The Wrecking Crew

by Taylor Zajonc

  “There are always treaties,” said Fatima. “But treaties were broken. Post-collapse, this program became a massive liability. The plagues and poisons necessitated disposal, and it is extraordinarily difficult to dispose of such virulent materials. I believe the waters off Somalia have been designated as a sacrifice zone. By whom, I do not know. When I saw the readings of this region, I felt I saw the fingerprint of the Dead Hand. Evidence indicates this is done under the direct supervision, protection, and profit of Charles Bettencourt and his mercenaries. The entire purpose of Anconia Island may well be to secure, facilitate, and conceal this disposal effort. He will stop at nothing to ensure our silence.”

  With Vitaly asleep, his mother cooking in the galley, and Alexis at the tiller, it might be time for a job he’d been putting off, a job he’d been dreading. Jonah’s little science project in the forward compartment had to be nearing its inevitable outcome. Dr. Nassiri shuddered a little just thinking about it. He’d already stacked up a rough equivalent to biohazard gear, mostly amounting to a painter’s mask, gloves, and a pair of slick plastic coveralls. He’d also found a discarded axe, an implement he desperately hoped he wouldn’t need. At least the Scorpion had a few body bags on hand; otherwise the job would be wholly unmanageable.

  Sighing, Dr. Nassiri put on his gloves but stopped when he heard footsteps behind him.

  “Hey,” said Alexis, leaning up against the wall, hands in the pockets of her cutoff jeans.

  “Hello,” said Dr. Nassiri. “Just about to begin the … unpleasantness.”

  “Can I help?” she asked.

  “It’s no job for a woman,” he stammered. Dr. Nassiri instantly regretted the sexist remark, what little he knew about Alexis should have told him she’d hate hearing that.

  “So I’ll just go back to painting my nails,” said Alexis irritably, waving her engine-grease-stained fingers in his face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He leaned against the wall, took off his gloves and let them fall to the floor. He crossed his arms. “I’ve been really dreading this task. The very thought of what lies beyond this threshold turns my stomach.”

  “And you’re trying to spare me from it,” she said. “Thoughtful, but still super sexist and kinda dumb to boot.”

  “I don’t want you to help me,” said Dr. Nassiri. “Disposing of burned bodies is a horrible task. If I allow you to help, you’ll look at me differently.”

  “How do I look at you now?” she asked.

  Was she … blushing? Dr. Nassiri smiled and looked away. He tried to come up with some answer, any answer, but couldn’t. To him each glance they shared, however fleeting, held immense meaning.

  “What would you be doing right now if you were home?” asked Alexis, changing the subject and sparing the doctor the painful silence.

  “My life in Morocco is very ordinary,” he answered. “I live in one of the smaller cities near the coast. Very beautiful. My flat had a very pleasing sea view. And I have a cat. Had a cat.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “No,” laughed Dr. Nassiri. “Despite the best efforts of my extended family. Although I’ve dated some, most women I know are interested in immediate marriage and family life. I suppose I wasn’t ready for that.”

  “I hear you there,” said Alexis. “Pretty much all the girls from my high school and college are married and pregnant. My Facebook feed is babies, babies, babies.”

  “Truth be told, most of my friends are unattached and incorrigible bachelors. They like the finer things in life—good food, expensive drinks, beautiful cars.”

  Alexis absentmindedly tapped her wrench against the bulkhead, thinking.

  “I don’t think I’d fit in with your friends,” she finally said. “And your mom already hates me.”

  “Perhaps I must find new friends,” said Dr. Nassiri. “And I believe mother will eventually come around.”

  Dr. Nassiri coughed and gagged as he scrubbed at the last long, angry tendril of smoke damage. He glanced over at the two bagged bodies, little more than blackened skeletons covered with dry, crepe-paper like fragments of skin.

  A burial at sea would have to do; the freezer was already full of dead men from the command compartment. They’d run out of shelving space for the engineer, his clear-plastic unwrapped corpse lay on the freezer floor. The forward compartment was more or less wrecked, but the doctor had cleared it of all the burned-up equipment. At the very least, it could serve for storage at some point in the future. He couldn’t image anyone sleeping here, not after what had happened.

  “Doc!” called Alexis from the command compartment, her voice echoing as it came up through the main passageway.

  He and Alexis didn’t know how to use the intercom system, and it wasn’t worth waking up Vitaly for something so minor.

  Dr. Nassiri glanced around the forward compartment. It was probably good enough; the bodies and the worst of the damage more or less mitigated. Still he closed the heavy hatchway between compartments before stripping off his gloves and making his way back.

  “What is it?” he asked, stepping into the command compartment.

  “Check out the periscope,” she said.

  Dr. Nassiri dropped the periscope and stepped up to it. He was surprised to see the sun in the sky. Daylight already and he hadn’t slept. Fortunately Fatima had found a quiet place to get some rest; he supposed she needed it more than he did.

  Alexis yawned, mirroring his exhaustion. Dr. Nassiri felt terrible, his eyes sunken, face unshaven, complete exhaustion anchoring every sigh and footstep.

  Visible through the periscope, a single wispy column of smoke rose from the horizon. Alexis kept the submarine on course, advancing on the mysterious target. Before them, the smoking hulk of a ship lay dead in the water.

  “It’s the Horizon,” announced Dr. Nassiri. “Continue forward, dead slow.”

  “Dead slow,” confirmed Alexis as she piloted the submarine ahead.

  The Scorpion edged closer to the hulk as Dr. Nassiri scanned the area for any remaining pirates. None appeared on the radar screen or through the periscope. They’d either given up the chase or decided the smoking wreck was not worth retrieving.

  “Surface,” he ordered. The Scorpion rose through the water, her conning tower slicing through a dissipating biodiesel slick.

  “What should we do?” asked Alexis.

  “I’m going to take a look,” said the doctor.

  He left the command compartment, made his way through the engine compartment and stepped into the bunk room. Vitaly could continue sleeping but he’d need Fatima. He gently touched his mother’s shoulder, allowing her to gradually wake.

  “What is it?” she asked, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  “We’ve found the Horizon. She’s dead in the water.”

  “Any sign of Klea? Or the pirates?”

  “No pirates,” said Dr. Nassiri. “And no signs of life. I’m going to take a look; I’d like you to accompany me.”

  “Of course,” said Fatima. “Give me a moment to dress.”

  Fatima followed him up the interior ladder of the conning tower. Dr. Nassiri wrestled with the hatch until it came free and squeaked open. He lifted himself outside, feeling better for a moment as sunshine and fresh air washed over him. For the first time, he could see the true extent of the damage inflicted when the Fool’s Errand rammed the Scorpion. Much of the steel plating behind the conning tower was torn away down to the pressure hull. Chunks of carbon fiber and aluminum were still stuck in the submarine’s skin like shrapnel. Thick gouges and scars covered much of the rear of the submarine.

  The still-smoldering hulk of the Horizon bobbed in the water. Dr. Nassiri descended the conning tower, paused for a moment, then jumped onto the nearest pontoon of the experimental yacht. Hand over hand, he made his way to the main body, to the cockpit, and the fantail. The entire cockpit of the ship had been completely torn open by a single explosion, laying the interior bare to the hot sun beating down from overhead.
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  The yacht was an unsalvageable mess. She was completely holed; the only thing keeping her afloat was her half-empty pontoon fuel tanks. Seawater washed over the deck, more with each passing wave. Fatima leapt onto the fantail, awkwardly clambering up to join her son.

  “Any bodies?” she asked.

  “No,” said Dr. Nassiri. “No bodies.”

  “The pirates could have taken them. Or just dumped them at sea.”

  Dr. Nassiri said nothing. Fatima tapped a nearby railing.

  “There was a lifeboat here,” she said. “Maybe they escaped in that.”

  “Doubtful,” said Dr. Nassiri.

  “What do you want to do? They’re not here.”

  Dr. Nassiri stood for a moment, watching the Horizon toss in the waves, flexing and groaning with each movement. Jonah must be dead. The alternatives were worse—captured or floating alone in an unforgiving ocean, far from shore. Every professional instinct in his body insisted to him the hopelessness of the situation.

  “We stay,” said Dr. Nassiri. “Jonah is not a man to give up. Neither shall we. We will search until we find him.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Jonah slowly stirred awake, sunlight easily penetrating the thin safety-orange ceiling to the ten-man inflatable raft. His gaze fell across Klea, who stared at him cross-armed as if she were trapped in the raft with a tiger.

  “How can you sleep?” she demanded, her fierce eyes flashing.

  Jonah gave her a pained smile but didn’t answer.

  “I’m actually asking you how you can sleep right now,” she said. “It’s not a rhetorical question.”

  “It’s a trick every sat diver picks up eventually,” Jonah answered. “Learn to sleep anywhere. You don’t know when or where your next snooze is coming, so you have to get ’em in as you can.”

  “What’s a sat diver?”

  “Saturation diver,” said Jonah. “Like recreational SCUBA divers, but much deeper and for industrial projects. Oil and gas industry, shipwrecks, that sort of thing. We stay underwater or in a pressurized environment for days, sometimes weeks at a time. Atmospheric gasses dissolve into our tissues to the point of saturation.”

  “Tell me how you do it. How do you sleep like that?”

  “I don’t know. Try forcing yourself to stay awake.”

  “That’s stupid,” she said.

  Jonah pulled himself up against one of the bumpers of the circular raft, using the wall for support. The raft was relatively well stocked. A side pocket held bottles of water amounting to about three gallons, fishing gear, a small knife, medical kit, and flashlight. He reached up and checked his slashed arm, finding it not as bad as he’d feared. It’d long since stopped bleeding, probably wouldn’t even need stitches. Good. He wasn’t looking forward to sewing himself up with repurposed fishing gear.

  “What about you? How did you sleep when you were a prisoner on your ship?”

  “Routine,” said Klea. “My captors gave me small electronics projects to work on, mostly from their outboard motors. Sometimes televisions or radios. I think they were running a little side electronics repair business for the locals. I’d work on those for most of the day. I’d make myself meals from whatever they’d bring me. I worked on the Horizon and made weapons all night. And then I’d do exercises until my arms and legs couldn’t move. I’d get maybe three or four hours of sleep if I was lucky.”

  “Three hours a night? That sucks.”

  “So what’s your secret?”

  “My first rotation on a research ship was pretty rough. I was part of a base crew for a saturation expedition to a sunken turn-of-the-century ocean liner. Spent more time dodging hurricanes than we spent actually getting any work done. I barely slept. Every night was the same. We’d ride these waves like a roller coaster; bow in, one after another. Eventually I would get used to the rhythm and fall sleep. But then we’d have to turn around so that we weren’t so far off station when the storm ended. The ship would start to change course and we’d take a massive three, four story wave almost completely broadside. The entire ship would heel over nearly forty-five degrees. Anything not strapped down would go flying across the entire breadth of the ship. Terrifying. I’d get jolted completely awake. For a moment, I’d be absolutely convinced that the ship was going to turn turtle and I was about to drown.”

  “How long did this last?”

  “Weeks. Eventually, I realized I could catch a few minutes here and again if I slept in my full uniform and steel-toed boots. Maybe part of my brain figured it was safe to sleep if I could wake up at a moment’s notice and make a run for it. Eventually I didn’t need the boots anymore.”

  “What’s your name?” asked Klea out of the blue.

  “Jonah. Jonah Blackwell.”

  “Your last name sounds familiar.”

  “It’s usually attached to ‘disgraced CIA section chief’,” said Jonah.

  “Can’t be you. You’re much too young.”

  “My father.”

  “Do you know my name?”

  “Klea something.”

  “Klea Ymeri.”

  “Slovakian?”

  She shook her head. “Kosovar. From what used to be Yugoslavia. By birth, anyway.”

  Silence fell between them. At least she’d stopped looking at him like he was some evil, treacherous bastard that would throw her overboard at any moment.

  “I’m really sorry about wrecking your dive equipment,” she finally said. “It’s my fault we’re stuck out here.”

  Jonah nodded, considered the apology. It seemed heartfelt enough.

  “I probably would have done the same thing,” he said. “So I’ll get over it.”

  “Seriously? Just like that? You’re what, over it now?”

  “Seriously. It was pretty shitty of me to come in with no intent of saving you. You saw your opportunity and took it. It wasn’t like you weren’t prepared, you certainly weren’t being vindictive. I mean, your plan to escape kinda sucked, but we made a decent go of it.”

  “I spent years working it out,” she said. “I was so certain. I visualized every detail, mapped out as many outcomes as I possibly could.”

  “By the look of things, you may have missed a scenario or two.”

  “No need to be a dick about it.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What other way could I possibly take it?”

  “Let me put it this way. Fatima’s son didn’t exactly hire me. He sprung me from a prison where’d I’d spent three years. I’d spent that time trying to dream up a way to escape. Lots of ideas came to me, but no real way to carry them out.”

  Klea remained silent.

  “So Doc Nassiri comes along,” continued Jonah. “And he offers me a way out. A real, bona-fide release from prison in exchange for some basic diving work. Basic for me, anyway. I got the sense he probably couldn’t pay anybody else enough to do it given the proximity to Somalia. But you know what I did?”

  “What did you do?’

  “I came within one second of taking his gun and trying to shoot my way out of the prison. And you know why? Because I only really knew of one way out. Death. I didn’t have a life to go back to outside those walls. Family is all gone; all my friends think I’m dead or holed up in Thailand with a needle in my arm. They’d said their goodbyes years ago. It was the one certainty I could find, the one absolute I could still control. Maybe I’d take a few assholes with me, maybe not.”

  Klea shook her head, refusing to look up, refusing to make eye contact.

  “I’m sorry I destroyed your ship,” he said. “I truly am. I know you can relate to what I’m saying. Your elaborate plan? All that Mad Max shit? Harpoons, spears, explosives, smoke clouds? I think you wanted to put yourself in a position where the only choice the pirates had was to kill you. I think you wanted to die on the Horizon.”

  She was too strong to sob, but Jonah could feel her heart breaking with every word.

  “I should have died four years a
go,” she finally said. “I should have died with my friends.”

  “Why does the Horizon mean so much to you?”

  Klea sat back in the raft, her eyes open, and her cheeks dry.

  “I was born in Kosovo,” she said. “This has a point to it, I promise. I was still pretty young during the troubles, but old enough to remember hiding in the woods and the six months I spent in a refugee camp. It’s the sort of thing that college admissions officers swoon over. That was great, because I was good at school. Like, really good. Especially math, physics, anything with numbers, formulas or computer programming. My family stayed observant, we drifted apart when I lost my religion.

  “And then I met Colin. He was two years ahead of me at MIT. He was brilliant, an actual certifiable genius. Always smiling, always laughing. Friends with a lot of the girls in his classes but didn’t get many dates. He was kind of awkward and a little overweight. But he was so brilliant and so kind. He showed me a world of phenomenal creativity and passion. Passion for me, a type of intense infatuation I’d never experienced before. It was so pure, so painfully earnest. Maybe other girls found it smothering. One of his exes even tried to warn me off. But I thought it was wonderful. He became my best friend. And then he became more, much more.

  “The Horizon was his masterpiece, the culmination of every moment he spent at MIT. He didn’t just want to build a ship that could go around the entire world using less fuel than any other ship before it; he wanted one that was fast and beautiful as well. Every line on this ship was an expression of his brilliant mind and open heart.

  “He wasn’t quite what you’d expect of a globe-trotting record-setting maritime explorer. Colin could be a little ridiculous. He wore sandals with tube socks pulled up to his knees, and khaki shorts. Squared-off glasses, even though I went out of my way to get him fitted for contacts. He wouldn’t even go outside unless he was dripping with sunscreen. But I didn’t care about any of that. If you’d met him, you’d understand why.

  “So there we are, sailing in the Indian Ocean. Colin thinks he’s planned for everything. We’re more than a hundred miles off the coast of Somalia coming out of the Gulf of Aden. Colin thinks there is no possible way the pirates are going to detect a vessel as small as ours.”