flooded the vessel.
Panic swept over her with the force of a tidal wave. And then the boat pitched with the next wave and cold water rushed over her. She gasped and choked until she caught her breath again.
What is going on? She didn’t know how she’d ended up on this boat, but that didn’t matter so much as how she was going to get off. She rolled to her knees to stand and get her sea legs to walk with the lurching, rolling of a boat in a storm. A sinking boat, no less.
Sadie made her way to the helm in search of the radio, aware that with each second that passed, the boat took on more water. Maybe she only needed to find the pump and expel the water from the storm, except it was already too late. The pump, if there was one, would be beneath the water that clearly rushed in from not only belowdecks, but above as waves crashed over the sinking vessel.
A drowning death was her worst nightmare. Oh, God, please help me! But it looked like that was exactly what was about to happen. Sadie was going to die in a watery grave.
Just like Karon.
That is, if she didn’t find a way to survive, or if someone didn’t come to her aid. At the helm, she found the radio and turned to the channel the Coast Guard, marine patrol or any other authorities might monitor.
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! I’m sinking. Is anyone out there? Mayday. Mayday!” Sadie repeated her calls. She glanced at the dash to relay her coordinates but nothing worked so she couldn’t know her exact location. The cold water assured her she must be somewhere in the North Pacific off the Washington coast where she’d been before waking up on the boat.
How could this happen? She continued calling for help, then realization slowly dawned. In her panic she hadn’t noticed the red light wasn’t flickering. There wasn’t the telltale squawk. Nothing. It was dead. The radio was unresponsive. Broken. Just like everything else.
That news hit her like an anchor, heavy and bone jarring. Someone had obviously sabotaged the vessel. They’d deliberately set her up to die.
Tears burned her eyes. “Oh, Karon,” she whispered. “I wanted to know what happened... I wanted to know, and now I think I do. But I don’t know why someone killed you. Or who!”
Memories rushed back at her. She’d been going through Karon’s things, looking for a clue as to why her best friend’s body had washed up on the beach. Then Sadie had woken up here. She had the sense that someone had been there in the house with her, but the image, the memory, was too vague. She couldn’t be sure. Nor could she worry about that now. Her life was in imminent jeopardy. How could she find Karon’s killer if she died too? And that gave her even more incentive to live. To survive. She had to find out who was behind this. She wouldn’t let them get away with it.
She searched for a life jacket or flotation device or smaller skiff attached to this boat before it plunged, submerging completely. Anything to which she could cling that would keep her above the surface of a blustering North Pacific Ocean.
But her search left her empty-handed. “Nothing!” Are you kidding me?
Of course, why would she expect there to be a flotation device if the radio had been sabotaged?
Her teeth chattered. Even if she found something to help her float, hypothermia would soon set in. And panic—the absolute worst thing she could do right now—washed over her again, flooding her soul with terror.
What do I do? What do I do?
“Okay, so I’m not going to save this boat, but I can hang on until the very last minute in case someone comes to help.” She said the words out loud, hoping to boost her confidence. But she fought against the reality of her dire predicament.
This wasn’t a princess story with a knight in shining armor to come to her rescue and guarantee a happy ending. And even if it were, she’d prefer to save herself.
Sadie went outside onto the deck to face the raging storm, and maybe even to face God. She stared up into the daunting black clouds as rain lashed her. “Why, God? Why?”
She felt so cliché in that moment, as if there had never been another person or literary character to stand in the rain to face the Creator of the universe—the calmer of storms, even—and ask that question. She searched for the horizon, but it was lost somewhere between the ocean and sky, both dark shades of gray.
How far was she from shore?
Could she swim?
In this weather, even if she didn’t exhaust herself fighting the storm as she swam and actually made it to the coastline, the ocean waves could dash her against the rocks. Same with the boat if it had power so she could run the engine and steer it toward shore.
Okay. No radio. No flotation device. And in a few minutes—less than half an hour or less, she’d say—no boat. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to kill her in a way that would look like an accident and there wouldn’t be much evidence left behind to say otherwise. She was staying in Coldwater Bay with her aunt—a boating and fishing community. Boating accidents happened. But there would be no one to question her death like she questioned Karon’s.
Why had someone killed her friend? Why were they trying to kill her? Some secret that was too important to expose?
The killer had to have made a mistake along the way. Sadie would be the one to find it. She wasn’t about to give up. Except she hung on to the boat in water up to her chest. Frosty, biting water, and her limbs grew numb. Giving up might not be within her control.
Her teeth chattered as she tried to force out the words. “I’m sorry, Aunt Debby.” And to her siblings, “Cora, Quinn and Jonna. I’m really sorry.”
With their parents’ tragic deaths more than a decade ago, they’d already lost so much, and losing Sadie would be so hard for them. Her death in this watery grave would leave them with questions instead of closure. She’d never felt so heartsick than in this moment when she realized there was nothing she could do—no grand scheme to win the day. No brilliant ideas that would save her from inescapable drowning.
* * *
Soaked and chilled to the bone despite his protective garb, CGIS—Coast Guard Investigative Service—special agent Gage Sessions stood at the helm of the USCGC Kraken with Lieutenant Johns, who had steered the eighty-seven-foot cutter straight into the storm. The twenty-foot swells had only just begun subsiding along with the fifty-knot winds as the storm slowly passed over them.
He’d joined the Kraken’s crew as part of a counter-drug smuggling operation, but one particular group eluded him. In the Pacific Northwest, the drug cartels were usually Russian or Asian. The last few months, intel had him chasing the Chang brothers, and he was getting close, but they always evaded him. He might have to work undercover if he was ever going to catch the brothers in the act.
In the interim, they’d received a distress call. Someone spotted a sinking boat and had shared the coordinates but were unable to assist.
Their counter-drug-smuggling operation had suddenly changed to a rescue mission.
Finding the sinking boat in the Pacific during a storm—well, it could already be too late. The boat had likely been tossed miles from the original location where it had been spotted. And in this storm, he didn’t hold out much hope. But he wouldn’t give up yet either.
