She nodded, her face wearing a rueful expression he didn't understand but was too wrought up to question.

"Yup. It's eighty-three hundred dollars, all right. Each."

Laying pencil and paper aside, she rubbed her face with both hands, hard. "Eighty-three hundred dollars," she repeated in a thoughtful voice. "Not bad for eight days' work."

Jack Morgan might live after all.

In one of those impetuous changes of mind for which Aleutian weather is rightfully famed, the fog shifted and revealed a high, broken overcast and, if Kate was not mistaken, a pale, brief and wholly transitory gleam that might be sunshine. The resulting scene was somewhere between appalling and enthralling. Dutch Harbor was a sheltered piece of Iliuliuk Bay, nuzzled up against Amaknak Island behind a mile-long spit of sand and gravel and grass. Amaknak Island, four miles long and a mile wide, in turn Jay snugly within two arms of the much larger Unalaska Island, eighty-seven miles long and thirty-seven miles wide and the second largest in the Aleutian Chain. Amaknak Island looked like a pelican facing northeast, Unalaska like a tomahawk with the blade facing north-northwest.

Mount Ballyhoo formed the beak of Amaknak's pelican, so named, Kate dimly remembered from some long-ago lesson in Mr. Kaufman's sixth-grade geography class, by Jack London when he'd been sealing between the Aleutians and the Kuriles at the turn of the century.

That voyage had formed the basis for local color in The Sea Wolf which Mr. Kaufman had forced down the class's collectively unwilling educational maw. All Kate could remember of the story was her conviction that though Humphrey Van Weyden might have survived Wolf Larsen, he wouldn't have lasted five minutes in the Park.

Ballyhoo had been her first sight of Dutch. In fact when she saw it loom up in the window of the 727 she flew in on she had been certain it was going to be her last sight of anything at all, as the airstrip clung precariously to a very narrow strip of land between the southwestern slopes of Ballyhoo (or the back of the pelican's head) and the Bering Sea. From the maps she knew a five-hundred-foot bridge connected Amaknak with Unalaska, and on the island of Unalaska was the village of Unalaska. Somewhere off to the northwest in the surrounding clouds was 6,680-foot Makushin Volcano, the second largest in the Chain. It was still active, as were most of the volcanoes in the Pacific's Ring of Fire.

Kate tried not to think about it.

From nowhere on either island was there a view that did not include a vast, unending expanse of water. In the north it was the Bering Sea; in the south, the Pacific Ocean. Both bodies of water were a constant reminder of what fueled Dutch Harbor. Dutch was a boom town and looked it. Prefabricated buildings crowded up against each other along narrow strips of beach, beaches that were themselves crowded between a landscape that rose suddenly and vertically with very few softening curves, and a sea that from one moment to the next varied in color from bright blue to dull green. Looking at this view was as alarming as it was invigorating, Kate now discovered, as if she were riding a roller coaster with both feet planted firmly on the ground.