by Daniel Pyne
Men love to talk when they’re poised for sex or violence. But rarely during or afterward.
At the B-deck landing, Castor stops, waits, listens, and softly shuffles across to the sea side, where he stabs his weapon out over the rail. No one below.
Again, gimping down the next flight of steps, he stays cautious, stopping every other painful step, cursing under his breath, waiting, listening. She’s down there. She’s unarmed. He hears the creaking of the ship’s rigging, the splash of the sea against the idled hull. His own people mill on the platform above him, waiting for the word.
But no sound of a fucking woman in flight. Below his feet, through the steel mesh step: an open doorway to the empty A-deck corridor, lights turned off. Crouching low to look down it, Castor sees only the daylight cast through the open stairway doorway on the other side of the tower.
Where is she?
Halfway down the corridor, she’s in the ship’s office, pressed up against the wall near the closed door, breathing shallowly. Her pulse is in her ears, her hands and arms are sticky with someone else’s blood, her pants are ripped, and she’s already lost a shoe. Unarmed, running out of real estate, Sentro strains to hear the alpha twin’s light tread on the metal stairs.
Start with fifteen armed antagonists, subtract the one on C-deck and the beta brother, if he’s dead from his wounds; a thirteen count of pirates, if that’s what they are—and she realizes there could be more—is still too many to separate and neutralize, even in a steady, sustained assault with a weapon she doesn’t have.
Footsteps settle softly on the outside landing. She considers her other options.
Castor slips to one side of the A-deck doorway and edges his eyes around to peer down its length. Who is she? His thinking clots with rage. He locks his injured knee and sidesteps across the opening to scan the doorways on the corridor’s other side.
Gesturing that he will provide them cover, Castor waves his hired men ahead of him, knowing they’ll be the ones killed first if this stupid bitch comes out of a compartment shooting. He’s willing to take that risk, because, well, it’s not him taking it, is it? He can’t wrap his mind around how a woman is causing all this trouble. Maybe she’s a he? A man would make more sense.
Castor’s men gyre down the corridor, kicking doors open and clearing the compartments, one by one. All the way to the other end, where, silhouettes against the daylight, they turn and signal back the all clear.
He follows them, the painful hitch in his gait getting worse, glancing into each open doorway as he passes. A small gym. The ship’s laundry. Ship’s office. The ship’s office, where there are community computers and the paperwork necessary for international travel and tall cupboards containing stationary, supplies, important papers for crew and passengers, and, he realizes too late, the woman he’s pursuing, somehow braced over the doorway right above him as he leans in to look.
Sentro waits until he’s all the way in before she drops, scissors Castor’s head while reaching down to try to wrest the machine pistol from his hands. The gun goes off. He bucks and rotates under her, gagging. The mercenaries at the end of the corridor dive back to the safety of the outside landing as bullets shred the corridor bulkheads and punch through the outer walls. Castor reels and slams against the wall, trying to dislodge her. Claws at the groin of her jeans as if hoping to find more there. She claps cupped hands hard over his ears; his knee buckles; she spills onto the floor and loses her hold on him. The machine pistol scuttles away. Sentro lunges for the weapon, but the hired men cowering on the stairwell open fire. Castor screams for his men to stop shooting as bullets plow the carpet, allowing Sentro to kick free and crab walk back out onto the opposite landing, where she manages a clumsy hook slide through that deck railing while more bullets chase her.
She catches the shallow steel gutter at the edge of the platform with her fingertips, arresting her drop into the whitecapped ocean thirty feet below. Momentum carries her out; physics jerks her back, banging her body hard into the side of the tower stairwell’s structural support.
Above her, she hears the alpha twin find his feet, recover his gun, and start to hobble out to the landing.
Sentro lets go, free-falls, catches the U-deck rigging a few feet below with her angled upper arm, not for the first time wrenching her balky left shoulder but enabling a clumsy sprawl onto the treaded narrows of the main deck, where she was jogging just half an hour ago.
The barrel of the machine pistol clatters, steely, when he aims it over the rail, but Castor must be unable to see where she’s gone, because he sends a wild, sustained, frustrated volley of bullets from his AK that chases her down the side of the ship; they spit off the hull and the spars, spark and make a lot of noise, but accomplish little else.
Racked by a grinding shoulder pain, Sentro pins her elbow to her ribs and keeps going. Cargo stutters past in disconnected fragments, like a badly cut film. She weaves and jogs along the high wall of containers, ducking into the first gap between them she can find to catch her breath.
Pressed against the cold metal, she looks back through a narrow gap. High above her, Castor glares down at the stacks of cargo stretching to the stern, slow on the uptake but figuring out, as she watches him, that there’s only one direction Sentro could have gone. As he turns to face where she’s hiding, his spooked-looking three-pirate cohort is just emerging to join him on the A-deck landing.
Carried by the sea wind through containers, his muffled, apoplectic “WHO FOR FUCK’S SAKE IS SHE?!” echoes and dies.
There appears to be no response. Maybe they don’t speak English.
In French, Castor exhorts them: “Va la chercher, va!”
Nobody moves. Sentro files away a thought for later use: this is a crew the twins put together on the fly.
“THE WOMAN HAD NO GUN! GO GET HER! Allez allez allez!” Castor lurches through them and limps back up the stairway. She stays still, watching, thinking, until he disappears inside and the men he’s left on the deck start to cautiously descend; then she turns away.
Deep in the Jeddah’s cargo maze, Sentro slows to a shuffle, bent double as the shock from her damaged shoulder overtakes her. She knows how to do this next part; she’s had it done in the field, even seen a colleague do it himself, but she can’t remember who that was. Her memories are like bingo balls in the rotating cage. It was Kinshasa. Congo. Wasn’t it? She recalls the relentless heat but has no recollection of when this happened. Was it her? She squeezes into an even narrower passageway, perpendicular to the alleys that run from port to starboard.
She needs to find the right place.
Containers shift and moan around her as the ship rolls on sawtooth waves. Without needing to think about it, she’s been picking up the odd deck detritus as she zigzagged through the labyrinth of cargo: a short snarl of wire, a rag, a crushed aluminum Pepsi can that somehow got left here when the containers were loaded and stacked. Things she may need, later, or not at all. Stuffing them with her one good hand into her pocket, where she feels the shape of the container bolt seal she found in a deck seam days before.
She stops. Sags sideways between the container walls and vomits. Tears of pain streak her face, and her lungs burn. She struggles to concentrate, settle. Wind rips, funneled through the container canyons; she can’t hear anything but this and the raw keening of stressed metal. A slash of deep-blue sky flares high above her. Sunlight breaks off partway down, leaving her concealed in the cool shadows. The smell of sea and oil is dizzying. She shuffles farther on, to an intersection, where she can see a thin slice of bright ocean in either direction and the U-deck perimeter track, where, sooner or later, the mercenary search party will pass by looking for her. It’s a risk she has to take. She tries to straighten her arm as best she can, then swings around into the perpendicular passageway, wedges her arm in the steel locking mechanism of a container’s access end, and braces herself with her other hand pressing against the facing container.
Deep breaths, pulse raci
ng. Her body knows what’s coming.
Sentro lifts a shoeless foot, her running sock filthy with deck grit, and she kicks out against the facing container as hard as she’s able, jacking her shoulder joint, popping it back into place.
She can’t help but scream.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Aubrey is on autopilot.
Reality itself comes to her in fragments, flip-book animation. The world has splintered. The base of her skull throbs where it impacted the stairs.
Fragments, torn, spread, fixed.
A decoupage of time, unglued.
She’s afraid if she stops moving, she won’t be able to start again.
“What a cock-up, yeah?”
Carlito has stanched his split nose with a scrap of towel, the scar creasing his eye and face bled pale, but his breathing is steady, if labored.
“Fucking mess,” Pauly wheezes.
Carlito keeps looking at Pauly strangely, and Pauly’s thinking, You’re the one who’s a bloody mess, mate.
The bodies of two hired men are splayed out dead on the corridor’s linoleum floor because of one fucking lesbian cunt, and Pauly has only managed to push himself into a sit against the secure room door before losing strength. Someone has wrapped his shredded, blown-away shoulder in the other cunt’s blood-soaked shirt. He doesn’t remember when that happened. Time lurches in fits and starts.
Pauly spits red, tasting metal. I just need a minute to sack up, he thinks.
Some of their remaining crew has gathered just inside the doorway, as if held back by invisible tape, as if what Pauly has is contagious. They’re staring at him like Carlito, somber, surly grown men surely wondering what they’ve gotten themselves into now, ivory eyeballs hooded in blank sun-blacked faces, stalled.
You gobs got nothing better to do? is what Pauly wants to ask, but he’s not sure it comes out as more than a mumble. “Find a fucking first aid kit. I’m gonna be fine.”
Pauly doesn’t feel fine, though, and nobody moves. He struggles to fill his lungs; he’s punched out and woozy. But not so gone he can’t cast a rictus grin at his brother when Castor limps in from the hallways and assesses him with a horror he can’t hide. “Brah, shit.”
“Fucked, brah. I am. Yeah. But it’ll fix.”
Castor goes quiet. Maybe he didn’t understand. Pauly wraps his lips around the consonants and vowels this time: “Where’s the running girl?”
“We’ll find her.”
“Wait. You lost her?”
“She ran.”
“Aw, you lost her, ya gaseous knob.”
“Misplaced her, brah. Don’t talk.”
Pauly frowns. Castor is scaring him.
“Lord almighty.” Pain webs across his chest, and all his muscles there cramp up. “Oy.”
“Middle of the fucking ocean. Where can she go? Save your strength, yeah? We’ll getchu back and sorted out.”
“What of the other slit?”
Castor cocks his head down the hallway. Pauly nods.
“Fine fit she did us.”
The others in the room are blinking in and out.
“Carlito?”
A labored wheeze, eyes closed, the scar gone white. “Right here.”
“She mashed your nose good, man.”
“Local problem, boss.”
Pauly closes his eyes too. His body trembles. “You go get her, Caz. And bring her back here. So I can watch. Yeah?”
His brother doesn’t seem to know what to say, which is surprising, because Castor always wants the last word, but eventually he says to Pauly, in French: “I’m telling the boys to throw the dead overboard. Make a whole scene. Just in case.”
In French: “Me included?”
Castor looks stricken. “Shut up.”
“I feel weird.”
“Don’t talk. Save your strength.”
“Sure.”
The lips and crannies, flanges and straps of the shipping containers provide a slow, sore ascent for Sentro, who has clambered to the top of a short stack, where, in cover, she tries to catch her breath and discovers the mercenaries are heaving bodies off C-deck to plummet into the sea.
Awkward, angular dropping shadows are set off starkly against the slate-blue sky. One, two, three. A pink hoodie flutters away from the last of them; it floats down for a long time, like a dying bird.
Do I scare you, Aubrey?
Sentro looks away from it, eyes watering, resisting the hollow chill rising from her heart.
Say no, then. My feelings won’t be hurt.
People wink out all the time. It’s staying alive that’s hard.
When he was on death watch, she would slip away from the office and go to the hospice, curl up next to her husband on his bed, careful because just touching sometimes hurt, but watching him, counting his breaths, the pulse of his heart in his neck, wondering what her life would be without him, knowing that it would be the same. But without him.
Once he woke up, his eyes clear despite the morphine drip, looked into hers, and said, “If this is God’s plan, the evangelists can have Him.”
Does she believe in God?
Sure. Why not?
But surely She’s not a supreme being who punishes or rewards or has anything to do with the affairs of men on this earth. Maybe She lit the fuse of the big bang and called it a day. Or made the rules by which the universe behaves, the Ten Commandments (or however many, Sentro thinks) of quantum physics (or whatever comes next).
And evil? Oh yeah. Baloney Bruce’s dark matter and black holes exist; these phony pirates and all the other malevolent zealots and clans and cartels and despots and free-market monsters she’s bumped up against over and over are what get born out the other end.
Fontaine and Dennis? Collateral damage.
Palming away cold tears, Sentro catches the movement she’s been expecting down on the starboard U-deck perimeter track. Three hired men hunting her. They move gap to gap, guns out, looking impatient and lost, small heads, big ropy bodies. Pay-to-play soldiers with death-dealing weapons. That men come to this as much out of necessity as choice always discourages her.
Sentro slides from her container perch into the cargo canyons and becomes one with the shadows.
Castor Zeme has discovered, on the Jeddah’s bridge, in an unsecured safe, the passengers’ passports, billfolds, paper money, credit cards, and IDs. He spills them across the glass of the navigation table, intending to flip through the passports for the pictures, figuring it’s time he familiarized himself with his leverage. But mostly he craves a moment’s distraction from the woman running loose on his ship. His ship. The simple fact of her, of what she’s done to his brother, blinds him with a bitter rage.
“Castor.”
“Yah?”
Carlito steps up behind him. “Man, what about the other hostages?” The scarred man has taped a splint and bandage from the plundered sick bay across his mangled nose; there’s blood streaked on his pilfered madras coat, and his voice is a shredded croak.
Castor manages a shrug and, in French, says, dismissive, “What about them?” He’s found the running woman’s passport, and his chest tightens, looking at her unsmiling picture. “Sentro, Aubrey.” When they catch her, he’ll let Pauly make her scream. “Gotcha.”
“We should still tryta get ’em outa that room, no?”
“Why?” Castor looks across the helm at his number three, a round-faced Colombian with a wishful mustache and soul patch. “They’ve done us a favor, Berto. Locked themselves in a very lovely jail.”
He goes through Aubrey Sentro’s wallet. Cash, bank cards, driver’s license. Snapshots of grown children, a few stray business cards, including: JEREMY TROON, Summer Associate, Sterling Financial Fund.
“Jail that we can’t get into.”
“That they can’t get out of. Boom.”
Carlito cackles into a coughing fit.
Gunfire pops like a snare drum out in the ship’s vast cargo; Castor reacts and snaps his head toward th
e doorway, where the burly, moon-faced hire from San Pedro Sula peers in, a little spooked and tentative. “Master Zeme? Man, you better come.”
Stones. Gravel?
Grain.
No. Beans.
Legumes. Thank goodness for Berlitz French.
Hunting the hunters, she again found the odd clearing between the stacks where she’d encountered the Zemes’ disfigured lieutenant, and she opened the top hatch of a dry-bulk container to hide in a dank, musky sanctuary of bulk cargo thick with the smell of soil and plants and herbicide.
But when she lowered herself, her feet at first found nothing solid; she hung by her hands from the hatch lip, gauging the drop, thinking: Why isn’t this bin full?
Hearing movement on the deck above her, her damaged shoulder cramping, she lost her grip and dropped.
The fall was less than a meter, and the landing was soft. Her legs sank deep into the fat seeds this bin holds, and after she kicked her feet free, she sprawled sideways, ungainly, stretching her good arm out to stall and stabilize herself in the pebbly mass. Hoping they hadn’t heard her.
Dry, hard beans.
She twists onto her stomach to make her body bigger, spreading herself across the surface of the grain to keep from sinking farther.
Soybeans, she decides.
Feet shuffle on steel. And men speaking muffled Portuguese above her.
A young, ashen-skinned, acne-ravaged Sentro hunter midship fires blindly from a crouch at the edge of the clearing toward where he thinks he saw movement. No way he’ll let the woman get a jump on him. Another young mercenary in a faded knockoff Arsenal kit crowds him. Bullets ricochet off the containers, and the sound kicks back sharp at them.
A third man, older but somehow outranked by the younger men, darker, long and lanky to the extreme, hangs back in a slot, trying not to be scared. His Portuguese is halting, not his native tongue. “Lucas. What is it? Is it her?” He eases carefully forward to join them.