With the boombox clutched firmly beneath one arm and Kate beneath his other, Anatoly plotted a course for the door, followed by laughing, chattering shipmates similarly laden with packages. Kate felt like she was leading a parade. -As they exited the store, what looked like an entire ship's company of Japanese fishermen flooded in and headed straight for the meat counter. So that was why everything in the store was priced in yen, too, Kate thought, and wondered why the store's owners didn't price their products in rubles as well.

The Shipwreck Bar had been a Dutch watering hole for time immemorial, which at this longitude meant since at least before World War 11. A cargo ship for Alaska Steam, she'd been conscripted by General Samuel Buckner to supply troops rushed to the Aleutians following Pearl Harbor. A gale drove her ashore during her first year of service. The SeaBees restored her to an upright position, filled her hold with concrete for ballast, reconditioned her generator and used her for a barracks during the war. Abandoned for two decades, when the crab fishing picked up in the sixties a local businessman acquired her as government surplus and remodeled her into a restaurant, hotel and bar.

Double doors were cut into the side of the hull. Kate entered first, only to dodge back out of the way of a fisherman slow dancing with a bar stool, eyes closed and cheek to seat. Jimmy Buffet was wishing he had a pencil-thin mustache and about thirty fishermen were crowded around the jukebox, leaning up against it and each other and singing along in an enthusiastic if tuneless chorus. Grimy windows cut through the hull looked out over the docks and boats of the harbor, tables were scattered around the room with a lavish hand, the floor was filthy with spilled beer and cigarette butts, and Kate couldn't even see the bar with all the bodies crowded up against it. Her eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom, she conservatively estimated about one woman for every twelve men in the place. She further estimated that at thirty-one years of age she was by far the oldest person in the room, save perhaps the bartender. He was a wrinkled little man with an anxious expression between the creases, who seemed to be the only waiter and was in constant motion between bar and tables.

One of those tables became free and Anatoly and his shipmates herded their prize female across the room in a proprietary manner that made Kate feel like the single houri in a harem otherwise filled with very needy sheiks.