Page 1 of Fire and Rain
Prologue
January 11
Air Station Kodiak
Kodiak Island, Alaska
The SAR alarmjerked Sean McKenna from a sound sleep. Instantly awake, he got to his feet and left his duty room, already wearing the black thermals that all flight crews wore beneath their survival suits.
The operations duty officer’s voice sounded over the loudspeaker. “Now put the ready helo online. Now put the ready helo online.”
Justin Koseki emerged from the duty room across the hall and walked with Sean down the narrow corridor toward the locker room. “Get any sleep?”
“Some. You?”
Sean had met Justin a little more than eight years ago at boot camp, and they’d been friends ever since. Tonight, they were both on duty and needed to be ready to take off at a moment’s notice.
Justin shook his head, a smile on his face. “I was talking with Eden. She wants to try for another baby.”
Eden Alexyev Koseki was Justin’s beautiful wife of three years and the mother of his eighteen-month-old son, Maverick.
Sean chuckled. “Weren’t you just complaining about the cost of diapers, man?”
Justin grinned. “She wants our kids to be born here in Kodiak so her parents can have time with them before we get transferred away. I’ll ask to stay here for as long as I can, but you know how that goes.”
Justin had already secured a second tour of duty in Kodiak, but where he served after that was up to the Coast Guard. Most Coastie families lived far from loved ones, moving every two to four years. But Eden had deep roots on the island, with ancestry that included Alutiiq, Russian, Scottish, and French Canadian. She’d never lived anywhere else, and Sean couldn’t blame her for wanting to raise her children here.
Justin glanced at him. “When are you going to meet someone?”
They turned the corner and headed down the stairs.
“Dude, do the math. There are twenty-six percent fewer women than men on this island, and if you subtract married women, little girls, and grandmas, the pickings are slim. Besides, you know what they say. If you mess around on Kodiak Island, you’ll end up with dependents, a disease, a divorce, or a dishonorable discharge—or maybe all four.”
Besides, Sean’s life was too unsettled, his job too risky, and his workdays too long to be in a serious relationship. The divorce rate for Coasties wasn’t as high as it was for members of the Air Force. Still, he didn’t want to settle down with a woman until he had a permanent home, and he’d never planned to be a father. For that reason, Sean had always kept his relationships safe and casual—until he’d transferred to Kodiak. Then he’d found himself without a love life.
Justin laughed. “You’re a flight mech. You’ve got shiny gold wings on your uniform. Women dig wings.”
“Too bad I can’t wear my uniform into the bars.”
“I didn’t meet Eden in a bar.”
“Not all of us get to show off the way you rescue swimmers do.”
Justin had jumped out of the helo at Kodiak’s Crab Fest as part of a demonstration to show the crowd what rescue swimmers did. But rather than hooking himself up so he could be hoisted back up to the helo like he was supposed to, he’d swum over to a pretty woman standing with her sisters at the pier and asked for her name and number. He’d been reprimanded, but it had been worth it. Six months later, Sean had flown up from Air Station San Francisco to stand with Justin at his wedding to Eden. Sean had taken one look at the landscape and had requested to be stationed in Kodiak for his next move.
Some Coasties hated Alaska, but Sean loved it. It was a land of extremes—extreme beauty, extreme weather, extreme risk. Living and working on Kodiak Island got Sean’s blood pumping in a way that no other assignment had.
They reached their lockers and dropped the banter. Lt. James Spurrier and Lt. Junior Grade David Abbott, the helo pilot and co-pilot, were already halfway into their survival suits.
“What’ve we got?” Sean opened his locker, began to dress out.
James yanked up the diagonal zipper of his survival suit. “Sector Anchorage got a call from a twenty-eight-foot fishing boat called the Marjorie T. A forty-six-year-old male collapsed suddenly, seized, and is having trouble breathing. The boat is about fifty miles offshore.”
“Do they have an AED on board?” As the rescue swimmer, Justin was an EMT and would be in charge of medical care once they got the patient into the helo.
“No defibrillator.” James grabbed his flight bag. “The woman who made the call sounded extremely upset and said she didn’t have first aid training. The operations duty officer told her how to put him in a recovery position and asked her to check for a pulse. She couldn’t tell his pulse from her own.”
“Adrenaline will do that.” Sean zipped his suit, grabbed the rest of his gear, and walked with the others toward the operations center. “What’s the weather doing?”
