by Joseph Badal
Peter looked at John calmly. “I am sorry, Mr. Hammond, but I cannot do zat. Not as long as you are armed. Now if you gif me zat gun, I vill do as you ask and haf your friend brought aboard. If you do not, I vill tell Tomas to kill her.”
John had to get Zoë away from the man who held her, and he realized the only way to do that was to turn over his pistol. His plan was in shambles. But he still felt there was a chance if he could get Zoë by him. Maybe they could still slip over the side of the boat where he’d tied up the diving gear. But Zoë’s condition suddenly defeated him. She was in no shape to dive. Leidner had trumped his every move. Almost.
John tossed the pistol onto a tarpaulin that covered a stack of fishing nets. Peter waved at the second man, who climbed on board the Penelope. John approached the man to take Zoë from him. When he touched her arm, she cried out.
Peter shoved John and Zoë toward the center of the deck—John barely able to support her as he stumbled backwards. Both of the men carried holstered weapons. They seemed to be confident that, unarmed, John was no longer a threat.
“Now za map, Mister Hammond,” Peter said.
John had hidden the map under the boat’s rail, just above where he’d hung the dive gear. He gently moved Zoë to the spot. The two men followed. John pulled the map from under the rail and handed it over. Peter unfolded it, looked at its markings, and then consulted with his partner.
Then Peter looked back at John. “Vell, Hammond, since you are a great deal more cooperative zen your girlfriend, perhaps you vill explain vat all of zese marks mean.” Then he gestured at Zoë. “You know, Hammond, you haf one brave voman zer. She never told us a thing. It’s too bad you don’t haf za same courage as she does.” He laughed. “Hell, she didn’t even talk ven ve took turns with her.” He grabbed his crotch as though to emphasize the point.
Before John could react, a moan burst from Zoë, and then a banshee-like shriek. She pushed away from John and leaped at Peter with her fingers extended like claws.
She caught him completely by surprise, knocked him to the deck, fell on top of him, and raked his face with her fingernails. She tore bloody furrows in his cheeks. The other man pulled Zoë off Peter and threw her aside like a rag doll. Her head hit the deck with a sickening thud and she rolled to the rail, curled in a fetal position.
John jumped to the tarpaulin-covered nets and grabbed the pistol while the two men were distracted. They didn’t have the time to pull out their own pistols. He leveled his pistol at them.
“Stand by the rail and toss your weapons over the side,” John ordered.
They calmly obeyed.
John shook with anger, but was still under control. “What did you plan to do with the two of us after you got the map?” he demanded, his pistol aimed at first one then the other man. He already knew the answer. He just had to hear it from their own mouths, in their superior, guttural tone. He needed to feed his hatred for them until he would be capable of anything.
“You must know zat you ver both to be killed,” Peter said, seemingly unworried, almost gleeful. “Vy then did you gif up your gun?”
“Because, asshole, I have a much larger weapon.” He pulled a small, black box, about the size of a garage door opener, out of a pocket in his windbreaker and showed it to them. “This is a remote control detonator. This entire boat is wired with explosives. Now tell me what your orders are.”
Peter seemed to be fixated on the little box in John’s hand. He ignored his question. “You ver prepared to blow yourselves up along viss us? Is zat vat you vant us to believe?” He laughed and looked over at his partner. He pointed a finger at John and laughed again.
When John didn’t respond, Peter asked his comrade, “Vat do you think, Tomas? Do you think zat Hammond has za guts to make good on his threats?” They both seemed to have recovered from the initial shock of seeing John with the pistol and the detonator in his hands.
The other man laughed and said, “No! Do you?”
John couldn’t believe it. They just stood there and laughed at him. He felt his rage grow almost to the point of desperation. Then all became calm. His hands no longer shook and he suddenly felt unencumbered by training or ethics. He aimed the pistol, confidently pressed the trigger, and put a 9mm round into Peter’s right kneecap. The man screamed and crumpled to the deck. Zoë, still huddled against the rail, moaned at the sound of the shot, but didn’t move. Blood quickly soaked Peter’s pant leg and pooled around him.
“What do you think now, Tomas?” John asked.
Tomas had that deer-in-the-headlights look.
John stared at him with contempt and ordered, “Talk!”
The man became an instant gusher of information. “Ve ver ordered to kill you both and dump your bodies into za sea. Ve are zen supposed to radio our employer zat ve haf za map and zat ve know ver za sunken boat is.”
“But you realized you couldn’t kill us until you knew the meaning of the markings on the map?”
“Zat’s correct,” he answered.
“What’s the name of your employer and where is he right now?”
After only a moment’s hesitation, Tomas said, “Herr Fritz Leidner,” confirming what the killer, Josef, had told him in his dying declaration. “He is on a boat about nine kilometers south of here.”
“Okay, let’s assume you now have the map and you know it will lead you to a sunken ship. What are you supposed to do?”
“Ve are supposed to radio Herr Leidner und tell him it is safe for him to join us.”
“Why don’t we do just that,” John said. He felt a surge of satisfaction at the thought of luring Leidner aboard the Penelope. He fingered the remote control detonator in his windbreaker pocket.
He ordered Tomas to use his shirt to tie a tourniquet above his friend’s knee, and then had him tie Peter to a large metal deck cleat near the bow. He told Tomas to climb down to the sport fishing boat and radio Leidner.
John remained on the Penelope, but kept his pistol trained on Tomas, who had turned on the sport fishing boat’s radio equipment and now talked into the hand-held transmitter. On the third attempt to raise someone, a voice finally responded.
“Ja, Tomas, hast du die karte?”
“Sorgsam, Tomas,” John said in a hoarse whisper, warning the man to be careful, “Ich spreche Deutsche.” He’d just used up four of the twenty words of German he knew. He hoped his bluff would work.
John could hear both ends of the conversation and did not have one iota of an idea what the two men said. After Tomas shut down the radio, John ordered him back aboard the Penelope. He made him sit next to the anchor chain and then clubbed him on the side of his head with the pistol. He tied him to the anchor chain, and then checked the rope that secured the other man. Satisfied they were going nowhere, he grabbed the map the Swiss man had dropped to the deck, folded it and placed it inside his shirt. Then he knelt next to Zoë.
Now conscious, she moaned when he lifted her shoulders off the deck. He cradled her in his arms and rocked her back and forth. He told her again and again he loved her. Tears flowed silently down her cheeks and dropped onto the arm of his windbreaker. She looked at John with spiritless eyes, a defeated creature. He had to get her off the Penelope. Leidner would arrive in a matter of minutes.
John tried to get her to stand, but she couldn’t. So he hoisted her to his shoulder, carried her to the rail, climbed down the ladder to the sport fishing boat, and laid her on the bench at its stern.
He covered her with his windbreaker, then retrieved the blanket from the deck and draped it over her. Though the morning had already grown warm, she shivered. John turned to the boat’s control panel—the keys were not in the ignition.
He grabbed the Penelope’s ladder and climbed as fast as he could. Peter was passed out where he’d left him tied to the deck cleat. Tomas had recovered from the blow to his head, but still sat where John h
ad tied him up with his hands behind his back. He searched Peter’s pockets, but found no key. Then he rushed to Tomas. “Do you have the boat keys?” he demanded.
Tomas gave him an evil grin and said, “Fuck you!”
The sound of a powerful motor caught John’s attention. He turned and saw a sleek sport boat, the kind sometimes called a “cigarette boat,” pounding the surface of the sea about two miles away. It came straight toward them. He rifled Tomas’s pockets and found a set of keys. He had his hand wrapped around them and started to pull them from the pocket when Tomas clubbed him on the side of his head with one of his fists. White sparks flashed behind his eyes. He felt suddenly disoriented, stunned. Somehow the bastard had worked loose of his bonds.
John’s hand came free of Tomas’s pocket as he fell backwards. He still gripped the keys. While John struggled to get up off the deck, Tomas ran over to him, and kicked him in the side hard enough to flip him over onto his back. He kicked at John again, but this time John managed to grab Tomas’s leg with both arms and knocked him off balance. Tomas fell backward and his head struck one of the metal deck cleats. His skull split like a ripe watermelon.
John got to his feet. He shook his head, trying to clear it of fuzziness. It seemed to help. He saw the cigarette boat close fast on the Penelope’s starboard side. He would wait until the boat came up against the far side of the Penelope and would then climb down to the smaller sport boat on the Penelope’s port side and make a run toward shore. He hadn’t explained his entire plan to Christo. John wanted Leidner dead. He’d never intended to use the explosives as just a threat. He’d hoped he would be able to use them to kill the Swiss sonofabitch.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
John heard the cigarette boat’s engine noise drop from a thunderous roar to a loud rumbling idle. The powerful boat coasted to the Penelope’s side. John climbed over the rail and vaulted to the deck of the sport fishing boat. There were five keys on the ring. The third key he tried fit the boat’s ignition.
Voices carried over the Penelope’s deck and down to where John stood at the controls of the sport fishing boat. He heard a woman shout, “Peter! Tomas!”
John turned the key in the boat’s ignition and the engine roared. He steered the boat directly toward shore. With the Penelope still screening them from view, he hoped they would get a good start toward the coast before the occupants of the speedboat could react. And he prayed they could reach the safety of the harbor, where Christo waited with police and Coast Guard personnel, before the occupants of the cigarette boat could recover and overtake them.
He popped the throttle to maximum power and felt the sport fishing boat surge ahead. Two hundred yards separated them from the Penelope. The cigarette boat suddenly came around the Penelope’s bow and turned after them. He needed to detonate the explosives now, while the speed boat was still within the estimated blast radius. John felt for the detonator he’d placed in his windbreaker pocket. “Shit!” he exclaimed and looked over his shoulder. He’d draped the windbreaker over Zoë.
The cigarette boat followed his wake through the entrance to the harbor. John didn’t believe their pursuers could catch them before they reached the shore, but then bullets, like angry hornets, ripped the air all around them and impacted the rear of the fishing boat. Whoever shot at them used a fully automatic weapon with a high firing rate. And they were not firing warning shots. Apparently, Leidner wanted to cut his losses. Map or no map. Maybe he had another way to get a copy of the map.
A thought careened like a ricocheting bullet through John’s brain. Leidner would go after Christo next. Leidner would go after anyone and everyone who had touched the map. The realization hit John that Leidner must have many men on Samos. Leidner had declared war and John and Zoë were only two of his targets.
John knew that if your enemy throws enough bullets at you, sooner or later one of them will hit something. A bullet slammed into the control panel of the sport fishing boat, right under his left elbow, and careened on into the boat’s electronics. The engine died and smoke billowed from the panel. They drifted to a dead stop in the water, the acrid smell of smoldering electric wires swirled around him.
While he helplessly watched the cigarette boat approach, John saw Zoë lift herself up on her elbow and raise her right hand. She held the remote control detonator box. She must have heard him mention the detonator to Tomas and Peter aboard the Penelope.
Then everything seemed to happen in slow motion—Zoë’s arm reached toward the Penelope; her finger depressed the detonator, the Penelope lifted itself out of the sea.
With the sound of the first explosion, everything returned to real time while dynamite tore the Penelope apart and turned her into a rain of debris that fell back onto the water—and onto them and the cigarette boat. He rushed down the stairs to the lower deck and leaped over to where Zoë lay. He covered her with his body. Fortunately, only small pieces of debris from the wrecked fishing boat found their way to where their boat now floated in Pythagorio Harbor. John craned his neck to see over the boat’s stern and saw a storm of debris fall on the cigarette boat.
The sounds of the explosions subsided into a momentary quiet quickly filled by the shrill wail of sirens. The morning air was gray with smoke and the distinctive odor of explosives assaulted John’s nostrils.
The cigarette boat banked into a turn and raced away. Like cavalry to the rescue, two Coast Guard boats sped after it.
John watched with dismay while the powerful speedboat ran for the mouth of the harbor, easily outdistancing its pursuers. It had gone well beyond the range of the guns on the Coast Guard boats when another explosion rocked the harbor, followed by two more thunderous blasts. A tower of flame and black smoke shot skyward along the shore. Then the Coast Guard boats that chased the speedboat simultaneously erupted and spewed flaming debris in all directions. They’d been sabotaged. The rescue of Zoë had been successful, but only at the expense of more lives. Leidner had out-thought them all. He’d covered his escape.
Then John’s heart seemed to lurch in his chest as a helicopter swooped down toward the water. It charged through the smoke from the onshore explosions and flew in the direction the speedboat had taken. A man sat in the open side door of the helicopter behind what looked to be a .50 caliber machinegun.
Like a spectator at a ballgame, John cheered for the good guys. The helicopter was past the harbor entrance, when he again heard the distinctive sound of automatic weapons.
Black smoke spiraled from the top of the helicopter. Its engine sputtered and the craft began to autorotate. John knew the aircraft and its occupants were lost, that they would crash. He’d seen it happen in Afghanistan, when Taliban ground fire disabled American helicopters. The chopper dropped, then blew apart in a fiery explosion.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
John and Zoë were taken to the Greek Army Hospital. While John watched nurses place Zoë on a gurney and wheel her away, he said a silent prayer for her recovery.
A doctor checked on John, cleaned up his cuts and abrasions, and gave him pills for back pain and to combat infection. He told John he should call him if he saw any evidence of blood in his urine, then walked off to care for another patient.
Zoë had been moved to an examination room down the hall. John dragged a chair from the waiting area and parked himself outside that door and waited . . . and waited. Over an hour passed before a tall, stout woman with a grim face came out. The dark bags under her eyes attested to a schedule that didn’t include much sleep.
“I am Doctor Stavrogianni,” she said. “You are Miss Vangelos’s friend, is that correct?”
He nodded. “I am more than her friend,” he said. “I love her.”
“Good!” Dr. Stavrogianni said. She rocked her head back and closed her eyes. Then she kneaded the back of her neck with one hand and let out a long sigh. She seemed to have gathered energy from the slight pause. “She’ll need all
the love she can get. Miss Vangelos has been badly abused. Her physical injuries will heal, although I’m worried about the possibility of pneumonia because of the seawater in her lungs. We’re working on that now. But it’s her mental and emotional condition I’m most concerned about. She’ll need support and understanding. I hesitate to tell you what she has been through. But if you’re not aware of the problem, you won’t be able to help her.”
John cut her off. “I know she was raped.”
The doctor looked at him, surprised. She lowered her voice. “How did you know? She won’t even acknowledge the attack herself. I discovered she had been sexually assaulted when I performed my examination. It’s obvious she was brutally raped and beaten. However, she screamed at me each time I brought up the subject of rape. Unfortunately, her reaction isn’t unexpected. Even with a highly educated woman. It’s a legacy of what we call epithexi andhrismou—what you might call machismo. If you were a Greek male, I would probably not share any of this with you. I hope you’re more enlightened than most Samian men are.”
“Doctor, the men who raped Zoë bragged about it to me—in front of her. I love her and I’ll do everything in my power to help her recover.”
“Wonderful!” she said as she placed a hand on John’s arm.
“But, Doctor, I’m a little confused. You said Zoë wouldn’t admit to the rapes. She heard one of her attackers brag about raping her. She has to be aware I already know.”
The doctor hesitated for a moment. “Maybe she just doesn’t remember, or she could be intentionally suppressing it. Either way, she has a problem. She won’t get well until she acknowledges to herself what she experienced.”
“I understand,” he said. “You can count on my support.”