“What words did you recognise that they used?” I asked one of them gently, doing what Marie had taught me to do and never asking a question that could be shut down with a one-word answer. I didn’t ask, ‘did you recognise any of the words they used?’ because anyone who wanted to stop reliving the ordeal would just answer ‘no’, but I forced them to think back over it and search for the answers.
“One said something about ‘the American’,” he told me, “that was all I knew that he say.”
“Mercenary?” Dan opined. “Or more likely a hostage.”
“Either one is likely,” Mitch said, “there was always a big US presence in the Gulf with the combined task force. Usually a full carrier group: a sub, destroyers, missile boats and the like. Stands to reason that some of those would have survived the thingy. Quite a lot of private security companies operated out there too, back in the day.”
The ‘thingy’. The global pandemic that wiped out most of the human life on Earth. Only Mitch could play that down with such dismissive nonchalance.
“True,” Dan said, “but unlikely that we’ll ever find out.”
Neil was out with one of his eager apprentices who rowed the wooden dingy for him as he spent the afternoon carefully depositing weighted cables connected to floats that each held a solar lamp. They were the kind that people bought on a whim from supermarkets and garden centres to spike into the grass of their lawns and provide a little night time decoration. They had been loaded up on one of our supply runs over the years on a similar whim, only this time used to light the darkest walkways of the town for safety reasons instead of an adornment to complete some green-thumbed person’s masterpiece.
They were collected up and he had spent the morning fixing them firmly into the blocks of polystyrene which he had kept stored for no known reason other than that they would come in handy one day. He crowed in delight as that hoarder instinct finally paid off.
I took over the watch at the sea wall after the midday meal, and Lucien had engineered his command of the standby force so that he could still be close to me. As I stood in the sun wearing short sleeves under my heavy vest and let it bathe me with warmth despite the briskness of the breeze coming in from the sea, he stood beside me and rested his big rifle on the stone wall to scan the horizon. I had rested my own rifle against the wall as my carbine hung from my vest, opting instead to use the big binoculars that would very likely have been incredibly expensive if they had been bought instead of removed from a dusty glass display cabinet.
“Nothing,” I said, surprising myself that I felt a little disappointed. Then I felt guilty as I recalled the look on Mitch’s face when he spoke about Africa. If he was scared, then it was damn good sign that I should be too.
“How long do we stay inside?” Lucien asked.
“Not sure. Depends on how long Dan decides, but we need to be fishing again within a week or we’ll be dipping into our winter stores and we won’t have enough to make the first quota for the start of the summer trade runs.”
Lucien shot me a look, hearing me speak with such authority about the economic situation when it didn’t usually feature on my radar.
“Polly told me,” I admitted with a shrug.
“So we send guards out on the fishing boats,” he said, as though the solution was really that simple.
I thought about that, looking for holes in the suggestion and finding none.
“Maybe wait until tomorrow to suggest that one,” I said before changing the subject. “Adam’s got the night watch again. Dan’s going to take the sleeping watch with the QRF. Marie’s not happy though.”
“What is this QRF?” he asked me as he pronounced the letters carefully.
“Sorry,” I told him as I bumped my right shoulder gently into his arm, remembering how he still struggled with all the little sayings and acronyms that we used, even after all this time and how far his English had developed. “It’s a Mitch thing. Quick Reaction Force. The standby team.”
“Ah,” he said, “why do you not just say this?”
“What?” I said with mock horror. “Say the words when a TLA would do?”
“And this? This TLA?”
“Three-Letter Acronym,” I said, using Dan’s joke on someone else who hadn’t heard it before.
“I will never understand you English,” he said with a resigned huff as he looked back out to sea.
“So stop trying,” I told him, “just go with it.”
He kept me company until the night darkened and Neil’s array of bobbing solar lights twinkled in the swell. He had gauged the increase of the tide well when cutting the length of each cable, and none of the lights were submerged as the tide came in to swell the bay. Adam and Dan took over, Adam with a smile and Dan with a scowl as he carried his kit bag to throw it on a folding cot in the building that had been opened up to house the relief fighters.
~
Leah leaned back from the ledger again, her back aching from the inactivity. She stood, stretching and hearing a pistol shot of a crack from somewhere up near her shoulder, and let out the stretch with a relaxed breath. She thought about the next part of the tale, about how they found themselves way out of their depth, quite literally, and how the turn of events shattered the boredom into pieces.
She wondered how best to describe what had happened, but because that part of the story wasn’t hers to tell she went to find the one person who could fill in the seven years’ worth of gaps.
“Come on, dozy bollocks,” she said to Ares who jumped up from his preposterous sleeping position in a patch of sunlight where he lay on his back with all four paws sticking up and his body bent in half as though he tried to sniff his own butt in his sleep.
He came awake instantly, thrashing and spinning as though electrified before looking up at her, sneezing loudly and shaking his head before giving her a daft look. He followed her outside, walking at her heel as he’d been taught to but needing constant reminders not to run off to inspect everything that caught his interest. She did this in the form of wordless noises and growls, like she was his alpha dog, and each time he slunk back to heel.
It seemed harsh whenever Leah had to train a new dog, at least to people who didn’t understand, but being too soft or kind with an animal that you wanted to be able to rely on to save your life was a bad idea. She formed a bond with the dogs. She’d done it with Ash when Dan first taught her how to give him commands so that he didn’t think he could make decisions. And with Nemesis who took to her so naturally that half of the time she just knew what Leah wanted her to do and had acted independently when she’d been incapacitated, which was the only time she’d ever want that to happen; if Leah couldn’t give her commands then the chances were that she’d been knocked out or stunned, in which case she’d want her dog to tear apart the person who had done it. She’d been like that with Athena, Nemesis’ daughter, but she had never really worked properly, which was a blessing because Leah had never really been called upon to use her like she had Nem. She’d proven to be a great breeder though, and had carried two litters in near perfect health without losing any of them.
Ares, as dumb as he seemed, had really warmed Leah’s heart after feeling the loss of that kind of connection since Nem had gone. She just hoped he could switch on and stop being so ungainly soon, because he was almost old enough to start learning how to track and do the ‘chase and detain’ drills which were really just a polite way of saying that you’re teaching your dog to bite someone and drag them to the ground. That usually cost her a hefty bribe to one of the younger boys in town who was prepared to take the risk and wear the thick leather sleeve to protect their limbs.
Leah was musing about whether to offer the task to one of the few hopeful teenagers who wanted to be part of the militia, just to test their resolve, when she bumped into the man she was looking for.
“Hey there,” Joshua said in his broad accent from one of the American states she had never visited, which remained unchanged despite the dilution of everyone’s
language. He even spoke French with the same accent.
“How’s things?” Leah asked him as he stood tall from the outboard motor he was tinkering with and nursing back to life.
“I’m all good,” he said, “I was just fixin’ to finish up here. How you doin’?”
“I’m good,” she said, smiling genuinely as she always found his genetic sense of hospitality so infectious. “I was hoping you could do me a big favour actually…”
Leah’s smile worked on him, like it always did, and he picked up an oily rag to remove the residue from his hands. He was tall and heavy but had a permanent streak of happiness that reminded Leah of Neil in so many ways, but his sayings and mannerisms were a world apart and still made her laugh after a decade of hearing them.
“Man, you’re as cute as a button when you’re after something. It’s like you’ve weaponised charm. How can I help you today?”
“I’m, err,” she said, feeling the natural apprehension of every writer everywhere who was about to admit that they were writing a story, “I’m trying to write an account about what happened when you first came here, but I don’t want to write something which isn’t true.”
“Happy to help,” he said, beaming, “you know that.”
“Awesome,” she said and returned his wide grin, “after evening meal?”
“It’s a date,” he said wickedly, knowing that Lucien would roll his eyes at the intentional goading.
Adalene went up to the rooms with her father after the evening meal and Leah took Joshua up to her favourite spot on the ramparts. They had the same idea, because Leah produced a bottle of the local sweet fire-water and he smiled to reveal a half-bottle of his favourite tipple.
“Have you met my brother?” he asked with a grin. “Leah, this is Jack. Jack, meet Leah.”
“Hi Jack,” she said.
“Funny you should use that word…”
“Ah, sorry,” she said sheepishly.
“It’s fine,” he said, “I ain’t gonna have a hissy fit now. So, what do you want to know?”
“Everything,” she said, “from the beginning to the end.” He took a measured pull on the bottle as his eyes glazed over into uncomfortable memory.
“It ain’t over yet,” he said, “but I’ll tell you how that part started.”
Alone on the Waves
My name is Joshua “Junior” Bucknor, and I was born and raised in Lutts, Tennessee which I thought was just a dot on the map but the townsfolk believed it was the centre of the world. It was mostly farms and churches, and I had little interest in finishing high school and turning my Saturday job at the hardware store into a full-time gig. On my last day at school I walked out with a three-point-oh and partied like everyone else.
The next day I took a two-hour ride on a Greyhound bus to Jackson and marched my ass right up to the US Army recruiters.
An hour I waited there, all the while getting the stink eye off this master sergeant who no doubt thought my skinny body wasn’t up to his own personal standards. I took exception to this; I may have been skinny back then, not that you’d believe that of me now, but I was tough.
I was so tough that I got up and asked the guy for directions to the US Navy recruiters. To his credit, he smiled and told me where it was, right down to the proper turns and he wrote it all down for me.
The son of a bitch sent me on a five mile walk for a one mile journey, so I was sweaty and pissed by the time I got there. The conversation went something like this:
“How can I help you, son?”
“Sir, I have a mind to become a Navy SEAL.”
“Well, son, only the toughest make it through. You sure you’re up for that?”
Well after a half-hour of him talking to me like I was a grown-up, the first man to ever have done that, I agreed to begin my new life in the dizzying world of mechanical and electrical. I took the bus home, then dealt with the bullshit from my parents and all the drama that followed. My dad went and got three sheets to the wind and my mom just cried. They told me how I’d never be home and this and that, which I kinda thought was the point. My appointed time came around and I went back on the bus, telling Momma and Daddy that I was a man then and didn’t need their help to get to Jackson. What I really meant was that I didn’t want to hear them going on at me to not go.
I went. I signed my life away and I don’t mind telling y’all that I felt knee high to a grasshopper when I walked in. My ass did not touch the ground for the next year, but I fell into it alright. I learned how to fix engines of all kinds and before I hit twenty years old I found myself looking down on something I ain’t never laid eyes on before: the open ocean.
We weren’t a poor family, but like a lot of kids my age I didn’t have a passport back then and I’d never been on a vacation outside of the closest states. I’d been to Panama City Beach in Florida, what they called The Redneck Riviera, but the Gulf ain’t nothin’ compared to the real ocean. The navy showed me a whole big new world, and my new gang had never been busier since nine-eleven. I went all over the world in a few short years, but that was just a backdrop to what happened.
We were part of the CTF, the Combined Task Force, as a petty officer third class onboard the USS Jean Evelyn Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. Best damn ship I ever laid eyes on. We were sent across the Atlantic to Europe and spent a few stressed-out days going down the Suez. We were on high alert; terrorists – tangos – everywhere and round the clock watches where we manned the weapons stations until we got out into the Red Sea where, guess what?
More round the clock watches.
Now this task force was made up of all kinds of different folks. There were some Brits, some Indians, the Japanese and even a tub from New Zealand. Now I don’t know how much you know about the world back then, and I don’t profess to know it all, but I only thought pirates were in the movies. Turns out that this bunch of African dudes who didn’t have jobs or something decided to start hijacking boats from all over when they got near the coast of East Africa.
These guys were seriously bad news.
We basically ranged out all over and got reports of activity in the coastal towns that the sons of bitches ran to whenever we got close. We were all set to just nuke ’em, not like real nukes but just to let them have it. Just send the whole bunch of them down so that they weren’t a problem no more, but you know how it is; orders come down, no firing unless fired upon and yadda, yadda, yadda.
So anyway, we’d been out there all of a month with nothing but exercises and everything when the scuttlebutt went insane. There was talk of some bio-attack or something, and half our boys were sent high-tailin’ it back home including the bubble-heads in the sub.
What happened next happened fast, and it was bad.
I won’t go into the details. I’m sure you have your own memories of that dark time. But I was left on the Jean Evelyn with just one other guy and he was losing his mind. There was no chance of us putting all the bodies of the crew in the morgue; we lost two hundred and seventy-one guys and girls in a day.
I did what I could, even wearing the sweaty respirator because I thought I’d somehow survived a chemical attack. The other guy didn’t do so good. He was more useless than tits on a boar hog, I mean this dude had lost it. I tried to use the radio, the sat phones, everything. Nobody was answering. It was just me and my buddy, and he was falling apart.
We spent a few weeks like that, but a ship of that size wasn’t designed for a crew of just one guy. One and a half at best. We were anchored up in shallower water, every day trying to just keep her afloat, when my buddy started yellin’. That was the first time I actually laid eyes on the sons of bitches we were out there to fix up in the first place. They came down from up yonder in their shitty little boats, AKs in the air and whoopin’ and hollerin’.
I ran to the Bushmaster, big 25 mil auto-cannon, real doomsday bit of gear, threw on the ear defenders and started lighting them up.
I let them have it, I mean these motherfuckers start
ed throwing themselves overboard after a few hits turned some of them into red mist. I took out two of the suckers, but the other ones got in close. I couldn’t stop them, and by the time I’d gotten my hands on a gun they were there. I got bashed something fierce in the head, rifle butt I reckon, and when I came to my beloved Jean Evelyn was gone.
My buddy, did I tell you his name? He was Bill. Billy. He didn’t try to fight them off, but he did manage to set off the thing we was able to rig up in case we had to scuttle her. I was bouncing along with blood in my eyes when I sat up to look over the stern of the shitty little stinkin’ boat they threw me on, and watched my girl going down.
They took me back to their ship, every one of them taking their turn to spit in my face. To hit me. To threaten me. I was this big prize to them; the infidel asshole American sailor. I got locked up, thrown in a tiny cabin. I didn’t know if it was a week or a month before they made me do the video. I tried to remember what I had to say, but I was freaked out. I was dehydrated. My mouth was so dry I could’a spit cotton, and I didn’t know which way was up half the time. They treated me real ugly.
“I am an American citizen,” I had to tell one of the skinnys who was filming me on an iPhone. A fuckin’ iPhone for God sake!
“I am Petty Officer Third Class Joshua Bucknor, I am a member of the United States Navy and an American citizen,” yadda, yadda. I did the whole service number thing, and when I refused to tell them what they wanted to know they kicked the shit out of me again and threw me back in the hole. I think it dawned on them after a while that they weren’t getting no ransom for me, so I tried fixing to get myself released any ways I could.
“I’m a mechanic,” I told them, “I can, you know, fix shit.”
Well, they let me fix shit, and after a while they even stopped beating on me. My uniform was gone, rotted off my stinking body, and my beard had come in so that I looked the part. After a few months, maybe a year, I became part of the crew. I ain’t proud of that, but it was the only way I could’a survived. I figured out that they weren’t all one crew, but a few of the original pirates found anyone left and just pressed them into their crews like it was nineteen hundred. I dunno, something about the place just made it easy for them to act like that. To turn pirate like it was nothing. One of the leaders survived and he kept them all together like some asshole papa bear.
Piracy: The Leah Chronicles (After it Happened Book 8) Page 5