‘Which of you is the pilot?’
‘I am,’ said the young man, as he approached with Hartlaub.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Terrence. Terrence Fletcher, sir. US Navy.’
‘Terry?’ The young man nodded back at me. ‘Drop the formalities, OK? Forget that you’re with the Navy for the next few hours.’
‘I’m not sure I can do that, sir. I’m-’
‘Getting off the boat if you don’t do as I ask,’ I finished for him.
He squinted, glanced sharply at the other man and Lassiter shot him a grin. Finally he nodded, ‘You’ve got it, sir.’
‘Right, Terry, work your magic and take us out of here.’
Terry looked at the older man again. Terry was the pilot, but the other was in charge. Lassiter had final say on whether the boat sailed or not.
‘Forget rank, Terry. Just take the fucking boat out before I decide to do it myself.’
Behind me Hartlaub chuckled. ‘I like your style, Hunter. How to win friends and influence people.’
‘If no one else has noticed, we’re in a hurry here,’ I said.
Terry took us out of the dock and into Chesapeake Bay at a steady clip. Above us rose the bridge connecting Norfolk to Northampton, crossed by a steady flow of traffic, lights sharp against the darkening sky. Beyond the bridge the bay widened as it greeted the open water of the Atlantic, and I urged Terry to speed up. He gave the boat all it had; the nose lifted and we shot across the waves at what I guessed was a steady forty knots.
Terry was a good man and my surliness had possibly ruined his day. It didn’t sit well with me, but needs must. When weighed against the fate Jenny faced, a harsh word or two was a necessary evil. Still, I couldn’t let it go on. Once we were a couple miles offshore, I clapped the guy on the shoulder and made my apology. Leaving Terry at the controls, I moved to his friend. Lassiter had sat on a folding chair bolted to the cabin wall so he could watch an instrument panel. There was a chair opposite him and I perched myself on it.
‘Sorry for being an ass back there,’ I said.
‘We’re service men. We’re used to taking orders from asses. As, I’m damn sure, are you.’
He had that right.
‘Look, I guess you got your orders, but apart from that you’re most likely in the dark.’
‘What’s new, huh? But you’re right, I think we do deserve an explanation,’ Lassiter said. Terry turned from the controls, nodding in agreement.
Where did I start? There was far too much back story to give them all the details, so I elected to go directly to the finish. ‘Put it this way, unless we get there in time an innocent woman is going to die horribly.’
Then I told them about Cain and what he would do to his hostage if we didn’t stop him. They wanted to know why a full response team wasn’t dealing with things. It was a good point, but I explained that Cain would slaughter Jenny if a response team showed up. By the time I’d finished Terry was shivering with the flow of adrenalin through his body and Lassiter had gone a funny green colour that had nothing to do with either the play of light in the cabin or with the rise and fall of the waves. I noticed that Terry had leaned heavily on the throttle again. I’d won a couple of new allies.
Lassiter tapped the instrument panel. Back at Langley Air Force Base someone under Walter’s guidance was feeding through coordinates for the suspect freighter. ‘She’s off the Barrier Islands, east of Roanoke,’ he said. ‘She’s come to a standstill.’
‘How long until we get there?’
Looking at other displays, he said, ‘There’s a storm heading in. It’s going to slow us down.’
I nodded at the dials, unable to decipher them. ‘What’s your best guess?’
‘We could throttle back, conserve fuel and still be there within a couple hours. Or we can go full out and do it in half the time.’
‘Full throttle then.’
‘We won’t have enough fuel for a return trip.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘As soon as we’re on board I want you to call the Coast Guard, the police, the rest of your Navy buddies if you have to. If we manage to get Jenny off the ship, I’ll only need you to take her a safe distance away. We can always have the boat towed back to port after.’
‘And what if you don’t manage to get her off?’
‘Don’t, whatever you do, try anything heroic,’ I cautioned. ‘Back off to a safe distance and do like I said. Call in reinforcements.’
‘You said this lunatic will kill the woman if he sees a naval vessel.’
‘Yes, that’s true. But if we get on board and fail to save her, she was already dead. Most likely me and Hartlaub won’t be coming back either. If that’s the case the Navy’s welcome to Cain and anyone else still alive.’
‘Jesus,’ Lassiter said. ‘To think this morning I was complaining that I was sick of routine duties.’
Taking the man’s comment as a sign of approval, I relaxed back on to the chair. Hartlaub had been watching us all and his amused demeanour hadn’t changed. He couldn’t have heard much of our conversation over the noise of the engine and the slap of the boat on the waves. He indicated a solid wedge of steel-grey clouds piling in the night sky. ‘Looks like there’s a storm brewing, guys,’ he called. His words would prove prophetic in more ways than one.
Chapter 39
Hartlaub nudged me awake.
‘Shake a leg, Hunter, we’re on.’
I hadn’t meant to sleep, but the last few days had been an eventful journey where I’d managed only a few hours here and there and fatigue must have finally caught up with me. Even the silencing of the engine hadn’t roused me, or the sudden cessation of forward movement. I blinked out of the fog of my dreams and looked up at Hartlaub’s angular face. One of the crewmen had switched off the lights and Hartlaub was a dark blur against the night sky. His eyes and teeth glistened against the backdrop of billowing clouds.
‘We’ve found the ship?’
‘We’ve found it,’ Hartlaub confirmed. ‘Maybe you want to take a look?’
I’d fallen asleep on one of the benches, my head propped on my backpack. Over the space of my nap, I’d managed to slide all the way across to one side and now had my head pillowed on one of the rubber floats. Hartlaub stretched out his left hand to help me up. My neck felt stiff.
‘Here.’ Hartlaub handed me some night vision binoculars. They must have belonged to the boat.
I was surprised to find that we were so close to a large ship. It was about two hundred yards away, a freighter with cargo containers stacked on the deck, cranes and winches bristling along its sides, and a tower containing the bridge perched towards the front. Ambient light pulsed from within the bridge, but all other lights had been extinguished. It was no pleasure cruiser, but an ugly rusting hulk that had been patched and painted over many times. There was little decipherable of the name that was etched on the ship’s hull, and some of that was in Cyrillic that I couldn’t read fluently, but I was certain that it was the Queen Sofia. There was no other reason why it sat out here in the middle of the sea, seemingly drifting under the power of the tides, than that something major had happened on board, or was under way.
‘Have you noticed any movement on deck?’
‘None,’ Hartlaub said. ‘We haven’t heard any voices either. Sitting there in the dark like that, it looks like a goddamn ghost ship. Maybe we’re already too late.’
I hoped that his words weren’t a bad omen. My stepfather, Bob Telfer, used to warn that mockery was catching: whenever anyone made a dire prediction of things to come he’d offer his own brand of psychobabble, as if by the simple act of voicing something it would come true. I prayed that Bob had been full of crap and that Hartlaub’s comment hadn’t invited bad luck. If Cain had already left the ship there’d be no way to find him in time, and that meant that I’d never save Jenny.
