward, brake lights flashing as he navigated the ramp, then pulled onto the gravel, the chain waving off the end of the crane like the trunk of a circus elephant. The truck ground to a stop. Fred and the rest of the men walked down the ramp and onto the beach—save one, Vitaliy now saw, who stood at the top of the ramp.
Vitaliy left the wheelhouse and walked forward. “You’re not taking this one?” he called to Fred.
“He’ll stay behind to lend a hand if you need it.”
“No need. We’ll manage.”
In reply, Fred simply smiled and lifted his hand in a wave. “We’ll be back.”
45
CLARK TOOK IT AS a sign of his advancing age that he’d grown increasingly intolerant of air travel. The cramped seats, the bad food, the noise . . . The only thing that made it remotely tolerable were the Bose noisecanceling headphones and a horseshoe neck pillow he’d gotten for Christmas, and a few tablets of Ativan Sandy had given him for the trip. For his part, Chavez sat in the window seat, eyes closed as he listened to his iPod Nano. At least the seat between them was empty, which gave each of them a little more elbow room.