Because right now there’s only one thing that matters.
Finding Holloway.
I shift closer to the open side door while the crew chief hands me my headset.
“Lost visual about eighteen minutes ago,” he tells me over the roar of the engine.
“Last known position?”
He taps the coordinates on the chart clipped beside the door.
“Just outside Pirate Cove. Current is pushing north with the swell.”
I glance down as we cross over Depoe Bay, the narrow channel cutting through the rock beneath us before the coastline opens suddenly into the full stretch of the Pacific.
The difference is immediate.
Inside the harbor, the water looked restless.
Out here it’s something else entirely.
The swells are bigger than they appeared from shore, long rolling walls of dark water rising and falling beneath us while wind tears across the surface and pulls white spray from the tops of the waves.
Behind us, the harbor at Depoe Bay quickly shrinks against the dark cliffs as the pilot angles the helicopter north toward Pirate Cove, where Holloway was last seen drifting with the current.
The pilot adjusts our heading.
“Search pattern Alpha,” he calls back through the headset.
“Copy that,” the crew chief answers.
I brace one hand against the doorframe and lean out slightly, scanning the water below.
Finding someone in the ocean isn’t about spotting a body.
A man in the water is small against all that moving water, and the sea has a way of swallowing anything that doesn’t belong there. From the air, you’re not looking for a person so much as you’re searching for the slightest thing out of place.
A color.
A shape.
Something that shouldn’t be there.
The current is running hard today, which means that if Holloway stayed afloat, the water could have already carried him a fair distance.
I sweep my eyes slowly across the swells as we move along the search pattern, watching the rhythm of the water and waiting for something—anything—to break it.
Come on, lad.
Where are you?
The helicopter continues along the grid while the wind howls through the open door and the sea rolls endlessly beneath us.
I keep my eyes moving across the swells, watching the rhythm of the water and waiting for the slightest thing to break it.
Then something farther out catches my attention.
A plume of white mist rises suddenly from the surface.
