Simon nodded, clenching his teeth. He could see that she was just as afraid of being left here alone, as she was of the two of them being caught here together. Besides, taking out the leader when he showed up here seemed the most sensible option. “You don’t have to say any more. I’ll hide behind the door. When he arrives…”
She nodded, showing her understanding, then lay back upon the bed, crying.
The only sounds they could hear while waiting were those of a heavy object bouncing against the hull, the Zodiac most likely, and the muffled arguments of the men trying to haul it up.
Ten minutes passed before they both heard a single man approach, cursing in Arabic. There was an edge of uncertainty, even fear in his tone. Simon didn’t understand the words, but it sounded like he was rehearsing giving orders, uncertain orders. Perhaps Simon’s ruse with the corpses had worked to unsettle the crew.
A tall, dark-skinned Arab blustered into the room, wearing the same shawl headscarf, thobe and futa skirts as the other Yemenis crew. Hanging from his belt was a traditional Jambiya short curved blade, of elegant craftsmanship, featuring a handle forged from what Simon presumed was rhinoceros horn. The unsuspecting man stood with his back to Simon, unaware that there was someone else in the cabin with him. He was dark-skinned, more African than Arab. He appeared to have ritual scarring on his hands and neck, and across other regions of his body. But what struck Simon the most were the gaping openings where his ears would be. Someone, long ago, had hacked the flesh and cartilage from both sides of his skull.
Simon moved, wrenching the man’s right arm behind his back to cause significant pain and, with the other hand, pressed the blade of his knife across his foe’s neck. Pushing the man up against the wall, Simon pinned his free arm behind him so he couldn’t reach round for the Jambiya.
At first the man resisted but, realizing that he was a single motion away from having his throat sliced open, he stilled, allowing Simon to immobilize him.
A stream of heated Arabic poured from his mouth.
“English,” Simon demanded, pressing the blade deep enough to nick the skin, causing a thin trickle of blood to spill down the man’s vulnerable neck onto his collarbone.
“You're the mercenary sent by the father?”
Simon remained silent.
“I think you are. I am here to tell you, my friend, that you have already failed.”
“I’m not your friend,” Simon growled.
The man laughed. “No. But you need friends here, friend. When my men come for you, you will wish you were this whore, because the things I will do to you will be far worse than what I have done to her.” He spat at the naked form of Ariana trembling on the bed. She didn’t move or even try to wipe away the spit. Her fear left her frozen, unresponsive to the violence unfolding before her.
“I will use my blade, cut you through the spine. I will start low and work upwards. And all the time, you’ll comprehend you are becoming more and more paralyzed with every cut.”
Simon wanted nothing more than to slice open the man’s throat, to end his disgusting life. But he knew this was his rage driving that course of action. What he needed was intel, information to maximize his chances of getting Ariana off the Spinecutter alive. He knew he couldn’t kill this brute until he gave up the information he required.
“How many men on this boat?”
The man sniggered again, so Simon twisted his arm further, increasing the strain between the bones and ligaments. A few more centimeters and the shoulder would dislocate. Simon would have gone that far already, but he didn’t want to prompt the mutilated man to call out and alert others. There was also the Jambiya blade to consider. Simon wanted it far from the man’s reach, but right now both his hands were busy immobilizing the sadistic captain.
“How many men?”
The captain tensed, unable to hide his agony, yet somehow managed spit on Ariana again.
Simon pulled harder on the twisted arm.
The man gave out a cry, loud enough for the noise to carry outside the room.
Simon pulled again, dislocating the man’s shoulder.
The sadistic man howled in pain.
Simon released him, raising the Uzi, ready to clobber him over the head.
The door burst open as the thugs from up on deck stormed the room.
Simon spun, raising his weapon to shoot the intruders. He fired once, a stream of bullets decimating a thug as his neck snapped back, a revolting mess of blood replacing the top of his skull.
Wiping the blood from his eyes, trying to turn away in the confines of the small room, Simon felt an iron pipe smash against his forehead.
Everything went dark.
CHAPTER 5
Simon woke to a splitting headache as his captors threw salty water across his face.
He cried out, confused, thinking he was standing on the edge of a cliff, about to fall. Then his memory came rushing back, and he knew he was about to endure a far worse fate.
Wishing he had feigned unconsciousness, he instead shuddered. Rope wrapped around his wrists and ankles bound him to a chair. He wore only the loose pants stolen earlier that day. A stream of wet, thick blood dripped down the left side of his face, neck and chest. He hoped it wasn’t his own.
Something was thumping, thrashing against the hull.
Something large.
Refocusing his eyes, he saw not one, but two sisters standing before him, both naked with the hands bound and stretched high above their heads, tied to strong hooks bolted into the ceiling. Wide-eyed with terror, they struggled to escape their bindings. Like him, they were powerless to do anything. With gags over their mouths they couldn’t call out. The absent manacle on Ariana’s ankle solved one of his problems. The kidnappers had snatched Meinke from the beach, suggesting that there were more men now than the six he had seen up on deck.
Simon took in his surroundings. They were in a cargo hold, one that appeared to be an old stateroom used for storage. Crates loaded with ancient coins, pottery fragments and rusting jewelry. Stacked against the walls were stone bas reliefs of bearded men, muscular hero types wielding swords, firing bows, riding horses and doing battle with lions. One corner held a pile of decapitated stone heads of Assyrian kings, and most prominent of all, two carved human-headed winged bull statues, each weighing at least half a ton. No wonder the trawler was low in its waterline.
Simon focused again, blinking away the thick blood dripping into his eyes, and counted three men.
The first was the captain, the earless, ritually scarred brute, with his dislocated arm now popped back into its socket. He could use it again, but Simon saw that his movements caused him discomfort. His skin was leathery from too much time in the hot equatorial sun. His cracked lips, like old parchment, looked like they never smiled.
The other two men were Arabs from Yemen, with olive skin and unblemished complexions. Each wore a Jambiya knife on their belts, but neither blade was as elegant or as ornamental as the captain’s weapon. The men seemed to revere him, casting their eyes downward whenever they glanced his way.
Simon’s hope sank so deep it felt like he had lost it to the very depths of the darkest ocean. A black flag hung on the wall behind the men, with Arabic scrawls and a white circle, with further scrawls inside it. The official flag of the world’s most horrific terrorist organization, the so-called Islamic State.
There would be no humanity here. The tortures the men would inflict on him and the two Venter sisters would be horrific beyond imagination.
“I’ll kill you all!” Simon blurted. He didn’t want to imagine what was coming.
The men ignored Simon. One spoke to the captain in Arabic. Simon understood only enough to work out that the captain had responded to the name Qate Aleumud Alfaqri.
Captain Alfaqri.
He looked around the room again, searching for a weapon. Spotting a box of C4 explosives and detonators, he understood everything laid out before him.
The relics were Assyria
n and Roman artifacts, plucked from the rubble of archaeological sites and museums decimated by the Islamic State during their recent occupation of Syria and Iraq. The men had smuggled the stolen loot out of the country, selling them unscrupulous collectors to increase funding for Islamic State terror activities across the globe.
The earless, scarred captain stared at Simon. He held another bucket of salty water, which he tipped over Simon.
“You hear me?” Simon yelled in Alfaqri’s face. “You’re all dead!”
Alfaqri stepped away, lifting a large, spare motor battery for the trawler from a cardboard box. It had two cables attached to the positive and negative connectors, which he grabbed and punched into Simon’s pectoral muscles.
The powerful electrical charge surged through Simon’s chest. Every muscle in his already exhausted body contracted and cramped. His heart beat like an out-of-control piston and it felt like his skin was on fire, everywhere, all at once. He couldn’t breathe.
He collapsed as Alfrqri released the charge.
Simon drew on every ounce of training he could to stay coherent. Again heard a crash against the hull, distracting him.
The terrorists seemed unconcerned by the noise and that worried him.
The deranged captain sat on a crate next to Simon, leaning close enough to whisper in Simon’s ear. “My friend — I told you you were my friend, no?”
Simon said nothing. He guessed that only twelve or fourteen volts had passed through him, but the salty water had made him a better conductor, ensuring the torture hurt so much more than an accidental shock. Fighting to keep his mind focused, he imagined crushing the brute’s throat with a single boot pressed on his windpipe.
“These infidels, these whores, I won’t damage them too much. I need them intact to get the best price for them.”
“The father will still pay,” Simon offered, hoping that if these brutes didn’t spare him, they would at least spare the two Venter sisters, “despite my presence here.”
Alfaqri laughed. “After all the trouble you’ve caused me, I think I rather make my money selling these whores to my Islamic State brothers. No?”
Simon tensed, pulling hard at his bindings, but there was no give. He knew all too well what happened to prisoners held captive by Islamic State; decapitations, crucifixion, burning or drowning people alive inside metal cages, or pushing bound and gagged victims off the tops of tall buildings. His own painful ending would come from having his spine sliced like a sushi dish, just as Alfaqri had described.
What scared Simon more was that women suffered far worse fates under Islamic State, especially those of non-Islamic faith. The pain lasted a lifetime; stripped naked and sold in markets as sex slaves, compelled to endure a life of physical, mental, emotional and sexual abuse. Most didn’t survive their ordeals for more than a year.
“Only one of us will be alive at the end of today,” Simon grimaced, “I promise you that.”
Alfaqri punched the cables into Simon’s chest, sending another surge of jolting pain searing through his body. His muscles twitched and cramped. Even his eyes quivered, as though they were about to pop out of his head. The burning, flesh-searing sensations felt too real.
And then it stopped.
Simon collapsed, willing himself to pass out. Unconsciousness was a strategy, to prolong his captivity time, in case someone was coming to rescue them.
But no rescue was coming, and neither was unconsciousness. He had to get himself out of this predicament. It was his only option.
“Oh, I agree,” said Alfaqri. “This is your last hour on God’s earth.” He nodded to the two men, who lifted Simon and carried him up onto the deck. “You murdered four of my men. You will suffer for your crime.”
Simon squinted against the bright light. Examining his surroundings, he could see nothing different. There seemed to be seven crew remaining, including Alfaqri. Two dealt with whatever it was they had thrashing at the side of the Spinecutter. Another two were readying the dinghy, tying a pair of ropes to the back of the vessel. The last couple of thugs held him immobile.
A man passed one of the Zodiac’s ropes up to Alfaqri. They had already attached the second rope to whatever was thrashing at the side of the trawler.
Simon had a terrifying realization.
“I’ve never done this before,” Alfaqri chuckled. “This will be most joyous for me.”
He tied the rope to the bindings around Simon’s wrists. He resisted, but the earlier electric shocks had weakened him, and the two thugs restraining him had muscles like steel.
Alfaqri boarded the dinghy. They started the engine and sped off across the ocean.
Simon watched in horror as the rope coiled away, then pulled taut, ripping him from the deck of the Spinecutter, pulling him into the ocean.
He hit the water hard and went straight under, hands pulled out in front and his legs dragging behind. Somehow he turned onto his back, dragging his head above the churning sea and sucking in a lungful of air.
Then he bounced against a gray leathery shape dragging through the water alongside him.
They bounced again, and the enormous shape thrashed in anger.
Simon froze with fear. He had collided with a bull shark.
They were both being dragged through the ocean.
Taking another breath, Simon ducked down for a clearer view, below the churning water.
It was the shark that had circled him earlier. It had a hook impaled through its mouth and jaw, with a taut rope pulling it along. Blood seeped fast from the bullet holes halfway down its back.
The currents converged and Simon bounced against the shark again.
He kicked against it, pushing himself away, causing it to twist and contort in pain and rage.
With no alternative, Simon came up again for air. It took every effort not to let his growing panic cripple him. Simon couldn’t breathe underwater but the shark had wounds. That had to even his odds.
Because they were both tied to the speeding Zodiac dinghy, Simon presumed that while they were being dragged at what was thirty or more kilometers per hour through the aqua blue waters, the shark couldn’t turn and bite him.
Then he felt the rope slacken.
The dinghy was slowing.
Simon steeled himself. Panic bubbled just below his skin. If he let the fear beat him, the shark would sense his vulnerability and make quick work of him.
As the ropes went slack, Simon repositioned himself. He kicked his leg out, aiming at the shark’s gills and angled his body through the blow, maximizing the impact.
The shark must have already lost a lot of blood, otherwise Simon suspected his tactic would not have had a chance. It didn’t react fast enough, and Simon’s foot made its mark. The shark twisted in on itself, wounded again. Simon hoped the injury to its gill would limit its ability to breathe. If he could kick the gill on the opposite side, he might even suffocate it.
He readied himself to kick again, planning to aim for the nose or the eye, knowing he wasn’t ready to swim to its other side just yet.
The shark twisted again, thrashing its body and fins, heading straight for Simon. Its dark mouth bubbled with clouds of red blood. A hundred sharp, serrated teeth, perfected over hundreds of millions of years of evolution to kill all varieties of prey, came at him.
Simon twisted his left elbow, smacking the shark in the nose, disorienting it for a second.
In this mock cage fight with a bull shark, Simon was winning the first round.
But his lungs screamed for air.
As soon as he surfaced, he knew the shark would have him.
The shark didn’t wait, lunging again.
Simon couldn’t turn fast enough. The shark would have his elbow inside its jaws in seconds.
The ropes tightened, and they were off again, dragging through the water at high speeds, bouncing off each other.
Although it tried to, the shark couldn’t angle itself to attack Simon as they propelled through the ocean, so he d
ucked his head above the water and took multiple, short, deep breaths. He needed as much air inside his lungs as he could hold.
He leaned against the shark, figuring that it only had one fatal end, and that couldn’t reach him right now. Kicking his legs over the rough, leathery skin, Simon angled his abdomen over the beast until gravity took over and flipped to the opposite side.
All the while he expected that his assumptions were wrong, that the shark would reach down and bite off his arms or head in a single, swift attack.
But it didn’t.
He felt the dinghy slow for a second time.
Taking a last, deep breath, Simon ducked down into the water.
There was slack in the ropes again. The men in the dinghy had figured out that Simon and the shark could only fight when they were not being dragged.
Simon kicked backwards, away from the shark.
It saw him, came for him again.
Vast volumes of blood trailed from its wounds.
Scared beyond belief, Simon pulled on every bit of determination and hope to give him the strength to fight. As the shark lunged, he grabbed the hook with both hands, twisting it. He pushed his body against the shark’s nose and pulled on the hook. It thrashed again, throwing Simon around in the water like a rag doll. Somehow Simon kept the serrated teeth away from him, even though it snapped again, and again, and again.
As long as he held on and pushed, it didn’t seem able to reach him.
But he was running out of air, so he had to act.
He kicked again, aiming for the second set of gills… and missed.
The Zodiac started up, and they were off again, dragging through the ocean once more. It seemed Alfaqri and his men would prolong this torture for as long as they could.
As Simon lay against the belly of the shark, he turned on his back and sucked a lungful of life-giving air. Being dragged through the water pressed up against the beast was far preferable to a watery fight with his carnivorous foe.
He knew the dinghy would slow again. The traumatized shark would go for him. Simon was facing either a quick but agonizing death, being mauled into bite-sized pieces of meat, or a slow distressing death by drowning. The only way to escape either fate was to free himself of his bindings, but to achieve that he needed something sharp to cut the rope with.
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