CLAIRE TAPPED HER PEN on the armrest of the captain’s chair. Tat-tat-tat. Everyone in the bridge heard it. Tat-tat-tat. No one said a word.
Thoughts about her orders, the man she had met, that idiot Lansdowne, and most of all, the crew member who had complained threatened to overwhelm her. Who was it? She wanted Captain Hall’s trust, but she also wanted to trust her own crew. And that macho moron Lansdowne had screwed up. Fury at him spun in her head. Captain Hall told her that he tried to pin the blame for losing the smugglers on her. Said she had positioned the Kingston too far for pursuit. Said she hadn’t followed his orders. Said that he wanted another officer to work with. Hall got her side of the story over the phone, with plenty of expletives in both official languages. He told Lansdowne that Claire would remain the navy contact.
Now a third vessel had been spotted sneaking up the coast.
She had no time to process everything. Her life suddenly spiked with activity after weeks of training, criticisms from the fleet captain, more training, and her first solo as captain of the Kingston. She sank a suspicious ship then capped it off with the failure with the CBSA. And now, this new hunting mission with clear operating instructions: box in the suspect ship, prevent them from escaping, and wait for police to arrest them. This time, navy takes the lead.
Her crew had only been given one hour to assemble on board from whatever lives they had suddenly been forced to give up, at least for a few more days. She had gathered the group of twenty-two and told them their mission was to intercept a third suspected smuggler vessel similar to the one they had sunk. It had been spotted leaving Boston. She had explained that she expected everyone to focus on his or her job and the mission would be successful.
The ship curved around the tree-tufted coast and entered the Bay of Fundy.
Claire realized her tapping had accelerated.
Wiseman, standing near, reminded her in a whispering voice that they shouldn’t be sailing into this particular bay, at least not too far. There was something special about it. It wasn’t that it was ringed by countless pretty fishing villages, or swarmed by flocks of squawky seagulls. What made the bay truly special was its tides. They were the highest in the world, and they could spell doom for the ship and her career.
In just over six hours, the sea level dipped sixteen metres. More water than flowed in all the rivers in the world rammed into the bay, and then, six hours later, went back into the open ocean. The tides were generated by a curious and fortunate series of coincidences. The floor of the funnel-shaped bay descended a staircase toward the ocean. The moon pulled on the water, just at the right time as it flowed in, then out of the bay. Together the moon and the peculiar shape of the bay created a natural resonance, like pushing on a swing. If you pushed at the right time, the swing rose higher. But in this case, what rose was the water level.
Her potential problem was therefore one of subtraction. The bay’s depth hovered around twenty-five metres at high tide. At low tide, only eight. The bay was also shallower along the eastern Nova Scotia coast than along the western New Brunswick side. Toward Truro and Maitland, it was very shallow, essentially becoming a mud flat for a few hours. But the Kingston’s draught, the minimum depth of water needed for the ship to navigate, was just over three metres. So at low tide, there wasn’t much margin of error. If she miscalculated, the multi-million-dollar ship would be stranded on a suddenly exposed sand reef.
Tat-tat-tat.
Of course, she would never jeopardize her ship and career by chasing smugglers deep into the bay. She only had to prevent them from escaping.
Preventing the smugglers’ escape was the main problem, but there was also the fact that someone in her crew had been complaining directly to Captain Hall about her decisions. How to expose the mole? Who could she trust? She should be able to count on her number one, Wiseman, the XO. He was biding his time on the Kingston until he could get his own command. No way he would jeopardize a strong recommendation from her when the time came.
Although they had only sailed together for a few months, she had come to rely on her bridge crew. They had performed as an amazing team during each exercise and certainly when they encountered the hostile ship two days ago. The engine crew below deck she was less familiar with. But they gave her a rock solid ship that did everything she had ever asked, even when under fire — the ultimate test for any crew.
As the setting sun glowed through the window on her left, and the coast, ablaze with snow tinged red and orange, lazily passed on the right, the printer wheezed out a sheet of paper. The radio operator, PO2 Sullivan, handed it to her. “Ma’am. A message from Maritime Command.” Maybe he’s the traitor, Claire thought. She shook her head in disgust at her rising suspicion.
The report updated what was known about the suspected smugglers. The FBI had advised the RCMP that a second boat had left the Boston pier under surveillance. The report warned that the smugglers probably had sophisticated weaponry, maybe even machine guns or Stinger surface-to-air missiles. Most importantly, the report said that the smugglers had evaded police on both sides of the border.
Her orders had changed; Maritime Command ordered the Kingston to intercept the boat as it entered Canadian waters.
She showed the communiqué to the XO.
“So what do you think?” He was at least a head taller than her. The ship must feel cramped to him, Claire thought.
Wiseman cleared his throat. “Looks straightforward. But …”
She eyed him. “Tell me. I need your opinion, especially if we might be putting the ship and crew in the line of fire once again.”
She noticed the bridge crew perk up.
“Our approach is high risk. Maybe higher risk than it need be.”
“Spell it out, X.” She swivelled in her chair, where only the captain could sit. When she wasn’t around, it stood empty, a powerful symbol of her sole authority on the ship. The XO was a year older than her and just as ambitious. She saw the way he longed for a chair of his own. She liked that; he wouldn’t hold back. But would he rat on me to move me out of his way to a promotion?
“Do we really need to enter the bay? We could wait here, at the entrance, until after they off-load whatever shipment they have. RCMP nab the haul and we catch them on the way back.”
She nodded slowly. “I want to force them to act. At a time of my choosing. To catch them off guard. Then catch them red-handed. And vector in the police. To do that, we need to be close.”
“But the bay. The tides. It’s tricky to manage the clearance. We could be stranded with no warning.”
“That’s why I’m counting on you and the rest of the crew. I want navigation calling out sounding depths and three spotters at all times.” She swivelled away to look at the front window. “But I appreciate your counsel, X.” She offered him this gentle termination of the conversation. It was her ship. Her decision stood. He got the hint and said no more.
All she had to do was contain the smugglers, send out the Kingston’s rigid-hulled inflatable boat, or RHIB, to hunt them down, box them in at the bay, and tell the RCMP where to pick them up. And at night, the Kingston, with its high-tech imaging system, would have the advantage. The only real problem was the tide, maybe giving her insufficient water to navigate. But, unlike the unknown mole on board, at least it was predictable.
Tat-tat-tat.