And that’s how I survived. That’s how I met the other hostages who found themselves some way to be useful to the pirates. There was an Indian guy, he was a good navigator. Never saw any women, but that didn’t surprise me and neither did I want to think about it. Never saw Bill again. Never wanted to question why.
It went on like that for years, day in and day out. I fixed stuff, I ate, I slept, and I thought about escape for the first few years. I gave up. I didn’t even have the courage to take my own life, despite thinking about it damn near every day. I was numb, and I thought I was beyond saving when their leader, Ahmad Gareer, took his whole fleet through the Suez and into European waters.
It all changed then.
~
“I remember it well,” Leah told him, “you looked like shit.”
“I think you would too, if you’d just spent seven years with them assholes,” he countered gently. “Seven years, man. Damn. I had no idea it had been that long. I guess I’d lost track of time after the first year when they kept me locked up. Went inside myself, you know? Even missed my own birthday turnin’ thirty.”
“I bet,” she said weakly, not wanting to consider what her life would have been like being captured by them.
Short, most probably, Leah told herself glumly, and unpleasant all the way down.
“You didn’t explain how they got the tanker,” she asked, having racked her brain but unable to recall the part of the tale when the pirates had come to get their hands on their mothership.
“Luck,” Joshua said, “pure luck. It was owned by somewhere in the Middle East, UAE most likely, them suckers owned pretty much everything anyway. Gareer found it just sat in the deep-water harbour in Mombasa, that’s in Kenya, next country down, all parked up and loaded with fuel from the refinery. Just sittin’ ripe for the pickin’. That became their little base of operations and all them other ones just hovered around it like flies on shit. These UAE-owned boats had what we called multi-national crews: some Europeans, some Indians and quite often a white guy from South Africa as the captain. Well these dumbasses killed or injured the few people left there and guess who they brought in to start the engines?”
He leaned back, taking another swig of Tennessee’s finest and pulling a face as he swallowed to relish the harshness of it.
“Well after that, after I’d proved I was useful, and seein’ as I hadn’t tried to escape or nothin’, they sent me out all over to fix their stuff. I’d tell ’em, ‘I need this oil’ or ‘I need that tool’ and they’d scurry off to fetch it for me.”
He sipped his drink again and let his eyes drift unfocussed on the distant sea.
“That’s what I was doin’ the day I first laid eyes on you. I’d have been the age you are now, I guess. I’d been given off to the smaller crew; they had a big fishin’ boat and a couple of them skiffs they liked so much, but their main engine had a real nasty habit of runnin’ too hot. First I knew of the shit that went down was when I heard yellin’ and shootin’ from up top. Then you hit me with that flashlight beam of yours and, as they say, the rest be nothin’ but history.”
Sea Rangers
I remember finding Joshua. I remember it clearly because I very nearly killed him. The ragged, bearded, deeply tanned squinting man looked every part the Islamic extremist or pirate or terrorist at the time, then I caught myself for generalising. All I had ever known about them was from movies anyway, which was probably mostly bullshit, so it was little wonder I stereotyped him when I first laid eyes on the man.
It wasn’t planned, and actually it was very ill-advised in hindsight, but after how I felt on that morning my head was all over the place and I think I was reckless. Cancel that, I knew I was being reckless but we all react to things differently, I guess.
~
Dan had finally relented to allow the fishing boats back out as long as they had an armed escort and followed the strict instructions to point their noses towards home and floor it should they see any boat that wasn’t one of ours. Most of the pressure came from the peaceful side of the argument; the side that pointed out that we survived because of the sea and the fish we took from it every day, and that we had quotas to fill for trade and others relying on our productivity. People like me who argued for action just because there was a fight to be had added weight to it, appealing to his own mentality in fact, but it was the thought of going hungry that pushed him over the edge.
He didn’t act without thinking, not like he used to and not like I had begun to, and he had sent pigeons to The Orchards and the farm and Andorra who formed our alliance along with half a dozen other small settlements within reach of our little fortress. The messages warned of the threat, not that it really mattered to any of them so far inland, but the request for any additional militia was answered with alacrity and without question. Two came from the farm the same day, one from The Orchards the following morning and six from Andorra the next evening led by Rafi who had originally been one of us until a couple of years before when he and I had an uncomfortably weird holiday in the strange but stunning little country hidden in the mountains.
Our last night of relative inactivity was spent in a little gathering which I joined late after Lucien had relieved me to command the night watch at the sea wall. I went to bed early, knowing that I would be out on the water at daybreak, but the subject that had been intermittently stressed over and forgotten about for the last two days finally bore down on me with too much weight.
I opened the packaging, annoyed at the fiddly bits of plastic, and tried to decipher the instructions. In the end I had to correlate the position of the lines with the sketch drawing next to what looked like a baby face emoji, and when that first test gave me the answer I dreaded I tried the other one.
That one had the same result, despite what I willed it to say.
I was pregnant, and that knowledge didn’t help me sleep at all.
I was up and dressed before the sun rose, opting for long sleeves despite the warm weather because I remembered how chilly the wind out there could be, adding my vest and instantly dropping another thirty percent of my body weight onto my feet. It was wearing the vest that kept me fit and strong as much as my running and swimming and training; ammunition weighs a flipping tonne.
With a carbine in one hand and a big rifle in the other and my face like thunder I walked up to the docks to join my crew for the day. Call it the benefit of command if you like, but I put myself on Mateo’s boat just because I like him. We didn’t ask any of the people from the other settlements to go out to sea, but kept them safely on land to stand guard while we went out. We were only letting the two biggest boats out, but allowed a handful of others to fish in the shallower waters near to our home just so long as they knew to keep watch and to flee back to the harbour if they saw anything. Their catches would be small, but food was food.
“Morning,” Lucien said, leaning in to kiss my cheek and recoiling when I held up a hand near his face. He took one look at me and asked what was wrong; not what he had done, but what the matter was because he knew me well enough by then how to handle me.
“Nothing,” I grumbled back, “just early. Not in the mood.”
He allowed that, not believing me for a second but choosing the safer path of not pushing me for an answer when there were lots of people around to see him get his butt kicked.
“I’ll be back later,” I told him before looking down at Nemesis and fixing her with a look. “Stay,” I told her, then watched her dance a little four-legged jig in frustration and sit beside Lucien looking up at him expectantly.
“Room for a wee one?” a familiar voice asked from the dock. Mitch threw his bag up to me which I swerved by leaning my upper body back and away so that the rucksack landed with a loud clank on the deck.
“Nice,” he said.
“Sorry, got my hands full,” I told him lifting up the two weapons I carried.
“Expecting trouble?”
“Always,” I told him seriously, leaving o
ut the fact that I was in the mood to actively search for it instead of letting it come to me as per usual, “aren’t you?”
In answer he waggled his eyebrows and comically stroked the contraption under the barrel of his rifle, which lobbed small bombs in the direction of things and people he didn’t like much.
I was right to go for the long sleeves, but it wasn’t enough because I was still chilly despite the warm sunshine. The wind whipping over the deck was doubled in intensity by our forward momentum, and my skin was tight with the cold before we had even lost clear sight of land.
From a mile out, our little patch of indomitable southern France appeared tiny and barely worth a second glance. I hoped that anyone looking that way with unwelcome intentions would think the same, but I was absolutely sure that after our brush with them the pirates would be unlikely to let it pass without further investigation.
Pirates, I scoffed to myself, can’t believe I’m actually using that word.
It still seemed ludicrous, but I was gauging that against the world from before when it was just total lawlessness. Back on land, even in the boring countryside of central England, there had been roaming gangs of men and women on bikes who hunted other survivors like extras from a bad movie. It made perfect sense for the same behaviour to apply to the seas, but that was now and not before. Now they were just another roving band of people firmly in the ‘not us’ category, which placed them in significant danger should our paths cross.
“Who’s on the other boat?” I yelled at Mitch to be heard, realising that I hadn’t seen who went out after we did and not having paid close enough attention the night before.
“Dan and Adam,” he shouted back, cupping one hand to his mouth and smiling like a dog with its head sticking out of a car window. I didn’t answer as there was no need. I did wonder why Dan didn’t put himself with me and that nagged at my confidence until I settled on the fact that he wanted to be able to support Adam – never one to miss a training opportunity – and allowed Mitch and me autonomous control of our own day.
In hindsight, he said that was a mistake. I still think it wasn’t, but I had to agree that the methods weren’t exactly textbook. If Dan had done what we had then it would have been fine, just so long as we didn’t tell Marie that he had done it, but he still liked to be the only person allowed to take risks like a control freak.
The engine note of the boat wound down to a low rumble and the crew got up from where they rested to start rigging up nets and winches in preparation of catching and dragging aboard the big ball of writhing and flapping silver that was our lifeblood. There were plenty of fish nearer shore I had learned, big shoals of mackerel and similar stuff, but to me fish was just fish. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t starve to death either. Still, nothing beat a nice bit of pork for me, and the offcuts of the fish had allowed the pigs to grow strong, so it was all part of the great circle of life I guessed.
I stood and used my rifle optic to scan the horizon, cursing myself for thinking the words and making the song from the Lion King run through my head on short-loop repeat, just as Mitch used a set of small binos to scan the other side. And that was how our morning went; they fished and we looked. Being a Sea Ranger was much easier, if a little more boring, than it was on land, at least that was what I thought until the late afternoon.
The first haul had been brought up and Mateo helped his crew sort them out into the hold before asking our permission to travel further out.
“The catch is small here,” he said, “we go deeper and get bigger, yes?”
“Up to you, my friend,” Mitch answered him, “we’re just your good-looking bodyguards.”
Mateo smiled, probably to cover up the fact that he hadn’t understood Mitch because of a combination of his accent and a poor grasp of English unless spoken very simply.
The second haul went very much the same as the first had, only this time when the winches whined and pulled up the net there was a ragged cheer from the stern which indicated that they were happier with their second attempt.
I took my eye away from the scope to see their celebrations and smiled before Mitch spoke a single word that cut through me to connect to my ‘switch on’ nerve.
“Boat.”
“Where?” I called out, scanning the horizon wildly.
“On me,” he replied, waiting until I had crossed the rolling deck to lean on the rail beside him. “My two o’clock.”
I tried to bring the rifle up to the right bearing, but the movement combined with the long barrel made it impossible. I dropped to my knee and rested the gun on the guardrail before finding what he had seen.
“Single boat,” I said, “looks like it’s moving fast.”
“Aye,” Mitch said with a hint of darkness in his voice, “look up and right of them.”
I tracked the movement with my gun and saw it. A smudge on the horizon. I stared at it for a long time, casting my eyes back to the smaller boat which hadn’t gained much distance on us.
“Mateo? We’ll be leaving as soon as you’re ready,” Mitch shouted, serving only to alert the captain of our boat to the direction of the threat which he found after snatching up his own binoculars. He dropped them after a second of wide-mouthed staring, yelling at his crew to fix the nets and prepare to head home.
“It doesn’t look that big,” I said, meaning the bigger boat.
“And how the hell do you know?” Mitch asked me incredulously. “It may be five miles away which would make it the size of a bloody cruise ship.”
“Trust me,” I insisted. “Mateo?”
The captain came over to me.
“How far away is the bigger boat?” I asked him, pointing out the direction that he needed to look.
He stared for a while before answering.
“Is two mile,” he said, “maybe three or four times of this?” He pointed to the deck we stood on.
“It’s not that big then,” I told Mitch with a wicked smile starting at the corner of my mouth. “We could use their boat and just take a look at them. Intelligence gathering.”
“I don’t like the look in your eye, missy,” he said as his own eyes narrowed. “Dan gave very strict instructions to not mix it with them. Let’s go.”
I must be getting old, I thought, my sweet and innocent eyes didn’t seem to work on him any more.
In the end I got my own way, but that was because the skiff chasing us was much faster, and we had to turn before gathering speed away from them.
The crew panicked and shouted, fearing the pursuit would stop them from getting home safely, but as we both stood at the stern of the ship the realisation that we would be caught only filled us with a ruthless resolve.
“Cut the engines,” Mitch shouted as he took his eye away from the scope. “Full auto,” he added to me, “light the fuckers up as soon as they’re in range.”
I nodded, pointlessly because he wasn’t looking at me, and unscrewed the suppressor from the barrel of my carbine. I planned to let them have a full magazine from the battle rifle and then switch to the smaller calibre if they were still coming.
“Ready,” I told him, and I was.
No Cover
The thing about fighting boat to boat is that there was no way to take cover and outmanoeuvre the enemy. With just one boat we couldn’t outflank the smaller, more agile craft chasing us, but as that was lower and flimsy by comparison I reassured myself that we held the high ground.
I let rip with twenty lightning-fast rounds from the big rifle, of which probably four or five found the boat. It was seriously difficult being accurate with fire on a moving platform. I switched weapons, found the four occupants just popping their heads up over the lip of the boat counting their lucky stars that none of them were hit, about to raise their own weapons just as a hailstorm peppered them from ours.
Rats in a barrel was what Mitch had said afterwards, and it was just like that. They had nowhere to go but they still didn’t break off or jump overboard. We cycled our weapo
ns, reloading after the first automatic barrage had snatched one of them backwards to spin off the boat into the sea, and fired again more carefully the second time. Two more dropped by the time they had overtaken us and slammed into our side where a hooked ladder was thrown over our railings, but when we ran to that side and aimed our guns downwards the sole surviving occupant of the boat realised he was alone and was trying to unhitch himself. He was torn between escape and fighting, and as he reached for a massive, long-barrelled machine gun he found himself staring up at two separate targets both pointing weapons at him.
He made the wrong call.
Snatching up the gun that seemed as long and probably heavier than he was, the simple physical mechanics of the move was his undoing. All we had to do was apply a few pounds of pressure to our right index fingers, and the two near-simultaneous bullets hit him in the chest to drop him like a rag doll having the briefest of epileptic seizures.
“We’re clear,” Mitch shouted to the fishermen who had fled from sight, “you’re alright now.”
Slowly they emerged, peeking around the scowling Mateo who made it clear and obvious that he was unimpressed at being a part of the brief sea battle.
The silence was filled with the sounds of reloading as Mateo looked down at the gun in his hand as though he hadn’t realised he had picked it up. He held it delicately, as though he was scared of it, which was more worrying than if he had pointed it at me. He went back into the wheelhouse and came out empty handed.
I retrieved my big rifle, slapped in a chunky twenty-round replacement magazine and knelt once again to check the horizon for the bigger boat. No signs of any other boats heading for us cut the waves.
Piracy: The Leah Chronicles (After it Happened Book 8) Page 6