by Dale Mayer
She loved the rock-and-roll movements when she was out on the ocean. She loved to feel the water gently roll under her feet, with the sense of being alone in the vast midst of Mother Nature out in the world. Gizella usually loved to be the only one out there, not seeing another boat or anything else around her. She felt such a tremendous sense of freedom when she was by herself on the water.
And that’s where they’d been, until they’d been boarded by these assholes, and then their yacht was rammed into a cargo liner. She didn’t even understand what part the cargo ship had in the whole thing. She did hear gunfire and knew that several of the yacht crew had been injured; she just didn’t know if they had gotten onto the liner and had been rescued or if they’d been deep-sixed into the water.
As she sat here, dry-eyed, wondering what options they had to escape, she realized that, even if she got the opportunity to jump off the ship and to swim to the river’s edge, and she certainly was capable of doing that, however, she couldn’t because her mother was not so able. After all they’d been through, Gizella wouldn’t leave her mother to deal with whatever consequences the kidnappers would dish out, if Gizella were to escape. Her father wasn’t in any better health now either.
It had taken Gizella much longer than her mother to forgive him for his infidelity, and, even now, Gizella wasn’t sure that she had forgiven him. As long as her mother had, and her parents were back together again, it was something Gizella was willing to work on. But it was just so damn hard sometimes.
When she saw her dad, she got so angry, wondering if he hadn’t brought on her mother’s breast cancer from the stress and the horrible sense of his betrayal. She knew all kinds of experts out there would say breast cancer had nothing to do with it. But, with the timing, it just seemed like something happened, and her mom couldn’t handle it anymore. The fact that her father was there for her treatments and that he seemed abjectly sorry for everything he’d done had also helped. She and her father had never spoken about his affairs directly, and she’d never accused him to his face about his behavior. It had been enough that they were both focused on making her mother’s days as doable as possible for her. Watching somebody go through cancer treatments was so devastating, and Gizella had felt so helpless.
And now here they were, stuck in a boat, with some assholes who had kidnapped them. And for what? They hadn’t asked for a ransom, so she didn’t even know if they’d been targeted or if they were just a side effect of something else. And, if that were true, then what? Would money get them out of this? But, if so, it should have worked already because her father had blatantly tried to buy their freedom as soon as the kidnappers had appeared on the yacht.
Now she stood somberly over her parents, one unconscious, the other barely beginning to stir. Gizella surmised they were across the world from Seattle, and yet she had no recollection of how that happened. She remembered trying to argue with the gunmen but had been knocked out and never did see how they’d gotten off their yacht and then boarded this ship to wherever they were now. That must have been a long, long time ago.
We were drugged.
Looking out the small porthole to the world beyond, she wondered if there would be any life after this. Since her father was a governor, she was sure some political motive was behind it all. She just hoped they survived it. She was a nobody in the political venue. She couldn’t imagine what their kidnappers would do with her when, very soon, they would find out she had no value.
Whether she liked it or not, she was the one who was the most disposable of the three, so she would have to work hard at finding a reason for them to keep her alive. And she knew enough about herself to realize that, in this situation right now, the more she talked, the more she’d get in trouble, and the worse it would get.
Chapter 2
Gizella woke from a doze and sat upright to see one of the gunmen grinning down at her, but that sexual edge to his leer made her blood run cold. Avoiding his gaze, she looked over at her sleeping mother. She softly stroked the hair off her brow to see if she was really in a deep sleep or if she was still unconscious. Her mother shuffled under her gentle hand, getting more comfortable. Gizella looked at her father and half smiled because he was curled up like a portly Santa Claus. But he appeared to be in a deep sleep too.
She tried to ignore the sleazy gunman, yet kept tabs on what he was doing from the corner of her eye. Then she settled back down and closed her eyes, hoping he’d go away. After a few minutes she opened her eyes again to see him retreating. Just the thought of him making any kind of sexual advances made her want to throw up, as that would be her biggest nightmare. No, maybe not, because if they did something to her parents, that would be much worse.
But she couldn’t imagine the consequences of them attacking her. God, she couldn’t even bear thinking about how horrible things could get, and she could only hope that, by now, her father’s people had raised some kind of alarm that he was missing.
But then she thought about how the gunmen had slammed the yacht into the tanker and realized that would make it sink, so any rescuers would probably assume that the whole family had been lost at sea. She wondered at the time why it had happened, but it made too much sense now.
Hell, she had no idea where they were. She looked out the porthole only to find it pitch-black outside. She noted lights on the shore but nowhere else. Had they been flown here, then placed on board another ship? But why would they do something like that? She imagined a helicopter off the tanker could have taken them to land and onto a private jet maybe.
She didn’t know how long they’d been out, but her throat was dry, and her stomach was still upset, as if she’d been given a potent drug. When she had realized the tanker was Russian, she’d been terribly worried about something from the Cold War having been revived and somebody along government lines deciding her parents would make great captives. She knew that her father was great friends with the US president, and maybe that was supposed to make him comply to do something their captors wanted.
She didn’t know and couldn’t stomach thinking about it because, although her father did have a wandering eye and hands that he didn’t know to keep at home, he appeared to have very strong business ethics. She never quite understood how he could have honor in one area of his life and not the other. But he had always told her that a man should be known by what he did on his good days because everybody was human and had bad days.
She wondered if he put the liaisons with his lovers in the bad day category. She stared at the man who she had grown up believing to be the epitome of male perfection. Finding out that her father had feet of clay had been a crushing blow.
Yet her mother had encouraged Gizella to find her way back to believing in her father again. The trouble was, she wasn’t sure how much she did anymore. In some ways, he was just a pathetic old man. Maybe he’d had a midlife crisis and had run away with somebody beautiful and much younger, but for him to leave her mother like that? That was pretty unforgivable.
Gizella thought about all the other broken families and all the other middle-aged women heading into their aging years, devastated when their husbands had taken off, breaking up their families by the same kind of behavior. It was just pitiful. And it wasn’t limited to just men running off, of course. Women did it too. But more often than not, women stayed for the family unit, while men seemed to have this last-ditch effort to be young again.
She slumped in her seated position on the bare floor, leaning against the wall, wishing she could sleep, but so far it eluded her. She dozed and then would wake up, check where they were and then doze again. She needed eight hours of solid sleep and didn’t know how or when she would get it. She stretched out on the floor, looking for enough space to lie down. Her mother was beside her, with her father crossways at their heads. Gizella closed her eyes, resolving to get some rest, when she heard voices coming nearer. There was just enough guttural English to understand.
“We’re only expected to deliver two.”
“Sure, but the third one is good too. The more they have for a bargaining chip, the better.”
“They want to make an exchange, huh?”
“Yes. The governor for one of the Kremlin’s top men.”
“Do you think the US will go for it?”
“Well they will, the more we have, which is why we need the daughter too.”
“But do they need the daughter for sure or maybe just a bruised-up daughter?”
“You don’t get to have her,” the man said in exasperation. “Once you start that, there’ll be no end to it.”
“Of course not,” he said in a crude manner. “She’s hot, and we’re all alone.”
“Don’t let the boss hear you say that,” he said, “or you’ll be dead before you know it.”
“I can take him,” he said in a snide voice. “A hot chick like this? Nobody gives a shit if she’s been well used or not. She’ll still get her freedom at the end of the day, so what do we care?”
“It’s not the same thing,” he said, “and the Americans view this very differently. Which also means we’re expendable,” the other man said pointedly.
She lay here, her eyes closed, her ears straining to hear every word.
“Besides, we’re almost there.”
At that, she rolled ever-so-slightly to get a little bit closer.
“But not until morning,” he said. “I could do a lot with her in a few hours.”
“Don’t even think about it,” the one said in a cold hard voice.
“Hell, all I do is think about it,” he said. Grudgingly he added, “Okay, fine. I still don’t see what difference it makes though.”
“Untouched. I mean it.” And, with that, he turned and stalked away.
She didn’t move, her heart frozen, because only one set of footsteps had left. One man stood there, staring at her. She could feel it like laser beams pinpointed into her skin, burning through with his sick passions. She didn’t have any way to defend herself. At that, she almost opened her eyes to stare at the ceiling, irritated with herself, recalling all the times she’d thought about taking self-defense courses, but she’d always been too busy. She took yoga and Pilates courses, when she should have been taking martial arts and self-defense. At least that would have come in handy now.
Although what would happen if she pissed him off with her little fly swats, she didn’t know, except that he’d probably backhand her into the ground and rape her anyway. With huge relief she heard the footsteps recede, as he turned and walked away again. She let out her breath ever-so-slowly and studied her surroundings from underneath her lashes. He was leaving. But she knew he would be back.
She knew it in her heart of hearts. She only hoped they arrived at their destination before it became too late for her to save herself in that sense. She didn’t know what would happen if her attacker woke up her parents. Who would try to stop him? Because, at that point in time, it would become a bloodbath, and there would be no winners at all. She closed her eyes, and slowly her exhaustion—or the drugs in her system—had her drifting off to sleep again.
*
Baylor studied the satellite images on the screen in front of him and tapped the small black speck. “That’s a boat,” he said.
“We can’t get a close-enough picture,” Mason said. “They are working on it.”
“Odds are it’s painted black or wrapped in a stealth cover,” Baylor said. “I’m pretty sure they’ve got the family on board.”
“It’s possible,” Mason said. “We’re certainly tracking it. We just need to have a location where they land.”
“If they land,” Baylor said. “Chances are they’ll go to another ship.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, studying it. “But it would have to be a ship around them here.”
“Or they’re taking them to shore and then flying them somewhere.”
“They’ll be trying to get them out into international waters where nobody can touch them,” he said.
“Sure, but if they can get them out of the country—into whatever country they’re trying to go to—a plane is a lot faster,” Mason said. “Water is good—it’s great as a matter of fact—but if you’re trying to get from point A to point B, like getting from Los Angeles to say, Russia, a plane is much faster.”
Baylor nodded at that. “But we don’t know where they’re going.”
“No, but I highly suspect that, if the Russian tanker isn’t part of it,” he said, “some of the crew on it are. We’re tracking all of the men’s histories right now, waiting for intel.”
“What about that Boris Karloff character from Interpol?” Baylor asked. “Do we have any update on him?”
Hudson, who was seated on the other side of Mason as they flew back to the base, joined the conversation. “His background appears to be KGB for fifteen years. He was drafted at age eighteen and moved up the ranks, until he walked away at thirty-three. He’s currently thirty-five, but nobody has any recent history on him. It is believed that he’s gone private.”
“Believed?” Baylor said, with a shake of his head. “I don’t believe anybody leaves the KGB, except in a pine box. But rumors said he’s been a merc for a couple years now.”
“It is pretty hard to imagine getting out of the KGB, isn’t it?” Mason said thoughtfully.
“Unless they have a new department that they don’t want anybody to know about, and he’s heading that up,” Hudson offered.
“But why the deception just because he’s KGB?” Baylor asked. “They have all kinds of departments we don’t know about.”
“That’s true, but this could give him a different cover,” Mason stated.
“I’m not saying he did go private,” Baylor explained. “I’m just saying it’s another possibility we have to consider. But that still doesn’t explain why they would care about this family.”
“Unless you combine it with that information we heard recently saying that the US is holding two Russian politicians,” Mason added.
“Not politicians,” Hudson corrected. “Businessmen. In telecommunications.”
“And do we believe that’s what they are actually doing over in the US?” Baylor asked.
“They were wanted for other activities,” Mason said, “and, as soon as they were found in South America, they were handed over to the US.”
“Of course now it’s an international incident,” Hudson noted.
“And now we have another,” Baylor said.
“True, and it could be as simple as that,” Mason said. “If that’s the case, at least we’d know that, in all probability, the kidnapped family would be kept in decent health.”
“Maybe,” Baylor said. “Depends on whether these kidnappers are contractors or if they’re directly under this Russian merc guy. I don’t think he suffers fools easily.”
“Nobody climbs up in the ranks of the KGB without having very decent training and self-control,” Hudson said.
“And it’s so much more than that,” Mason said quietly. “The discipline these guys go through for their training? Some of it puts ours to shame,” he admitted.
“Which is a hell of a thing to say too,” Baylor said. “But I understand what you mean. It’s almost like they’re indoctrinated, not just signed up. In truth, it’s a way of life.”
“I think it’s probably even way harsher than a way of life,” Mason said. “But the bottom line is, we still have to figure out where this is all happening. And see what we can do about getting the family back.”
“We need intel on that stealth ship,” Baylor said. “It’s not very big.”
At that, Mason’s phone rang. He answered it, and both Baylor and Hudson stared at him, as he nodded and made several comments, then finally hung up. “Well, the stealth ship, as you call it, headed into waters just south of Monaco.”
“Interesting.”
“It stayed at the international water line, where it had a meeting with another s
maller boat, and it is believed that packages were potentially handed off.”
“Packages,” Baylor said. “Interesting terminology. What do we have after that?”
“The ship came in to land at a small yacht club, where packages were unloaded, and they disappeared.”
“And we’re tracking that, I presume?”
“Absolutely. So far, we haven’t got any answers as to where the packages have gone,” Mason said.
“My vote is an airport,” Baylor said.
Mason looked at him grimly. “You could be right. If this is a Russian tie-in, they’ll want to get them home as soon as possible.”
“Yeah. Either to Russia or to a neutral country somewhere in between Russia and Monaco, where they can keep the governor’s family hidden,” Hudson said.
“What if this Boris Karloff guy is a contractor?” Baylor said suddenly. “What if somehow he did get free of the KGB and decided he had more ability to do things to help the Kremlin if he wasn’t constrained by the hierarchy of the organization and the inherent government restrictions—though they don’t seem to be all that constricted compared to us,” he admitted. “But still, what if he went out on a contract basis, and he’s the one who has collected the family and is taking them home?”
“So? What difference does that make?” Mason asked.
Baylor stared at him. “You know what? I’m not sure,” he said. “It just occurred to me that he didn’t have to be KGB anymore or a mercenary. He could be somebody working with them.”
“Well, that goes for anybody. It could be a friend of this guy, or it could be somebody who was hired by this guy to collect the family.”
“Which would imply that they knew where the family was and that they had the ability to get in and to get out without getting caught.”
“Exactly,” Mason said, “and I’m not sure that information is all that hard to come by in this day and age.”