Blindfold Game

by Dana Stabenow

  “All right, let’s tell the troops what’s going on.” Sara caught a down swell to port and was at the microphone in two steps. “Attention all hands, attention all hands, this is Lieutenant Commander Lange,” she said, wincing a little as her voice boomed back at her from the speaker. Tommy reached quickly for the volume knob and Sara thanked her with a nod. She only hoped that the pipe wasn’t reaching across the water to the Star of Bali.

  “Yesterday I told you what we’ve been doing and why. We are going into action again against a bunch of suspected terrorists who present a serious threat to the nation. They must be stopped and they must be stopped now, before they get any closer to their target. I don’t have to remind you that there are two hundred and sixty thousand people living in and around that target. Our communications are still out, so we have no way of alerting anyone on shore to the threat. We can’t risk letting them out of our sight, so it’s up to us.”

  She paused to take a breath. “This is going to be tricky and dangerous. To be on the safe side, I want every one of you with a survival suit in arm’s reach. Chief Saunders is standing by in the portside equipment locker ready to issue them. Proceed there directly following this pipe and then report to your duty station.”

  She wanted to be able to say something inspirational but all that came to mind was lame words about duty, honor, and country. She remembered the blood all over the bridge after the attack, the limp bodies of Captain Lowe and Seaman Razo as they were carried from the bridge. Captain Lowe would have been much better at this than she was.

  It never occurred to her that Captain Lowe had had twenty years on her, during none of which had he faced a situation like this one, so he probably wouldn’t have known what to say, either.

  Sara said, “The sea is vast and our ship is small, but never doubt that we will prevail. That is all.”

  She hung up the mike and looked at Hugh, who was standing in front of the open portside hatch. She jerked her head, and he nodded. “I’ll be right back, Chief,” she told Mark Edelen, and left the bridge, Hugh following behind.

  SHE LED THE WAY to her stateroom and closed the door. He raised an eyebrow. “Won’t people talk?”

  “Shut up,” she said, and walked into his arms.

  They held each other as the precious seconds ticked by. She pressed her face against his heart and heard its steady reassuring beat even through the Mustang suit. He might have kissed her hair, she couldn’t tell, but she felt his arms tight around her, to where it started the wound on her arm aching again. She didn’t move.

  Ostlund’s voice sounded on the pipe. “Boarding party, assemble aft, I say again, boarding party, assemble aft immediately.” His grip loosened. She looked up. “I love you, Rincon.” The corner of his mouth quirked up. “Same goes, Lange.” On the way back to the bridge she blundered into Chief Katelnikof. If he saw the tears in her eyes, he was tactful enough not to say so.

  THE FOG AND SLEET dissolved so suddenly it startled everyone on the bridge, especially when Rugged Island thrust up out of the heaving gray seas like a fifteen-hundred foot claymore in the hand of a vengeful ocean god. On this monolith of cracked granite, stunted evergreens clung to microscopic crevices all the way to the top, where a sharp-toothed peak gnawed at the belly of the gray skies.

  “I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in my life,” Tommy said fervently, and no one contradicted her. Chief Edelen miracled them up a course that gave the small boat a lee to port and at the same time kept their starboard side to the Star of Bali, in case anyone on the other ship looked in their direction. So far their luck was holding, because it didn’t appear that anyone had. They lowered the inflatable and loaded the crew the way they always did. It helped that the seas had dropped five feet overnight, but the boarding team was still taking one hell of a pounding.

  Sara watched them labor up a wave and disappear into a trough. She looked up at the sky. They’d planned the boarding for this hour specifically, that hour between darkness and dawn when the light played tricks on the mind and at least for a few moments no one could be absolutely sure of what they were seeing.

  “I wanted to go with them,” Chief Edelen said from beside her.

  “So did I,” she said, and went to stand in front of the captain’s chair. She still couldn’t bring herself to sit in it. She wanted to pace but it would drive everyone crazy, so she refrained.

  She couldn’t help following along in the inflatable in her imagination. Were they shipping water? Had they come up on the freighter yet? What if someone saw the grapnel come up over the taffrail and hook on? What if the stern was too high for climbing and Hugh couldn’t get up and over? It wasn’t like he was a field agent; he was an analyst. He wasn’t trained in boarding hostile vessels in the open ocean from a small boat that wouldn’t stay still underfoot.

  What if the Star of Bali had had icing problems, too? What if the hook wouldn’t hold? What if the motion of the ship caused Hugh to lose his grip and he fell in?

  What if the freighter sank? Would the Scud go off underwater? If it did, what kind of damage would it do? How long before they would know?

  Was Hugh seasick yet?

  ON BOARD THE STAR OF BALI

  THEY WERE OUT OF the container and on deck. It was daybreak, and the sky was going from a dour black to a sullen gray. They were rolling hard enough to ship occasional water over the sides, which led Fang to believe that the engine had yet to regain full power, because it was obvious that either the storm had run its course or they had gained shelter in the lee of whatever land they were approaching. The spray was freezing on contact into a pearlescent sheen over every exposed surface, a sight that frightened Fang right down to his marrow. He nudged Smith in the small of the back and pointed at the ice. “Let’s go!”

  Smith looked at the ice and appeared to understand, because he moved out.

  They were careful, but there wasn’t much need for it. The first crewman they encountered went down without a sound, blood bubbling out of his mouth and chest from Fang’s knife. The second crewman, one of the junior officers if the markings on his shirt were correct, backed away with his hands upraised, but he, too, went down.

  Fang motioned to Soo to heave the bodies overboard and followed Smith. They swarmed up the outside ladders to the bridge to surprise the officer on watch with his feet up on the instrument panel, admiring the proportions of this month’s Playboy Playmate. They burst in and he looked up, gaping. He reached for what later proved to be a radio, and Fang shot him. He spun out of the chair and fell on the floor, his eyes wide and surprised beneath the bullet hole in his forehead.

  “No,” the helmsman said, backing away, “no, no.” He tripped and fell and Fang’s bullet caught his arm on the way down. “No, no,” he said as he tried to scrabble out of the way. Fang shot him again, this time in the chest. He tried to speak and couldn’t.

  Fang wedged a foot beneath his body and flipped him over for a swift search of his pockets. He found a wad of cash inside a wallet otherwise filled with pictures of a young Filipino woman and several toothy children of various ages. The officer was wearing a very nice watch. Fang took that, too. When he was done, he hauled the helmsman out of the bridge and onto the catwalk. “No, no,” the man said faintly, as Fang tipped him into the sea. The officer’s body followed.

  The rest of the crew were either in their bunks or at breakfast in the mess and were easily cowed into submission by the automatic weapons the pirates held. The captain, surprised in the shower, was inclined to put up a fight and was clubbed into unconsciousness with a rifle butt, after which he followed the officer on the bridge over the side. It silenced the rest of the crew, as if they imagined that keeping quiet would save their lives. It didn’t.

  Fang took over the bridge, sending Liet, his second in command and his best engineer, to the engine room. A while later a phone rang on the bridge. It was Liet, reporting that while all the moving parts were at a stage that could only be described as geriatric they were, in f
act, still moving and it looked as if they would continue to do so. Liet, a Thai with almost uncanny intuitions about the internal combustion engine, was completely to be trusted, and Fang breathed a sigh of relief.

  His relief was tempered by the southeastern horizon, which was looking very black. The horizon was backed up by the barometer, which was dropping like a rock.

  “The AIS,” Smith said, and Fang found it and disabled it.

  “Steer this course,” Smith said, handing him a piece of paper.

  Fang looked at it and raised his eyebrows. “North?” he said. He looked up and peered at the horizon. “That’s right into that bay.” He realized something else. “Hey. Where’s Jones? Where are the rest of the men?”

  “Steer that course,” Smith said. “Watch him,” he said to one of his men.

  “What for?” Fang said. “And where’s the rest of my men?”

  Smith left without answering. The man remaining behind kept his rifle pointed in Fang’s general direction.

  Fang stood at the wheel for a few moments, getting the feel of the ship. The pitch seemed to him to be heavier than it ought to have been, given the height of the waves. He looked out on deck, over the rows of neatly stacked and lashed containers. The gray dawn revealed the topless container they had ridden in, and Smith and his men pulling back the canvas top of the container next to it.

  He looked around for Catalino, one of his own men who had also remained behind. “Find me a cargo manifest.”

  Catalino, an Abu Sayyaf guerrilla from the southern Philippines who in a shockingly procapitalist gesture had abandoned the fight for freedom for the acquisition of personal wealth without a backward look when Fang recruited him, was back in less than ten minutes with a clipboard and some new blood spatters down the front of his jacket.

  The manifest showed the containers to be filled with drilling equipment bound for the port of Seward, Alaska, and a hold full of Chinese steel bound for Seattle. Fang put the manifest down and looked out the window again. He had a sinking feeling that the container Smith was busy with didn’t have drilling equipment inside it.

  He headed for the door to the ladder down and was stopped by Smith’s man.

  “Let me by,” Fang said angrily.

  The man watched him out of expressionless eyes, said nothing, and didn’t move.

  Fang headed for the starboard door and the mercenary was there before him. This time the mercenary deigned to speak. “No,” he said.

  Fang had set his rifle next to the wheel, and he eyed it now, wondering if he could get to it, click off the safety, aim, and fire before the mercenary shot him.

  “No,” said the mercenary, who was evidently also a mind reader.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Fang said. “What’s in that container?”

  The mercenary said, “No.” He motioned again with the rifle. Fang looked at Catalino.

  Smith’s man fired. Catalino’s weapon clattered to the floor and a second later Catalino’s body followed it.

  Smith’s man motioned with the rifle again, and this time Fang returned to the helm.

  JANUARY

  IN THE INFLATABLE, HUGH was too terrified to be seasick. The walls of water surrounding the small boat were so high he could barely see the sky, and the boarding team was so packed in and so bristling with weapons that even if he was sick he wouldn’t have been able to do anything but puke down the front of his Mustang suit. The coxswain was a square-shouldered young man with a large flat brown mole on his left cheek. He had his teeth bared in what looked more like a snarl than a grin, and his hands on the controls were quick and deft.

  Hugh had insisted on going with the boarding team. “I speak Korean,” he had said. Since he was the only person on board who did, it had been impossible to gainsay him, and Sara was the first to back him up. She knew what he was thinking because she was thinking the same thing. No way was he letting whatever it was on board the Star of Bali any closer to a populated landmass, especially his populated landmass.

  Suddenly the stern of the freighter was looming above them, water smacking against the hull and rebounding to spray them all. Ostlund slapped Ensign Reese’s helmet. “Go!”

  Ensign Reese, the best arm on the ship in Ops’ opinion, stood up and braced himself against the steering column. Everyone ducked as he swung a rope with a grapnel on it around his head, once, twice, three times, and let fly.

  It missed. He reeled it back in as the coxswain, cursing under his breath, coaxed the small boat back beneath the stern. Another wave smacked the stern of the freighter and rained down on their hapless heads.

  Again, Reese started the windup, once, twice, three times, and it flew up, up, and over the stern, and Seaman Lewis grabbed him around the waist as he hauled on the line as hard as he could. Seaman Lewis was six feet four inches tall and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds and he had been selected for this mission for just that reason. If Hugh was not mistaken he was wearing Seaman Lewis’s pants.

  “On belay,” Lewis bellowed.

  “Feels solid!” Reese yelled. The coxswain turned the small boat off the stern of the freighter, just enough to keep the line taut, or as taut as possible in these heaving seas.

  Seaman Delgado, the size of a monkey and just as agile, stepped up to the rope. He was five-one and wouldn’t tell anyone what he weighed, but he had been observed in the gym bench-pressing one-fifty. He wore no pack and carried only a sidearm.

  “Go!” Ostlund shouted, and Delgado went up the rope hand over hand without pause and vanished over the stern. A second later the grapnel came hurtling down, splashing into the water next to the small boat, to be reeled in briskly by Ensign Reese.

  The coxswain took that as a sign and opened up the throttle to maneuver the small boat around to the freighter’s starboard side. He dropped off the stern a little, where they endeavored not to be squashed by the freighter’s rise and fall, and waited.

  Hugh noticed a sheen of white across Ostlund’s shoulders, and reached out to touch it. Ice. He looked around and noticed that the small boat was adding a layer of ice with every wave they took. He started beating on the sides with his fists, and everyone else woke up from their frozen stupor and started beating. It got rid of most of the ice so long as they kept beating, and it warmed them up a little, too.

  “There!” Ostlund said, after what seemed hours and was probably only minutes. Hugh followed his pointing finger and saw a rope ladder rattle down the hull of the freighter. The coxswain goosed the engine until they were alongside, and kept them alongside until Ensign Reese managed to snag it. Hugh looked up and saw Delgado grinning down at them from the gunnel, and his mind numbly remembered the briefing. This would be the pilot’s ladder, the ladder the ship would let down to board the local marine pilot when the ship got close enough to port to need one.

  Ostlund was first up.

  “Mr. Rincon?” Ensign Reese said.

  It was a very small ladder, and the hull of the freighter seemed impossibly high.

  “Mr. Rincon?” Ensign Reese said again.

  In some small part of his mind that was still functioning Hugh knew he was holding up the line and endangering the mission. He grabbed the side of the inflatable and rose shakily to his feet, losing his balance immediately and pitching forward. He flung up his hands to catch himself and by sheer luck fell into the ladder.

  The sea fell away from beneath the inflatable and he was left clinging to the ladder. His feet scrabbled automatically for the narrow slats of wood that formed the steps. The hull of the freighter rolled away from him and he found himself lying face down against it, his knuckles caught between the rope of the ladder and the metal of the hull.

  “Go!” Reese shouted. “Go now!”

  His feet fumbled for the rungs and he gained a few shaky steps before the hull of the freighter rolled back and he found himself swinging wildly away from the hull, the ladder twisting and twirling. He looked down and saw faces turned up to him. When the ship rolled b
ack he slammed hard against the hull.

  “Ouch,” he clearly heard someone say.

  “Climb, goddammit, Mr. Rincon! Climb! Climb now!”

  Reese’s urgency got through, and Hugh unclenched one hand for the next rung, and the next, fighting the heave of the sea and the roll of the freighter and the shove of the wind and the sting of the spray. About halfway up he lost all contact with his feet, and his hands were bloodied and painful from rubbing against the hull. It felt like an hour later when a hand grasped the back of his Mustang suit and began to pull. “It’s okay, Mr. Rincon, I’ve got you,” Ostlund’s voice said, and the next thing he knew he was sitting on the deck and dry-heaving between his legs. Nothing had ever felt as good to him as the solid deck of the Star of Bali beneath his ass.

  When he recovered enough to look around, the coxswain was climbing over the gunnel. He staggered to his feet in time to see the inflatable fall off the hull of the freighter. The line fastening the small boat to the bottom of the rope ladder pulled taut, twisting the ladder into a helix.

  This had been much discussed in the planning session. “Mr. Ryan said they had fifteen people on board the Agafia. We have to assume there are at least that many on board the Star of Bali,” Sara had said. “We can fit ten of you, plus Mr. Rincon, into the small boat without swamping her. We will need every gun we’ve got. Everyone boards. They can leave the small boat tied off to the ship.” An escape hatch, in case things went sour, was what she was thinking.

  On board the freighter, Delgado closed the door behind the coxswain and slammed down the hatch handle. He donned his pack and shouldered his shotgun. “This way,” he said, and they followed him single file through bundled pallets of rebar and angle iron stacked as high as the hold.

  They came to a hatch. Ostlund put his ear to it for a moment. “Can’t hear a goddamn thing,” he said cheerfully, and cranked it open. Delgado slithered through, gave an all-clear, and motioned the rest of them inside. Hugh was last in, and he closed the hatch behind him. Ostlund tied a strip of red cloth to the hatch handle. “Hansel and Gretel,” he told them, “only better than bread crumbs.”