There followed a long silence. “What is their purpose on the MBL?” the captain said.

“According to Sparks, whose wife watched the press conference on CNN, they are protesting the overfishing of the North Pacific Ocean, which they say is causing the precipitous drop in the Steller’s sea lion population in the Bering Sea, the sea otter population in the Aleutian Islands, and the salmon runs in Bristol Bay.”

There was another long silence while they both thought about the last time they’d had dealings with the Sunrise Warrior. Six months before, Greenpeace had been protesting the taking of bowhead whales in the Arctic Ocean by the Inupiat people who lived there. Television footage had been involved, featuring bloodied whale carcasses being winched to shore and one memorable scene when one of the catch was revealed to be female and pregnant. Sara wasn’t sure the sight of the dead baby whale rolling out of its dead mother’s abdomen had faded from the public consciousness six months later. She knew for a fact that the footage of the Sojourner Truth getting in front of the Sunrise Warrior so the Sunrise Warrior couldn’t get in between the whales and the exploding harpoon heads had not. They were still getting indignant letters from whale lovers all over the world.

At last the captain said, “Thanks, XO.”

He was right. There wasn’t much else to be said. At least this time nothing as beloved-or as photogenic-as whales was involved. She hoped. “You’re welcome, captain.”

She hung up and sat staring at the screen of her computer, trying to summon up enough energy to move.

Truth was, she was tired. This was the Sojourner Truth’s second patrol in four months, the first one lasting fifty days and this one scheduled for fifty-one, with barely enough time in port between patrols for a crewman to father a child and then out to sea again. They were short two cutters on the Bering Sea, and the remaining fleet had to pick up the slack.

But she knew that it was as much loneliness and depression as it was fatigue. Her mind started backsliding toward that hotel room in Anchorage three months before. Just the memory made her breath come faster.

There wasn’t anything she didn’t love about sleeping with Hugh Rincon. They’d barely waited for the elevator doors to close before they were on each other, and she didn’t know now if anyone had been waiting to get on when the doors opened again on his floor or if there had been maids or other hotel staff who had watched them stagger from wall to wall down the hall, see Sara climbing up Hugh’s body and wrapping her legs around his waist. His tie was twisted around to the side and his shirt was missing two buttons by the time she got her key out, and by then he had his hand up her skirt and she had a very difficult time focusing on the lock.

And then they were inside the room and he had shoved her up against the door and gone down on his knees and his mouth was there and, oh, she couldn’t get her legs open far enough, couldn’t press his face to her hard enough, couldn’t scream loud enough when she came. He got back to his feet and tossed her up into his arms for the three steps to the bed, threw her down, and fell on her before she had a chance to protest. Not that she tried. He didn’t bother undressing, just moved his clothes enough out of the way before he was on her and in her, and that was when he stopped, bracing himself on his arms, looking down into her face with fierce eyes. “Sara,” he said, his voice a husk of sound. “Sara.”

“Move,” she said, arching up, clawing frantically at his back, and he laughed, deep and low and triumphant.

He hadn’t slept much that night, and hadn’t let her sleep, either. He was proving to her how much she had missed him, and she knew it, and she didn’t care. He wanted everything she had to give him and he took it without hesitation or apology, tender only when it suited him, rough and urgent when it did not.

She had reveled in it. She’d never understood other people talking about how the sex had become routine in their marriages. There couldn’t be anything better than married sex, with each knowing exactly what button to push when, that one move that would-

“XO?”

Her eyes snapped open to see Ensign Hank Ryan looking in her open door with a quizzical expression on his face. By sheer willpower she forced the color from her face. “What’s up, Hank?” she said.

“You look tired, XO,” he said. “The cap’n still pissed?”

She sat up and said briskly, “Captain Lowe doesn’t dwell, Ensign. It’s done, it’s over, and we’re moving on. What’s up?”

A member of that generation raised by baby boomers, he had no problem serving under a woman and moreover thought Sara was a damn fine officer, and if he also thought she was hotter than a stick of dynamite he was able to hide his admiration beneath a suitably professional veneer. He accepted the implied rebuke without flinching. He had some crew requests for training to discuss, and when he left she turned to her computer to check her e-mail. Hugh’s name in the in-box was like a siren going off. She swore out loud, earning a quizzical look from BMOW Meridian, passing by on the bosun’s mate of the watch’s duty round.

She swore again, silently this time, resisting the urge to close the door to her cabin, and turned away from the computer and her in-box and the e-mail that seemed to glow in the dark.

That night in October was the first time they’d seen each other in over a year, since the big fight when she was offered the XO position on “I thought you wanted to join the Peace Corps!”

He looked at her, still with that saintly patience that made her want to rip his head from his shoulders and hand it to him, and said, “Sure. Someday. When I’m older. When we’re both older.”

“When we’re retired and too old to be of any use elsewhere,” she freely translated.

They’d managed to battle their way back from that precipice to maintain an uneasy peace in a marriage that was conducted in at best rare and admittedly joyous fragments of time when they were both in the same town at the same time and at worst with long stretches of separation endured with at least the appearance of compliance.

Until she’d been offered the XO position on the Sojourner Truth, when it had been Hugh’s turn to stage a meltdown. “We don’t spend enough time apart already, now you’ve got to go to sea again?”

“You could move to Kodiak,” she said, her turn to be patient, if not precisely saintlike.

“And what the hell am I supposed to do in goddamn Kodiak, Alaska, while I’m waiting for you to get back into port? Learn to speak grizzly?”

This time, the fight had ended with her packing her bags and moving into bachelor quarters on base until her orders came through. She hadn’t called him before she left, either, maybe the one thing she felt guilty about.

Well. She shied away from thinking about how she’d crept out of that hotel room in Anchorage while Hugh was still asleep. Make that two things.

But still, it wasn’t like Hugh didn’t know whom he had married. They’d been friends since birth, coconspirators since they were five, and lovers since they were seventeen. During all that time she had never made a secret of her intention to follow a life at sea.

She tried to imagine that life without Hugh and couldn’t, but truth be told, that was essentially the life she was living.

There were other maritime jobs, even other Coastie jobs she could have taken and been home for dinner every night, but none of them had either the sense of mission or the freedom of action she craved. With the advent of satellite communications it was true that much of the autonomy of a ship at sea had leached back to the District HQs, but she still dreamed of the day when she would command her own two-sixty-four. It was a dream she had had since her father sat her on his lap in the wheelhouse of the Melanie L, and placed her five-year-old hands on the wheel. Sara could have paid her way to the college of her choice with ease, but nothing but the Coast Guard Academy would do. She wanted ships, and in some atavistic throwback to a more barbaric time, she wanted an armed ship. She had been raised by a commercial fisherman in a commercial fishing town and there had never been any question what service she wanted.