“No,” Marisa said coldly.
“Marisa!”
“No.” She looked up at him and shrugged. “I won’t do it.”
The silence fell again like a curtain, moments passing like the drift. Until, without words, the Poet stood and began suiting up. When he was ready, he pushed Reggie’s body down deep into the sand and disappeared entirely with the sandal hop. Peary didn’t know how deep the old man took Reggie, because the Poet was down awhile, but when the old man surfaced again he pulled himself onto the sand and sat with his arms hugging his knees. There were tears in his eyes and a deep sadness on his face. Deeper than usual.
“So it’s suicide, then?” the Poet asked. “Or if not suicide per se, then a suicidal plan to outwit them and escape, which amounts to the same thing."
Neither Peary nor Marisa answered him. The eyes of all three met and darted back and forth for a moment.
“Well, if it’s to be suicide, then I say we make a plan,” the Poet said.
***
“They’ll set up camp as soon as they’ve caught up with us,” the Poet said. “I’ve been in enough pirate camps to know how they’ll orient the tents.”
“How does that help us?” Marisa asked.
Peary pointed down into the very bottom of the valley. “We can bury some dive gear. Not deep. Just deep enough so that we can find it in the dark and dig it out with our hands.”
“I know where they’ll put their command center,” the Poet added, pointing. “The bosses will be using that tent after dark, but it also becomes a gathering place—like a party center at night. There’ll be a supply tent, right over there, with boxes of ammunition and explosives, tools, food supplies.”
“I thought you said their supplies were way behind them… being brought up by tri-hulls?” Marisa asked.
“Could be,” the Poet said. “But the stuff will be here soon enough one way or another. And they’ll want to rest after chasing us for so long, so they’ll camp here a few days at least. Could be two. Probably three.”
Marisa nodded. “So we get a bomb and blow them all up?”
The Poet nodded. “They’ll keep us alive, since they don’t yet know who knows what about the location of Danvar. They’ll threaten us of course, but they won’t kill anyone until they know everything they need to know about the location of the lost city.”
“They’ll torture us and probably rape Marisa,” Peary said. He didn’t look at her when he said it, but he could feel her eyes on him anyway. “And I’m not going to let that happen.”
The Poet nodded. “They will, but not at first. They’ll threaten, but they’ll play nice for a day or two. First and foremost, they want the information, and they won’t put that objective at risk. But their patience will not last forever. I’ve been in these camps before. I know how they think.”
“Why would they wait at all?” Peary asked. “Why not just torture us as soon as they can?”
The Poet smiled gently. “Because information gathered by consent, even if it is through passive coercion, barter, or some other method is generally more accurate and trustworthy than information gained strictly by torture. People being tortured will say anything to make it stop.”
“Right then,” Peary said. “We should know when the critical time has arrived, and we’ll just have to hope they save the worst of it for the morning so we can move on them at night.”
The Poet nodded.
Peary inhaled deeply and then exhaled. “So during the night—the night before we think things are going to go bad—sometime after the supplies have arrived, we get to the dive suits, and dive. We come up inside the supply tent. We find or fashion a bomb, and then we walk into the command tent and make our demands.”
“Agreed,” the Poet said. “So… what demands will we make? Let’s make them good!” He smiled, but it seemed the others were not in a joking mood.
“I don’t understand,” Marisa said. “If we can get out and get our dive suits, why don’t we just escape?”
“Because we’d be right back where we are now,” Peary said. “They’ll just catch us again.”
“But if we can get bombs, we can blow up their sarfers so they can’t follow us,” she said.
“We’d never get all of them,” the old man said. “No way. And whoever we left alive would catch us again and things would be worse for us.”
“So we’re all going to just blow ourselves up?”
“If we have to. But it doesn’t have to be all of us, Marisa,” Peary said. “You can go now.”
“I won’t.”
“What if I promised to take them to Danvar?” Peary said. “And try to escape along the way to get back to you?”
Marisa smirked. “You just said yourself that wouldn’t work.”
The Poet interrupted the conversation. “We’ll demand to be released, and we’ll take the bomb with us. We’ll tell them if they follow us and get too close, we’ll blow them—and ourselves—to pieces.”
The three plotters stared at one another, eyes darting back and forth. One way or another, the tension of the journey was soon to be relieved.
“All right then,” the Poet said finally. “It seems we have a plan.”
“Yep,” Peary said. “If we can’t have the spoils of Danvar—we, who earned them righteously—then we’ll at least make sure these pirates never touch them.”
Cornered
Chapter Twenty
The three friends were seated at the base of the dunes on the edge of the valley, the bags of coin at their feet, when the pirates arrived. Cord was at the head of the brigands and seemed to be in charge, and when he saw Peary and the bags of coin he just smiled.
“Appreciate you watching our coin for us, diver,” Cord said with a grin. “Where’s your wounded friend?”
“Died a few days ago,” Peary answered.
“Too bad,” Cord said. “Really surprised to catch you three together. We expected the old man might have sacrificed himself so you and the missus could gain speed.” He nodded at the Poet. “Guess he didn’t have it in him.”
“You’d have caught them and killed them anyway,” the Poet said flatly.
Cord nodded. “We can’t all be heroic, old man, and, well… you’re right about that.”
“Just take the coin and go!” Peary shouted. Anger flushed his cheeks as his eyes darted across the faces of the pirates. He noted the sly grins his words put on their faces. The old man was right. They had no intention of ever letting their captives go.
“Oh yes,” Cord said, and then lied, “we’ll be letting you go. But there are things we need to talk about first. Business. Give us a few days, will you? Then we’ll let you go.”
The period at the end of his sentence was emphasized by the cry of the sand hawk in the distance.
***
The captives were kept in a low tent with no carpet or tarp for a floor. The screened windows had their flaps tied up to let the breeze through. Sand flies buzzed here and there, never quite giving up or going away.
Every few hours one of the three would be retrieved by a pirate and taken to the leader’s tent to be questioned. For the most part, at least in the beginning, the interrogations were carried out without violence. Threats… plenty of those. But no violence.
Each of the captives stuck to their story.
Yes, the map that Peary had given to Joel accurately showed the location of the part of Danvar that the divers had discovered. No, they didn’t think anyone else had yet located the find. Yes, they were certain they hadn’t told anyone else. No, they were not interested in guiding the pirates to the treasure.
After the first long night, Peary was sure that the torture—and worse—would begin soon enough. Maybe tomorrow, he thought. Maybe tomorrow they stop beating around the bush and start beating the captives.
According to the Poet, the brigands would plan on resting for two or three full days, so if they were planning on getting answers from their captives, the brutality had to begi
n soon.
But the pirates weren’t in a hurry. On the second day, the tri-hulls and sand-skidders arrived with supplies, which were unloaded and deposited into the supply tent. Around noon, the questioning proceeded as before, though the threats became more specific, and both Peary and the old man were slapped a few times when their answers didn’t satisfy Cord’s curiosity.
When Marisa was returned to the tent after her interrogation, Peary noted the red splotch on her left cheek, and her downcast eyes told him that things had gotten much more serious this time. When she saw him looking, she smiled and shrugged, as if to say it wasn’t that bad. That smile made him feel better, and the rage that was boiling up in him abated just a bit. But not completely. Just enough to keep him from doing anything stupid.
As the blue-gray and then black shadow of night fell on the end of the second day, the three friends knew it was time to activate their plan. They wouldn’t make it through another day of interrogation, especially if the pirates planned on heading north the next day.
Something has to give, Peary thought. So tonight has to be the night.
A look from the Poet told him that he was right.
***
The place where they’d buried the dive suits was partially under their tent. The Poet had been dead accurate in his estimation of how the brigands would arrange their camp.
Peary and the Poet suited up in silence as Marisa watched. The party in the command tent had sputtered out, and the camp was now mostly quiet, save for the occasional stirring of men going out to piss on a dune, or the grunt of a drunk being shoved aside to make room for someone to lie down.
The plan was to make their way under the sand to the supply tent, where they’d try to steal some explosives and make a bomb big enough to kill everyone in the camp. Their own selves included, if that became necessary. That was the plan. Get away, or die trying.
The Poet activated his suit first, and without a wink or a nod he disappeared beneath the sand. Peary looked at Marisa and smiled, and when she returned his smile, he slapped the button on his chest and started to move the sand. Before he could dive down though, Marisa moved stealthily to his side and embraced him. He squeezed her in reply and then gently pushed her away. The sand softened beneath him, and he nodded at her as he sank down. Their hands remained touching until Peary was completely immersed beneath the sand.
***
The cool pressed in on him, and Peary felt the momentary lie of freedom beckoning him from down deep. Granular hope—untrue, but sweet for a moment in his thoughts. He only sank a few meters before he hardened the sand near his feet and pushed off in the direction of the supply tent.
They’d measured the distance as closely as they could, and he ticked off the meters in his mind as he kicked forward through the sand. He was glad they’d brought excess dive gear. The pirates had never suspected that their captives might have prepared the camp location for an escape attempt.
When he’d gone the requisite distance, Peary turned upward a little and looked through his visor at the colors up above him. The purple showed that there were no people up top, save for one wavering orange figure with dashes of yellow. That would be the Poet. There were also some dark splotches where boxes and cases of supplies must be stowed. All was as it should be.
Peary ascended slowly, breaking the surface just enough to look around. In the darkness, he could see almost nothing, so he freed his hand and raised his visor. Off to his left, he could make out the Poet seated cross-legged on the sand, waiting.
“Let’s get this done,” the old man whispered. Both men removed their headgear and Peary raised himself until he was fully above the sand.
“I’ve already found what we need,” the Poet said. “It’s here, in this box.”
Peary followed the old man’s finger to a box with strange markings on the side. “What is it?”
“Bombs. Very big bombs. Bigger than what we’ll need, but they’ll work.”
“Wow.”
“There are four of them in one box,” the Poet said.
“Do you know how to work them?” Peary asked.
“I do.”
The old man reached into the crate and pulled out a large rectangular case. Attached to the top of the case was a smaller box that had a timer and several switches. Wires from the smaller control module disappeared into the larger case.
“These are for blowing through rock. They’ll make a mess of everyone in this camp if we set one off.”
“So what do we do now?” Peary asked.
“Grab that crate and follow me,” the Poet said. “We’re going to wake up our captors and let them know that if they don’t let us go, they’re never going to see Danvar.”
***
Cord, his hired brigands, and the Legionnaires who’d joined the posse weren’t all sleeping. At least, some of them weren’t. They weren’t partying either. The bulk of them were in that middle state: the quiet overtaking them like a damp blanket, the booze dulling them enough that sleep was imminent, but not yet arrived.
When the Poet pushed through the flap and into the command tent, he had to shove his way through the bodies lying here and there near the tent entrance, but before long, eyes caught his and heads were turned, and a slow murmur began to make its way through the structure.
Peary and Marisa followed close behind the Poet, each holding tightly to the cloak of the one in front of them. There were lanterns still burning, and the three of them stepped carefully to the center of the command tent, where a half-dozen folding chairs had been placed upon an area rug in a loose circle. Cord, their nemesis and the suspected leader of the outfit, was seated in one of the chairs, his eyes half-closed and his head lolling to one side in near sleep.
The Poet approached a different chair, then kicked the man who lounged in it such that he slid off and landed on the ground. The Poet sat down heavily in the vacated seat and let out a whistle that sounded almost like the screech of a sand hawk. The piercing sound quickly brought the men in the tent to some form of attention.
Cord was slow in realizing what was going on, but at last he jumped a little and then went for the knife in his scabbard.
He froze when the Poet reacted by lifting up the bomb he held in his arms and placing his thumb against the detonation switch.
The rest of the crew—at least, those who were still sober enough to realize what was happening—now moved, slowly at first, but then almost in unison. Weapons were drawn, and the men formed a wall of thick, rank bodies in order to keep anyone from escaping the tent.
“Those bombs aren’t armed,” Cord said. He said it, but it was evident in his eyes that he didn’t believe it.
“Yes they are, Cord,” Peary said. The Poet kept his thumb on the button, but didn’t speak. He only smiled. Peary walked into the center of the ring of chairs and looked into Cord’s eyes. “Our old poet friend here armed them. And he knows what he’s doing. He’s been on a lot of these expeditions—haven’t you, Poet?”
The Poet nodded.
“Sure he has,” Peary continued. “And he knows how to arm explosives like these, don’t you think, Cord?”
There was silence for a half minute, then Cord nodded.
Peary reached over and unsnapped the sheath that held Cord’s knife, withdrawing the weapon with a smooth motion.
“You can borrow it,” Cord said, “but don’t start thinking that your little plan here has worked. As if we’re just going to let you walk on out of here.”
“That’s exactly what you’re going to do,” Peary said. “We’re leaving the gold, and the maps, and we’re heading west. Over the mountains. And you aren’t going to follow us or we’ll blow you all to hell.”
“That’s not the way this is going to happen,” Cord said. A smile just barely began to touch his lips. He was now past his initial shock, and his mind was starting to function.
“Oh really?” Peary said.
“Really.”
“And how is it going to happe
n?”
The old man interrupted. “Well, let me tell you —”
“Shut up, old man,” Peary snapped. “I’m talking to Cord.”
“Listen, Peary,” the old Poet snapped back. “It’s high time you listened instead of acting like you have all the answers all the time. Here’s how things work in the real world. Cord here will let us go, sure enough, and we’ll pack up the sarfers and get gone. And then he and his crew will follow behind, close enough to keep tabs on us, but not close enough to get blown up. Then he’ll send one of his hirelings in a fast skidder to harass us. Maybe we’ll throw a bomb at him. If we’re going fast enough so that it doesn’t kill us, at worst it’ll kill the brigand in the skidder.”
“Exactly,” Peary said.
“And then Cord will send another one,” the Poet said, “and then another one. He’ll keep sending them to their deaths until we run out of bombs.”
Marisa sucked air into her lungs and shook her head. “Why would they do that, though? Why would they die for him?”
The Poet looked around the room at Cord’s men, taking a moment to stare each man in the eye. “Because every salvage expedition is the same. They all know that if they don’t do what he says, he’ll kill them anyway. They know that. And then, when he gets back to wherever it is he recruited them from, he’ll kill their families. It’s the way of the pirate.”
There was silence for a few moments, and then Cord slowly stood to his feet. The Poet kept his thumb on the trigger of the bomb and stepped closer to Cord, who raised his hands to show he wasn’t going to try anything stupid.
“The old man is right,” Cord said. “That’s exactly what we’ll do. So you see, you can’t get away.”
Peary turned to the Poet, and his voice shook with anger. “What the hell, Poet? This was the plan! And you tell me now that the plan won’t work?”
“The plan was never going to work,” the Poet replied. “And it never was the real plan anyway. I only told you that to get you to go along.”
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