Nights like tonight. On nights like tonight, it was as if they were sailing straight off the edge of the earth and into the cosmos. Nights when the moon came up or the aurora came out verged on the paranormal.

On the night watch voices were muted, lights were softer to the eye, and the seas seemed somehow less severe no matter the height of the wave or the length between swells. At night, things were a little less formal and a little more friendly. Sara loved her job and she loved the Coast Guard, but executive officer was just another description for captain’s hatchet man. It could get pretty lonely, especially since she was the only female officer. Being one of only eleven women in a crew of a hundred didn’t help.

Promotion to executive officer was not anything an ambitious officer in the United States Coast Guard refused, not if she were in her right mind, but as XO her days with filled with administrative minutiae and a lamentable lack of action. Logistics made the boat go, she understood that, but instead of driving the boat-or standing watch-her days were spent in two-hour meetings over ways to dispose of the trash accumulated during a fifty-one-day patrol on a ship with ten officers and ninety enlisted men and women on board. It wasn’t that she wanted to be an ensign again, but she wished, not for the first time, that she were on a smaller ship with fewer officers, where once in a while she might get to lead a boarding.

And where she didn’t have so many memories eight hundred miles off their starboard bow. She pulled her hat down to hide her expression, forgetting that it was black as the pit on the bridge, raised one foot to the ledge that ran around the radar console, and wedged herself in the narrow space between it and the control console. She put an elbow on her raised knee and her chin in her hand.

“Can’t sleep?” the chief said in a low voice.

“Dominoes,” Sara said.

He laughed. He had a marvelous laugh, which pretty much matched the rest of him. He was smart, funny, and good at his job, and if that wasn’t enough, he was handsome, too, with the most beautiful brown eyes Sara had ever seen. That wasn’t all that was beautiful about him, either. Their first full day underway she’d gone below to work out in the ship’s gym and found the chief there before her, dressed in T-shirt and shorts, far less clothing than she was accustomed to seeing him in. She’d been unable to meet his eyes for a good twenty-four hours afterward for fear that he would know exactly what she was thinking. Aside from the fact that she was an officer and he was an enlisted man, that they were underway on two hundred and eight-two feet of ship that seemed to shrink with every day of patrol that passed, and that the last thing the crew needed was to have its nose rubbed in what the Coast Guard officially referred to as an “inappropriate romantic relationship,” they were both married to other people.

Even if Sara was feeling less and less married as time went on. “Got any plans for Dutch?” she said at random. She didn’t need to be thinking about Hugh.

They were headed for Dutch Harbor the next day, their first port call of the patrol. “Seafood buffet at the Grand Aleutian,” Mark said. “Hike up the mountain beforehand to earn it.”

“No joy ride on the helo?”

The helicopter pilots took crew members for rides in port, racking up hours in the air and making friends with the crew as a bonus. “Nah,” Mark said, with the disdain only a career sailor could display toward an aviator. “I’ve been. Figured I’d let some of the newbies have a shot. You?”

“District is flying in for a briefing.”

Mark’s teeth flashed. “Oh yeah, I remember you and the captain talking about that the other day. What was it Winston Churchill said? Some thing about democracy being the worst system of government ever invented, except for all the others? Didn’t mention bureaucracy, did he.”

And he could read. Sara hardened her heart to this suddenly even more attractive man and did not reply. Instead, she thought about what she always thought about, her next duty assignment, and if she could finagle another tour in Alaska, or at the very least on the West Coast. She was terrified that she would be assigned to command in D.C. again, and was equally determined to foil, thwart, or otherwise avert that misguided effort on the part of her commanding officers if at all possible.

She’d been amazing lucky so far. The Sojourner Truth was her fifth boat in ten years, if you counted her summer on the Eagle, the Coast Guard’s tall ship, and she did. She would have her cutterman’s pin before the year was out, denoting seven years’ sea duty, which included two years’ command of a one-ten white hull out of Eureka, California. The time in D.C. had probably been essential in getting her the one-ten, she admitted, if only reluctantly and if only to herself, but shore duty was not what she had signed on for with the U.S. Coast Guard, and she made sure that every commanding officer she served under knew it. She’d been lucky in them, too, but then she worked hard at fostering the good opinion of her COs. When she had gotten the Sojourner Truth, she had showed up for duty a week early and spent that time learning every nook and cranny of the ex-navy salvage tug from bilge to crow’s nest and pestering the then first officer for every detail of his two years on board. When she had drained him dry, she started in on the engineer officer.

Blond hair, blue eyes, and long legs tended to engender thoughts other than her competency as a serving officer in the “always ready” service, but it helped that she deliberately desexed herself for each patrol, wearing her uniform a size too large, with a T-shirt and leggings beneath, no makeup, no jewelry, no perfume, no scented soaps or body lotions. Her hair she kept just long enough to wear in a ponytail, drawn through the band of the uniform baseball cap, which never left her head except at flight quarters, meals, and asleep in her bunk. She showered, she washed her clothes regularly, she was clean and neat-if only to keep herself from the unfortunate Seaman Rosenberg’s fate-but that was the most effort she made for her personal appearance under way.

“For crissake, Sara,” Hugh had said the first time he’d seen her in what she called her underway ensemble, “where are your breasts?” He’d pulled out the neck of the dark blue polar fleece jacket to check that they were still there, and that had been the end of that conversation.

She drew in a sharp breath. It had been a while since Hugh Rincon had managed to creep into her thoughts unawares, and now there he was again, the second time in five minutes. She wondered how he was, what he was doing, whether he was still in Anchorage or back at his desk in Langley, gathering gossip in the service of his country.

It was with heartfelt relief that she heard the marine band crackle into life. The voice was male and on the ragged edge of panic. “Coast Guard, Coast Guard, this is the fishing vessel Arctic Wind, emergency, emergency, Coast Guard, Coast Guard, this is the fishing vessel Arctic Wind, over.”

In a photo finish Sara beat both Mark and Tommy to the microphone mounted over the plot table. “Fishing vessel Arctic Wind, this is the Coast Guard cutter Sojourner Truth, go up to two-two-alpha.”

“Up to two-two-alpha, roger.”

She reached up and clicked the frequency knob on the radio to twenty-two-alpha, aware of an attentiveness on the bridge that had not been there a moment before. “Arctic Wind, this is cutter Sojourner Truth, how copy?”

The voice came back with distinct relief. “Five-by, Sojourner, good to know you guys are out there.”

“Good to hear, Arctic Wind, what’s the problem?”

“Sojourner, I’ve got a deckhand with three-inch J-hook in his eye.”