“The truth, which is double-plus-eyes-only-top-secret, don’t tell her or I will keelhaul you for real, is when she contacted me anonymously, I was paranoid someone was after me, so I hacked back to her computer, took over her webcam, and went ‘hello, baby, you can cyberstalk me any time!’”
“Oh.”
“But seriously, breathe a word of that to no one. Not even Sophie. I mean, not asking you to lie to your girlfriend, but if she doesn’t ask, don’t tell. It’s a big deal to Anya that I didn’t know what she looked like. She’d kill me. Not even sure that’s hyperbole.”
“Gotcha,” I agreed.
Out of the corner of my eye I caught a visual discontinuity on the laptop, and turned to look. It was set to automatically rotate between drone data on one map and the ship’s radar on the other. At first I thought the black blotch on the radar screen was a returning UAV. Then I realized it was much too big.
“Hey,” I said. “We’ve got company.”
“No kidding? Must be a fishing boat. They don’t usually come this far out.”
The blotch vanished, then re-appeared closer to us. Again, and again. It looked like it was coming straight for us, and fast.
“Huh. Weird,” Jesse said. “Hey, you know what? I’ve got an actual telescope. Want to go play Captain Jack Sparrow?”
We climbed up atop the bridge. Below us Anya carved laps around the boat with a competitive-level front crawl, while Sophie floated on her back. Jesse extended the wood-and-brass telescope, squinted through it, panned it across the horizon, stopped. His curious expression morphed into a frown.
“Who is it?” I asked.
Instead of answering he passed over the telescope. It took me a little while to local the oncoming vessel. It was like Wilfrid’s water taxi, but newer and cleaner, with a big radio antenna and two powerful engines. There were four men on board, all young and strong, in khaki pants and black T-shirts. They looked Hispanic, not Haitian.
“No one you know?” I asked, handing it back.
Jesse shook his head.
“Maybe the Dominican Republic coast guard?”
“We’re a long way from the DR. And they’ve got no flag.”
I turned and squinted at the horizon, and made out a faint dot. I almost imagined I could hear those dual engines. There was no way we could outrun them.
I tried to make a joke out of it. “There aren’t any real pirates of the Caribbean nowadays, right?”
“No. I’m sure it’s no big deal.” But he did not sound at all sure. “Let’s get the girls out of the water. Whoever they are, I’m guessing they -“
He didn’t finish the sentence; instead he froze with the telescope against his eye.
“What?”
After a long moment Jesse lowered the telescope. “Whoever they are,” he said grimly, “they’ve got guns.”
Chapter 27
Jesse and Anya waited on the deck while Sophie and I lurked in the common area, watching through the open doors. Sophie held the satellite phone in her hand, finger poised over the DIAL button. In case there was some kind of problem. We hadn’t articulated the bad-case scenarios in any more detail than that.
“Ahoy there! What’s going on?” Jesse cried out as their boat approached.
Instead of answering they zoomed right up beside us. They had guns slung over their shoulders, big scary assault rifles that looked like M-16s from Vietnam movies. Three of them leaped onto our deck while their boat was still moving.
Jesse shouted, “Hey!” angrily, and took an aggressive step towards them, as if trying to drive off unwanted dogs.
The nearest one kicked him in the crotch with a lethally quick motion. Jesse doubled over. The other two attackers raced into the common room. Clumsy with fear and shock, I tried to interpose myself between them and Sophie as she pushed the green button, but it was already too late. We should have waited on the bridge, behind the only door on board with a lock, instead of in the common room. We should have called the moment we saw the guns. I guess we didn’t because being attacked by armed men on the high seas just didn’t seem like something that actually happened to people like us.
The lead invader smashed the butt of his gun into my face. When you imagine those kinds of things happening, you imagine being able to see what’s going on and react, but the first I knew of his action was when the gunbutt collided with my cheekbone. The impact reverberated through my whole body. I staggered back two steps, fell down hard, and lost some time. The next thing I knew Sophie was on her stomach on the ground beside me, squealing in pain as the man who had thrown her to the floor folded her arms behind her back and knelt on them. The other man, the one with a moustache who had hit me, used the butt of his gun to smash our satellite phone to smithereens.
I reached out without thinking and grabbed the guy holding down Sophie, tried to pull him off, but I had no leverage, my senses were reeling, and my muscles seemed unable to exert any significant force.
Then a strong hand grabbed me by the hair and Sophie and I were dragged outside. I didn’t resist. It was all I could do not to fall over. Time seemed to be fragmenting, splintering. We were shoved to the very aft of the boat, just above the engine. Jesse and Anya were already there. Anya seemed unhurt, but Jesse stood hunched with both hands cupped over his wounded crotch, sporting an incipient black eye.
I turned around, still dazed. One of them stood about ten feet away, at the edge of the dive pool, aiming his rifle at us. Behind him two more were searching the Ark Royale. I couldn’t believe the world had turned upside down so quickly.
Their pilot finished roping their boat to ours, and climbed on with an odd, straight-legged gait, like he had some kind of hip injury. He and the gunman exchanged a few phrases in Spanish, while both ogled Anya in her bikini. She was shivering despite the heat. I too felt cold, like my spine had turned to ice, and weak. The prospect of more violence, and probably rape and mass murder, seemed inescapable.
Unless – the two men facing us had the dive pool behind them. If their guns were safetied, maybe we could rush them, knock them into that water, steal their boat. It was a desperate chance: but after what had just happened, that kind of all-out attack before the situation settled in, before it was too late to do anything at all, seemed like our only hope.
It was one thing to know that intellectually and quite another to actually charge a man with a gun, but I felt ready to do it. It helped that I was still dazed and unable to think clearly. I glanced over at Jesse. He looked back. I prayed we were thinking the same thing, and crouched, ready to charge.
I counted down in my head: Three. Two.
They must have noticed something. The gunman raised his weapon slightly and pulled the trigger, aiming close above our heads. I felt the bullets tear through the air. The flashes of automatic gunfire seemed crazy-bright, like lightning strikes, and the earsplitting fusillade nearly deafened me.
He lowered the gun and grinned at us over it. His teeth were rotten and uneven. I stared down the black hole of the gunbarrel as the air around it warped from its heat. This man who had never seen the inside of a dentist’s office was just a finger-twitch away from killing us all, and I didn’t doubt he would do it if we charged. I felt paralyzed, didn’t know what to do. There was nothing we could do. We were helpless. There was no escape, and no hope but that of mercy.
Chapter 28
They didn’t kill us. They didn’t even harm us further. They just half-pulled and half-shoved us down into the cabin Sophie and I shared. One kept us against a wall while another searched our bags and took our ID and money.
