by Tom Wright
There were two boats sheltered in the lee of the atoll, one motored yacht and another more dilapidated looking catamaran. There were at least a half dozen people moving back and forth between the vessels and taking turns at several bottles. I watched a large dark-skinned man emerge from below decks on the yacht. He grabbed a bottle from another smaller man and took a long pull. He held his arm up, and a small flame flickered in his hand. He blew out the contents of his mouth and it erupted into a giant fireball. The man laughed. It looked like a fun party. In any other situation, we might have gone over to join them. At the very least, it was a sign that not all was wrong in the world—some people were still having a good time.
It was sort of weird watching people go about their daily lives without any idea that they were being watched. But it had been ten days since we’d seen another person and I enjoyed the company. The yacht shifted in the current and showed us its stern. Its name was Hawaii 5 Oh!, home port: Honolulu, Hawaii.
I suddenly wished we didn’t have to lower the sails since it was costing us time. I didn’t need anything to remind me of Kate—hardly a minute passed without me thinking of her and the children—but watching those people having such a good time reminded me of how much she loved boating and parties. She would have loved to be there at that moment.
I took a turn at the helm, and Sonny took up the telescope.
“Oh, baby!” Sonny exclaimed. “There’s a woman. She’s topless. Looks hot.”
“What? It’s a little cold for that,” I said, jumping up and grabbing for scope. “Give me that back.”
After some begging, Sonny gave me a turn. It was hard to make out detail at that range, but as I watched the woman on the deck of the boat, it became apparent she was not just topless, but naked. The titillation was only fleeting as I got a strange feeling from the scene. I gave the scope back to Sonny. “Have at it,” I said.
Sonny watched for a few minutes, and then his expression changed from one of lust to one of surprise. “What the hell are they doing?”
Sonny handed me the scope. The big, dark guy held the naked woman by the hair and appeared to be yelling at her. She slapped at him, but he dodged it. He threw her down to the deck, and she buried her face in her hands.
By this time, Sonny had emerged from below with binoculars and Jeff stared through the sextant. Two other men wrestled a fourth man onto the deck. The big man grabbed him by the back of the neck and forced him to watch as he fondled the woman’s breast. The man struggled, and the woman lunged toward him. The big man kicked her in the chest, and she fell back.
Sonny was the only one who spoke. “Oh God, no,” he said calmly.
Just then, the big man pulled a gun from his waistband. He held it to the woman’s head. The other men dragged the fourth man to the edge of the deck and released him. He stood up. The big man pointed the gun at him and then back at the woman. The man jumped into the water. The big man walked over to the edge, pointed the gun toward the water, but did not fire. Suddenly the man disappeared under the surface. The big man leaned back, laughing and slapping his thighs. The woman scrambled to the rail and collapsed on it, her hands outstretched toward the water.
The two men grabbed the woman, dragged her to the bow of the boat and held her. The big man began to undo his pants.
We all lowered our instruments and stood silently. I looked at Jeff and then Sonny. Sonny looked at me and then back to Jeff. Our minds reeled. An anger rose in my stomach. I rubbed my forehead, a migraine suddenly brewing. The idiots on Wake were bad, but we made it; the heads were gruesome but abstract; the ash could have been anything; but a man being murdered and a woman being raped in our very presence was too real.
“We can’t save the world,” Jeff said, stoically.
“But we can save her!” Sonny snapped.
They both looked to me to break the tie.
My anger melted into fear and then guilt. I thought that if there were a God, it would be a great time for it to say something. I looked out over the bow at the magnificent nothing beyond and waited a second for something to happen. As usual, nothing did. I raised the telescope and peered through for a moment and then quickly lowered it in disgust. I sighed and looked at Jeff. “Would you want someone to ignore this on your account?
Jeff lowered his head and answered immediately: “No.”
“Neither would our wives or children.”
. . .
Darkness settled in from the east over the next half hour. It would be pitch black at night, so we could probably get right up to them before they saw us. We knew for sure that there were three bad guys aboard and at least one gun. We knew of only one remaining victim, but we allowed for the possibility of more. We weren’t master tacticians, so we planned to get close enough to take a full survey of the situation, but without putting ourselves in too much danger.
The RY engine was very quiet and when in idle emitted almost no sound. We motored to within about a hundred yards downwind of the boats. We occasionally heard laughter but hadn’t seen any activity on deck since the rape. The light from within both boats illuminated a circle of at most twenty feet. Everything beyond was vague, so we quietly motored in to the edge of the light.
We heard the muffled scream from within the yacht which was followed by laughter. I felt a sudden burst of pride that we didn’t sail on. At the same time, anger seethed inside me.
“Now what are we going to do?” I whispered.
Just then three of the men emerged from below—the two smaller men from earlier (we could now see that they were oriental) and a gangly black man that we hadn’t seen before. Two of the men carried another man as he sang some terribly slurred song. He made the men stop and then threw up on the deck. They loaded the man onto the adjacent catamaran and took him below.
The big man stumbled out onto the deck and yelled: “Where the fuck did everyone go?” He slipped on the vomit and fell and then laughed at himself. He looked Hawaiian and had a goatee and Mohawk. He weighed at least three hundred pounds—mostly muscle. His tattooed arms bulged as he lifted himself up. I didn’t like our odds if one—or even all three of us—had to fight him. He went back inside.
“He’s drunk as a skunk. Maybe we can take him,” Sonny said.
“At least one of the others is out of commission, maybe both,” Jeff replied.
I motioned to the back of the yacht. “We could swim over and easily get up on the back there. Will the guns still work if they get wet?”
“I think so,” said Jeff.
We decided that Jeff would stay on the RY since we might need to make a quick getaway, and he was the best at maneuvering it in tight spaces. Sonny and I would go. We couldn’t be sure that there weren’t others on board, but the element of surprise was on our side.
Sonny and I checked that our guns were loaded and the safeties off. We took one extra clip each and stuck it all in our pockets. We removed our shoes and slipped silently into the water. As we neared the yacht, I started shaking violently, but not from the cold. The water was still much warmer than the air. No, I was scared shitless. I swam around to the stern and lifted myself carefully onto the dive platform. Then I helped Sonny aboard.
Sonny pointed to his eyes and then made some hand motions. Apparently thinking that I knew what he meant, Sonny took off around one side of the boat. I went around the other.
I peered in the first window I came to. It was the galley, and it had been ransacked. I tiptoed further along and came to another window. My heart jumped as I saw the woman, still naked, tied to a table. She was much worse than I imagined. She had been beaten, cut up, tortured. She bled from the nose and mouth and had bruises all over. The ropes that bound her were tainted with the rusty color of dried blood where she had struggled against them. As she lay motionless, part of me hoped she was still alive, but another part of me knew that she was probably better off dead.
I shifted my angle and noticed the Hawaiian passed out on the couch next to the table.
&nbs
p; I tiptoed around to the front of the boat and met Sonny there.
“What did you see?”
“The woman.”
He paused for a moment and wiped his eyes. “I swear to God if I get the chance I’m going to gut that mother fucker.”
I agreed.
“He’s passed out,” I said. “Do you think they’d hear it over there if we just went in a shot him?”
“Probably. I wish I had a big knife. We could easily sneak up and put it through his heart.”
Just then, the black and the oriental came out of the catamaran and jumped over to the yacht. We ducked, but they had seen movement. The black man stood watching while the oriental yelled the name “Spike” and raced into the yacht. Within seconds, Spike popped out on the port side, and the oriental came out on starboard. They both walked forward guns drawn. We were trapped.
I already knew that we were no Navy Seals, but I expected us to do better than that. We were also not gunfighters. “Stick your gun back in your pants and get ready to jump,” I whispered to Sonny. We concealed our guns.
Spike came around the corner and started laughing.
“Well, well. What do we have here? More fisheries people? I thought we got you all the first time.”
We said nothing. Desperation rose within me. I smelled the vomit and heard the waves bouncing off the hull. My mind scrambled for an idea. Every thought that occurred to me was more dangerous and less likely to succeed than the previous. My original thought—which was to jump and swim for it—still seemed like the best idea.
“So, how do you like my new boat? Beautiful, eh?”
We just stared at him. I thought of Kate and the kids and knew that they were doomed. I screwed up.
“Would you like to meet my new wife?” Spike asked. “Her name is fuck you. At least that’s what she says every time I ask her name.” He laughed. “I found papers though. Her name is Jill.”
“Of course, maybe you already know her. Maybe she is why you have come.”
Spike waited for our response, and none came.
“Chang. Where is Sulu?” Spike asked, looking toward the other man.
“He fucked up. No good,” Chang replied.
The black man walked up behind Chang. Spike motioned at him to come over to him.
“Sundance. What do you think we can do with these two, huh? Be a good boy and go check them for weapons.”
Sundance hesitated, and Spike raised his hand to backhand him. Sundance cowered and then scrambled over to us to frisk us.
I turned to Sonny and said “Go.”
We both sprinted for the rail. Spike fired in front of us, stopping us cold.
“Yes, by all means, do that,” he said. “But first I would like to warn you: these waters are infested with sharks. We’ve been feeding them for days.” Spike turned to Chang, and they both laughed. I shuddered at the thought of sharks circling below us as we swam to the yacht.
Sundance checked us over. He ran his hand over the gun in my pants, but he said nothing. His frightened eyes tried to tell me something, but I couldn’t understand. He walked back and heeled at Spike’s hip.
“How did you get here, anyway?” Spike asked, squinting out over the water through the ink-black night. “I’m surprised you made it all the way from the island. The sharks are usually very hungry.”
I studied Spike’s face for any hint of humanity. I found none. His right eye looked at me, and the other looked up and left. His taut, weathered face showed no hint of emotion except desire—a desire to watch me die. I imagined little difference between him and the sharks circling below. At that moment, I knew our only chance was to fight it out. I would have rather died with guns blazing than in whatever sadistic way Spike could dream up. It’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees, as they say. As I prepared to go for my gun, I hoped that Sonny saw the same thing I did.
I looked at Sundance. He stared oddly at me, as if he were trying to look through me. He shook his head as if to discourage me from what I was about to do. He shifted his eyes to the right and tilted his head, motioning. I casually glanced that way and saw a triangle emerging from the darkness and heard a puttering engine.
Spike turned to fire and got off one round before the bow of the RY crashed into the side of the yacht. The yacht lurched heavily to port. At that same moment, Sundance punched Chang and sent him tumbling. Spike stumbled and fired up into the black. I fumbled for my gun and drew it, but it slipped from my grasp and skittered away along the tilted deck. As Spike righted himself and took aim again at the RY, the football player inside me kicked in. I sprinted toward Spike and drove my shoulder into his mid-section with every bit of force I could muster. Spike was just as solid as I imagined, but he went down hard and in the process, hit his head on the railing.
As I got to my knees and knelt over Spike and prepared to finish the job with my fists, I heard two gunshots in rapid succession from the other side of the boat. I looked over just as Sonny fell backwards. My heart sank. I scrambled over to Sonny and began to pat at his torso. He stared at me, stunned but all right. I looked at the other two men. A dark pool formed between Chang and the rail. He was dead. Sundance stared straight ahead, clutching his chest.
Sonny leaned in toward Sundance and said: “Thank you.” Then he moved toward Spike.
I grabbed him. “We don’t have time for that, and we don’t know who’s on the other boat. Let’s get the woman and get out of here.”
Sonny and I retrieved our guns and then scrambled into the yacht. I untied the woman and told Sonny to check the rest of the cabin for other victims. I checked for a pulse and breathing and found both.
Sonny came back. “No one. How do we know they don’t have hostages on the other boat?”
I slapped lightly at the woman’s face. “Jill. Wake up. Are there other hostages?” She moaned. Her injuries were terrible. I repeated the question twice. She finally managed to say no.
“Let’s get out of here before the other one wakes up,” I said.
Sonny hoisted Jill onto his back and ran from the cabin. I followed, keeping my eye on the other boat and in the direction where we left Spike. I had seen enough movies to know that I should go back and kill him. But I had already done the fight part and was now focused solely on flight.
Jeff had already put the RY in position at the stern of the yacht. We carefully transferred Jill onto the RY and hopped aboard. Jeff gunned the engine, and we pulled away at a break-neck eight knots.
We took her below and laid her on one of the bunks. Sonny prepared an IV for her, and I began to clean and dress her wounds the best I could. I applied some alcohol to a small pad and dabbed it on one of her leg wounds. She winced and moaned in pain. It became obvious that she would not be able to tolerate the pain of our touching her.
“We will probably need to dope her up to get through this,” I said to Sonny. “We’ve got to clean these. And she’ll need stitches here and here.” I pointed to a spot on her chest and another on her abdomen. “What do we have in there?”
Sonny fumbled through the various medications in our first aid kit and came up with a bottle of liquid morphine.
“Look at this,” he said as he held up the bottle. The name of the drug was written across the bottle in big letters.
“Good!” I said. “Do we have any syringes?”
“Yes,” said Sonny. “But we might as well put it right in the IV,” he pointed to the little injection port on the IV tube that was used for administering additional medications.
“While you’re at it, don’t you think we should put some antibiotics in that IV?” I asked. “Some of these are starting to look infected.”
“I don’t see any liquid antibiotics in here. Just pills.”
“How much of this do you think we should use?” asked Sonny, holding up the morphine.
“What does it say on the bottle?”
“Morphine. Single-use Vial. 10 milligrams per milliliter.”
“Wel
l, single use vial would mean just that, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I.”
Jill drifted into consciousness and mumbled: “Three milligrams.”
“How do you know that?” I asked. “Are you sure?”
But she was already out again.
“She sure sounded like she knew what she was talking about,” said Sonny.
Jeff stuck his head in from above. “We’ve got company.”
I rushed topside to see the yacht bearing down on us from behind, Spike at the helm. I drew my weapon and began to fire at him. Spike was a hundred yards and closing, but in rough seas, I was lucky to hit the boat, much less anything meaningful.
As the boat drew nearer, Spike began to fire at us, which sent me under cover. He was going to ram us, and at a top speed of eight knots, there was little we could do about it. That was when I noticed Sundance, still on deck and propped up against the rail in the position we’d left him. His face was calm and unflinching. Blood soaked his shirt. He had Chang’s gun and fired rhythmically at something. He fired one round, then rested, took aim, and fired again. Sundance made a half dozen such attempts, and for attempt number seven, we hit a patch of smooth water. This steadied him just enough—he squeezed the trigger and the yacht erupted into a fireball. Even at some distance, the concussion from the explosion nearly knocked me over. An intense heat wafted over us and then subsided. Flaming debris rained down behind us.
Finally safe, Sonny and I went back to tending to Jill. We gave her the three milligrams of morphine as she suggested and then another dose as she began to arouse before we were finished. I stitched her larger wounds as best as I could from the memory of watching my own finger being stitched after losing a battle with a soup can. We cleaned and dressed her smaller abrasions. We checked her for broken bones. It looked to our untrained eyes as if most of the damage had been done on the outside; time would tell about the inside. We decided she would probably heal physically, but we had no idea how she would be mentally.