The Catch: A Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  “Ah,” he said, and he smirked, then put the weapon on the floor beside the bed, swung his legs back up, and lay down as if she were a trifling inconvenience. “That cut goes to Natan,” he said.

  “Natan isn’t here, I am.”

  He laughed. “Your body may be here, but you’re of no help and there’s no way I’m giving you a cut.”

  “Natan’s body isn’t here,” she said. “That makes him even more useless than me.”

  Leo propped himself on his elbow in a brief pause, then sat up again. Swung his legs over the side of the bed again and rested his bare feet on the floor. “You had no reason for being down in the hold,” he said. “You are digging into things that don’t involve you.” He paused for emphasis. “It could get you hurt.”

  She maintained eye contact, a deliberate challenge to his authority, which, if he’d been capable of seeing beyond his idea of who she was, should have given him pause, made him wary; but his body language said otherwise.

  “It involves me,” she said. “You left out a lot of important details when you demanded I come along.”

  In response, Leo slowly stood, shoulders back, chest out, hands slack at his sides, as if his implied threat should cause her, the purportedly weaker of the two, to retreat out of fear of whatever would come next.

  Munroe followed him with her eyes but didn’t move. “Natan wasn’t hurt that badly,” she said. “He could have come if that was what you’d wanted.”

  In a space so small that Leo could have reached her if he’d stretched far, he took a step in her direction: another challenge.

  “I won’t be as easy to throw overboard as you imagine,” she said.

  “You are far out of line.”

  “Hardly. What’s your plan for the discharge? We get close to the Somali coast, offload at sea, and be on our way? Is this the captain’s doing or is someone else pulling the strings?” And because the muscles in his legs tensed as if he were preparing to take another step, she said, “It would be a mistake to get any closer.”

  Leo paused at her warning, then laughed. “Okay,” he said, “whatever you say.” He turned away from her and sat on the bed. The laughter stopped. He glanced up and said, “Get out.”

  “I want my cut.”

  “I’m done talking,” he said. “Get out or I make you leave.”

  She didn’t move. Didn’t speak.

  Shorter than she was, he came after her, hands first as if he would grab her collar and toss her to the bed. Time slowed. Instinct overrode thought, and with a speed hard-won in her struggle to stay alive, she blocked and parried. History that had made her who she was called out for the kill, was held in check by years of controlling the urges.

  The attack and smack back lasted less than two seconds, and in the wake of her defense, Leo paused and stood hunched over, hands clenched, confusion and anger advertised on his face, a message on a well-lit marquee. Munroe nodded and opened the door. Stepped into the passageway and shut it behind her. If deceit-and-revelation was the deed by which score was kept, tonight had evened the game.

  CHAPTER 5

  Late afternoon the next day, Munroe left the relative solace of the engine room and headed out to the main deck, blinking back against the blinding sun, staring up to where Leo patrolled on the bridge wing. She’d avoided him since her confrontation, had snuck into the galley to grab food when she knew his men wouldn’t be around and slept when most of the ship was awake.

  She took her time in the climb to be certain he knew she was coming, each slow footstep reverberating against the metal. Leo didn’t speak or acknowledge her when she reached him and so she leaned her forearms against the rail, kicked a foot up on a slat of one of the many shipping pallets lining the railing, and allowed him the silence while he continued the slow pace along the wing, a small circuit from which he could see the full length of the ship, miles of ocean ahead and around, and everything that lay in their wake. A minute passed. Two. Five. Ten, and finally Leo stopped beside her. “What do you want?” he said.

  “What do you know of the captain?” she asked.

  Turning back to the ocean, he said, “Why?”

  “He committed us to delivering arms off the coast of Somalia—would be nice to know something about the hands we’re in.”

  Leo snorted. Patted his rifle. “Not his hands.”

  Munroe nodded toward the weapon. “That’s fine while we’re moving and out on the open sea,” she said. “But to make this handoff we’ll be stationary and vulnerable—not just to whoever we’re dropping off with, but to warring clans and pirate factions.”

  “What would you know about keeping a ship safe?” he said.

  “More than you’d imagine.”

  He was silent again, perhaps replaying their last encounter and the truths he’d uncovered in those seconds, perhaps debating whether she was worthy of the discussion. “I’m not expecting complications,” he said.

  “Have you done business with him before?”

  “He comes recommended from a trusted source.”

  “But what of his history? His enemies?”

  Leo stretched a hand toward the empty ocean and drew his arm around in an arc. “Whatever enemies he might have, they’re certainly not here.”

  Munroe shrugged and turned from him, back to the water.

  Leo could be right, she hoped he was right, but she’d experienced far more than her share of treachery in remote places of the world, had felt too much of humanity, too deeply, to believe that anything was ever what it appeared to be. Without knowing what strings the captain had pulled to get these weapons, whom he might have pissed off along the way, it was impossible to predict what traps lay ahead and plot a strategy to avoid them; but if Leo didn’t already see this, hadn’t been concerned enough to vet the captain for himself, explaining her reasoning now wouldn’t change anything.

  “How far out are we?” she said. “One day? Two days?”

  “Around thirty hours.”

  “I want my cut for the delivery.”

  Leo shook his head.

  “If I turned out to be useful after all, you’d still give it to Natan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ve already had this discussion.”

  “You’re certain you won’t change your mind?”

  He glared as if she were a fool for asking and so she straightened, nodded, said, “Okay then,” and turned for the ladder.

  This conversation had been her final attempt at reconciliation, an olive branch. Leo’s decision severed her path from his completely. Had he given her what was her due, she would have been more useful than all four of his men, and not just in her ability to understand the whispers behind their backs. She’d lived her own store of experience from that previous lifetime, had survived when betrayal had come while they were anchored and men with guns, as well trained as any of Leo’s team, hadn’t been enough to keep the ship safe.

  In passing the door of the bridge, Munroe spotted the captain, who, like Leo, had become her enemy: He had put the lives of his crew at risk—a violation even greater than what Leo had done to her, because even if he’d compensated them for this detour, unlike her, his men weren’t in a position to say no. They were poor, had families to feed, and if the ship was taken for ransom, they had no resources to raise the money should the ship’s owner refuse to pay. And even if they were fortunate enough that the Favorita carried kidnap and ransom insurance, the captain’s violations, if they came to light—and insurance companies being what they were, this breakaway excursion would come to light—would cause the policy to be voided, and the crew, like so many ship’s crews before them, would be abandoned to their fate.

  The weight of it made her head hurt, made her nauseous. She had run to Djibouti to get away from the killing, from monsters who played and toyed with people’s lives, had run to get away from the burden of caring, and here, the yoke of life’s injustice had found her again.

  Munroe reach
ed the main deck and headed through the open door to the interior, hating humanity, hating that she felt anything at all. Jogged up a level and strode the passageway to the berth where Victor slept. Stepped into the room quietly, trying to avoid waking him, but his eyes opened and he said nothing as she knelt and reached for one of his bags.

  “I need to borrow your backup radio,” she said.

  Victor nodded, and in what was probably the greatest repair of trust that he could have offered, he closed his eyes and rolled toward the wall.

  WHEN IT WAS dark again and Victor was back on watch, Munroe left the supply room and returned to the berth to retrieve her pack. Carried it with her to the deck and walked the full length of the ship, skirting the patrol, until she’d passed beyond the foremost coaming. Here there were shadows that even the sporadic light of the clouded moon wouldn’t reach.

  Sheltered from the wind, she settled for the night with her pack as a pillow, the pictures in her pocket for company, and for entertainment the three men on watch trading crude jokes in her earpiece.

  In the rhythm of the ship as it rose and fell, Munroe watched the map in the sky, same as she had done so many, many nights before in that land of superstition where rumors of her juju, her magic, went out before her and kept her team ahead of conflict and out of trouble. Here on the Favorita, thousands of miles and over a decade away, the story could have been the same had she not, in her running, worked so hard to develop the reputation of a nothing.

  Munroe closed her eyes and drifted into the constant of the engine’s hum, swallowed by the soothing comfort of the monotony until the ship shuddered, tossing her from her place of repose as if she were on a toy boat rattled by a child in a bathtub.

  Confusion erupted in her earpiece.

  Victor’s voice came first in a series of swears, followed by Marcus on the starboard wing of the bridge in a heated exchange with the chief officer, arguing in a French that Nowak couldn’t understand, while Nowak used broken English that meant nothing to Marcus. A simple flick of a switch and in less than a minute Munroe could have settled things, but the decision to intervene or not had already been made by Leo. They were on their own.

  Munroe grabbed the strap of her bag and belly-crawled out from the shadows and in the direction of the starboard railing. Far down the deck so that they were shapeless blurs in the dim, Victor and Emmanuel paced at their respective rails, too focused on scanning the water to get involved in the argument up top, which continued, increasing in volume if not clarity.

  Three shadows rushed through the doors of the upper deck, and all of them moved quickly toward the bridge. Again in her earpiece, another discussion, this time the captain’s voice, first in English to Leo, it seemed, something about the propeller getting caught in a fishing net or ocean garbage, about it not being unusual, about sending a man to look, then something in Russian to Nowak, which she would have understood if she could have heard, but the words were garbled. These were two wholly distinct reactions by the different factions: the captain and the Favorita’s officers, as if the propeller stoppage could have come from a number of different sources; Leo’s crew, as if an attack was the only possibility—which was what Leo was here for, of course—though logically, tactically, the captain’s reaction made the most sense.

  How did you stop a freighter, a pinprick of black against more black, in the middle of the goddamn ocean at night, without warning, and nothing to worry the radar? And yet Munroe sided with Leo.

  Not because of the weapons in the hold or her misgivings about the handoff, but because she’d heard of similar happenings, knew how she would have stopped the ship if it needed to be done.

  The lights didn’t power on, and from her earpiece the captain’s logic was clear: If there was nothing on the water, he didn’t want to attract something. Leo didn’t argue. If there was something on the water, he didn’t want to give the invaders a map and create targets.

  Munroe continued the low crawl toward the railing, covering the distance tentatively, knowing that Marcus in his nest up by the bridge would inevitably spot her and, amped up and trigger-happy as he was, might not register that it was she until after he’d already shot her.

  Nothing in her earpiece indicated he’d seen anything out in the darkness.

  Nothing of value came from Victor or Emmanuel, or from David, who’d by now joined Marcus on the wing. All of the men were equipped with night vision on their scopes, had low-light binoculars, but little good those would do as they hunted, hunted through a hazy green for small specks in the vast emptiness.

  Without the propeller the ship moved on momentum alone, and Munroe could feel the slowing while the pacing of the men intensified. The silence dragged on for long, long minutes until the ship was dead in the water and at the mercy of the wind and the currents.

  No armed ship had yet been hijacked off Somalia because guards were able to fend off attacks from a distance, made it impossible for the marauders to get close enough to fire at the bridge or put an RPG round through the engine room: the guards kept the ship moving, but tonight that strategy had been thwarted.

  Munroe scanned the ocean again, saw only blackness, and in the continued eeriness of the ship gone quiet, the only sounds were the water lapping and the whispered coordination in her earpiece while the jolt of adrenaline that had come in the wake of the stoppage settled some.

  The longer they went without any sign of attack, the more the tension subsided. Fifteen minutes passed, twenty perhaps. The engineers and the mechanic had been roused, and problem solving had gone into full swing. And then Victor whispered a slur, as if he’d found an enemy that even Marcus and David up by the bridge hadn’t spotted. He fired several quick bursts. A warning to whatever was out there, assuming something was out there.

  And then more silence.

  Even the radio went quiet and Munroe could feel the focus as each man studied the water, trying to find the threat that eluded them.

  Another five minutes passed and then Marcus, a tremor of excitement in his voice, gave coordinates for an approaching attack boat, though no sound of an engine came in over the water. Then new coordinates. And new ones again. And again. The tempo on deck picked up. Not confusion so much as tension in trying to home in on multiple moving targets far enough away that they were not easily spotted among the swells even with the aid of low-light goggles.

  Munroe lay flat near the railing, watching, waiting, analyzing, puzzling.

  So much about the scenario was wrong.

  Pirates might follow a well-lit ship at night waiting for dawn before they launched an attack, but she’d never heard of a night strike that targeted a ship out in the dark like this.

  Victor fired three more bursts.

  Wrong.

  Even a calm ocean dumped four- to six-foot swells against the ship’s hull and turned waterline boarding into a climb up a sharp, wet, rocking, bucking wall. It was hard enough using grappling hooks and ropes and ladders when there was no armed resistance and you could see what you were doing.

  This made no sense.

  Flashes sparked out in the dark, far behind the freighter, and a barrage of weapon reports returned from the ocean, though it didn’t appear that the attack drew closer. And then there was silence again. An elongated stretch of minutes where the automatic weapons went quiet and the armed guards, finding protection behind strategically placed sandbags, searched again for the enemy, and in that eternity, the first flash-bang grenade hit the deck.

  Even this far fore, dulled by the distance, muted by the open air, Munroe felt the concussion wave. David screamed, and Munroe knew his pain. Through the night goggles, looking at the moon was like looking into the sun—how much more the searing light that had just exploded in front of him.

  Without the night vision, the men on the ship would be forced to fight blind.

  And then another explosion, another flash.

  Wrong, all wrong.

  Munroe struggled to pick Victor out from the darkn
ess but couldn’t find him. A shadow or two moved down from the bridge, an other one up, but she could no longer tell who was whom. The ship’s foghorn blew, signal to most of the crew to gather in the safe room. Another explosion followed, and then another, and then from the port wing of the bridge a staccato of weapon reports more sprayed anger than targeted shooting.

  Munroe closed her eyes, breathed in the sounds of silence and the fragrance of the impending battle. She saw the strategy, knew the reason for the suppressive fire, understood that it wouldn’t be long before the fighting escalated and whatever was out there closed in: Leo’s team had the high ground, presumably had superior training and better weapons, but the ship was the length of a football field, and they could no longer see in the dark and hadn’t come prepared for a full-on assault of a standing ship. Leo’s team didn’t have the capacity to hold the Favorita indefinitely.

  The silence lingered and Munroe knelt, palms to the deck. The cool of the metal bled into her hands. The first rush burned through her veins and, with it, release in abandoning herself to fate, to the predator’s instinct: tranquillity in the knowledge that death had come for her again.

  CHAPTER 6

  Munroe crawled along the edge of the coaming in the direction where she’d last seen Victor. The muzzle flashes out on the ocean stayed dark and, without targets at which to aim, so did the weapons on deck. How long before Leo’s men pulled the night goggles back on and began hunting the water once more? Probably never—being blinded again was too great of a risk. And then as if to confirm the thought, another concussion grenade landed midship and brought more searing light.

  This was Leo’s war. He and his men could do what they’d been paid to do, but she wasn’t sticking around. No matter how far away the suppressive fire might be, something was close enough to get those grenades on deck, and that was her way out.

  A minute passed, then two, while she continued a cautious stop-start in Victor’s direction; she’d drag him with her if she could, if only for the kindness he had shown, and then she heard the thud, soft and sick: a body being hit with a metal pipe or a rubber-coated grappling hook laying hold somewhere along the railing.