by Thomas Waite
But the swells also gave Galina breathing room when he couldn’t shoot her. She used that time to message Lana that Oleg had shot and killed the captain of her boat. She tried to communicate quickly, but her boat still rose and fell several times on the rolling sea before she turned her attention back to Oleg’s trawler, freezing when she saw the vessel only half a soccer field length away.
She stared through the riflescope for him, tense as one of the trawler’s steel cables.
The cop must have seen her burgeoning panic: “I can help,” he yelled from the cabin. “Cut me loose.”
Don’t be a fool, she warned herself. He works for them. Galina realized she must look scared and desperate. But I’m not stupid.
As Oleg’s ship rose back into view, she tried again to pick him out with the scope. Still no luck, but she fired anyway, hoping to give Oleg the impression that she’d sighted him. What else could she do with the ship sailing ever closer?
Captain Younes’s VHF radio crackled. Someone was trying to reach them, but the voice kept breaking up. She couldn’t tell if it was Oleg, or possibly Lana or someone else on her boat. Or maybe another boat entirely.
Each time her ship rose on a swell, Galina looked over the stern, then both sides, ready to shoot. Oleg, she realized, could be anywhere. The radio crackled again.
She crawled forward, still holding the hunting rifle, and reached up, grabbing the VHF mouthpiece from next to the wheel. Clicking it, she thought she heard Oleg’s voice, when she wanted more than anything to hear Lana’s again.
“Drop dead!” she shouted.
“I think that was the other captain trying to reach you,” the cop yelled from the bench in the cabin.
Galina froze. Was the cop trying to confuse her? But if that were the other captain on the VHF, where was Oleg? A haunting question.
The answer came, but not on radio waves.
As Younes’s trawler rode up another swell, Oleg appeared right beside her ship in a Zodiac with an electric outboard.
For the briefest moment, she thought he would fall away and she could rush the railing and shoot him at will. But in the same instant he hurled himself over the gunwale with his pistol in hand and lunged toward her.
She tried to raise the long hunting rifle, but it was cumbersome in such close quarters. He grabbed the barrel, pushing it down as she fired, and jerked the weapon from her hands.
He tossed it aside and pointed his nine millimeter at her face as he walked toward her. His smile returned. Cocky as ever, he shoved the pistol into the back of his pants, as though daring her to fight him with her hands.
She threw herself at him, knowing Alexandra’s life was at stake, too.
He swatted her arms away easily, seized her neck, and, still smiling, started choking her.
Lana hung up Storm Season’s VHF radio in frustration. There was a lot of co-channel interference, probably from the unknown numbers of unseen boats plying the waters in an attempt to escape the hazards of staying moored or docked in rising seas. Even so, Lana was pretty sure she’d heard Galina say, “Drop dead,” although it could have been from another boater frustrated by the radio interference.
“That crap happens,” Don said to Lana. “I’m guessing the troposphere is lit up with signals about now.”
“That’s not the kind of interference we should be worrying about,” Red shouted, studying Galina’s trawler with his binoculars. “Dernov’s going aboard. Oh, shit, he’s grabbing her. He’s strangling her!”
“What?” Lana asked, grabbing the binoculars when he set them aside and started tearing off his pants and shirt.
Veal quickly followed his commander’s lead. Kurt joined the rapid disrobing.
“No,” Red said to the wounded man, without slowing down his own efforts. “Not with your shoulder. It’d be like trolling for sharks.”
“You’re swimming over there?” Lana said as Red and Veal pulled on dark skullcaps and goggles that fit as snuggly as their shirts and briefs. Each hitched on what looked like tool belts with knives, lights, flares, and handguns.
“Why do you think they call us SEALs?” Red said, pulling on flippers. “I want you two to stay right on course until you risk a serious chance of getting shot, then just sail away.”
The pair climbed over the starboard side, out of view of Galina’s boat, and disappeared instantly into the sea.
Oleg and Galina were no longer in sight, either; Lana guessed they were struggling on the deck. If she’s still alive.
Don kept checking the water for the SEALs’ reappearance, but neither man had surfaced after two minutes. “They’ve got to be on a different set of swells by now.”
Lana nodded, still glassing the trawler with Galina. “I can’t see them.”
“Did you see the guns on their belts?” Don said. “German. Heckler & Koch. They shoot steel darts. They’re made for the water, but they can do a lot of damage in the air, too.”
Lana listened, but kept moving the binoculars over Galina’s trawler. Oleg and his prey still hadn’t reappeared. It was hard not to imagine her dead on the deck. At least the son of a bitch wouldn’t get away.
Before she looked back at Don, he spun the wheel, veering from the trawler they’d been heading toward since early morning. “I hope that doesn’t give away too much,” he said, “but we’re in gunshot range now.”
As Don jibed, she checked messages. Maybe Galina had overpowered Oleg somehow. Or there was news from Holmes or Esme.
Only Holmes had left a message: “We’re looking for the kids. Church members said they were driven away by the Fourth Street Kings gang.” But what perplexed Lana was Holmes’s order: “Tell Don.”
She followed Holmes’s directive.
Don listened, studying the sea with the binoculars Lana had set down. Still no sign of Red or Veal. He had her repeat the message before responding: “Tell your boss to set up communications directly between me and Michael Prince. He’s their leader.”
“Why, Don? I can’t just tell Holmes to do that.”
“Yes, you can because Prince and I have some history. That’s why he told you to tell me. Now do it, and then you can tell me why you never said a word about our daughter going missing.”
Lana messaged Holmes. Looking up, she remembered all too vividly the reason she’d never told Don about Emma: she’d figured a convicted drug dealer would be useless in this situation.
“You’re right,” she said to him. “I should have told you. I’m sorry.”
Don held the binoculars on Galina’s trawler. Without lowering them, he responded to Lana: “Goddamn right you should have told me. I know that crew. They run a lot of drugs in DC. They’re fully integrated vertically, from the Colombian producers down to street dealing. You do not fuck with them. But guess what?” He lowered the binoculars and stared at his ex-wife. “You do not fuck with our daughter.”
At any other time in their lives, Lana would have considered Don’s words mere bluster. But she didn’t now. Maybe it was nothing more than hope on her part, but she’d been seeing a different side of him since the shades had been lifted on his secret life. It was a scary side, to be sure, but she was deeply grateful to discover it. They needed someone who might spark fear in the men who’d taken Emma. Maybe he could do the same to Oleg Dernov—or just kill him.
There was still no sign of him or Galina.
Emma and Tanesa had been squashed into the Hummer’s backseat between two “soldiers.” That was what the big guy called the young men next to each of them. The pair called him Prince. Both had semiautomatic pistols pressed into Emma’s and Tanesa’s sides.
“They know to shoot if you try any shit. You hear?” Prince said from the front passenger seat. A guy almost as large was behind the wheel.
“Yes,” Emma said. Whatever defiance she’d felt at the edge of the flood had been overwhelmed
as surely as the sandbag wall.
“They don’t need any permission,” Prince went on, “because they’ve got all they need.”
The big beast of an SUV plowed right through the flooded streets of southeast DC, one of the most violent neighborhoods in the U.S. They came to a warehouse district, where the flood had receded to less than six inches. Other than the water, the area was empty.
The driver gunned the engine, racing up a concrete ramp toward the loading dock behind a windowless brick building. There were five doors, each large enough to accommodate a Freightliner.
The driver clicked a remote on the sun visor. The door in the center rose so swiftly the Hummer never had to stop moving. As soon as they rolled into the darkness inside, the door closed behind them.
Then the driver hit another button on the remote, which switched on ceiling lights that illuminated rows of long wooden crates stacked three high.
“Now get out,” Prince said. “But if you try any hide-and-seek with us, we’ll make you wish you drowned back there.”
Emma believed him. She didn’t sense a single bit of bluff in his words or manner.
“On the other hand, do what you’re told and you might live,” he added with an unpleasant grin.
Emma and Tanesa piled out of the backseat.
“What’s all this stuff?” Tanesa asked, staring at the long narrow crates.
“You can’t tell by the shape? You’re too white for a black girl. Kids around here, they don’t need to look twice. Show them, Ship.”
The driver, his thick arms only a little tensed by the weight of the nearest crate, lowered it to the floor.
He unsnapped metal buckles that Emma hadn’t noticed till then and opened the top. A gleaming mahogany casket, corners padded with custom-fitted Styrofoam cushions, appeared.
“Someone I know well gave me the keys to this place,” Prince told them. “Maybe ’cause I’m so good for business, you hear? Open that up. Girl should see where she’s bedding down for the next day or two.”
“What!” Tanesa exclaimed. “Don’t do that to me. I’m scared to death of tight spaces. That’s my nightmare.”
Emma put her arm around Tanesa’s back. “Hold on,” she whispered.
“That’s cute,” Prince bellowed. “White girl getting close with her black girlfriend. Makes me all warm inside. Maybe we should squeeze them both inside that thing. Yeah, that’s what we should do.”
“No!” Tanesa screamed.
Prince strolled over to them. He pushed Emma aside and glared at Tanesa. “You look at me, girl. You’re going to get your black ass in that coffin or I’m going to cut your heart out and put you in there for good.”
Just that fast he pulled out a switchblade and clicked it open.
“Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, help me,” Tanesa said, as Prince shoved her into the casket.
While the others laughed, Emma looked around. She thought if it had been a movie she would have seen something to save them, but she saw nothing but stacks and stacks of crates. A lot of coffins. It sickened her to know that sooner or later they’d all be filled from the flooding. And other kinds of death.
She looked back at Tanesa, who had curled into a fetal position. Prince was leaning over her. “Get on your back and put your hands across your pretty chest,” he snapped at her. “And keep your big browns open.”
Tanesa, tears streaming down her cheeks, obeyed.
“Get another one over here for ivory,” Prince ordered. “Line it up, and get our cameraman,” he told one of the soldiers. “We need the video.”
Emma lay down in a matching coffin, wondering if they’d actually close them up and how long they’d keep them locked inside.
Prince ordered the cameraman, a short skinny man with big glasses, to take video of them lying side by side. He raised his camera and went to work.
Nobody spoke until Prince walked over and stared at Tanesa. “We’ll bury you alive,” he told her. “I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it to you. That’s why they call me ‘The Undertaker.’ You’ll be in there all by yourself, six feet under, and there’ll be no chance in hell anyone will ever hear you.”
Prince slowly lowered the lid on Tanesa’s unearthly screams and her hopeless attempt to keep him from closing the coffin. Locking it muffled her anguish so effectively it might not have been heard five feet away.
Then he closed Emma’s casket. She was terrified, too, but mostly that they’d load her onto a vehicle because that could mean burial. She couldn’t bear to let herself even think about that. Instead, she prayed as best she could, which she realized might never be good enough.
And she hoped—oh, God how she hoped—that she wouldn’t run out of air because they might not have thought of that.
Oleg and Galina were fighting furiously, rolling across the trawler’s deck. Early in their struggle, she had kicked him hard enough to break his stranglehold and back him into a bulkhead-mounted grappling hook. When he’d reached down, as if to grab the knife-wielding hand of an attacker, she’d twisted her head away, squirming and punching. Gasping for air, she’d fought madly to get away from him.
He swung wildly at her now, striking her mouth and drawing blood from her lips. She stumbled backward, looking for any help she could find on the deck. Her fear of dying at his hands was great, but nothing compared to her dread for Alexandra once she was gone.
As he moved toward her, she remembered he’d slipped his gun into the back of his pants, cocky enough—or so vengeful—that he wanted to make her murder as personal as possible. But when she tried to circle around him to reach for his weapon, he seized her hand.
“I know you want the gun, and you’ll get it.”
Galina tried to pull away, but his other hand latched on. Before she could fight back, he forced her onto her knees, his hands like steel clamps around her neck once more.
“Stupid girl. You could have had the whole world with me.”
Galina tried to speak, a futile effort with him draining the last of her air. But he must have wanted to hear her because he eased up just enough for her to cough and say, “I had nothing with you but lies. Better dead than with you.”
He pressed his thumbs back into her neck and snapped her head around. “I will strangle your cancer kid next. I promise.”
His eyes bulged with anger, and his hands squeezed harder. She couldn’t break his grip. She looked around frantically once more. Anything.
There.
The cop was frantically trying to work his hands free from the bench where he’d been tied up. All she had was hope, spurred by his offer of help only minutes ago.
Get his gun, she thought at the cop. The gun.
Galina fought for every extra second of life now, pounding Oleg’s hands, but to no avail. She began to black out. The cop had loosened the rope, but was still entangled in it.
Galina threw a desperate punch, trying to pound Oleg’s scrotum. She missed, but alarm filled his face, and she guessed she must have come close. She tried again. He caught her fist this time.
He was still choking her, but with only one hand. She was grabbing half breaths, telling herself she just needed a few seconds more.
His gun. Grab it. Staring at the cop again, hoping he really was on her side. Black splotches appeared before her eyes. The cop rose to his feet.
The gun, she pleaded silently one last time.
But the cop would never get it because Oleg reached back right then and grabbed his nine millimeter. He shoved the barrel into Galina’s mouth.
She choked.
He laughed. “What does this remind you of, bad girl?”
Then he froze: The cop had the muzzle of Galina’s hunting rifle pressed against the back of Oleg’s head. The only part of him moving now was his mouth:
“You will be tortured and killed unless you put that down now.”
“No. It’s not what I will do,” the cop replied. “It’s what you will do. Take the gun out of her mouth or you’re a dead man.”
“No, he’s not,” a voice called from the stern.
Galina could just make out a red-haired guy with swim goggles propped on his forehead. He was pointing a bulky handgun at Oleg, who was now targeted from two positions.
“I’m Lieutenant John Walker,” the man said. “U.S. Navy. We don’t want him dead. So, Oleg, if you put down your weapon, we can do business. Otherwise, we’ll have to let him shoot you.”
“Put it down,” the cop yelled, jamming the barrel into Oleg’s head hard enough to draw blood.
Oleg kept the gun in Galina’s mouth, but he’d eased the pressure until she was no longer choking.
“I want to go to Moscow,” Oleg yelled at Walker.
“We want you to go back there, too,” the lieutenant replied. “That’s the honest-to-God truth. We don’t want anything messy happening out here.”
The Russian cop smacked the side of Oleg’s head with the barrel. “I will shoot this son of a bitch, no matter what he says, if he doesn’t get that gun out of her mouth.”
Oleg slowly withdrew it.
“Put the gun on the deck,” Lieutenant Walker said. “In front of you.”
“Moscow?” Oleg said.
“Moscow,” Walker echoed.
What choice does he have? Galina wondered. They’ve got him both ways.
The SEAL walked up and grabbed the nine millimeter. “You’re a Russian policeman, right?” he said to the cop, who nodded. “I’d like you to stand down.”
“I want asylum in the U.S. I can’t go back. Did you hear what he said? They’ll torture and kill me.”
“You’ve got asylum,” Walker replied quickly.
“A guy in flippers,” the cop looked Walker over, “can do that.”
“This guy can,” Walker said, removing the cumbersome fins.
The cop lowered the rifle.