Blacktide Reckoning

She left Astoria at four in the morning because the tide tables said to.

The truck smelled like neoprene and bad coffee from the thermos wedged between the seats. Renn Mackey drove north on 101 with the windows cracked two inches and the heater blowing because that was the only way the defroster worked. The windshield was fogged at the edges. She could see the road and that was enough.

The coast was dark at this hour. No moon, no stars, just the headlights and the trees pressing in from both sides and, somewhere to her left, beyond the timber and the dunes, the Pacific. She couldn't see it. She could feel it. The air through the cracked windows carried salt and kelp and the heavy mineral smell of surf hitting rock. She'd been breathing that air for three years, since she came to Astoria and bought the trawler and started taking contract work, and she still noticed it every morning. Some people stopped noticing. Renn figured that was how you got careless.

Her dive gear was in the truck bed under a tarp, strapped to a plywood frame she'd built herself. Two steel 80s, filled to 3,200 psi at the shop in Astoria yesterday. A backup aluminum 40. Regulators she serviced every sixty days whether they needed it or not. Exposure suit, 7mm with hood and gloves, because the water up here didn't forgive anything thinner. Fins, mask, BCD, lights, knife, slate, reel. Everything checked twice. Everything in its place.

She didn't keep a checklist on paper anymore. The list was in her hands. She could pack a dive bag in the dark and know by weight and feel whether something was missing. That was the kind of knowledge that came from doing it a thousand times, and from knowing what happened when you did it nine hundred and ninety-nine times and skipped the thousandth.

The drive from Astoria to Westport was three hours if you didn't stop and the construction near Raymond didn't hold you up. She didn't stop. The construction held her up for eleven minutes. She sat in the truck behind a log hauler and drank the bad coffee and watched the sky lighten over Willapa Bay, gray on gray, the water and the clouds bleeding into each other until the horizon was just a guess.

She was thirty-one years old and she lived on a thirty-six-foot trawler she'd bought at a government surplus auction for fourteen thousand dollars, which was twelve thousand less than it needed in repairs. She'd done the work herself over two winters: hull, engine, electrical, plumbing. It floated. It ran. It kept the rain off. She hadn't named it. People named boats they loved. Renn's trawler was a tool that happened to be her address.

She pulled into Westport just after seven.

The harbor was working. Crab boats lined the commercial pier, rigging clanking in the breeze. A fuel barge sat at the end of Float 3 with its hoses out. Two men in orange Grundéns were hosing down a deck, and the runoff carried fish blood into the harbor in thin pink threads. The air smelled like diesel and bait and creosote from the pilings. Gulls circled but didn't land. The wind was out of the southwest at maybe twelve knots, steady, which meant the swell offshore would be running four to six feet, organized, manageable. Good enough to work.

She parked at the marina lot and walked the float to Slip 17, where the Nereid was tied.

The Nereid was a hundred and ten feet of ocean salvage tug, white hull gone to yellow at the waterline, a working boat with working rust. She had a crane on her stern rated for twenty tons, a dive platform that folded down at the transom, and a wheelhouse that looked like it had been welded on as an afterthought by someone who understood function but not beauty. She was ugly and solid, which was everything a salvage tug needed to be.

Gil Rosario was sitting on the Nereid's stern bollard with a coffee cup and a cigarette, watching Renn walk down the float. He stood up when she got close.

"Mackey."

"Gil."

He was mid-thirties, compact, with a dark beard he kept trimmed close and hands that were permanently rough from saltwater and line work. He wore a fleece pullover and the same steel-toed boots he wore on every job. They'd worked together three times in the past two years: a hull survey in Coos Bay, a propeller recovery in the San Juans, and a wreck documentation job on a fishing vessel that went down near Neah Bay. He was a good diver. Calm at depth, efficient with his air, didn't talk too much on comms. Renn trusted him underwater, which was the highest compliment she gave anyone and one she'd never said out loud.

"You eat?" he asked.

"Coffee."

"That's not eating."

"It's not not eating."

He shook his head and offered her a granola bar from his jacket pocket. She took it because it wasn't worth the conversation to refuse. They stood on the stern in the early gray and ate granola bars and didn't talk, which was the best kind of professional relationship. Close enough to work. Far enough to leave.

Renn had arrived at this distance with everyone in her life through a process so gradual she didn't think of it as a choice. It just was. Friends from the service had stopped calling after a while, and she hadn't called them back. Her parents were in Boise and she phoned them on holidays. She didn't date. She worked, she slept on the trawler, she maintained her gear, and she took jobs that put her underwater where the only voice was the sound of her own breathing. It wasn't a policy. It was a current she'd stopped fighting.

"You meet the skipper yet?" she asked.

"Nguyen. Yeah. He's in the wheelhouse doing his logs." Gil crushed his cup and pocketed it. "Seems solid. Runs a tight boat. Doesn't talk your ear off."

"What do you know about the job?"

"Assessment dive on a cargo wreck, three weeks down. MV Prosper. Went down in that blow we had mid-March." He shrugged. "Standard scope. Hull survey, cargo condition, recovery feasibility. Two-day charter with an option for a third if the conditions push us."

"Who's paying?"

"Insurance side. The charter came through a broker." He paused. "It's clean, Mackey. I checked."

"I didn't say it wasn't."

"You had the face."

She didn't know what face he meant, so she let it go. "Let's go see the boat."

Captain Jack Nguyen was in the wheelhouse with a logbook and a mug of tea. He was fifty or so, Vietnamese American, lean, with the slow-moving economy of a man who'd spent thirty years on the water and didn't waste effort on anything that didn't need it. His license certificates were framed on the wheelhouse bulkhead next to a tide chart and a photograph of a woman and two kids that was old enough for the kids to be grown. He shook Renn's hand without standing up.

"You're Mackey."

"I am."

"Gil says you're the best hull diver on the coast."

"Gil's generous."

"Gil says you'll say that." He set down the logbook. "Sit. I'll go through the charter."

She sat. Nguyen laid out the paperwork on the chart table. The charter contract was six pages, standard marine salvage language, with a scope of work appendix that specified the dive parameters: two assessment dives over two days, maximum depth one hundred and fifty feet, mixed gas authorized, with photo and video documentation required. Client deliverable was a written report with recommendations on recovery feasibility. The pay was four thousand dollars per diver, plus a day rate for the Nereid, plus fuel. Good money for two days. Better than good, actually, for what amounted to a look-and-report job.

Renn read every page. She always read every page. Gil watched her read the way people watched someone do a thing they considered unnecessary but knew better than to argue about.

The contracting chain went: an insurance assessor in Seattle had retained a maritime services broker in Tacoma, who had subcontracted through an administrative entity called Clearpath Administrative Services for the charter and dive crew coordination, and Clearpath had retained the Nereid through Nguyen's charter listing. Three layers between the money and the boat.

Renn looked at the Clearpath page. A Virginia address. Tysons Corner. An LLC with a registered agent service and no company description beyond "administrative and logistical support services."

"This outfit," she said, tapping the page. "Clearpath. You worked with them before?"

Nguyen shook his head. "First time. The broker vouched for them. Wire transfer cleared yesterday, half the charter fee up front."

"Virginia company running a dive charter on the Washington coast."

"Money's from Virginia. The work's here. Doesn't bother me."

It didn't bother Renn either. Not exactly. She'd done contract work through outfits with thinner paper trails than this. Salvage contracts ran through brokers and intermediaries and holding companies because the insurance industry ran that way. You learned to read the money, not the names. The money was here and it had cleared. That was usually enough.

She set the page down and moved on to the scope of work.

The MV Prosper was a two-hundred-and-eighty-foot general cargo vessel, registered out of Seattle, reported lost on March 14 during a storm with sustained winds of forty-five knots and seas running twelve to fifteen feet. The crew had been evacuated by the Coast Guard before the vessel went down. Official cause of loss: catastrophic structural failure in heavy weather. The wreck was located approximately twelve nautical miles west of Westport in roughly one hundred and forty feet of water on a sand-and-rock bottom. The filed cargo manifest listed agricultural equipment, crated, twelve pallets, with a declared value that seemed low for the insurance claim but wasn't Renn's problem.

"What do you know about the sinking?" she asked Nguyen.

"What the report says. She took on water in the storm, lost stability, rolled. Crew got off clean. Coasties picked them up. Vessel went down fast after that."

"Any hazmat? Fuel concerns?"

"Manifest shows clean cargo. No chemicals, no petroleum products beyond ship's fuel. She had maybe eight thousand gallons of diesel when she went down, which is standard for a vessel that size on a coastal run. The fuel tanks should be intact if the hull held together."

Renn nodded. Standard work. Go down, look at the wreck, document the condition, write the report, collect the check.

She and Gil spent the next two hours prepping gear on the Nereid's dive platform. The tug had the basics: a compressor for surface-supplied air (which they wouldn't be using at this depth), a dive ladder, a tag line, and deck space for their cylinders. Renn set up her rig while Gil set up his and they talked through the dive plan the way they always did, out loud, checking each other's math.

"Bottom time at a hundred and forty on air is what, twenty-two minutes?" Gil said.

"Twenty, with a safety margin. Call it eighteen for the first dive. We're surveying, not working."

"Descent rate?"

"Sixty feet per minute. We'll be on the bottom in two and a half minutes. Leaves us fifteen-plus minutes of work time before we start up."

"Deco?"

"At this depth, on air, we'll owe a safety stop at fifteen feet, three minutes minimum. If we push bottom time past twenty, we pick up mandatory deco at ten and twenty feet. I don't want to do that on the first dive."

"Agreed. Keep it clean."

They checked regulators, tested lights, verified camera housings. Renn inspected her BCD, inflating it on deck and listening for leaks, then checked Gil's without being asked. He let her. He'd learned early that Renn checked everything twice and it wasn't personal. It was just how she stayed alive.

The water temperature was forty-nine degrees, according to the NOAA buoy off Westport. That meant full 7mm suits with hoods and gloves, which meant restricted dexterity and a higher breathing rate from the cold, which meant more conservative gas planning. She ran the numbers again. They had enough gas for two dives with a generous reserve, assuming neither dive went long. If conditions pushed them, they had the backup aluminum 40 and Nguyen's compressor for partial refills.

"Tide window?" Gil asked.

Renn pulled up the tables on her phone. "Slack water at eleven-forty. That gives us a two-hour window of minimal current on the bottom. First dive starts at ten-thirty, we're on the bottom by ten-thirty-three, up by ten-fifty-five. Surface interval, two hours minimum. Second dive at thirteen hundred, if conditions allow."

"And if they don't?"

"Then we come back tomorrow. The weather window holds through Thursday."

Gil nodded. He trusted her planning. Everyone who worked with Renn trusted her planning. It was the personal stuff they didn't get close enough to trust or not trust.

Nguyen fired the Nereid's engines at nine-fifteen and they cleared the harbor at nine-thirty, heading west into a four-foot swell under overcast skies. The wind had dropped to eight knots, which was a gift. Renn stood on the stern and watched Westport fall behind, the jetty and the marina and the fishing boats getting small, then indistinct, then gone. Ahead was gray water and gray sky and twelve miles of open ocean between her and a dead ship on the bottom.

She felt the way she always felt before a dive: focused, quiet, present. The rest of the world fell away when there was water to read. The surface chop was regular, four seconds between crests, which meant the swell was organized and the wind wasn't fighting the current. Below the surface, at depth, there would be less motion, but there would be current. There was always current. You planned for it, adjusted for it, and if it surprised you, you dealt with it. The ocean didn't negotiate.

She ran her hand along the rail and felt the cold in the steel. Spring on the Pacific Northwest coast was a rumor. The calendar said April. The water said February. The sky said it could go either way.

Gil came up beside her and leaned on the rail.

"Good day for it," he said.

"We'll see."

"You always say that."

"And I'm always right. We see when we get there."

He smiled. Renn almost smiled back. Almost was as close as she got with most people, and Gil was closer to most than most.

They rode in silence. The Nereid's engines drummed through the hull, steady and low. The wake spread behind them in a white V that dissolved into the gray. Somewhere ahead, sitting in the dark at a hundred and forty feet, was a ship that the ocean had taken and the insurance company wanted assessed and nobody had looked at closely enough to ask why it was really down there.