by Daniel Pyne
Giving birth again, she thinks.
Reaching out in the cold water, reaching, kicking, the breath beginning to boil out of her, she’s got him, Jeremy, in her arms, his eyes wide, his lips white, pink water blooming from fingertips shredded by his attempt to shed the explosive rigging that was dragging him to the bottom. Sentro strips Dennis’s heavy leather coat off, hooks one arm under her son, and swims them both to the surface.
Rising, gasping, into a pool of fiery patrol-boat bits and acrid smoke. Jeremy isn’t breathing. But Zeme is no longer on the ladder.
Fuck fuck fuck.
Zoala has Sentro’s pocketknife—the one she needs to slice the explosives off her son. She’s not sure how long she can hold him up, treading water.
“Ahoy!”
The sharp prow of a skiff slips out of the surface smoke, aimed right at her. She kicks and pulls her son out of the way, the boat already churning in reverse, sliding past, slowing, propellers thrashing close. It slides back with Eccola leaning over the bow, reaching for Jeremy. Morehouse kills the throttle and comes to the side to help his pregnant girlfriend lift the lifeless body up and into the boat.
“He’s not breathing,” Sentro gasps.
“What a surprise,” Morehouse says with the eerie calm of a real doctor. He disappears below the gunwale where Jeremy flopped aboard.
“He’s my son,” Sentro says, so flush with emotion she’s unsure that the doctor heard her. Eccola reaches out again. “I can help you,” she says, but Sentro doesn’t have the strength to lift her arm.
“Wait,” she wheezes. “Wait, let me just, let me just . . .”
From the boat, the C-4 rig Jeremy was wearing sails over her head and splashes down, disappearing. Clutched in Sentro’s hand is her husband’s waterlogged jacket; she couldn’t leave it. There’s a charred spot on one side, but knotting the sleeves together, she flaps it and captures a big bubble of air inside to help keep her afloat while she catches her breath.
Eccola gazes down at her with those mournful, liquid brown eyes. “Let me help you.”
Sentro worries what she’ll find if she comes aboard.
Morehouse has begun singing, off key.
The girl’s arm still extended. “Please.”
Under his breath, falsetto, tone-deaf flat, but in a steady beat, Morehouse huffs: “Ah ah ah ah, ah ah ah ah—”
Reaching, grasping Eccola’s arm for leverage, Sentro summons all her remaining strength, flutter kicks up out of the water, and, using the girl’s surprising strength as a pivot point, tumbles over into the boat, dragging the sopping leather coat behind her. She’s just in time to see Jeremy tilt to his side and cough up a thin gruel of bile and water. The doctor has brought him from the dead. Delivered him back to her.
“Bee Gees?”
Morehouse nods, looking spent, sitting back. “Pretty much the perfect rhythm.”
“Thank you,” Sentro says. She flashes on Jeremy’s birth, a grueling ordeal, his tiny body slick with her blood, pale and blue from the cord that nearly finished him, her terror, watching, drugged, helpless, terrified that he wouldn’t ever take that first breath.
Morehouse makes a face, still trying to catch his breath. “I do ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ as an encore.”
“No need.” Fighting back tears, just as she did long ago.
Jeremy, fetal, on his side, stares at his mother with what she hopes is wonder. “You shot me.”
There are a million things she wants to say, but all that comes out between gasps as she recovers her wind is, “Flare gun.”
Her son just stares, as if at a stranger.
“Sulfur burn,” Morehouse realizes. “Explains how your chest got grilled.” He frowns, intrigued, at Sentro. “You didn’t worry it’d go right through him?”
“Flare gun,” Sentro says again.
“Oh man.” Jeremy closes his eyes.
No need to get into how she never intended to even hit him. Missions go sideways, but usually not with your own children at stake. Sentro demurs. “Insufficient velocity. And he was pretty well protected. With that coat.” But she felt her heart leave her body when her son went backward into the sea.
“A coat which I see you also recovered from the deep. Special meaning?”
None of his business. Jeremy coughs like he can’t stop, but the sound to her is as beautiful as anything she’s ever heard.
“What if you’d missed?” the doctor asks her.
Sentro wants to say I tried and I was out of options, but she doesn’t know if it’s true. When she pulled the trigger, was she thinking, This is my son? Did she think at all?
She looks at Jeremy. “I knew what I was doing,” she tries to reassure him. Then, as he stares, unconvinced, she hedges: “More or less.”
“More, I hope,” Jeremy says and then shuts his eyes as another fit of racked wet coughing overtakes him.
She puts her hand lightly against his face, murmurs, “Rest,” then rises to take the tiller and aim the skiff back at the Jeddah.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
All he has left is the ransom money.
Brother dead, the bitch and her boy underwater, the whole point of this latest fiasco now drowned, Castor Zeme limp-skips, knee throbbing again, through the cargo toward the container stack where he spotted the silvery special delivery chute flagging in the breeze. He doesn’t understand how the hell this all went so wrong again.
In retrospect, killing the Dutchman was a boneheaded move, but at least it bought him time to collect this payoff and disappear, maybe to Belize or Curaçao, go to ground while the colonel rages. And Castor’s sure that old fascist fucker will rage. Demand his kilo of flesh or whatever. If his brother were here, Castor would smack him for answering that bloody online ad that launched them spiraling into high sea cargo-ship piracy for a duplicitous Englishwoman and the serial calamity that has followed.
Oy, dude, chick swears we’ll net a hundred grand, Pauly had crowed.
Dumb, dumb, dumb. The ache of missing him twists inside.
At the base of the tilted stack, Carlito steps up from behind Castor, cups his hands, and boosts the good leg clattering up onto a lateral brace of strapping from which Castor will find decent purchase to keep going. The ship is otherwise unnervingly quiet.
It should be only a short cliff climb up to the prize.
Seabirds flock and dart and complain, made skittish by all the low aircraft flybys. Another, he senses, is due soon.
At the top of the stack, Zeme spots the package right away, wedged one level higher than he thought, in a narrow slot between salt-rusted green containers, but before he and Carlito can cross over for the final climb, sure enough, the seaplane is back, swooping low on a slant, port to starboard. Bullets pluck at their feet; they dance away from them until Carlito loses balance and goes over the side with a startled cry. Disappeared.
Zeme drops to the sun-warmed steel, then flips onto his back and empties half his magazine up at the belly of the aircraft when it zooms over him.
Elsayed is reloading when Zeme’s return fire peppers the fuselage. More pinholes of light; their punching through sounds like popcorn in a cheap pot. He presses back against the cabin bulkhead, trying to make himself very small, praying that there isn’t a stray one with his name on it. Agent Warren leans in from the strut, unhurt. Behind him one of the wing engines has caught fire.
“Hell’s bells,” Warren says, sounding disappointed.
Smoke pours in on them, and the plane tips when the pilot tries to shut the engine down. Bracing himself so he doesn’t slide out his open door, which is angled sharply down, Elsayed spies an open fishing skiff glide up against the stern of the cargo ship, and he watches as Aubrey Sentro, hair plastered drowned-cat down on her head like a bad hat, leaps to climb a dangling ladder up the hull. Her small body moves with such grace that he marvels at how easy she can make some things look.
“I have got to splash down,” the pilot shouts back at them in Spanish.
Warren says something that gets lost in the wind.
Elsayed looks again and sees, spread eagled on a stern container, a saggy-ass sniper who has drawn a bead on Sentro as she threads through the starboard rails of the main deck. The seaplane wobbles badly, but Reno makes the adjustment, double taps his trigger, and the prone shooter jerks once and goes still, his rifle clattering away.
“Bada boom.”
Sentro is looking up at the plane as it passes over her. Elsayed waves down at his friend, grinning like it’s Saturday softball, until engine smoke blinds him; he gropes for a flapping cabin restraint to pull himself in and buckle up for the emergency descent.
The ransom package has turned out to be a suspiciously repurposed Amazon shipping box, duct-taped to the hilt but already cracked open along one seam by the impact of its arrival. Impatient and wary of his continued exposure atop the containers, Castor has dislodged and dropped it to a lower level and the relative protection of looming cargo on either side. Having climbed down after it, he pulls the drapery of its parachute away and jams his fingers in the split to finish ripping the cardboard open.
Blank, money-size slips of paper cascade out at his feet.
Another infuriating fail. Another elaborate fucking ruse.
Castor Z. screams his outrage.
A bullet grazes his head, slapping it sideways, and he falls back.
The box overturned, the plain paper gets swirled by the wind, twisting, rolling, skittering white across the container top and down into the cargo canyons, nearly indistinguishable from the dropping, diving, peripatetic flock of unsettled gulls.
If there is ever an official intelligence white paper on the Jeddah siege, Sentro knows that it will be briefly covered and summarily redacted: an abortive high sea extortion by unknown apolitical nonstate actors, thwarted by quick and decisive actions of Captain Montez and his crew. Mulligan may get special mention for his bravery. The casualties will be deemed inevitable and unfortunate. Bruce’s family will receive a settlement. The United States government will not comment, and no public mention will be made of Aubrey Sentro, Reno “Lucky” Elsayed, or whomever he brought with him in the seaplane (she’s already preparing herself, not uncharitably, for the two-manhattan-cocktail session her friend will require in order to spin a labyrinthian, half-true tale of how he got there with his new federal BFF in a private RICO jet that once belonged to some knucklehead like El Chapo). She further doubts any account of what has actually happened will make it even as far as the internal-eyes-only anecdotes that sometimes circulate among the bureaucrats and NGOs and private contractors through back channels and word of mouth.
Unless, of course, she somehow dies during this mop-up.
Her government does not negotiate with kidnappers.
The Jeddah’s shipping company will report no loss of assets, human or otherwise; their ransom insurer will settle privately with the surviving passengers for their emotional distress, subject to a strict boilerplate NDA everyone will gladly sign.
Lowering the Kalashnikov she recovered from where she heard it fall between containers, she watches through a narrow gap as blank white paper waterfalls down on weird thermals from over the lip of the container, where the bottoms of Castor Z.’s shoes just skittered backward out of view after she fired at him.
The gun’s sight has been torqued, she decides, which is no surprise; she guesses she missed Zeme by a meter or more. Slipping the rifle strap over her good shoulder, she’s beginning to climb containers to find a better angle and try again, when an answering bullet explodes against the corrugated steel next to her and the resulting shrapnel peppers and shreds Sentro’s lower rib cage and chest. She cries out and falls back to the deck. The rifle strap is dislodged; the Kalashnikov gets away from her.
More bullets ricochet off the decking before Sentro can heave herself around a container to safe cover. She’s hit, and it hurts, and the shock of it hasn’t even gathered yet.
Crawling away, she hears Carlito’s quick movement to the next intersection and knows what comes next. She turns in that direction; sure enough, he pivots around a corner with his gun thrust out in front of him, but the cricket bat that strikes his face crushes his nose and rattles his brain so badly it causes him to pirouette in a helpless rage as the small shape responsible dances past.
Upswinging: rib cage, kidney, balls.
Carlito somehow keeps his feet. The blows keep coming, but the bat splits lengthwise, and the better half clatters away, leaving mostly splinters in Zoala’s hand.
Carlito yells and somehow manages to block the next swing with the forearm of his gun hand, while with the other he backhands Zoala to the deck. He raises his revolver and fires a bullet into the boy before Sentro can react and retrieve the sharp good half of the broken cricket bat to plunge it through the scarred tweaker from behind like a spear.
Carlito gasps, vomits blood, and collapses, dead.
She steps over him and takes the boy in her arms. More gunfire rains down on Sentro through the cascading slips of paper from where Castor Zeme has taken the high ground.
Sentro lifts Zoala and carries him to cover through the open end of a breached and plundered deck-level container. Panicking, she rips open his shirt where the bullets struck and discovers to her astonishment that Jeremy’s hardback edition of Lord Jim, which the boy had wedged in the waistband of his shorts, has two slugs buried in it. They’ve penetrated over halfway, but Zoala is unhurt, just the wind knocked out of him. She exhales in relief. His eyes blink; he’s dazed.
“Matei ele?” he asks.
Bullets jackhammer into the container and rattle around. The sound of Zeme’s feet pounds across steel as he circles and then descends, searching for a better angle in on them.
Sentro doesn’t want to be trapped. Her ribs are on fire, her shirt matted wet with what she knows, without looking, is blood. She darts out into the open, telling Zoala, “You’ll be safer in here,” and, using the container door as a shield, grabs ahold and swings back with it, momentarily protected from the gunfire that tracks her and punches into the other side. She jams the door shut, drops the latch, and rolls into a slender chasm between the next group of stacks.
As Sentro crawls away, hands and knees, she can hear Zoala screaming and pounding on the door. Cast down, Zeme’s long shadow gimps along the container tops, tracking her retreat through the rats’ maze of passageways, popping off single rounds, missing, but not by much.
She hears Elsayed’s seaplane buzz past again. Through a slotted opening, she sees it drop low, one engine smoking, struggling to stay airborne, and then it banks out of sight.
Not entirely by chance, she’s wound her way into that midship widening that she remembers from the last time Castor had her chased. The full depth of the lower hold gapes beneath her in a slot between the dry-bulk containers. A top hatch of the soybean bin is at her feet; she throws it open and dives into the temporary safety of its darkness.
Zeme has seen her go in.
Hearing the yellow seaplane approach again, he flinches, distracted, and turns to watch it pass low, one engine smoking, struggling to stay airborne and loop around the leeward side of the ship to land in calmer water.
Rifle slung over his shoulder, blood leaking warm from the nick on his widow’s peak to the ridge of his jaw, he half clambers, half falls down to the main deck, midship, where the bin into which Sentro has disappeared waits for him.
He also knows where the exit is.
From where he stands, he can look through a gap in the main deck cargo to the bin’s second hatch, still flipped open from the American’s escape days before.
Not this time.
With a stony flash of his sharpened teeth, he locks down the hatch door at his feet, watertight, and then heads for the other one.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The match Zoala strikes sparks the gleaming glass eyes of a thousand shrink-wrapped baby dolls, and they stare back at him, torn from their packaging and piled up like corpses. St
artled, he cries out and stumbles away from them until his back strikes the container door.
Ti bolom, he thinks, terrified. Little babies who die before they get baptized. His sister says they lure grown-ups with their plaintive crying so the devil can take their souls. Zoala covers his ears and shouts at the bolom, “Count sand!”
There’s no beach in this dark container. But maybe they’ll be fooled. His match goes out, and the life is gone from the bolom as well.
Faint light bleeds through cracks in the door. There is an emergency-release handle, painted bright red, high on the inside, just out of reach.
If he can pile the devil dolls high and sturdy enough, he might climb them to reach it.
Her strength is fading. She just wants this ordeal to be over. It’s not her first injury from gunfire, but she’s shivering with shock and exhaustion, light headed from hunger and dehydration, and the deep wound in her side throbs and continues to bleed. Even breathing in this fetid bin proves difficult as she snakes across the surface of the soybeans, lit dimly by daylight that seeps through the hatch she’s crawling toward. She’s heard the hatch behind her get sealed, no surprise. But after a moment, a shadow eclipses the dim moon of daylight up ahead, the bin goes almost black, and a wave of nausea grips her. Castor Zeme. She’s boxed in. Her chest muscles spasm, and as she curls fetal for relief, her buried hands brush across something cool, close underneath her. Scraping, digging, she uncovers what feels like the slick steel of another recoilless-rifle case.
The latches pop open.
She gropes for the Gustaf’s components, gauging the different shapes with her hands, desperate to broom the fog from her brain and remember how they go together as her eyes try to adjust to the darkness.
Muffled voices ring through the cargo canyons from the main deck perimeter: Zeme assumes that Jeddah crewmen have emerged from their safe room to search for Aubrey Sentro and—without a doubt—for him.