Death Echo Read Free Page A

dock on the Elliott Bay waterfront.
    With quick, economical motions he checked both fuel filter housings for water.
    All good. At least the greedy sucks put in clean fuel.
    What there was of it.
    He looked carefully around the engine room. Salt water was as corrosive as acid to metal parts and systems. Even with the best care and maintenance, time and use and the sea would mark the yacht. But right now, she was bright and clean, shining with promise.
    Mac loved taking a new boat on its first real cruise. It was like meeting a really interesting woman. Challenging. That was where the reward came—getting the best out of himself and an unknown boat.
    No one else at risk, no one else to die, no one else to survive alone and sweat through nightmares the same way.
    When Mac had finished his checklist, he climbed the inner steps back up out of the engine compartment into the salon. Plastic wrapped the upholstered furnishings and protected the narrow, varnished teak planks that were technically a deck but were too beautiful to be called anything but a floor. When he closed the hatch, it fit almost seamlessly into the floor in front of the sofa.
    Opposite the sofa was another, bigger, L-shaped sofa. Nestled in the angle of the L was a teak dining table, also protected by plastic and cardboard. Polished black granite curved around the galley. It was tucked underneath wrappings. Everything was, except the wheel itself. Varnished teak gleamed with invitation.
    Mac opened the teak panel that concealed two ranks of electrical circuit breakers and meters. He noted a scratch on the inside of the door. Cosmetic, not a problem. He checked each carefully labeled meter and breaker, going down the ranks, engaging breakers and energizing the circuits he expected to need.
    The last two breakers he threw were marked Port and Starboard Engine start/stop. When he engaged them, two loud buzzers signaled that the diesels in the engine room were ready to go.
    With a final check of the batteries, he went back through the salon, into the well, and up the narrow six-step stairway to the flying bridge. He checked the switch settings on bridge controls, then lifted his hand and twirled his fingers in a tight circle.
    The overhead crane operator smoothly picked up five feet of cable, lifting the yacht up and out of its cradle. The fresh afternoon breeze off Puget Sound tried to turn
Blackbird
perpendicular to the container ship, but the operator had anticipated the wind and corrected for it. The overhead crane arm swung the yacht toward the huge ship’s outside rail.
    For a second Mac felt like the boat was adrift, flying. This was the part of the job he didn’t like, when he had to trust his life to the crane operator’s skill.
    He looked out over the waterfront toward the Seattle skyline beyond. The restless sound, the rain-washed city, the evergreen islands. The beautiful silver chaos of intersecting wakes—container ships, freighters, ferries, tugs, pleasure boats zipping about like water bugs.
    One of the water bugs seemed to be fascinated by the process of off-loading the yacht. Mac had seen the Zodiac while he waited for the
Lotus
to be nudged into its berth. The little rubber boat had weaved through the commercial traffic, circling ferries and tugs, taking pictures of everything, even the Harbor Patrol boat that had barked at it for getting too close to the
Lotus.
    Sightseers,
Mac thought, grateful that he no longer lived a life where the little inflatable would have been an instant threat.
Sweet, innocent civilians.
    He did a quick check of the water near the container ship, where he would soon be dropped into the busy bay. A small coastal freighter, freshly loaded with two dozen containers destined for local delivery, pushed west toward the San Juan Islands. Two Washington State ferries, one inbound to Seattle and the other headed across to Bainbridge Island, were passing one another a few hundred yards to the north. A City of Seattle fireboat