Bøger udgivet af University Book Store Press

This is the fourth in a series of five sea stories based on the author's experience in the merchant marine. The S.S. Summit was one of the prototype containerships running up and down the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. During winter, that's probably the most miserable route for U.S. merchant ships. John signs on as Wiper, the lowest form of life in the engine room. After trying to save his work partner from a marijuana bust, John ends up sitting beside him in jail in Cordova, Alaska. Unable to make bail, John concludes that he'd need to be a lawyer himself to get out of jail. That realization starts a years-long process for John to go to law school and actually become a lawyer helping other seamen. John Merriam was an unlicensed merchant seaman from 1970 to 1982 while working his way through college and law school. Tuition for law school was paid with a scholarship from the Seafarers Int'l Union. John passed the bar in 1982 and is now a sole practitioner at Fishermen's Terminal in Seattle. He restricts his practice to maritime claims for wages and injury. The author lives with his wife, Kaye Walker, in Shoreline, Washington.

John Merriam was part of the crew for the S.S. Producer when she put in to Bandar Abbas in early 1972, the first U.S-flag ship to visit that godforsaken port. The Shah of Iran was still in power and tension was in the air. Unannounced, and seemingly from nowhere, a man named Mike Costello walked out of the desert. He came aboard the Producer casually as if he were part of the crew, pushing a handtruck stacked with cases of soda--a welcome sight in that parched region of the Persian Gulf. John wouldn't know until later, when he unwittingly became Mike's mule, that Mike was a professional smuggler and that hidden between the cases of soda on the handtruck were 40 kilograms of Afghani hashish. John also wouldn't know until later that Mike's original mule was one of the Ordinary Seamen on the ship, a man who later would be murdered for reasons that had nothing to do with smuggling.